He went back to Allan, sat down by his side, and took his hand. “Forgive me,” he said, gently; “I have hurt you for the last time.” Before it was possible to reply, he snatched up the whisky flask from the deck. “Come!” he exclaimed, with a sudden effort to match his friend’s cheerfulness, “you have been trying the doctor’s medicine, why shouldn’t I?”
Allan was delighted. “This is something like a change for the better,” he said; “Midwinter is himself again. Hark! there are the birds. Hail, smiling morn! smiling morn!” He sang the words of the glee in his old, cheerful voice, and clapped Midwinter on the shoulder in his old, hearty way. “How did you manage to clear your head of those confounded megrims? Do you know you were quite alarming about something happening to one or other of us before we were out of this ship?”
“Sheer nonsense!” returned Midwinter, contemptuously. “I don’t think my head has ever been quite right since that fever; I’ve got a bee in my bonnet, as they say in the North. Let’s talk of something else. About those people you have let the cottage to? I wonder whether the agent’s account of Major Milroy’s family is to be depended on? There might be another lady in the household besides his wife and his daughter.”
“Oho!” cried Allan, “you’re beginning to think of nymphs among the trees, and flirtations in the fruit-garden, are you? Another lady, eh? Suppose the major’s family circle won’t supply another? We shall have to spin that half-crown again, and toss up for which is to have the first chance with Miss Milroy.”
For once Midwinter spoke as lightly and carelessly as Allan himself. “No, no,” he said, “the major’s landlord has the first claim to the notice of the major’s daughter. I’ll retire into the background, and wait for the next lady who makes her appearance at Thorpe Ambrose.”
“Very good. I’ll have an address to the women of Norfolk posted in the park to that effect,” said Allan. “Are you particular to a shade about size or complexion? What’s your favorite age?”
Midwinter trifled with his own superstition, as a man trifles with the loaded gun that may kill him, or with the savage animal that may maim him for life. He mentioned the age (as he had reckoned it himself) of the woman in the black gown and the red Paisley shawl.
“Five-and-thirty,” he said.
As the words passed his lips, his factitious spirits deserted him. He left his seat, impenetrably deaf to all Allan’s efforts at rallying him on his extraordinary answer, and resumed his restless pacing of the deck in dead silence. Once more the haunting thought which had gone to and fro with him in the hour of darkness went to and fro with him now in the hour of daylight.
Once more the conviction possessed itself of his mind that something was to happen to Allan or to himself before they left the wreck.
Minute by minute the light strengthened in the eastern sky; and the shadowy places on the deck of the timber-ship revealed their barren emptiness under the eye of day. As the breeze rose again, the sea began to murmur wakefully in the morning light. Even the cold bubbling of the broken water changed its cheerless note, and softened on the ear as the mellowing flood of daylight poured warm over it from the rising sun. Midwinter paused near the forward part of the ship, and recalled his wandering attention to the passing time. The cheering influences of the hour were round him, look where he might. The happy morning smile of the summer sky, so brightly merciful to the old and weary earth, lavished its all-embracing beauty even on the wreck. The dew that lay glittering on the inland fields lay glittering on the deck, and the worn and rusted rigging was gemmed as brightly as the fresh green leaves on shore. Insensibly, as he looked round, Midwinter’s thoughts reverted to the comrade who had shared with him the adventure of the night. He returned to the after-part of the ship, spoke to Allan as he advanced. Receiving no answer, he approached the recumbent figure and looked closer at it. Left to his own resources, Allan had let the fatigues of the night take their own way with him. His head had sunk back; his hat had fallen off; he lay stretched at full length on the deck of the timber-ship, deeply and peacefully asleep.
Midwinter resumed his walk; his mind lost in doubt; his own past thoughts seeming suddenly to have grown strange to him. How darkly his forebodings had distrusted the coming time, and how harmlessly that time had come! The sun was mounting in the heavens, the hour of release was drawing nearer and nearer, and of the two Armadales imprisoned in the fatal ship, one was sleeping away the weary time, and the other was quietly watching the growth of the new day.
The sun climbed higher; the hour wore on. With the latent distrust of the wreck which still clung to him, Midwinter looked inquiringly on either shore for signs of awakening human life. The land was still lonely. The smoke wreaths that were soon to rise from cottage chimneys had not risen yet.
After a moment’s thought he went back again to the after-part of the vessel, to see if there might be a fisherman’s boat within hail astern of them. Absorbed for the moment by the new idea, he passed Allan hastily, after barely noticing that he still lay asleep. One step more would have brought him to the taffrail, when that step was suspended by a sound behind him, a sound like a faint groan. He turned, and looked at the sleeper on the deck. He knelt softly, and looked closer.
“It has come!” he whispered to himself. “Not to me — but to him.”
It had come, in the bright freshness of the morning; it had come, in the mystery and terror of a Dream. The face which Midwinter had last seen in perfect repose was now the distorted face of a suffering man. The perspiration stood thick on Allan’s forehead, and matted his curling hair. His partially opened eyes showed nothing but the white of the eyeball gleaming blindly. His outstretched hands scratched and struggled on the deck. From moment to moment he moaned and muttered helplessly; but the words that escaped him were lost in the grinding and gnashing of his teeth. There he lay — so near in the body to the friend who bent over him; so far away in the spirit, that the two might have been in different worlds — there he lay, with the morning sunshine on his face, in the torture of his dream.
One question, and one only, rose in the mind of the man who was looking at him. What had the fatality which had imprisoned him in the wreck decreed that he should see?
Had the treachery of Sleep opened the gates of the grave to that one of the two Armadales whom the other had kept in ignorance of the truth? Was the murder of the father revealing itself to the son — there, on the very spot where the crime had been committed — in the vision of a dream?
With that question overshadowing all else in his mind, the son of the homicide knelt on the deck, and looked at the son of the man whom his father’s hand had slain.
The conflict between the sleeping body and the waking mind was strengthening every moment. The dreamer’s helpless groaning for deliverance grew louder; his hands raised themselves, and clutched at the empty air. Struggling with the all-mastering dread that still held him, Midwinter laid his hand gently on Allan’s forehead. Light as the touch was, there were mysterious sympathies in the dreaming man that answered it. His groaning ceased, and his hands dropped slowly. There was an instant of suspense and Midwinter looked closer. His breath just fluttered over the sleeper’s face. Before the next breath had risen to his lips, Allan suddenly sprang up on his knees — sprang up, as if the call of a trumpet had rung on his ear, awake in an instant.
“You have been dreaming,” said Midwinter, as the other looked at him wildly, in the first bewilderment of waking.
Allan’s eyes began to wander about the wreck, at first vacantly, then with a look of angry surprise. “Are we here still?” he said, as Midwinter helped him to his feet. “Whatever else I do on board this infernal ship,”