After reading those sentences, he pushed the manuscript from him, without looking up. The fatal reserve which he had been in a fair way of conquering but a few minutes since, possessed itself of him once more. Again his eyes wandered; again his voice sank in tone. A stranger who had heard his story, and who saw him now, would have said, “His look is lurking, his manner is bad; he is, every inch of him, his father’s son.”
“I have a question to ask you,” said Mr. Brock, breaking the silence between them, on his side. “Why have you just read that passage in your father’s letter?”
“To force me into telling you the truth,” was the answer. “You must know how much there is of my father in me before you trust me to be Mr. Armadale’s friend. I got my letter yesterday, in the morning. Some inner warning troubled me, and I went down on the sea-shore by myself before I broke the seal. Do you believe the dead can come back to the world they once lived in? I believe my father came back in that bright morning light, through the glare of that broad sunshine and the roar of that joyful sea, and watched me while I read. When I got to the words that you have just heard, and when I knew that the very end which he had died dreading was the end that had really come, I felt the horror that had crept over him in his last moments creeping over me. I struggled against myself, as he would have had me struggle. I tried to be all that was most repellent to my own gentler nature; I tried to think pitilessly of putting the mountains and the seas between me and the man who bore my name. Hours passed before I could prevail on myself to go back and run the risk of meeting Allan Armadale in this house. When I did get back, and when he met me at night on the stairs, I thought I was looking him in the face as my father looked his father in the face when the cabin door closed between them. Draw your own conclusions, sir. Say, if you like, that the inheritance of my father’s heathen belief in fate is one of the inheritances he has left to me. I won’t dispute it; I won’t deny that all through yesterday his superstition was my superstition. The night came before I could find my way to calmer and brighter thoughts. But I did find my way. You may set it down in my favor that I lifted myself at last above the influence of this horrible letter. Do you know what helped me?”
“Did you reason with yourself?”
“I can’t reason about what I feel.”
“Did you quiet your mind by prayer?”
“I was not fit to pray.”
“And yet something guided you to the better feeling and the truer view?”
“Something did.”
“What was it?”
“My love for Allan Armadale.”
He cast a doubting, almost a timid look at Mr. Brock as he gave that answer, and, suddenly leaving the table, went back to the window-seat.
“Have I no right to speak of him in that way?” he asked, keeping his face hidden from the rector. “Have I not known him long enough; have I not done enough for him yet? Remember what my experience of other men had been when I first saw his hand held out to me—when I first heard his voice speaking to me in my sick-room. What had I known of strangers’ hands all through my childhood? I had only known them as hands raised to threaten and to strike me. His hand put my pillow straight, and patted me on the shoulder, and gave me my food and drink. What had I known of other men’s voices, when I was growing up to be a man myself? I had only known them as voices that jeered, voices that cursed, voices that whispered in corners with a vile distrust. His voice said to me, ‘Cheer up, Midwinter! we’ll soon bring you round again. You’ll be strong enough in a week to go out for a drive with me in our Somersetshire lanes.’ Think of the gypsy’s stick; think of the devils laughing at me when I went by their windows with my little dead dog in my arms; think of the master who cheated me of my month’s salary on his deathbed—and ask your own heart if the miserable wretch whom Allan Armadale has treated as his equal and his friend has said too much in saying that he loves him? I do love him! It will come out of me; I can’t keep it back. I love the very ground he treads on! I would give my life—yes, the life that is precious to me now, because his kindness has made it a happy one—I tell you I would give my life—”
The next words died away on his lips; the hysterical passion rose, and conquered him. He stretched out one of his hands with a wild gesture of entreaty to Mr. Brock; his head sank on the window-sill and he burst into tears.
Even then the hard discipline of the man’s life asserted itself. He expected no sympathy, he counted on no merciful human respect for human weakness. The cruel necessity of self-suppression was present to his mind, while the tears were pouring over his cheeks. “Give me a minute,” he said, faintly. “I’ll fight it down in a minute; I won’t distress you in this way again.”
True to his resolution, in a minute he had fought it down. In a minute more he was able to speak calmly.
“We will get back, sir, to those better thoughts which have brought me from my room to yours,” he resumed. “I can only repeat that I should never have torn myself from the hold which this letter fastened on me, if I had not loved Allan Armadale with all that I have in me of a brother’s love. I said to myself, ‘If the thought of leaving him breaks my heart, the thought of leaving him is wrong!’ That was some hours since, and I am in the same mind still. I can’t believe—I won’t believe—that a friendship which has grown out of nothing but kindness on one side, and nothing but gratitude on the other, is destined to lead to an evil end. Judge, you who are a clergyman, between the dead father, whose word is in these pages, and the living son, whose word is now on his lips! What is it appointed me to do, now that I am breathing the same air, and living under the same roof with the son of the man whom my father killed—to perpetuate my father’s crime by mortally injuring him, or to atone for my father’s crime by giving him the devotion of my whole life? The last of those two faiths is my faith, and shall be my faith, happen what may. In the strength of that better conviction, I have come here to trust you with my father’s secret, and to confess the wretched story of my own life. In the strength of that better conviction, I can face you resolutely with the one plain question, which marks the one plain end of all that I have come here to say. Your pupil stands at the starting-point of his new career, in a position singularly friendless; his one great need is a companion of his own age on whom he can rely. The time has come, sir, to decide whether I am to be that companion or not. After all you have heard of Ozias Midwinter, tell me plainly, will you trust him to be Allan Armadale’s friend?”
Mr. Brock met that fearlessly frank question by a fearless frankness on his side.
“I believe you love Allan,” he said, “and I believe you have spoken the truth. A man who has produced that impression on me is a man whom I am bound to trust. I trust you.”
Midwinter started to his feet, his dark face flushing deep; his eyes fixed brightly and steadily, at last, on the rector’s face. “A light!” he exclaimed, tearing the pages of his father’s letter, one by one, from the fastening that held them. “Let us destroy the last link that holds us to the horrible past! Let us see this confession a heap of ashes before we part!”
“Wait!” said Mr. Brock. “Before you burn it, there is a reason for looking at it once more.”
The parted leaves of the manuscript dropped from Midwinter’s hands. Mr. Brock took them up, and sorted them carefully until he found the last page.
“I view your father’s superstition as you view it,” said the rector. “But there is a warning given you here, which you will do well (for Allan’s sake and for your own sake) not to neglect. The last link with the past will not be destroyed when you have burned these pages. One of the actors in this story of treachery and murder is not dead yet. Read those words.”
He pushed the page across the table, with his finger on one sentence. Midwinter’s agitation misled him. He mistook the indication, and read, “Avoid the widow of the man I killed, if the widow still lives.”
“Not that sentence,”