Chapter 3

He turned on the instant, and saw before him, with the pure midday light shining full on her, a woman of the mixed blood of the European and the African race, with the Northern delicacy in the shape of her face, and the Southern richness in its color--a woman in the prime of her beauty, who moved with an inbred grace, who looked with an inbred fascination, whose large, languid black eyes rested on him gratefully, whose little dusky hand offered itself to him in mute expression of her thanks, with the welcome that is given to the coming of a friend. For the first time in his life the Scotchman was taken by surprise. Every self-preservative word that he had been meditating but an instant since dropped out of his memory. His thrice impenetrable armor of habitual suspicion, habitual self-discipline, and habitual reserve, which had never fallen from him in a woman’s presence before, fell from him in this woman’s presence, and brought him to his knees, a conquered man. He took the hand she offered him, and bowed over it his first honest homage to the sex, in silence.

She hesitated on her side. The quick feminine perception which, in happier circumstances, would have pounced on the secret of his embarrassment in an instant, failed her now. She attributed his strange reception of her to pride, to reluctance--to any cause but the unexpected revelation of her own beauty. “I have no words to thank you,” she said, faintly, trying to propitiate him. “I should only distress you if I tried to speak.” Her lip began to tremble, she drew back a little, and turned away her head in silence.

The doctor, who had been standing apart, quietly observant in a corner, advanced before Mr. Neal could interfere, and led Mrs. Armadale to a chair. “Don’t be afraid of him,” whispered the good man, patting her gently on the shoulder. “He was hard as iron in my hands, but I think, by the look of him, he will be soft as wax in yours. Say the words I told you to say, and let us take him to your husband’s room, before those sharp wits of his have time to recover themselves.”

She roused her sinking resolution, and advanced half-way to the window to meet Mr. Neal. “My kind friend, the doctor, has told me, sir, that your only hesitation in coming here is a hesitation on my account,” she said, her head drooping a little, and her rich color fading away while she spoke. “I am deeply grateful, but I entreat you not to think of _me_. What my husband wishes--” Her voice faltered; she waited resolutely, and recovered herself. “What my husband wishes in his last moments, I wish too.”

This time Mr. Neal was composed enough to answer her. In low, earnest tones, he entreated her to say no more. “I was only anxious to show you every consideration,” he said. “I am only anxious now to spare you every distress.” As he spoke, something like a glow of color rose slowly on his sallow face. Her eyes were looking at him, softly attentive; and he thought guiltily of his meditations at the window before she came in.

The doctor saw his opportunity. He opened the door that led into Mr. Armadale’s room, and stood by it, waiting silently. Mrs. Armadale entered first. In a minute more the door was closed again; and Mr. Neal stood committed to the responsibility that had been forced on him--committed beyond recall.

The room was decorated in the gaudy continental fashion, and the warm sunlight was shining in joyously. Cupids and flowers were painted on the ceiling; bright ribbons looped up the white window-curtains; a smart gilt clock ticked on a velvet-covered mantelpiece; mirrors gleamed on the walls, and flowers in all the colors of the rainbow speckled the carpet. In the midst of the finery, and the glitter, and the light, lay the paralyzed man, with his wandering eyes, and his lifeless lower face--his head propped high with many pillows; his helpless hands laid out over the bed-clothes like the hands of a corpse. By the bed head stood, grim, and old, and silent, the shriveled black nurse; and on the counter-pane, between his father’s outspread hands, lay the child, in his little white frock, absorbed in the enjoyment of a new toy. When the door opened, and Mrs. Armadale led the way in, the boy was tossing his plaything--a soldier on horseback--backward and forward over the helpless hands on either side of him; and the father’s wandering eyes were following the toy to and fro, with a stealthy and ceaseless vigilance--a vigilance as of a wild animal, terrible to see.

The moment Mr. Neal appeared in the doorway, those restless eyes stopped, looked up, and fastened on the stranger with a fierce eagerness of inquiry. Slowly the motionless lips struggled into movement. With thick, hesitating articulation, they put the question which the eyes asked mutely, into words: “Are you the man?”

Mr. Neal advanced to the bedside, Mrs. Armadale drawing back from it as he approached, and waiting with the doctor at the further end of the room. The child looked up, toy in hand, as the stranger came near, opened his bright brown eyes in momentary astonishment, and then went on with his game.

“I have been made acquainted with your sad situation, sir,” said Mr. Neal; “and I have come here to place my services at your disposal--services which no one but myself, as your medical attendant informs me, is in a position to render you in this strange place. My name is Neal. I am a writer to the signet in Edinburgh; and I may presume to say for myself that any confidence you wish to place in me will be confidence not improperly bestowed.”

The eyes of the beautiful wife were not confusing him now. He spoke to the helpless husband quietly and seriously, without his customary harshness, and with a grave compassion in his manner which presented him at his best. The sight of the death-bed had steadied him.

“You wish me to write something for you?” he resumed, after waiting for a reply, and waiting in vain.

“Yes!” said the dying man, with the all-mastering impatience which his tongue was powerless to express, glittering angrily in his eye. “My hand is gone, and my speech is going. Write!”

Before there was time to speak again, Mr. Neal heard the rustling of a woman’s dress, and the quick creaking of casters on the carpet behind him. Mrs. Armadale was moving the writing-table across the room to the foot of the bed. If he was to set up those safeguards of his own devising that were to bear him harmless through all results to come, now was the time, or never. He, kept his back turned on Mrs. Armadale, and put his precautionary question at once in the plainest terms.

“May I ask, sir, before I take the pen in hand, what it is you wish me to write?”

The angry eyes of the paralyzed man glittered brighter and brighter. His lips opened and closed again. He made no reply.

Mr. Neal tried another precautionary question, in a new direction.

“When I have written what you wish me to write,” he asked, “what is to be done with it?”

This time the answer came:

“Seal it up in my presence, and post it to my ex--”

His laboring articulation suddenly stopped and he looked piteously in the questioner’s face for the next word.

“Do you mean your executor?”

“Yes.”

“It is a letter, I suppose, that I am to post?” There was no answer. “May I ask if it is a letter altering your will?”

“Nothing of the sort.”

Mr. Neal considered a little. The mystery was thickening. The one way out of it, so far, was the way traced faintly through that strange story of the unfinished letter which the doctor had repeated to him in Mrs. Armadale’s words. The nearer he approached his unknown responsibility, the more ominous it seemed of something serious to come. Should he risk another question before he pledged himself irrevocably? As the doubt crossed his mind, he felt Mrs. Armadale’s silk dress touch him on the side furthest from her husband. Her delicate dark hand was laid gently on his arm; her full deep African eyes looked at him in submissive entreaty. “My husband is very anxious,” she whispered. “Will you quiet his anxiety, sir, by taking your place at the writing-table?”

It was from _her_ lips that the request came--from the lips of the person who had the best right to hesitate, the wife who was excluded from the secret! Most men in Mr. Neal’s position would have given up all their safeguards on the spot. The Scotchman gave them all up but one.

“I will write what you wish me to write,” he said, addressing Mr. Armadale. “I will seal it in your presence; and I will post it to your executor myself. But, in engaging to do this, I must beg you to remember that I am acting entirely in the dark; and I must ask you to excuse me, if I reserve my own entire freedom of action, when your wishes in relation to the writing and the posting of the letter have been fulfilled.”

“Do you give me your promise?”

“If you want my promise, sir, I will give it--subject to the condition I have just named.”

“Take your condition, and keep your promise. My desk,” he added, looking at his wife for the first time.

She crossed the room eagerly to fetch the desk from a chair in a corner. Returning with it, she made a passing sign to the negress, who still stood, grim and silent, in the place that she had occupied from the first. The woman advanced, obedient to the sign, to take the child from the bed. At the instant when she touched him, the father’s eyes--fixed previously on the desk--turned on her with the stealthy quickness of a cat. “No!” he said. “No!” echoed the fresh voice of the boy, still charmed with his plaything, and still liking his place on the bed. The negress left the room, and the child, in high triumph, trotted his toy soldier up and down on the bedclothes that lay rumpled over his father’s breast. His mother’s lovely face contracted with a pang of jealousy as she looked at him.

“Shall I open your desk?” she asked, pushing back the child’s plaything sharply while she spoke. An answering look from her husband guided her hand to the place under his pillow where the key was hidden. She opened the desk, and disclosed inside some small sheets of manuscript pinned together. “These?” she inquired, producing them.

“Yes,” he said. “You can go now.”

The Scotchman sitting at the writing-table, the doctor stirring a stimulant mixture in a corner, looked at each other with an anxiety in both their faces which they could neither of them control. The words that banished the wife from the room were spoken. The moment had come.

“You can go now,” said Mr. Armadale, for the second time.

She looked at the child, established comfortably on the bed, and an ashy paleness spread slowly over her face. She looked at the fatal letter which was a sealed secret to her, and a torture of jealous suspicion--suspicion of that other woman who had been the shadow and the poison of her life--wrung her to the heart. After moving a few steps from the bedside, she stopped, and came back again. Armed with the double courage of her love and her despair, she pressed her lips on her dying husband’s cheek, and pleaded with him for the last time. Her burning tears dropped on his face as she whispered to him: “Oh, Allan, think how I have loved you! think how hard I have tried to make you happy! think how soon I shall lose you! Oh, my own love! don’t, don’t send me away!”

The words pleaded for her; the kiss pleaded for her; the recollection of the love that had been given to him, and never returned, touched the heart of the fast-sinking man as nothing had touched it since the day of his marriage. A heavy sigh broke from him. He looked at her, and hesitated.

“Let me stay,” she whispered, pressing her face closer to his.

“It will only distress you,” he whispered back.

“Nothing distresses me, but being sent away from _you_!”

He waited. She saw that he was thinking, and waited too.

“If I let you stay a little--?”

“Yes! yes!”

“Will you go when I tell you?”

“I will.”

“On your oath?”

The fetters that bound his tongue seemed to be loosened for a moment in the great outburst of anxiety which forced that question to his lips. He spoke those startling words as he had spoken no words yet.

“On my oath!” she repeated, and, dropping on her knees at the bedside, passionately kissed his hand. The two strangers in the room turned their heads away by common consent. In the silence that followed, the one sound stirring was the small sound of the child’s toy, as he moved it hither and thither on the bed.

The doctor was the first who broke the spell of stillness which had fallen on all the persons present. He approached the patient, and examined him anxiously. Mrs. Armadale rose from her knees; and, first waiting for her husband’s permission, carried the sheets of manuscript which she had taken out of the desk to the table at which Mr. Neal was waiting. Flushed and eager, more beautiful than ever in the vehement agitation which still possessed her, she stooped over him as she put the letter into his hands, and, seizing on the means to her end with a woman’s headlong self-abandonment to her own impulses, whispered to him, “Read it out from the beginning. I must and will hear it!” Her eyes flashed their burning light into his; her breath beat on his cheek. Before he could answer, before he could think, she was back with her husband. In an instant she had spoken, and in that instant her beauty had bent the Scotchman to her will. Frowning in reluctant acknowledgment of his own inability to resist her, he turned over the leaves of the letter; looked at the blank place where the pen had dropped from the writer’s hand and had left a blot on the paper; turned back again to the beginning, and said the words, in the wife’s interest, which the wife herself had put into his lips.

“Perhaps, sir, you may wish to make some corrections,” he began, with all his attention apparently fixed on the letter, and with every outward appearance of letting his sour temper again get the better of him. “Shall I read over to you what you have already written?”

Mrs. Armadale, sitting at the bed head on one side, and the doctor, with his fingers on the patient’s pulse, sitting on the other, waited with widely different anxieties for the answer to Mr. Neal’s question. Mr. Armadale’s eyes turned searchingly from his child to his wife.

“You _will_ hear it?” he said. Her breath came and went quickly; her hand stole up and took his; she bowed her head in silence. Her husband paused, taking secret counsel with his thoughts, and keeping his eyes fixed on his wife. At last he decided, and gave the answer. “Read it,” he said, “and stop when I tell you.”

It was close on one o’clock, and the bell was ringing which summoned the visitors to their early dinner at the inn. The quick beat of footsteps, and the gathering hum of voices outside, penetrated gayly into the room, as Mr. Neal spread the manuscript before him on the table, and read the opening sentences in these words:

“I address this letter to my son, when my son is of an age to understand it. Having lost all hope of living to see my boy grow up to manhood, I have no choice but to write here what I would fain have said to him at a future time with my own lips.

“I have three objects in writing. First, to reveal the circumstances which attended the marriage of an English lady of my acquaintance, in the island of Madeira. Secondly, to throw the true light on the death of her husband a short time afterward, on board the French timber ship _La Grace de Dieu_. Thirdly, to warn my son of a danger that lies in wait for him--a danger that will rise from his father’s grave when the earth has closed over his father’s ashes.

“The story of the English lady’s marriage begins with my inheriting the great Armadale property, and my taking the fatal Armadale name.

“I am the only surviving son of the late Mathew Wrentmore, of Barbadoes. I was born on our family estate in that island, and I lost my father when I was still a child. My mother was blindly fond of me; she denied me nothing, she let me live as I pleased. My boyhood and youth were passed in idleness and self-indulgence, among people--slaves and half-castes mostly--to whom my will was law. I doubt if there is a gentleman of my birth and station in all England as ignorant as I am at this moment. I doubt if there was ever a young man in this world whose passions were left so entirely without control of any kind as mine were in those early days.

“My mother had a woman’s romantic objection to my father’s homely Christian name. I was christened Allan, after the name of a wealthy cousin of my father’s--the late Allan Armadale--who possessed estates in our neighborhood, the largest and most productive in the island, and who consented to be my godfather by proxy. Mr. Armadale had never seen his West Indian property. He lived in England; and, after sending me the customary godfather’s present, he held no further communication with my parents for years afterward. I was just twenty-one before we heard again from Mr. Armadale. On that occasion my mother received a letter from him asking if I was still alive, and offering no less (if I was) than to make me the heir to his West Indian property.