Armadale (77 page)

But I am not mistress yet – and I can't take a step in the direction of the great house till I have got the answer to my letter, and till I know that Midwinter is out of the way. Patience! patience! I must go and forget myself at my piano. There is the ‘Moonlight Sonata' open, and
tempting me, on the music-stand. Have I nerve enough to play it, I wonder? Or will it set me shuddering with the mystery and terror of it, as it did the other day?

Five o'clock
. – I have got his answer. The slightest request I can make is a command to him. He has gone – and he sends me his address in London. ‘There are two considerations,' (he says,) ‘which help to reconcile me to leaving you. The first is, that
you
wish it, and that it is only to be for a little while. The second is, that I think I can make some arrangements in London for adding to my income by my own labour. I have never cared for money for myself – but you don't know how I am beginning already to prize the luxuries and refinements that money can provide, for my wife's sake.' Poor fellow! I almost wish I had not written to him as I did; I almost wish I had not sent him away from me.

Fancy, if Mother Oldershaw saw this page in my diary! I have had a letter from her this morning – a letter to remind me of my obligations, and to tell me she suspects things are all going wrong. Let her suspect! I shan't trouble myself to answer – I can't be worried with that old wretch in the state I am in now.

It is a lovely afternoon – I want a walk – I mustn't think of Midwinter. Suppose I put on my bonnet, and try my experiment at once at the great house? Everything is in my favour. There is no spy to follow me, and no lawyer to keep me out, this time. Am I handsome enough, to-day? Well, yes – handsome enough to be a match for a little dowdy, awkward, freckled creature, who ought to be perched on a form at school, and strapped to a back-board to straighten her crooked shoulders.

The nursery lisps out in all they utter;

Besides, they always smell of bread and butter.

How admirably Byron has described girls in their teens!
¹

Eight o'clock
. – I have just got back from Armadale's house. I have seen him, and spoken to him; and the end of it may be set down in three plain words. I have failed. There is no more chance of my being Mrs Armadale of Thorpe-Ambrose than there is of my being Queen of England.

Shall I write and tell Oldershaw? Shall I go back to London? Not till I have had time to think a little. Not just yet.

Let me think; I have failed completely – failed, with all the circumstances in favour of success. I caught him alone on the drive in front
of the house. He was excessively disconcerted, but at the same time quite willing to hear me. I tried him, first quietly – then with tears, and the rest of it. I introduced myself in the character of the poor innocent woman whom he had been the means of injuring. I confused, I interested, I convinced him. I went on to the purely Christian part of my errand, and spoke with such feeling of his separation from his friend, for which I was innocently responsible, that I turned his odious rosy face quite pale, and made him beg me at last not to distress him. But, whatever other feelings I roused in him, I never once roused his old feeling for
me
. I saw it in his eyes when he looked at me; I felt it in his fingers when we shook hands. We parted friends and nothing more.

It is for this, is it, Miss Milroy, that I resisted temptation,
²
morning after morning, when I knew you were out alone in the park? I have just left you time to slip in, and take my place in Armadale's good graces, have I? I never resisted temptation yet without suffering for it in some such way as this! If I had only followed my first thoughts, on the day when I took leave of you, my young lady – well, well, never mind that now. I have got the future before me; you are not Mrs Armadale yet! And I can tell you one other thing – whoever else he marries, he will never marry
you
. If I am even with you in no other way, trust me, whatever comes of it, to be even with you there!

I am not, to my own surprise, in one of my furious passions. The last time I was in this perfectly cool state, under serious provocation, something came of it, which I daren't write down, even in my own private diary. I shouldn't be surprised if something comes of it now.

On my way back, I called at Mr Bashwood's lodgings in the town. He was not at home, and I left a message telling him to come here tonight and speak to me. I mean to relieve him at once of the duty of looking after Armadale and Miss Milroy. I may not see my way yet to ruining her prospects at Thorpe-Ambrose as completely as she has ruined mine. But when the time comes, and I do see it, I don't know to what lengths my sense of injury may take me; and there may be inconvenience, and possibly danger, in having such a chicken-hearted creature as Mr Bashwood in my confidence.

I suspect I am more upset by all this than I supposed. Midwinter's story is beginning to haunt me again, without rhyme or reason.

A soft, quick, trembling knock at the street door! I know who it is. No hand but old Bashwood's could knock in that way.

*

Nine o'clock
. – I have just got rid of him. He has surprised me by coming out in a new character.

It seems (though I didn't detect him) that he was at the great house while I was in company with Armadale. He saw us talking on the drive; and he afterwards heard what the servants said, who saw us too. The wise opinion below stairs is that we have ‘made it up', and that the master is likely to marry me after all. ‘He's sweet on her red hair,' was the elegant expression they used in the kitchen. ‘Little Missie can't match her there – and little Missie will get the worst of it.' How I hate the coarse ways of the lower orders!

While old Bashwood was telling me this, I thought he looked even more confused and nervous than usual. But I failed to see what was really the matter until after I had told him that he was to leave all further observation of Mr Armadale and Miss Milroy to me. Every drop of the little blood there is in the feeble old creature's body seemed to fly up into his face. He made quite an overpowering effort; he really looked as if he would drop down dead of fright at his own boldness; but he forced out the question, for all that, stammering, and stuttering, and kneading desperately with both hands at the brim of his hideous great hat. ‘I beg your pardon, Miss Gwi-Gwi-Gwilt! You are not really go go-going to marry Mr Armadale, are you?' Jealous – if ever I saw it in a man's face yet, I saw it in his – actually jealous of Armadale, at his age!
³
If I had been in the humour for it, I should have burst out laughing in his face. As it was, I was angry, and lost all patience with him. I told him he was an old fool, and ordered him to go on quietly with his usual business until I sent him word that he was wanted again. He submitted as usual; but there was an indescribable something in his watery old eyes, when he took leave of me, which I have never noticed in them before. Love has the credit of working all sorts of strange transformations. Can it be really possible that Love has made Mr Bashwood man enough to be angry with me?

Wednesday
. – My experience of Miss Milroy's habits suggested a suspicion to me last night, which I thought it desirable to clear up this morning.

It was always her way, when I was at the cottage, to take a walk early in the morning before breakfast. Considering that I used often to choose that very time for
my
private meetings with Armadale, it struck me as likely that my former pupil might be taking a leaf out of my book, and that I might make some desirable discoveries if I turned my steps in the direction of the major's garden at the right hour. I deprived myself of my Drops, to make sure of waking; passed a miser
able night in consequence; and was ready enough to get up at six o'clock, and walk the distance from my lodgings to the cottage in the fresh morning air.

I had not been five minutes on the park-side of the garden enclosure before I saw her come out.
She
seemed to have had a bad night too; her eyes were heavy and red, and her lips and cheeks looked swollen as if she had been crying. There was something on her mind, evidently; something, as it soon appeared, to take her out of the garden into the park. She walked (if one can call it walking, with such legs as hers!) straight to the summer-house, and opened the door, and crossed the bridge, and went on quicker and quicker towards the low ground in the park, where the trees are thickest. I followed her over the open space with perfect impunity, in the preoccupied state she was in; and when she began to slacken her pace among the trees, I was among the trees too, and was not afraid of her seeing me.

Before long, there was a crackling and trampling of heavy feet coming up towards us through the underwood in a deep dip of the ground. I knew that step as well as she knew it. ‘Here I am,' she said, in a faint little voice. I kept behind the trees a few yards off, in some doubt on which side Armadale would come out of the underwood to join her. He came out, up the side of the dell opposite to the tree behind which I was standing. They sat down together on the bank. I sat down behind the tree, and looked at them through the underwood, and heard without the slightest difficulty every word that they said.

The talk began by his noticing that she looked out of spirits, and asking if anything had gone wrong at the cottage. The artful little minx lost no time in making the necessary impression on him; she began to cry. He took her hand, of course, and tried, in his brutishly straightforward way, to comfort her. No: she was not to be comforted. A miserable prospect was before her; she had not slept the whole night for thinking of it. Her father had called her into his room the previous evening, had spoken about the state of her education, and had told her, in so many words, that she was to go to school. The place had been found, and the terms had been settled; and as soon as her clothes could be got ready, Miss was to go. ‘While that hateful Miss Gwilt was in the house,' says this model young person, ‘I would have gone to school willingly – I wanted to go. But it's all different now; I don't think of it in the same way; I feel too old for school. I'm quite heart-broken, Mr Armadale.' There she stopped, as if she had meant to say more, and gave him a look which finished the sentence plainly – ‘I'm quite heart
broken, Mr Armadale, now we are friendly again, at going away from
you
!' For downright brazen impudence, which a grown woman would be ashamed of, give me the young girls whose ‘modesty' is so pertinaciously insisted on by the nauseous domestic sentimentalists of the present day!
⁴

Even Armadale, booby as he is, understood her. After bewildering himself in a labyrinth of words that led nowhere, he took her – one can hardly say round the waist, for she hasn't got one – he took her round the last hook-and-eye of her dress, and, by way of offering her a refuge from the indignity of being sent to school at her age, made her a proposal of marriage in so many words.

If I could have killed them both at that moment by lifting up my little finger, I have not the least doubt I should have lifted it. As things were, I only waited to see what Miss Milroy would do.

She appeared to think it necessary – feeling, I suppose, that she had met him without her father's knowledge, and not forgetting that I had had the start of her as the favoured object of Mr Armadale's good opinion – to assert herself by an explosion of virtuous indignation. She wondered how he could think of such a thing after his conduct with Miss Gwilt, and after her father had forbidden him the house! Did he want to make her feel how inexcusably she had forgotten what was due to herself? Was it worthy of a gentleman to propose what he knew as well as she did, was impossible? and so on, and so on. Any man with brains in his head would have known what all this rodomontade really meant. Armadale took it so seriously that he actually attempted to justify himself. He declared, in his headlong blundering way, that he was quite in earnest; he and her father might make it up, and be friends again; and if the major persisted in treating him as a stranger, young ladies and gentlemen in their situation had made runaway marriages before now, and fathers and mothers who wouldn't forgive them before, had forgiven them afterwards. Such outrageously straightforward love-making as this, left Miss Milroy, of course, but two alternatives – to confess that she had been saying No, when she meant Yes, or to take refuge in another explosion. She was hypocrite enough to prefer another explosion. ‘How dare you, Mr Armadale? Go away directly! It's inconsiderate, it's heartless, it's perfectly disgraceful to say such things to me!' and so on, and so on. It seems incredible, but it is not the less true, that he was positively fool enough to take her at her word. He begged her pardon, and went away like a child that is put in the corner – the most contemptible object in the form of man that eyes ever looked on!

She waited, after he had gone, to compose herself, and I waited behind the trees to see how she would succeed. Her eyes wandered round slily to the path by which he had left her. She smiled (grinned would be the truer way of putting it, with such a mouth as hers); took a few steps on tiptoe to look after him; turned back again, and suddenly burst into a violent fit of crying. I am not quite so easily taken in as Armadale, and I saw what it all meant plainly enough.

‘To-morrow,' I thought to myself, ‘you will be in the park again, miss, by pure accident. The next day, you will lead him on into proposing to you for the second time. The day after, he will venture back to the subject of runaway marriages, and you will only be becomingly confused. And the day after that, if he has got a plan to propose, and if your clothes are ready to be packed for school, you will listen to him.' Yes, yes; Time is always on the man's side, where a woman is concerned, if the man is only patient enough to let Time help him.