 3. The Wreck of the Timbership, Part 3. At the moment when the two men rose to their feet, the door leading into the next room was shaken heavily on the outer side, and a sound like the sound of a fall, striking dull on their ears, silenced them both. Standing nearest to the door, the doctor opened it, passed through, and closed it instantly. Mr. Neal turned his back on the bed, and waited the event in silence. The sound, which had failed to awaken the child, had failed also to attract the father's notice. His own words had taken him far from all that was passing at his deathbed. His helpless body was back on the Wreck, and the ghost of the lifeless hand was turning the lock of the cabin door. A bell rang in the next room. Eager voices talked, hurried footsteps moved in it. An interval passed, and the doctor returned. Was she listening? whispered Mr. Neal in German. The women are restoring her, the doctor whispered back. She has heard it all. In God's name, what are we to do next? Before it was possible to reply, Mr. Armadale spoke. The doctor's return had roused him to a sense of present things. Go on, he said, as if nothing had happened. I refuse to meddle further with your infamous secret, returned Mr. Neal. You are a murderer on your own confession. If that letter is to be finished, don't ask me to hold the pen for you. You gave me your promise, was the reply, spoken with the same immovable self-possession. You must write for me, or break your word. For the moment Mr. Neal was silenced. There the man lay, sheltered from the execration of his fellow creatures, under the shadow of death, beyond the reach of all human condemnation, beyond the dread of all mortal laws, sensitive to nothing but his one last resolution to finish the letter addressed to his son. Mr. Neal drew the doctor aside. A word with you, he said, in German. Do you persist in asserting that he may be speechless before we consent to Stuttgart? Look at his lips, said the doctor, and judge for yourself. His lips answered for him. The reading of the narrative had left its mark on the more ready. A distortion at the corners of his mouth, which had been barely noticeable when Mr. Neal entered the room, was plainly visible now. His slow articulation laboured more and more painfully with every word he uttered. The position was emphatically a terrible one. After a moment more of hesitation Mr. Neal made a last attempt to withdraw from it. Now my eyes are open, he said sternly. Do you dare hold me to an engagement which you forced on me, blindfold? No, answered Mr. Armadale. I leave you to break your word. The look which accompanied that reply stung the Scotchman's pride to the quick. When he spoke next, he spoke seated in his former place at the table. No man ever yet said of me that I broke my word, he retorted angrily, and not even you shall say it of me now. Mind this, if you hold me to my promise, I hold you to my condition. I have reserved my freedom of action, and I warn you I will use it at my own sole discretion, as soon as I am released from the sight of you. Remember he is dying, pleaded the doctor gently. Take your place, sir, said Mr. Neal, pointing to the empty chair. What remains to be read I will only read in your hearing. What remains to be written I will only write in your presence. You brought me here. I have a right to insist, and I do insist, on your remaining as a witness to the last. The doctor accepted his position without remonstrance. Mr. Neal returned to the manuscript, and read what remained of it uninterruptedly to the end. Without a word in my own defence, I have acknowledged my guilt. Without a word in my own defence, I will reveal how the crime was committed. No thought of him was in my mind, when I saw his wife insensible on the deck of the timbership. I did my part in lowering her safely into the boat. Then, and not till then, I felt the thought of him coming back. In the confusion that prevailed while the men of the yacht were forcing the men of the ship to wait their time, I had an opportunity of searching for him unobserved. I stepped back from the bulwark, not knowing whether he was away in the first boat, or whether he was still on board. I stepped back, and saw him mount the cabin stairs empty-handed, with the water dripping from him. After looking eagerly towards the boat, without noticing me, he saw there was time to spare before the crew were taken off. Once more, he said to himself, and disappeared again to make a last effort at recovering the jewel-box. The devil at my elbow whispered, Don't shoot him like a man, drown him like a dog. He was under water when I bolted the scuttle, but his head rose to the surface before I could close the cabin door. I looked at him, and he looked at me, and I locked the door in his face. The next minute I was back among the last men left on deck. The minute after it was too late to repent. The storm was threatening us with destruction, and the boat's crew were pulling for their lives from the ship. My son, I have pursued you from my grave with a confession which my love might have spared you. Read on, and you will know why. I will say nothing of my sufferings. I will plead for no mercy to my memory. There is a strange sinking at my heart, a strange trembling in my hand while I write these lines, which warns me to hasten to the end. I left the island without daring to look for the last time at the woman whom I had lost so miserably, to whom I had injured so violently. When I left, the whole weight of the suspicion roused by the manner of Ingleby's death rested on the crew of the French vessel. No motive for the supposed murder could be brought home to any of them, but they were known to be, for the most part, outlawed Ruffians capable of any crime, and they were suspected and examined accordingly. It was not till afterwards that I heard by accident of the suspicion shifting round at last to me. The widow alone recognized the vague description given of the strange man who had made one of the yacht's crew and who had disappeared the day afterwards. The widow alone knew, from that time forth, why her husband had been murdered and who had done the deed. When she made that discovery, a false report of my death had been previously circulated in the island. Perhaps I was indebted to the report for my immunity from all legal proceedings. Perhaps, no I but Ingleby's, having seen me lock the cabin door, there was not evidence enough to justify an inquiry. Perhaps the widow shrank from the disclosures which must have followed a public charge against me, based on her own bare suspicion of the truth. However it might be, the crime which I had committed unseen has remained a crime unpunished from that time to this. I left Madeira for the West Indies in disguise. The first news that met me when the ship touched at Barbados was the news of my mother's death. I had no heart to return to the old scenes. The prospect of living at home in solitude, with the torment of my own guilty remembrances gnawing at me day and night, was more than I had the courage to confront. Without landing, or discovering myself to any one on shore, I went as far as the ship would take me, to the island of Trinidad. At that place I first saw your mother. It was my duty to tell her the truth, and I treacherously kept my secret. It was my duty to spare her the hopeless sacrifice of her freedom and her happiness to such an existence as mine. But I did her the injury of marrying her. If she is alive when you read this, grant her the mercy of still concealing the truth. The one atonement I can make to her is to keep her unsuspicious to the last of the man she has married. Pity her, as I have pitted her. Let this letter be a sacred confidence between father and son. The time when you were born was the time when my health began to give way. Some months afterwards, in the first days of my recovery, you were brought to me, and I was told that you had been christened during my illness. Your mother had done as other loving mothers do. She had christened her firstborn by his father's name. You, too, were Alan Armadale. Even in that early time, even while I was happily ignorant of what I have discovered since, my mind misgave me when I looked at you and thought of that fatal name. As soon as I could be moved, my presence was required at my estates in Barbados. It crossed my mind, wild as the idea may appear to you, to renounce the condition which compelled my son as well as myself to take the Armadale name or lose the succession to the Armadale property. But even in those days the rumour of a contemplated emancipation of the slaves, the emancipation which is now close at hand, was spreading widely in the colony. No man could tell how the value of West Indian property might be affected if this threatened change ever took place. No man could tell if I gave you back my own paternal name and left you without other possession in the future than my own paternal estate, how you might one day miss the broad Armadale acres, or to what future penury I might be blindly condemning your mother and yourself. Mark how the fatalities gathered one on the other. Mark how your Christian name came to you, how your surname held to you in spite of me. My health had improved in my old home, but it was for a time only. I sank again and the doctors ordered me to Europe. Avoiding England, why, you may guess, I took my passage with you and your mother for France. From France we passed into Italy. We lived here, we lived there. It was useless. Death had got me, and death followed me. Go wherever I might. I bore it, for I had an alleviation to turn to which I had not deserved. You may shrink in horror from the very memory of me now. In those days you comforted me. The only warmth I still felt at my heart was the warmth you brought to it. My last glimpses of happiness in this world were the glimpses given me by my infant son. We removed from Italy and we went to Lausanne, the place from which I am now writing to you. The post of this morning has brought me news, later and fuller than any I had received thus far of the widow of the murdered man. The letter lies before me while I write. It comes from a friend of my early days who has seen her and spoken to her, who has been the first to inform her that the report of my death in Madeira was false. He writes at a loss to account for the violent agitation which she showed on hearing that I was still alive, that I was married, and that I had an infant son. He asks me if I can explain it. He speaks in terms of sympathy for her, a young and beautiful woman buried in the retirement of a fishing village on the Devonshire coast. Her father dead, her family estranged from her, in merciless disapproval of her marriage. He writes words which might have cut me to the heart, but for a closing passage in his letter which seized my whole attention the instant I came to it, and which has forced from me the narrative which these pages contain. I now know what never even entered my mind as a suspicion till the letter reached me. I now know that the widow of the man whose death lies at my door has borne a posthumous child. That child is a boy, a year older than my own son. Securing her belief in my death, his mother has done what my son's mother did. She has christened her child by his father's name. Again in the second generation there are two Alan Armadales as there were in the first. After working its deadly mischief with the father's, the fatal resemblance of names has descended to work its deadly mischief with the son's. Guiltless minds may see nothing thus far, but the result of a series of events which could lead no other way. I, with that man's life to answer for, I, going down into the grave with my crime unpunished and unattoned, see what no guiltless minds can discern. I see danger in the future, begotten of the danger in the past, treachery that is the offspring of his treachery, and crime that is the child of my crime, is the dread that now shakes me to the soul, a phantom raised by the superstition of a dying man. I look into the book which all christened and venerates, and the book tells me that the sin of the father shall be visited on the child. I look out into the world and I see the living witnesses around me to that terrible truth. I see the vices which have contaminated the father, descending, and contaminating the child. I see the shame which has disgraced the father's name, descending and disgracing the child's. I look in on myself, and I see my crime ripening again for the future in the self-same circumstance which first sowed the seeds of it in the past, and descending in inherited contamination of evil from me to my son. At those lines the writing ended. There the stroke had struck him and the pen had dropped from his hand. He knew the place, he remembered the words. At the instant when the reader's voice stopped he looked eagerly at the doctor. I have got what comes next in my mind, he said, with slower and slower articulation. Help me to speak it!" The doctor administered a stimulant and signed to Mr. Neal to give him time. After a little delay the flame of the sinking spirit leapt up in his eyes once more. Resolutely struggling with his failing speech he summoned the Scotchman to take the pen, and pronounced the closing sentences of the narrative, as his memory gave them back to him, one by one, in these words. Despise my dying conviction, if you will, but grant me I solemnly employ you one last request. My son, the only hope I have left for you, hangs on a great doubt, the doubt whether we are or are not the masters of our own destinies. It may be that mortal free will can conquer mortal fate, and that going as we all do, inevitably to death, we go inevitably to nothing that is before death. If this be so, indeed, respect, though you respect nothing else, the warning which I give you from my grave. Never to your dying day let any living soul approach you, who is associated, directly or indirectly, with the crime which your father has committed. Avoid the widow of the man I killed, if the widow still lives. Avoid the maid whose wicked hand smoothed the way to the marriage, if the maid is still in her service. And more than all, avoid the man who bears the same name as your own. Offend your best benefactor, if that benefactor's influence has connected you one with the other. Desert the woman who loves you, if that woman is a link between you and him. Hide yourself from him under an assumed name. Put the mountains and the seas between you. Be ungrateful. Be unforgiving. Be all that is most repellent to your own gentler nature, rather than live under the same roof and breathe the same air with that man. Never let the two Alan Armadales meet in this world. Never, never, never. There lies the way by which you may escape, if any way there be. Take it, if you prize your own innocence and your own happiness, through all your life to come. I have done. If I could have trusted any weaker influence than the influence of this confession to incline you to my will, I would have spared you the disclosure which these pages contain. You are lying on my breast, sleeping the innocent sleep of a child, while a stranger's hand writes these words for you as they fall from my lips. Think what the strength of my conviction must be, when I can find the courage on my own deathbed to darken all your young life at its outset with the shadow of your father's crime. Think and be warned. Think and forgive me if you can. There it ended. Those were the father's last words to the son. Inexcerably faithful to his forced duty, Mr. Neal laid aside the pen and read over aloud the lines he had just written. "'Is there more to add?' he asked, with his pitilessly steady voice. There was no more to add. Mr. Neal folded the manuscript, enclosed it in a sheet of paper, and sealed it with Mr. Armadale's own seal. The address,' he said, with his merciless business formality. To Alan Armadale, Jr., he wrote, as the words were dictated from the bed, Care of Godfrey Hammock Esquire, Offices of Messers Hammock and Ridge, Lincoln's Infields, London. Having written the address, he waited, and considered for a moment. "'Is your executor to open this?' he asked. "'No. No. He is to give it to my son, when my son is of an age to understand it. In that case,' pursued Mr. Neal, with all his wits in remorseless working order, I will add a dated note to the address, repeating your own words as you have just spoken them, and explaining the circumstances under which my handwriting appears on the document.' He wrote the note in the briefest and plainest terms, read it over a loud as he had read over what went before, signed his name and address at the end, and made the doctor sign next as witness of the proceedings, and as medical evidence of the condition in which Mr. Armadale then lay. This done he placed the letter in a second enclosure, sealed it as before, and directed it to Mr. Hammock, with the superscription of private added to the address. "'Do you insist on my posting this?' he asked, rising with the letter in his hand. "'Give him time to think,' said the doctor. "'For the child's sake, give him time to think. A minute may change him.' "'I will give him five minutes,' answered Mr. Neal, placing his watch on the table, implacably just to the very last. They waited, both looking attentively at Mr. Armadale. The signs of change which had appeared in him already were multiplying fast. The movement which continued mental agitation had communicated to the muscles of his face was beginning under the same dangerous influence to spread downwards. His once helpless hands lay still no longer. They struggled pitifully on the bed-clothes. At sight of that warning token, the doctor turned with a gesture of alarm, and beckoned Mr. Neal to come nearer. "'Put the question at once,' he said. "'If you let the five minutes pass, you may be too late.' Mr. Neal approached the bed. "'He, too, noticed the movement of the hands.' "'Is that a bad sign?' he asked. The doctor bent his head gravely. "'Put your question at once,' he repeated. "'Or you may be too late.' Mr. Neal held the letter before the eyes of the dying man. "'Do you know what this is?' "'My letter. "'Do you insist on my posting it?' He mastered his failing speech for the last time, and gave the answer. "'Yes.' Mr. Neal moved to the door with the letter in his hand. The German followed him a few steps, opened his lips to plead for a longer delay, met the scotch-man's inexorable eye, and drew back again in silence. The door closed and parted them, without a word having passed on either side. The doctor went back to the bed, and whispered to the sinking man, "'Let me call him back. There is time to stop him yet.' It was useless. No answer came. Nothing showed that he heeded, or even heard. His eyes wandered from the child, rested for a moment on his own struggling hand, and looked up entreatingly in the compassionate face that bent over him. The doctor lifted the hand, paused, followed the father's longing eyes back to the child, and, interpreting his last wish, moved the hand gently towards the boy's head. The hand touched it, and trembled violently. In another instant the trembling seized on the arm, and spread over the whole upper part of the body. The face turned from pale to red, from red to purple, and from purple to pale again. Then the toiling hands lay still, and the shifting colour changed no more. The window of the next room was open, when the doctor entered it from the death chamber, with the child in his arms. He looked out as he passed by, and saw Mr. Neil in the street below, slowly returning to the inn. Where is the letter, he asked. Three words sufficed for the Scotchman's answer. In the post. End of the prologue. 1. The Mystery of Ozias Midwinter On a warm May night, in the year 1851, the Reverend Decimus Brock, at that time a visitor to the Isle of Man, retired to his bedroom at Castletown, with a serious personal responsibility in close pursuit of him, and with no distinct idea of the means by which he might relieve himself from the pressure of his present circumstances. The clergyman had reached that mature period of human life, at which a sensible man learns to decline, as often as his temper will let him, all useless conflict with a tyranny of his own troubles. Abandoning any further effort to reach a decision in the emergency that now beset him, Mr. Brock sat down placidly in his shirt sleeves on the side of his bed, and applied his mind to consider next whether the emergency itself was as serious as he had hitherto been inclined to think it. Following this new way out of his perplexities, Mr. Brock found himself unexpectedly traveling to the end in view by the lease and spiriting of all human journeys, a journey through the past years of his own life. One by one, the events of those years, all connected with the same little group of characters, and all more or less answerable for the anxiety which was now intruding itself between the clergyman and his knight's rest, rose in progressive series on Mr. Brock's memory. The first of the series took him back, through a period of fourteen years, to his own rectory on the summer-set-shear shores of the Bristol Channel, and closeted him at a private interview with the lady who had paid him a visit in the character of a total stranger to the parson and the place. The lady's complexion was fair. The lady's figure was well preserved. She was still a young woman, and she looked even younger than her age. There was a shade of melancholy in her expression, and an undertone of suffering in her voice, enough in each case to indicate that she had known trouble, but not enough to obtrude that trouble on the notice of others. She brought with her a fine, fair-haired boy of eight years old whom she presented as her son, and who was sent out of the way at the beginning of the interview to amuse himself in the rectory garden. Her card had preceded her entrance into the study, and had announced her under the name of Mrs. Armadale. Mr. Brock began to feel interested in her before she had opened her lips, and when the son had been dismissed, he awaited with some anxiety to hear what the mother had to say to him. Mrs. Armadale began by informing the rector that she was a widow. Her husband had perished by shipwreck a short time after their union on the voyage from Madeira to Lisbon. She had been brought to England after her affliction under her father's protection, and her child, a posthumous son, had been born on the family estate in Norfolk. Her father's death shortly afterwards had deprived her of her only surviving parent, and had exposed her to neglect and misconstruction on the part of her remaining relatives, two brothers, which had estranged her from them, she feared, for the rest of her days. For some time past she had lived in the neighboring county of Devonshire, devoting herself to the education of her boy, who had now reached an age at which he required other than his mother's teaching. Leaving out of the question her own unwillingness to part with him in her solitary position, she was especially anxious that he should not be thrown among strangers by being sent to school. Her darling project was to bring him up privately at home and to keep him as the advanced in years from all contact with the temptations and the dangers of the world. With these objects in view, her longer sojourn in her own locality, where the services of the resident clergyman in the capacity of Tudor were not obtainable, must come to an end. She had made inquiries, had heard of a house that would suit her in Mr. Brock's neighborhood, and had also been told that Mr. Brock himself had formerly been in the habit of taking pupils. Possessed of this information, she had ventured to present herself with references that vouched for her respectability, but without a formal introduction, and she had now to ask whether in the event of her anxiety in the neighborhood, any terms that could be offered would induce Mr. Brock to open his doors once more to a pupil and to allow that pupil to be her son. If Mrs. Armadale had been a woman of no personal attractions, or if Mr. Brock had been provided with an entrenchment to fight behind in the shape of a wife, it is probable that the widow's journey might have been taken in vain. As things really were, the rector examined the references which were offered to him, and asked time for consideration. When the time had expired, he did what Mrs. Armadale wished him to do. He offered his back to the burden, and let the mother load in with the responsibility of the son. This was the first event of the series, the date of it being the year 1837. Mr. Brock's memory, traveling forward towards the present from that point, picked up the second event in his turn, and stopped next at the year 1845. The fishing village on the summer-setshire coast was still the scene, and the characters were once again Mrs. Armadale and her son. Through the eight years that had passed, Mr. Brock's responsibility had rested on him lightly enough. The boy had given his mother and his tutor but little trouble. He was certainly slow over his books, but more from a constitutional inability to fix his attention on the tasks than from want of capacity to understand them. His temperament, it could not be denied, was heedless to the last degree. He acted recklessly on his first impulses, and rushed blindfold at all his conclusions. On the other hand, it was to be said in his favor that his disposition was open as the day, a more generous, affectionate, sweet-tempered lad it would have been hard to find anywhere. A certain quaint originality of character, and a natural healthiness in all his tastes, carried him free of most of the dangers to which his mother's system of education inevitably exposed him. He had a thoroughly English love of the sea, and of all that belonged to it, and as he grew in years, there was no luring him away from the waterside, and no keeping him out of the boatbuilder's yard. In course of time, his mother caught him actually working there, to her infinite annoyance and surprise, as a volunteer. He acknowledged that his whole future ambition was to have a yard of his own, and that his one's present object was to learn to build a boat for himself. Wisely foreseeing that such a pursuit as this for his leisure hours was exactly what was wanted to reconcile the lad to a position of isolation from companions of his own rank and age, Mr. Brock prevailed on Mrs. Armadale, with no small difficulty, to let her son have his way. At the period of that second event in the clergyman's life with his pupil, which is now to be related, young Armadale had practiced long enough in the builder's yard to have reached the summit of his wishes, by laying with his own hands the keel of his own boat. Late on a certain summer day, not long after Allen had completed his 16th year, Mr. Brock left his pupil hard at work in the yard, and went to spend the evening with Mrs. Armadale, taking the time's newspaper with him in his hand. The gears that had passed since they had first met had long since regulated the lives of the clergyman and his neighbor. The first advances which Mr. Brock's growing admiration for the widow had led him to make in the early days of their intercourse had been met on her side by an appeal to his forbearance, which had closed his lips for the future. She had satisfied him, at once and forever, that the one place in her heart which she could hope to occupy was the place of a friend. He loved her well enough to take what she would give him, friends they became, and friends they remained from that time forth. No jealous dread of another man succeeding where he had failed embittered the clergyman's placid relations with the woman whom he loved. Of the few resident gentlemen in the neighborhood, none were ever admitted by Mrs. Armadale to more than the merest acquaintance with her. Contentedly self-buried in her country retreat, she was proof against every social attraction that would have attempted other women in her position and at her age. Mr. Brock and his newspaper, appearing with monotonous regularity at her tea table three times a week, told her all she knew or cared to know of the great outer world which circled round the narrow and changeless limits of her daily life. On the evening in question, Mr. Brock took the armchair in which he always sat, accepted the one cup of tea which he always drank, and opened the newspaper which he always read aloud to Mrs. Armadale, who invariably listened to him reclining on the same sofa with the same sort of needlework everlastingly in her hand. Less my soul cried the rector with his voice in a new octave and his eyes fixed in astonishment on the first page of the newspaper. No such introduction to the evening's readings as this had ever happened before in all Mrs. Armadale's experiences as a listener. She looked up from the sofa in a flutter of curiosity and besought her reverend friend to favor her with an explanation. I can hardly believe my own eyes said Mr. Brock. Here is an advertisement Mrs. Armadale addressed to your son. Without further preface, he read the advertisement as follows. If this should meet the eye of Alan Armadale, he is desired to communicate either personally or by letter with Messier's hammock and ridge, Lincoln's in fields, London, on business of importance which seriously concerns him. Anyone capable of informing Messier's E&R, where the person herein advertised can be found, would confer a favor by doing the same. To prevent mistakes, it is further notified that the missing Alan Armadale is a youth aged fifteen years and that this advertisement is inserted at the insistence of his family and friends. Another family and other friends said Mrs. Armadale. The person whose name appears in that advertisement is not my son. The tone in which she spoke surprised Mr. Brock. The change in her face when he looked up shocked him. Her delicate complexion had faded away to a dull white. Her eyes were averted from her visitor with a strange mixture of confusion and alarm. She looked an older woman than she was by ten good years at least. The name is so very uncommon, said Mr. Brock. Imagine he had offended her and trying to excuse himself. It really seemed impossible that there could be two persons. There are two. Interpose Mrs. Armadale. Alan, as you know, is sixteen years old. If you look back at the advertisement, you will find the missing person described as being only fifteen. Although he bears the same surname and the same Christian name, he is, I thank God, in no way whatever, related to my son. As long as I live, it will be the object of my hopes and prayers that Alan may never see him, may never even hear of him. My kind friend, I see I surprise you. Will you bear with me if I leave these strange circumstances unexplained? There is past misfortune and misery in my early life too painful for me to speak of, even to you. Will you help me to bear the remembrance of it by never referring to this again? Will you do even more? Will you promise not to speak of it to Alan and not to let that newspaper fall in his way? Mr. Brock gave the pledge required of him and considerably left her to herself. The rector had been too long and too truly attached to Mrs. Armadale to be capable of regarding her with any unworthy distrust, but it would be idle to deny that he felt disappointed by her want of confidence in him and that he looked inquisitively at the advertisement more than once on his way back to his own house. It was clear enough now that Mrs. Armadale's motives for burying her son as well as herself in the seclusion of her remote country village was not so much to keep him under her own eye as to keep him from discovery by his namesake. Why did she dread the idea of their ever meeting? Was it a dread for herself or a dread for her son? Mr. Brock's loyal belief in his friend rejected any solution of the difficulty which pointed at some past misconduct of Mrs. Armadale's. That night he destroyed the advertisement with his own hand. That night he resolved the subject would never be suffered to enter his mind again. There was another Alan Armadale about the world, a stranger to his pupil's blood, and a vagabond advertised in the public newspapers. So much accident had revealed to him. More for Mrs. Armadale's sake he had no wish to discover and more he would never seek to know. This was the second in the series of events which dated from the rector's connection with Mrs. Armadale and her son. Mr. Brock's memory traveling on nearer and nearer to present circumstances reached the third stage of his journey through the bygone time and stopped at the year 1850 next. The five years that had passed had made little if any change in Alan's character. He had simply developed to use his tutor's own expression from a boy of 16 to a boy of 21. He was just as easy and open in his disposition as ever, just as quaintly and inveterately good-humored, just as heedless in following his own impulses lead him where they might. His bias towards the sea had strengthened with his advance to the years of manhood. From building a boat he now got on with two journeymen at work under him to building a decked vessel of five and thirty tons. Mr. Brock had conscientiously tried to divert him to higher aspirations, had taken him to Oxford to see what college life was like, had taken him to London to expand his mind by the spectacle of the great metropolis. The change had diverted Alan but had not altered him in the least. He was as impenetrable superior to all worldly ambition as Diogenes himself. Which is best, asked this unconscious philosopher, to find out the way to be happy for yourself or to let other people try if they can to find it out for you. From that moment Mr. Brock permitted his pupils character to grow at its own rate of development and Alan went on uninterruptedly with the work of his yacht. Time which had wrought so little change in the sun had not passed harmless over the mother. Mrs. Armadale's health was breaking fast. As her strength failed her temper altered for the worse. She grew more and more fretful, more and more subject to morbid fears and fancies, more and more reluctant to leave her own room. Since the appearance of the advertisement five years since, nothing had happened to force her memory back to the painful associations connected with her early life. No word more on the forbidden topic had passed between the rector and herself. No suspicion had ever been raised in Alan's mind of the existence of his namesake and yet without the shadow of a reason for any special anxiety Mrs. Armadale had become of late years obstinately and fretfully uneasy on the subject of her son. More than once Mr. Brock dreaded a serious disagreement between them but Alan's natural sweetness of temper fortified by his love for his mother carried him triumphantly through all trials. Not a hard word or a harsh look ever escaped him in her presence. He was unchangeably loving and forbearing with her to the very last. Such were the positions of the son, the mother, and the friend when the next notable event happened in the lives of the three. On a dreary afternoon early in the month of November, Mr. Brock was disturbed over the composition of his sermon by a visit from the landlord of the village Inn. After making his introductory apologies the landlord stated the urgent business on which he had come to the rectory clearly enough. A few hours since a young man had been brought to the Inn by some farm laborers in the neighborhood who had found him wandering about one of their master's fields in a disordered state of mind which looked to their eyes like downright madness. The landlord had given the poor creature shelter while he sent for medical help and the doctor on seeing him had pronounced that he was suffering from fever on the brain and that his removal to the nearest town at which a hospital or workhouse infirmary could be found to receive him would in all probability be fatal to his chances of recovery. After hearing this expression of opinion and after observing for himself that the stranger's only luggage consisted of a small carpet bag which had been found in the field near him the landlord had set off on the spot to consult the rector and to ask in this serious emergency what course he was to take next. Mr. Brock was the magistrate as well as the clergyman of the district and the course to be taken in the first instance was to his mind clear enough. He put on his hat and accompanied the landlord back to the Inn. At the indoor they were joined by Allen who had heard the news through another channel and who was waiting Mr. Brock's arrival to follow in the magistrates train and to see what the stranger was like. The village surgeon joined them at the same moment and the four went into the Inn together. They found the landlord's son on one side and the hustler on the other holding the man down in his chair. Young, slim and undersized he was strong enough at that moment to make it a matter of difficulty for the two to master him. His tawny complexion, his large bright brown eyes and his black beard gave him something of a foreign look. His dress was a little worn but his linen was clean. His dusky hands were wiry and nervous and were lividly discolored in more places than one by the scars of old wounds. The toes of one of his feet off which he had kicked the shoe grasped at the chair rail through his stocking with a sensitive must-your-action which is only seen in those who have been accustomed to go barefoot. In the frenzy that now possessed him it was impossible to notice to any useful purpose more than this. After a whispered consultation with Mr. Brock the surgeon personally super intended the patient's removal to a quiet bedroom at the back of the house. Shortly afterwards his clothes and his carpet bag were sent downstairs and were searched on the chance of finding a clue by which to communicate with his friends in the magistrate's presence. The carpet bag contained nothing but a change of clothing and two books, the plays of Sophocles in the original Greek and the Faust of Guta in the original German. Both volumes were much worn by reading and on the flyleaf of each were inscribed the initials O-M. So much the bag revealed and no more. The clothes which the man wore when he was discovered in the field were tried next, a purse containing a sovereign and a few shillings, a pipe, a tobacco pouch, a handkerchief, and a little drinking cup of horn were produced in succession. The next object and the last was found crumpled up carelessly in the breast pocket of the coat. It was a written testimonial to character dated and signed but without any address. So far as this document could tell it the stranger story was a sad one indeed. He had apparently been employed for a short time as Usher at a school and had been turned adrift in the world at the outset of his illness from the fear that the fever might be infectious and that the prosperity of his establishment might suffer accordingly. Not the slightest imputation of any misbehavior in his employment rested on him. On the contrary, the schoolmaster had great pleasure in testifying to his capacity and his character and then expressing a fervent hope that he might under providence succeed in recovering his health in somebody else's house. The written testimonial, which afforded this glimpse at the man's story, served one purpose more. It connected him with the initials on the books and identified him to the magistrate and the landlord under the strangely uncouth name of Osias Midwinter. Mr. Brock laid aside the testimonial, suspecting that the schoolmaster had purposely abstained from writing his address on it with the view of escaping all responsibility in the event of his Usher's death. In any case, it was manifestly useless under existing circumstances to think of tracing the poor wretch's friends if friends he had. To the end he had been brought and as a matter of common humanity at the end he must remain for the present. The difficulty about expenses, if it came to the worst, might possibly be met by charitable contributions from the neighbors or by a collection after a sermon at church. Assuring the landlord that he would consider this part of the question and would let him know the result, Mr. Brock quitted the end without noticing for the moment that he had left Allen there behind him. Before he had got fifty yards from the house, his pupil overtook him. Allen had been most uncharacteristically silent and serious all through the search at the end. But he had now recovered his usual high spirits. A stranger would have set him down as wanting and common feeling. This is a sad business, said the rector. I really don't know what to do for the best about that unfortunate man. You may make your mind quite easy, sir, said young Armadale in his offhand way. I settled it all with the landlord a minute ago. You, exclaimed Mr. Brock, in the utmost astonishment. I have merely given a few simple directions, pursued Allen. Our friend the usher is to have everything he requires and is to be treated like a prince. And when the doctor and the landlord want their money, they are to come to me. My dear Allen, Mr. Brock, gently remonstrated, when will you learn to think before you act on those generous impulses of yours? You are spending more money already on your yacht building than you can afford. Only think. We lay the first planks of the deck the day before yesterday, said Allen, flying off to the new subject in his usual bird-witted way. There's just enough of it done to walk on, if you don't feel giddy. I'll help you up the ladder, Mr. Brock, if you'll only come and try. Listen to me, persisted rector. I'm not talking about the yacht now. That is to say, I am only referring to the yacht as an illustration. And a very pretty illustration, too, remarked the incorrigible Allen. Find me a smarter little vessel of her size in all England, and I'll give a yacht building tomorrow. Whereabouts were we in our conversation, sir? I am rather afraid we have lost ourselves somehow. 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, Allen, 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 Allen, whose habit it was to believe in everybody and the 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, Osias 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 for it? What's that the chancellor of the exchequer says when he finds himself in a mess with his accounts and doesn't quite see his way out again, asked Allen. He always tells his honorable friend he is quite willing to leave a something or other a margin, suggested Mr. Brock. That's it, said Allen. I am like the chancellor of the exchequer. I am quite willing to leave a margin. The yacht, bless her heart, doesn't eat up everything. If I am 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 neighborhood. Deuce take the pounds, shillings, and pints. I wish they could all three get rid of themselves like the Bedouin brothers to show. Don't you remember the Bedouin brothers, Mr. Brock? Ali will take a lighted torch and jump down the throat of his brother Mouli. Mouli will take a lighted torch and jump down the throat of his brother Hassan, and Hassan, taking a third lighted torch, will conclude the performance 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 flavor 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 Allen, quite unconscious that he was preaching socialist doctrines to a clergyman, is the meaning of the fuss that's been 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 humored 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, Allen had made regular inquiries at the end, and as soon as the sick man was allowed to see visitors, Allen was the first to appear 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 be stir himself. Mr. Brock acted on the hint immediately and discovered that Allen had followed his usual impulses in his usual headlong way. He had taken a violent fancy to the castaway usher and had invited Osias midwinter to reside permanently in the neighborhood 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 Allen's mother, begging him to use his privilege as an old friend and to pay her a visit in her room. Armadale. He found Mrs. Armadale's suffering under violent nervous agitation caused entirely by a recent interview with her son. Allen 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 Allen 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 a sailing. Allen 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 be sought director 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 director, 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 an Osias 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 downward. Mr. Brock took the wise way out of the difficulty. He said no more, and he set off for the inn immediately. Osias midwinter, recovering from brain fever, was a startling object to contemplate on a first view of him. His shaven head, tied up in an old yellow silk handkerchief, his tawny haggard cheeks, his bright brown eyes, preternaturally large and wild, his rough black beard, 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 had 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 fiber in his lean, lithe body. Director's healthy anglo-saxon flesh crept responsibly 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 Allen and Allen's mother. I wish I could see my way to turning Osia's 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 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 traveling a long distance by railway with a purpose, if he had a purpose, which it was now impossible to recall, and then wandering coastward 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. 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 a system 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 acknowledgement to make at his time of life, there was no denying it. It might tell against him in the opinion 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. Osias midwinter at 20 spoke of his life as Osias midwinter at 70 might have spoken with a long weariness of years on him, which he had learned 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. Osias midwinter spoke of his obligations, and especially of his obligation to Allen, with a fervor 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 Allen'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 Alan, and with Alan'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 use for results. Once started on the subject of Ozias midwinter, Alan rattled on about his new friend in his usual easy, lighthearted 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 Alan had got some valuable hints. They had discussed, with diagrams to assist them, and with more valuable hints for Alan, the serious impending question of the launch of the yacht. On other occasions they had diverged to other subjects, to more of them that Alan 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. Mr. Brock still persisted. He inquired next what Alan had seen in The Stranger to take such a fancy to. Alan had seen in him what he didn't see in people in general. He wasn't like all the other fellows in the neighborhood. All the other fellows were cut out on the same pattern. Every man of them was equally healthy, muscular, loud, hard-hearted, clean-skinned, and rough. Every man of them drank the same drafts 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. Leaving all remonstrances for a fitter opportunity, the rector went back to Mrs. Armadale. He could not disguise from himself that Alan's mother was the person really answerable for Alan's present indiscretion. If the lad had seen a little less of the small gentry in the neighborhood and a little more of the great outside world at home and abroad, the pleasure of cultivating Osaias Midwinter society might have had fewer attractions for him. Conscious of the unsatisfactory result of his visit to the inn, Mr. Brock felt some anxiety about the reception of his report when he found himself once more in Mrs. Armadale's presence. His forebodings were soon realized. Try as he might to make the best of it, Mrs. Armadale seized on the one suspicious fact of the usher's silence about himself as justifying the strongest measures that could be taken to separate him from her son. If the rector refused to interfere, she declared her intention of writing to Osaias Midwinter with her own hand. Remonstrance irritated her to such a pitch that she astounded Mr. Brock by reverting to the forbidden subject of five years since and referring him to the conversation which had passed between them when the advertisement had been discovered in the newspaper. She passionately declared that the vagabond Armadale of that advertisement and the vagabond Midwinter at the village inn might, for all she knew to the contrary, be one and the same. Foreboding a serious disagreement between the mother and son if the mother interfered, Mr. Brock undertook to see Midwinter again and to tell him plainly that he must give a proper account of himself or that his intimacy with Alan must cease. The two concessions which he exacted from Mrs. Armadale in return were that she should wait patiently until the doctor reported the man fit to travel and that she should be careful in the interval not to mention the matter in any way to her son. In a week's time Midwinter was able to drive out, with Alan for his coachman, in the pony chase belonging to the inn and in ten days the doctor privately reported him as fit to travel. Toward the close of that tenth day Mr. Brock met Alan and his new friend enjoying the last gleams of wintry sunshine in one of the inland lanes. He waited until the two had separated and then followed the usher on his way back to the inn. The rector's resolution to speak pitilessly to the purpose was in some danger of failing him as he drew nearer and nearer to the friendless man and saw how feebly he still walked, how loosely his worn coat hung about him, and how heavily he leaned on his cheap clumsy stick. Humanely reluctant to say the decisive words too precipitately, Mr. Brock tried him first with a little compliment on the range of his reading as shown by the volume of Sophocles and the volume of Guta which had been found in his bag and asked how long he had been acquainted with German and Greek. The quick ear of Midwinter detected something wrong in the tone of Mr. Brock's voice. He turned in the darkening twilight and looked suddenly and suspiciously in the rector's face. You have something to say to me, he answered, and it is not what you are saying now. There was no help for it but to accept the challenge. Very delicately, with many preparatory words to which the other listened in unbroken silence, Mr. Brock came little by little nearer and nearer to the point. Long before he had really reached it, long before a man of no more than ordinary sensibility would have felt what was coming, Osias Midwinter stood still in the lane and told the rector that he needs say no more. I understand you, sir, said the usher. Mr. Armadale has an ascertained position in the world. Mr. Armadale has nothing to conceal and nothing to be ashamed of. I agree with you that I am not a fit companion for him. The best return I can make for his kindness is to presume on it no longer. You may depend on my leaving this place tomorrow morning. He spoke no word more, he would hear no word more. With a self-control which, at his years and with his temperament, was nothing less than marvelous, he civilly took off his hat, bowed, and returned to the inn by himself. Mr. Brock slept badly that night. The issue of the interview in the lane had made the problem of Osias Midwinter a harder problem to solve than ever. Early the next morning a letter was brought to the rector from the inn and the messenger announced that the strange gentleman had taken his departure. The letter enclosed an open note addressed to Allen and requested Allen's tutor, after first reading it himself, to forward it or not at his own sole discretion. The note was a startlingly short one. It began and ended in a dozen words. Don't blame Mr. Brock, Mr. Brock is right. Thank you and goodbye, O. M. The rector forwarded the note to its proper destination, as a matter of course, and sent a few lines to Mrs. Armadale at the same time to quiet her anxiety by the news of the usher's departure. This done he waited the visit from his pupil, which would probably follow the delivery of the note in no very tranquil frame of mind. There might or might not be some deep motive at the bottom of Midwinter's conduct, but thus far it was impossible to deny that he had behaved in such a manner as to rebuke the rector's distrust and to justify Allen's good opinion of him. The morning wore on and young Armadale never appeared. After looking for him vainly in the yard where the yacht was building, Mrs. Brock went to Mrs. Armadale's house and there heard news from the servant which turned his steps in the direction of the inn. The landlord at once acknowledged the truth. Young Mr. Armadale had come there with an open letter in his hand and had insisted on being informed of the road which his friend had taken. For the first time in the landlord's experience of him, the young gentleman was out of temper, and the girl who waited on the customers had stupidly mentioned a circumstance which had added fuel to the fire. She had acknowledged having heard Mr. Midwinter lock himself into his room overnight and burst into a violent fit of crying. That trifling particular had set Mr. Armadale's face all of a flame. He had shouted and sworn, he had rushed into the staples and forced the hustler to saddle him a horse, and had set off full gallop on the road that Ozias Midwinter had taken before him. After cautioning the landlord to keep Allen's conduct a secret, if any of Mrs. Armadale's servants came that morning to the inn, Mr. Brock went home again and waited anxiously to see what the day would bring forth. To his infinite relief, his pupil appeared at the rectory late in the afternoon. Allen looked and spoke with a dogged determination which was quite new in his old friend's experience of him. Without waiting to be questioned, he told his story in the usual straightforward way. He had overtaken Midwinter on the road and, after trying vainly first to induce him to return, then to find out where he was going to, had threatened to keep company with him for the rest of the day, and had so extorted the confession that he was going to try his luck in London. Having gained this point, Allen had asked Nex for his friend's address in London, had been entreated by the other not to press his request, had pressed it nevertheless with all his might, and had got the address at last by making an appeal to Midwinter's gratitude, for which, feeling heartily ashamed of himself, he had afterward asked Midwinter's pardon. I liked the poor fellow and I won't give him up, concluded Allen, bringing his clenched fists down with a thump on the rectory table. Don't be afraid of my vexing my mother. I'll leave you to speak to her, Mr. Brock, at your own time and in your own way, and I'll just say this much more by way of bringing the thing to an end. Here is the address safe in my pocketbook, and here am I, standing firm for once on a resolution of my own. I'll give you and my mother time to reconsider this, and when the time is up, if my friend Midwinter doesn't come to me, I'll go to my friend Midwinter. So the matter rested for the present, and such was the result of turning the castaway usher adrift in the world again. A month passed and brought in the new year, 51. Overleaping that short lapse of time, Mr. Brock paused with a heavy heart at the next event. To his mind, the one mournful, the one memorable event of the series, Mrs. Armadale's death. The first warning of the affliction that was near at hand had followed close on the usher's departure in December, and had arisen out of a circumstance which dwelt painfully on the rector's memory from that time forth. But three days after Midwinter had left for London, Mr. Brock was accosted in the village by a neatly dressed woman wearing a gown and bonnet of black silk and a red paisley shawl, who was a total stranger to him, and who inquired the way to Mrs. Armadale's house. She put the question without raising the thick black veil that hung over her face. Mr. Brock, in giving her the necessary directions, observed that she was a remarkably elegant and graceful woman, and looked after her as she bowed and left him, wondering who Mrs. Armadale's visitor could possibly be. A quarter of an hour later the lady, still veiled as before, passed Mr. Brock again close to the inn. She entered the house and spoke to the landlady. Seeing the landlord shortly afterwards hurrying round to the stables, Mr. Brock asked him if the lady was going away. Yes, she had come from the railway on the omnibus, but she was going back again more credibly in a carriage of her own hiring supplied by the inn. The rector proceeded on his walk, rather surprised to find his thoughts running inquisitively on a woman who was a stranger to him. When he got home again, he found the village surgeon waiting his return with an urgent message from Allen's mother. About an hour since, the surgeon had been sent for in great haste to see Mrs. Armadale. He had found her suffering from an alarming nervous attack brought on, as the servant suspected, by an unexpected and possibly an unwelcome visitor who had called that morning. The surgeon had done all that was needful and had no apprehension of any dangerous results. Finding his patient eagerly desirous on recovering herself to see Mr. Brock immediately, he had thought it important to humor her and had readily undertaken to call a directory with a message to that effect. Looking at Mrs. Armadale with a far deeper interest in her than the surgeon's interest, Mr. Brock saw enough in her face when it turned toward him on his entering the room to justify instant and serious alarm. She allowed no opportunity of soothing her. She heeded none of his inquiries. Answers to certain questions of her own were what she wanted and what she was determined to have. Had Mr. Brock seen the woman who had presumed to visit her at that morning? Yes. Had Allen seen her? No. Allen had been at work since breakfast and was at work still in his yard by the water side. This latter reply appeared to quiet Mrs. Armadale for the moment. She put her next question, the most extraordinary question of the three more composedly. Did the rector think Allen would object to leaving his vessel for the present and to accompanying his mother on a journey to look out for a new house in some other part of England? In the greatest amazement, Mr. Brock asked what reason there could possibly be for leaving her present residence. Mrs. Armadale's reason, when she gave it, only added to his surprise. The woman's first visit might be followed by a second and rather than see her again, rather than run the risk of Allen seeing her and speaking to her, Mrs. Armadale would leave England if necessary and in her days in a foreign land. Taking counsel of his experience as a magistrate, Mr. Brock inquired if the woman had come to ask for money. Yes, respectively as she was dressed, she had described herself as being in distress. She had asked for money and had got it, but the money was of no importance. The one thing needful was to get away before the woman came again. More and more surprised, Mr. Brock ventured on another question. Was it long since Mrs. Armadale and her visitor had last met? Yes, longer than all Allen's lifetime, as long ago as the year before Allen was born. At that reply, the rector shifted his ground and took counsel next of his experience as a friend. Is this person, he asked, connected in any way with the painful remembrances of your early life? Yes, with the painful remembrance of the time when I was married, said Mrs. Armadale. She was associated as a mere child with a circumstance which I must think of with shame and sorrow to my dying day. Mr. Brock noticed the altered tone in which his old friend spoke, and the unwillingness with which she gave her answer. Can you tell me more about her without referring to yourself? He went on. I am sure I can protect you if you will only help me a little. Her name, for instance. You can tell me her name? Mrs. Armadale shook her head. The name I knew her by, she said, would be of no use to you. She has been married since then. She told me so herself. And without telling you her married name, she refused to tell it. Do you know anything of her friends? Only of her friends when she was a child. They called themselves her uncle and aunt. They were low people, and they deserted her at the school on my father's estate. We never heard any more of them. Did she remain under your father's care? She remained under my care. That is to say, she traveled with us. We were leaving England just at that time for Madeira. I had my father's leave to take her with me and to train the wretch to be my maid. At those words Mrs. Armadale stopped confusedly. Mr. Brock tried gently to lead her on. It was useless. She started up in violent agitation and walked excitedly backward and forward in the room. Don't ask me anymore, she cried out in loud angry tones. I parted with her when she was a girl of 12 years old. I never saw her again. I never heard of her again from that time to this. I don't know how she has discovered me after all the years that have passed. I only know that she has discovered me. She will find her way to Alan next. She will poison my son's mind against me. Help me to get away from her. Help me to take Alan away before she comes back. Director asked no more questions. It would have been cruel to press her further. The first necessity was to compose her by promising compliance with all that she desired. The second was to induce her to see another medical man. Mr. Brock contrived to reach his end harmlessly in this latter case by reminding her that she wanted strength to travel and that her own medical attendant might restore her all the more speedily to herself if he were assisted by the best professional advice. Having overcome her habitual reluctance to see strangers by this means, the rector at once went to Alan and delicately concealing what Mrs. Armadale had said at the interview broke the news to him that his mother was seriously ill. Alan would hear of no messengers being sent for assistance. He drove off on the spot to the railway and telegraphed himself to Bristol for medical help. On the next morning the help came and Mr. Brock's worst fears were confirmed. The village surgeon had fatally misunderstood the case from the first and the time was passed now at which his errors of treatment might have been set right. The shock of the previous morning had completed the mischief. Mrs. Armadale's days were numbered. The son who dearly loved her, the old friend to whom her life was precious, hoped vainly to the last. In a month when the physician's visit all hope was over and Alan shed the first bitter tears of his life at his mother's grave. She had died more peacefully than Mr. Brock had dared to hope, leaving all her little fortune to her son and committing him solemnly to the care of her one friend on earth. The rector had entreated her to let him write and try to reconcile her brothers with her before it was too late. She had only answered sadly that it was too late already. But one reference escaped her in the last illness to those early sorrows which had weighed heavily on all her afterlife and which had passed thrice already like shadows of evil between the rector and herself. Even on her deathbed she had shrunk from letting the light fall clearly on the story of her past. She had looked at Alan kneeling by the bedside and had whispered to Mr. Brock, never let this namesake come near him, never let that woman find him out. No word more fell from her that touched on the misfortunes which had tried her in the past or on the dangers which she dreaded in the future. The secret which she kept from her son and from her friend was a secret which she carried with her to the grave. When the last offices of affection and respect had been performed Mr. Brock felt at his duty as executor to the deceased lady to write to her brothers and to give them information of her death. Believing that he had to deal with two men who would probably misinterpret his motives if he left Alan's position unexplained he was careful to remind them that Mrs. Armadale's son was well provided for and that the object of his letter was simply to communicate the news of their sister's deceased. The two letters were dispatched toward the middle of January and by return of post the answers were received. The first which the rector opened was written not by the elder brother but by the elder brother's only son. The young man had succeeded to the estates in Norfolk on his father's death some little time since. He wrote in a frank and friendly spirit assuring Mr. Brock that however strongly his father might have been prejudiced against Mrs. Armadale the hostile feeling had never extended to her son. For himself he had only to add that he would be sincerely happy to welcome his cousin to Thorpe Ambrose whenever his cousin came that way. The second letter was a far less agreeable reply to receive than the first. The younger brother was still alive and still resolute neither to forget nor forgive. He informed Mr. Brock that his deceased sister's choice of a husband and her conduct to her father at the time of the marriage had made interrelations of affection or esteem impossible on his side from that time forth. Holding the opinions he did it would be equally painful to his nephew and himself if any personal intercourse took place between them. He had adverted as generally as possible to the nature of the differences which had kept him apart from his late sister in order to satisfy Mr. Brock's mind that a personal acquaintance with young Mr. Armadale was as a matter of delicacy quite out of the question and having done this he would beg leave to close the correspondence. Mr. Brock wisely destroyed the second letter on the spot and after showing Alan his cousin's invitation suggested that he should go to Thorpe Ambrose as soon as he felt fit to present himself to strangers. Alan listened to the advice patiently enough but he declined to profit by it. I will shake hands with my cousin willingly if I ever meet him he said but I will visit no family and be a guest in no house in which my mother has been badly treated. Mr. Brock remonstrated gently and tried to put matters in their proper light. Even at that time even while he was still ignorant of events which were then impending Alan's strangely isolated position in the world was a subject of serious anxiety to his old friend and tutor. The proposed visit to Thorpe Ambrose opened the very prospect of his making friends and connections suited to him in rank and age which Mr. Brock most desired to see but Alan was not to be persuaded he was obstinate and unreasonable and the rector had no alternative but to drop the subject. One on another the weeks passed monotonously and Alan showed but little of the elasticity of his age and character in bearing the affliction that had made him motherless. He finished and launched his yacht but his own journeyman remarked that the work seemed to have lost its interest for him. It was not natural to the young man to brood over his solitude and his grief as he was brooding now. As the spring advanced Mr. Brock began to feel uneasy about the future if Alan was not roused at once by change of scene. After much pondering the rector decided on trying a trip to Paris and on extending the journey southward if his companion shown an interest in continental traveling. Alan's reception of the proposal made atonement for his obstinacy in refusing to cultivate his cousin's acquaintance. He was willing to go with Mr. Brock wherever Mr. Brock pleased. The rector took him at his word and in the middle of March the two strangely assorted companions left for London on their way to Paris. End of chapter one part two recording by Alan Winteroud boomcoach.blogspot.com