"July 21st, Monday night, eleven o'clock.—Midwinter has just
left me. We parted by my desire at the path out of the coppice; he going his way to the hotel, and I going mine to my lodgings.
"I have managed to avoid making another appointment with him by
arranging to write to him to-morrow morning. This gives me the
night's interval to compose myself, and to coax my mind back (if
I can) to my own affairs. Will the night pass, and the morning
find me still thinking of the Letter that came to him from his
father's deathbed? of the night he watched through on the Wrecked
Ship; and, more than all, of the first breathless moment when he
told me his real Name?
"Would it help me to shake off these impressions, I wonder, if
I made the effort of writing them down? There would be no danger, in that case, of my forgetting anything important. And perhaps, after all, it may be the fear of forgetting something which I ought to remember that keeps this story of Midwinter's weighing as it does on my mind. At any rate, the experiment is worth trying. In my present situation I must be free to think of other things, or I shall never find my way through all the difficulties at Thorpe Ambrose that are still to come.
"Let me think. What haunts me, to begin with?
"The Names haunt me. I keep saying and saying to myself: Both
alike!—Christian name and surname both alike! A light-haired
Allan Armadale, whom I have long since known of, and who is the
son of my old mistress. A dark-haired Allan Armadale, whom I only
know of now, and who is only known to others under the name of
Ozias Midwinter. Stranger still; it is not relationship, it is
not chance, that has made them namesakes. The father of the light
Armadale was the man who was born to the family name, and who
lost the family inheritance. The father of the dark Armadale
was the man who took the name, on condition of getting the
inheritance—and who got it.
"So there are two of them—I can't help thinking of it—both
unmarried. The light-haired Armadale, who offers to the woman who
can secure him, eight thousand a year while he lives; who leaves
her twelve hundred a year when he dies; who must and shall marry
me for those two golden reasons; and whom I hate and loathe as I
never hated and loathed a man yet. And the dark-haired Armadale, who has a poor little income, which might perhaps pay his wife's milliner, if his wife was careful; who has just left me, persuaded that I mean to marry him; and whom—well, whom I might have loved once, before I was the woman I am now.
"And Allan the Fair doesn't know he has a namesake. And Allan
the Dark has kept the secret from everybody but the Somersetshire
clergyman (whose discretion he can depend on) and myself.
"And there are two Allan Armadales—two Allan Armadales—two
Allan Armadales. There! three is a lucky number. Haunt me again, after that, if you can!
"What next? The murder in the timber ship? No; the murder is
a good reason why the dark Armadale, whose father committed it, should keep his secret from the fair Armadale, whose father was killed; but it doesn't concern me. I remember there was a suspicion in Madeira at the time of something wrong. Was it wrong? Was the man who had been tricked out of his wife to blame for shutting the cabin door, and leaving the man who had tricked him to drown in the wreck? Yes; the woman wasn't worth it.
"What am I sure of that really concerns myself?