“What’s that the Chancellor of the Exchequer says when he finds himself in a mess with his accounts, and doesn’t see his way out again?” asked Allan. “He always tells his honourable friend he is quite willing to leave a something or other — ”
“A margin?” suggested Mr. Brock.
“That’s it,” said Allan. “I’m like the Chancellor of the Exchequer. I’m quite willing to leave a margin. The yacht (bless her heart!) doesn’t eat up everything. If I’m short by a pound or two, don’t be afraid, sir. There’s no pride about me; I’ll go round with the hat, and get the balance in the neighbourhood. Deuce take the pounds, shillings, and pence! I wish they could all three get rid of themselves, like the Bedouin brothers at the show. Don’t you remember the Bedouin brothers, Mr. Brock? ‘Ali will take a lighted torch, and jump down the throat of his brother Muli; Muli will take a lighted torch, and jump down the throat of his brother Hassan; and Hassan, taking a third lighted torch, will conclude the performances by jumping down his own throat, and leaving the spectators in total darkness.’ Wonderfully good, that — what I call real wit, with a fine strong flavour about it. Wait a minute! Where are we? We have lost ourselves again. Oh, I remember — money. What I can’t beat into my thick head,” concluded Allan, quite unconscious that he was preaching socialist doctrines to a clergyman; “is the meaning of the fuss that’s made about giving money away. Why can’t the people who have got money to spare give it to the people who haven’t got money to spare, and make things pleasant and comfortable all the world over in that way? You’re always telling me to cultivate ideas, Mr. Brock There’s an idea, and, upon my life, I don’t think it’s a bad one.”
Mr. Brock gave his pupil a good-humored poke with the end of his stick. “Go back to your yacht,” he said. “All the little discretion you have got in that flighty head of yours is left on board in your tool-chest. How that lad will end,” pursued the rector, when he was left by himself, “is more than any human being can say. I almost wish I had never taken the responsibility of him on my shoulders.”
Three weeks passed before the stranger with the uncouth name was pronounced to be at last on the way to recovery.
During this period Allan had made regular inquiries at the inn, and, as soon as the sick man was allowed to see visitors, Allan was the first who appeared at his bedside. So far Mr. Brock’s pupil had shown no more than a natural interest in one of the few romantic circumstances which had varied the monotony of the village life: he had committed no imprudence, and he had exposed himself to no blame. But as the days passed, young Armadale’s visits to the inn began to lengthen considerably, and the surgeon (a cautious elderly man) gave the rector a private hint to bestir himself. Mr. Brock acted on the hint immediately, and discovered that Allan had followed his usual impulses in his usual headlong way. He had taken a violent fancy to the castaway usher and had invited Ozias Midwinter to reside permanently in the neighbourhood in the new and interesting character of his bosom friend.
Before Mr. Brock could make up his mind how to act in this emergency, he received a note from Allan’s mother, begging him to use his privilege as an old friend, and to pay her a visit in her room.
He found Mrs. Armadale suffering under violent nervous agitation, caused entirely by a recent interview with her son. Allan had been sitting with her all the morning, and had talked of nothing but his new friend. The man with the horrible name (as poor Mrs. Armadale described him) had questioned Allan, in a singularly inquisitive manner, on the subject of himself and his family, but had kept his own personal history entirely in the dark. At some former period of his life he had been accustomed to the sea and to sailing. Allan had, unfortunately, found this out, and a bond of union between them was formed on the spot. With a merciless distrust of the stranger — simply because he was a stranger — which appeared rather unreasonable to Mr. Brock, Mrs. Armadale besought the rector to go to the inn without a moment’s loss of time, and never to rest until he had made the man give a proper account of himself. “Find out everything about his father and mother!” she said, in her vehement female way. “Make sure before you leave him that he is not a vagabond roaming the country under an assumed name.”
“My dear lady,” remonstrated the rector, obediently taking his hat, “whatever else we may doubt, I really think we may feel sure about the man’s name! It is so remarkably ugly that it must be genuine. No sane human being would assume such a name as Ozias Midwinter.”
“You may be quite right, and I may be quite wrong; but pray go and see him,” persisted Mrs. Armadale. “Go, and don’t spare him, Mr. Brock. How do we know that this illness of his may not have been put on for a purpose?”
It was useless to reason with her. The whole College of Physicians might have certified to the man’s illness, and, in her present frame of mind, Mrs. Armadale would have disbelieved the College, one and all, from the president downward. Mr. Brock took the wise way out of the difficulty — he said no more, and he set off for the inn immediately.
Ozias Midwinter, recovering from brain-fever, was a startling object to contemplate on a first view of him. His shaven head, tied up in an old yellow silk handkerchief; his tawny, haggard cheeks; his bright brown eyes, preternaturally large and wild; his rough black beard; his long, supple, sinewy fingers, wasted by suffering till they looked like claws — all tended to discompose the rector at the outset of the interview. When the first feeling of surprise had worn off, the impression that followed it was not an agreeable one. Mr. Brock could not conceal from himself that the stranger’s manner was against him. The general opinion has settled that, if a man is honest, he is bound to assert it by looking straight at his fellow-creatures when he speaks to them. If this man was honest, his eyes showed a singular perversity in looking away and denying it. Possibly they were affected in some degree by a nervous restlessness in his organisation, which appeared to pervade every fiber in his lean, lithe body. The rector’s healthy Anglo-Saxon flesh crept responsively at every casual movement of the usher’s supple brown fingers, and every passing distortion of the usher’s haggard yellow face. “God forgive me!” thought Mr. Brock, with his mind running on Allan and Allan’s mother, “I wish I could see my way to turning Ozias Midwinter adrift in the world again!”
The conversation which ensued between the two was a very guarded one. Mr. Brock felt his way gently, and found himself, try where he might, always kept politely, more or less, in the dark.
From first to last, the man’s real character shrank back with a savage shyness from the rector’s touch. He started by an assertion which it was impossible to look at him and believe — he declared that he was only twenty years of age. All he could be persuaded to say on the subject of the school was that the bare recollection of it was horrible to him. He had only filled the usher’s situation for ten days when the first appearance of his illness caused his dismissal. How he had reached the field in which he had been found was more than he could say. He remembered traveling a long distance by railway, with a purpose (if he had a purpose) which it was now impossible to recall, and then wandering coastward, on foot, all through the day, or all through the night — he was not sure which. The sea kept running in his mind when his mind began to give way. He had been employed on the sea as a lad. He had left it, and had filled a situation at a bookseller’s in a country town. He had left the bookseller’s, and had tried the school. Now the school had turned him out, he must try something else. It mattered little what he tried — failure (for which nobody was ever to blame but himself) was sure to be the end of it, sooner or later. Friends to assist him, he had none to apply to; and as for relations, he wished to be excused from speaking of them. For all he knew they might be dead, and for all they knew he might be dead. That was a melancholy acknowledgment to make at his time of life, there was no denying it. It might tell against him in the opinions of others; and it did tell against him, no doubt, in the opinion of the gentleman who was talking to him at that moment.
These strange answers were given in a tone and manner far removed from bitterness on the one side,