Music Welcome to Snewscast, the podcast designed to help you fall asleep. Find us on Snewscast.com and follow us on Instagram at snoozecast to find behind the scenes content. If you would like to get an email once a week with upcoming sleep stories and other news, subscribe to the snoozeletter at snoozecast.com. This episode is brought to you by Ozzias midwinter. Tonight we'll read an excerpt from Wilkie Collins 1864 novel Armadale. It is the third of his four great novels of the decade after the woman in white and no name and before the moonstone.

This is Snuescast's third and a half time featuring Collins' work. If you enjoy this episode,

you can also find our moonstone episode from March 2019, our Woman in White episode from December 2019,

and the Lazy Tour of two idol of apprentices from July 2020,

which calls co-room with this friend, Charles Dickens. Let's get cozy. Close your eyes. Relax your body into the softness of your Beth.

Now, take a few deep breaths. On a warm May night, in the year 1800 and 51, the Reverend Desemis Brock, at that time a visitor to the Isle of Man, retired to his bedroom at Castletown, with a serious personal responsibility in close pursuit of him, and with no distinct idea of the means by which he might relieve himself from the pressure of his present circumstances. The clergyman had reached that mature period of human life, at which a sensible man learns to decline, as often as his temper will let him, all useless conflict with the tyranny of his own troubles. Abandoning any further effort to reach a decision in the emergency that now beset him. Mr. Brock sat down placently in his shirt sleeves on the side of his bed, and applied his mind to consider next whether the emergency itself was as serious as he had hitherto been inclined to think it. Following this new way out of his perplexities, Mr. Brock found himself unexpectedly traveling to the end-in-view by the least in speerting of all human journeys. a journey through the past years of his own life. One by one, the events of those years all connected with the same little group of characters, and all more or less answerable for the anxiety which now intruding itself between the clergymen and his knights' rest, Rose, in progressive series on Mr. Brock's memory. The first of the series took him back through a period of fourteen years to his own rectory on the Somerset Chire shores of the Bristol Channel and closeted him at a private interview with a lady who had paid him a visit in the character of a total stranger to the person and the place. The lady's complexion was fair. The lady's figure was well preserved. She was still a young woman and she looked young for her age. There was a shade of melancholy in her expression and an undertone of suffering in her voice. Enough, in each case, to indicate that she had known trouble, but not enough to obtrude that trouble on the notice of others. She brought with her a fine, fair-haired boy of eight years old whom whom she presented as her son, and who was sent out of the way at the beginning of the interview to amuse himself in the rectory garden. Her card had preceded her entrance into the study and had announced her under the name of Mrs. Armadale. Mr. Brock began to feel interested in her before she had opened her lips. And when the sun had been dismissed, he awaited to hear what the mother had to say to him. Mrs. Armadale began by informing the Rector that she was a widow. Her husband had perished by shipwreck a short time after their union on the voyage from Madira to Lisbon. She had been brought to England after her affliction under her father's protection, and her child, a posthumous son, had been born on the family estate in Norfolk. Her father's passing shortly afterward had deprived her of her only surviving parent, and had exposed her to neglect and misconstruction on the part of her remaining relatives to brothers, which had estranged her from them, she feared, for the rest of her days. some time passed, she had lived in the neighboring county of Devonshire, devoting herself to the education of her boy, who had now reached an age at which he required other than his mother's teaching. Leaving out of the question her own unwillingness to part with him, in her solitary position, she was especially concerned that he should not be thrown among strangers by being sent to school. Her darling project was to bring him up privately at home and to keep him as he advanced in years from all contact with the temptations and the dangers of the world. With these objects in view, her longer sojourn in her own locality where the the services of the resident clergymen, in the capacity of tutor were not obtainable, must come to an end. She had made inquiries, had heard of a house that would suit her in Mr. Brock's neighborhood, and had also been told that Mr. Brock himself had formally been in the habit of taking pupils. Possessed of this information, she had ventured to present herself with references that vouched for her respectability, but without a formal introduction. And she had now to ask whether, in the event of her residing in the neighborhood, any terms that could be offered would induce Mr. Brock to open his doors once more to a pupil, and to allow that pupil to be her son. If Mrs. Armadale had been a woman of no personal attractions, or if Mr. Brock had been provided with an entrenchment to fight behind in the shape of a wife, it is probable that the widow's journey might have been taken in vain. As things really were, the rector examined the references which were offered to him, and asked time for consideration. When the time had expired, he did what Mrs. Armadale wished him to do. He offered his back to the burden, and let the mother load him with the responsibility of the son. This was the first event of the series, the date of it being the year 1837. Mr. Brock's memory, traveling forward toward the present from that point, picked up the second event in its turn, and and stopped next at the year 1845.

The fishing village on the summer set Chyre coast was still the scene, and the characters were once again Mrs. Armadale and her son. Through the eight years that had passed, Mr. Brock's responsibility had rested on him lightly enough. The boy had given his mother and his tutor but little trouble. He was certainly slow over his books, but more from a constitutional inability to fix his attention on his tasks than from want of capacity to understand them. His temperament, it could not be denied, was heedless to the last degree. He acted recklessly on his first impulses and rushed blindfold at all his conclusions. On the other hand, it was to be said in his favor that his disposition was open as the day, a more generous, affectionate, sweet tempered lad it would have been hard to find anywhere.

A certain quaint originality of character, and a natural healthiness, and all his tastes, carried him free of most of the dangers to which his mother's system of education inevitably exposed him. He had a thoroughly English love of this sea and of all that belongs to it. And as he grew in years, there was no learning him away from the water side and no keeping him out of the boat builders yard. course of time, his mother caught him actually working there to her infinite annoyance and surprise as a volunteer. He acknowledged that his whole future ambition was to have a yard of his own, and that his one present object was to learn to build a boat for himself. Wisely for seeing that such a pursuit as this for his leisure hours was exactly what was wanted to reconcile a lad to a position of isolation from companions of his own rank and age. Mr. Brock prevailed on Mrs. Armadale with no small difficulty to let her son have his way. At the period of that second event in the clergyman's life with his pupil, which is now to be related, young Armadale had practiced long enough in the builder's yard to reach the summit of his wishes. By laying with his own hands, the keel of his own boat. Late on a certain summer day, not long after Alan had completed his 16th year, Mr. Brock left his pupil hard at work in the yard and went to spend the evening with Mrs. Armadale, taking the time's newspaper with him in his hand. The years that had passed since they had first met, had long since regulated the lives of the clergymen and his neighbor. The first advances, which Mr. Brock's growing admiration for for the widow had led him to make in the early days of their intercourse had been met on her side by an appeal to his four barons, which had closed his lips for the future. She had satisfied him at once and forever that the one place in her heart which he could hope to occupy was the place of her friend. He loved her well enough to take what she would give him. Friends they became, and friends they remained from that time forth.

No jealous dread of another man succeeding where he had failed,

embittered the clergyman's placid relations with the woman whom he loved.

Of the few resident gentlemen in the neighborhood, none were ever admitted by Mrs. Armadale to more than the merest acquaintance with her. Contentfully self-buried in her country retreat, she was proof against every social attraction that would have tempted other women in her position, and at her age. Mr. Brock and his newspaper appearing with monotonous regularity at her tea table three times a week told her all she knew or cared to know of the great outer world which circled round the narrow and changeless limits of her daily life. On the evening in question Mr. Brock took the armchair in which he always sat Accepted the one cup of tea which he always drank, and opened the newspaper which

he always read aloud to Mrs. Armadale, who invariably listened to him reclining on the same sofa with the same sort of needlework everlastingly in her hand. Bless my soul, cried the Rector, with his voice in a new octave and his eyes fixed in astonishment on the first page of the newspaper. No such introduction to the evening readings as this had ever happened before in all Mrs. Armadale's experience as a listener. She looked up from the sofa in a flutter of curiosity and besought her reverend friend to favor her with an explanation. I can hardly believe my own eyes," said Mr. Brock. Here is an advertisement Mrs. Armadale addressed to your son. Without further preface, he read the advertisement as follows. If this should meet the eyes of Alan Armadale, he is desired to communicate either personally or by letter with Mr.'s hammock and rage, Lincoln's and Fields London, on business of importance, which seriously concerns him. Anyone capable of informing Mr.'s H&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 Allen Armadale is a youth aged 15 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 who's... 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. Allen, as you know, is sixteen years old. If you look back at that 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 think 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 Alan 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 to 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 Allen and not to let that newspaper fall in his way? Mr. Brock gave the pledge required of him and considerably 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 Alan Armadale about the world, a stranger to his pupil's blood,

and a vagabond in the public newspapers. So much accident had revealed to him. 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 Reckter'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 bygone time and stopped at the year 1850, next.

The five years that had passed had made little if any change in Alan's character. He had simply developed to use his tutor's own expression from a boy of 16 to a boy of 21. He was just as easy and open in his disposition as ever.

Just as quaintly and good-humored, just as heatless and following his own impulses. His bias toward the sea had strengthened with his advance to the years of manhood. From building a boat, He had now got on with two journeymen at work under him, to building a decked vessel of five and thirty tons. Mr. Brock tried to divert him to hire aspirations, had taken him to Oxford to see what college life was like, had taken him to London to expand his mind by the spectacle of the great metropolis. The change had diverted Alan, but had not altered him in the least. He was as impenetrable superior to all worldly ambition as Dio genis himself, which is best, asked this unconscious philosopher to find out the way to be happy for yourself, or to let other people try if they can find it out for you.

From that moment, Mr. Brock permitted his pupil's character to grow at its own rate of development. An Alan went on uninterruptedly with the work of his yacht. which had wrought so little change in the sun, had not passed harmless over the mother. Mrs. Armadale's health was breaking fast, as her strength failed, her temper altered for the worse. She grew more and more fretful, more and more subject to fears and fancies, more and more reluctant to leave her own room. Since the appearance of the ad five years since nothing had happened to force her memory back to the associations connected with her early life. No word more on the forbidden topic had passed between the Rector and herself. suspicion had ever been raised in Alan's mind of the existence of his namesake. And yet Mrs. Armadale had become of late years, obstinately and fretfully uneasy on the subject of her son. than, Mr. Brock dreaded a serious disagreement between them. But Alan's natural sweetness of temper, fortified by his love for his mother, carried him triumphantly through all trials, not a hard word or a harsh look ever escaped him in her presence. He was unchangeably loving and forebearing with her to the very last. Such were the positions of the sun, the mother, and the friend, when the next notable event happened in the lives of the three, on a dreary afternoon, early in the month of November, Mr. Brock was disturbed over the composition of a sermon by a visit from the landlord of the village. After making his introductory apologies, the landlord stated the urgent business on which he had come to the factory clearly enough. A few hours since a young man had been brought to the inn by some farm laborers in the neighborhood who had found him wandering about one of their master's fields in a disordered state of mind, which looked to their eyes like downright madness. The landlord had given the poor creature shelter while he sent for medical help, and the doctor, on seeing him, had pronounced that he was suffering from fever of the brain, and that his removal to the nearest town at which a hospital or a workhouse in firmerie could be found to receive him would in all probability be fatal to his chances of recovery. After hearing this expression of opinion, and after observing for himself that the stranger's only luggage consisted of a small carpet bag which had been found in the field near him, The landlord had set off on the spot to consult director and to ask in this serious emergency what course he was to take next. Mr. Brock was the magistrate as well as the clergyman of the district and the course to be taken in the first instance was to his mind clear enough. He put on his hat and accompanied the landlord back to the inn. At the end door, they were joined by Alan, who had heard the news through another channel, and who was

waiting Mr. Brock's arrival to follow in the Magistrate's train, and to see what the

...