“He still shrank from giving it to me. ‘I daren’t! I daren’t!’ he said to himself, vacantly. ‘The shock of it might be the death of her.’
“I snatched the letter from him. One glance at the writing on the address was enough. My hands fell on my lap, with the letter fast held in them. I sat petrified, without moving, without speaking, without hearing a word of what Bashwood was saying to me, and slowly realized the terrible truth. The man whose widow I had claimed to be was a living man to confront me! In vain I had mixed the drink at Naples—in vain I had betrayed him into Manuel’s hands. Twice I had set the deadly snare for him, and twice Armadale had escaped me! I came to my sense of outward things again, and found Bashwood on his knees at my feet, crying.
“‘You look angry,’ he murmured, helplessly. ‘Are you angry with me? Oh, if you only knew what hopes I had when we last saw each other, and how cruelly that letter has dashed them all to the ground!’
“I put the miserable old creature back from me, but very gently. ‘Hush!’ I said. ‘Don’t distress me now. I want composure; I want to read the letter.’
“He went away submissively to the other end of the room. As soon as my eye was off him, I heard him say to himself, with impotent malignity, ‘If the sea had been of my mind, the sea would have drowned him!’
“One by one I slowly opened the folds of the letter; feeling, while I did so, the strangest incapability of fixing my attention on the very lines that I was burning to read. But why dwell any longer on sensations which I can’t describe? It will be more to the purpose if I place the letter itself, for future reference, on this page of my journal.
“‘Fiume, Illyria, November 21, 1851.
“MR. BASHWOOD—The address I date from will surprise you; and you will be more surprised still when you hear how it is that I come to write to you from a port on the Adriatic Sea.
“I have been the victim of a rascally attempt at robbery and murder. The robbery has succeeded; and it is only through the mercy of God that the murder did not succeed too.
“I hired a yacht rather more than a month ago at Naples; and sailed (I am glad to think now) without any friend with me, for Messina. From Messina I went for a cruise in the Adriatic. Two days out we were caught in a storm. Storms get up in a hurry, and go down in a hurry, in those parts. The vessel behaved nobly: I declare I feel the tears in my eyes now, when I think of her at the bottom of the sea! Toward sunset it began to moderate; and by midnight, except for a long, smooth swell, the sea was as quiet as need be. I went below, a little tired (having helped in working the yacht while the gale lasted), and fell asleep in five minutes. About two hours after, I was woke by something falling into my cabin through a chink of the ventilator in the upper part of the door. I jumped up, and found a bit of paper with a key wrapped in it, and with writing on the inner side, in a hand which it was not very easy to read.