Armadale by Wilkie Collins

letter; there was enclosed in it a miniature portrait of Miss Blanchard. At the back of the portrait, her father had written half-jestingly, half-tenderly, ‘I can’t ask my daughter to spare my eyes as usual, without telling her of your inquiries, and putting a young lady’s diffidence to the blush. So I send her in effigy (without her knowledge) to answer for herself. It is a good likeness of a good girl. If she likes your son – and if I like him, which I am sure I shall – we may yet live, my good friend, to see our children what we might once have been ourselves – man and wife.’ My mother gave me the miniature with the letter. The portrait at once struck me – I can’t say why, I can’t say how – as nothing of the kind had ever struck me before.
    Harder intellects than mine might have attributed the extraordinary impression produced on me to the disordered condition of my mind at that time; to the weariness of my own base pleasures which had been gaining on me for months past; to the undefined longing which that weariness implied for newer interests and fresher hopes than any that had possessed me yet. I attempted no such sober self-examination as this: I believed in destiny then; I believe in destiny now. It was enough for me to know – as I did know – that the first sense I had ever felt of something better in my nature than my animal-self, was roused by that girl’s face looking at me from her picture, as no woman’s face had ever looked at me yet. In those tender eyes – in the chance of making that gentle creature my wife – I saw my destiny written. The portrait which had come into my hands so strangely and so unexpectedly, was the silent messenger of happiness close at hand, sent to warn, to encourage, to rouse me before it was too late. I put the miniature under my pillow at night; I looked at it again the next morning. My conviction of the day before remained as strong as ever; my superstition (if you please to call it so) pointed out to me irresistibly the way on which I should go. There was a ship in port which was to sail for England in a fortnight, touching at Madeira. In that ship I took my passage.
    Thus far, the reader had advanced with no interruption to disturb him. But at the last words, the tones of another voice, low and broken, mingled with his own.
    â€˜Was she a fair woman?’ asked the voice, ‘or dark, like me?’
    Mr Neal paused, and looked up. The doctor was still at the bed-head, with his fingers mechanically on the patient’s pulse. The child, missing his midday sleep, was beginning to play languidly with his new toy. The father’s eyes were watching him with a rapt and ceaseless attention. But one great change was visible in the listeners since the narrative had begun. Mrs Armadale had dropped her hold of her husband’s hand, and sat with her face steadily turned away from him. The hot African blood burnt red in her dusky cheeks as she obstinately repeated the question, ‘Was she a fair woman – or dark, like me?’
    â€˜Fair,’ said her husband, without looking at her.
    Her hands, lying clasped together in her lap, wrung each other hard – she said no more. Mr Neal’s overhanging eyebrows lowered ominously, as he returned to the narrative. He had incurred his own severe displeasure – he had caught himself in the act of secretly pitying her.
    I have said – the letter proceeded – that Ingleby was admitted to my closest confidence. I was sorry to leave him; and I was distressed by his evident surprise and mortification when he heard that I was going away. In my own justification, I showed him the letter and the likeness, and told him the truth. His interest in the portrait seemed to be hardly inferior to my own. He asked me about Miss Blanchard’s family, and Miss Blanchard’s fortune with the sympathy of a true friend; and he strengthened my regard