Late on a certain summer day, not long after Allan had completed his sixteenth year, Mr. Brock left his pupil hard at work in the yard, and went to spend the evening with Mrs. Armadale, taking the Times newspaper with him in his hand.
The years that had passed since they had first met had long since regulated the lives of the clergyman and his neighbour. The first advances which Mr. Brock’s growing admiration for the widow had led him to make in the early days of their intercourse had been met on her side by an appeal to his forbearance which had closed his lips for the future. She had satisfied him, at once and forever, that the one place in her heart which he could hope to occupy was the place of a friend. He loved her well enough to take what she would give him: friends they became, and friends they remained from that time forth. No jealous dread of another man’s succeeding where he had failed imbittered the clergyman’s placid relations with the woman whom he loved. Of the few resident gentlemen in the neighbourhood, none were ever admitted by Mrs. Armadale to more than the merest acquaintance with her. Contentedly self-buried in her country retreat, she was proof against every social attraction that would have tempted other women in her position and at her age. Mr. Brock and his newspaper, appearing with monotonous regularity at her tea-table three times a week, told her all she knew or cared to know of the great outer world which circled round the narrow and changeless limits of her daily life.
On the evening in question Mr. Brock took the armchair in which he always sat, accepted the one cup of tea which he always drank, and opened the newspaper which he always read aloud to Mrs. Armadale, who invariably listened to him reclining on the same sofa, with the same sort of needlework everlastingly in her hand.
“Bless my soul!” cried the rector, with his voice in a new octave, and his eyes fixed in astonishment on the first page of the newspaper.
No such introduction to the evening readings as this had ever happened before in all Mrs. Armadale’s experience as a listener. She looked up from the sofa in a flutter of curiosity, and besought her reverend friend to favor her with an explanation.
“I can hardly believe my own eyes,” said Mr. Brock. “Here is an advertisement, Mrs. Armadale, addressed to your son.”
Without further preface, he read the advertisement as follows:
If this should meet the eye of ALLAN ARMADALE, he is desired to communicate, either personally or by letter, with Messrs. Hammick and Ridge (Lincoln’s Inn Fields, London), on business of importance which seriously concerns him. Any one capable of informing Messrs. E. and R. where the person herein advertised can be found would confer a favor by doing the same. To prevent mistakes, it is further notified that the missing Allan Armadale is a youth aged fifteen years, and that this advertisement is inserted at the instance of his family and friends.
“Another family, and other friends,” said Mrs. Armadale. “The person whose name appears in that advertisement is not my son.”
The tone in which she spoke surprised Mr. Brock. The change in her face, when he looked up, shocked him. Her delicate complexion had faded away to a dull white; her eyes were averted from her visitor with a strange mixture of confusion and alarm; she looked an older woman than she was, by ten good years at least.
“The name is so very uncommon,” said Mr. Brock, imagining he had offended her, and trying to excuse himself. “It really seemed impossible there could be two persons — ”
“There are two,” interposed Mrs. Armadale. “Allan, as you know, is sixteen years old. If you look back at the advertisement, you will find the missing person described as being only fifteen. Although he bears the same surname and the same Christian name, he is, I thank God, in no way whatever related to my son. As long as I live, it will be the object of my hopes and prayers that Allan may never see him, may never even hear of him. My kind friend, I see I surprise you: will you bear with me if I leave these strange circumstances unexplained? There is past misfortune and misery in my early life too painful for me to speak of, even to you. Will you help me to bear the remembrance of it, by never referring to this again? Will you do even more — will you promise not to speak of it to Allan, and not to let that newspaper fall in his way?”
Mr. Brock gave the pledge required of him, and considerately left her to herself.
The rector had been too long and too truly attached to Mrs. Armadale to be capable of regarding her with any unworthy distrust. But it would be idle to deny that he felt disappointed by her want of confidence in him, and that he looked inquisitively at the advertisement more than once on his way back to his own house.
It was clear enough, now, that Mrs. Armadale’s motives for burying her son as well as herself in the seclusion of a remote country village was not so much to keep him under her own eye as to keep him from discovery by his namesake. Why did she dread the idea of their ever meeting? Was it a dread for herself, or a dread for her son? Mr. Brock’s loyal belief in his friend rejected any solution of the difficulty which pointed at some past misconduct of Mrs. Armadale’s. That night he destroyed the advertisement with his own hand; that night he resolved that the subject should never be suffered to enter his mind again. There was another Allan Armadale about the world, a stranger to his pupil’s blood, and a vagabond advertised in the public newspapers. So much accident had revealed to him. More, for Mrs. Armadale’s sake, he had no wish to discover — and more he would never seek to know.
This was the second in the series of events which dated from the rector’s connection with Mrs. Armadale and her son. Mr. Brock’s memory, traveling on nearer and nearer to present circumstances, reached the third stage of its journey through the by-gone time, and stopped at the year eighteen hundred and fifty, next.
The five years that had passed had made little if any change in Allan’s character. He had simply developed (to use his tutor’s own expression) from a boy of sixteen to a boy of twenty-one. He was just as easy and open in his disposition as ever; just as quaintly and inveterately good-humored; just as heedless in following his own impulses, lead him where they might. His bias toward the sea had strengthened with his advance to the years of manhood. From building a boat, he had now got on — with two journeymen at work under him — to building a decked vessel of five-and-thirty tons. Mr. Brock had conscientiously tried to divert him to higher aspirations; had taken him to Oxford, to see what college life was like; had taken him to London, to expand his mind by the spectacle of the great metropolis. The change had diverted Allan, but had not altered him in the least. He was as impenetrably superior to all worldly ambition as Diogenes himself. “Which is best,” asked this unconscious philosopher, “to find out the way to be happy for yourself, or to let other people try if they can find it out for you?” From that moment Mr. Brock permitted his pupil’s character to grow at its own rate of development, and Allan went on uninterruptedly with the work of his yacht.
Time, which had wrought so little change in the son, had not passed harmless over the mother.
Mrs. Armadale’s health was breaking fast. As her strength failed, her temper altered for the worse: she grew more and more fretful, more and more subject to morbid fears and fancies, more and more