Without further preface, he read the advertisement as follows:
IF this should meet the eye of ALLAN ARMADALE, he is desired to communicate, either personally or by letter, with Messrs. Hammick and Ridge (Lincoln’s Inn Fields, London), on business of importance which seriously concerns him. Any one capable of informing Messrs. H. and R. where the person herein advertised can be found would confer a favor by doing the same. To prevent mistakes, it is further notified that the missing Allan Armadale is a youth aged fifteen years, and that this advertisement is inserted at the instance of his family and friends.
“Another family, and other friends,” said Mrs. Armadale. “The person whose name appears in that advertisement is not my son.”
The tone in which she spoke surprised Mr. Brock. The change in her face, when he looked up, shocked him. Her delicate complexion had faded away to a dull white; her eyes were averted from her visitor with a strange mixture of confusion and alarm; she looked an older woman than she was, by ten good years at least.
“The name is so very uncommon,” said Mr. Brock, imagining he had offended her, and trying to excuse himself. “It really seemed impossible there could be two persons—”
“There are two,” interposed Mrs. Armadale. “Allan, as you know, is sixteen years old. If you look back at the advertisement, you will find the missing person described as being only fifteen. Although he bears the same surname and the same Christian name, he is, I thank God, in no way whatever related to my son. As long as I live, it will be the object of my hopes and prayers that Allan may never see him, may never even hear of him. My kind friend, I see I surprise you: will you bear with me if I leave these strange circumstances unexplained? There is past misfortune and misery in my early life too painful for me to speak of, even to you. Will you help me to bear the remembrance of it, by never referring to this again? Will you do even more—will you promise not to speak of it to Allan, and not to let that newspaper fall in his way?”
Mr. Brock gave the pledge required of him, and considerately left her to herself.
The rector had been too long and too truly attached to Mrs. Armadale to be capable of regarding her with any unworthy distrust. But it would be idle to deny that he felt disappointed by her want of confidence in him, and that he looked inquisitively at the advertisement more than once on his way back to his own house.
It was clear enough, now, that Mrs. Armadale’s motives for burying her son as well as herself in the seclusion of a remote country village was not so much to keep him under her own eye as to keep him from discovery by his namesake. Why did she dread the idea of their ever meeting? Was it a dread for herself, or a dread for her son? Mr. Brock’s loyal belief in his friend rejected any solution of the difficulty which pointed at some past misconduct of Mrs. Armadale’s. That night he destroyed the advertisement with his own hand; that night he resolved that the subject should never be suffered to enter his mind again. There was another Allan Armadale about the world, a stranger to his pupil’s blood, and a vagabond advertised in the public newspapers. So much accident had revealed to him. More, for Mrs. Armadale’s sake, he had no wish to discover—and more he would never seek to know.
This was the second in the series of events which dated from the rector’s connection with Mrs. Armadale and her son. Mr. Brock’s memory, traveling on nearer and nearer to present circumstances, reached the third stage of its journey through the by-gone time, and stopped at the year eighteen hundred and fifty, next.