Armadale (38 page)

No such ill-omened shadow as this had passed over the bright domestic picture of the inhabitants of the cottage, which Allan's enthusiasm had painted for the contemplation of his friend. It was plain that the secret of the tenants had been kept from the landlord so far. Five
minutes more of walking brought Midwinter to the park gates. ‘Am I fated to see nothing and hear nothing to-day which can give me heart and hope for the future?' he thought, as he angrily swung back the lodge gate. ‘Even the people Allan has let the cottage to, are people whose lives are embittered by a household misery which it is
my
misfortune to have found out!'

He took the first road that lay before him, and walked on, noticing little, immersed in his own thoughts. More than an hour passed before the necessity of turning back entered his mind. As soon as the idea occurred to him, he consulted his watch, and determined to retrace his steps, so as to be at the house in good time to meet Allan on his return. Ten minutes of walking brought him back to a point at which three roads met; and one moment's observation of the place satisfied him that he had entirely failed to notice, at the time, by which of the three roads he had advanced. No sign-post was to be seen; the country on either side was lonely and flat, intersected by broad drains and ditches. Cattle were grazing here and there; and a windmill rose in the distance above the pollard willows that fringed the low horizon. But not a house was to be seen, and not a human creature appeared on the visible perspective of any one of the three roads. Midwinter glanced back in the only direction left to look at – the direction of the road along which he had just been walking. There, to his relief, was the figure of a man, rapidly advancing towards him, of whom he could ask his way.

The figure came on, clad from head to foot in dreary black – a moving blot on the brilliant white surface of the sun-brightened road. He was a lean, elderly, miserably respectable man. He wore a poor old black dress-coat, and a cheap brown wig, which made no pretence of being his own natural hair. Short black trousers clung like attached old servants round his wizen legs; and rusty black gaiters hid all they could of his knobbed ungainly feet. Black crape added its mite to the decayed and dingy wretchedness of his old beaver hat; black mohair in the obsolete form of a stock, drearily encircled his neck and rose as high as his haggard jaws. The one morsel of colour he carried about him, was a lawyer's bag of blue serge as lean and limp as himself. The one attractive feature in his clean-shaven, weary old face, was a neat set of teeth – teeth (as honest as his wig), which said plainly to all inquiring eyes, ‘We pass our nights on his looking-glass, and our days in his mouth.'

All the little blood in the man's body faintly reddened his fleshless cheeks as Midwinter advanced to meet him, and asked the way to Thorpe-Ambrose. His weak watery eyes looked hither and thither in a bewilderment painful to see. If he had met with a lion instead of a man,
and if the few words addressed to him had been words expressing a threat instead of a question, he could hardly have looked more confused and alarmed than he looked now. For the first time in his life, Midwinter saw his own shy uneasiness in the presence of strangers reflected, with tenfold intensity of nervous suffering, in the face of another man – and that man old enough to be his father.

‘Which do you please to mean, sir – the Town or the House? I beg your pardon for asking, but they both go by the same name in these parts.'

He spoke with a timid gentleness of tone, an ingratiatory smile, and an anxious courtesy of manner, all distressingly suggestive of his being accustomed to receive rough answers in exchange for his own politeness, from the persons whom he habitually addressed.

‘I was not aware that both the House and the Town went by the same name,' said Midwinter: ‘I meant the House.' He instinctively conquered his own shyness as he answered in those words; speaking with a cordiality of manner which was very rare with him in his intercourse with strangers.

The man of miserable-respectability seemed to feel the warm return of his own politeness gratefully: he brightened and took a little courage. His lean forefinger pointed eagerly to the right road. ‘That way, sir,' he said, ‘and when you come to two roads next, please take the left one of the two. I am sorry I have business the other way – I mean in the town. I should have been happy to go with you, and show you. Fine summer weather, sir, for walking? You can't miss your way if you keep to the left. Oh, don't mention it! I'm afraid I have detained you, sir. I wish you a pleasant walk back, and – good morning.'

By the time he had made an end of speaking (under an impression apparently that the more he talked the more polite he would be) he had lost his courage again. He darted away down his own road, as if Midwinter's attempts to thank him, involved a series of trials too terrible to confront. In two minutes more, his black retreating figure had lessened in the distance till it looked again, what it had once looked already, a moving blot on the brilliant white surface of the sun-brightened road.

The man ran strangely in Midwinter's thoughts while he took his way back to the house. He was at a loss to account for it. It never occurred to him that he might have been insensibly reminded of himself, when he saw the plain traces of past misfortune and present nervous suffering in the poor wretch's face. He blindly resented his own perverse interest in this chance foot-passenger on the high road, as he
had resented all else that had happened to him since the beginning of the day. ‘Have I made another unlucky discovery?' he asked himself impatiently. ‘Shall I see this man again, I wonder? who can he be?'

Time was to answer both those questions before many days more had passed over the inquirer's head.

Allan had not returned when Midwinter reached the house. Nothing had happened but the arrival of a message of apology from the cottage. ‘Major Milroy's compliments, and he was sorry that Mrs Milroy's illness would prevent his receiving Mr Armadale that day.' It was plain that Mrs Milroy's occasional fits of suffering (or of ill-temper) created no mere transitory disturbance of the tranquillity of the household. Drawing this natural inference, after what he had himself heard at the cottage nearly three hours since, Midwinter withdrew into the library to wait patiently among the books until his friend came back.

It was past six o'clock, when the well-known hearty voice was heard again in the hall. Allan burst into the library, in a state of irrepressible excitement, and pushed Midwinter back unceremoniously into the chair from which he was just rising, before he could utter a word.

‘Here's a riddle for you, old boy!' cried Allan. ‘Why am I like the resident manager of the Augean stable, before Hercules was called in to sweep the litter out? Because I have had my place to keep up, and I've gone and made an infernal mess of it! Why don't you laugh? By George, he doesn't see the point! Let's try again. Why am I like the resident manager?—'

‘For God's sake, Allan, be serious for a moment!' interposed Midwinter. ‘You don't know how anxious I am to hear if you have recovered the good opinion of your neighbours.'

‘That's just what the riddle was intended to tell you!' rejoined Allan. ‘But if you will have it in so many words, my own impression is that you would have done better not to disturb me under that tree in the park. I've been calculating it to a nicety, and I beg to inform you that I have sunk exactly three degrees lower in the estimation of the resident gentry since I had the pleasure of seeing you last.'

‘You
will
have your joke out,' said Midwinter, bitterly. ‘Well, if I can't laugh, I can wait.'

‘My dear fellow, I'm not joking; I really mean what I say. You shall hear what happened – you shall have a report in full of my first visit. It will do, I can promise you, as a sample for all the rest. Mind this, in the first place, I've gone wrong, with the best possible intentions. When I started for these visits, I own I was angry with that old brute of a
lawyer, and I certainly had a notion of carrying things with a high hand. But it wore off somehow on the road; and the first family I called on, I went in as I tell you with the best possible intentions. Oh dear, dear! there was the same spick-and-span reception room for me to wait in, with the neat conservatory beyond, which I saw again and again and again at every other house I went to afterwards. There was the same choice selection of books for me to look at – a religious book, a book about the Duke of Wellington, a book about sporting, and a book about nothing in particular, beautifully illustrated with pictures. Down came papa with his nice white hair, and mamma with her nice lace cap; down came young Mister with the pink face and the straw-coloured whiskers, and young Miss with the plump cheeks and the large petticoats. Don't suppose there was the least unfriendliness on my side; I always began with them in the same way – I insisted on shaking hands all round. That staggered them to begin with. When I came to the sore subject next – the subject of the public reception – I give you my word of honour I took the greatest possible pains with my apologies. It hadn't the slightest effect; they let my apologies in at one ear and out at the other, and then waited to hear more. Some men would have been disheartened: I tried another way with them; I addressed myself to the master of the house, and put it pleasantly next. “The fact is,” I said, “I wanted to escape the speechifying – my getting up, you know, and telling you to your face, you're the best of men, and I beg to propose your health; and you're getting up, and telling me to my face, I'm the best of men, and you beg to thank me; and so on, man after man, praising each other and pestering each other all round the table.” That's how I put it, in an easy, light-handed, convincing sort of way. Do you think any of them took it in the same friendly spirit? Not one! It's my belief they had got their speeches ready for the reception, with the flags and the flowers, and that they're secretly angry with me for stopping their open mouths just as they were ready to begin. Anyway, whenever we came to the matter of the speechifying (whether they touched it first or I), down I fell in their estimation the first of those three steps I told you of just now. Don't suppose I made no efforts to get up again! I made desperate efforts. I found they were all anxious to know what sort of life I had led before I came in for the Thorpe-Ambrose property, and I did my best to satisfy them. And what came of that, do you think? Hang me, if I didn't disappoint them for the second time! When they found out that I had actually never been to Eton or Harrow, or Oxford or Cambridge, they were quite dumb with astonishment. I fancy they thought me a sort of outlaw. At any rate, they all
froze up again – and down I fell the second step in their estimation. Never mind! I wasn't to be beaten; I had promised you to do my best, and I did it. I tried cheerful small-talk about the neighbourhood next. The women said nothing in particular; the men, to my unutterable astonishment, all began to condole with me. I shouldn't be able to find a pack of hounds, they said, within twenty miles of my house; and they thought it only right to prepare me for the disgracefully careless manner in which the Thorpe-Ambrose covers had been preserved. I let them go on condoling with me, and then what do you think I did? I put my foot in it again. “Oh, don't take that to heart!” I said; “I don't care two straws about hunting or shooting, either. When I meet with a bird in my walk, I can't for the life of me feel eager to kill it – I rather like to see the bird flying about and enjoying itself.” You should have seen their faces! They had thought me a sort of outlaw before; now they evidently thought me mad. Dead silence fell upon them all; and down I tumbled the third step in the general estimation. It was just the same at the next house, and the next, and the next. The devil possessed us all, I think. It
would
come out, now in one way and now in another, that I couldn't make speeches – that I had been brought up without a university education – and that I could enjoy a ride on horseback without galloping after a wretched stinking fox or a poor distracted little hare. Those three unlucky defects of mine are not excused, it seems, in a country gentleman (especially when he has dodged a public reception to begin with). I think I got on best, upon the whole, with the wives and daughters. The women and I always fell, sooner or later, on the subject of Mrs Blanchard and her niece. We invariably agreed that they had done wisely in going to Florence; and the only reason we had to give for our opinion was – that we thought their minds would be benefited after their sad bereavement, by the contemplation of the masterpieces of Italian Art. Every one of the ladies – I solemnly declare it – at every house I went to, came sooner or later to Mrs and Miss Blanchard's bereavement, and the masterpieces of Italian Art. What we should have done without that bright idea to help us, I really don't know. The one pleasant thing at any of the visits was when we all shook our heads together, and declared that the masterpieces would console them. As for the rest of it, there's only one thing more to be said. What I might be in other places I don't know – I'm the wrong man in the wrong place here. Let me muddle on for the future in my own way, with my own few friends; and ask me anything else in the world, as long as you don't ask me to make any more calls on my neighbours.'

With that characteristic request, Allan's report of his exploring
expedition among the resident gentry came to a close. For a moment Midwinter remained silent. He had allowed Allan to run on from first to last without uttering a word on his side. The disastrous result of the visits – coming after what had happened earlier in the day; and threatening Allan, as it did, with exclusion from all local sympathies at the very outset of his local career – had broken down Midwinter's power of resisting the stealthily-depressing influence of his own superstition. It was with an effort that he now looked up at Allan; it was with an effort that he roused himself to answer.