Those were the last words. In that strange way the letter ended.
I felt a perfect fever of curiosity to know what he meant. His loving me, of course, was easy enough to understand. But what did he mean by saying he had been warned? Why was he never to live under the same roof, never to breathe the same air again with young Armadale? What sort of quarrel could it be which obliged one man to hide himself from another under an assumed name, and to put the mountains and the seas between them? Above all, if he came back, and let me fascinate him, why should it be fatal to the hateful lout who possesses the noble fortune, and lives in the great house?
I never longed in my life as I longed to see him again, and put these questions to him. I got quite superstitious about it as the day drew on. They gave me a sweetbread and a cherry pudding for dinner. I actually tried if he would come back by the stones in the plate! He will, he won’t, he will, he won’t – and so on. It ended in ‘he won’t’. I rang the bell, and had the things taken away. I contradicted Destiny quite fiercely. I said, ‘He will!’ and I waited at home for him.
You don’t know what a pleasure it is to me to give you all these little particulars. Count up – my bosom friend, my second mother – count up the money you have advanced on the chance of my becoming Mrs Armadale, and then think of my feeling this breathless interest in another man. Oh, Mrs Oldershaw, how intensely I enjoy the luxury of irritating you!
The day got on towards evening. I rang again, and sent down to borrow a railway time-table. What trains were there to take him away on Sunday? The national respect for the Sabbath stood my friend. There was only one train, which had started hours before he wrote to me. I went and consulted my glass. It paid me the compliment of contradicting the divination by cherry-stones. My glass said, ‘Get behind the window-curtain; he won’t pass the long lonely evening without coming back again to look at the house.’ I got behind the window-curtain, and waited with his letter in my hand.
The dismal Sunday light faded, and the dismal Sunday quietness in the street grew quieter still. The dusk came, and I heard a step coming with it in the silence. My heart gave a little jump – only think of my having any heart left! I said to myself, ‘Midwinter!’ And Midwinter it was.
When he came in sight he was walking slowly, stopping and hesitating at every two or three steps. My ugly little drawing-room window seemed to be beckoning him on in spite of himself. After waiting till I saw him come to a standstill, a little aside from the house, but still within view of my irresistible window, I put on my things and slipped out by the back way into the garden. The landlord and his family were at supper, and nobody saw me. I opened the door in the wall, and got round by the lane into the street. At that awkward moment I suddenly remembered, what I had forgotten before, the spy set to watch me, who was, no doubt, waiting somewhere in sight of the house.
It was necessary to get time to think, and it was (in my state of mind) impossible to let Midwinter go without speaking to him. In great difficulties you generally decide at once, if you decide at all. I decided to make an appointment with him for the next evening, and to consider in the interval how to manage the interview so that it might escape observation. This, as I felt at the time, was leaving my own curiosity free to torment me for four-and-twenty mortal hours – but what other choice had I? It was as good as giving up being mistress of Thorpe-Ambrose altogether, to come to a private understanding with Midwinter in the sight and possibly in the hearing of Armadale’s spy.
Finding an old letter of yours in my pocket, I drew back into the lane, and wrote on the blank leaf, with the little pencil that hangs at my watch-chain: ‘I must and will speak to you. It is impossible to-night, but be in the street to-morrow at this time, and leave me afterwards for ever, if you like. When you have read this, overtake me, and say as you pass, without stopping or looking round, “Yes, I promise.”’
I folded up the paper, and came on him suddenly from behind. As he started and turned round, I put the note into his hand, pressed his hand, and passed on. Before I had taken ten steps I heard him behind me. I can’t say he didn’t look round – I saw his big black eyes, bright and glittering in the dusk, devour me from head to foot in a moment; but otherwise he did what I told him. ‘I can deny you nothing,’ he whispered; ‘I promise.’ He went on and left me. I couldn’t help thinking at the time how that brute and booby Armadale would have spoilt everything in the same situation.
I tried hard all night to think of a way of making our interview of the next evening safe from discovery, and tried in vain.4 Even as early as this, I began to feel as if Midwinter’s letter had, in some unaccountable manner, stupefied me.
Monday morning made matters worse. News came from my faithful ally, Mr Bashwood, that Miss Milroy and Armadale had met and become friends again. You may fancy the state I was in! An hour or two later there came more news from Mr Bashwood – good news this time. The mischievous idiot Thorpe-Ambrose had shown sense enough at last to be ashamed of himself. He had decided on withdrawing the spy that very day, and he and his lawyer had quarrelled in consequence.
So here was the obstacle which I was too stupid to remove for myself, obligingly removed for me! No more need to fret about the coming interview with Midwinter – and plenty of time to consider my next proceedings, now that Miss Milroy and her precious swain had come together again. Would you believe it, the letter, or the man himself (I don’t know which), had taken such a hold on me that, though I tried and tried, I could think of nothing else – and this, when I had every reason to fear that Miss Milroy was in a fair way of changing her name to Armadale, and when I knew that my heavy debt of obligation to her was not paid yet? Was there ever such perversity? I can’t account for it – can you?
The dusk of the evening came at last. I looked out of the window – and there he was!
I joined him at once; the people of the house, as before, being too much absorbed in their eating and drinking to notice anything else. ‘We mustn’t be seen together here,’ I whispered. ‘I must go on first, and you must follow me.’
He said nothing in the way of reply. What was going on in his mind I can’t pretend to guess – but, after coming to his appointment, he actually hung back as if he was half inclined to go away again.
‘You look as if you were afraid of me,’ I said.
‘I am afraid of you,’ he answered – ‘of you, and of myself.’
It was not encouraging; it was not complimentary. But I was in such a frenzy of curiosity by this time, that if he had been ruder still, I should have taken no notice of it. I led the way a few steps towards the new buildings, and stopped and looked round after him.
‘Must I ask it of you as a favour,’ I said, ‘after your giving me your promise, and after such a letter as you have written to me?’
Something suddenly changed him; he was at my side in an instant. ‘I beg your pardon, Miss Gwilt; lead the way where you please.’ He dropped back a little after that answer, and I heard him say to himself, ‘What is to be, will be. What have I to do with it, and what has she?’
It could hardly have been the words, for I didn’t understand them – it must have been the tone he spoke in, I suppose, that made me feel a momentary tremor. I was half inclined, without the ghost of a reason for it, to wish him good-night, and go in again. Not much like me, you will say. Not much, indeed! It didn’t last a moment. Your darling Lydia soon came to her senses again.
I led the way towards the unfinished cottages, and the country beyond. It would have been much more to my taste to have had him into the house, and have talked to him in the light of the candles. But I had risked it once already; and in this scandal-mongering place, and in my critical position, I was afraid to risk it again. The garden was not to be thought of either – for the landlord smokes his pipe there after his supper. There was no alternative but to take him away from the town.
From time to time, I looked back as I went on. There he was, always at the same distance, dim and ghostlike in the dusk,
silently following me.
I must leave off for a little while. The church bells have broken out, and the jangling of them drives me mad. In these days, when we have all got watches or clocks, why are bells wanted to remind us when the service begins? We don’t require to be rung into the theatre. How excessively discreditable to the clergy to be obliged to ring us into the church!
They have rung the congregation in at last – and I can take up my pen, and go on again.
I was a little in doubt where to lead him to. The high-road was on one side of me – but, empty as it looked, somebody might be passing when we least expected it. The other way was through the coppice. I led him through the coppice.
At the outskirts of the trees, on the other side, there was a dip in the ground, with some felled timber lying in it, and a little pool beyond, still and white and shining in the twilight. The long grazing-grounds rose over its farther shore, with the mist thickening on them, and a dim black line far away of cattle in slow procession going home. There wasn’t a living creature near; there wasn’t a sound to be heard. I sat down on one of the felled trees, and looked back for him. ‘Come,’ I said softly, ‘come and sit by me here.’
Why am I so particular about all this? I hardly know. The place made an unaccountably vivid impression on me, and I can’t help writing about it. If I end badly – suppose we say on the scaffold? – I believe the last thing I shall see, before the hangman pulls the drop, will be the little shining pool, and the long misty grazing-grounds, and the cattle winding dimly home in the thickening night. Don’t be alarmed, you worthy creature! My fancy plays me strange tricks sometimes – and there is a little of last night’s laudanum,5 I dare say, in this part of my letter.
He came – in the strangest silent way, like a man walking in his sleep – he came and sat down by me. Either the night was very close, or I was by this time literally in a fever – I couldn’t bear my bonnet on; I couldn’t bear my gloves. The want to look at him, and see what his singular silence meant, and the impossibility of doing it in the darkening light, irritated my nerves till I thought I should have screamed. I took his hand, to try if that would help me. It was burning hot; and it closed instantly on mine – you know how. Silence, after that, was not to be thought of. The one safe way was to begin talking to him at once.
‘Don’t despise me,’ I said. ‘I am obliged to bring you to this lonely place; I should lose my character if we were seen together.’
I waited a little. His hand warned me once more not to let the silence continue. I determined to make him speak to me this time.
‘You have interested me, and frightened me,’ I went on. ‘You have written me a very strange letter. I must know what it means.’
‘It is too late to ask. You have taken the way, and I have taken the way, from which there is no turning back.’ He made that strange answer in a tone that was quite new to me – a tone that made me even more uneasy than his silence had made me the moment before. ‘Too late,’ he repeated, ‘too late! There is only one question to ask me now.’
‘What is it?’
As I said the words, a sudden trembling passed from his hand to mine, and told me instantly that I had better have held my tongue. Before I could move, before I could think, he had me in his arms. ‘Ask me if I love you,’ he whispered. At the same moment his head sank on my bosom; and some unutterable torture that was in him burst its way out, as it does with us, in a passion of sobs and tears.
My first impulse was the impulse of a fool. I was on the point of making our usual protest and defending myself in our usual way. Luckily or unluckily, I don’t know which, I have lost the fine edge of the sensitiveness of youth; and I checked the first movement of my hands, and the first word on my lips. Oh, dear, how old I felt, while he was sobbing his heart out on my breast! How I thought of the time when he might have possessed himself of my love! All he had possessed himself of now was – my waist.
I wonder whether I pitied him? It doesn’t matter if I did. At any rate, my hand lifted itself somehow, and my fingers twined themselves softly in his hair. Horrible recollections came back to me of other times, and made me shudder as I touched him. And yet I did it. What fools women are!
‘I won’t reproach you,’ I said gently; ‘I won’t say this is a cruel advantage to take of me, in such a position as mine. You are dreadfully agitated – I will let you wait a little, and compose yourself.’
Having got as far as that, I stopped to consider how I should put the questions to him that I was burning to ask. But I was too confused, I suppose, or perhaps too impatient to consider. I let out what was uppermost in my mind, in the words that came first.
‘I don’t believe you love me,’ I said. ‘You write strange things to me; you frighten me with mysteries. What did you mean by saying in your letter that it would be fatal to Mr Armadale if you came back to me? What danger can there be to Mr Armadale—?’
Before I could finish the question, he suddenly lifted his head and unclasped his arms. I had apparently touched some painful subject which recalled him to himself. Instead of my shrinking from him, it was he who shrank from me. I felt offended with him; why, I don’t know – but offended I was; and I thanked him with my bitterest emphasis, for remembering what was due to me, at last!
‘Do you believe in Dreams?’ he burst out in the most strangely abrupt manner, without taking the slightest notice of what I had said to him. ‘Tell me,’ he went on, without allowing me time to answer, ‘were you, or was any relation of yours, ever connected with Allan Armadale’s father or mother? Were you, or was anybody belonging to you, ever in the island of Madeira?’
Conceive my astonishment, if you can. I turned cold. In an instant I turned cold all over. He was plainly in the secret of what had happened when I was in Mrs Armadale’s service in Madeira – in all probability before he was born! That was startling enough of itself. And he had evidently some reason of his own for trying to connect me with those events – which was more startling still.
‘No,’ I said, as soon as I could trust myself to speak. ‘I know nothing of his father or mother.’
‘And nothing of the island of Madeira?’
‘Nothing of the island of Madeira.’
He turned his head away; and began talking to himself.
‘strange!’ he said. ‘As certainly as I was in the Shadow’s place at the window, she was in the Shadow’s place at the pool!’
Under other circumstances, his extraordinary behaviour might have alarmed me. But after his question about Madeira, there was some greater fear in me which kept all common alarm at a distance. I don’t think I ever determined on anything in my life as I determined on finding out how he had got his information, and who he really was. It was quite plain to me that I had roused some hidden feeling in him by my question about Armadale, which was as strong in its way as his feeling for me. What had become of my influence over him?
I couldn’t imagine what had become of it; but I could and did set to work to make him feel it again.
‘Don’t treat me cruelly,’ I said; ‘I didn’t treat you cruelly just now. Oh, Mr Midwinter, it’s so lonely, it’s so dark – don’t frighten me!’
‘Frighten you!’ He was close to me again in a moment. ‘Frighten you!’ He repeated the word with as much astonishment as if I had woke him from a dream, and charged him with something that he had said in his sleep.
It was on the tip of my tongue, finding how I had surprised him, to take him while he was off his guard, and to ask why my question about Armadale had produced such a change in his behaviour to me. But after what had happened already, I was afraid to risk returning to the subject too soon. Something or other – what they call an instinct, I daresay – warned me to let Armadale alone for the present, and to talk to him first about himself. As I told you in one of my early letters, I had noticed signs and tokens in his manner and appearance which convinced me, young as he was, that he had done something or suffered something out of the common in his
past life. I had asked myself more and more suspiciously every time I saw him, whether he was what he appeared to be; and first and foremost among my other doubts was a doubt whether he was passing among us by his real name. Having secrets to keep about my own past life, and having gone myself in other days by more than one assumed name, I suppose I am all the readier to suspect other people when I find something mysterious about them. Any way, having the suspicion in my mind, I determined to startle him, as he had startled me, by an unexpected question on my side – a question about his name.
While I was thinking, he was thinking – and, as it soon appeared, of what I had just said to him. ‘I am so grieved to have frightened you,’ he whispered, with that gentleness and humility which we all so heartily despise in a man when he speaks to other women, and which we all so dearly like when he speaks to ourselves. ‘I hardly know what I have been saying,’ he went on; ‘my mind is miserably disturbed. Pray forgive me, if you can – I am not myself to-night.’
‘I am not angry,’ I said; ‘I have nothing to forgive. We are both imprudent – we are both unhappy.’ I laid my head on his shoulder. ‘Do you really love me?’ I asked him softly, in a whisper.
His arm stole round me again; and I felt the quick beat of his heart get quicker and quicker. ‘If you only knew! he whispered back; ‘if you only knew—’ He could say no more. I felt his face bending towards mine, and dropped my head lower, and stopped him in the very act of kissing me. ‘No,’ I said; ‘I am only a woman who has taken your fancy. You are treating me as if I was your promised wife.’