"My son! I have pursued you from my grave with a confession which
my love might have spared you. Read on, and you will know why.
"I will say nothing of my sufferings; I will plead for no mercy
to my memory. There is a strange sinking at my heart, a strange
trembling in my hand, while I write these lines, which warns me
to hasten to the end. I left the island without daring to look
for the last time at the woman whom I had lost so miserably, whom
I had injured so vilely. When I left, the whole weight of the
suspicion roused by the manner of Ingleby's death rested on the
crew of the French vessel. No motive for the supposed murder
could be brought home to any of them; but they were known to be,
for the most part, outlawed ruffians capable of any crime, and
they were suspected and examined accordingly. It was not till
afterward that I heard by accident of the suspicion shifting
round at last to me. The widow alone recognized the vague
description given of the strange man who had made one of the
yacht's crew, and who had disappeared the day afterward. The
widow alone knew, from that time forth, why her husband had been
murdered, and who had done the deed. When she made that
discovery, a false report of my death had been previously
circulated in the island. Perhaps I was indebted to the report
for my immunity from all legal proceedings; perhaps (no eye but
Ingleby's having seen me lock the cabin door) there was not
evidence enough to justify an inquiry; perhaps the widow shrank
from the disclosures which must have followed a public charge
against me, based on her own bare suspicion of the truth. However
it might be, the crime which I had committed unseen has remained
a crime unpunished from that time to this.
"I left Madeira for the West Indies in disguise. The first news
that met me when the ship touched at Barbadoes was the news of
my mother's death. I had no heart to return to the old scenes.
The prospect of living at home in solitude, with the torment
of my own guilty remembrances gnawing at me day and night,
was more than I had the courage to confront. Without landing,
or discovering myself to any one on shore, I went on as far
as the ship would take me--to the island of Trinidad.
"At that place I first saw your mother. It was my duty to tell
her the truth--and I treacherously kept my secret. It was my duty
to spare her the hopeless sacrifice of her freedom and her
happiness to such an existence as mine--and I did her the injury
of marrying her. If she is alive when you read this, grant her
the mercy of still concealing the truth. The one atonement I can
make to her is to keep her unsuspicious to the last of the man
she has married. Pity her, as I have pitied her. Let this letter
be a sacred confidence between father and son.
"The time when you were born was the time when my health began
to give way. Some months afterward, in the first days of my
recovery, you were brought to me; and I was told that you had
been christened during my illness. Your mother had done as other
loving mothers do--she had christened her first-born by his
father's name. You, too, were Allan Armadale. Even in that early
time--even while I was happily ignorant of what I have discovered
since--my mind misgave me when I looked at you, and thought of
that fatal name.
"As soon as I could be moved, my presence was required at my
estates in Barbadoes. It crossed my mind--wild as the idea may
appear to you--to renounce the condition which compelled my son
as well as myself to take the Armadale name, or lose the
succession to the Armadale property. But, even in those days,
the rumor of a contemplated emancipation of the slaves--the
emancipation which is now close at hand--was spreading widely
in the colony. No man could tell how the value of West Indian
property might be affected if that threatened change ever took
place. No man could tell--if I gave you back my own paternal
name, and left you without other provision in the future than
my own paternal estate--how you might one day miss the broad
Armadale acres, or to what future penury I might be blindly
condemning your mother and yourself. Mark how the fatalities
gathered one on the other! Mark how your Christian name came
to you, how your surname held to you, in spite of me!
"My health had improved in my old home--but it was for a time
only. I sank again, and the doctors ordered me to Europe.
Avoiding England (why, you may guess), I took my passage, with
you and your mother, for France. From France we passed into
Italy. We lived here; we lived there. It was useless. Death had
got met and Death followed me, go where I might. I bore it, for
I had an alleviation to turn to which I had not deserved. You may
shrink in horror from the very memory of me now. In those days,
you comforted me. The only warmth I still felt at my heart was
the warmth you brought to it. My last glimpses of happiness in
this world were the glimpses given me by my infant son.
"We removed from Italy, and went next to Lausanne--the place
from which I am now writing to you. The post of this morning has
brought me news, later and fuller than any I had received thus
far, of the widow of the murdered man. The letter lies before me
while I write. It comes from a friend of my early days, who has
seen her, and spoken to her--who has been the first to inform her
that the report of my death in Madeira was false. He writes, at
a loss to account for the violent agitation which she showed on
hearing that I was still alive, that I was married, and that I
had an infant son. He asks me if I can explain it. He speaks in
terms of sympathy for her--a young and beautiful woman, buried
in the retirement of a fishing-village on the Devonshire coast;
her father dead; her family estranged from her, in merciless
disapproval of her marriage. He writes words which might have cut
me to the heart, but for a closing passage in his letter, which
seized my whole attention the instant I came to it, and which has
forced from me the narrative that these pages contain.
"I now know what never even entered my mind as a suspicion till
the letter reached me. I now know that the widow of the man whose
death lies at my door has borne a posthumous child. That child
is a boy--a year older than my own son. Secure in her belief in
my death, his mother has done what my son's mother did: she has
christened her child by his father's name. Again, in the second
generation, there are two Allan Armadales as there were in the
first. After working its deadly mischief with the fathers, the
fatal resemblance of names has descended to work its deadly
mischief with the sons.
"Guiltless minds may see nothing thus far but the result of
a series of events which could lead no other way. I--with that
man's life to answer for--I, going down into my grave, with my
crime unpunished and unatoned, see what no guiltless minds can
discern. I see danger in the future, begotten of the danger in
the past--treachery that is the offspring of _his_ treachery,
and crime that is the child of _my_ crime. Is the dread that now
shakes me to the soul a phantom raised by the superstition of a
dying man? I look into the Book which all Christendom venerates,
and the Book tells me that the sin of the father shall be visited
on the child. I look out into the world, and I see the living
witnesses round me to that terrible truth. I see the vices which
have contaminated the father descending, and contaminating
the child; I see the shame which has disgraced the father's name
descending, and disgracing the child's. I look in on myself, and
I see my crime ripening again for the future in the self-same
circumstance which first sowed the seeds of it in the past,
and descending, in inherited contamination of evil, from me
to my son."
At those lines the writing ended. There the stroke had struck
him, and the pen had dropped from his hand.
He knew the place; he remembered the words. At the instant when
the reader's voice stopped, he looked eagerly at the doctor.
"I have got what comes next in my mind," he said, with slower
and slower articulation. "Help me to speak it."
The doctor administered a stimulant, and signed to Mr. Neal to
give him time. After a little delay, the flame of the sinking
spirit leaped up in his eyes once more. Resolutely struggling
with his failing speech, he summoned the Scotchman to take the
pen, and pronounced the closing sentences of the narrative, as
his memory gave them back to him, one by one, in these words:
"Despise my dying conviction if you will, but grant me, I
solemnly implore you, one last request. My son! the only hope
I have left for you hangs on a great doubt--the doubt whether we
are, or are not, the masters of our own destinies. It may be that
mortal free-will can conquer mortal fate; and that going, as we
all do, inevitably to death, we go inevitably to nothing that is
before death. If this be so, indeed, respect--though you respect
nothing else--the warning which I give you from my grave. Never,
to your dying day, let any living soul approach you who is
associated, directly or indirectly, with the crime which your
father has committed. Avoid the widow of the man I killed--if
the widow still lives. Avoid the maid whose wicked hand smoothed
the way to the marriage--if the maid is still in her service. And
more than all, avoid the man who bears the same name as your own.
Offend your best benefactor, if that benefactor's influence has
connected you one with the other. Desert the woman who loves you,
if that woman is a link between you and him. Hide yourself from
him under an assumed name. Put the mountains and the seas between
you; be ungrateful, be unforgiving; be all that is most repellent
to your own gentler nature, rather than live under the same roof,
and breathe the same air, with that man. Never let the two Allan
Armadales meet in this world: never, never, never!
"There lies the way by which you may escape--if any way there be.
Take it, if you prize your own innocence and your own happiness,
through all your life to come!
"I have done. If I could have trusted any weaker influence than
the influence of this confession to incline you to my will,
I would have spared you the disclosure which these pages contain.
You are lying on my breast, sleeping the innocent sleep of a
child, while a stranger's hand writes these words for you as they
fall from my lips. Think what the strength of my conviction must
be, when I can find the courage, on my death-bed, to darken all
your young life at its outset with the shadow of your father's
crime. Think, and be warned. Think, and forgive me if you can."
There it ended. Those were the father's last words to the son.