It was the opening of the season of eighteen hundred and
thirty-two, at the Baths of Wildbad.
The evening shadows were beginning to gather over the quiet
little German town, and the diligence was expected every minute.
Before the door of the principal inn, waiting the arrival of the
first visitors of the year, were assembled the three notable
personages of Wildbad, accompanied by their wives—the mayor,
representing the inhabitants; the doctor, representing the waters;
the landlord, representing his own establishment. Beyond this
select circle, grouped snugly about the trim little square in front
of the inn, appeared the towns-people in general, mixed here and
there with the country people, in their quaint German costume,
placidly expectant of the diligence—the men in short black jackets,
tight black breeches, and three-cornered beaver hats; the women
with their long light hair hanging in one thickly plaited tail
behind them, and the waists of their short woolen gowns inserted
modestly in the region of their shoulder-blades. Round the outer
edge of the assemblage thus formed, flying detachments of plump
white-headed children careered in perpetual motion; while,
mysteriously apart from the rest of the inhabitants, the musicians
of the Baths stood collected in one lost corner, waiting the
appearance of the first visitors to play the first tune of the
season in the form of a serenade. The light of a May evening was
still bright on the tops of the great wooded hills watching high
over the town on the right hand and the left; and the cool breeze
that comes before sunset came keenly fragrant here with the
balsamic odor of the first of the Black Forest.
"Mr. Landlord," said the mayor's wife (giving the landlord
his title), "have you any foreign guests coming on this first day
of the season?"
"Madame Mayoress," replied the landlord (returning the
compliment), "I have two. They have written—the one by the hand of
his servant, the other by his own hand apparently—to order their
rooms; and they are from England, both, as I think by their names.
If you ask me to pronounce those names, my tongue hesitates; if you
ask me to spell them, here they are, letter by letter, first and
second in their order as they come. First, a high-born stranger (by
title Mister) who introduces himself in eight letters, A, r, m, a,
d, a, l, e—and comes ill in his own carriage. Second, a high-born
stranger (by title Mister also), who introduces himself in four
letters—N, e, a, l—and comes ill in the diligence. His excellency
of the eight letters writes to me (by his servant) in French; his
excellency of the four letters writes to me in German. The rooms of
both are ready. I know no more."
"Perhaps," suggested the mayor's wife, "Mr. Doctor has heard
from one or both of these illustrious strangers?"
"From one only, Madam Mayoress; but not, strictly speaking,
from the person himself. I have received a medical report of his
excellency of the eight letters, and his case seems a bad one. God
help him!"
"The diligence!" cried a child from the outskirts of the
crowd.
The musicians seized their instruments, and silence fell on
the whole community. From far away in the windings of the forest
gorge, the ring of horses' bells came faintly clear through the
evening stillness. Which carriage was approaching—the private
carriage with Mr. Armadale, or the public carriage with Mr.
Neal?
"Play, my friends!" cried the mayor to the musicians. "Public
or private, here are the first sick people of the season. Let them
find us cheerful."
The band played a lively dance tune, and the children in the
square footed it merrily to the music. At the same moment, their
elders near the inn door drew aside, and disclosed the first shadow
of gloom that fell over the gayety and beauty of the scene. Through
the opening made on either hand, a little procession of stout
country girls advanced, each drawing after her an empty chair on
wheels; each in waiting (and knitting while she waited) for the
paralyzed wretches who came helpless by hundreds then—who come
helpless by thousands now—to the waters of Wildbad for
relief.
While the band played, while the children danced, while the
buzz of many talkers deepened, while the strong young nurses of the
coming cripples knitted impenetrably, a woman's insatiable
curiosity about other women asserted itself in the mayor's wife.
She drew the landlady aside, and whispered a question to her on the
spot.
"A word more, ma'am," said the mayor's wife, "about the two
strangers from England. Are their letters explicit? Have they got
any ladies with them?"
"The one by the diligence—no," replied the landlady. "But the
one by the private carriage—yes. He comes with a child; he comes
with a nurse; and," concluded the landlady, skillfully keeping the
main point of interest till the last, "he comes with a
Wife."
The mayoress brightened; the doctoress (assisting at the
conference) brightened; the landlady nodded significantly. In the
minds of all three the same thought started into life at the same
moment—"We shall see the Fashions!"
In a minute more, there was a sudden movement in the crowd;
and a chorus of voices proclaimed that the travelers were at
hand.
By this time the coming vehicle was in sight, and all further
doubt was at an end. It was the diligence that now approached by
the long street leading into the square—the diligence (in a
dazzling new coat of yellow paint) that delivered the first
visitors of the season at the inn door. Of the ten travelers
released from the middle compartment and the back compartment of
the carriage—all from various parts of Germany—three were lifted
out helpless, and were placed in the chairs on wheels to be drawn
to their lodgings in the town. The front compartment contained two
passengers only—Mr. Neal and his traveling servant. With an arm on
either side to assist him, the stranger (whose malady appeared to
be locally confined to a lameness in one of his feet) succeeded in
descending the steps of the carriage easily enough. While he
steadied himself on the pavement by the help of his stick—looking
not over-patiently toward the musicians who were serenading him
with the waltz in "Der Freischutz"—his personal appearance rather
damped the enthusiasm of the friendly little circle assembled to
welcome him. He was a lean, tall, serious, middle-aged man, with a
cold gray eye and a long upper lip, with overhanging eyebrows and
high cheek-bones; a man who looked what he was—every inch a
Scotchman.
"Where is the proprietor of this hotel?" he asked, speaking
in the German language, with a fluent readiness of expression, and
an icy coldness of manner. "Fetch the doctor," he continued, when
the landlord had presented himself, "I want to see him
immediately."
"I am here already, sir," said the doctor, advancing from the
circle of friends, "and my services are entirely at your
disposal."
"Thank you," said Mr. Neal, looking at the doctor, as the
rest of us look at a dog when we have whistled and the dog has
come. "I shall be glad to consult you to-morrow morning, at ten
o'clock, about my own case. I only want to trouble you now with a
message which I have undertaken to deliver. We overtook a traveling
carriage on the road here with a gentleman in it—an Englishman, I
believe—who appeared to be seriously ill. A lady who was with him
begged me to see you immediately on my arrival, and to secure your
professional assistance in removing the patient from the carriage.
Their courier has met with an accident, and has been left behind on
the road, and they are obliged to travel very slowly. If you are
here in an hour, you will be here in time to receive them. That is
the message. Who is this gentleman who appears to be anxious to
speak to me? The mayor? If you wish to see my passport, sir, my
servant will show it to you. No? You wish to welcome me to the
place, and to offer your services? I am infinitely flattered. If
you have any authority to shorten the performances of your town
band, you would be doing me a kindness to exert it. My nerves are
irritable, and I dislike music. Where is the landlord? No; I want
to see my rooms. I don't want your arm; I can get upstairs with the
help of my stick. Mr. Mayor and Mr. Doctor, we need not detain one
another any longer. I wish you good-night."
Both mayor and doctor looked after the Scotchman as he limped
upstairs, and shook their heads together in mute disapproval of
him. The ladies, as usual, went a step further, and expressed their
opinions openly in the plainest words. The case under consideration
(so far as they were concerned)
was the scandalous case of a man who had passed them over entirely
without notice. Mrs. Mayor could only attribute such an outrage to
the native ferocity of a savage. Mrs. Doctor took a stronger view
still, and considered it as proceeding from the inbred brutality of
a hog.
The hour of waiting for the traveling-carriage wore on, and
the creeping night stole up the hillsides softly. One by one the
stars appeared, and the first lights twinkled in the windows of the
inn. As the darkness came, the last idlers deserted the square; as
the darkness came, the mighty silence of the forest above flowed in
on the valley, and strangely and suddenly hushed the lonely little
town.
The hour of waiting wore out, and the figure of the doctor,
walking backward and forward anxiously, was still the only living
figure left in the square. Five minutes, ten minutes, twenty
minutes, were counted out by the doctor's watch, before the first
sound came through the night silence to warn him of the approaching
carriage. Slowly it emerged into the square, at the walking pace of
the horses, and drew up, as a hearse might have drawn up, at the
door of the inn.
"Is the doctor here?" asked a woman's voice, speaking, out of
the darkness of the carriage, in the French language.
"I am here, madam," replied the doctor, taking a light from
the landlord's hand and opening the carriage door.
The first face that the light fell on was the face of the
lady who had just spoken—a young, darkly beautiful woman, with the
tears standing thick and bright in her eager black eyes. The second
face revealed was the face of a shriveled old negress, sitting
opposite the lady on the back seat. The third was the face of a
little sleeping child in the negress's lap. With a quick gesture of
impatience, the lady signed to the nurse to leave the carriage
first with the child. "Pray take them out of the way," she said to
the landlady; "pray take them to their room." She got out herself
when her request had been complied with. Then the light fell clear
for the first time on the further side of the carriage, and the
fourth traveler was disclosed to view.
He lay helpless on a mattress, supported by a stretcher; his
hair, long and disordered, under a black skull-cap; his eyes wide
open, rolling to and fro ceaselessly anxious; the rest of his face
as void of all expression of the character within him, and the
thought within him, as if he had been dead. There was no looking at
him now, and guessing what he might once have been. The leaden
blank of his face met every question as to his age, his rank, his
temper, and his looks which that face might once have answered, in
impenetrable silence. Nothing spoke for him now but the shock that
had struck him with the death-in-life of paralysis. The doctor's
eye questioned his lower limbs, and Death-in-Life answered,
I am here . The doctor's eye, rising
attentively by way of his hands and arms, questioned upward and
upward to the muscles round his mouth, and Death-in-Life
answered, I am coming
.
In the face of a calamity so unsparing and so dreadful, there
was nothing to be said. The silent sympathy of help was all that
could be offered to the woman who stood weeping at the carriage
door.
As they bore him on his bed across the hall of the hotel, his
wandering eyes encountered the face of his wife. They rested on her
for a moment, and in that moment he spoke.
"The child?" he said in English, with a slow, thick, laboring
articulation.
"The child is safe upstairs," she answered,
faintly.
"My desk?"
"It is in my hands. Look! I won't trust it to anybody; I am
taking care of it for you myself."
He closed his eyes for the first time after that answer, and
said no more. Tenderly and skillfully he was carried up the stairs,
with his wife on one side of him, and the doctor (ominously silent)
on the other. The landlord and the servants following saw the door
of his room open and close on him; heard the lady burst out crying
hysterically as soon as she was alone with the doctor and the sick
man; saw the doctor come out, half an hour later, with his ruddy
face a shade paler than usual; pressed him eagerly for information,
and received but one answer to all their inquiries—"Wait till I
have seen him to-morrow. Ask me nothing to-night." They all knew
the doctor's ways, and they augured ill when he left them hurriedly
with that reply.
So the two first English visitors of the year came to the
Baths of Wildbad in the season of eighteen hundred and
thirty-two.
AT ten o'clock the next morning, Mr. Neal—waiting for the
medical visit which he had himself appointed for that hour—looked
at his watch, and discovered, to his amazement, that he was waiting
in vain. It was close on eleven when the door opened at last, and
the doctor entered the room.
"I appointed ten o'clock for your visit," said Mr. Neal. "In
my country, a medical man is a punctual man."
"In my country," returned the doctor, without the least
ill-humor, "a medical man is exactly like other men—he is at the
mercy of accidents. Pray grant me your pardon, sir, for being so
long after my time; I have been detained by a very distressing
case—the case of Mr. Armadale, whose traveling-carriage you passed
on the road yesterday."
Mr. Neal looked at his medical attendant with a sour
surprise. There was a latent anxiety in the doctor's eye, a latent
preoccupation in the doctor's manner, which he was at a loss to
account for. For a moment the two faces confronted each other
silently, in marked national contrast—the Scotchman's, long and
lean, hard and regular; the German's, plump and florid, soft and
shapeless. One face looked as if it had never been young; the
other, as if it would never grow old.
"Might I venture to remind you," said Mr. Neal, "that the
case now under consideration is MY case, and not Mr.
Armadale's?"
"Certainly," replied the doctor, still vacillating between
the case he had come to see and the case he had just left. "You
appear to be suffering from lameness; let me look at your
foot."
Mr. Neal's malady, however serious it might be in his own
estimation, was of no extraordinary importance in a medical point
of view. He was suffering from a rheumatic affection of the
ankle-joint. The necessary questions were asked and answered and
the necessary baths were prescribed. In ten minutes the
consultation was at an end, and the patient was waiting in
significant silence for the medical adviser to take his
leave.
"I cannot conceal from myself," said the doctor, rising, and
hesitating a little, "that I am intruding on you. But I am
compelled to beg your indulgence if I return to the subject of Mr.
Armadale."
"May I ask what compels you?"
"The duty which I owe as a Christian," answered the doctor,
"to a dying man."
Mr. Neal started. Those who touched his sense of religious
duty touched the quickest sense in his nature.
"You have established your claim on my attention," he said,
gravely. "My time is yours."
"I will not abuse your kindness," replied the doctor,
resuming his chair. "I will be as short as I can. Mr. Armadale's
case is briefly this: He has passed the greater part of his life in
the West Indies—a wild life, and a vicious life, by his own
confession. Shortly after his marriage—now some three years
since—the first symptoms of an approaching paralytic affection
began to show themselves, and his medical advisers ordered him away
to try the climate of Europe. Since leaving the West Indies he has
lived principally in Italy, with no benefit to his health. From
Italy, before the last seizure attacked him, he removed to
Switzerland, and from Switzerland he has been sent to this place.
So much I know from his doctor's report; the rest I can tell you
from my own personal experience. Mr. Armadale has been sent to
Wildbad too late: he is virtually a dead man. The paralysis is fast
spreading upward, and disease of the lower part of the spine has
already taken place. He can still move his hands a little, but he
can hold nothing in his fingers. He can still articulate, but he
may wake speechless to-morrow or next day. If I give him a week
more to live, I give him what I honestly believe to be the utmost
length of his span. At his own request I told him, as carefully and
as tenderly as I could, what I have just told you. The result was
very distressing; the violence of the patient's agitation was a
violence which I despair of describing to you. I took the liberty
of asking him whether his affairs were unsettled. Nothing of the
sort. His will is in the hands of his executor in London, and he
leaves his wife and child well provided for. My next question
succeeded better; it hit the mark: 'Have you something on your mind
to do before you die which is not done yet?' He gave a great gasp
of relief, which said, as no words could have said it, Yes. 'Can I
help you?' 'Yes. I have something to write that I
must write; can you make me hold a
pen?'
"He might as well have asked me if I could perform a miracle.
I could only say No. 'If I dictate the words,' he went on, 'can you
write what I tell you to write?' Once more I could only say No I
understand a little English, but I can neither speak it nor write
it. Mr. Armadale understands French when it is spoken (as I speak
it to him) slowly, but he cannot express himself in that language;
and of German he is totally ignorant. In this difficulty, I said,
what any one else in my situation would have said: 'Why ask
me ? there is Mrs. Armadale at your
service in the next room.' Before I could get up from my chair to
fetch her, he stopped me—not by words, but by a look of horror
which fixed me, by main force of astonishment, in my place.
'Surely,' I said, 'your wife is the fittest person to write for you
as you desire?' 'The last person under heaven!' he answered.
'What!' I said, 'you ask me, a foreigner and a stranger, to write
words at your dictation which you keep a secret from your wife!'
Conceive my astonishment when he answered me, without a moment's
hesitation, 'Yes!' I sat lost; I sat silent. 'If
you can't write English,' he said,
'find somebody who can.' I tried to remonstrate. He burst into a
dreadful moaning cry—a dumb entreaty, like the entreaty of a dog.
'Hush! hush!' I said, 'I will find somebody.' 'To-day!' he broke
out, 'before my speech fails me, like my hand.' 'To-day, in an
hour's time.' He shut his eyes; he quieted himself instantly.
'While I am waiting for you,' he said, 'let me see my little boy.'
He had shown no tenderness when he spoke of his wife, but I saw the
tears on his cheeks when he asked for his child. My profession,
sir, has not made me so hard a man as you might think; and my
doctor's heart was as heavy, when I went out to fetch the child, as
if I had not been a doctor at all. I am afraid you think this
rather weak on my part?"
The doctor looked appealingly at Mr. Neal. He might as well
have looked at a rock in the Black Forest. Mr. Neal entirely
declined to be drawn by any doctor in Christendom out of the
regions of plain fact.
"Go on," he said. "I presume you have not told me all that
you have to tell me, yet?"
"Surely you understand my object in coming here, now?"
returned the other.
"Your object is plain enough, at last. You invite me to
connect myself blindfold with a matter which is in the last degree
suspicious, so far. I decline giving you any answer until I know
more than I know now. Did you think it necessary to inform this
man's wife of what had passed between you, and to ask her for an
explanation?"
"Of course I thought it necessary!" said the doctor,
indignant at the reflection on his humanity which the question
seemed to imply. "If ever I saw a woman fond of her husband, and
sorry for her husband, it is this unhappy Mrs. Armadale. As soon as
we were left alone together, I sat down by her side, and I took her
hand in mine. Why not? I am an ugly old man, and I may allow myself
such liberties as these!"
"Excuse me," said the impenetrable Scotchman. "I beg to
suggest that you are losing the thread of the
narrative."
"Nothing more likely," returned the doctor, recovering his
good humor. "It is in the habit of my nation to be perpetually
losing the thread; and it is evidently in the habit of yours, sir,
to be perpetually finding it. What an example here of the order of
the universe, and the everlasting fitness of things!"
"Will you oblige me, once for all, by confining yourself to
the facts," persisted Mr. Neal, frowning impatiently. "May I
inquire, for my own information, whether Mrs. Armadale could tell
you what it is her husband wishes me to write, and why it is that
he refuses to let her write for him?"
"There is my thread found—and thank you for finding it!" said
the doctor. "You shall hear what Mrs. Armadale had to tell me, in
Mrs. Armadale's own words. 'The cause that now shuts me out of his
confidence,' she said, 'is, I firmly believe, the same cause that
has always shut me out of his heart. I am the wife he has wedded,
but I am not the woman he loves. I knew when he married me that
another man had won from him the woman he loved. I thought I could
make him forget her. I hoped when I married him; I hoped again when
I bore him a son. Need I tell you the end of my hopes—you have seen
it for yourself.' (Wait, sir, I entreat you! I have not lost the
thread again; I am following it inch by inch.) 'Is this all you
know?' I asked. 'All I knew,' she said, 'till a short time since.
It was when we were in Switzerland, and when his illness was nearly
at its worst, that news came to him by accident of that other woman
who has been the shadow and the poison of my life—news that she
(like me) had borne her husband a son. On the instant of his making
that discovery—a trifling discovery, if ever there was one yet—a
mortal fear seized on him: not for me, not for himself; a fear for
his own child. The same day (without a word to me) he sent for the
doctor. I was mean, wicked, what you please—I listened at the door.
I heard him say: I have something to tell my son,
when my son grows old enough to understand me. Shall I live to tell
it ? The doctor would say nothing certain. The
same night (still without a word to me) he locked himself into his
room. What would any woman, treated as I was, have done in my
place? She would have done as I did—she would have listened again.
I heard him say to himself: I shall not live to
tell it: I must; write it before I die . I heard
his pen scrape, scrape, scrape over the paper; I heard him groaning
and sobbing as he wrote; I implored him for God's sake to let me
in. The cruel pen went scrape, scrape, scrape; the cruel pen was
all the answer he gave me. I waited at the door—hours—I don't know
how long. On a sudden, the pen stopped; and I heard no more. I
whispered through the keyhole softly; I said I was cold and weary
with waiting; I said, Oh, my love, let me in! Not even the cruel
pen answered me now: silence answered me. With all the strength of
my miserable hands I beat at the door. The servants came up and
broke it in. We were too late; the harm was done. Over that fatal
letter, the stroke had struck him—over that fatal letter, we found
him paralyzed as you see him now. Those words which he wants you to
write are the words he would have written himself if the stroke had
spared him till the morning. From that time to this there has been
a blank place left in the letter; and it is that blank place which
he has just asked you to fill up.'—In those words Mrs. Armadale
spoke to me; in those words you have the sum and substance of all
the information I can give. Say, if you please, sir, have I kept
the thread at last? Have I shown you the necessity which brings me
here from your countryman's death-bed?"
"Thus far," said Mr. Neal, "you merely show me that you are
exciting yourself. This is too serious a matter to be treated as
you are treating it now. You have involved Me in the business, and
I insist on seeing my way plainly. Don't raise your hands; your
hands are not a part of the question. If I am to be concerned in
the completion of this mysterious letter, it is only an act of
justifiable prudence on my part to inquire what the letter is
about. Mrs. Armadale appears to have favored you with an infinite
number of domestic particulars—in return, I presume, for your
polite attention in taking her by the hand. May I ask what she
could tell you about her husband's letter, so far as her husband
has written it?"
"Mrs. Armadale could tell me nothing," replied the doctor,
with a sudden formality in his manner, which showed that his
forbearance was at last failing him. "Before she was composed
enough to think of the letter, her husband had asked for it, and
had caused it to be locked up in his desk. She knows that he has
since, time after time, tried to finish it, and that, time after
time, the pen has dropped from his fingers. She knows, when all
other hope of his restoration was at an end, that his medical
advisers encouraged him to hope in the famous waters of this place.
And last, she knows how that hope has ended; for she knows what I
told her husband this morning."
The frown which had been gathering latterly on Mr. Neal's
face deepened and darkened. He looked at the doctor as if the
doctor had personally offended him.
"The more I think of the position you are asking me to take,"
he said, "the less I like it. Can you undertake to say positively
that Mr. Armadale is in his right mind?"
"Yes; as positively as words can say it."
"Does his wife sanction your coming here to request my
interference?"
"His wife sends me to you—the only Englishman in Wildbad—to
write for your dying countryman what he cannot write for himself;
and what no one else in this place but you can write for
him."
That answer drove Mr. Neal back to the last inch of ground
left him to stand on. Even on that inch the Scotchman resisted
still.
"Wait a little!" he said. "You put it strongly; let us be
quite sure you put it correctly as well. Let us be quite sure there
is nobody to take this responsibility but myself. There is a mayor
in Wildbad, to begin with—a man who possesses an official character
to justify his interference."
"A man of a thousand," said the doctor. "With one fault—he
knows no language but his own."
"There is an English legation at Stuttgart," persisted Mr.
Neal.
"And there are miles on miles of the forest between this and
Stuttgart," rejoined the doctor. "If we sent this moment, we could
get no help from the legation before to-morrow; and it is as likely
as not, in the state of this dying man's articulation, that
to-morrow may find him speechless. I don't know whether his last
wishes are wishes harmless to his child and to others, wishes
hurtful to his child and to others; but I
do know that they must be fulfilled at
once or never, and that you are the only man that can help
him."
That open declaration brought the discussion to a close. It
fixed Mr. Neal fast between the two alternatives of saying Yes, and
committing an act of imprudence, or of saying No, and committing an
act of inhumanity. There was a silence of some minutes. The
Scotchman steadily reflected; and the German steadily watched
him.
The responsibility of saying the next words rested on Mr.
Neal, and in course of time Mr. Neal took it. He rose from his
chair with a sullen sense of injury lowering on his heavy eyebrows,
and working sourly in the lines at the corners of his
mouth.
"My position is forced on me," he said. "I have no choice but
to accept it."
The doctor's impulsive nature rose in revolt against the
merciless brevity and gracelessness of that reply. "I wish to God,"
he broke out fervently, "I knew English enough to take your place
at Mr. Armadale's bedside!"
"Bating your taking the name of the Almighty in vain,"
answered the Scotchman, "I entirely agree with you. I wish you
did."
Without another word on either side, they left the room
together—the doctor leading the way.