Armadale (15 page)

‘I am rather afraid one of us is in the habit of losing himself every
time he opens his lips,' retorted Mr Brock. ‘Come, come, Allan, this is serious. You have been rendering yourself liable for expenses which you may not be able to pay. Mind, I am far from blaming you for your kind feeling towards this poor friendless man—'

‘Don't be low-spirited about him, sir. He'll get over it – he'll be all right again in a week or so. A capital fellow, I have not the least doubt!' continued Allan, whose habit it was to believe in everybody, and to despair of nothing. ‘Suppose you ask him to dinner when he gets well, Mr Brock? I should like to find out (when we are all three snug and friendly together over our wine, you know) how he came by that extraordinary name of his. Ozias Midwinter! Upon my life, his father ought to be ashamed of himself.'

‘Will you answer me one question before I go in?' said the rector, stopping in despair at his own gate. ‘This man's bill for lodging and medical attendance may mount to twenty or thirty pounds before he gets well again, if he ever does get well. How are you to pay it?'

‘What's that the Chancellor of the Exchequer says, when he finds himself in a mess with his accounts, and doesn't see his way out again?' asked Allan. ‘He always tells his honourable friend he's quite willing to leave a something or other—'

‘A margin?' suggested Mr Brock.

‘That's it,' said Allan. ‘I'm like the Chancellor of the Exchequer. I'm quite willing to leave a margin. The yacht (bless her heart!) doesn't eat up everything.
⁵
If I'm short by a pound or two, don't be afraid, sir. There's no pride about me; I'll go round with the hat, and get the balance in the neighbourhood. Deuce take the pounds, shillings, and pence! I wish they could all three get rid of themselves like the Bedouin brothers at the show. Don't you remember the Bedouin brothers, Mr Brock? “Ali will take a lighted torch, and jump down the throat of his brother Muli – Muli will take a lighted torch, and jump down the throat of his brother Hassan – and Hassan, taking a third lighted torch, will conclude the performances by jumping down his own throat, and leaving the spectators in total darkness.” Wonderfully good, that – what I call real wit, with a fine strong flavour about it. Wait a minute! Where are we? We have lost ourselves again. Oh, I remember – money. What I can't beat into my thick head,' concluded Allan, quite unconscious that he was preaching socialist doctrines to a clergyman,
⁶
‘is the meaning of the fuss that's made about giving money away. Why can't the people who have got money to spare give it to the people who haven't got money to spare, and make things pleasant and comfortable all the world over in that way? You're always telling me to cultivate
ideas, Mr Brock. There's an idea, and, upon my life, I don't think it's a bad one.'

Mr Brock gave his pupil a good-humoured poke with the end of his stick. ‘Go back to your yacht,' he said. ‘All the little discretion you have got in that flighty head of yours, is left on board in your tool-chest. How that lad will end,' pursued the rector, when he was left by himself, ‘is more than any human being can say. I almost wish I had never taken the responsibility of him on my shoulders.'

Three weeks passed before the stranger with the uncouth name was pronounced to be at last on the way to recovery. During this period, Allan had made regular inquiries at the inn; and, as soon as the sick man was allowed to see visitors, Allan was the first who appeared at his bedside. So far, Mr Brock's pupil had shown no more than a natural interest in one of the few romantic circumstances which had varied the monotony of the village life: he had committed no imprudence, and he had exposed himself to no blame. But as the days passed, young Armadale's visits to the inn began to lengthen considerably; and the surgeon (a cautious elderly man) gave the rector a private hint to bestir himself. Mr Brock acted on the hint immediately, and discovered that Allan had followed his usual impulses in his usual headlong way. He had taken a violent fancy to the castaway usher; and had invited Ozias Midwinter to reside permanently in the neighbourhood, in the new and interesting character of his bosom friend.

Before Mr Brock could make up his mind how to act in this emergency, he received a note from Allan's mother, begging him to use his privilege as an old friend, and to pay her a visit in her room. He found Mrs Armadale suffering under violent nervous agitation, caused entirely by a recent interview with her son. Allan had been sitting with her all the morning, and had talked of nothing but his new friend. The man with the horrible name (as poor Mrs Armadale described him) had questioned Allan, in a singularly inquisitive manner, on the subject of himself and his family, but had kept his own personal history entirely in the dark. At some former period of his life he had been accustomed to the sea and to sailing. Allan had, unfortunately, found this out, and a bond of union between them was formed on the spot. With a merciless distrust of the stranger – simply
because
he was a stranger – which appeared rather unreasonable to Mr Brock, Mrs Armadale besought the rector to go to the inn without a moment's loss of time, and never to rest until he had made the man give a proper account of himself. ‘Find out everything about his father and mother!' she said, in her vehement
female way. ‘Make sure before you leave him that he is not a vagabond roaming the country under an assumed name.'

‘My dear lady,' remonstrated the rector, obediently taking his hat, ‘whatever else we may doubt, I really think we may feel sure about the man's name! It is so remarkably ugly, that it must be genuine. No sane human being would
assume
such a name as Ozias Midwinter.'

‘You may be quite right, and I may be quite wrong; but pray go and see him,' persisted Mrs Armadale. ‘Go, and don't spare him, Mr Brock. How do we know that this illness of his may not have been put on for a purpose?'

It was useless to reason with her. The whole College of Physicians might have certified to the man's illness, and, in her present frame of mind, Mrs Armadale would have disbelieved the College, one and all, from the president downwards. Mr Brock took the wise way out of the difficulty – he said no more, and he set off for the inn immediately.

Ozias Midwinter, recovering from brain-fever, was a startling object to contemplate, on a first view of him. His shaven head, tied up roughly in an old yellow silk handkerchief; his tawny, haggard cheeks; his bright brown eyes, preternaturally large and wild; his tangled black beard;
⁷
his long supple, sinewy fingers, wasted by suffering, till they looked like claws – all tended to discompose the rector at the outset of the interview. When the first feeling of surprise had worn off, the impression that followed it was not an agreeable one. Mr Brock could not conceal from himself that the stranger's manner was against him. The general opinion has settled that if a man is honest, he is bound to assert it by looking straight at his fellow-creatures when he speaks to them. If this man was honest, his eyes showed a singular perversity in looking away and denying it. Possibly they were affected in some degree by a nervous restlessness in his organization, which appeared to pervade every fibre in his lean, lithe body. The rector's healthy Anglo-Saxon flesh crept responsively at every casual movement of the usher's supple brown fingers, and every passing distortion of the usher's haggard yellow face. ‘God forgive me!'thought Mr Brock, with his mind running on Allan, and Allan's mother, ‘I wish I could see my way to turning Ozias Midwinter adrift in the world again!'

The conversation which ensued between the two was a very guarded one. Mr Brock felt his way gently, and found himself, try where he might, always kept politely, more or less, in the dark. From first to last, the man's real character shrank back with a savage shyness from the rector's touch. He started by an assertion which it was impossible to look at him and believe – he declared that he was only twenty years of
age. All he could be persuaded to say on the subject of the school was, that the bare recollection of it was horrible to him. He had only filled the usher's situation for ten days when the first appearance of his illness caused his dismissal. How he had reached the field in which he had been found, was more than he could say. He remembered travelling a long distance by railway, with a purpose (if he had a purpose) which it was now impossible to recall, and then wandering coastwards, on foot, all through the day, or all through the night – he was not sure which. The sea kept running in his mind, when his mind began to give way. He had been employed on the sea, as a lad. He had left it, and had filled a situation at a bookseller's in a country town.
⁸
He had left the bookseller's, and had tried the school. Now the school had turned him out, he must try something else. It mattered little what he tried – failure (for which nobody was ever to blame but himself) was sure to be the end of it, sooner or later. Friends to assist him, he had none to apply to; and as for relations, he wished to be excused from speaking of them. For all he knew they might be dead, and for all
they
knew
he
might be dead. That was a melancholy acknowledgment to make at his time of life, there was no denying it. It might tell against him in the opinions of others – and it did tell against him, no doubt, in the opinion of the gentleman who was talking to him at that moment.

These strange answers were given in a tone and manner far removed from bitterness on the one side, or from indifference on the other. Ozias Midwinter at twenty, spoke of his life as Ozias Midwinter at seventy might have spoken, with a long weariness of years on him which he had learnt to bear patiently.

Two circumstances pleaded strongly against the distrust with which, in sheer perplexity of mind, Mr Brock blindly regarded him. He had written to a savings bank in a distant part of England, had drawn his money, and had paid the doctor and the landlord. A man of vulgar mind, after acting in this manner, would have treated his obligations lightly, when he had settled his bills. Ozias Midwinter spoke of his obligations – and especially of his obligation to Allan – with a fervour of thankfulness which it was not surprising only, but absolutely painful to witness. He showed a horrible sincerity of astonishment at having been treated with common Christian kindness in a Christian land. He spoke of Allan's having become answerable for all the expenses of sheltering, nursing, and curing him, with a savage rapture of gratitude and surprise, which burst out of him like a flash of lightning. ‘So help me God!' cried the castaway usher, ‘I never met with the like of him; I never heard of the like of him before!' In the next instant, the one
glimpse of light which the man had let in on his own passionate nature was quenched again in darkness. His wandering eyes, returning to their old trick, looked uneasily away from Mr Brock; and his voice dropped back once more into its unnatural steadiness and quietness of tone. ‘I beg your pardon, sir,' he said. ‘I have been used to be hunted, and cheated, and starved. Everything else comes strange to me.' Half attracted by the man, half repelled by him, Mr Brock, on rising to take leave, impulsively offered his hand, and then, with a sudden misgiving, confusedly drew it back again. ‘You meant that kindly, sir,' said Ozias Midwinter, with his own hands crossed resolutely behind him. ‘I don't complain of your thinking better of it. A man who can't give a proper account of himself, is not a man for a gentleman in your position to take by the hand.'

Mr Brock left the inn thoroughly puzzled. Before returning to Mrs Armadale, he sent for her son. The chances were that the guard had been off the stranger's tongue when he spoke to Allan; and with Allan's frankness, there was no fear of his concealing anything that had passed between them from the rector's knowledge.

Here, again, Mr Brock's diplomacy achieved no useful results. Once started on the subject of Ozias Midwinter, Allan rattled on about his new friend, in his usual easy light-hearted way. But he had really nothing of importance to tell – for nothing of importance had been revealed to him. They had talked about boat-building and sailing by the hour together; and Allan had got some valuable hints. They had discussed (with diagrams to assist them, and with more valuable hints for Allan) the serious impending question of the launch of the yacht.
⁹
On other occasions they had diverged to other subjects – to more of them than Allan could remember, on the spur of the moment. Had Midwinter said nothing about his relations in the flow of all this friendly talk? Nothing, except that they had not behaved well to him – hang his relations! Was he at all sensitive on the subject of his own odd name? Not the least in the world; he had set the example, like a sensible fellow, of laughing at it himself: deuce take his name, it did very well when you were used to it. What had Allan seen in him to take such a fancy to? Allan had seen in him – what he didn't see in people in general. He wasn't like all the other fellows in the neighbourhood. All the other fellows were cut out on the same pattern. Every man of them was equally healthy, muscular, loud, hard-headed, clean-skinned, and rough; every man of them drank the same draughts of beer, smoked the same short pipes all day long, rode the best horse, shot over the best dog, and put the best bottle of wine in England on his table at night;
every man of them sponged himself every morning in the same sort of tub of cold water, and bragged about it in frosty weather in the same sort of way; every man of them thought getting into debt a capital joke, and betting on horse-races one of the most meritorious actions that a human being can perform. They were no doubt excellent fellows in their way; but the worst of them was, they were all exactly alike. It was a perfect godsend to meet with a man like Midwinter – a man who was not cut out on the regular local pattern, and whose way in the world had the one great merit (in those parts) of being a way of his own.