""As you have no further interest in my wicked speculation at Thorpe Ambrose," I said, "perhaps you will give me back the written paper that I signed, when you were not quite such an exemplary person as you are now?"
"The shameless old hypocrite instantly shut her eyes and shuddered.
""Does that mean Yes, or No"?" I asked.
""On moral and religious grounds, Lydia," said Mrs. Oldershaw, "it means No."
""On wicked and worldly grounds," I rejoined, "I beg to thank you for showing me your hand."
"There could, indeed, be no doubt now about the object she really had in view. She would run no more risks and lend no more money; she would leave me to win or lose single-handed. If I lost, she would not be compromised. If I won, she would produce the paper I had signed, and profit by it without remorse. In my present situation, it was mere waste of time and words to prolong the matter by any useless recrimination on my side. I put the warning away privately in my memory for future use, and got up to go.
"At the moment when I left my chair there was a sharp double knock at the street door. Mrs. Oldershaw evidently recognized it. She rose in a violent hurry, and rang the bell. "I am too unwell to see anybody," she said, when the servant appeared. "Wait a moment, if you please," she added, turning sharply on me, when the woman had left us to answer the door.
"It was small, very small, spitefulness on my part, I know; but the satisfaction of thwarting Mother Jezebel, even in a trifle, was not to be resisted. "I can"t wait," I said; "you reminded me just now that I ought to be at church." Before she could answer I was out of the room.
"As I put my foot on the first stair the street door was opened, and a man"s voice inquired whether Mrs. Oldershaw was at home.
"I instantly recognized the voice. Doctor Downward!
"The doctor repeated the servant"s message in a tone which betrayed unmistakable irritation at finding himself admitted no further than the door.
""Your mistress is not well enough to see visitors? Give her that card,"
said the doctor, "and say I expect her, the next time I call, to be well enough to see _me_."
"If his voice had not told me plainly that he felt in no friendly mood toward Mrs. Oldershaw, I dare say I should have let him go without claiming his acquaintance; but, as things were, I felt an impulse to speak to him or to anybody who had a grudge against Mother Jezebel.
There was more of my small spitefulness in this, I suppose. Anyway, I slipped downstairs; and, following the doctor out quietly, overtook him in the street.
"I had recognized his voice, and I recognized his back as I walked behind him. But when I called him by his name, and when he turned round with a start and confronted me, I followed his example, and started on my side. The doctor"s face was transformed into the face of a perfect stranger! His baldness had hidden itself under an artfully grizzled wig.
He had allowed his whiskers to grow, and had dyed them to match his new head of hair. Hideous circular spectacles bestrode his nose in place of the neat double eyegla.s.s that he used to carry in his hand; and a black neckerchief, surmounted by immense shirt-collars, appeared as the unworthy successor of the clerical white cravat of former times. Nothing remained of the man I once knew but the comfortable plumpness of his figure, and the confidential courtesy and smoothness of his manner and his voice.
""Charmed to see you again," said the doctor, looking about him a little anxiously, and producing his card-case in a very precipitate manner.
"But, my dear Miss Gwilt, permit me to rectify a slight mistake on your part. Doctor Downward of Pimlico is dead and buried; and you will infinitely oblige me if you will never, on any consideration, mention him again!"
"I took the card he offered me, and discovered that I was now supposed to be speaking to "Doctor Le Doux, of the Sanitarium, Fairweather Vale, Hampstead!"
""You seem to have found it necessary," I said, "to change a great many things since I last saw you? Your name, your residence, your personal appearance--?"
""And my branch of practice," interposed the doctor. "I have purchased of the original possessor (a person of feeble enterprise and no resources) a name, a diploma, and a partially completed sanitarium for the reception of nervous invalids. We are open already to the inspection of a few privileged friends--come and see us. Are you walking my way?
Pray take my arm, and tell me to what happy chance I am indebted for the pleasure of seeing you again?"
"I told him the circ.u.mstances exactly as they had happened, and I added (with a view to making sure of his relations with his former ally at Pimlico) that I had been greatly surprised to hear Mrs. Oldershaw"s door shut on such an old friend as himself. Cautious as he was, the doctor"s manner of receiving my remark satisfied me at once that my suspicions of an estrangement were well founded. His smile vanished, and he settled his hideous spectacles irritably on the bridge of his nose.
""Pardon me if I leave you to draw your own conclusions," he said. "The subject of Mrs. Oldershaw is, I regret to say, far from agreeable to me under existing circ.u.mstances--a business difficulty connected with our late partnership at Pimlico, entirely without interest for a young and brilliant woman like yourself. Tell me your news! Have you left your situation at Thorpe Ambrose? Are you residing in London? Is there anything, professional or otherwise, that I can do for you?"
"That last question was a more important one than he supposed. Before I answered it, I felt the necessity of parting company with him and of getting a little time to think.
""You have kindly asked me, doctor, to pay you a visit," I said. "In your quiet house at Hampstead, I may possibly have something to say to you which I can"t say in this noisy street. When are you at home at the Sanitarium? Should I find you there later in the day?"
"The doctor a.s.sured me that he was then on his way back, and begged that I would name my own hour. I said, "Toward the afternoon;" and, pleading an engagement, hailed the first omnibus that pa.s.sed us. "Don"t forget the address," said the doctor, as he handed me in. "I have got your card," I answered, and so we parted.
"I returned to the hotel, and went up into my room, and thought over it very anxiously.
"The serious obstacle of the signature on the marriage register still stood in my way as unmanageably as ever. All hope of getting a.s.sistance from Mrs. Oldershaw was at an end. I could only regard her henceforth as an enemy hidden in the dark--the enemy, beyond all doubt now, who had had me followed and watched when I was last in London. To what other counselor could I turn for the advice which my unlucky ignorance of law and business obliged me to seek from some one more experienced than myself? Could I go to the lawyer whom I consulted when I was about to marry Midwinter in my maiden name? Impossible! To say nothing of his cold reception of me when I had last seen him, the advice I wanted this time related (disguise the facts as I might) to commission of a Fraud--a fraud of the sort that no prosperous lawyer would consent to a.s.sist if he had a character to lose. Was there any other competent person I could think of? There was one, and one only--the doctor who had died at Pimlico, and had revived again at Hampstead.
"I knew him to be entirely without scruples; to have the business experience that I wanted myself; and to be as cunning, as clever, and as far-seeing a man as could be found in all London. Beyond this, I had made two important discoveries in connection with him that morning. In the first place, he was on bad terms with Mrs. Oldershaw, which would protect me from all danger of the two leaguing together against me if I trusted him. In the second place, circ.u.mstances still obliged him to keep his ident.i.ty carefully disguised, which gave me a hold over him in no respect inferior to any hold that _I_ might give him over _me_. In every way he was the right man, the only man, for my purpose; and yet I hesitated at going to him--hesitated for a full hour and more, without knowing why!
"It was two o"clock before I finally decided on paying the doctor a visit. Having, after this, occupied nearly another hour in determining to a hair-breadth how far I should take him into my confidence, I sent for a cab at last, and set off toward three in the afternoon for Hampstead.
"I found the Sanitarium with some little difficulty.
"Fairweather Vale proved to be a new neighborhood, situated below the high ground of Hampstead, on the southern side. The day was overcast, and the place looked very dreary. We approached it by a new road running between trees, which might once have been the park avenue of a country house. At the end we came upon a wilderness of open ground, with half-finished villas dotted about, and a hideous litter of boards, wheelbarrows, and building materials of all sorts scattered in every direction. At one corner of this scene of desolation, stood a great overgrown dismal house, plastered with drab-colored stucco, and surrounded by a naked, unfinished garden, without a shrub or a flower in it, frightful to behold. On the open iron gate that led into this inclosure was a new bra.s.s plate, with "Sanitarium" inscribed on it in great black letters. The bell, when the cabman rang it, pealed through the empty house like a knell; and the pallid, withered old man-servant in black who answered the door looked as if he had stepped up out of his grave to perform that service. He let out on me a smell of damp plaster and new varnish; and he let in with me a chilling draft of the damp November air. I didn"t notice it at the time, but, writing of it now, I remember that I shivered as I crossed the threshold.
"I gave my name to the servant as "Mrs. Armadale," and was shown into the waiting-room. The very fire itself was dying of damp in the grate.
The only books on the table were the doctor"s Works, in sober drab covers; and the only object that ornamented the walls was the foreign Diploma (handsomely framed and glazed), of which the doctor had possessed himself by purchase, along with the foreign name.
"After a moment or two, the proprietor of the Sanitarium came in, and held up his hands in cheerful astonishment at the sight of me.
""I hadn"t an idea who "Mrs. Armadale" was!" he said. "My dear lady, have _you_ changed your name too? How sly of you not to tell me when we met this morning! Come into my private snuggery--I can"t think of keeping an old and dear friend like you in the patients" waiting-room."
"The doctor"s private snuggery was at the back of the house, looking out on fields and trees, doomed but not yet destroyed by the builder.
Horrible objects in bra.s.s and leather and gla.s.s, twisted and turned as if they were sentient things writhing in agonies of pain, filled up one end of the room. A great book-case with gla.s.s doors extended over the whole of the opposite wall, and exhibited on its shelves long rows of gla.s.s jars, in which shapeless dead creatures of a dull white color floated in yellow liquid. Above the fireplace hung a collection of photographic portraits of men and women, inclosed in two large frames hanging side by side with a s.p.a.ce between them. The left-hand frame ill.u.s.trated the effects of nervous suffering as seen in the face; the right-hand frame exhibited the ravages of insanity from the same point of view; while the s.p.a.ce between was occupied by an elegantly illuminated scroll, bearing inscribed on it the time-honored motto, "Prevention is better than Cure."
""Here I am, with my galvanic apparatus, and my preserved specimens, and all the rest of it," said the doctor, placing me in a chair by the fireside. "And there is my System mutely addressing you just above your head, under a form of exposition which I venture to describe as frankness itself. This is no mad-house, my dear lady. Let other men treat insanity, if they like--_I_ stop it! No patients in the house as yet. But we live in an age when nervous derangement (parent of insanity) is steadily on the increase; and in due time the sufferers will come. I can wait as Harvey waited, as Jenner waited. And now do put your feet up on the fender, and tell me about yourself. You are married, of course? And what a pretty name! Accept my best and most heart-felt congratulations. You have the two greatest blessings that can fall to a woman"s lot; the two capital H"s, as I call them--Husband and Home."
"I interrupted the genial flow of the doctor"s congratulations at the first opportunity.
""I am married; but the circ.u.mstances are by no means of the ordinary kind," I said, seriously. My present position includes none of the blessings that are usually supposed to fall to a woman"s lot. I am already in a situation of very serious difficulty; and before long I may be in a situation of very serious danger as well."
"The doctor drew his chair a little nearer to me, and fell at once into his old professional manner and his old confidential tone.
""If you wish to consult me," he said, softly, "you know that I have kept some dangerous secrets in my time, and you also know that I possess two valuable qualities as an adviser. I am not easily shocked; and I can be implicitly trusted."
"I hesitated even now, at the eleventh hour, sitting alone with him in his own room. It was so strange to me to be trusting to anybody but myself! And yet, how could I help trusting another person in a difficulty which turned on a matter of law?
""Just as you please, you know," added the doctor. "I never invite confidences. I merely receive them."
"There was no help for it; I had come there not to hesitate, but to speak. I risked it, and spoke.
""The matter on which I wish to consult you," I said, "is not (as you seem to think) within your experience as a professional man. But I believe you may be of a.s.sistance to me, if I trust myself to your larger experience as a man of the world. I warn you beforehand that I shall certainly surprise, and possibly alarm, you before I have done."
"With that preface I entered on my story, telling him what I had settled to tell him, and no more.
"I made no secret, at the outset, of my intention to personate Armadale"s widow; and I mentioned without reserve (knowing that the doctor could go to the office and examine the will for himself) the handsome income that would be settled on me in the event of my success.
Some of the circ.u.mstances that followed next in succession I thought it desirable to alter or conceal. I showed him the newspaper account of the loss of the yacht, but I said nothing about events at Naples. I informed him of the exact similarity of the two names; leaving him to imagine that it was accidental. I told him, as an important element in the matter, that my husband had kept his real name a profound secret from everybody but myself; but (to prevent any communication between them) I carefully concealed from the doctor what the a.s.sumed name under which Midwinter had lived all his life really was. I acknowledged that I had left my husband behind me on the Continent; but when the doctor put the question, I allowed him to conclude--I couldn"t, with all my resolution, tell him positively!--that Midwinter knew of the contemplated Fraud, and that he was staying away purposely, so as not to compromise me by his presence. This difficulty smoothed over--or, as I feel it now, this baseness committed--I reverted to myself, and came back again to the truth. One after another I mentioned all the circ.u.mstances connected with my private marriage, and with the movements of Armadale and Midwinter, which rendered any discovery of the false personation (through the evidence of other people) a downright impossibility. "So much," I said, in conclusion, "for the object in view. The next thing is to tell you plainly of a very serious obstacle that stands in my way."
"The doctor, who had listened thus far without interrupting me, begged permission here to say a few words on his side before I went on.
"The "few words" proved to be all questions--clever, searching, suspicious questions--which I was, however, able to answer with little or no reserve, for they related, in almost every instance, to the circ.u.mstances under which I had been married, and to the chances for and against my lawful husband if he chose to a.s.sert his claim to me at any future time.