Armadale (116 page)

The next sound was the sound of the women-servants' voices. Two of them came up to put the sheets on the beds in Number Three and Number Four. The women were in high good-humour, laughing and talking to each other through the open doors of the rooms. The master's customers were coming in at last, they said, with a vengeance; the house would soon begin to look cheerful, if things went on like this.

After a little, the beds were got ready, and the women returned to the kitchen-floor, on which the sleeping rooms of the domestic servants were all situated. Then there was silence again.

The next sound was the sound of the doctor's voice. He appeared at the end of the corridor, showing Allan and Midwinter the way to their rooms. They all went together into Number Four. After a little, the doctor came out first. He waited till Midwinter joined him, and pointed
with a formal bow to the door of Number Three. Midwinter entered the room without speaking, and shut himself in. The doctor, left alone, withdrew to the staircase door and unlocked it – then waited in the corridor, whistling to himself softly, under his breath.

Voices pitched cautiously low became audible in a minute more in the hall. The Resident Dispenser and the Head Nurse appeared, on their way to the Dormitories of the Attendants at the top of the house. The man bowed silently, and passed the doctor; the woman curtseyed silently, and followed the man. The doctor acknowledged their salutations by a courteous wave of his hand; and once more left alone, paused a moment, still whistling softly to himself – then walked to the door of Number Four, and opened the case of the fumigating apparatus fixed near it in the corner of the wall. As he lifted the lid and looked in, his whistling ceased. He took a long purple bottle out, examined it by the gaslight, put it back, and closed the case. This done, he advanced on tiptoe to the open staircase door – passed through it – and secured it on the inner side as usual.

Mr Bashwood had seen him at the apparatus; Mr Bashwood had noticed the manner of his withdrawal through the staircase-door. Again the sense of an unutterable expectation throbbed at his heart. A terror that was slow and cold and deadly crept into his hands, and guided them in the dark to the key that had been left for him in the inner side of the door. He turned it in vague distrust of what might happen next, and waited.

The slow minutes passed, and nothing happened. The silence was horrible; the solitude of the lonely corridor was a solitude of invisible treacheries. He began to count to keep his mind employed – to keep his own growing dread away from him. The numbers, as he whispered them, followed each other slowly up to a hundred, and still nothing happened. He had begun the second hundred; he had got on to twenty – when, without a sound to betray that he had been moving in his room, Midwinter suddenly appeared in the corridor.

He stood for a moment and listened – he went to the stairs and looked over into the hall beneath. Then, for the second time that night, he tried the staircase door, and for the second time found it fast. After a moment's reflection, he tried the doors of the bedrooms on his right hand next, looked into one after the other, and saw that they were empty, then came to the door of the end room in which the steward was concealed. Here again, the lock resisted him. He listened, and looked up at the grating. No sound was to be heard, no light was to be seen inside. ‘Shall I break the door in,' he said to himself, ‘and make sure? No; it
would be giving the doctor an excuse for turning me out of the house.' He moved away, and looked into the two empty rooms in the row occupied by Allan and himself, then walked to the window at the staircase end of the corridor. Here, the case of the fumigating apparatus attracted his attention. After trying vainly to open it, his suspicion seemed to be aroused. He searched back along the corridor, and observed that no object of a similar kind appeared outside any of the other bedchambers. Again at the window, he looked again at the apparatus, and turned away from it with a gesture which plainly indicated that he had tried, and failed, to guess what it might be.

Baffled at all points, he still showed no sign of returning to his bedchamber. He stood at the window, with his eyes fixed on the door of Allan's room, thinking. If Mr Bashwood, furtively watching him through the grating, could have seen him at that moment in the mind as well as in the body, Mr Bashwood's heart might have throbbed even faster than it was throbbing now, in expectation of the next event which Midwinter's decision of the next minute was to bring forth.

On what was his mind occupied as he stood alone, at the dead of night, in the strange house?

His mind was occupied in drawing its disconnected impressions together, little by little, to one point. Convinced, from the first, that some hidden danger threatened Allan in the Sanatorium, his distrust – vaguely associated, thus far, with the place itself; with his wife (whom he firmly believed to be now under the same roof with him); with the doctor, who was as plainly in her confidence as Mr Bashwood himself – now narrowed its range, and centred itself obstinately in Allan's room. Resigning all further effort to connect his suspicion of a conspiracy against his friend, with the outrage which had the day before been offered to himself – an effort which would have led him, if he could have maintained it, to a discovery of the Fraud really contemplated by his wife – his mind, clouded and confused by disturbing influences, instinctively took refuge in its impressions of facts as they had shown themselves, since he had entered the house. Everything that he had noticed below stairs suggested that there was some secret purpose to be answered by getting Allan to sleep in the Sanatorium. Everything that he had noticed above stairs, associated the lurking-place in which the danger lay hid, with Allan's room. To reach this conclusion, and to decide on baffling the conspiracy, whatever it might be, by taking Allan's place, was with Midwinter the work of an instant. Confronted by actual peril, the great nature of the man intuitively freed itself from the weaknesses that had beset it in happier and safer times. Not even the shadow of the
old superstition rested on his mind now – no fatalist suspicion of himself disturbed the steady resolution that was in him. The one last doubt that troubled him, as he stood at the window thinking, was the doubt whether he could persuade Allan to change rooms with him, without involving himself in an explanation which might lead Allan to suspect the truth.

In the minute that elapsed, while he waited with his eyes on the room, the doubt was resolved – he found the trivial, yet sufficient, excuse of which he was in search. Mr Bashwood saw him rouse himself, and go to the door. Mr Bashwood heard him knock softly, and whisper, ‘Allan, are you in bed?'

‘No,' answered the voice inside, ‘come in.'

He appeared to be on the point of entering the room, when he checked himself as if he had suddenly remembered something. ‘Wait a minute,' he said, through the door, and, turning away, went straight to the end room. ‘If there is anybody watching us in there,' he said aloud, ‘let him watch us through this!' He took out his handkerchief, and stuffed it into the wires of the grating, so as completely to close the aperture. Having thus forced the spy inside (if there was one) either to betray himself by moving the handkerchief, or to remain blinded to all view of what might happen next, Midwinter presented himself in Allan's room.

‘You know what poor nerves I have,' he said, ‘and what a wretched sleeper I am at the best of times. I can't sleep to-night. The window in my room rattles every time the wind blows. I wish it was as fast as your window here.'

‘My dear fellow!' cried Allan, ‘I don't mind a rattling window. Let's change rooms. Nonsense! Why should you make excuses to
me
? Don't I know how easily trifles upset those excitable nerves of yours? Now the doctor has quieted my mind about my poor little Neelie, I begin to feel the journey – and I'll answer for sleeping anywhere till to-morrow comes.' He took up his travelling-bag. ‘We must be quick about it,' he added, pointing to his candle. ‘They haven't left me much candle to go to bed by.'

‘Be very quiet, Allan,' said Midwinter, opening the door for him. ‘We mustn't disturb the house at this time of night.'

‘Yes, yes,' returned Allan, in a whisper. ‘Good night – I hope you'll sleep as well as I shall.'

Midwinter saw him into Number Three, and noticed that his own candle (which he had left there) was as short as Allan's. ‘Good night,' he said, and came out again into the corridor.

He went straight to the grating, and looked and listened once more. The handkerchief remained exactly as he had left it, and still there was no sound to be heard within. He returned slowly along the corridor, and thought of the precautions he had taken, for the last time. Was there no other way than the way he was trying now? There was none. Any openly-avowed posture of defence – while the nature of the danger, and the quarter from which it might come, were alike unknown – would be useless in itself, and worse than useless in the consequences which it might produce by putting the people of the house on their guard. Without a fact that could justify to other minds his distrust of what might happen with the night; incapable of shaking Allan's ready faith in the fair outside which the doctor had presented to him, the one safeguard in his friend's interests that Midwinter could set up, was the safeguard of changing the rooms – the one policy he could follow, come what might of it, was the policy of waiting for events. ‘I can trust to one thing,' he said to himself, as he looked for the last time up and down the corridor – ‘I can trust myself to keep awake.'

After a glance at the clock on the wall opposite, he went into Number Four. The sound of the closing door was heard, the sound of the turning lock followed it. Then, the dead silence fell over the house once more.

Little by little, the steward's horror of the stillness and the darkness overcame his dread of moving the handkerchief. He cautiously drew aside one corner of it – waited – looked – and took courage at last to draw the whole handkerchief through the wires of the grating. After first hiding it in his pocket, he thought of the consequences if it was found on him, and threw it down in a corner of the room. He trembled when he had cast it from him, as he looked at his watch, and placed himself again at the grating to wait for Miss Gwilt.

It was a quarter to one. The moon had come round from the side to the front of the Sanatorium. From time to time her light gleamed on the window of the corridor, when the gaps in the flying clouds let it through. The wind had risen, and sung its mournful song faintly, as it swept at intervals over the desert ground in front of the house.

The minute-hand of the clock travelled on half-way round the circle of the dial. As it touched the quarter-past one, Miss Gwilt stepped noiselessly into the corridor. ‘Let yourself out,' she whispered through the grating, ‘and follow me.' She returned to the stairs by which she had just descended; pushed the door to softly, after Mr Bashwood had followed her; and led the way up to the landing of the second-floor. There she put the question to him which she had not ventured to put below stairs.

‘Was Mr Armadale shown into Number Four?' she asked.

He bowed his head without speaking.

‘Answer me in words. Has Mr Armadale left the room since?'

He answered, ‘No.'

‘Have you never lost sight of Number Four since I left you?'

He answered, ‘
Never
.'

Something strange in his manner, something unfamiliar in his voice, as he made that last reply, attracted her attention. She took her candle from a table near, on which she had left it, and threw its light on him. His eyes were staring, his teeth chattered. There was everything to betray him to her as a terrified man – there was nothing to tell her that the terror was caused by his consciousness of deceiving her, for the first time in his life, to her face. If she had threatened him less openly when she placed him on the watch; if she had spoken less unreservedly of the interview which was to reward him in the morning, he might have owned the truth. As it was, his strongest fears and his dearest hopes were alike interested in telling her the fatal lie that he had now told – the fatal lie which he reiterated when she put her question for the second time.

She looked at him, deceived by the last man on earth whom she would have suspected of deception – the man whom she had deceived herself.

‘You seem to be over-excited,' she said quietly. ‘The night has been too much for you. Go upstairs, and rest. You will find the door of one of the rooms left open. That is the room you are to occupy. Good night.'

She put the candle (which she had left burning for him) on the table, and gave him her hand. He held her back by it desperately as she turned to leave him. His horror of what might happen when she was left by herself, forced the words to his lips which he would have feared to speak to her at any other time.

‘Don't,' he pleaded in a whisper; ‘oh, don't, don't, don't go downstairs to-night!'

She released her hand, and signed to him to take the candle. ‘You shall see me to-morrow,' she said. ‘Not a word more now!'

Her stronger will conquered him at that last moment, as it had conquered him throughout. He took the candle, and waited – following her eagerly with his eyes as she descended the stairs. The cold of the December night seemed to have found its way to her through the warmth of the house. She had put on a long heavy black shawl, and had fastened it close over her breast. The plaited coronet in which she wore her hair seemed to have weighed too heavily on her head. She had
untwisted it, and thrown it back over her shoulders. The old man looked at her flowing hair, as it lay red over the black shawl – at her supple, long-fingered hand, as it slid down the banisters – at the smooth, seductive grace of every movement that took her farther and farther away from him. ‘The night will go quickly,' he said to himself as she passed from his view; ‘I shall dream of her till the morning comes!'