Armadale (52 page)

Both governess and pupil were close to the summer-house before they looked that way, and noticed Midwinter standing inside. The governess saw him first.

‘A friend of yours, Miss Milroy?' she asked quietly, without starting, or betraying any sign of surprise.

Neelie recognized him instantly. Prejudiced against Midwinter by his conduct when his friend had introduced him at the cottage, she now fairly detested him as the unlucky first cause of her misunderstanding with Allan at the picnic. Her face flushed, and she drew back from the summer-house with an expression of merciless surprise.

‘He is a friend of Mr Armadale's,' she replied sharply. ‘I don't know what he wants, or why he is here.'

‘A friend of Mr Armadale's!' The governess's face lit up with a suddenly-roused interest as she repeated the words. She returned
Midwinter's look, still steadily fixed on her, with equal steadiness on her side.

‘For my part,' pursued Neelie, resenting Midwinter's insensibility to her presence on the scene, ‘I think it a great liberty to treat papa's garden as if it was the open park!'

The governess turned round, and gently interposed.

‘My dear Miss Milroy,' she remonstrated, ‘there are certain distinctions to be observed. This gentleman is a friend of Mr Armadale's. You could hardly express yourself more strongly, if he was a perfect stranger.'

‘I express my opinion,' retorted Neelie, chafing under the satirically indulgent tone in which the governess addressed her. ‘It's a matter of taste, Miss Gwilt; and tastes differ.' She turned away petulantly, and walked back by herself to the cottage.

‘She is very young,' said Miss Gwilt, appealing with a smile to Midwinter's forbearance; ‘and, as you must see for yourself, sir, she is a spoilt child.' She paused – showed, for an instant only, her surprise at Midwinter's strange silence and strange persistency in keeping his eyes still fixed on her – then set herself, with a charming grace and readiness, to help him out of the false position in which he stood. ‘As you have extended your walk thus far,' she resumed, ‘perhaps you will kindly favour me, on your return, by taking a message to your friend? Mr Armadale has been so good as to invite me to see the Thorpe-Ambrose gardens this morning. Will you say that Major Milroy permits me to accept the invitation (in company with Miss Milroy) between ten and eleven o'clock?' For a moment her eyes rested, with a renewed look of interest, on Midwinter's face. She waited, still in vain, for an answering word from him – smiled, as if his extraordinary silence amused rather than angered her – and followed her pupil back to the cottage.

It was only when the last trace of her had disappeared that Midwinter roused himself, and attempted to realize the position in which he stood. The revelation of her beauty was in no respect answerable for the breathless astonishment which had held him spell-bound up to this moment. The one clear impression she had produced on him thus far, began and ended with his discovery of the astounding contradiction that her face offered, in one feature after another, to the description in Mr Brock's letter. All beyond this was vague and misty – a dim consciousness of a tall, elegant woman, and of kind words, modestly and gracefully spoken to him, and nothing more.

He advanced a few steps into the garden, without knowing why –
stopped, glancing hither and thither like a man lost – recognized the summer-house by an effort, as if years had elapsed since he had seen it –and made his way out again, at last, into the park. Even here, he wandered first in one direction, then in another. His mind was still reeling under the shock that had fallen on it; his perceptions were all confused. Something kept him mechanically in action, walking eagerly without a motive, walking he knew not where.

A far less sensitively organized man might have been overwhelmed, as he was overwhelmed now, by the immense, the instantaneous revulsion of feeling which the event of the last few minutes had wrought in his mind.

At the memorable instant when he had opened the door of the summer-house, no confusing influence troubled his faculties. Right or wrong, in all that related to his position towards his friend, he had reached an absolutely definite conclusion, by an absolutely definite process of thought. The whole strength of the motive which had driven him into the resolution to part from Allan, rooted itself in the belief that he had seen at Hurle Mere the fatal fulfilment of the first Vision of the Dream. And this belief, in its turn, rested, necessarily, on the conviction that the woman who was the one survivor of the tragedy in Madeira, must be also inevitably the woman whom he had seen standing in the Shadow's place at the pool. Firm in that persuasion, he had himself compared the object of his distrust and of the rector's distrust with the description written by the rector himself – a description, carefully minute, by a man entirely trustworthy – and his own eyes had informed him that the woman whom he had seen at the Mere, and the woman whom Mr Brock had identified in London, were not one, but Two. In the place of the Dream-Shadow, there had stood, on the evidence of the rector's letter, not the instrument of the Fatality – but a stranger!

No such doubts as might have troubled a less superstitious man, were started in
his
mind by the discovery that had now opened on him.

It never occurred to him to ask himself, whether a stranger might not be the appointed instrument of the Fatality, now when the letter had persuaded him that a stranger had been revealed as the figure in the dream-landscape. No such idea entered, or could enter, his mind. The one woman, whom
his
superstition dreaded, was the woman who had entwined herself with the lives of the two Armadales in the first generation, and with the fortunes of the two Armadales in the second – who was at once the marked object of his father's death-bed warning,
and the first cause of the family calamities which had opened Allan's way to the Thorpe-Ambrose estate
⁴
– the woman, in a word, whom he would have known instinctively, but for Mr Brock's letter, to be the woman whom he had now actually seen.

Looking at events as they had just happened, under the influence of the misapprehension into which the rector had innocently misled him, his mind saw and seized its new conclusion instantaneously; acting precisely as it had acted in the past time of his interview with Mr Brock at the Isle of Man.

Exactly as he had once declared it to be an all-sufficient refutation of the idea of the Fatality; that he had never met with the timber-ship in any of his voyages at sea – so he now seized on the similarly derived conclusion, that the whole claim of the Dream to a supernatural origin stood self-refuted by the disclosure of a stranger in the Shadow's place. Once started from this point – once encouraged to let his love for Allan influence him undividedly again – his mind hurried along the whole resulting chain of thought at lightning speed. If the Dream was proved to be no longer a warning from the other world, it followed, inevitably, that accident and not fate had led the way to the night on the Wreck, and that all the events which had happened since Allan and he had parted from Mr Brock, were events in themselves harmless, which his superstition had distorted from their proper shape. In less than a moment, his mobile imagination had taken him back to the morning at Castletown when he had revealed to the rector the secret of his name; when he had declared to the rector, with his father's letter before his eyes, the better faith that was in him. Now once more, he felt his heart holding firmly by the bond of brotherhood between Allan and himself; now once more he could say with the eager sincerity of the old time, ‘If the thought of leaving him breaks my heart, the thought of leaving him is wrong!' As that nobler conviction possessed itself again of his mind – quieting the tumult, clearing the confusion within him – the house at Thorpe-Ambrose, with Allan on the steps, waiting and looking for him, opened on his eyes through the trees. A sense of illimitable relief lifted his eager spirit high above the cares, and doubts, and fears that had oppressed it so long; and showed him once more the better and brighter future of his early dreams. His eyes filled with tears, and he pressed the rector's letter, in his wild passionate way to his lips, as he looked at Allan through the vista of the trees. ‘But for this morsel of paper,' he thought, ‘my life might have been one long sorrow to me, and my father's crime might have parted us for ever!'

*

Such was the result of the stratagem which had shown the housemaid's face to Mr Brock as the face of Miss Gwilt. And so – by shaking Midwinter's trust in his own superstition, in the one case in which that superstition pointed to the truth – did Mother Oldershaw's cunning triumph over difficulties and dangers, which had never been contemplated by Mother Oldershaw herself.

1. –
From the Reverend Decimus Brock to Ozias Midwinter

Thursday.

M
Y DEAR
M
IDWINTER
, – No words can tell what a relief it was to me to get your letter this morning, and what a happiness I honestly feel in having been, thus far, proved to be in the wrong. The precautions you have taken in case the woman should still confirm my apprehensions by venturing herself at Thorpe-Ambrose, seem to me to be all that can be desired. You are no doubt sure to hear of her from one or other of the people in the lawyer's office, whom you have asked to inform you of the appearance of a stranger in the town.

I am the more pleased at finding how entirely I can trust you in this matter – for I am likely to be obliged to leave Allan's interests longer than I supposed solely in your hands. My visit to Thorpe-Ambrose must, I regret to say, be deferred for two months. The only-one of my brother-clegymen in London, who is able to take my duty for me, cannot make it convenient to remove with his family to Somersetshire before that time. I have no alternative but to finish my business here, and be back at my rectory on Saturday next. If anything happens, you will of course instantly communicate with me – and, in that case, be the inconvenience what it may, I must leave home for Thorpe-Ambrose. If, on the other hand, all goes more smoothly than my own obstinate
apprehensions will allow me to suppose, then Allan (to whom I have written) must not expect to see me till this day two months.

No result has, up to this time, rewarded our exertions to recover the trace lost at the railway. I will keep my letter open, however, until post-time, in case the next few hours bring any news.

Always truly yours,   

D
ECIMUS
B
ROCK
.

P.S. – I have just heard from the lawyers. They have found out the name the woman passed by in London. If this discovery (not a very important one, I am afraid,) suggests any new course of proceeding to you, pray act on it at once. The name is – Miss Gwilt.

2. –
From Miss Gwilt to Mrs Oldershaw

The Cottage, Thorpe-Ambrose,

Saturday, June 28th.

I
F
you will promise not to be alarmed, Mamma Oldershaw, I will begin this letter in a very odd way, by copying a page of a letter written by somebody else. You have an excellent memory, and you may not have forgotten that I received a note from Major Milroy's mother (after she engaged me as governess), on Monday last. It was dated and signed; and here it is, as far as the first page: ‘June 23rd, 1851. Dear Madam, – Pray excuse my troubling you, before you go to Thorpe-Ambrose, with a word more about the habits observed in my son's household. When I had the pleasure of seeing you at two o'clock to-day, in Kingsdown Crescent, I had another appointment in a distant part of London at three; and, in the hurry of the moment, one or two little matters escaped me, which I think I ought to impress on your attention.' The rest of the letter is not of the slightest importance, but the lines that I have just copied, are well worthy of all the attention you can bestow on them. They have saved me from discovery, my dear, before I have been a week in Major Milroy's service!

It happened no later than yesterday evening, and it began and ended in this manner, –

There is a gentleman here (of whom I shall have more to say presently), who is an intimate friend of young Armadale's, and who bears the strange name of Midwinter. He contrived yesterday to speak to me alone in the park. Almost as soon as he opened his lips, I found that my name had been discovered in London (no doubt by the Somersetshire clergyman); and that Mr Midwinter had been chosen (evidently by the same person) to identify the Miss Gwilt who had vanished from Brompton, with the Miss Gwilt who had appeared at Thorpe-Ambrose. You foresaw this danger, I remember; but you could scarcely have imagined that the exposure would threaten me so soon.

I spare you the details of our conversation, to come to the end. Mr Midwinter put the matter very delicately, declaring, to my great surprise, that he felt quite certain himself, that I was not the Miss Gwilt of whom his friend was in search; and that he only acted as he did out of regard to the anxiety of a person whose wishes he was bound to respect. Would I assist him, in setting that anxiety completely at rest, so far as I was concerned, by kindly answering one plain question – which he had no other right to ask me than the right my indulgence might give him? The lost ‘Miss Gwilt' had been missed on Monday last, at two o'clock, in the crowd on the platform of the North-Western Railway, in Euston Square. Would I authorize him to say, that on that day, and at that hour, the Miss Gwilt who was Major Milroy's governess, had never been near the place?

I need hardly tell you that I seized the fine opportunity he had given me of disarming all future suspicion. I took a high tone on the spot, and met him with the old lady's letter. He politely refused to look at it. I insisted on his looking at it. ‘I don't choose to be mistaken,' I said, ‘for a woman who may be a bad character, because she happens to bear, or to have assumed, the same name as mine. I insist on your reading the first part of this letter for my satisfaction, if not for your own.' He was obliged to comply – and there was the proof, in the old lady's own handwriting, that at two o'clock on Monday last, she and I were together in Kingsdown Crescent, which any directory would tell him is a ‘crescent' in Bayswater! I leave you to imagine his apologies, and the perfect sweetness with which I received them.