“Mere restlessness!” she said, briefly. “The longer I live, the more impatient I get.”
The doctor, who had noticed before she spoke that her face looked strangely pale and old that morning, observed, when she answered him, that her expression—naturally mobile in no ordinary degree—remained quite unaltered by the effort of speaking. There was none of the usual animation on her lips, none of the usual temper in her eyes. He had never seen her so impenetrably and coldly composed as he saw her now. “She has made up her mind at last,” he thought. “I may say to her this morning what I couldn’t say to her last night.”
He prefaced the coming remarks by a warning look at her widow’s dress.
“Now you have got your luggage,” he began, gravely, “permit me to suggest putting that cap away, and wearing another gown.”
“Why?”
“Do you remember what you told me a day or two since?” asked the doctor. “You said there was a chance of Mr. Armadale’s dying in my Sanitarium?”
“I will say it again, if you like.”
“A more unlikely chance,” pursued the doctor, deaf as ever to all awkward interruptions, “it is hardly possible to imagine! But as long as it is a chance at all, it is worth considering. Say, then, that he dies—dies suddenly and unexpectedly, and makes a Coroner’s Inquest necessary in the house. What is our course in that case? Our course is to preserve the characters to which we have committed ourselves—you as his widow, and I as the witness of your marriage—and, in those characters, to court the fullest inquiry. In the entirely improbable event of his dying just when we want him to die, my idea—I might even say, my resolution—is to admit that we knew of his resurrection from the sea; and to acknowledge that we instructed Mr. Bashwood to entrap him into this house, by means of a false statement about Miss Milroy. When the inevitable questions follow, I propose to assert that he exhibited symptoms of mental alienation shortly after your marriage; that his delusion consisted in denying that you were his wife, and in declaring that he was engaged to be married to Miss Milroy; that you were in such terror of him on this account, when you heard he was alive and coming back, as to be in a state of nervous agitation that required my care; that at your request, and to calm that nervous agitation, I saw him professionally, and got him quietly into the house by a humoring of his delusion, perfectly justifiable in such a case; and, lastly, that I can certify his brain to have been affected by one of those mysterious disorders, eminently incurable, eminently fatal, in relation to which medical science is still in the dark. Such a course as this (in the remotely possible event which we are now supposing) would be, in your interests and mine, unquestionably the right course to take; and such a dress as that is, just as certainly, under existing circumstances, the wrong dress to wear.”
“Shall I take it off at once?” she asked, rising from the breakfast-table, without a word of remark on what had just been said to her.
“Anytime before two o’clock to-day will do,” said the doctor.