Armadale (117 page)

She secured the staircase door, after she had passed through it – listened, and satisfied herself that nothing was stirring – then went on slowly along the corridor to the window. Leaning on the window-sill, she looked out at the night. The clouds were over the moon at that moment; nothing was to be seen through the darkness but the scattered gaslights in the suburb. Turning from the window, she looked at the clock. It was twenty minutes past one.

For the last time, the resolution that had come to her in the earlier night, with the knowledge that her husband was in the house, forced itself uppermost in her mind. For the last time, the voice within her said, ‘Think if there is no other way!'

She pondered over it till the minute-hand of the clock pointed to the half-hour. ‘No!' she said, still thinking of her husband. ‘The one chance left, is to go through with it to the end. He will leave the thing undone which he has come here to do; he will leave the words unspoken which he has come here to say – when he knows that the act may make me a public scandal, and that the words may send me to the scaffold!' Her colour rose, and she smiled with a terrible irony as she looked for the first time at the door of the Room. ‘I shall be your widow,' she said, ‘in half-an-hour!'

She opened the case of the apparatus, and took the Purple Flask in her hand. After marking the time by a glance at the clock, she dropped into the glass funnel the first of the six separate Pourings that were measured for her by the paper slips.

When she had put the Flask back, she listened at the mouth of the funnel. Not a sound reached her ear: the deadly process did its work, in the silence of death itself. When she rose, and looked up, the moon was shining in at the window, and the moaning wind was quiet.

Oh, the time! the time! If it could only have been begun and ended with the first Pouring!

She went downstairs into the hall – she walked to and fro, and listened at the open door that led to the kitchen stairs. She came up again; she went down again. The first of the intervals of five minutes was endless. The time stood still. The suspense was maddening.

The interval passed. As she took the Flask for the second time, and dropped in the second Pouring, the clouds floated over the moon, and the night-view through the window slowly darkened.

The restlessness that had driven her up and down the stairs, and backwards and forwards in the hall, left her as suddenly as it had come. She waited through the second interval, leaning on the window-sill, and staring, without conscious thought of any kind, into the black night The howling of a belated dog was borne towards her on the wind, at intervals, from some distant part of the suburb. She found herself following the faint sound as it died away into silence with a dull attention, and listening for its coming again with an expectation that was duller still. Her arms lay like lead on the window-sill; her forehead rested against the glass without feeling the cold. It was not till the moon struggled out again that she was startled into sudden self-remembrance. She turned quickly, and looked at the clock; seven minutes had passed since the second Pouring.

As she snatched up the Flask, and fed the funnel for the third time, the full consciousness of her position came back to her. The fever-heat throbbed again in her blood, and flushed fiercely in her cheeks. Swift, smooth, and noiseless, she paced from end to end of the corridor, with her arms folded in her shawl, and her eye moment after moment on the clock.

Three out of the next five minutes passed, and again the suspense began to madden her. The space in the corridor grew too confined for the illimitable restlessness that possessed her limbs. She went down into the hall again, and circled round and round it like a wild creature in a cage. At the third turn, she felt something moving softly against her dress. The house-cat had come up through the open kitchen-door – a large, tawny, companionable cat that purred in high good temper, and followed her for company. She took the animal up in her arms – it rubbed its sleek head luxuriously against her chin as she bent her face over it. ‘Armadale hates cats,' she whispered in the creature's ear. ‘Come up and see Armadale killed!' The next moment her own frightful fancy horrified her. She dropped the cat with a shudder; she drove it below again with threatening hands. For a moment after, she stood still – then, in headlong haste, suddenly mounted the stairs. Her husband had forced his way back again into her thoughts; her husband threatened her with a danger which had never entered her mind till now. What, if he were not asleep? What if he came out upon her, and found her with the Purple Flask in her hand?

She stole to the door of number three, and listened. The slow, regular
breathing of a sleeping man was just audible. After waiting a moment to let the feeling of relief quiet her, she took a step towards Number Four – and checked herself. It was needless to listen at
that
door. The doctor had told her that Sleep came first, as certainly as Death afterwards, in the poisoned air. She looked aside at the clock. The time had come for the fourth Pouring.

Her hand began to tremble violently, as she fed the funnel for the fourth time. The fear of her husband was back again in her heart. What if some noise disturbed him before the sixth Pouring? What if he woke on a sudden (as she had often seen him wake) without any noise at all?

She looked up and down the corridor. The end room, in which Mr Bashwood had been concealed, offered itself to her as a place of refuge. ‘I might go in there!' she thought. ‘Has he left the key?' She opened the door to look, and saw the handkerchief thrown down on the floor. Was it Mr Bashwood's handkerchief, left there by accident? She examined it at the corners. In the second corner she found her husband's name!

Her first impulse hurried her to the staircase-door, to rouse the steward, and insist on an explanation. The next moment, she remembered the Purple Flask, and the danger of leaving the corridor. She turned, and looked at the door of number three. Her husband, on the evidence of the handkerchief, had unquestionably been out of his room – and Mr Bashwood had not told her. Was he in his room now? In the violence of her agitation, as the question passed through her mind, she forgot the discovery which she had herself made not a minute before. Again, she listened at the door; again, she heard the slow regular breathing of the sleeping man. The first time, the evidence of her ears had been enough to quiet her.
This
time, in the tenfold aggravation of her suspicion and her alarm, she was determined to have the evidence of her eyes as well. ‘All the doors open softly in this house,' she said to herself; ‘there's no fear of my waking him.' Noiselessly, by an inch at a time, she opened the unlocked door, and looked in the moment the aperture was wide enough. In the little light she had let into the room, the sleeper's head was just visible on the pillow. Was it quite as dark against the white pillow as her husband's head looked when he was in bed? Was the breathing as light as her husband's breathing when he was asleep?

She opened the door more widely, and looked in by the clearer light.

There lay the man whose life she had attempted for the third time, peacefully sleeping in the room that had been given to her husband, and in the air that could harm nobody!

The inevitable conclusion overwhelmed her on the instant. With a
frantic upward action of her hands she staggered back into the passage. The door of Allan's room fell to – but not noisily enough to wake him. She turned as she heard it close. For one moment she stood staring at it like a woman stupefied. The next, her instinct rushed into action, before her reason recovered itself. In two steps she was at the door of Number Four.

The door was locked.

She felt over the wall with both hands, wildly and clumsily, for the button which she had seen the doctor press, when he was showing the room to the visitors. Twice she missed it. The third time her eyes helped her hands – she found the button and pressed on it. The mortice of the lock inside fell back, and the door yielded to her.

Without an instant's hesitation she entered the room. Though the door was open – though so short a time had elapsed since the fourth Pouring, that but little more than half the contemplated volume of gas had been produced as yet – the poisoned air seized her, like the grasp of a hand at her throat, like the twisting of a wire round her head. She found him on the floor at the foot of the bed – his head and one arm were towards the door, as if he had risen under the first feeling of drowsiness, and had sunk in the effort to leave the room. With the desperate concentration of strength of which women are capable in emergencies, she lifted him and dragged him out into the corridor. Her brain reeled as she laid him down and crawled back on her knees to the room, to shut out the poisoned air from pursuing them into the passage. After closing the door, she waited, without daring to look at him the while, for strength enough to rise and get to the window over the stairs. When the window was opened, when the keen air of the early winter morning blew steadily in, she ventured back to him and raised his head, and looked for the first time closely at his face.

Was it death that spread the livid pallor over his forehead and his cheeks, and the dull leaden hue on his eyelids and his lips?

She loosened his cravat and opened his waistcoat, and bared his throat and breast to the air. With her hand on his heart, with her bosom supporting his head, so that he fronted the window, she waited the event. A time passed: a time short enough to be reckoned by minutes on the clock; and yet long enough to take her memory back over all her married life with him – long enough to mature the resolution that now rose in her mind as the one result that could come of the retrospect. As her eyes rested on him, a strange composure settled slowly on her face. She bore the look of a woman who was equally
resigned to welcome the chance of his recovery, or to accept the certainty of his death.

Not a cry or a tear had escaped her yet. Not a cry or a tear escaped her when the interval had passed, and she felt the first faint fluttering of his heart, and heard the first faint catching of the breath at his lips. She silently bent over him and kissed his forehead. When she looked up again, the hard despair had melted from her face. There was something softly radiant in her eyes, which lit her whole countenance as with an inner light, and made her womanly and lovely once more.

She laid him down, and, taking off her shawl, made a pillow of it to support his head. ‘It might have been hard, love,' she said, as she felt the faint pulsation strengthening at his heart. ‘You have made it easy now.'

She rose, and, turning from him, noticed the Purple Flask in the place where she had left it since the fourth Pouring. ‘Ah,' she thought quietly, ‘I had forgotten my best friend – I had forgotten that there is more to pour in yet.'

With a steady hand, with a calm, attentive face, she fed the funnel for the fifth time. ‘Five minutes more,' she said, when she had put the Flask back, after a look at the clock.

She fell into thought – thought that only deepened the grave and gentle composure of her face. ‘Shall I write him a farewell word?' she asked herself. ‘Shall I tell him the truth before I leave him for ever?'

Her little gold pencil-case hung with the other toys at her watch-chain. After looking about her for a moment, she knelt over her husband, and put her hand into the breast-pocket of his coat.

His pocket-book was there. Some papers fell from it as she unfastened the clasp. One of them was the letter which had come to him from Mr Brock's death-bed. She turned over the two sheets of note-paper on which the rector had written the words that had now come true – and found the last page of the last sheet a blank. On that page she wrote her farewell words, kneeling at her husband's side.

I am worse than the worst you can think of me. You have saved Armadale by changing rooms with him to-night – and you have saved him from Me. You can guess now whose widow I should have claimed to be, if you had not preserved his life; and you will know what a wretch you married when you married the woman who writes these lines. Still, I had some innocent moments – and then I loved you dearly. Forget me, my darling, in the love of a better woman than I am. I might, perhaps, have been that better
woman myself, if I had not lived a miserable life before you met with me. It matters little now. The one atonement I can make for all the wrong I have done you is the atonement of my death. It is not hard for me to die, now I know you will live. Even my wickedness has one merit – it has not prospered. I have never been a happy woman.'
⁷

She folded the letter again, and put it into his hand, to attract his attention in that way when he came to himself. As she gently closed his fingers on the paper and looked up, the last minute of the last interval faced her, recorded on the clock.

She bent over him, and gave him her farewell kiss.

‘Live, my angel, live!' she murmured tenderly, with her lips just touching his. ‘All your life is before you – a happy life, and an honoured life, if you are freed from
me
!'

With a last, lingering tenderness, she parted the hair back from his forehead. ‘It is no merit to have loved you,' she said. ‘You are one of the men whom women all like.' She sighed and left him. It was her last weakness. She bent her head affirmatively to the clock, as if it had been a living creature speaking to her – and fed the funnel for the last time, to the last drop left in the Flask.

The waning moon shone in faintly at the window. With her hand on the door of the room, she turned and looked at the light that was slowly fading out of the murky sky.

‘Oh, God, forgive me!' she said. ‘Oh, Christ, bear witness that I have suffered!'

One moment more she lingered on the threshold; lingered for her last look in this world – and turned that look on
him
.

‘Good-by!' she said softly.