Armadale by Wilkie Collins (page 5)

flooded bright in its summer glory by the light of the morning sun.

On one side, an archway, broken through, a wall, led into the fruit garden. On the other, a terrace of turf led to ground on a lower level, laid out as an Italian garden. Wandering past the fountains and statues, Allan reached another shrubbery, winding its way apparently to some remote part of the grounds. Thus far, not a human creature had been visible or audible anywhere; but, as he approached the end of the second shrubbery, it struck him that he heard something on the other side of the foliage. He stopped and listened. There were two voices speaking distinctly–an old voice that sounded very obstinate, and a young voice that sounded very angry.

“It’s no use, miss,” said the old voice. “I mustn’t allow it, and I won’t allow it. What would Mr. Armadale say?”

“If Mr. Armadale is the gentleman I take him for, you old brute!” replied the young voice, “he would say, ‘Come into my garden, Miss Milroy, as often as you like, and take as many nosegays as you please.'” Allan’s bright blue eyes twinkled mischievously. Inspired by a sudden idea, he stole softly to the end of the shrubbery, darted round the corner of it, and, vaulting over a low ring fence, found himself in a trim little paddock, crossed by a gravel walk. At a short distance down the wall stood a young lady, with her back toward him, trying to force her way past an impenetrable old man, with a rake in his hand, who stood obstinately in front of her, shaking his head.

“Come into my garden, Miss Milroy, as often as you like, and take as many nosegays as you please,” cried Allan, remorselessly repeating her own words.

The young lady turned round, with a scream; her muslin dress, which she was holding up in front, dropped from her hand, and a prodigious lapful of flowers rolled out on the gravel walk.

Before another word could be said, the impenetrable old man stepped forward, with the utmost composure, and entered on the question of his own personal interests, as if nothing whatever had happened, and nobody was present but his new master and himself.

“I bid you humbly welcome to Thorpe Ambrose, sir,” said this ancient of the gardens. “My name is Abraham Sage. I’ve been employed in the grounds for more than forty years; and I hope you’ll be pleased to continue me in my place.”

So, with vision inexorably limited to the horizon of his own prospects, spoke the gardener, and spoke in vain. Allan was down on his knees on the gravel walk, collecting the fallen flowers, and forming his first impressions of Miss Milroy from the feet upward.

She was pretty; she was not pretty; she charmed, she disappointed, she charmed again. Tried by recognized line and rule, she was too short and too well developed for her age. And yet few men’s eyes would have wished her figure other than it was. Her hands were so prettily plump and dimpled that it was hard to see how red they were with the blessed exuberance of youth and health. Her feet apologized gracefully for her old and ill fitting shoes; and her shoulders made ample amends for the misdemeanor in muslin which covered them in the shape of a dress. Her dark-gray eyes were lovely in their clear softness of color, in their spirit, tenderness, and sweet good humor of expression; and her hair (where a shabby old garden hat allowed it to be seen) was of just that lighter shade of brown which gave value by contrast to the darker beauty of her eyes. But these attractions passed, the little attendant blemishes and imperfections of this self-contradictory girl began again. Her nose was too short, her mouth was too large, her face was too round and too rosy. The dreadful justice of photography would have had no mercy on her; and the sculptors of classical Greece would have bowed her regretfully out of their studios. Admitting all this, and more, the girdle round Miss Milroy’s waist was the girdle of Venus nevertheless; and the passkey that opens the general heart was the key she carried, if ever a girl possessed it yet. Before Allan had picked up his second handful of flowers, Allan was in love with her.

“Don’t! pray don’t, Mr. Armadale!” she said, receiving the flowers under protest, as Allan vigorously showered them back into the lap of her dress. “I am so ashamed! I didn’t mean to invite myself in that bold way into your garden; my tongue ran away with me–it did, indeed! What can I say to excuse myself? Oh, Mr. Armadale, what must you think of me?”

Allan suddenly saw his way to a compliment, and tossed it up to her forthwith, with the third handful of flowers.

“I’ll tell you what I think, Miss Milroy,” he said, in his blunt, boyish way. “I think the luckiest walk I ever took in my life was the walk this morning that brought me here.”

He looked eager and handsome. He was not addressing a woman worn out with admiration, but a girl just beginning a woman’s life; and it did him no harm, at any rate, to speak in the character of master of Thorpe Ambrose. The penitential expression on Miss Milroy’s face gently melted away; she looked down, demure and smiling, at the flowers in her lap.

“I deserve a good scolding,” she said. “I don’t deserve compliments, Mr. Armadale–least of all from _you_.”

“Oh, yes, you do!” cried the headlong Allan, getting briskly on his legs. “Besides, it isn’t a compliment; it’s true. You are the prettiest–I beg your pardon, Miss Milroy! _my_ tongue ran away with me that time.”

Among the heavy burdens that are laid on female human nature, perhaps the heaviest, at the age of sixteen, is the burden of gravity. Miss Milroy struggled, tittered, struggled again, and composed herself for the time being.

The gardener, who still stood where he had stood from the first, immovably waiting for his next opportunity, saw it now, and gently pushed his personal interests into the first gap of silence that had opened within his reach since Allan’s appearance on the scene.

“I humbly bid you welcome to Thorpe Ambrose, sir,” said Abraham Sage, beginning obstinately with his little introductory speech for the second time. “My name–“

Before he could deliver himself of his name, Miss Milroy looked accidentally in the horticulturist’s pertinacious face, and instantly lost her hold on her gravity beyond recall. Allan, never backward in following a boisterous example of any sort, joined in her laughter with right goodwill. The wise man of the gardens showed no surprise, and took no offense. He waited for another gap of silence, and walked in again gently with his personal interests the moment the two young people stopped to take breath.

“I have been employed in the grounds,” proceeded Abraham Sage, irrepressibly, “for more than forty years–“

“You shall be employed in the grounds for forty more, if you’ll only hold your tongue and take yourself off!” cried Allan, as soon as he could speak.

“Thank you kindly, sir,” said the gardener, with the utmost politeness, but with no present signs either of holding his tongue or of taking himself off.

“Well?” said Allan.

Abraham Sage carefully cleared his throat, and shifted his rake from one hand to the other. He looked down the length of his own invaluable implement, with a grave interest and attention, seeing, apparently, not the long handle of a rake, but the long perspective of a vista, with a supplementary personal interest established at the end of it. “When more convenient, sir,” resumed this immovable man, “I should wish respectfully to speak to you about my son. Perhaps it may be more convenient in the course of the day? My humble duty, sir, and my best thanks. My son is strictly sober. He is accustomed to the stables, and he belongs to the Church of England–without incumbrances.” Having thus planted his offspring provisionally in his master’s estimation, Abraham Sage shouldered his invaluable rake, and hobbled slowly out of view.

“If that’s a specimen of a trustworthy old servant,” said Allan, “I think I’d rather take my chance of being cheated by a new one. _You_ shall not be troubled with him again, Miss Milroy, at any rate. All the flower-beds in the garden are at your disposal, and all the fruit in the fruit season, if you’ll only come here and eat it.”

“Oh, Mr. Armadale, how very, very kind you are. How can I thank you?”

Allan saw his way to another compliment–an elaborate compliment, in the shape of a trap, this time.

“You can do me the greatest possible favor,” he said. “You can assist me in forming an agreeable impression of my own grounds.”

“Dear me! how?” asked Miss Milroy, innocently.

Allan judiciously closed the trap on the spot in these words: “By taking me with you, Miss Milroy, on your morning walk.” He spoke, smiled, and offered his arm.

She saw the way, on her side, to a little flirtation. She rested her hand on his arm, blushed, hesitated, and suddenly took it away again.

“I don’t think it’s quite right, Mr. Armadale,” she said, devoting herself with the deepest attention to her collection of flowers. “Oughtn’t we to have some old lady here? Isn’t it improper to take your arm until I know you a little better than I do now? I am obliged to ask; I have had so little instruction; I have seen so little of society, and one of papa’s friends once said my manners were too bold for my age. What do _you_ think?”

“I think it’s a very good thing your papa’s friend is not here now,” answered the outspoken Allan; “I should quarrel with him to a dead certainty. As for society, Miss Milroy, nobody knows less about it than I do; but if we _had_ an old lady here, I must say myself I think she would be uncommonly in the way. Won’t you?” concluded Allan, imploringly offering his arm for the second time. “Do!”

Miss Milroy looked up at him sidelong from her flowers “You are as bad as the gardener, Mr. Armadale!” She looked down again in a flutter of indecision. “I’m sure it’s wrong,” she said, and took his arm the instant afterward without the slightest hesitation.

They moved away together over the daisied turf of the paddock, young and bright and happy, with the sunlight of the summer morning shining cloudless over their flowery path.

“And where are we going to, now?” asked Allan. “Into another garden?”

She laughed gayly. “How very odd of you, Mr. Armadale, not to know, when it all belongs to you! Are you really seeing Thorpe Ambrose this morning for the first time? How indescribably strange it must feel! No, no; don’t say any more complimentary things to me just yet. You may turn my head if you do. We haven’t got the old lady with us; and I really must take care of myself. Let me be useful; let me tell you all about your own grounds. We are going out at that little gate, across one of the drives in the park, and then over the rustic bridge, and then round the corner of the plantation–where do you think? To where I live, Mr. Armadale; to the lovely little cottage that you have let to papa. Oh, if you only knew how lucky we thought ourselves to get it!’

She paused, looked up at her companion, and stopped another compliment on the incorrigible Allan’s lips.

“I’ll drop your arm,” she said coquettishly, “if you do! We _were_ lucky to get the cottage, Mr. Armadale. Papa said he felt under an obligation to you for letting it, the day we got in. And _I_ said I felt under an obligation, no longer ago than last week.”

“You, Miss Milroy!” exclaimed Allan.

“Yes. It may surprise you to hear it; but if you hadn’t let the cottage to papa, I believe I should have suffered the indignity and misery of being sent to school.”

Allan’s memory reverted to the half-crown that he had spun on the cabin-table of the yacht, at Castletown. “If she only knew that I had tossed up for it!” he thought, guiltily.

“I dare say you don’t understand why I should feel such a horror of going to school,” pursued Miss Milroy, misinterpreting the momentary silence on her companion’s side. “If I had gone to school in early life–I mean at the age when other girls go–I shouldn’t have minded it now. But I had no such chance at the time. It was the time of mamma’s illness and of papa’s unfortunate speculation; and as papa had nobody to comfort him but me, of course I stayed at home. You needn’t laugh; I was of some use, I can tell you. I helped papa over his trouble, by sitting on his knee after dinner, and asking him to tell me stories of all the remarkable people he had known when he was about in the great world, at home and abroad. Without me to amuse him in the evening, and his clock to occupy him in the daytime–“

“His clock?” repeated Allan.

“Oh, yes! I ought to have told you. Papa is an extraordinary mechanical genius. You will say so, too, when you see his clock. It’s nothing like so large, of course, but it’s on the model of the famous clock at Strasbourg. Only think, he began it when I was eight years old; and (though I was sixteen last birthday) it isn’t finished yet! Some of our friends were quite surprised he should take to such a thing when his troubles began. But papa himself set that right in no time; he reminded them that Louis the Sixteenth took to lock-making when _his_ troubles began, and then everybody was perfectly satisfied.” She stopped, and changed color confusedly. “Oh, Mr. Armadale,” she said, in genuine embarrassment this time, “here is my unlucky tongue running away with me again! I am talking to you already as if I had known you for years! This is what papa’s friend meant when he said my manners were too bold. It’s quite true; I have a dreadful way of getting familiar with people, if–” She checked herself suddenly, on the brink of ending the sentence by saying, “if I like them.”

“No, no; do go on!” pleaded Allan. “It’s a fault of mine to be familiar, too. Besides, we _must_ be familiar; we are such near neighbors. I’m rather an uncultivated sort of fellow, and I don’t know quite how to say it; but I want your cottage to be jolly and friendly with my house, and my house to be jolly and friendly with your cottage. There’s my meaning, all in the wrong words. Do go on, Miss Milroy; pray go on!”

She smiled and hesitated. “I don’t exactly remember where I was,” she replied, “I only remember I had something I wanted to tell you. This comes, Mr. Armadale, of my taking your arm. I should get on so much better, if you would only consent to walk separately. You won’t? Well, then, will you tell me what it was I wanted to say? Where was I before I went wandering off to papa’s troubles and papa’s clock?”

“At school!” replied Allan, with a prodigious effort of memory.

“_Not_ at school, you mean,” said Miss Milroy; “and all through _you_. Now I can go on again, which is a great comfort. I am quite serious, Mr. Armadale, in saying that I should have been sent to school, if you had said No when papa proposed for the cottage. This is how it happened. When we began moving in, Mrs. Blanchard sent us a most kind message from the great house to say that her servants were at our disposal, if we wanted any assistance. The least papa and I could do, after that, was to call and thank her. We saw Mrs. Blanchard and Miss Blanchard. Mistress was charming, and miss looked perfectly lovely in her mourning. I’m sure you admire her? She’s tall and pale and graceful–quite your idea of beauty, I should think?”

“Nothing like it,” began Allan. “My idea of beauty at the present moment–“

Miss Milroy felt it coming, and instantly took her hand off his arm.

“I mean I have never seen either Mrs. Blanchard or her niece,” added Allan, precipitately correcting himself.

Miss Milroy tempered justice with mercy, and put her hand back again.

“How extraordinary that you should never have seen them!” she went on. “Why, you are a perfect stranger to everything and everybody at Thorpe Ambrose! Well, after Miss Blanchard and I had sat and talked a little while, I heard my name on Mrs. Blanchard’s lips and instantly held my breath. She was asking papa if I had finished my education. Out came papa’s great grievance directly. My old governess, you must know, left us to be married just before we came here, and none of our friends could produce a new one whose terms were reasonable. ‘I’m told, Mrs. Blanchard, by people who understand it better than I do,’ says papa, ‘that advertising is a risk. It all falls on me, in Mrs. Milroy’s state of health, and I suppose I must end in sending my little girl to school. Do you happen to know of a school within the means of a poor man?’ Mrs. Blanchard shook her head; I could have kissed her on the spot for doing it. ‘All my experience, Major Milroy,’ says this perfect angel of a woman, ‘is in favor of advertising. My niece’s governess was originally obtained by an advertisement, and you may imagine her value to us when I tell you she lived in our family for more than ten years.’ I could have gone down on both my knees and worshipped Mrs. Blanchard then and there; and I only wonder I didn’t! Papa was struck at the time–I could see that–and he referred to it again on the way home. ‘Though I have been long out of the world, my dear,’ says papa, ‘I know a highly-bred woman and a sensible woman when I see her. Mrs. Blanchard’s experience puts advertising in a new light; I must think about it.’ He has thought about it, and (though he hasn’t openly confessed it to me) I know that he decided to advertise, no later than last night. So, if papa thanks you for letting the cottage, Mr. Armadale, I thank you, too. But for you, we should never have known darling Mrs. Blanchard; and but for darling Mrs. Blanchard, I should have been sent to school.”

Before Allan could reply, they turned the corner of the plantation, and came in sight of the cottage. Description of it is needless; the civilized universe knows it already. It was the typical cottage of the drawing-master’s early lessons in neat shading and the broad pencil touch–with the trim thatch, the luxuriant creepers, the modest lattice-windows, the rustic porch, and the wicker bird-cage, all complete.

“Isn’t it lovely?” said Miss Milroy. “Do come in!”

“May I?” asked Allan. “Won’t the major think it too early?”

“Early or late, I am sure papa will be only too glad to see you.”

She led the way briskly up the garden path, and opened the parlor door. As Allan followed her into the little room, he saw, at the further end of it, a gentleman sitting alone at an old-fashioned writing-table, with his back turned to his visitor.

“Papa! a surprise for you!” said Miss Milroy, rousing him from his occupation. “Mr. Armadale has come to Thorpe Ambrose; and I have brought him here to see you.”

The major started; rose, bewildered for the moment; recovered himself immediately, and advanced to welcome his young landlord, with hospitable, outstretched hand.

A man with a larger experience of the world and a finer observation of humanity than Allan possessed would have seen the story of Major Milroy’s life written in Major Milroy’s face. The home troubles that had struck him were plainly betrayed in his stooping figure and his wan, deeply wrinkled cheeks, when he first showed himself on rising from his chair. The changeless influence of one monotonous pursuit and one monotonous habit of thought was next expressed in the dull, dreamy self-absorption of his manner and his look while his daughter was speaking to him. The moment after, when he had roused himself to welcome his guest, was the moment which made the self-revelation complete. Then there flickered in the major’s weary eyes a faint reflection of the spirit of his happier youth. Then there passed over the major’s dull and dreamy manner a change which told unmistakably of social graces and accomplishments, learned at some past time in no ignoble social school; a man who had long since taken his patient refuge from trouble in his own mechanical pursuit; a man only roused at intervals to know himself again for what he once had been. So revealed to all eyes that could read him aright, Major Milroy now stood before Allan, on the first morning of an acquaintance which was destined to be an event in Allan’s life.

“I am heartily glad to see you, Mr. Armadale,” he said, speaking in the changeless quiet, subdued tone peculiar to most men whose occupations are of the solitary and monotonous kind. “You have done me one favor already by taking me as your tenant, and you now do me another by paying this friendly visit. If you have not breakfasted already, let me waive all ceremony on my side, and ask you to take your place at our little table.”

“With the greatest pleasure, Major Milroy, if I am not in the way,” replied Allan, delighted at his reception. “I was sorry to hear from Miss Milroy that Mrs. Milroy is an invalid. Perhaps my being here unexpectedly; perhaps the sight of a strange face–“

“I understand your hesitation, Mr. Armadale,” said the major; “but it is quite unnecessary. Mrs. Milroy’s illness keeps her entirely confined to her own room. Have we got everything we want on the table, my love?” he went on, changing the subject so abruptly that a closer observer than Allan might have suspected it was distasteful to him. “Will you come and make tea?”

Miss Milroy’s attention appeared to be already pre-engaged; she made no reply. While her father and Allan had been exchanging civilities, she had been putting the writing-table in order, and examining the various objects scattered on it with the unrestrained curiosity of a spoiled child. The moment after the major had spoken to her, she discovered a morsel of paper hidden between the leaves of the blotting-book, snatched it up, looked at it, and turned round instantly, with an exclamation of surprise.

“Do my eyes deceive me, papa?” she asked. “Or were you really and truly writing the advertisement when I came in?”

“I had just finished it,” replied her father. “But, my dear, Mr. Armadale is here–we are waiting for breakfast.”

“Mr. Armadale knows all about it,” rejoined Miss Milroy. “I told him in the garden.”

“Oh, yes!” said Allan. “Pray, don’t make a stranger of me, major! If it’s about the governess, I’ve got something (in an indirect sort of way) to do with it too.”

Major Milroy smiled. Before he could answer, his daughter, who had been reading the advertisement, appealed to him eagerly, for the second time.

“Oh, papa,” she said, “there’s one thing here I don’t like at all! Why do you put grandmamma’s initials at the end? Why do you tell them to write to grandmamma’s house in London?”

“My dear! your mother can do nothing in this matter, as you know. And as for me (even if I went to London), questioning strange ladies about their characters and accomplishments is the last thing in the world that I am fit to do. Your grandmamma is on the spot; and your grandmamma is the proper person to receive the letters, and to make all the necessary inquires.”

“But I want to see the letters myself,” persisted the spoiled child. “Some of them are sure to be amusing–“

“I don’t apologize for this very unceremonious reception of you, Mr. Armadale,” said the major, turning to Allan, with a quaint and quiet humor. “It may be useful as a warning, if you ever chance to marry and have a daughter, not to begin, as I have done, by letting her have her own way.”

Allan laughed, and Miss Milroy persisted.

“Besides,” she went on, “I should like to help in choosing which letters we answer, and which we don’t. I think I ought to have some voice in the selection of my own governess. Why not tell them, papa, to send their letters down here–to the post-office or the stationer’s, or anywhere you like? When you and I have read them, we can send up the letters we prefer to grandmamma; and she can ask all the questions, and pick out the best governess, just as you have arranged already, without leaving ME entirely in the dark, which I consider (don’t you, Mr. Armadale?) to be quite inhuman. Let me alter the address, papa; do, there’s a darling!”

“We shall get no breakfast, Mr. Armadale, if I don’t say Yes,” said the major good-humoredly. “Do as you like, my dear,” he added, turning to his daughter. “As long as it ends in your grandmamma’s managing the matter for us, the rest is of very little consequence.”

Miss Milroy took up her father’s pen, drew it through the last line of the advertisement, and wrote the altered address with her own hand as follows:

“_Apply, by letter, to M., Post-office, Thorpe Ambrose, Norfolk_.”

“There!” she said, bustling to her place at the breakfast-table. “The advertisement may go to London now; and, if a governess _does_ come of it, oh, papa, who in the name of wonder will she be? Tea or coffee, Mr. Armadale? I’m really ashamed of having kept you waiting. But it is such a comfort,” she added, saucily, “to get all one’s business off one’s mind before breakfast!”

Father, daughter, and guest sat down together sociably at the little round table, the best of good neighbors and good friends already.

Three days later, one of the London newsboys got _his_ business off his mind before breakfast. His district was Diana Street, Pimlico; and the last of the morning’s newspapers which he disposed of was the newspaper he left at Mrs. Oldershaw’s door.

CHAPTER III.

THE CLAIMS OF SOCIETY.

More than an hour after Allan had set forth on his exploring expedition through his own grounds, Midwinter rose, and enjoyed, in his turn, a full view by daylight of the magnificence of the new house.

Refreshed by his long night’s rest, he descended the great staircase as cheerfully as Allan himself. One after another, he, too, looked into the spacious rooms on the ground floor in breathless astonishment at the beauty and the luxury which surrounded him. “The house where I lived in service when I was a boy, was a fine one,” he thought, gayly; “but it was nothing to this! I wonder if Allan is as surprised and delighted as I am?” The beauty of the summer morning drew him out through the open hall door, as it had drawn his friend out before him. He ran briskly down the steps, humming the burden of one of the old vagabond tunes which he had danced to long since in the old vagabond time. Even the memories of his wretched childhood took their color, on that happy morning. from the bright medium through which he looked back at them. “If I was not out of practice,” he thought to himself, as he leaned on the fence and looked over at the park, “I could try some of my old tumbling tricks on that delicious grass.” He turned, noticed two of the servants talking together near the shrubbery, and asked for news of the master of the house.

The men pointed with a smile in the direction of the gardens; Mr. Armadale had gone that way more than an hour since, and had met (as had been reported) with Miss Milroy in the grounds. Midwinter followed the path through the shrubbery, but, on reaching the flower garden, stopped, considered a little, and retraced his steps. “If Allan has met with the young lady,” he said to himself, “Allan doesn’t want me.” He laughed as he drew that inevitable inference, and turned considerately to explore the beauties of Thorpe Ambrose on the other side of the house.

Passing the angle of the front wall of the building, he descended some steps, advanced along a paved walk, turned another angle, and found himself in a strip of garden ground at the back of the house.

Behind him was a row of small rooms situated on the level of the servants’ offices. In front of him, on the further side of the little garden, rose a wall, screened by a laurel hedge, and having a door at one end of it, leading past the stables to a gate that opened on the high-road. Perceiving that he had only discovered thus far the shorter way to the house, used by the servants and trades-people, Midwinter turned back again, and looked in at the window of one of the rooms on the basement story as he passed it. Were these the servants’ offices? No; the offices were apparently in some other part of the ground-floor; the window he had looked in at was the window of a lumber-room. The next two rooms in the row were both empty. The fourth window, when he approached it, presented a little variety. It served also as a door; and it stood open to the garden at that moment.

Attracted by the book-shelves which he noticed on one of the walls, Midwinter stepped into the room.

The books, few in number, did not detain him long; a glance at their backs was enough without taking them down. The Waverley Novels, Tales by Miss Edgeworth, and by Miss Edgeworth’s many followers, the Poems of Mrs. Hemans, with a few odd volumes of the illustrated gift-books of the period, composed the bulk of the little library. Midwinter turned to leave the room, when an object on one side of the window, which he had not previously noticed, caught his attention and stopped him. It was a statuette standing on a bracket–a reduced copy of the famous Niobe of the Florence Museum. He glanced from the statuette to the window, with a sudden doubt which set his heart throbbing fast. It was a French window. He looked out with a suspicion which he had not felt yet. The view before him was the view of a lawn and garden. For a moment his mind struggled blindly to escape the conclusion which had seized it, and struggled in vain. Here, close round him and close before him–here, forcing him mercilessly back from the happy present to the horrible past, was the room that Allan had seen in the Second Vision of the Dream.

He waited, thinking and looking round him while he thought. There was wonderfully little disturbance in his face and manner; he looked steadily from one to the other of the few objects in the room, as if the discovery of it had saddened rather than surprised him. Matting of some foreign sort covered the floor. Two cane chairs and a plain table comprised the whole of the furniture. The walls were plainly papered, and bare–broken to the eye in one place by a door leading into the interior of the house; in another, by a small stove; in a third, by the book-shelves which Midwinter had already noticed. He returned to the books, and this time he took some of them down from the shelves.

The first that he opened contained lines in a woman’s handwriting, traced in ink that had faded with time. He read the inscription–“Jane Armadale, from her beloved father. Thorpe Ambrose, October, 1828.” In the second, third, and fourth volumes that he opened, the same inscription re-appeared. His previous knowledge of dates and persons helped him to draw the true inference from what he saw. The books must have belonged to Allan’s mother; and she must have inscribed them with her name, in the interval of time between her return to Thorpe Ambrose from Madeira and the birth of her son. Midwinter passed on to a volume on another shelf–one of a series containing the writings of Mrs. Hemans. In this case, the blank leaf at the beginning of the book was filled on both sides with a copy of verses, the writing being still in Mrs. Armadale’s hand. The verses were headed “Farewell to Thorpe Ambrose,” and were dated “March, 1829”–two months only after Allan had been born.

Entirely without merit in itself, the only interest of the little poem was in the domestic story that it told.

The very room in which Midwinter then stood was described–with the view on the garden, the window made to open on it, the bookshelves, the Niobe, and other more perishable ornaments which Time had destroyed. Here, at variance with her brothers, shrinking from her friends, the widow of the murdered man had, on her own acknowledgment, secluded herself, without other comfort than the love and forgiveness of her father, until her child was born. The father’s mercy and the father’s recent death filled many verses, happily too vague in their commonplace expression of penitence and despair to give any hint of the marriage story in Madeira to any reader who looked at them ignorant of the truth. A passing reference to the writer’s estrangement from her surviving relatives, and to her approaching departure from Thorpe Ambrose, followed. Last came the assertion of the mother’s resolution to separate herself from all her old associations; to leave behind her every possession, even to the most trifling thing she had, that could remind her of the miserable past; and to date her new life in the future from the birthday of the child who had been spared to console her–who was now the one earthly object that could still speak to her of love and hope. So the old story of passionate feeling that finds comfort in phrases rather than not find comfort at all was told once again. So the poem in the faded ink faded away to its end.

Midwinter put the book back with a heavy sigh, and opened no other volume on the shelves. “Here in the country house, or there on board the wreck,” he said, bitterly, “the traces of my father’s crime follow me, go where I may.” He advanced toward the window, stopped, and looked back into the lonely, neglected little room. “Is _this_ chance?” he asked himself. “The place where his mother suffered is the place he sees in the Dream; and the first morning in the new house is the morning that reveals it, not to _him_, but to me. Oh, Allan! Allan! how will it end?”

The thought had barely passed through his mind before he heard Allan’s voice, from the paved walk at the side of the house, calling to him by his name. He hastily stepped out into the garden. At the same moment Allan came running round the corner, full of voluble apologies for having forgotten, in the society of his new neighbors, what was due to the laws of hospitality and the claims of his friend.

“I really haven’t missed you,” said Midwinter; “and I am very, very glad to hear that the new neighbors have produced such a pleasant impression on you already.”

He tried, as he spoke, to lead the way back by the outside of the house; but Allan’s flighty attention had been caught by the open window and the lonely little room. He stepped in immediately. Midwinter followed, and watched him in breathless anxiety as he looked round. Not the slightest recollection of the Dream troubled Allan’s easy mind. Not the slightest reference to it fell from the silent lips of his friend.

“Exactly the sort of place I should have expected you to hit on!” exclaimed Allan, gayly. “Small and snug and unpretending. I know you, Master Midwinter! You’ll be slipping off here when the county families come visiting, and I rather think on those dreadful occasions you won’t find me far behind you. What’s the matter? You look ill and out of spirits. Hungry? Of course you are! unpardonable of me to have kept you waiting. This door leads somewhere, I suppose; let’s try a short cut into the house. Don’t be afraid of my not keeping you company at breakfast. I didn’t eat much at the cottage; I feasted my eyes on Miss Milroy, as the poets say. Oh, the darling! the darling! she turns you topsy-turvy the moment you look at her. As for her father, wait till you see his wonderful clock! It’s twice the size of the famous clock at Strasbourg, and the most tremendous striker ever heard yet in the memory of man!”

Singing the praises of his new friends in this strain at the top of his voice, Allan hurried Midwinter along the stone passages on the basement floor, which led, as he had rightly guessed, to a staircase communicating with the hall. They passed the servants’ offices on the way. At the sight of the cook and the roaring fire, disclosed through the open kitchen door, Allan’s mind went off at a tangent, and Allan’s dignity scattered itself to the four winds of heaven, as usual.

“Aha, Mrs. Gripper, there you are with your pots and pans, and your burning fiery furnace! One had need be Shadrach, Meshach, and the other fellow to stand over that. Breakfast as soon as ever you like. Eggs, sausages, bacon, kidneys, marmalade, water-cresses, coffee, and so forth. My friend and I belong to the select few whom it’s a perfect privilege to cook for. Voluptuaries, Mrs. Gripper, voluptuaries, both of us. You’ll see,” continued Allan, as they went on toward the stairs, “I shall make that worthy creature young again; I’m better than a doctor for Mrs. Gripper. When she laughs, she shakes her fat sides, and when she shakes her fat sides, she exerts her muscular system; and when she exerts her muscular system– Ha! here’s Susan again. Don’t squeeze yourself flat against the banisters, my dear; if you don’t mind hustling _me_ on the stairs, I rather like hustling _you_. She looks like a full-blown rose when she blushes, doesn’t she? Stop, Susan! I’ve orders to give. Be very particular with Mr. Midwinter’s room: shake up his bed like mad, and dust his furniture till those nice round arms of yours ache again. Nonsense, my dear fellow! I’m not too familiar with them; I’m only keeping them up to their work. Now, then, Richard! where do we breakfast? Oh, here. Between ourselves, Midwinter, these splendid rooms of mine are a size too large for me; I don’t feel as if I should ever be on intimate terms with my own furniture. My views in life are of the snug and slovenly sort–a kitchen chair, you know, and a low ceiling. Man wants but little here below, and wants that little long. That’s not exactly the right quotation; but it expresses my meaning, and we’ll let alone correcting it till the next opportunity.”

“I beg your pardon,” interposed Midwinter, “here is something waiting for you which you have not noticed yet.”

As he spoke, he pointed a little impatiently to a letter lying on the breakfast-table. He could conceal the ominous discovery which he had made that morning, from Allan’s knowledge; but he could not conquer the latent distrust of circumstances which was now raised again in his superstitious nature–the instinctive suspicion of everything that happened, no matter how common or how trifling the event, on the first memorable day when the new life began in the new house.

Allan ran his eye over the letter, and tossed it across the table to his friend. “I can’t make head or tail of it,” he said, “can you?”

Midwinter read the letter, slowly, aloud. “Sir–I trust you will pardon the liberty I take in sending these few lines to wait your arrival at Thorpe Ambrose. In the event of circumstances not disposing you to place your law business in the hands of Mr. Darch–” He suddenly stopped at that point, and considered a little.

“Darch is our friend the lawyer,” said Allan, supposing Midwinter had forgotten the name. “Don’t you remember our spinning the half-crown on the cabin table, when I got the two offers for the cottage? Heads, the major; tails, the lawyer. This is the lawyer.”

Without making any reply, Midwinter resumed reading the letter. “In the event of circumstances not disposing you to place your law business in the hands of Mr. Darch, I beg to say that I shall be happy to take charge of your interests, if you feel willing to honor me with your confidence. Inclosing a reference (should you desire it) to my agents in London, and again apologizing for this intrusion, I beg to remain, sir, respectfully yours, A. PEDGIFT, Sen.”

“Circumstances?” repeated Midwinter, as he laid the letter down. “What circumstances can possibly indispose you to give your law business to Mr. Darch?”

“Nothing can indispose me,” said Allan. “Besides being the family lawyer here, Darch was the first to write me word at Paris of my coming in for my fortune; and, if I have got any business to give, of course he ought to have it.”

Midwinter still looked distrustfully at the open letter on the table. “I am sadly afraid, Allan, there is something wrong already,” he said. “This man would never have ventured on the application he has made to you, unless he had some good reason for believing he would succeed. If you wish to put yourself right at starting, you will send to Mr. Darch this morning to tell him you are here, and you will take no notice for the present of Mr. Pedgift’s letter.”

Before more could be said on either side, the footman made his appearance with the breakfast tray. He was followed, after an interval, by the butler, a man of the essentially confidential kind, with a modulated voice, a courtly manner, and a bulbous nose. Anybody but Allan would have seen in his face that he had come into the room having a special communication to make to his master. Allan, who saw nothing under the surface, and whose head was running on the lawyer’s letter, stopped him bluntly with the point-blank question: “Who’s Mr. Pedgift?”

The butler’s sources of local knowledge opened confidentially on the instant. Mr. Pedgift was the second of the two lawyers in the town. Not so long established, not so wealthy, not so universally looked up to as old Mr. Darch. Not doing the business of the highest people in the county, and not mixing freely with the best society, like old Mr. Darch. A very sufficient man, in his way, nevertheless. Known as a perfectly competent and respectable practitioner all round the neighborhood. In short, professionally next best to Mr. Darch; and personally superior to him (if the expression might be permitted) in this respect–that Darch was a Crusty One, and Pedgift wasn’t.

Having imparted this information, the butler, taking a wise advantage of his position, glided, without a moment’s stoppage, from Mr. Pedgift’s character to the business that had brought him into the breakfast-room. The Midsummer Audit was near at hand; and the tenants were accustomed to have a week’s notice of the rent-day dinner. With this necessity pressing, and with no orders given as yet, and no steward in office at Thorpe Ambrose, it appeared desirable that some confidential person should bring the matter forward. The butler was that confidential person; and he now ventured accordingly to trouble his master on the subject.

At this point Allan opened his lips to interrupt, and was himself interrupted before he could utter a word.

“Wait!” interposed Midwinter, seeing in Allan’s face that he was in danger of being publicly announced in the capacity of steward. “Wait!” he repeated, eagerly, “till I can speak to you first.”

The butler’s courtly manner remained alike unruffled by Midwinter’s sudden interference and by his own dismissal from the scene. Nothing but the mounting color in his bulbous nose betrayed the sense of injury that animated him as he withdrew. Mr. Armadale’s chance of regaling his friend and himself that day with the best wine in the cellar trembled in the balance, as the butler took his way back to the basement story.

“This is beyond a joke, Allan,” said Midwinter, when they were alone. “Somebody must meet your tenants on the rent-day who is really fit to take the steward’s place. With the best will in the world to learn, it is impossible for _me_ to master the business at a week’s notice. Don’t, pray don’t let your anxiety for my welfare put you in a false position with other people! I should never forgive myself if I was the unlucky cause–“

“Gently gently!’ cried Allan, amazed at his friend’s extraordinary earnestness. “If I write to London by to-night’s post for the man who came down here before, will that satisfy you?”

Midwinter shook his head. “Our time is short,” he said; “and the man may not be at liberty. Why not try in the neighborhood first? You were going to write to Mr. Darch. Send at once, and see if he can’t help us between this and post-time.”

Allan withdrew to a side-table on which writing materials were placed. “You shall breakfast in peace, you old fidget,” he replied, and addressed himself forthwith to Mr. Darch, with his usual Spartan brevity of epistolary expression. “Dear Sir–Here I am, bag and baggage. Will you kindly oblige me by being my lawyer? I ask this, because I want to consult you at once. Please look in in the course of the day, and stop to dinner if you possibly can. Yours truly. ALLAN ARMADALE.” Having read this composition aloud with unconcealed admiration of his own rapidity of literary execution, Allan addressed the letter to Mr. Darch, and rang the bell. “Here, Richard, take this at once, and wait for an answer. And, I say, if there’s any news stirring in the town, pick it up and bring it back with you. See how I manage my servants!” continued Allan, joining his friend at the breakfast-table. “See how I adapt myself to my new duties! I haven’t been down here one clear day yet, and I’m taking an interest in the neighborhood already.”

Breakfast over, the two friends went out to idle away the morning under the shade of a tree in the park. Noon came, and Richard never appeared. One o’clock struck, and still there were no signs of an answer from Mr. Darch. Midwinter’s patience was not proof against the delay. He left Allan dozing on the grass, and went to the house to make inquiries. The town was described as little more than two miles distant; but the day of the week happened to be market day, and Richard was being detained no doubt by some of the many acquaintances whom he would be sure to meet with on that occasion.

Half an hour later the truant messenger returned, and was sent out to report himself to his master under the tree in the park.

“Any answer from Mr. Darch?” asked Midwinter, seeing that Allan was too lazy to put the question for himself.

“Mr. Darch was engaged, sir. I was desired to say that he would send an answer.”

“Any news in the town?” inquired Allan, drowsily, without troubling himself to open his eyes.

“No, sir; nothing in particular.”

Observing the man suspiciously as he made that reply, Midwinter detected in his face that he was not speaking the truth. He was plainly embarrassed, and plainly relieved when his master’s silence allowed him to withdraw. After a little consideration, Midwinter followed, and overtook the retreating servant on the drive before the house.

“Richard,” he said, quietly, “if I was to guess that there _is_ some news in the town, and that you don’t like telling it to your master, should I be guessing the truth?”

The man started and changed color. “I don’t know how you have found it out,” he said; “but I can’t deny you have guessed right.”

“If you let me hear what the news is, I will take the responsibility on myself of telling Mr. Armadale.”

After some little hesitation, and some distrustful consideration, on his side, of Midwinter’s face, Richard at last prevailed on himself to repeat what he had heard that day in the town.

The news of Allan’s sudden appearance at Thorpe Ambrose had preceded the servant’s arrival at his destination by some hours. Wherever he went, he found his master the subject of public discussion. The opinion of Allan’s conduct among the leading townspeople, the resident gentry of the neighborhood, and the principal tenants on the estate was unanimously unfavorable. Only the day before, the committee for managing the pubic reception of the new squire had sketched the progress of the procession; had settled the serious question of the triumphal arches; and had appointed a competent person to solicit subscriptions for the flags, the flowers, the feasting, the fireworks, and the band. In less than a week more the money could have been collected, and the rector would have written to Mr. Armadale to fix the day. And now, by Allan’s own act, the public welcome waiting to honor him had been cast back contemptuously in the public teeth! Everybody took for granted (what was unfortunately true) that he had received private information of the contemplated proceedings. Everybody declared that he had purposely stolen into his own house like a thief in the night (so the phrase ran) to escape accepting the offered civilities of his neighbors. In brief, the sensitive self-importance of the little town was wounded to the quick, and of Allan’s once enviable position in the estimation of the neighborhood not a vestige remained.

For a moment, Midwinter faced the messenger of evil tidings in silent distress. That moment past, the sense of Allan’s critical position roused him, now the evil was known, to seek the remedy.

“Has the little you have seen of your master, Richard, inclined you to like him?” he asked.

This time the man answered without hesitation, “A pleasanter and kinder gentleman than Mr. Armadale no one could wish to serve.”

“If you think that,” pursued Midwinter, “you won’t object to give me some information which will help your master to set himself right with his neighbors. Come into the house.”

He led the way into the library, and, after asking the necessary questions, took down in writing a list of the names and addresses of the most influential persons living in the town and its neighborhood. This done, he rang the bell for the head footman, having previously sent Richard with a message to the stables directing an open carriage to be ready in an hour’s time.

“When the late Mr. Blanchard went out to make calls in the neighborhood, it was your place to go with him, was it not?” he asked, when the upper servant appeared. “Very well. Be ready in an hour’s time, if you please, to go out with Mr. Armadale.” Having given that order, he left the house again on his way back to Allan, with the visiting list in his hand. He smiled a little sadly as he descended the steps. “Who would have imagined,” he thought, “that my foot-boy’s experience of the ways of gentlefolks would be worth looking back at one day for Allan’s sake?”

The object of the popular odium lay innocently slumbering on the grass, with his garden hat over his nose, his waistcoat unbuttoned, and his trousers wrinkled half way up his outstretched legs. Midwinter roused him without hesitation, and remorselessly repeated the servant’s news.

Allan accepted the disclosure thus forced on him without the slightest disturbance of temper. “Oh, hang ’em!” was all he said. “Let’s have another cigar.” Midwinter took the cigar out of his hand, and, insisting on his treating the matter seriously, told him in plain words that he must set himself right with his offended neighbors by calling on them personally to make his apologies. Allan sat up on the grass in astonishment; his eyes opened wide in incredulous dismay. Did Midwinter positively meditate forcing him into a “chimney-pot hat,” a nicely brushed frock-coat, and a clean pair of gloves? Was it actually in contemplation to shut him up in a carriage, with his footman on the box and his card-case in his hand, and send him round from house to house, to tell a pack of fools that he begged their pardon for not letting them make a public show of him? If anything so outrageously absurd as this was really to be done, it could not be done that day, at any rate. He had promised to go back to the charming Milroy at the cottage and to take Midwinter with him. What earthly need had he of the good opinion of the resident gentry? The only friends he wanted were the friends he had got already. Let the whole neighborhood turn its back on him if it liked; back or face, the Squire of Thorpe Ambrose didn’t care two straws about it.

After allowing him to run on in this way until his whole stock of objections was exhausted, Midwinter wisely tried his personal influence next. He took Allan affectionately by the hand. “I am going to ask a great favor,” he said. “If you won’t call on these people for your own sake, will you call on them to please _me_?”

Allan delivered himself of a groan of despair, stared in mute surprise at the anxious face of his friend, and good-humoredly gave way. As Midwinter took his arm, and led him back to the house, he looked round with rueful eyes at the cattle hard by, placidly whisking their tails in the pleasant shade. “Don’t mention it in the neighborhood,” he said; “I should like to change places with one of my own cows.”

Midwinter left him to dress, engaging to return when the carriage was at the door. Allan’s toilet did not promise to be a speedy one. He began it by reading his own visiting cards; and he advanced it a second stage by looking into his wardrobe, and devoting the resident gentry to the infernal regions. Before he could discover any third means of delaying his own proceedings, the necessary pretext was unexpectedly supplied by Richard’s appearance with a note in his hand. The messenger had just called with Mr. Darch’s answer. Allan briskly shut up the wardrobe, and gave his whole attention to the lawyer’s letter. The lawyer’s letter rewarded him by the following lines:

“SIR–I beg to acknowledge the receipt of your favor of to-day’s date, honoring me with two proposals; namely, ONE inviting me to act as your legal adviser, and ONE inviting me to pay you a visit at your house. In reference to the first proposal, I beg permission to decline it with thanks. With regard to the second proposal, I have to inform you that circumstances have come to my knowledge relating to the letting of the cottage at Thorpe Ambrose which render it impossible for me (in justice to myself) to accept your invitation. I have ascertained, sir, that my offer reached you at the same time as Major Milroy’s; and that, with both proposals thus before you, you gave the preference to a total stranger, who addressed you through a house agent, over a man who had faithfully served your relatives for two generations, and who had been the first person to inform you of the most important event in your life. After this specimen of your estimate of what is due to the claims of common courtesy and common justice, I cannot flatter myself that I possess any of the qualities which would fit me to take my place on the list of your friends.

“I remain, sir, your obedient servant,

“JAMES DARCH.”

“Stop the messenger!” cried Allan, leaping to his feet, his ruddy face aflame with indignation. “Give me pen, ink, and paper! By the Lord Harry, they’re a nice set of people in these parts; the whole neighborhood is in a conspiracy to bully me!” He snatched up the pen in a fine frenzy of epistolary inspiration. “Sir–I despise you and your letter.–” At that point the pen made a blot, and the writer was seized with a momentary hesitation. “Too strong,” he thought; “I’ll give it to the lawyer in his own cool and cutting style.” He began again on a clean sheet of paper. “Sir–You remind me of an Irish bull. I mean that story in ‘Joe Miller’ where Pat remarked, in the hearing of a wag hard by, that ‘the reciprocity was all on one side.’ _Your_ reciprocity is all on one side. You take the privilege of refusing to be my lawyer, and then you complain of my taking the privilege of refusing to be your landlord.” He paused fondly over those last words. “Neat!” he thought. “Argument and hard hitting both in one. I wonder where my knack of writing comes from?” He went on, and finished the letter in two more sentences. “As for your casting my invitation back in my teeth, I beg to inform you my teeth are none the worse for it. I am equally glad to have nothing to say to you, either in the capacity of a friend or a tenant.–ALLAN ARMADALE.” He nodded exultantly at his own composition, as he addressed it and sent it down to the messenger. “Darch’s hide must be a thick one,” he said, “if he doesn’t feel _that_!”

The sound of the wheels outside suddenly recalled him to the business of the day. There was the carriage waiting to take him on his round of visits; and there was Midwinter at his post, pacing to and fro on the drive.

“Read that,” cried Allan, throwing out the lawyer’s letter; “I’ve written him back a smasher.”

He bustled away to the wardrobe to get his coat. There was a wonderful change in him; he felt little or no reluctance to pay the visits now. The pleasurable excitement of answering Mr. Darth had put him in a fine aggressive frame of mind for asserting himself in the neighborhood. “Whatever else they may say of me, they shan’t say I was afraid to face them.” Heated red-hot with that idea, he seized his hat and gloves, and hurrying out of the room, met Midwinter in the corridor with the lawyer’s letter in his hand.

“Keep up your spirits!” cried Allan, seeing the anxiety in his friend’s face, and misinterpreting the motive of it immediately. “If Darch can’t be counted on to send us a helping hand into the steward’s office, Pedgift can.”

“My dear Allan, I was not thinking of that; I was thinking of Mr. Darch’s letter. I don’t defend this sour-tempered man; but I am afraid we must admit he has some cause for complaint. Pray don’t give him another chance of putting you in the wrong. Where is your answer to his letter?”

“Gone!” replied Allan. “I always strike while the iron’s hot–a word and a blow, and the blow first, that’s my way. Don’t, there’s a good fellow, don’t fidget about the steward’s books and the rent-day. Here! here’s a bunch of keys they gave me last night: one of them opens the room where the steward’s books are; go in and read them till I come back. I give you my sacred word of honor I’ll settle it all with Pedgift before you see me again.”

“One moment,” interposed Midwinter, stopping him resolutely on his way out to the carriage. “I say nothing against Mr. Pedgift’s fitness to possess your confidence, for I know nothing to justify me in distrusting him. But he has not introduced himself to your notice in a very delicate way; and he has not acknowledged (what is quite clear to my mind) that he knew of Mr. Darch’s unfriendly feeling toward you when he wrote. Wait a little before you go to this stranger; wait till we can talk it over together to-night.”

“Wait!” replied Allan. “Haven’t I told you that I always strike while the iron’s hot? Trust my eye for character, old boy, I’ll look Pedgift through and through, and act accordingly. Don’t keep me any longer, for Heaven’s sake. I’m in a fine humor for tackling the resident gentry; and if I don’t go at once, I’m afraid it may wear off.”

With that excellent reason for being in a hurry, Allan boisterously broke away. Before it was possible to stop him again, he had jumped into the carriage and had left the house.

CHAPTER IV.

THE MARCH OF EVENTS.

Midwinter’s face darkened when the last trace of the carriage had disappeared from view. “I have done my best,” he said, as he turned back gloomily into the house “If Mr. Brock himself were here, Mr. Brock could do no more!”

He looked at the bunch of keys which Allan had thrust into his hand, and a sudden longing to put himself to the test over the steward’s books took possession of his sensitive self-tormenting nature. Inquiring his way to the room in which the various movables of the steward’s office had been provisionally placed after the letting of the cottage, he sat down at the desk, and tried how his own unaided capacity would guide him through the business records of the Thorpe Ambrose estate. The result exposed his own ignorance unanswerably before his own eyes. The ledgers bewildered him; the leases, the plans, and even the correspondence itself, might have been written, for all he could understand of them, in an unknown tongue. His memory reverted bitterly as he left the room again to his two years’ solitary self-instruction in the Shrewsbury book-seller’s shop. “If I could only have worked at a business!” he thought. “If I could only have known that the company of poets and philosophers was company too high for a vagabond like me!”

He sat down alone in the great hall; the silence of it fell heavier and heavier on his sinking spirits; the beauty of it exasperated him, like an insult from a purse-proud man. “Curse the place!” he said, snatching up his hat and stick. “I like the bleakest hillside I ever slept on better than I like this house!”

He impatiently descended the door-steps, and stopped on the drive, considering, by which direction he should leave the park for the country beyond. If he followed the road taken by the carriage, he might risk unsettling Allan by accidentally meeting him in the town. If he went out by the back gate, he knew his own nature well enough to doubt his ability to pass the room of the dream without entering it again. But one other way remained: the way which he had taken, and then abandoned again, in the morning. There was no fear of disturbing Allan and the major’s daughter now. Without further hesitation, Midwinter set forth through the gardens to explore the open country on that side of the estate.

Thrown off its balance by the events of the day, his mind was full of that sourly savage resistance to the inevitable self-assertion of wealth, so amiably deplored by the prosperous and the rich; so bitterly familiar to the unfortunate and the poor. “The heather-bell costs nothing!” he thought, looking contemptuously at the masses of rare and beautiful flowers that surrounded him; “and the buttercups and daisies are as bright as the best of you!” He followed the artfully contrived ovals and squares of the Italian garden with a vagabond indifference to the symmetry of their construction and the ingenuity of their design. “How many pounds a foot did _you_ cost?” he said, looking back with scornful eyes at the last path as he left it. “Wind away over high and low like the sheep-walk on the mountain side, if you can!”

He entered the shrubbery which Allan had entered before him; crossed the paddock and the rustic bridge beyond; and reached the major’s cottage. His ready mind seized the right conclusion at the first sight of it; and he stopped before the garden gate, to look at the trim little residence which would never have been empty, and would never have been let, but for Allan’s ill-advised resolution to force the steward’s situation on his friend.

The summer afternoon was warm; the summer air was faint and still. On the upper and the lower floor of the cottage the windows were all open. From one of them, on the upper story, the sound of voices was startlingly audible in the quiet of the park as Midwinter paused on the outer side of the garden inclosure. The voice of a woman, harsh, high, and angrily complaining–a voice with all the freshness and the melody gone, and with nothing but the hard power of it left–was the discordantly predominant sound. With it, from moment to moment, there mingled the deeper and quieter tones, soothing and compassionate, of the voice of a man. Although the distance was too great to allow Midwinter to distinguish the words that were spoken, he felt the impropriety of remaining within hearing of the voices, and at once stepped forward to continue his walk.

At the same moment, the face of a young girl (easily recognizable as the face of Miss Milroy, from Allan’s description of her) appeared at the open window of the room. In spite of himself, Midwinter paused to look at her. The expression of the bright young face, which had smiled so prettily on Allan, was weary and disheartened. After looking out absently over the park, she suddenly turned her head back into the room, her attention having been apparently struck by something that had just been said in it. “Oh, mamma, mamma,” she exclaimed, indignantly, “how _can_ you say such things!” The words were spoken close to the window; they reached Midwinter’s ears, and hurried him away before he heard more. But the self-disclosure of Major Milroy’s domestic position had not reached its end yet. As Midwinter turned the corner of the garden fence, a tradesman’s boy was handing a parcel in at the wicket gate to the woman servant. “Well,” said the boy, with the irrepressible impudence of his class, “how is the missus?” The woman lifted her hand to box his ears. “How is the missus?” she repeated, with an angry toss of her head, as the boy ran off. “If it would only please God to take the missus, it would be a blessing to everybody in the house.”

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 imbittered 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 toward 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 pretense 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 color 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 attempt 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 neighbors.”

“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 afterward. 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 straw-colored 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 honor 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 your 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 neighborhood 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. These 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 neighbors.”

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.

“It shall be as you wish,” he said, quietly. “I am sorry for what has happened; but I am not the less obliged to you, Allan, for having done what I asked you.”

His head sank on his breast, and the fatalist resignation which had once already quieted him on board the wreck now quieted him again. “What _must_ be, _will_ be,” he thought once more. “What have I to do with the future, and what has he?”

“Cheer up!” said Allan. “_Your_ affairs are in a thriving condition, at any rate. I paid one pleasant visit in the town, which I haven’t told you of yet. I’ve seen Pedgift, and Pedgift’s son, who helps him in the office. They’re the two jolliest lawyers I ever met with in my life; and, what’s more, they can produce the very man you want to teach you the steward’s business.”

Midwinter looked up quickly. Distrust of Allan’s discovery was plainly written in his face already; but he said nothing.

“I thought of you,” Allan proceeded, “as soon as the two Pedgifts and I had had a glass of wine all round to drink to our friendly connection. The finest sherry I ever tasted in my life; I’ve ordered some of the same–but that’s not the question just now. In two words I told these worthy fellows your difficulty, and in two seconds old Pedgift understood all about it. ‘I have got the man in my office,’ he said, ‘and before the audit-day comes, I’ll place him with the greatest pleasure at your friend’s disposal.'”

At this last announcement, Midwinter’s distrust found its expression in words. He questioned Allan unsparingly.

The man’s name, it appeared was Bashwood. He had been some time (how long, Allan could not remember) in Mr. Pedgift’s service. He had been previously steward to a Norfolk gentleman (name forgotten) in the westward district of the county. He had lost the steward’s place, through some domestic trouble, in connection with his son, the precise nature of which Allan was not able to specify. Pedgift vouched for him, and Pedgift would send him to Thorpe Ambrose two or three days before the rent-day dinner. He could not be spared, for office reasons, before that time. There was no need to fidget about it; Pedgift laughed at the idea of there being any difficulty with the tenants. Two or three day’s work over the steward’s books with a man to help Midwinter who practically understood that sort of thing would put him all right for the audit; and the other business would keep till afterward.

“Have you seen this Mr. Bashwood yourself, Allan?” asked Midwinter, still obstinately on his guard.

“No,” replied Allan “he was out–out with the bag, as young Pedgift called it. They tell me he’s a decent elderly man. A little broken by his troubles, and a little apt to be nervous and confused in his manner with strangers; but thoroughly competent and thoroughly to be depended on–those are Pedgift’s own words.”

Midwinter paused and considered a little, with a new interest in the subject. The strange man whom he had just heard described, and the strange man of whom he had asked his way where the three roads met, were remarkably like each other. Was this another link in the fast-lengthening chain of events? Midwinter grew doubly determined to be careful, as the bare doubt that it might be so passed through his mind.

“When Mr. Bashwood comes,” he said, “will you let me see him, and speak to him, before anything definite is done?”

“Of course I will!” rejoined Allan. He stopped and looked at his watch. “And I’ll tell you what I’ll do for you, old boy, in the meantime,” he added; “I’ll introduce you to the prettiest girl in Norfolk! There’s just time to run over to the cottage before dinner. Come along, and be introduced to Miss Milroy.”

“You can’t introduce me to Miss Milroy today,” replied Midwinter; and he repeated the message of apology which had been brought from the major that afternoon. Allan was surprised and disappointed; but he was not to be foiled in his resolution to advance himself in the good graces of the inhabitants of the cottage. After a little consideration he hit on a means of turning the present adverse circumstances to good account. “I’ll show a proper anxiety for Mrs. Milroy’s recovery,” he said, gravely. “I’ll send her a basket of strawberries, with my best respects, to-morrow morning.”

Nothing more happened to mark the end of that first day in the new house.

The one noticeable event of the next day was another disclosure of Mrs. Milroy’s infirmity of temper. Half an hour after Allan’s basket of strawberries had been delivered at the cottage, it was returned to him intact (by the hands of the invalid lady’s nurse), with a short and sharp message, shortly and sharply delivered. “Mrs. Milroy’s compliments and thanks. Strawberries invariably disagreed with her.” If this curiously petulant acknowledgment of an act of politeness was intended to irritate Allan, it failed entirely in accomplishing its object. Instead of being offended with the mother, he sympathized with the daughter. “Poor little thing,” was all he said, “she must have a hard life of it with such a mother as that!”

He called at the cottage himself later in the day, but Miss Milroy was not to be seen; she was engaged upstairs. The major received his visitor in his working apron–far more deeply immersed in his wonderful clock, and far less readily accessible to outer influences, than Allan had seen him at their first interview. His manner was as kind as before; but not a word more could be extracted from him on the subject of his wife than that Mrs. Milroy “had not improved since yesterday.”

The two next days passed quietly and uneventfully. Allan persisted in making his inquiries at the cottage; but all he saw of the major’s daughter was a glimpse of her on one occasion at a window on the bedroom floor. Nothing more was heard from Mr. Pedgift; and Mr. Bashwood’s appearance was still delayed. Midwinter declined to move in the matter until time enough had passed to allow of his first hearing from Mr. Brock, in answer to the letter which he had addressed to the rector on the night of his arrival at Thorpe Ambrose. He was unusually silent and quiet, and passed most of his hours in the library among the books. The time wore on wearily. The resident gentry acknowledged Allan’s visit by formally leaving their cards. Nobody came near the house afterward; the weather was monotonously fine. Allan grew a little restless and dissatisfied. He began to resent Mrs. Milroy’s illness; he began to think regretfully of his deserted yacht.

The next day–the twentieth–brought some news with it from the outer world. A message was delivered from Mr. Pedgift, announcing that his clerk, Mr. Bashwood, would personally present himself at Thorpe Ambrose on the following day; and a letter in answer to Midwinter was received from Mr. Brock.

The letter was dated the 18th, and the news which it contained raised not Allan’s spirits only, but Midwinter’s as well.

On the day on which he wrote, Mr. Brock announced that he was about to journey to London; having been summoned thither on business connected with the interests of a sick relative, to whom he stood in the position of trustee. The business completed, he had good hope of finding one or other of his clerical friends in the metropolis who would be able and willing to do duty for him at the rectory; and, in that case, he trusted to travel on from London to Thorpe Ambrose in a week’s’ time or less. Under these circumstances, he would leave the majority of the subjects on which Midwinter had written to him to be discussed when they met. But as time might be of importance, in relation to the stewardship of the Thorpe Ambrose estate, he would say at once that he saw no reason why Midwinter should not apply his mind to learning the steward’s duties, and should not succeed in rendering himself invaluably serviceable in that way to the interests of his friend.

Leaving Midwinter reading and re-reading the rector’s cheering letter, as if he was bent on getting every sentence in it by heart, Allan went out rather earlier than usual, to make his daily inquiry at the cottage–or, in plainer words, to make a fourth attempt at improving his acquaintance with Miss Milroy. The day had begun encouragingly, and encouragingly it seemed destined to go on. When Allan turned the corner of the second shrubbery, and entered the little paddock where he and the major’s daughter had first met, there was Miss Milroy herself loitering to and fro on the grass, to all appearance on the watch for somebody.

She gave a little start when Allan appeared, and came forward without hesitation to meet him. She was not in her best looks. Her rosy complexion had suffered under confinement to the house, and a marked expression of embarrassment clouded her pretty face.

“I hardly know how to confess it, Mr. Armadale,” she said, speaking eagerly, before Allan could utter a word, “but I certainly ventured here this morning in the hope of meeting with you. I have been very much distressed; I have only just heard, by accident, of the manner in which mamma received the present of fruit you so kindly sent to her. Will you try to excuse her? She has been miserably ill for years, and she is not always quite herself. After your being so very, very kind to me (and to papa), I really could not help stealing out here in the hope of seeing you, and telling you how sorry I was. Pray forgive and forget, Mr. Armadale–pray do!” her voice faltered over the last words, and, in her eagerness to make her mother’s peace with him, she laid her hand on his arm.

Allan was himself a little confused. Her earnestness took him by surprise, and her evident conviction that he had been offended honestly distressed him. Not knowing what else to do, he followed his instincts, and possessed himself of her hand to begin with.

“My dear Miss Milroy, if you say a word more you will distress _me_ next,” he rejoined, unconsciously pressing her hand closer and closer, in the embarrassment of the moment. “I never was in the least offended; I made allowances–upon my honor I did–for poor Mrs. Milroy’s illness. Offended!” cried Allan, reverting energetically to the old complimentary strain. “I should like to have my basket of fruit sent back every day–if I could only be sure of its bringing you out into the paddock the first thing in the morning.”

Some of Miss Milroy’s missing color began to appear again in her cheeks. “Oh, Mr. Armadale, there is really no end to your kindness,” she said; “you don’t know how you relieve me! She paused; her spirits rallied with as happy a readiness of recovery as if they had been the spirits of a child; and her native brightness of temper sparkled again in her eyes, as she looked up, shyly smiling in Allan’s face. “Don’t you think,” she asked, demurely, “that it is almost time now to let go of my hand?”

Their eyes met. Allan followed his instincts for the second time. Instead of releasing her hand, he lifted it to his lips and kissed it. All the missing tints of the rosier sort returned to Miss Milroy’s complexion on the instant. She snatched away her hand as if Allan had burned it.

“I’m sure _that’s_ wrong, Mr. Armadale,” she said, and turned her head aside quickly, for she was smiling in spite of herself.

“I meant it as an apology for–for holding your hand too long,” stammered Allan. “An apology can’t be wrong–can it?”

There are occasions, though not many, when the female mind accurately appreciates an appeal to the force of pure reason. This was one of the occasions. An abstract proposition had been presented to Miss Milroy, and Miss Milroy was convinced. If it was meant as an apology, that, she admitted, made all the difference. “I only hope,” said the little coquet, looking at him slyly, “you’re not misleading me. Not that it matters much now,” she added, with a serious shake of her head. “If we have committed any improprieties, Mr. Armadale, we are not likely to have the opportunity of committing many more.”

“You’re not going away?” exclaimed Allan, in great alarm.

“Worse than that, Mr. Armadale. My new governess is coming.”

“Coming?” repeated Allan. “Coming already?”

“As good as coming, I ought to have said–only I didn’t know you wished me to be so very particular. We got the answers to the advertisements this morning. Papa and I opened them and read them together half an hour ago; and we both picked out the same letter from all the rest. I picked it out, because it was so prettily expressed; and papa picked it out because the terms were so reasonable. He is going to send the letter up to grandmamma in London by today’s post, and, if she finds everything satisfactory on inquiry, the governess is to be engaged You don’t know how dreadfully nervous I am getting about it already; a strange governess is such an awful prospect. But it is not quite so bad as going to school; and I have great hopes of this new lady, because she writes such a nice letter! As I said to papa, it almost reconciles me to her horrid, unromantic name.”

“What is her name?” asked Allan. “Brown? Grubb? Scraggs? Anything of that sort?”

“Hush! hush! Nothing quite so horrible as that. Her name is Gwilt. Dreadfully unpoetical, isn’t it? Her reference must be a respectable person, though; for she lives in the same part of London as grandmamma. Stop, Mr. Armadale! we are going the wrong way. No; I can’t wait to look at those lovely flowers of yours this morning, and, many thanks, I can’t accept your arm. I have stayed here too long already. Papa is waiting for his breakfast; and I must run back every step of the way. Thank you for making those kind allowances for mamma; thank you again and again, and good-by! “

“Won’t you shake hands?” asked Allan.

She gave him her hand. “No more apologies, if you please, Mr. Armadale,” she said, saucily. Once more their eyes met, and once more the plump, dimpled little hand found its way to Allan’s lips. “It isn’t an apology this time!” cried Allan, precipitately defending himself. “It’s–it’s a mark of respect.”

She started back a few steps, and burst out laughing. “You won’t find me in our grounds again, Mr. Armadale,” she said, merrily, “till I have got Miss Gwilt to take care of me!” With that farewell, she gathered up her skirts, and ran back across the paddock at the top of her speed.

Allan stood watching her in speechless admiration till she was out of sight. His second interview with Miss Milroy had produced an extraordinary effect on him. For the first time since he had become the master of Thorpe Ambrose, he was absorbed in serious consideration of what he owed to his new position in life. “The question is,” pondered Allan, “whether I hadn’t better set myself right with my neighbors by becoming a married man? I’ll take the day to consider; and if I keep in the same mind about it, I’ll consult Midwinter to-morrow morning.”

When the morning came, and when Allan descended to the breakfast-room, resolute to consult his friend on the obligations that he owed to his neighbors in general, and to Miss Milroy in particular, no Midwinter was to he seen. On making inquiry, it appeared that he had been observed in the hall; that he had taken from the table a letter which the morning’s post had brought to him; and that he had gone back immediately to his own room. Allan at once ascended the stairs again, and knocked at his friend’s door.

“May I come in?” he asked.

“Not just now,” was the answer.

“You have got a letter, haven’t you?” persisted Allan. “Any bad news? Anything wrong?”

“Nothing. I’m not very well this morning. Don’t wait breakfast for me; I’ll come down as soon as I can.”

No more was said on either side. Allan returned to the breakfast-room a little disappointed. He had set his heart on rushing headlong into his consultation with Midwinter, and here was the consultation indefinitely delayed. “What an odd fellow he is!” thought Allan. “What on earth can he be doing, locked in there by himself?”

He was doing nothing. He was sitting by the window, with the letter which had reached him that morning open in his hand. The handwriting was Mr. Brock’s, and the words written were these:

“MY DEAR MIDWINTER–I have literally only two minutes before post time to tell you that I have just met (in Kensington Gardens) with the woman whom we both only know, thus far, as the woman with the red Paisley shawl. I have traced her and her companion (a respectable-looking elderly lady) to their residence–after having distinctly heard Allan’s name mentioned between them. Depend on my not losing sight of the woman until I am satisfied that she means no mischief at Thorpe Ambrose; and expect to hear from me again as soon as I know how this strange discovery is to end.

“Very truly yours, DECIMUS BROCK.”

After reading the letter for the second time, Midwinter folded it up thoughtfully, and placed it in his pocket-book, side by side with the manuscript narrative of Allan’s dream.

“Your discovery will not end with _you_, Mr. Brock,” he said. “Do what you will with the woman, when the time comes the woman will be here.”

CHAPTER V.

MOTHER OLDERSHAW ON HER GUARD.

1. _From Mrs. Oldershaw (Diana Street, Pimlico) to Miss Gwilt (West Place, Old Brompton)_.

“Ladies’ Toilet Repository, June 20th,

Eight in the Evening.

“MY DEAR LYDIA–About three hours have passed, as well as I can remember, since I pushed you unceremoniously inside my house in West Place, and, merely telling you to wait till you saw me again, banged the door to between us, and left you alone in the hall. I know your sensitive nature, my dear, and I am afraid you have made up your mind by this time that never yet was a guest treated so abominably by her hostess as I have treated you.

“The delay that has prevented me from explaining my strange conduct is, believe me, a delay for which I am not to blame. One of the many delicate little difficulties which beset so essentially confidential a business as mine occurred here (as I have since discovered) while we were taking the air this afternoon in Kensington Gardens. I see no chance of being able to get back to you for some hours to come, and I have a word of very urgent caution for your private ear, which has been too long delayed already. So I must use the spare minutes as they come, and write.

“Here is caution the first. On no account venture outside the door again this evening, and be very careful, while the daylight lasts, not to show yourself at any of the front windows. I have reason to fear that a certain charming person now staying with me may possibly be watched. Don’t be alarmed, and don’t be impatient; you shall know why.

“I can only explain myself by going back to our unlucky meeting in the Gardens with that reverend gentleman who was so obliging as to follow us both back to my house.

“It crossed my mind, just as we were close to the door, that there might be a motive for the parson’s anxiety to trace us home, far less creditable to his taste, and far more dangerous to both of us, than the motive you supposed him to have. In plainer words, Lydia, I rather doubted whether you had met with another admirer; and I strongly suspected that you had encountered another enemy instead . There was no time to tell you this. There was only time to see you safe into the house, and to make sure of the parson (in case my suspicions were right) by treating him as he had treated us; I mean, by following him in his turn.

“I kept some little distance behind him at first, to turn the thing over in my mind, and to be satisfied that my doubts were not misleading me. We have no concealments from each other; and you shall know what my doubts were.

“I was not surprised at _your_ recognizing _him_; he is not at all a common-looking old man; and you had seen him twice in Somersetshire–once when you asked your way of him to Mrs. Armadale’s house, and once when you saw him again on your way back to the railroad. But I was a little puzzled (considering that you had your veil down on both those occasions, and your veil down also when we were in the Gardens) at his recognizing _you_. I doubted his remembering your figure in a summer dress after he had only seen it in a winter dress; and though we were talking when he met us, and your voice is one among your many charms, I doubted his remembering your voice, either. And yet I felt persuaded that he knew you. ‘How?’ you will ask. My dear, as ill-luck would have it, we were speaking at the time of young Armadale. I firmly believe that the name was the first thing that struck him; and when he heard _that_, your voice certainly and your figure perhaps, came back to his memory. ‘And what if it did?’ you may say. Think again, Lydia, and tell me whether the parson of the place where Mrs. Armadale lived was not likely to be Mrs. Armadale’s friend? If he _was_ her friend, the very first person to whom she would apply for advice after the manner in which you frightened her, and after what you most injudiciously said on the subject of appealing to her son, would be the clergyman of the parish–and the magistrate, too, as the landlord at the inn himself told you.

“You will now understand why I left you in that extremely uncivil manner, and I may go on to what happened next.

“I followed the old gentleman till he turned into a quiet street, and then accosted him, with respect for the Church written (I flatter myself) in every line of my face.

“‘Will you excuse me,’ I said, ‘if I venture to inquire, sir, whether you recognized the lady who was walking with me when you happened to pass us in the Gardens?’

“‘Will you excuse my asking, ma’am, why you put that question?’ was all the answer I got.

“‘I will endeavor to tell you, sir,’ I said. ‘If my friend is not an absolute stranger to you, I should wish to request your attention to a very delicate subject, connected with a lady deceased, and with her son who survives her.’

“He was staggered; I could see that. But he was sly enough at the same time to hold his tongue and wait till I said something more.

“‘If I am wrong, sir, in thinking that you recognized my friend,’ I went on, ‘I beg to apologize. But I could hardly suppose it possible that a gentleman in your profession would follow a lady home who was a total stranger to him.’

“There I had him. He colored up (fancy that, at his age!), and owned the truth, in defense of his own precious character.

“‘I have met with the lady once before, and I acknowledge that I recognized her in the Gardens,’ he said. ‘You will excuse me if I decline entering into the question of whether I did or did not purposely follow her home. If you wish to be assured that your friend is not an absolute stranger to me, you now have that assurance; and if you have anything particular to say to me, I leave you to decide whether the time has come to say it.’

“He waited, and looked about. I waited, and looked about. He said the street was hardly a fit place to speak of a delicate subject in. I said the street was hardly a fit place to speak of a delicate subject in. He didn’t offer to take me to where he lived. I didn’t offer to take him to where I lived. Have you ever seen two strange cats, my dear, nose to nose on the tiles? If you have, you have seen the parson and me done to the life.

“‘Well, ma’am,’ he said, at last, ‘shall we go on with our conversation in spite of circumstances?’

“‘Yes, sir,’ I said; ‘we are both of us, fortunately, of an age to set circumstances at defiance’ (I had seen the old wretch looking at my gray hair, and satisfying himself that his character was safe if he _was_ seen with me).

“After all this snapping and snarling, we came to the point at last. I began by telling him that I feared his interest in you was not of the friendly sort. He admitted that much–of course, in defense of his own character once more. I next repeated to him everything you had told me about your proceedings in Somersetshire, when we first found that he was following us home. Don’t be alarmed my dear–I was acting on principle. If you want