Armadale

A light was burning on the bedside table, and a letter lay on it, waiting for him till he was awake. It was in his son's handwriting, and it contained these words:

'MY DEAR DAD—Having seen you safe out of the hospital, and back at your hotel, I think I may fairly claim to have done my duty by you, and may consider myself free to look after my own affairs. Business will prevent me from seeing you to-night; and I don't think it at all likely I shall be in your neighborhood to-morrow morning. My advice to you is to go back to Thorpe Ambrose, and to stick to your employment in the steward's office. Wherever Mr. Armadale may be, he must, sooner or later, write to you on business. I wash my hands of the whole matter, mind, so far as I am concerned, from this time forth. But if you like to go on with it, my professional opinion is (though you couldn't hinder his marriage), you may part him from his wife.

'Pray take care of yourself.

'Your affectionate son,

'JAMES BASHWOOD.'

The letter dropped from the old man's feeble hands. 'I wish Jemmy could have come to see me to-night,' he thought. 'But it's very kind of him to advise me, all the same.'

He turned wearily on the pillow, and read the letter a second time. 'Yes,' he said, 'there's nothing left for me but to go back. I'm too poor and too old to hunt after them all by myself.' He closed his eyes: the tears trickled slowly over his wrinkled cheeks. 'I've been a trouble to Jemmy,' he murmured, faintly; 'I've been a sad trouble, I'm afraid, to poor Jemmy!' In a minute more his weakness overpowered him, and he fell asleep again.

The clock of the neighboring church struck. It was ten. As the bell tolled the hour, the tidal train—with Midwinter and his wife among the passengers—was speeding nearer and nearer to Paris. As the bell tolled the hour, the watch on board Allan's outward-bound yacht had sighted the light-house off the Land's End, and had set the course of the vessel for Ushant and Finisterre.

THE END OF THE THIRD BOOK.

BOOK THE FOURTH.

I. MISS GWILT'S DIARY.

'NAPLES, October 10th.—It is two months to-day since I declared that I had closed my Diary, never to open it again.

'Why have I broken my resolution? Why have I gone back to this secret friend of my wretchedest and wickedest hours? Because I am more friendless than ever; because I am more lonely than ever, though my husband is sitting writing in the next room to me. My misery is a woman's misery, and it will speak—here, rather than nowhere; to my second self, in this book, if I have no one else to hear me.

'How happy I was in the first days that followed our marriage, and how happy I made him! Only two months have passed, and that time is a by-gone time already! I try to think of anything I might have said or done wrongly, on my side—of anything he might have said or done wrongly, on his; and I can remember nothing unworthy of my husband, nothing unworthy of myself. I cannot even lay my finger on the day when the cloud first rose between us.

'I could bear it, if I loved him less dearly than I do. I could conquer the misery of our estrangement, if he only showed the change in him as brutally as other men would show it.

'But this never has happened—never will happen. It is not in his nature to inflict suffering on others. Not a hard word, not a hard look, escapes him. It is only at night, when I hear him sighing in his sleep, and sometimes when I see him dreaming in the morning hours, that I know how hopelessly I am losing the love he once felt for me. He hides, or tries to hide, it in the day, for my sake. He is all gentleness, all kindness; but his heart is not on his lips when he kisses me now; his hand tells me nothing when it touches mine. Day after day the hours that he gives to his hateful writing grow longer and longer; day after day he becomes more and more silent in the hours that he gives to me.

'And, with all this, there is nothing that I can complain of—nothing marked enough to justify me in noticing it. His disappointment shrinks from all open confession; his resignation collects itself by such fine degrees that even my watchfulness fails to see the growth of it. Fifty times a day I feel the longing in me to throw my arms round his neck, and say: 'For God's sake, do anything to me, rather than treat me like this!' and fifty times a day the words are forced back into my heart by the cruel considerateness of his conduct; which gives me no excuse for speaking them. I thought I had suffered the sharpest pain that I could feel when my first husband laid his whip across my face. I thought I knew the worst that despair could do on the day when I knew that the other villain, the meaner villain still, had cast me off. Live and learn. There is sharper pain than I felt under Waldron's whip; there is bitterer despair than the despair I knew when Manuel deserted me.

'Am I too old for him? Surely not yet! Have I lost my beauty? Not a man passes me in the street but his eyes tell me I am as handsome as ever.

'Ah, no! no! the secret lies deeper than that! I have thought and thought about it till a horrible fancy has taken possession of me. He has been noble and good in his past life, and I have been wicked and disgraced. Who can tell what a gap that dreadful difference may make between us, unknown to him and unknown to me? It is folly, it is madness; but, when I lie awake by him in the darkness, I ask myself whether any unconscious disclosure of the truth escapes me in the close intimacy that now unites us? Is there an unutterable Something left by the horror of my past life, which clings invisibly to me still? And is he feeling the influence of it, sensibly, and yet incomprehensibly to himself? Oh me! is there no purifying power in such love as mine? Are there plague-spots of past wickedness on my heart which no after-repentance can wash out?

'Who can tell? There is something wrong in our married life—I can only come back to that. There is some adverse influence that neither he nor I can trace which is parting us further and further from each other day by day. Well! I suppose I shall be hardened in time, and learn to bear it.

'An open carriage has just driven by my window, with a nicely dressed lady in it. She had her husband by her side, and her children on the seat opposite. At the moment when I saw her she was laughing and talking in high spirits—a sparkling, light-hearted, happy woman. Ah, my lady, when you were a few years younger, if you had been left to yourself, and thrown on the world like me—'

'October 11th.—The eleventh day of the month was the day (two months since) when we were married. He