Strange Stories
by Grant Allen · English · Gutenberg #38575 · 685,737 chars · public domain (US)
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Title: Strange Stories
Author: Grant Allen
Illustrator: George Du Maurier
Release date: January 15, 2012 [eBook #38575]
Most recently updated: January 8, 2021
Language: English
Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/38575
Credits: Produced by Annie R. McGuire. This book was produced from
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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK STRANGE STORIES ***
Produced by Annie R. McGuire. This book was produced from
scanned images of public domain material from the Google
Print archive.
THE PICCADILLY NOVELS.
_POPULAR STORIES BY THE BEST AUTHORS._
Many of them Illustrated. Crown 8vo., cloth extra, 3s. 6d. each.
By MRS. ALEXANDER.
Maid, Wife, or Widow?
By WALTER BESANT & JAMES RICE.
Ready-Money Mortiboy.
My Little Girl.
Case of Mr. Lucraft.
This Son of Vulcan.
With Harp & Crown.
The Golden Butterfly.
By Celia's Arbour.
Monks of Thelema.
'Twas In Trafalgar's Bay.
The Seamy Side.
Ten Tears' Tenant.
Chaplain of the Fleet.
By WALTER BESANT.
All Sorts and Conditions of Men.
The Captains' Room.
All In a Garden Fair.
By ROBERT BUCHANAN.
A Child of Nature.
God and the Man.
Shadow of the Sword.
Love Me for Ever.
Martyrdom of Madeline.
Annan Water.
The New Abelard.
By MRS. LOVETT CAMERON.
Deceivers Ever.
Juliet's Guardian.
By MORTIMER COLLINS.
Sweet Anne Page.
Transmigration.
From Midnight to Midnight.
By MORTIMER & FRANCES COLLINS.
Blacksmith and Scholar.
The Village Comedy.
You Play Me False.
By WILKIE COLLINS.
Antonina.
Basil.
Hide and Seek.
The Dead Secret.
The Queen of Hearts.
My Miscellanies.
The Woman in White.
The Moonstone.
Man and Wife.
Poor Miss Finch.
Miss or Mrs.?
The New Magdalen.
The Frozen Deep.
The Law and the Lady.
The Two Destinies.
The Haunted Hotel.
The Fallen Leaves.
Jezebel's Daughter.
The Black Robe.
Heart and Science.
By DUTTON COOK.
Paul Foster's Daughter.
By WILLIAM CYPLES.
Hearts of Gold.
By ALPHONSE DAUDET.
Port Salvation.
By JAMES DE MILLE.
A Castle in Spain.
By J. LEITH DERWENT.
Our Lady of Tears.
Circe's Lovers.
By M. BETHAM-EDWARDS.
Felicia.
Kitty.
By MRS. ANNIE EDWARDES.
Archie Lovell.
By R. E. FRANCILLON.
Olympia.
Queen Cophetua.
A Real Queen.
One by One.
Prefaced by SIR BARTLE FRERE.
Pandurang Hari.
By EDWARD GARRETT.
The Capel Girls.
By CHARLES GIBBON.
Robin Gray.
For Lack of Gold.
In Love and War.
What will World say?
For the King.
In Honour Bound.
Queen of the Meadow.
In Pastures Green.
Flower of the Forest.
A Heart's Problem.
The Braes of Yarrow.
The Golden Shaft.
Of High Degree.
Fancy Free.
Loving a Dream.
By THOMAS HARDY.
Under the Greenwood Tree.
By JULIAN HAWTHORNE.
Garth.
Ellice Quentin.
Sebastian Strome.
Prince Saroni's Wife.
Dust.
Beatrix Randolph.
Fortune's Fool.
By SIR ARTHUR HELPS.
Ivan de Biron.
By MRS. ALFRED HUNT.
Thornicroft's Model.
The Leaden Casket.
Self-Condemned.
By JEAN INGELOW.
Fated to be Free.
By HENRY JAMES, Jun.
Confidence.
By HARRIETT JAY.
Queen of Connaught.
The Dark Colleen.
By HENRY KINGSLEY.
Number Seventeen.
Oakshott Castle.
By E. LYNN LINTON.
Patricia Kemball.
The Atonement of Leam Dundas.
The World Well Lost.
Under Which Lord?
With a Silken Thread.
Rebel of the Family.
'My Love!'
Ione.
By HENRY W. LUCY.
Gideon Fleyce.
By JUSTIN McCARTHY.
Waterdale Neighbours.
My Enemy's Daughter.
Linley Rochford.
A Fair Saxon.
Dear Lady Disdain.
Miss Misanthrope.
Donna Quixote.
Comet of a Season.
Maid of Athens.
By GEORGE MACDONALD, LL.D.
Paul Faber, Surgeon.
Thomas Wingfold.
By MRS. MACDONELL.
Quaker Cousins.
By KATHARINE S. MACQUOID.
Lost Rose.
The Evil Eye.
By FLORENCE MARRYAT.
Open! Sesame!
Written in Fire.
By JEAN MIDDLEMASS.
Touch and Go.
By D. CHRISTIE MURRAY.
A Life's Atonement.
Joseph's Coat.
Val Strange.
Coals of Fire.
A Model Father.
Hearts.
By the Gate of the Sea.
The Way of the World.
By MRS. OLIPHANT.
Whiteladies.
By MARGARET A. PAUL.
Gentle and Simple.
By JAMES PAYN.
Lost Sir Massingberd.
The Best of Husbands.
Fallen Fortunes.
Halves.
Walter's Word.
What He Cost Her.
Less Black than we're Painted.
By Proxy.
High Spirits.
Under One Roof.
Carlyon's Year.
A Confidential Agent.
From Exile.
A Grape from a Thorn.
For Cash Only.
Kit: a Memory.
The Canon's Ward.
By E. C. PRICE.
Valentina.
The Foreigners.
By MRS. J. H. RIDDELL.
Her Mother's Darling.
The Prince of Wales's Garden Party.
By CHARLES READE.
It is Never Too Late to Mend.
Hard Cash.
Peg Woffington.
Christie Johnstone.
Griffith Gaunt.
The Double Marriage
Love Me Little, Love Me Long.
Foul Play.
Cloister and Hearth.
The Course of True Love.
The Autobiography of a Thief.
Put Yourself in His Place.
Terrible Temptation.
The Wandering Heir.
A Simpleton.
A Woman-Hater.
Readiana.
Singleheart and Doubleface.
The Jilt.
Good Stories of Men and other Animals.
By F. W. ROBINSON.
Women are Strange.
The Hands of Justice.
By JOHN SAUNDERS.
Bound to the Wheel.
One Against the World.
Guy Waterman.
The Lion in the Path.
The Two Dreamers.
By KATHARINE SAUNDERS.
Joan Merryweather.
Margaret and Elizabeth.
Gideon's Rock.
The High Mills.
By T. W. SPEIGHT.
The Mysteries of Heron Dyke.
By R. A. STERNDALE.
The Afghan Knife.
By BERTHA THOMAS.
Proud Maisie.
The Violin-player.
Cressida.
By ANTHONY TROLLOPE.
The Way We Live Now.
American Senator.
Kept in the Dark.
Frau Frohmann.
Marion Fay.
Mr. Scarborough's Family.
The Land-Leaguers.
By FRANCES E. TROLLOPE.
Mabel's Progress.
Anne Furness.
Like Ships upon the Sea.
By T. ADOLPHUS TROLLOPE.
Diamond Cut Diamond.
By IVAN TURGENIEFF, and Others.
Stories from Foreign Novelists.
By C. C. FRASER-TYTLER.
Mistress Judith.
By SARAH TYTLER.
What She Came Through.
The Bride's Pass.
By J. S. WINTER.
Cavalry Life.
Regimental Legends.
_CHATTO AND WINDUS, PICCADILLY, W._
STRANGE STORIES
STRANGE STORIES
BY
GRANT ALLEN
(_J. Arbuthnot Wilson_)
[Illustration]
_WITH A FRONTISPIECE BY GEORGE DU MAURIER_
London
CHATTO AND WINDUS, PICCADILLY
1884
PREFACE.
It is with some little trepidation that I venture to submit to the
critical world this small collection of short stories. I feel that in
doing so I owe some apology both to my readers and to the regular
story-tellers. Being by trade a psychologist and scientific journeyman,
I have been bold enough at times to stray surreptitiously and
tentatively from my proper sphere into the flowery fields of pure
fiction. Some of these my divarications from the strict path of sterner
science, however, having been already publicly performed under the
incognito of "J. Arbuthnot Wilson," have been so far condoned by
generous and kindly critics that I am emboldened to present them to the
judgment of readers under a more permanent form, and even to dispense
with the convenient cloak of a pseudonym, under which one can always so
easily cover one's hasty retreat from an untenable position. I can only
hope that my confession will be accepted in partial extenuation of this
culpable departure from the good old rule, "Ne sutor ultra crepidam;"
and that older hands at the craft of story-telling will pardon an
amateur novice his defective workmanship on the general plea of his
humble demeanour.
I may perhaps also venture to plead in self-defence that though these
stories do not profess to be anything more than mere short sensational
tales, I have yet endeavoured to give to most of them some slight tinge
of scientific or psychological import and meaning. "The Reverend John
Creedy," for example, is a study from within of a singular persistence
of hereditary character, well known to all students of modern
anthropological papers and reports. Members of barbarous or savage
races, trained for a time in civilized habits, are liable at any moment
to revert naturally to their primitive condition, especially under the
contagious influence of companionship with persons of their own blood,
and close subjection to the ancestral circumstances. The tale which I
have based upon several such historical instances in real life
endeavours briefly to hint at the modes of feeling likely to accompany
such a relapse into barbarism in an essentially fine and sensitive
savage nature. To most European readers, no doubt, such a sheer fall
from the pinnacle of civilization to the nethermost abysses of savagery,
would seem to call for the display of no other emotion than pure disgust
and aversion; but those who know intimately the whole gamut of the
intensely impressionable African mind will be able to treat its
temptations and its tendencies far more sympathetically. In "The Curate
of Churnside," again, I have tried to present a psychical analysis of a
temperament not uncommon among the cultured class of the Italian
Renaissance, and less rare than many people will be inclined to imagine
among the colder type of our own emancipated and cultivated classes. The
union of high intellectual and aesthetic culture with a total want of
moral sensibility is a recognized fact in many periods of history,
though our own age is singularly loth to admit of its possibility in its
own contemporaries. In "Ram Das of Cawnpore," once more, I have
attempted to depict a few circumstances of the Indian Mutiny as they
must naturally have presented themselves to the mind and feelings of a
humble native actor in that great and terrible drama. Accustomed
ourselves to looking always at the massacres and reprisals of the Mutiny
from a purely English point of view, we are liable to forget that every
act of the mutineers and their aiders or abettors must have been fully
justified in their own eyes, at the moment at least, as every act of
every human being always is to his own inner personality. In his
conscience of conscience, no man ever really believes that under given
circumstances he could conceivably have acted otherwise than he actually
did. If he persuades himself that he does really so believe, then he
shows himself at once to be a very poor introspective psychologist. "The
Child of the Phalanstery," to take another case, is a more ideal effort
to realize the moral conceptions of a community brought up under a
social and ethical environment utterly different from that by which we
ourselves are now surrounded. In like manner, almost all the stories
(except the lightest among them) have their germ or prime motive in some
scientific or quasi-scientific idea; and this narrow link which thus
connects them at bottom with my more habitual sphere of work must serve
as my excuse to the regular story-tellers for an otherwise unwarrantable
intrusion upon their private preserves. I trust they will forgive me on
this plea for my trespass on their legitimate domains, and allow me to
occupy in peace a little adjacent corner of unclaimed territory, which
lies so temptingly close beside my own small original freehold.
I should add that "The Reverend John Creedy," "The Curate of Churnside,"
"Dr. Greatrex's Engagement," and "The Backslider," have already appeared
in the _Cornhill Magazine_; while "The Foundering of the _Fortuna_" was
first published in _Longman's Magazine_. The remainder of the tales
comprised in this volume have seen the light originally in the pages of
_Belgravia_. I have to thank the courtesy of the publishers and editors
of those periodicals for kind permission to reprint them here.
G. A.
THE NOOK, DORKING,
_October_ 12, 1884.
CONTENTS.
Page
THE REVEREND JOHN CREEDY 1
DR. GREATREX'S ENGAGEMENT 21
MR. CHUNG 47
THE CURATE OF CHURNSIDE 66
AN EPISODE IN HIGH LIFE 100
MY NEW YEAR'S EVE AMONG THE MUMMIES 126
THE FOUNDERING OF THE "FORTUNA" 144
THE BACKSLIDER 164
THE MYSTERIOUS OCCURRENCE IN PICCADILLY 191
CARVALHO 207
PAUSODYNE 234
THE EMPRESS OF ANDORRA 255
THE SENIOR PROCTOR'S WOOING 278
THE CHILD OF THE PHALANSTERY 301
OUR SCIENTIFIC OBSERVATIONS ON A GHOST 321
RAM DAS OF CAWNPORE 341
_THE REVEREND JOHN CREEDY._
I.
"On Sunday next, the 14th inst., the Reverend John Creedy, B.A., of
Magdalen College, Oxford, will preach in Walton Magna Church, on behalf
of the Gold Coast Mission." Not a very startling announcement that, and
yet, simple as it looks, it stirred Ethel Berry's soul to its inmost
depths. For Ethel had been brought up by her Aunt Emily to look upon
foreign missions as the one thing on earth worth living for and thinking
about, and the Reverend John Creedy, B.A., had a missionary history of
his own, strange enough even in these strange days of queer
juxtapositions between utter savagery and advanced civilization.
"Only think," she said to her aunt, as they read the placard on the
schoolhouse-board, "he's a real African negro, the vicar says, taken
from a slaver on the Gold Coast when he was a child, and brought to
England to be educated. He's been to Oxford and got a degree; and now
he's going out again to Africa to convert his own people. And he's
coming down to the vicar's to stay on Wednesday."
"It's my belief," said old Uncle James, Aunt Emily's brother, the
superannuated skipper, "that he'd much better stop in England for ever.
I've been a good bit on the Coast myself in my time, after palm oil and
such, and my opinion is that a nigger's a nigger anywhere, but he's a
sight less of a nigger in England than out yonder in Africa. Take him to
England, and you make a gentleman of him: send him home again, and the
nigger comes out at once in spite of you."
"Oh, James," Aunt Emily put in, "how can you talk such unchristianlike
talk, setting yourself up against missions, when we know that all the
nations of the earth are made of one blood?"
"I've always lived a Christian life myself, Emily," answered Uncle
James, "though I have cruised a good bit on the Coast, too, which is
against it, certainly; but I take it a nigger's a nigger whatever you do
with him. The Ethiopian cannot change his skin, the Scripture says, nor
the leopard his spots, and a nigger he'll be to the end of his days; you
mark my words, Emily."
On Wednesday, in due course, the Reverend John Creedy arrived at the
vicarage, and much curiosity there was throughout the village of Walton
Magna that week to see this curious new thing, a coal-black parson. Next
day, Thursday, an almost equally unusual event occurred to Ethel Berry,
for, to her great surprise, she got a little note in the morning
inviting her up to a tennis party at the vicarage the same afternoon.
Now, though the vicar called on Aunt Emily often enough, and accepted
her help readily for school feasts and other village festivities of the
milder sort, the Berrys were hardly up to that level of society which is
commonly invited to the parson's lawn tennis parties. And the reason why
Ethel was asked on this particular Thursday must be traced to a certain
pious conspiracy between the vicar and the secretary of the Gold Coast
Evangelistic Society. When those two eminent missionary advocates had
met a fortnight before at Exeter Hall, the secretary had represented to
the vicar the desirability of young John Creedy's taking to himself an
English wife before his departure. "It will steady him, and keep him
right on the Coast," he said, "and it will give him importance in the
eyes of the natives as well." Whereto the vicar responded that he knew
exactly the right girl to suit the place in his own parish, and that by
a providential conjunction she already took a deep interest in foreign
missions. So these two good men conspired in all innocence of heart to
sell poor Ethel into African slavery; and the vicar had asked John
Creedy down to Walton Magna on purpose to meet her.
That afternoon Ethel put on her pretty sateen and her witching little
white hat, with two natural dog-roses pinned on one side, and went
pleased and proud up to the vicarage. The Reverend John Creedy was
there, not in full clerical costume, but arrayed in tennis flannels,
with only a loose white tie beneath his flap collar to mark his newly
acquired spiritual dignity. He was a comely looking negro enough,
full-blooded, but not too broad-faced nor painfully African in type; and
when he was playing tennis his athletic quick limbs and his really
handsome build took away greatly from the general impression of an
inferior race. His voice was of the ordinary Oxford type, open,
pleasant, and refined, with a certain easy-going air of natural
gentility, hardly marred by just the faintest tinge of the thick negro
blur in the broad vowels. When he talked to Ethel--and the vicar's wife
took good care that they should talk together a great deal--his
conversation was of a sort that she seldom heard at Walton Magna. It was
full of London and Oxford, of boat-races at Iffley and cricket matches
at Lord's; of people and books whose very names Ethel had never
heard--one of them was a Mr. Mill, she thought, and another a Mr.
Aristotle--but which she felt vaguely to be one step higher in the
intellectual scale than her own level. Then his friends, to whom he
alluded casually, not like one who airs his grand acquaintances, were
such very distinguished people. There was a real live lord, apparently,
at the same college with him, and he spoke of a young baronet whose
estate lay close by, as plain "Harrington of Christchurch," without any
"Sir Arthur"--a thing which even the vicar himself would hardly have
ventured to do. She knew that he was learned, too; as a matter of fact
he had taken a fair second class in Greats at Oxford; and he could talk
delightfully of poetry and novels. To say the truth, John Creedy, in
spite of his black face, dazzled poor Ethel, for he was more of a
scholar and a gentleman than anybody with whom she had ever before had
the chance of conversing on equal terms.
When Ethel turned the course of talk to Africa, the young parson was
equally eloquent and fascinating. He didn't care about leaving England
for many reasons, but he would be glad to do something for his poor
brethren. He was enthusiastic about missions; that was a common
interest; and he was so anxious to raise and improve the condition of
his fellow-negroes that Ethel couldn't help feeling what a noble thing
it was of him thus to sacrifice himself, cultivated gentleman as he was,
in an African jungle, for his heathen countrymen. Altogether, she went
home from the tennis-court that afternoon thoroughly overcome by John
Creedy's personality. She didn't for a moment think of falling in love
with him--a certain indescribable race-instinct set up an impassable
barrier against that--but she admired him and was interested in him in a
way that she had never yet felt with any other man.
As for John Creedy, he was naturally charmed with Ethel. In the first
place, he would have been charmed with any English girl who took so much
interest in himself and his plans, for, like all negroes, he was
frankly egotistical, and delighted to find a white lady who seemed to
treat him as a superior being. But in the second place, Ethel was really
a charming, simple English village lassie, with sweet little manners and
a delicious blush, who might have impressed a far less susceptible man
than the young negro parson. So, whatever Ethel felt, John Creedy felt
himself truly in love. And after all, John Creedy was in all essentials
an educated English gentleman, with the same chivalrous feelings towards
a pretty and attractive girl that every English gentleman ought to have.
On Sunday morning Aunt Emily and Ethel went to the parish church, and
the Reverend John Creedy preached the expected sermon. It was almost his
first--sounded like a trial trip, Uncle James muttered--but it was
undoubtedly what connoisseurs describe as an admirable discourse. John
Creedy was free from any tinge of nervousness--negroes never know what
that word means--and he spoke fervently, eloquently, and with much power
of manner about the necessity for a Gold Coast Mission. Perhaps there
was really nothing very original or striking in what he said, but his
way of saying it was impressive and vigorous. The negro, like many other
lower races, has the faculty of speech largely developed, and John
Creedy had been noted as one of the readiest and most fluent talkers at
the Oxford Union debates. When he enlarged upon the need for workers,
the need for help, the need for succour and sympathy in the great task
of evangelization, Aunt Emily and Ethel forgot his black hands,
stretched out open-palmed towards the people, and felt only their hearts
stirred within them by the eloquence and enthusiasm of that appealing
gesture.
The end of it all was, that instead of a week John Creedy stopped for
two months at Walton Magna, and during all that time he saw a great deal
of Ethel. Before the end of the first fortnight he walked out one
afternoon along the river-bank with her, and talked earnestly of his
expected mission.
"Miss Berry," he said, as they sat to rest awhile on the parapet of the
little bridge by the weeping willows, "I don't mind going to Africa, but
I can't bear going all alone. I am to have a station entirely by myself
up the Ancobra river, where I shall see no other Christian face from
year's end to year's end. I wish I could have had some one to accompany
me."
"You will be very lonely," Ethel answered. "I wish indeed you could have
some companionship."
"Do you really?" John Creedy went on. "It is not good for man to live
alone; he wants a helpmate. Oh, Miss Ethel, may I venture to hope that
perhaps, if I can try to deserve you, you will be mine?"
Ethel started in dismay. Mr. Creedy had been very attentive, very kind,
and she had liked to hear him talk and had encouraged his coming, but
she was hardly prepared for this. The nameless something in our blood
recoiled at it. The proposal stunned her, and she said nothing but "Oh,
Mr. Creedy, how can you say such a thing?"
John Creedy saw the shadow on her face, the unintentional dilatation of
her delicate nostrils, the faint puckering at the corner of her lips,
and knew with a negro's quick instinct of face-reading what it all
meant. "Oh, Miss Ethel," he said, with a touch of genuine bitterness in
his tone, "don't you, too, despise us. I won't ask you for any answer
now; I don't want an answer. But I want you to think it over. Do think
it over, and consider whether you can ever love me. I won't press the
matter on you. I won't insult you by importunity, but I will tell you
just this once, and once for all, what I feel. I love you, and I shall
always love you, whatever you answer me now. I know it would cost you a
wrench to take me, a greater wrench than to take the least and the
unworthiest of your own people. But if you can only get over that first
wrench, I can promise earnestly and faithfully to love you as well as
ever woman yet was loved. Don't say anything now," he went on, as he saw
she was going to open her mouth again: "wait and think it over; pray it
over; and if you can't see your way straight before you when I ask you
this day fortnight "yes or no," answer me "no," and I give you my word
of honour as a gentleman I will never speak to you of the matter again.
But I shall carry your picture written on my heart to my grave."
And Ethel knew that he was speaking from his very soul.
When she went home, she took Aunt Emily up into her little bedroom, over
the porch where the dog-roses grew, and told her all about it. Aunt
Emily cried and sobbed as if her heart would break, but she saw only one
answer from the first. "It is a gate opened to you, my darling," she
said: "I shall break my heart over it, Ethel, but it is a gate opened."
And though she felt that all the light would be gone out of her life if
Ethel went, she worked with her might from that moment forth to induce
Ethel to marry John Creedy and go to Africa. Poor soul, she acted
faithfully up to her lights.
As for Uncle James, he looked at the matter very differently. "Her
instinct is against it," he said stoutly, "and our instincts wasn't put
in our hearts for nothing. They're meant to be a guide and a light to us
in these dark questions. No white girl ought to marry a black man, even
if he _is_ a parson. It ain't natural: our instinct is again it. A white
man may marry a black woman if he likes: I don't say anything again him,
though I don't say I'd do it myself, not for any money. But a white
woman to marry a black man, why, it makes our blood rise, you know,
'specially if you've happened to have cruised worth speaking of along
the Coast."
But the vicar and the vicar's wife were charmed with the prospect of
success, and spoke seriously to Ethel about it. It was a call, they
thought, and Ethel oughtn't to disregard it. They had argued themselves
out of those wholesome race instincts that Uncle James so rightly
valued, and they were eager to argue Ethel out of them too. What could
the poor girl do? Her aunt and the vicar on the one hand, and John
Creedy on the other, were too much between them for her native feelings.
At the end of the fortnight John Creedy asked her his simple question
"yes or no," and half against her will she answered "yes." John Creedy
took her hand delicately in his and fervidly kissed the very tips of her
fingers; something within him told him he must not kiss her lips. She
started at the kiss, but she said nothing. John Creedy noticed the
start, and said within himself, "I shall so love and cherish her that I
will make her love me in spite of my black skin." For with all the
faults of his negro nature, John Creedy was at heart an earnest and
affectionate man, after his kind.
And Ethel really did, to some extent, love him already. It was such a
strange mixture of feeling. From one point of view he was a gentleman by
position, a clergyman, a man of learning and of piety; and from this
point of view Ethel was not only satisfied, but even proud of him. For
the rest, she took him as some good Catholics take the veil, from a
sense of the call. And so, before the two months were out, Ethel Berry
had married John Creedy, and both started together at once for
Southampton, on their way to Axim. Aunt Emily cried, and hoped they
might be blessed in their new work, but Uncle James never lost his
misgivings about the effect of Africa upon a born African. "Instincts is
a great thing," he said, with a shake of his head, as he saw the West
Coast mail steam slowly down Southampton Water, "and when he gets among
his own people his instincts will surely get the better of him, as safe
as my name is James Berry."
II.
The little mission bungalow at Butabue, a wooden shed neatly thatched
with fan palms, had been built and garnished by the native catechist
from Axim and his wife before the arrival of the missionaries, so that
Ethel found a habitable dwelling ready for her at the end of her long
boat journey up the rapid stream of the Ancobra. There the strangely
matched pair settled down quietly enough to their work of teaching and
catechizing, for the mission had already been started by the native
evangelist, and many of the people were fairly ready to hear and accept
the new religion. For the first ten or twelve months Ethel's letters
home were full of praise and love for dear John. Now that she had come
to know him well, she wondered she had ever feared to marry him. No
husband was ever so tender, so gentle, so considerate. He nursed her in
all her little ailments like a woman; she leaned on him as a wife leans
on the strong arm of her husband. And then he was so clever, so wise, so
learned. Her only grief was that she feared she was not and would never
be good enough for him. Yet it was well for her that they were living so
entirely away from all white society at Butabue, for there she had
nobody with whom to contrast John but the half-clad savages around them.
Judged by the light of that startling contrast, good John Creedy, with
his cultivated ways and gentle manners, seemed like an Englishman
indeed.
John Creedy, for his part, thought no less well of his Ethel. He was
tenderly respectful to her; more distant, perhaps, than is usual between
husband and wife, even in the first months of marriage, but that was due
to his innate delicacy of feeling, which made him half unconsciously
recognize the depth of the gulf that still divided them. He cherished
her like some saintly thing, too sacred for the common world. Yet Ethel
was his helper in all his work, so cheerful under the necessary
privations of their life, so ready to put up with bananas and cassava
balls, so apt at kneading plantain paste, so willing to learn from the
negro women all the mysteries of mixing agadey, cankey, and koko
pudding. No tropical heat seemed to put her out of temper; even the
horrible country fever itself she bore with such gentle resignation.
John Creedy felt in his heart of hearts that he would willingly give up
his life for her, and that it would be but a small sacrifice for so
sweet a creature.
One day, shortly after their arrival at Butabue, John Creedy began
talking in English to the catechist about the best way of setting to
work to learn the native language. He had left the country when he was
nine years old, he said, and had forgotten all about it. The catechist
answered him quickly in a Fantee phrase. John Creedy looked amazed and
started.
"What does he say?" asked Ethel.
"He says that I shall soon learn if only I listen; but the curious thing
is, Ethie, that I understand him."
"It has come back to you, John, that's all. You are so quick at
languages, and now you hear it again you remember it."
"Perhaps so," said the missionary, slowly, "but I have never recalled a
word of it for all these years. I wonder if it will all come back to
me."
"Of course it will, dear," said Ethel; "you know, things come to you so
easily in that way. You almost learned Portuguese while we were coming
out from hearing those Benguela people."
And so it did come back, sure enough. Before John Creedy had been six
weeks at Butabue, he could talk Fantee as fluently as any of the natives
around him. After all, he was nine years old when he was taken to
England, and it was no great wonder that he should recollect the
language he had heard in his childhood till that age. Still, he himself
noticed rather uneasily that every phrase and word, down to the very
heathen charms and prayers of his infancy, came back to him now with
startling vividness and without an effort.
Four months after their arrival John saw one day a tall and ugly negro
woman, in the scanty native dress, standing near the rude market-place
where the Butabue butchers killed and sold their reeking goat-meat.
Ethel saw him start again, and with a terrible foreboding in her heart,
she could not help asking him why he started. "I can't tell you, Ethie,"
he said, piteously; "for heaven's sake don't press me. I want to spare
you." But Ethel would hear. "Is it your mother, John?" she asked
hoarsely.
"No, thank heaven, not my mother, Ethie," he answered her, with
something like pallor on his dark cheek, "not my mother; but I remember
the woman."
"A relative?"
"Oh, Ethie, don't press me. Yes, my mother's sister. I remember her
years ago. Let us say no more about it." And Ethel, looking at that
gaunt and squalid savage woman, shuddered in her heart and said no more.
Slowly, as time went on, however, Ethel began to notice a strange shade
of change coming over John's ideas and remarks about the negroes. At
first he had been shocked and distressed at their heathendom and
savagery, but the more he saw of it the more he seemed to find it
natural enough in their position, and even in a sort of way to
sympathize with it or apologize for it. One morning, a month or two
later, he spoke to her voluntarily of his father. He had never done so
in England. "I can remember," he said, "he was a chief, a great chief.
He had many wives, and my mother was one. He was beaten in War by Kola,
and I was taken prisoner. But he had a fine palace at Kwantah, and many
fan-bearers." Ethel observed with a faint terror that he seemed to speak
with pride and complacency of his father's chieftaincy. She shuddered
again and wondered. Was the West African instinct getting the upper hand
in him over the Christian gentleman?
When the dries were over, and the koko-harvest gathered, the negroes
held a grand feast. John had preached in the open air to some of the
market people in the morning, and in the evening he was sitting in the
hut with Ethel, waiting till the catechist and his wife should come in
to prayers, for they carried out their accustomed ceremony decorously,
even there, every night and morning. Suddenly they heard the din of
savage music out of doors, and the noise of a great crowd laughing and
shouting down the street. John listened, and listened with deepening
attention. "Don't you hear it, Ethie?" he cried. "It's the tom-toms. I
know what it means. It's the harvest battle-feast!"
"How hideous!" said Ethel, shrinking back.
"Don't be afraid, dearest," John said, smiling at her. "It means no
harm. It's only the people amusing themselves." And he began to keep
time to the tom-toms rapidly with the palms of his hands.
The din drew nearer, and John grew more evidently excited at every step.
"Don't you hear, Ethie?" he said again. "It's the Salonga. What
inspiriting music! It's like a drum and fife band; it's like the
bagpipes; it's like a military march. By Jove, it compels one to dance!"
And he got up as he spoke, in English clerical dress (for he wore
clerical dress even at Butabue), and began capering in a sort of
hornpipe round the tiny room.
"Oh, John, don't," cried Ethel. "Suppose the catechist were to come in!"
But John's blood was up. "Look here," he said excitedly, "it goes like
this. Here you hold your matchlock out; here you fire; here you charge
with cutlasses; here you hack them down before you; here you hold up
your enemy's head in your hands, and here you kick it off among the
women. Oh, it's grand!" There was a terrible light in his black eyes as
he spoke, and a terrible trembling in his clenched black hands.
"John," cried Ethel, in an agony of horror, "it isn't Christian, it
isn't human, it isn't worthy of you. I can never, never love you if you
do such a thing again."
In a moment John's face changed and his hand fell as if she had stabbed
him. "Ethie," he said in a low voice, creeping back to her like a
whipped spaniel, "Ethie, my darling, my own soul, my beloved; what have
I done! Oh, heavens, I will never listen to the accursed thing again.
Oh, Ethie, for heaven's sake, for mercy's sake, forgive me!"
Ethel laid her hand, trembling, on his head. John sank upon his knees
before her, and bowed himself down with his head between his arms, like
one staggered and penitent. Ethel lifted him gently, and at that moment
the catechist and his wife came in. John stood up firmly, took down his
Bible and Prayer-book, and read through evening prayer at once in his
usual impressive tone. In one moment he had changed back again from the
Fantee savage to the decorous Oxford clergyman.
It was only a week later that Ethel, hunting about in the little
storeroom, happened to notice a stout wooden box carefully covered up.
She opened the lid with some difficulty, for it was fastened down with a
native lock, and to her horror she found inside it a surreptitious keg
of raw negro rum. She took the keg out, put it conspicuously in the
midst of the storeroom, and said nothing. That night she heard John in
the jungle behind the yard, and looking out, she saw dimly that he was
hacking the keg to pieces vehemently with an axe. After that he was even
kinder and tenderer to her than usual for the next week, but Ethel
vaguely remembered that once or twice before, he had seemed a little odd
in his manner, and that it was on those days that she had seen gleams of
the savage nature peeping through. Perhaps, she thought, with a shiver,
his civilization was only a veneer, and a glass of raw rum or so was
enough to wash it off.
Twelve months after their first arrival, Ethel came home very feverish
one evening from her girls' school, and found John gone from the hut.
Searching about in the room for the quinine bottle, she came once more
upon a rum-keg, and this time it was empty. A nameless terror drove her
into the little bedroom. There, on the bed, torn into a hundred shreds,
lay John Creedy's black coat and European clothing. The room whirled
around her, and though she had never heard of such a thing before, the
terrible truth flashed across her bewildered mind like a hideous dream.
She went out, alone, at night, as she had never done before since she
came to Africa, into the broad lane between the huts which constituted
the chief street of Butabue. So far away from home, so utterly solitary
among all those black faces, so sick at heart with that burning and
devouring horror! She reeled and staggered down the street, not knowing
how or where she went, till at the end, beneath the two tall date-palms,
she saw lights flashing and heard the noise of shouts and laughter. A
group of natives, men and women together, were dancing and howling round
a dancing and howling negro. The central figure was dressed in the
native fashion, with arms and legs bare, and he was shouting a loud song
at the top of his voice in the Fantee language, while he shook a
tom-tom. There was a huskiness as of drink in his throat, and his steps
were unsteady and doubtful. Great heavens! could that reeling, shrieking
black savage be John Creedy?
Yes, instinct had gained the day over civilization; the savage in John
Creedy had broken out; he had torn up his English clothes and, in West
African parlance, "had gone Fantee." Ethel gazed at him, white with
horror--stood still and gazed, and never cried nor fainted, nor said a
word. The crowd of negroes divided to right and left, and John Creedy
saw his wife standing there like a marble figure. With one awful cry he
came to himself again, and rushed to her side. She did not repel him, as
he expected; she did not speak; she was mute and cold like a corpse, not
like a living woman. He took her up in his strong arms, laid her head on
his shoulder, and carried her home through the long line of thatched
huts, erect and steady as when he first walked up the aisle of Walton
Magna church. Then he laid her down gently on the bed, and called the
wife of the catechist. "She has the fever," he said in Fantee. "Sit by
her."
The catechist's wife looked at her, and said, "Yes; the yellow fever."
And so she had. Even before she saw John the fever had been upon her,
and that awful revelation had brought it out suddenly in full force. She
lay unconscious upon the bed, her eyes open, staring ghastlily, but not
a trace of colour in her cheek nor a sign of life upon her face.
John Creedy wrote a few words on a piece of paper, which he folded in
his hand, gave a few directions in Fantee to the woman at the bedside,
and then hurried out like one on fire into the darkness outside.
III.
It was thirty miles through the jungle, by a native trackway, to the
nearest mission station at Effuenta. There were two Methodist
missionaries stationed there, John Creedy knew, for he had gone round by
boat more than once to see them. When he first came to Africa he could
no more have found his way across the neck of the river fork by that
tangled jungle track than he could have flown bodily over the top of the
cocoa palms; but now, half naked, barefooted, and inspired with an
overpowering emotion, he threaded his path through the darkness among
the creepers and lianas of the forest in true African fashion. Stooping
here, creeping on all fours there, running in the open at full speed
anon, he never once stopped to draw breath till he had covered the whole
thirty miles, and knocked in the early dawn at the door of the mission
hut at Effuenta.
One of the missionaries opened the barred door cautiously. "What do you
want?" he asked in Fantee of the bare-legged savage, who stood crouching
by the threshold.
"I bring a message from Missionary John Creedy," the bare-legged savage
answered, also in Fantee. "He wants European clothes."
"Has he sent a letter?" asked the missionary.
John Creedy took the folded piece of paper from his palm. The missionary
read it. It told him in a few words how the Butabue people had pillaged
John's hut at night and stolen his clothing, and how he could not go
outside his door till he got some European dress again.
"This is strange," said the missionary. "Brother Felton died three days
ago of the fever. You can take his clothes to Brother Creedy, if you
will."
The bare-limbed savage nodded acquiescence. The missionary looked hard
at him, and fancied he had seen his face before, but he never even for a
moment suspected that he was speaking to John Creedy himself.
A bundle was soon made of dead Brother Felton's clothes, and the
bare-limbed man took it in his arms and prepared to run back again the
whole way to Butabue.
"You have had nothing to eat," said the lonely missionary. "Won't you
take something to help you on your way?"
"Give me some plantain paste," answered John Creedy. "I can eat it as I
go." And when they gave it him he forgot himself for the moment, and
answered, "Thank you" in English. The missionary stared, but thought it
was only a single phrase that he had picked up at Butabue, and that he
was anxious, negro-fashion, to air his knowledge.
Back through the jungle, with the bundle in his arms, John Creedy wormed
his way once more, like a snake or a tiger, never pausing or halting on
the road till he found himself again in the open space outside the
village of Butabue. There he stayed awhile, and behind a clump of wild
ginger, he opened the bundle and arrayed himself once more from head to
foot in English clerical dress. That done, too proud to slink, he walked
bold and erect down the main alley, and quietly entered his own hut. It
was high noon, the baking high noon of Africa, as he did so.
Ethel lay unconscious still upon the bed. The negro woman crouched, half
asleep after her night's watching, at the foot. John Creedy looked at
his watch, which stood hard by on the little wooden table. "Sixty miles
in fourteen hours," he said aloud. "Better time by a great deal than
when we walked from Oxford to the White Horse, eighteen months since."
And then he sat down silently by Ethel's bedside.
"Has she moved her eyes?" he asked the negress.
"Never, John Creedy," answered the woman. Till last night she had always
called him "Master."
He watched the lifeless face for an hour or two. There was no change in
it till about four o'clock; then Ethel's eyes began to alter their
expression. He saw the dilated pupils contract a little, and knew that
consciousness was gradually returning.
In a moment more she looked round at him and gave a little cry. "John,"
she exclaimed, with a sort of awakening hopefulness in her voice, "where
on earth did you get those clothes?"
"These clothes?" he answered softly. "Why, you must be wandering in
your mind, Ethie dearest, to ask such a question now. At Standen's, in
the High at Oxford, my darling." And he passed his black hand gently
across her loose hair.
Ethel gave a great cry of joy. "Then it was a dream, a horrid dream,
John, or a terrible mistake? Oh, John, say it was a dream!"
John drew his hand across his forehead slowly. "Ethie darling," he said,
"you are wandering, I'm afraid. You have a bad fever. I don't know what
you mean."
"Then you didn't tear them up, and wear a Fantee dress, and dance with a
tom-tom down the street? Oh, John!"
"Oh, Ethel! No. What a terrible delirium you must have had!"
"It is all well," she said. "I don't mind if I die now." And she sank
back exhausted into a sort of feverish sleep.
"John Creedy," said the black catechist's wife solemnly, in Fantee, "you
will have to answer for that lie to a dying woman with your soul!"
"_My_ soul!" cried John Creedy passionately, smiting both breasts with
his clenched fists. "_My_ soul! Do you think, you negro wench, I
wouldn't give my poor, miserable, black soul to eternal torments a
thousand times over, if only I could give her little white heart one
moment's forgetfulness before she dies?"
For five days longer Ethel lingered in the burning fever, sometimes
conscious for a minute or two, but for the most part delirious or drowsy
all the time. She never said another word to John about her terrible
dream, and John never said another word to her. But he sat by her side
and tended her like a woman, doing everything that was possible for her
in the bare little hut, and devouring his full heart with a horrible
gnawing remorse too deep for pen or tongue to probe and fathom. For
civilization with John Creedy was really at bottom far more than a mere
veneer; though the savage instincts might break out with him now and
again, such outbursts no more affected his adult and acquired nature
than a single bump supper or wine party at college affects the nature of
many a gentle-minded English lad. The truest John Creedy of all was the
gentle, tender, English clergyman.
As he sat by her bedside sleepless and agonized, night and day for five
days together, one prayer only rose to his lips time after time: "Heaven
grant she may die!" He had depth enough in the civilized side of his
soul to feel that that was the only way to save her from a lifelong
shame. "If she gets well," he said to himself, trembling, "I will leave
this accursed Africa at once. I will work my way back to England as a
common sailor, and send her home by the mail with my remaining money. I
will never inflict my presence upon her again, for she cannot be
persuaded, if once she recovers, that she did not see me, as she did see
me, a bare-limbed heathen Fantee brandishing a devilish tom-tom. But I
shall get work in England--not a parson's; that I can never be
again--but clerk's work, labourer's work, navvy's work, anything! Look
at my arms: I rowed five in the Magdalen eight: I could hold a spade as
well as any man. I will toil, and slave, and save, and keep her still
like a lady, if I starve for it myself, but she shall never see my face
again, if once she recovers. Even then it will be a living death for
her, poor angel! There is only one hope--Heaven grant she may die!"
On the fifth day she opened her eyes once. John saw that his prayer was
about to be fulfilled. "John," she said feebly--"John, tell me, on your
honour, it was only my delirium."
And John, raising his hand to heaven, _splendide mendax_, answered in a
firm voice, "I swear it."
Ethel smiled and shut her eyes. It was for the last time.
Next morning, John Creedy--tearless, but parched and dry in the mouth,
like one stunned and unmanned--took a pickaxe and hewed out a rude grave
in the loose soil near the river. Then he fashioned a rough coffin from
twisted canes with his own hands, and in it he reverently placed the
sacred body. He allowed no one to help him or come near him--not even
his fellow-Christians, the catechist and his wife: Ethel was too holy a
thing for their African hands to touch. Next he put on his white
surplice, and for the first and only time in his life he read, without a
quaver in his voice, the Church of England burial service over the open
grave. And when he had finished he went back to his desolate hut, and
cried with a loud voice of utter despair, "The one thing that bound me
to civilization is gone. Henceforth I shall never speak another word of
English. I go to my own people." So saying, he solemnly tore up his
European clothes once more, bound a cotton loin-cloth round his waist,
covered his head with dirt, and sat fasting and wailing piteously, like
a broken-hearted child, in his cabin.
* * * * *
Nowadays, the old half-caste Portuguese rum-dealer at Butabue can point
out to any English pioneer who comes up the river which one, among a
crowd of dilapidated negroes who lie basking in the soft dust outside
his hut, was once the Reverend John Creedy, B.A., of Magdalen College,
Oxford.
_DR. GREATREX'S ENGAGEMENT._
Everybody knows by name at least the celebrated Dr. Greatrex, the
discoverer of that abstruse molecular theory of the interrelations of
forces and energies. He is a comparatively young man still, as times go,
for a person of such scientific distinction, for he is now barely forty;
but to look at his tall, spare, earnest figure, and his clear-cut,
delicate, intellectual face, you would scarcely imagine that he had once
been the hero of a singularly strange and romantic story. Yet there have
been few lives more romantic than Arthur Greatrex's, and few histories
stranger in their way than this of his engagement. After all, why should
not a scientific light have a romance of his own as well as other
people?
Fifteen years ago Arthur Greatrex, then a young Cambridge fellow, had
just come up to begin his medical studies at a London hospital. He was
tall in those days, of course, but not nearly so slender or so pale as
now; for he had rowed seven in his college boat, and was a fine,
athletic young man of the true English university pattern. Handsome,
too, then and always, but with a more human-looking and ordinary
handsomeness when he was young than in these latter times of his
scientific eminence. Indeed, any one who met Arthur Greatrex at that
time would merely have noticed him as a fine, intelligent young English
gentleman, with a marked taste for manly sports, and a decided opinion
of his own about most passing matters of public interest.
Already, even in those days, the young medical student was very deeply
engaged in recondite speculations on the question of energy. His active
mind, always dwelling upon wide points of cosmical significance, had hit
upon the germ of that great revolutionary idea which was afterwards to
change the whole course of modern physics. But, as often happens with
young men of twenty-five, there was another subject which divided his
attention with the grand theory of his life: and that subject was the
pretty daughter of his friend and instructor, Dr. Abury, the eminent
authority on the treatment of the insane. In all London you couldn't
have found a sweeter or prettier girl than Hetty Abury. Young Greatrex
thought her clever, too; and, though that is perhaps saying rather too
much, she was certainly a good deal above the average of ordinary London
girls in intellect and accomplishments.
"They say, Arthur," she said to him on the day after their formal
engagement, "that the course of true love never did run smooth; and yet
it seems somehow as if ours was wonderfully smoothed over for us by
everybody and everything. I am the happiest and proudest girl in all the
world to have won the love of such a man as you for my future husband."
Arthur Greatrex stroked the back of her white little hand with his, and
answered gently, "I hope nothing will ever arise to make the course of
our love run any the rougher; for certainly we do seem to have every
happiness laid out most temptingly before us. It almost feels to me as
if my paradise had been too easily won, and I ought to have something
harder to do before I enter it."
"Don't say that, Arthur," Hetty put in hastily. "It sounds too much like
an evil omen."
"You superstitious little woman!" the young doctor replied with a
smile. "Talking to a scientific man about signs and portents!" And he
kissed her wee hand tenderly, and went home to his bachelor lodging with
that strange exhilaration in heart and step which only the ecstasy of
first love can ever bring one.
"No," he thought to himself, as he sat down in his own easy-chair, and
lighted his cigar; "I don't believe any cloud can ever arise between me
and Hetty. We have everything in our favour--means to live upon, love
for one another, a mutual respect, kind relations, and hearts that were
meant by nature each for the other. Hetty is certainly the very sweetest
little girl that ever lived; and she's as good as she's sweet, and as
loving as she's beautiful. What a dreadful thing it is for a man in love
to have to read up medicine for his next examination!" and he took a
medical book down from the shelf with a sigh, and pretended to be deeply
interested in the diagnosis of scarlet fever till his cigar was
finished. But, if the truth must be told, the words really swam before
him, and all the letters on the page apparently conspired together to
make up but a single name a thousand times over--Hetty, Hetty, Hetty,
Hetty. At last he laid the volume down as hopeless, and turned dreamily
into his bedroom, only to lie awake half the night and think perpetually
on that one theme of Hetty.
Next day was Dr. Abury's weekly lecture on diseases of the brain and
nervous system; and Arthur Greatrex, convinced that he really must make
an effort, went to hear it. The subject was one that always interested
him; and partly by dint of mental attention, partly out of sheer desire
to master the matter, he managed to hear it through, and even take in
the greater part of its import. As he left the room to go down the
hospital stairs, he had his mind fairly distracted between the
premonitory symptoms of insanity and Hetty Abury. "Was there ever such
an unfortunate profession as medicine for a man in love?" he asked
himself, half angrily. "Why didn't I go and be a parson or a barrister,
or anything else that would have kept me from mixing up such incongruous
associations? And yet, when one comes to think of it, too, there's no
particular natural connection after all between 'Chitty on Contract' and
dearest Hetty."
Musing thus, he turned to walk down the great central staircase of the
hospital. As he did so, his attention was attracted for a moment by a
singular person who was descending the opposite stair towards the same
landing. This person was tall and not ill-looking; but, as he came down
the steps, he kept pursing up his mouth and cheeks into the most
extraordinary and hideous grimaces; in fact, he was obviously making
insulting faces at Arthur Greatrex. Arthur was so much preoccupied at
the moment, however, that he hardly had time to notice the eccentric
stranger; and, as he took him for one of the harmless lunatic patients
in the mental-diseases ward, he would have passed on without further
observing the man but for an odd circumstance which occurred as they
both reached the great central landing together. Arthur happened to drop
the book he was carrying from under his arm, and instinctively stooped
to pick it up. At the same moment the grimacing stranger dropped his own
book also, not in imitation, but by obvious coincidence, and stooped to
pick it up with the self-same gesture. Struck by the oddity of the
situation, Arthur turned to look at the curious patient. To his utter
horror and surprise, he discovered that the man he had been observing
was his own reflection.
In one second the real state of the case flashed like lightning across
his bewildered brain. There was no opposite staircase, as he knew very
well, for he had been down those steps a hundred times before: nothing
but a big mirror, which reflected and doubled the one-sided flight from
top to bottom. It was only his momentary preoccupation which had made
him for a minute fall into the obvious delusion. The man whom he saw
descending towards him was really himself, Arthur Greatrex.
Even so, he did not at once grasp the full strangeness of the scene he
had just witnessed. It was only as he turned to descend again that he
caught another glimpse of himself in the big mirror, and saw that he was
still making the most horrible and ghastliest grimaces--grimaces such as
he had never seen equalled save by the monkeys at the Zoo, and
(horridest thought of all!) by the worst patients in the mental-disease
ward. He pulled himself up in speechless horror, and looked once more
into the big mirror. Yes, there was positively no mistaking the fact: it
was he, Arthur Greatrex, fellow of Catherine's, who was making these
hideous and meaningless distortions of his own countenance.
With a terrible effort of will he pulled his face quite straight again,
and assumed his usual grave and quiet demeanour. For a full minute he
stood looking at himself in the glass; and then, fearful that some one
else would come and surprise him, he hurried down the remaining steps,
and rushed out into the streets of London. Which way he turned he did
not know or care; all he knew was that he was repressing by sheer force
of muscular strain a deadly impulse to pucker up his mouth and draw down
the corners of his lips into one-sided grimaces. As he passed down the
streets, he watched his own image faintly reflected in the panes of the
windows, and saw that he was maintaining outward decorum, but only with
a conscious and evident struggle. At one doorstep a little child was
playing with a kitten; Arthur Greatrex, who was a naturally kindly man,
looked down at her and smiled, in spite of his preoccupation: instead of
smiling back, the child uttered a scream of terror, and rushed back into
the house to hide her face in her mother's apron. He felt instinctively
that, in place of smiling, he had looked at the child with one of his
awful faces. It was horrible, unendurable, and he walked on through the
streets and across the bridges, pulling himself together all the time,
till at last, half-unconsciously, he found himself near Pimlico, where
the Aburys were then living.
Looking around him, he saw that he had come nearly to the corner where
Hetty's little drawing-room faced the road. The accustomed place seemed
to draw him off for a moment from thinking of himself, and he remembered
that he had promised Hetty to come in for luncheon. But dare he go in
such a state of mind and body as he then found himself in? Well, Hetty
would be expecting him; Hetty would be disappointed if he didn't come;
he certainly mustn't break his engagement with dear little Hetty. After
all, he began to say to himself, what was it but a mere twitching of his
face, probably a slight nervous affection? Young doctors are always
nervous about themselves, they say; they find all their own symptoms
accurately described in all the text-books. His face wasn't twitching
now, of that he was certain; the nearer he got to Hetty's, the calmer he
grew, and the more he was conscious he could relax his attention without
finding his muscles were playing tricks upon him. He would turn in and
have luncheon, and soon forgot all about it.
Hetty saw him coming, and ran lightly to open the door for him, and as
he took his seat beside her at the table, he forgot straightway his
whole trouble, and found himself at once in Paradise once more. All
through lunch they talked about other things--happy plans for the
future, and the small prettinesses that lovers find so perennially
delightful; and long before Arthur went away the twitching in his face
had altogether ceased to trouble him. Once or twice, indeed, in the
course of the afternoon he happened to glance casually at the
looking-glass above the drawing-room fireplace (those were the
pre-Morrisian days when overmantels as yet were not), and he saw to his
great comfort that his face was resting in its usual handsome repose and
peacefulness. A bright, earnest, strong face it was, with all the
promise of greatness already in it; and so Hetty thought as she looked
up at it from the low footstool where she sat by his side, and half
whispered into his ear the little timid confidences of early betrothal.
Five o'clock tea came all too soon, and then Arthur felt he must really
be going and must get home to do a little reading. On his way, he
fancied once he saw a street boy start in evident surprise as he
approached him, but it might be fancy; and when the street boy stuck his
tongue into the corner of his cheek and uttered derisive shouts from a
safe distance, Arthur concluded he was only doing after the manner of
his kind out of pure gratuitous insolence. He went home to his lodgings
and sat down to an hour's work; but after he had read up several pages
more of "Stuckey on Gout," he laid down the book in disgust, and took
out Helmholtz and Joule instead, indulging himself with a little
desultory reading in his favourite study of the higher physics.
As he read and read the theory of correlation, the great idea as to the
real nature of energy, which had escaped all these learned physicists,
and which was then slowly forming itself in his own mind, grew gradually
clearer and clearer still before his mental vision. Helmholtz was wrong
here, because he had not thoroughly appreciated the disjunctive nature
of electric energy; Joule was wrong here, because he had failed to
understand the real antithesis between potential and kinetic. He laid
down the books, paced up and down the room thoughtfully, and beheld the
whole concrete theory of interrelation embodying itself visibly before
his very eyes. At last he grew fired with the stupendous grandeur of his
own conception, seized a quire of foolscap, and sat down eagerly at the
table to give written form to the splendid phantom that was floating
before him in so distinct a fashion. He would make a great name, for
Hetty's sake; and, when he had made it, his dearest reward would be to
know that Hetty was proud of him.
Hour after hour he sat and wrote, as if inspired, at his little table.
The landlady knocked at the door to tell him dinner was ready, but he
would have none of it, he said; let her bring him up a good cup of
strong tea and a few plain biscuits. So he wrote and wrote in feverish
haste, drinking cup after cup of tea, and turning off page after page of
foolscap, till long past midnight. The whole theory had come up so
distinctly before his mind's eye, under the exceptional exaltation of
first love, and the powerful stimulus of the day's excitement, that he
wrote it off as though he had it by heart; omitting only the
mathematical calculations, which he left blank, not because he had not
got them clearly in his head, but because he would not stop his flying
pen to copy them all out then and there at full length, for fear of
losing the main thread of his argument. When he had finished, about
forty sheets of foolscap lay huddled together on the table before him,
written in a hasty hand, and scarcely legible; but they contained the
first rough draft and central principle of that immortal work, the
"Transcendental Dynamics."
Arthur Greatrex rose from the table, where his grand discovery was first
formulated, well satisfied with himself and his theory, and fully
determined to submit it shortly to the critical judgment of the Royal
Society. As he took up his bedroom candle, however, he went over to the
mantelpiece to kiss Hetty's photograph, as he always did (for even men
of science are human) every evening before retiring. He lifted the
portrait reverently to his lips, and was just about to kiss it, when
suddenly in the mirror before him he saw the same horrible mocking face
which had greeted him so unexpectedly that morning on the hospital
staircase. It was a face of inhuman devilry; the face of a mediaeval
demon, a hideous, grinning, distorted ghoul, a very caricature and
insult upon the features of humanity. In his dismay he dropped the frame
and the photograph, shivering the glass that covered it into a thousand
atoms. Summoning up all his resolution, he looked again. Yes, there was
no mistaking it: a face was gibing and jeering at him from the mirror
with diabolical ingenuity of distorted hideousness; a disgusting face
which even the direct evidence of his senses would scarcely permit him
to believe was really the reflection of his own features. It was
overpowering, it was awful, it was wholly incredible; and, utterly
unmanned by the sight, he sank back into his easy-chair and buried his
face bitterly between the shelter of his trembling hands.
At that moment Arthur Greatrex felt sure he knew the real meaning of the
horror that surrounded him. He was going mad.
For ten minutes or more he sat there motionless, hot tears boiling up
from his eyes and falling silently between his fingers. Then at last he
rose nervously from his seat, and reached down a volume from the shelf
behind him. It was Prang's "Treatise on the Physiology of the Brain." He
turned it over hurriedly for a few pages, till he came to the passage he
was looking for.
"Ah, I thought so," he said to himself, half aloud: "'Premonitory
symptoms: facial distortions; infirmity of the will; inability to
distinguish muscular movements.' Let's see what Prang has to say about
it. 'A not uncommon concomitant of these early stages'--Great heavens,
how calmly the man talks about losing your reason!-'is an unconscious or
semi-conscious tendency to produce a series of extraordinary facial
distortions. At times, the sufferer is not aware of the movements thus
initiated; at other times they are quite voluntary, and are accompanied
by bodily gestures of contempt or derision for passing strangers.' Why,
that's what must have happened with that boy this morning! 'Symptoms of
this character usually result from excessive activity of the brain, and
are most frequent among mathematicians or scholars who have overworked
their intellectual faculties. They may be regarded as the immediate
precursors of acute dementia.' Acute dementia! Oh, Hetty! Oh, heavens!
What have I done to deserve such a blow as this?"
He laid his face between his hands once more, and sobbed like a
broken-hearted child for a few minutes. Then he turned accidentally
towards his tumbled manuscript. "No, no," he said to himself,
reassuringly; "I can't be going mad. My brain was never clearer in my
life. I couldn't have done a piece of good work like that, bristling
with equations and figures and formulas, if my head was really giving
way. I seemed to grasp the subject as I never grasped it in my life
before. I never worked so well at Cambridge; this is a discovery, a
genuine discovery. It's impossible that a man who was going mad could
ever see anything so visibly and distinctly as I see that universal
principle. Let's look again at what Prang has to say upon that subject."
He turned over the volume a few pages further, and glanced lightly at
the contents at the head of each chapter, till at last a few words in
the title struck his eye, and he hurried on to the paragraph they
indicated, with feverish eagerness. As he did so, these were the words
which met his bewildered gaze.
"In certain cases, especially among men of unusual intelligence and high
attainments, the exaltation of incipient madness takes rather the guise
of a scientific or philosophic enthusiasm. Instead of imagining himself
the possessor of untold wealth, or the absolute despot of a servile
people, the patient deludes himself with the belief that he has made a
great discovery or lighted upon a splendid generalization of the deepest
and most universal importance. He sees new truths crowding upon him
with the most startling and vivid objectivity. He perceives intimate
relations of things which he never before suspected. He destroys at one
blow the Newtonian theory of gravitation; he discovers obvious flaws in
the nebular hypothesis of Laplace; he gives a scholar's-mate to Kant in
the very fundamental points of the 'Critique of Pure Reason.' The more
serious the attack, the more utterly convinced is the patient of the
exceptional clearness of his own intelligence at that particular moment.
He writes pamphlets whose scientific value he ridiculously
over-estimates; and he is sure to be very angry with any one who tries
rationally to combat his newly found authority. Mathematical reasoners
are specially liable to this form of incipient mental disease, which,
when combined with the facial distortions already alluded to in a
previous section, is peculiarly apt to terminate in acute dementia."
"Acute dementia again!" Arthur Greatrex cried with a gesture of horror,
flinging the book from him as if it were a poisonous serpent. "Acute
dementia, acute dementia, acute dementia; nothing but acute dementia
ahead of me, whichever way I happen to turn. Oh, this is too horrible! I
shall never be able to marry Hetty! And yet I shall never be able to
break it to Hetty! Great heavens, that such a phantom as this should
have risen between me and paradise only since this very morning!"
In his agony he caught up the papers on which he had written the rough
draft of his grand discovery, and crumpled them up fiercely in his
fingers. "The cursed things!" he groaned between his teeth, tossing them
with a gesture of impatient disgust into the waste-paper basket; "how
could I ever have deluded myself into thinking I had hit off-hand upon a
grand truth which had escaped such men as Helmholtz, and Mayer, and
Joule, and Thomson! The thing's preposterous upon the very face of it; I
must be going mad, indeed, ever to have dreamt of it!"
He took up his candle once more, kissed the portrait in the broken frame
with intense fervour a dozen times over, and then went up gloomily into
his own bedroom. There he did not attempt to undress, but merely pulled
off his boots, lay down in his clothes upon the bed, and hastily blew
out the candle. For a long time he lay tossing and turning in
unspeakable terror; but at last, after perhaps two hours or so, he fell
into a troubled sleep, and dreamed a hideous nightmare, in which
somebody or other in shadowy outlines was trying perpetually to tear him
away by main force from poor pale and weeping Hetty.
It was daylight when Arthur woke again, and he lay for some time upon
his bed, thinking over his last night's scare, which seemed much less
serious, as such things always do, now that the sun had risen upon it.
After a while his mind got round to the energy question; and, as he
thought it over once more, the conviction forced itself afresh upon him
that he was right upon the matter after all, and that if he was going
mad there was at least method in his madness. So firmly was he convinced
upon this point now (though he recognized that that very certainty might
be merely a symptom of his coming malady) that he got up hurriedly,
before the lodging-house servant came to clean up his little
sitting-room, so as to rescue his crumpled foolscap from the waste-paper
basket. After that, a bath and breakfast almost made him laugh at his
evening terrors.
All the morning Arthur Greatrex sat down at his table again, working in
the algebraical calculations which he had omitted from his paper
overnight, and finishing it in full form as if for presentation to a
learned society. But he did not mean now to offer it to any society: he
had a far deeper and more personal interest in the matter at present
than that. He wanted to settle first of all the question whether he was
going mad or not. Afterwards, there would be plenty of time to settle
such minor theoretical problems as the general physical constitution of
the universe.
As soon as he had finished his calculations he took the paper in his
hands, and went out with it to make two calls on scientific
acquaintances. The first man he called upon was that distinguished
specialist, Professor Linklight, one of the greatest authorities of his
own day on all questions of molecular physics. Poor man! he is almost
forgotten now, for he died ten years ago; and his scientific reputation
was, after all, of that flashy sort which bases itself chiefly upon
giving good dinners to leading fellows of the Royal Society. But fifteen
years ago Professor Linklight, with his cut-and-dried dogmatic notions,
and his narrow technical accuracy, was universally considered the
principal physical philosopher in all England. To him, then, Arthur
Greatrex--a far deeper and clearer thinker--took in all humility the
first manuscript of his marvellous discovery; not to ask him whether it
was true or not, but to find out whether it was physical science at all
or pure insanity. The professor received him kindly; and when Arthur,
who had of course his own reasons for attempting a little modest
concealment, asked him to look over a friend's paper for him, with a
view to its presentation to the Royal Society, he cheerfully promised to
do his best. "Though you will admit, my dear Mr. Greatrex," he said with
his blandest smile, "that your friend's manuscript certainly does not
err on the side of excessive brevity." From Linklight's, Arthur walked
on tremulously to the house of another great scientific magnate, Dr.
Warminster, of being the first living authority on the treatment of the
insane in the United Kingdom. Before Dr. Warminster, Arthur made no
attempt to conceal his apprehensions. He told out all his symptoms and
fears without reserve, even exaggerating them a little, as a man is
prone to do through over-anxiety not to put too favourable a face upon
his own ailments. Dr. Warminster listened attentively and with a
gathering interest to all that Arthur told him, and at the end of his
account he shook his head gloomily, and answered in a very grave and
sympathetic tone.
"My dear Greatrex," he said gently, holding his arm with a kindly
pressure, "I should be dealing wrongly with you if I did not candidly
tell you that your case gives ground for very serious apprehensions. You
are a young man, and with steady attention to curative means and
surroundings, it is possible that you may ward off this threatened
danger. Society, amusement, relaxation, complete cessation of scientific
work, absence, as far as possible, of mental anxiety in any form, may
enable you to tide over the turning point. But that there is danger
threatened, it would be unkind and untrue not to warn you. It is very
unusual for a patient to consult us in person about these matters. More
often it is the friends who notice the coming change; but, as you ask me
directly for an opinion, I can't help telling you that I regard your
case as not without real cause for the strictest care and for a
preventive regimen."
Arthur thanked him for the numerous directions he gave as to things
which should be done or things which should be avoided, and hurried out
into the street with his brain swimming and reeling. "Absence of mental
anxiety!" he said to himself bitterly. "How calmly they talk about
mental anxiety! How can I possibly be free from anxiety when I know I
may go mad at any moment, and that the blow would kill Hetty outright?
For myself, I should not care a farthing; but for Hetty! It is too
terrible."
He had not the heart to call at the Aburys' that afternoon, though he
had promised to do so; and he tortured himself with the thought that
Hetty would think him neglectful. He could not call again while the
present suspense lasted; and if his worst fears were confirmed he could
never call again, except once, to take leave of Hetty for ever. For,
deeply as Arthur Greatrex loved her, he loved her too well ever to dream
of marrying her if the possible shadow of madness was to cloud her
future life with its perpetual presence. Better she should bear the
shock, even if it killed her at once, than that both should live in
ceaseless apprehension of that horrible possibility, and should become
the parents of children upon whom that hereditary curse might rest for a
lifetime, reflecting itself back with the added sting of conscientious
remorse on the father who had brought them into the world against his
own clear judgment of right and justice.
Next morning Arthur went round once more to Professor Linklight's. The
professor had promised to read through the paper immediately, and give
his opinion of its chances for presentation to the Royal Society. He was
sitting at his breakfast-table, in his flowered dressing-gown and
slippers, when Arthur called upon him, and, with a cup of coffee in one
hand, was actually skimming the last few pages through his critical
eyeglass as his visitor entered.
"Good-morning, Mr. Greatrex!" he said, with one of his most gracious
smiles, indicative of the warm welcome attended by acknowledged wisdom
towards rising talent. "You see I have been reading your friend's paper,
as I promised. Well, my dear sir, not to put too fine a point upon it,
it won't hold water. In fact, it's a mere rigmarole. Excuse my asking
you, Greatrex, but have you any idea, my dear fellow, whether your
friend is inclined to be a little cracky?"
Arthur swallowed a groan with the greatest difficulty, and answered in
as unconcerned a tone as possible, "Well, to tell you the truth, Mr.
Linklight, some doubts _have_ been cast upon his perfect sanity."
"Ah, I should have thought so," the professor went on in his airiest
manner; "I should have thought so. The fact is, this paper is fitter for
the _Transactions_ of the Colney Hatch Academy than for those of the
Royal Society. It has a delusive outer appearance of physical thinking,
but there's no real meaning in it of any sort. It's gassy,
unsubstantial, purely imaginative." And the professor waved his hand in
the air to indicate its utter gaseousness. "If you were to ask my own
opinion about it, I should say it's the sort of thing that might be
produced by a young man of some mathematical training with a very
superficial knowledge of modern physics, just as he was on the point of
lapsing into complete insanity. It's the maddest bit of writing that has
ever yet fallen under my critical notice."
"Your opinion is of course conclusive," Arthur answered with unfeigned
humility, his eyes almost bursting with the tears he would not let come
to the surface. "It will be a great disappointment to my friend, but I
have no doubt he will accept your verdict."
"Not a bit of it, my dear sir," the professor put in quickly. "Not a bit
of it. These crazy fellows always stick to their own opinions, and think
you a perfect fool for disagreeing with them. Mark my words, Mr.
Greatrex, your friend will still go on believing, in spite of
everything, that his roundabout reasoning upon that preposterous
square-root-of-Pi theorem is sound mathematics."
And Arthur, looking within, felt with a glow of horror that the theorem
in question seemed to him at that moment more obviously true and certain
in all its deductions than it had ever done before since the first day
that he conceived it. How very mad he must be after all.
He thanked Professor Linklight as well as he was able for his kindness
in looking over the paper, and groped his way blindly through the
passage to the front door and out into the square. Thence he staggered
home wearily, convinced that it was all over between him and Hetty, and
that he must make up his mind forthwith to his horrible destiny.
If he had only known at that moment that forty years earlier Professor
Linklight had used almost the same words about Young's theory of
undulations, and had since used them about every new discovery from that
day to the one on which he then saw him, he might have attached less
importance than he actually did to this supposed final proof of his own
insanity.
As Arthur entered his lodgings he hung his hat up on the stand in the
passage. There was a little strip of mirror in the middle of the stand,
and glancing at it casually he saw once more that awful face--his
own--distorted and almost diabolical, which he had learnt so soon to
hate instinctively as if it were a felon's and a murderer's. He rushed
away wildly into his little sitting-room, and flung his manuscript on
the table, almost without observing that his friend Freeling, the rising
physiologist, was quietly seated on the sofa opposite.
"What's this, Arthur?" Freeling asked, taking it up carelessly and
glancing at the title. "You don't mean to say that you've finally
written out that splendid idea of yours about the interrelations of
energy?"
"Yes, I have, Harry: I have, and I wish to heaven I hadn't, for it's all
mad and silly and foolish and meaningless!"
"If it is, then I'm mad too, my dear fellow, for I think it's the most
convincing thing in physics I ever listened to. Let me have the
manuscript to look over, and see how you've worked out those beautiful
calculations about the square root of Pi, will you?"
"Take the thing, for heaven's sake, and leave me, Harry, for if I'm not
left alone I shall break down and cry before you." And as he spoke he
buried his head in his arm and sobbed like a woman.
Dr. Freeling knew Arthur was in love, and was aware that people
sometimes act very unaccountably under such circumstances; so he did the
wisest thing to be done then and there: he grasped his friend's arm
gently with his hand, spoke never a word, and, taking up his hat and
the manuscript, walked quietly out into the passage. Then he told the
landlady to make Mr. Greatrex a strong cup of tea, with a dash of brandy
in it, and turned away, leaving Arthur to solitude and his own
reflections.
That evening's post brought Arthur Greatrex two letters, which finally
completed his utter prostration. The first he opened was from Dr. Abury.
He broke the envelope with a terrible misgiving, and read the letter
through with a deepening and sickening feeling of horror. It was not he
alone, then, who had distorted the secret of his own incipient insanity.
Dr. Abury's practised eye had also detected the rising symptoms. The
doctor wrote kindly and with evident grief; but there was no mistaking
the firm purport of his intentions. Conferring this morning with his
professional friend Warminster, a case had been mentioned to him,
without a name, which he at once recognized as Arthur's. He recalled
certain symptoms he had himself observed, and his suspicions were thus
vividly aroused. Happening accidentally to follow Arthur in the street
he was convinced that his surmise was correct, and he thought it his
duty both to inform Arthur of the danger that encompassed him, and to
assure him that, deeply as it grieved him to withdraw the consent he had
so gladly given, he could not allow his only daughter to marry a man
bearing on his face the evident marks of an insane tendency. The letter
contained much more of regret and condolence; but that was the pith that
Arthur Greatrex picked out of it all through the blinding tears, that
dimmed his vision.
The second letter was from Hetty. Half guessing its contents, he had
left it purposely till the last, and he tore it open now with a fearful
sinking feeling in his bosom. It was indeed a heart-broken,
heart-breaking letter. What could be the secret which papa would not
tell her? Why had not Arthur come yesterday? Why could she never marry
him? Why was papa so cruel as not to tell her the reason? He couldn't
have done anything in the slightest degree dishonourable, far less
anything wicked: of that she felt sure; but, if not, what could be this
horrible, mysterious, unknown barrier that was so suddenly raised
between them? "Do write, dearest Arthur, and relieve me from this
terrible, incomprehensible suspense; do let me know what has happened to
make papa so determined against you. I could bear to lose you--at least
I could bear it as other women have done--but I can't bear this awful
uncertainty, this awful doubt as to your love or your constancy. For
heaven's sake, darling, send me a note somehow! send me a line to tell
me you love me. Your heart-broken
"HETTY."
Arthur took his hat, and, unable to endure this agony, set out at once
for the Aburys'. When he reached the door, the servant who answered his
ring at the bell told him he could not see the doctor; he was engaged
with two other doctors in a consultation about Miss Hetty. What was the
matter with Miss Hetty, then? What, didn't he know that? Oh, Miss Hetty
had had a fit, and Dr. Freeling and Dr. MacKinlay had been called in to
see her. Arthur did not wait for a moment, but walked upstairs
unannounced, and into the consulting room.
Was it a very serious matter? Yes, Freeling answered, very serious. It
seemed Miss Abury had had a great shock--a great shock to her
affections--which, he added in a lower voice, "you yourself can perhaps
best explain to me. She will certainly have a long illness. Perhaps she
may never recover."
"Come out into the conservatory, Harry," said Arthur to his friend. "I
can tell you there what it is all about."
In a few words Arthur told him the nature of the shock, but without
describing the particular symptoms on which the opinion of his supposed
approaching insanity was based. Freeling listened with an incredulous
smile, and at the end he said to his friend gently, "My dear Arthur, I
wish you had told me all this before. If you had done so, we might have
saved Miss Abury a shock which may perhaps be fatal. You are no more
going mad than I am; on the contrary, you're about the sanest and most
clear-headed fellow of my acquaintance. But these mad-doctors are always
finding madness everywhere. If you had come to me and told me the
symptoms that troubled you, I should soon have set you right again in
your own opinion. To have gone to Warminster was most unfortunate, but
it can't be helped now. What we have to do at present is to take care of
Miss Abury."
Arthur shook his head sadly. "Ah," he said, "you don't know the real
gravity of the symptoms I am suffering from. I shall tell you all about
them some other time. However, as you say, what we have to think about
now is Hetty. Can you let me see her? I am sure if I could see her it
would reassure her and do her good."
Dr. Abury was at first very unwilling to let Arthur visit Hetty, who was
now lying unconscious on the sofa in her own boudoir; but Freeling's
opinion that it might possibly do her good at last prevailed with him,
and he gave his permission grudgingly.
Arthur went into the room silently and took his seat beside the low
couch where the motherless girl was lying. Her face was very white, and
her hands pale and bloodless. He took one hand in his: the pulse was
hardly perceptible. He laid it down upon her breast, and leaned back to
watch for any sign of returning life in her pallid cheek and closed
eyelids.
For hours and hours he sat there watching, and no sign came. Dr. Abury
sat at the bottom of the couch, watching with him; and as they watched,
Arthur felt from time to time that his face was again twitching
horribly. However, he had only thoughts for one thing now: would Hetty
die or would she recover? The servants brought them a little cake and
wine. They sat and drank in silence, looking at one another, but each
absorbed in his own thoughts, and speaking never a word for good or
evil.
At last Hetty's eyes opened. Arthur noticed the change first, and took
her hand in his gently. Her staring gaze fell upon him for a moment, and
she asked feebly, "Arthur, Arthur, do you still love me?"
"Love you, Hetty? With all my heart and soul, as I have always loved
you!"
She smiled, and said nothing. Dr. Abury gave her a little wine in a
teaspoon, and she drank it quietly. Then she shut her eyes again, but
this time she was sleeping.
All night Arthur watched still by the bedside where they put her a
little later, and Dr. Abury and a nurse watched with him. In the morning
she woke slightly better, and when she saw Arthur still there, she
smiled again, and said that if he was with her, she was happy. When
Freeling came to inquire after the patient, he found her so much
stronger, and Arthur so worn with fear and sleeplessness, that he
insisted upon carrying off his friend in his brougham to his own house,
and giving him a slight restorative. He might come back at once, he
said; but only after he had had a dose of mixture, a glass of brandy and
seltzer, and at least a mouthful of something for breakfast.
As Freeling was drawing the cork of the seltzer, Arthur's eye happened
to light on a monkey, which was chained to a post in the little area
plot outside the consulting-room. Arthur was accustomed to see monkeys
there, for Freeling often had invalids from the Zoo to observe side by
side with human patients; but this particular monkey fascinated him even
in his present shattered state of nerves, because there was a something
in its face which seemed strangely and horribly familiar to him. As he
looked, he recognized with a feeling of unspeakable aversion what it was
of which the monkey reminded him. It was making a series of hideous and
apparently mocking grimaces--the very self-same grimaces which he had
seen on his own features in the mirror during the last day or two!
Horrible idea! He was descending to the level of the very monkeys!
The more he watched, the more absolutely identical the two sets of
grimaces appeared to him to be. Could it be fancy or was it reality? Or
might it be one more delusion, showing that his brain was now giving way
entirely? He rubbed his eyes, steadied his attention, and looked again
with the deepest interest. No, he could not be mistaken. The monkey was
acting in every respect precisely as he himself had acted.
"Harry," he said, in a low and frightened tone, "look at this monkey. Is
he mad? Tell me."
"My dear Arthur," replied his friend, with just a shade of expostulation
in his voice, "you have really got madness on the brain at present. No,
he isn't mad at all. He's as sane as you are, and that's saying a good
deal, I can assure you."
"But, Harry, you can't have seen what he's doing. He's grimacing and
contorting himself in the most extraordinary fashion."
"Well, monkeys often do grimace, don't they?" Harry Freeling answered
coolly. "Take this brandy and you'll soon feel better."
"But they don't grimace like this one," Arthur persisted.
"No, not like this one, certainly. That's why I've got him here. I'm
going to operate upon him for it under chloroform, and cure him
immediately."
Arthur leaped from his seat like one demented. "Operate upon him, cure
him!" he cried hastily. "What on earth do you mean, Harry?"
"My dear boy, don't be so excited," said Freeling. "This suspense and
sleeplessness have been too much for you. This is antivivisection
carried _ad absurdum_. You don't mean to say you object to operations
upon a monkey for his own benefit, do you? If I don't cut a nerve,
tetanus will finally set in, and he'll die of it in great agony. Drink
off your brandy, and you'll feel better after it."
"But, Harry, what's the matter with the monkey? For heaven's sake, tell
me!"
Harry Freeling looked at his friend for the first time a little
suspiciously. Could Warminster be right after all, and could Arthur
really be going mad? It was so ridiculous of him to get into such a
state of flurry about the ailments of a tame monkey, and at such a
moment, too! "Well," he answered slowly, "the monkey has got facial
distortions due to a slight local paralysis of the inhibitory nerves
supplied to the buccal and pharyngeal muscles, with a tendency to end in
tetanus. If I cut a small ganglion behind the ear, and exhibit santonin,
the muscles will be relaxed; and though they won't act so freely as
before, they won't jerk and grimace any longer."
"Does it ever occur in human beings?" Arthur asked eagerly.
"Occur in human beings? Bless my soul, yes! I've seen dozens of cases.
Why, goodness gracious, Arthur, it's positively occurring in your own
face at this very moment!"
"I know it is," Arthur answered in an agony of suspense. "Do you think
this twitching of mine is due to a local paralysis of the inhibitories,
such as you speak of?"
"Excuse my laughing, my dear fellow; you really do look so absurdly
comical. No, I don't think anything about it. I know it is."
"Then you believe Warminster was wrong in taking it for a symptom of
incipient insanity?"
It was Freeling's turn now to jump up in surprise. "You don't mean to
tell me, Arthur, that that was the sole ground on which that old fool,
Warminster, thought you were going crazy?"
"He didn't see it himself," answered Arthur, with a sigh of unspeakable
relief. "I only described it to him, and he drew his inference from what
I told him. But the real question is this, Harry: Do you feel quite sure
that there's nothing more than that the matter with me?"
"Absolutely certain, my dear fellow. I can cure you in half an hour.
I've done it dozens of times before, and know the thing as well as you
know an ordinary case of scarlet fever."
Arthur sighed again. "And perhaps," he said bitterly, "this terrible
mistake may cost dear Hetty her life!"
He drank off the brandy, ate a few mouthfuls of food as best he might,
and hastened back to the Aburys'. When he got there he learned from the
servant that Hetty was at least no worse; and with that negative comfort
he had for the moment to content himself.
Hetty's illness was long and serious; but before it was over Freeling
was able to convince Dr. Abury of his own and his colleague's error, and
to prove by a simple piece of surgery that Arthur's hideous grimaces
were due to nothing worse than a purely physical impediment. The
operation was quite a successful one; but though Greatrex's face has
never since been liable to these curious contortions, the consequent
relaxation of the muscles has given his features that peculiarly calm
and almost impassive expression which everybody must have noticed upon
them at the present day, even in moments of the greatest animation. The
difficulty was how to break the cause of the temporary mistake to Hetty,
and this they were unable to do until she was to a great extent
convalescent. When once the needful explanation was over, and Arthur
was able once more to kiss her with perfect freedom from any tinge of
suspicion on her part, he felt that his paradise was at last attained.
A few days before the deferred date fixed for their wedding, Freeling
came into the doctor's drawing-room, where Hetty and Arthur were sitting
together, and threw a letter with a French official stamp on its face
down upon the table. "There," he said, "I find all the members of the
Academie des Sciences at Paris are madmen also!"
Hetty smiled faintly, and said with a little earnestness in her tone,
"Ah, Dr. Freeling, that subject has been far too serious a one for both
of us to make it pleasant jesting."
"Oh, but look here, Miss Abury," said Freeling; "I have to apologise to
Arthur for a great liberty I have ventured to take, and I think it best
to begin by explaining to you wherein it consisted. The fact is, before
you were ill, Arthur had just written a paper on the interrelations of
energy, which he showed to that pompous old nincompoop, Professor
Linklight. Well, Linklight being one of those men who can never see an
inch beyond his own nose, had the incomprehensible stupidity to tell him
there was nothing in it. Thereupon your future husband, who is a modest
and self-depreciating sort of fellow, was minded to throw it
incontinently into the waste-paper basket. But a friend of his, Harry
Freeling, who flatters himself that he can see an inch or two beyond his
own nose, read it over, and recognized that it was a brilliant
discovery. So what does he go and do--here comes in the apologetic
matter--but get this memoir quietly translated into French, affix a
motto to it, put it in an envelope, and send it in for the gold medal
competition of the Academie. Strange to say, the members of the Academie
turned out to be every bit as mad as the author and his friend; for I
have just received this letter, addressed to Arthur at my house (which I
have taken the further liberty of opening), and it informs me that the
Academie decrees its gold medal for physical discovery to M. Arthur
Greatrex, of London, which is a subject of congratulation for us three,
and a regular slap in the face for pompous old Linklight."
Hetty seized Freeling's two hands in hers. "You have been our good
genius, Dr. Freeling," she said with brimming eyes. "I owe Arthur to
you; and Arthur owes me to you; and now we both owe you this. What can
we ever do to thank you sufficiently?"
Since those days Hetty and Arthur have long been married, and Dr.
Greatrex's famous work (in its enlarged form) has been translated into
all the civilized languages of the world, as well as into German; but to
this moment, happy as they both are, you can read in their faces the
lasting marks of that one terrible anxiety. To many of their friends it
seemed afterwards a mere laughing matter; but to those two, who went
through it, and especially to Arthur Greatrex, it is a memory too
painful to be looked back upon even now without a thrill of terrible
recollection.
_MR. CHUNG._
The first time I ever met poor Chung was at one of Mrs. Bouverie
Barton's Thursday evening receptions in Eaton Place. Of course you know
Mrs. Bouverie Barton, the cleverest literary hostess at this moment
living in London. Herself a well-known novelist, she collects around her
all the people worth knowing, at her delightful At Homes; and whenever
you go there you are sure to meet somebody whose acquaintance is a
treasure and an acquisition for your whole after life.
Well, it so happened on one of those enjoyable Thursday evenings that I
was sitting on the circular ottoman in the little back room with Miss
Amelia Hogg, the famous woman's-rights advocate. Now, if there is a
subject on earth which infinitely bores me, that subject is woman's
rights; and if there is a person on earth who can make it absolutely
unendurable, that person is Miss Amelia Hogg. So I let her speak on
placidly in her own interminable manner about the fortunes of the
Bill--she always talks as though her own pet Bill were the only Bill now
existing on this sublunary planet--and while I interposed an occasional
"Indeed" or "Quite so" for form's sake, I gave myself up in reality to
digesting the conversation of two intelligent people who sat back to
back with us on the other side of the round ottoman.
"Yes," said one of the speakers, in a peculiarly soft silvery voice
which contrasted oddly with Miss Hogg's querulous treble, "his loss is a
very severe one to contemporary philosophy. His book on the "Physiology
of Perception" is one of the most masterly pieces of analytic work I
have ever met with in the whole course of my psychological reading. It
was to me, I confess, who approached it fresh from the school of
Schelling and Hegel, a perfect revelation of _a posteriori_ thinking. I
shall never cease to regret that he did not live long enough to complete
the second volume."
Just at this point Miss Hogg had come to a pause in her explanation of
the seventy-first clause of the Bill, and I stole a look round the
corner to see who my philosophic neighbour might happen to be. An Oxford
don, no doubt, I said to myself, or a young Cambridge professor, freshly
crammed to the throat with all the learning of the Moral Science Tripos.
Imagine my surprise when, on glancing casually at the silvery-voiced
speaker, I discovered him to be a full-blown Chinaman! Yes, a
yellow-skinned, almond-eyed, Mongolian-featured Chinaman, with a long
pigtail hanging down his back, and attired in the official amber silk
robe and purple slippers of a mandarin of the third grade, and the
silver button. My curiosity was so fully aroused by this strange
discovery that I determined to learn something more about so curious a
product of an alien civilization; and therefore, after a few minutes, I
managed to give Miss Amelia Hogg the slip by drawing in young Harry
Farquhar the artist at the hundred-and-twentieth section, and making my
way quietly across the room to Mrs. Bouverie Barton.
"The name of that young Chinaman?" our hostess said in answer to my
question. "Oh, certainly; he is Mr. Chung, of the Chinese Legation. A
most intelligent and well-educated young man, with a great deal of taste
for European literature. Introduce you?--of course, this minute." And
she led the way back to where my Oriental phenomenon was still sitting,
deep as ever in philosophical problems with Professor Woolstock, a
spectacled old gentleman of German aspect, who was evidently pumping him
thoroughly with a view to the materials for Volume Forty of his
forthcoming great work on "Ethnical Psychology."
I sat by Mr. Chung for the greater part of what was left of that
evening. From the very first he exercised a sort of indescribable
fascination over me. His English had hardly a trace of foreign accent,
and his voice was one of the sweetest and most exquisitely modulated
that I have ever heard. When he looked at you, his deep calm eyes
bespoke at once the very essence of transparent sincerity. Before the
evening was over, he had told me the whole history of his education and
his past life. The son of a well-to-do Pekin mandarin, of distinctly
European tastes, he had early passed all his examinations in China, and
had been selected by the Celestial Government as one of the first batch
of students sent to Europe to acquire the tongues and the sciences of
the Western barbarians. Chung's billet was to England; and here, or in
France, he had lived with a few intervals ever since he first came to
man's estate. He had picked up our language quickly; had taken a degree
at London University; and had made himself thoroughly at home in English
literature. In fact, he was practically an Englishman in everything but
face and clothing. His naturally fine intellect had assimilated European
thought and European feeling with extraordinary ease, and it was often
almost impossible in talking with him to remember that he was not one of
ourselves. If you shut your eyes and listened, you heard a pleasant,
cultivated, intelligent young Englishman; when you opened them again, it
was always a fresh surprise to find yourself conversing with a genuine
yellow-faced pig-tailed Chinaman, in the full costume of the peacock's
feather.
"You could never go back to live in China?" I said to him inquiringly
after a time. "You could never endure life among your own people after
so long a residence in civilized Europe?"
"My dear sir," he answered with a slight shudder of horror, "you do not
reflect what my position actually is. My Government may recall me any
day. I am simply at their mercy, and I must do as I am bidden."
"But you would not like China," I put in.
"Like it!" he exclaimed with a gesture which for a Chinaman I suppose
one must call violent. "I should abhor it. It would be a living death.
You who have never been in China can have no idea of what an awful
misfortune it would be for a man who has acquired civilized habits and
modes of thought to live among such a set of more than mediaeval
barbarians as my countrymen still remain at the present day. Oh no; God
grant I may never have to return there permanently, for it would be more
than I could endure. Even a short visit to Pekin is bad enough; the
place reeks of cruelty, jobbery, and superstition from end to end; and I
always breathe more freely when I have once more got back on to the deck
of a European steamer that flies the familiar British flag."
"Then you are not patriotic," I ventured to say.
"Patriotic!" he replied with a slight curl of the lip; "how can a man be
patriotic to such a mass of corruption and abomination as our Chinese
Government? I can understand a patriotic Russian, a patriotic Egyptian,
nay, even a patriotic Turk; but a patriotic Chinaman--why, the very
notion is palpably absurd. Listen, my dear sir; you ask me if I could
live in China. No, I couldn't; and for the best of all possible
reasons--they wouldn't let me. You don't know what the furious prejudice
and blind superstition of that awful country really is. Before I had
been there three months they would accuse me either of foreign
practices or, what comes to much the same thing, of witchcraft; and
they would put me to death by one of their most horrible torturing
punishments--atrocities which I could not even mention in an English
drawing-room. That is the sort of Damocles' sword that is always hanging
over the head of every Europeanized Chinaman who returns against his own
free will to his native land."
I was startled and surprised. It seemed so natural and simple to be
talking under Mrs. Bouverie Barton's big chandelier with this
interesting young man, and yet so impossible for a moment to connect him
in thought with all the terrible things that one had read in books about
the prisons and penal laws of China. That a graduate of London
University, a philosopher learned in all the political wisdom of
Ricardo, Mill, and Herbert Spencer, should really be subject to that
barbaric code of abominable tortures, was more than one could positively
realize. I hesitated a moment, and then I said, "But of course they will
never recall you."
"I trust not," he said quietly; "I pray not. Very likely they will let
me stop here all my lifetime. I am an assistant interpreter to the
Embassy, in which capacity I am useful to Pekin; whereas in any home
appointment I would of course be an utter failure, a manifest
impossibility. But there is really no accounting for the wild vagaries
and caprices of the Vermilion Pencil. For aught I know to the contrary,
I might even be recalled to-morrow. If once they suspect a man of
European sympathies, their first idea is to cut off his head. They
regard it as you would regard the first plague-spot of cholera or
small-pox in a great city."
"Heaven forbid that they should ever recall you," I said earnestly; for
already I had taken a strong fancy to his strange phenomenon of Western
education grafted on an immemorial Eastern stock; and I had read enough
of China to know that what he said about his probable fate if he
returned there permanently was nothing more than the literal truth. The
bare idea of such a catastrophe was too horrible to be realized for a
moment in Eaton Place.
As we drove home in our little one-horse brougham that evening, my wife
and Effie were very anxious to learn what manner of man my Chinese
acquaintance might really be; and when I told them what a charming
person I had found him, they were both inclined rather to laugh at me
for my enthusiastic description. Effie, in particular, jeered much at
the notion of an intelligent and earnest-minded Chinaman. "You know,
Uncle darling," she said in her bewitching way, "all your geese are
always swans. Every woman you meet is absolutely beautiful, and every
man is perfectly delightful--till Auntie and I have seen them."
"Perfectly true, Effie," I answered; "it is an amiable weakness of mine,
after all."
However, before the week was out Effie and Marian between them would
have it that I must call upon Chung and ask him to dine with us at
Kensington Park Terrace. Their curiosity was piqued, for one thing; and
for another thing, they thought it rather the cheese in these days of
expansive cosmopolitanism to be on speaking terms with a Chinese
_attache_. "Japanese are cheap," said Effie, "horribly cheap of late
years--a perfect drug in the market; but a Chinaman is still, thank
Heaven, at a social premium." Now, though I am an obedient enough
husband, as husbands go, I don't always accede to Marian's wishes in
these matters; but everybody takes it for granted that Effie's will is
law. Effie, I may mention parenthetically, is more than a daughter to
us, for she is poor Tom's only child; and of course everybody connected
with dear Tom is doubly precious to us now, as you may easily imagine.
So when Effie had made up her mind that Chung was to dine with us, the
thing was settled; and I called at his rooms and duly invited him, to
the general satisfaction of everybody concerned.
The dinner was a very pleasant one, and, for a wonder, Effie and Marian
both coincided entirely in my hastily formed opinion of Mr. Chung. His
mellow silvery voice, his frank truthful manner, his perfect freedom
from self-consciousness, all pleased and impressed those stern critics,
and by the end of the evening they were both quite as much taken with
his delightful personality as I myself had originally been. One link
leads on to another; and the end of it all was that when we went down
for our summer villeggiatura to Abbot's Norbury, nothing would please
Marian but that Mr. Chung must be invited down as one of our party. He
came willingly enough, and for five or six weeks we had as pleasant a
time together as any four people over spent. Chung was a perfect
encyclopaedia of information, while his good humour and good spirits
never for a moment failed him under any circumstances whatsoever.
One day we had made up a little private picnic to Norbury Edge, and were
sitting together after luncheon under the shade of the big ash tree,
when the conversation happened to turn by accident on the small feet of
Chinese ladies. I had often noticed that Chung was very reticent about
China; he did not like talking about his native country; and he was most
pleased and most at home when we treated him most like a European born.
Evidently he hated the provincialism of the Flowery Land, and loved to
lose his identity in the wider culture of a Western civilization.
"How funny it will be," said Effie, "to see Mrs. Chung's tiny feet when
you bring her to London. I suppose one of these days, on one of your
flying visits to Pekin, you will take to yourself a wife in your
country?"
"No," Chung answered, with quiet dignity; "I shall never marry--that I
have quite decided in my own mind."
"Oh, don't say that," Marian put in quickly; "I hate to hear men say
they'll never marry. It is such a terrible mistake. They become so
selfish, and frumpish, and old-bachelorish." Dear Marian has a high
idea of the services she has rendered to society in saving her own
fortunate husband from this miserable and deplorable condition.
"Perhaps so," Chung replied quietly. "No doubt what you say is true as a
rule. But, for my own part, I could never marry a Chinawoman; I am too
thoroughly Europeanized for that; we should have absolutely no tastes or
sympathies in common. You don't know what my countrywomen are like, Mrs.
Walters."
"Ah, no," said my wife contemplatively; "I suppose your people are all
heathens. Why, goodness gracious, Mr. Chung, if it comes to that, I
suppose really you are a heathen yourself!"
Chung parried the question gracefully. "Don't you know," said he, "what
Lord Chesterfield answered to the lady who asked him what religion he
professed? 'Madam, the religion to which all wise men belong.' 'And what
is that?' said she. 'Madam, no wise man ever says.'"
"Never mind Lord Chesterfield," said Effie, smiling, "but let us come
back to the future Mrs. Chung. I'm quite disappointed you won't marry a
Chinawoman; but at any rate I suppose you'll marry somebody?"
"Well, not a European, of course," Marian put in.
"Oh, of course not," Chung echoed with true Oriental imperturbability.
"Why _of course_?" Effie asked half unconsciously; and yet the very
unconsciousness with which she asked the question showed in itself that
she instinctively felt the gulf as much as any of us. If Chung had been
a white man instead of a yellow one, she would hardly have discussed the
question at issue with so much simplicity and obvious innocence.
"Well, I will tell you why," Chung answered. "Because, even supposing
any European lady were to consent to become my wife--which is in the
first place eminently improbable--I could never think of putting her in
the terribly false position that she would have to occupy under
existing circumstances. To begin with, her place in English society
would be a peculiar and a trying one. But that is not all. You must
remember that I am still a subject of the Chinese Empire, and a member
of the Chinese Civil Service. I may any day be recalled to China, and of
course--I say 'of course' this time advisedly--it would be absolutely
impossible for me to take an English wife to Pekin with me. So I am
placed in this awkward dilemma. I would never care to marry anybody
except a European lady; and to marry a European lady would be an act of
injustice to her which I could never dream of committing. But
considering the justifiable contempt which all Europeans rightly feel
for us poor John Chinamen, I don't think it probable in any case that
the temptation is at all likely to arise. And so, if you please, as the
newspapers always put it, 'the subject then dropped.'"
We all saw that Chung was in earnest as to his wish that no more should
be said about the matter, and we respected his feelings accordingly; but
that evening, as we sat smoking in the arbour after the ladies had
retired, I said to him quietly, "Tell me, Chung, if you really dislike
China so very much, and are so anxious not to return there, why don't
you throw off your allegiance altogether, become a British subject, and
settle down among us for good and all?"
"My dear fellow," he said, smiling, "you don't think of the
difficulties, I may say the impossibilities, in the way of any such plan
as you propose. It is easy enough for a European to throw off his
nationality whenever he chooses; it is a very different thing for an
Asiatic to do so. Moreover, I am a member of a Legation. My Government
would never willingly let me become a naturalized Englishman; and if I
tried to manage it against their will they would demand my extradition,
and would carry their point, too, as a matter of international courtesy,
for one nation could never interfere with the accredited representative
of another, or with any of his suite. Even if I were to abscond and get
rid of my personality altogether, what would be the use of it? Nobody in
England could find any employment for a Chinaman. I have no property of
my own; I depend entirely upon my salary for support; my position is
therefore quite hopeless. I must simply let things go their own way, and
trust to chance not to be recalled to Pekin."
During all the rest of Chung's visit we let him roam pretty much as he
liked about the place, and Effie and I generally went with him. Of
course we never for a moment fancied it possible that Effie could
conceivably take a fancy to a yellow man like him; the very notion was
too preposterously absurd. And yet, just towards the end of his stay
with us, it began to strike me uneasily that after all even a Chinaman
is human. And when a Chinaman happens to have perfect manners, noble
ideas, delicate sensibility, and a chivalrous respect for English
ladies, it is perhaps just within the bounds of conceivability that at
some odd moments an English girl might for a second partially forget his
oblique eyelids and his yellow skin. I was sometimes half afraid that it
might be so with Effie; and though I don't think she would ever herself
have dreamed of marrying such a man--the physical barrier between the
races is far too profound for that--I fancy she occasionally pitied poor
Chung's loneliness with that womanly pity which so easily glides into a
deeper and closer sentiment. Certainly she felt his isolation greatly,
and often hoped he would never really be obliged to go back for ever to
that hateful China.
One lovely summer evening, a few days before Chung's holiday was to end,
and his chief at the Embassy expected him back again, Marian and I had
gone out for a stroll together, and in coming home happened to walk
above the little arbour in the shrubbery by the upper path. A seat let
into the hedge bank overhung the summer-house, and here we both sat down
silently to rest after our walking. As we did so, we heard Chung's voice
in the arbour close below, so near and so clear that every word was
quite distinctly audible.
"For the last time in England," he was saying, with a softly regretful
cadence in his tone, as we came upon him.
"The _last_ time, Mr. Chung!" The other voice was Effie's. "What on
earth do you mean by that?"
"What I say, Miss Walters. I am recalled to China; I got the letters of
recall the day before yesterday."
"The day before yesterday, and you never told us! Why didn't you let us
know before?"
"I did not know you would interest yourselves in my private affairs."
"Mr. Chung!" There was a deep air of reproach in Effie's tone.
"Well, Miss Walters, that is not quite true. I ought not to have said it
to friends so kind as you have all shown yourselves to be. No; my real
reason was that I did not wish to grieve you unnecessarily, and even now
I would not have done so, only----"
"Only----?"
At this moment I for my part felt we had heard too much. I blushed up to
my eyes at the thought that we should have unwittingly played the spy
upon these two innocent young people. I was just going to call out and
rush down the little path to them; but as I made a slight movement
forward, Marian held my wrist with an imploring gesture, and earnestly
put her finger on my lips. I was overborne, and I regret to say I
stopped and listened. Marian did not utter a word, but speaking rapidly
on her fingers, as we all had learnt to do for poor Tom, she said
impressively, "For God's sake, not a sound. This is serious. We must and
ought to hear it out." Marian is a very clever woman in these matters;
and when she thinks anything a point of duty to poor Tom's girl, I
always give way to her implicitly. But I confess I didn't like it.
"Only----?" Effie had said.
"Only I felt compelled to now. I could not leave without telling you how
deeply I had appreciated all your kindness."
"But, Mr. Chung, tell me one thing," she asked earnestly; "why have they
recalled you to Pekin?"
"I had rather not tell you."
"I insist."
"Because they are displeased with my foreign tastes and habits, which
have been reported to them by some of my fellow-_attaches_."
"But, Mr. Chung, Uncle says there is no knowing what they will do to
you. They may kill you on some absurd charge or other of witchcraft or
something equally meaningless."
"I am afraid," he answered imperturbably, "that may be the case. I don't
mind at all on my own account--we Chinese are an apathetic race, you
know--but I should be sorry to be a cause of grief to any of the dear
friends I have made in England."
"Mr. Chung!" This time the tone was one of unspeakable horror.
"Don't speak like that," Chung said quickly. "There is no use in taking
trouble at interest. I may come to no harm; at any rate, it will not
matter much to any one but myself. Now let us go back to the house. I
ought not to have stopped here with you so long, and it is nearly dinner
time."
"No," said Effie firmly; "we will not go back. I must understand more
about this. There is plenty of time before dinner: and if not, dinner
must wait."
"But, Miss Walters, I don't think I ought to have brought you out here,
and I am quite sure I ought not to stay any longer. Do return. Your Aunt
will be annoyed."
"Bother Aunt! She is the best woman in the world, but I must hear all
about this. Mr. Chung, why don't you say you won't go, and stay in
England in spite of them?"
Nobody ever disobeys Effie, and so Chung wavered visibly. "I will tell
you why," he answered slowly; "because I cannot. I am a servant of the
Chinese Government, and if they choose to recall me, I must go."
"But they couldn't enforce their demand."
"Yes, they could. Your Government would give me up."
"But Mr. Chung, couldn't you run away and hide for a while, and then
come out again, and live like an Englishman?"
"No," he answered quietly; "it is quite impossible. A Chinaman couldn't
get work in England as a clerk or anything of that sort, and I have
nothing of my own to live upon."
There was a silence of a few minutes. Both were evidently thinking it
out. Effie broke the silence first.
"Oh, Mr Chung, do you think they will really put you to death?"
"I don't think it; I know it."
"You know it?"
"Yes."
Again a silence, and this time Chung broke it first. "Miss Effie," he
said, "one Chinaman more or less in the world does not matter much, and
I shall never forgive myself for having been led to grieve you for a
moment, even though this is the last time I shall be able to speak to
you. But I see you are sorry for me, and now--Chinaman as I am, I must
speak out--I can't leave you without having told you all I feel. I am
going to a terrible end, and I know it--so you will forgive me. We shall
never meet again, so what I am going to say need never cause you any
embarrassment in future. That I am recalled does not much trouble me;
that I am going to die does not much trouble me; but that I can never,
could never possibly have called you my wife, troubles me and cuts me to
the very quick. It is the deepest drop in my cup of humiliation."
"I knew it," said Effie, with wonderful composure.
"You knew it?"
"Yes, I knew it. I saw it from the second week you were here; and I
liked you for it. But of course it was impossible, so there is nothing
more to be said about it."
"Of course," said Chung. "Ah, that terrible _of course_! I feel it; you
feel it; we all feel it; and yet what a horrible thing it is. I am so
human in everything else, but there is that one impassable barrier
between us, and I myself cannot fail to recognize it. I could not even
wish you to feel that you could marry a Chinaman."
At that moment--for a moment only--I almost felt as if I could have said
to Effie, "Take him!" but the thing was too impossible--a something
within us rises against it--and I said nothing.
"So now," Chung continued, "I must go. We must both go back to the
house. I have said more than I ought to have said, and I am ashamed of
myself for having done so. Yet, in spite of the measureless gulf that
parts us, I felt I could not return to China without having told you.
Will you forgive me?"
"I am glad you did," said Effie; "it will relieve you."
She stood a minute irresolute, and then she began again: "Mr. Chung, I
am too horrified to know what I ought to do. I can't grasp it and take
it all in so quickly. If you had money of your own, would you be able to
run away and live somehow?"
"I might possibly," Chung answered, "but not probably. A Chinaman, even
if he wears European clothing, is too marked a person ever to escape.
The only chance would be by going to Mauritius or California, where I
might get lost in the crowd."
"But, Mr. Chung, I have money of my own. What can I do? Help me, tell
me. I can't let a fellow-creature die for a mere prejudice of race and
colour. If I were your wife it would be yours. Isn't it my duty?"
"No," said Chung. "It is more sacrifice than any woman ought to make for
any man. You like me, but that is all."
"If I shut my eyes and only heard you, I think I could love you."
"Miss Effie," said Chung suddenly, "this is wrong, very wrong of me. I
have let my weakness overcome me. I won't stop any longer. I have done
what I ought not to have done, and I shall go this minute. Just once,
before I go, shut your eyes and let me kiss the tips of your fingers.
Thank you. No, I will not stop," and without another word he was gone.
Marian and I stared at one another in blank horror. What on earth was to
be done? All solutions were equally impossible. Even to meet Chung at
dinner was terrible. We both knew in our heart of hearts that if Chung
had been an Englishman, remaining in heart and soul the very self-same
man he was, we would willingly have chosen him for Effie's husband. But
a Chinaman! Reason about the prejudice as you like, there it is, a thing
not to be got over, and at bottom so real that even the very notion of
getting over it is terribly repugnant to our natural instincts. On the
other hand, was poor Chung, with his fine delicate feelings, his
courteous manners, his cultivated intellect, his English chivalry, to go
back among the savage semi-barbarians of Pekin, and to be put to death
in Heaven knows what inhuman manner for the atrocious crime of having
outstripped his race and nation? The thing was too awful to contemplate
either way.
We walked home together without a word. Chung had taken the lower path;
we took the upper one and followed him at a distance. Effie remained
behind for a while in the summer-house. I don't know how we managed to
dress for dinner, but we did somehow; and when we went down into the
little drawing-room at eight o'clock, we were not surprised to hear that
Miss Effie had a headache and did not want any dinner that evening. I
was more surprised, however, when, shortly before the gong sounded, one
of the servants brought me a little twisted note from Chung, written
hurriedly in pencil, and sent, she said, by a porter from the railway
station. It ran thus:--
"DEAR MR. WALTERS,
"Excuse great haste. Compelled to return to town immediately. Shall
write more fully to-morrow. Just in time to catch up express.
"Yours ever,
"CHUNG."
Evidently, instead of returning to the house, he had gone straight to
the station. After all, Chung had the true feelings of a gentleman. He
could not meet Effie again after what had passed, and he cut the Gordian
knot in the only way possible.
Effie said nothing to us, and we said nothing to Effie, except to show
her Chung's note next morning in a casual, off-hand fashion. Two days
later a note came for us from the Embassy in Chung's pretty incisive
handwriting. It contained copious excuses for his hasty departure, and a
few lines to say that he was ordered back to China by the next mail,
which started two days later. Marian and I talked it all over, but we
could think of nothing that could be of any use; and after all, we said
to one another, poor Chung might be mistaken about the probable fate
that was in store for him.
"I don't think," Effie said, when we showed her the letter, "I ever met
such a nice man as Mr. Chung. I believe he is really a hero." We
pretended not to understand what she could mean by it.
The days went by, and we went back again to the dull round of London
society. We heard nothing more of Chung for many weeks; till at last one
morning I found a letter on the table bearing the Hong Kong postmark. I
opened it hastily. As I supposed, it was a note from Chung. It was
written in a very small hand on a tiny square of rice-paper, and it ran
as follows:--
"Thien-Shan Prison, Pekin, Dec. 8.
"MY DEAR FRIEND,
"Immediately on my return here I was arrested on a charge of
witchcraft, and of complicity with the Foreign Devils to introduce
the Western barbarism into China. I have now been in a loathsome
prison in Pekin for three weeks, in the midst of sights and sounds
which I dare not describe to you. Already I have suffered more than
I can tell; and I have very little doubt that I shall be brought to
trial and executed within a few weeks. I write now begging you not
to let Miss Effie hear of this, and if my name happens to be
mentioned in the English papers, to keep my fate a secret from her
as far as possible. I trust to chance for the opportunity of
getting this letter forwarded to Hong Kong, and I have had to write
it secretly, for I am not allowed pen, ink, or paper. Thank you
much for your very great kindness to me. I am not sorry to die, for
it is a mistake for a man to have lived outside the life of his own
people, and there was no place left for me on earth. Good-bye.
"Ever yours gratefully,
"CHUNG."
The letter almost drove me wild with ineffectual remorse and regret. Why
had I not tried to persuade Chung to remain in England? Why had I not
managed to smuggle him out of the way, and to find him some kind of
light employment, such as even a Chinaman might easily have performed?
But it was no use regretting now. The impassable gulf was fixed between
us; and it was hardly possible even then to realize that this amiable
young student, versed in all the science and philosophy of the
nineteenth century, had been handed over alive to the tender mercies of
a worse than mediaeval barbarism and superstition. My heart sank within
me, and I did not venture to show the letter even to Marian.
For some weeks the days passed heavily indeed. I could not get Chung out
of my mind, and I saw that Effie could not either. We never mentioned
his name; but I noticed that Effie had got from Mudie's all the books
about China that she could hear of, and that she was reading up with a
sort of awful interest all the chapters that related to Chinese law and
Chinese criminal punishments. Poor child, the subject evidently
enthralled her with a terrible fascination; and I feared that the
excitement she was in might bring on a brain fever.
One morning, early in April, we were all seated in the little
breakfast-room about ten o'clock, and Effie had taken up the outside
sheet of the _Times_, while I was engaged in looking over the telegrams
on the central pages. Suddenly she gave a cry of horror, flung down the
paper with a gesture of awful repugnance, and fell from her chair as
stiff and white as a corpse. I knew instinctively what had happened, and
I took her up in my arms and carried her to her room. After the doctor
had come, and Effie had recovered a little from the first shock, I took
up the paper from the ground where it lay and read the curt little
paragraph which contained the news that seemed to us so terrible:--
"The numerous persons who made the acquaintance of Chung Fo Tsiou, late
assistant interpreter to the Chinese Embassy in London, will learn with
regret that this unfortunate member of the Civil Service has been
accused of witchcraft and executed at Pekin by the frightful Chinese
method known as the Heavy Death. Chung Fo Tsiou was well known in London
and Paris, where he spent many years of his official life, and attracted
some attention by his natural inclination to European society and
manners."
Poor Chung! His end was too horrible for an English reader even to hear
of it. But Effie knew it all, and I did not wonder that the news should
have affected her so deeply.
Effie was some weeks ill, and at first we almost feared her mind would
give way under the pressure. Not that she had more than merely liked
poor Chung, but the sense of horror was too great for her easily to cast
it off. Even I myself did not sleep lightly for many and many a day
after I heard the terrible truth. But while Effie was still ill, a
second letter reached us, written this time in blood with a piece of
stick, apparently on a scrap of coarse English paper, such as that which
is used for wrapping up tobacco. It was no more than this:--
"Execution to-day. Keep it from Miss Effie. Cannot forgive myself
for having spoken to her. Will you forgive me? It was the weakness
of a moment: but even Chinamen have hearts. I could not die without
telling her.--CHUNG."
I showed Effie the scrap afterwards--it had come without a line of
explanation from Shanghao--and she has kept it ever since locked up in
her little desk as a sacred memento. I don't doubt that some of these
days Effie will marry; but as long as she lives she will bear the
impress of what she has suffered about poor Chung. An English girl could
not conceivably marry a Chinaman; but now that Chung is dead, Effie
cannot help admiring the steadfastness, the bravery, and the noble
qualities of her Chinese lover. It is an awful state of things which
sometimes brings the nineteenth century and primitive barbarism into
such close and horrible juxtaposition.
_THE CURATE OF CHURNSIDE._
Walter Dene, deacon, in his faultless Oxford clerical coat and broad
felt hat, strolled along slowly, sunning himself as he went, after his
wont, down the pretty central lane of West Churnside. It was just the
idyllic village best suited to the taste of such an idyllic young curate
as Walter Dene. There were cottages with low-thatched roofs, thickly
overgrown with yellow stonecrop and pink house-leek; there were
trellis-work porches up which the scented dog-rose and the fainter
honeysuckle clambered together in sisterly rivalry; there were pargeted
gable-ends of Elizabethan farmhouses, quaintly varied with black oak
joists and moulded plaster panels. At the end of all, between an avenue
of ancient elm trees, the heavy square tower of the old church closed in
the little vista--a church with a round Norman doorway and dog-tooth
arches, melting into Early English lancets in the aisle, and finishing
up with a great Decorated east window by the broken cross and yew tree.
Not a trace of Perpendicularity about it anywhere, thank goodness: "for
if it were Perpendicular," said Walter Dene to himself often, "I really
think, in spite of my uncle, I should have to look out for another
curacy."
Yes, it was a charming village, and a charming country; but, above all,
it was rendered habitable and pleasurable for a man of taste by the
informing presence of Christina Eliot. "I don't think I shall propose
to Christina this week after all," thought Walter Dene as he strolled
along lazily. "The most delightful part of love-making is certainly its
first beginning. The little tremor of hope and expectation; the
half-needless doubt you feel as to whether she really loves you; the
pains you take to pierce the thin veil of maidenly reserve; the triumph
of detecting her at a blush or a flutter when she sees you coming--all
these are delicate little morsels to be rolled daintily on the critical
palate, and not to be swallowed down coarsely at one vulgar gulp. Poor
child, she is on tenter-hooks of hesitation and expectancy all the time,
I know; for I'm sure she loves me now, I'm sure she loves me; but I must
wait a week yet: she will be grateful to me for it hereafter. We mustn't
kill the goose that lays the golden eggs; we mustn't eat up all our
capital at one extravagant feast, and then lament the want of our
interest ever afterward. Let us live another week in our first fool's
paradise before we enter on the safer but less tremulous pleasures of
sure possession. We can enjoy first love but once in a lifetime; let us
enjoy it now while we can, and not fling away the chance prematurely by
mere childish haste and girlish precipitancy." Thinking which thing,
Walter Dene halted a moment by the churchyard wall, picked a long spray
of scented wild thyme from a mossy cranny, and gazed into the blue sky
above at the graceful swifts who nested in the old tower, as they curved
and circled through the yielding air on their evenly poised and powerful
pinions.
Just at that moment old Mary Long came out of her cottage to speak with
the young parson. "If ye plaze, Maister Dene," she said in her native
west-country dialect, "our Nully would like to zee 'ee. She's main ill
to-day, zur, and she be like to die a'most, I'm thinking."
"Poor child, poor child," said Walter Dene tenderly. "She's a dear
little thing, Mrs. Long, is your Nellie, and I hope she may yet be
spared to you. I'll come and see her at once, and try if I can do
anything to ease her."
He crossed the road compassionately with the tottering old grandmother,
giving her his helping hand over the kerbstone, and following her with
bated breath into the close little sick-room. Then he flung open the
tiny casement with its diamond-leaded panes, so as to let in the fresh
summer air, and picked a few sprigs of sweet-briar from the porch, which
he joined with the geranium from his own button-hole to make a tiny
nosegay for the bare bedside. After that, he sat and talked awhile
gently in an undertone to pale, pretty little Nellie herself, and went
away at last promising to send her some jelly and some soup immediately
from the vicarage kitchen.
"She's a sweet little child," he said to himself musingly, "though I'm
afraid she's not long for this world now; and the poor like these small
attentions dearly. They get them seldom, and value them for the sake of
the thoughtfulness they imply, rather than for the sake of the mere
things themselves. I can order a bottle of calf's-foot at the grocer's,
and Carter can set it in a mould without any trouble; while as for the
soup, some tinned mock-turtle and a little fresh stock makes a really
capital mixture for this sort of thing. It costs so little to give these
poor souls pleasure, and it is a great luxury to oneself undeniably.
But, after all, what a funny trade it is to set an educated man to do!
They send us up to Oxford or Cambridge, give us a distinct taste for
AEschylus and Catullus, Dante and Milton, Mendelssohn and Chopin, good
claret and _olives farcies_, and then bring us down to a country
village, to look after the bodily and spiritual ailments of rheumatic
old washerwomen! If it were not for poetry, flowers, and Christina, I
really think I should succumb entirely under the infliction."
"He's a dear, good man, that he is, is young passon," murmured old Miry
Long as Walter disappeared between the elm trees; "and he do love the
poor and the zick, the same as if he was their own brother. God bless
his zoul, the dear, good vulla, vor all his kindness to our Nully."
Halfway down the main lane Walter came across Christina Eliot. As she
saw him she smiled and coloured a little, and held out her small gloved
hand prettily. Walter took it with a certain courtly and graceful
chivalry. "An exquisite day, Miss Eliot," he said; "such a depth of
sapphire in the sky, such a faint undertone of green on the clouds by
the horizon, such a lovely humming of bees over the flickering hot
meadows! On days like this, one feels that Schopenhauer is wrong after
all, and that life is sometimes really worth living."
"It seems to me often worth living," Christina answered; "if not for
oneself, at least for others. But you pretend to be more of a pessimist
than you really are, I fancy, Mr. Dene. Any one who finds so much beauty
in the world as you do can hardly think life poor or meagre. You seem to
catch the loveliest points in everything you look at, and to throw a
little literary or artistic reflection over them which makes them even
lovelier than they are in themselves."
"Well, no doubt one can increase one's possibilities of enjoyment by
carefully cultivating one's own faculties of admiration and
appreciation," said the curate thoughtfully; "but, after all, life has
only a few chapters that are thoroughly interesting and enthralling in
all its history. We oughtn't to hurry over them too lightly, Miss Eliot;
we ought to linger on them lovingly, and make the most of their
potentialities; we ought to dwell upon them like "linked sweetness long
drawn out." It is the mistake of the world at large to hurry too rapidly
over the pleasantest episodes, just as children pick all the plums at
once out of the pudding. I often think that, from the purely selfish and
temporal point of view, the real value of a life to its subject may be
measured by the space of time over which he has managed to spread the
enjoyment of its greatest pleasures. Look, for example, at poetry, now."
A faint shade of disappointment passed across Christina's face as he
turned from what seemed another groove into that indifferent subject;
but she answered at once, "Yes, of course one feels that with the higher
pleasures at least; but there are others in which the interest of plot
is greater, and then one looks naturally rather to the end. When you
begin a good novel, you can't help hurrying through it in order to find
out what becomes of everybody at last."
"Ah, but the highest artistic interest goes beyond mere plot interest. I
like rather to read for the pleasure of reading, and to loiter over the
passages that please me, quite irrespective of what goes before or what
comes after; just as you, for your part, like to sketch a beautiful
scene for its own worth to you, irrespective of what may happen to the
leaves in autumn, or to the cottage roof in twenty years from this. By
the way, have you finished that little water-colour of the mill yet?
It's the prettiest thing of yours I've ever seen, and I want to look how
you've managed the light on your foreground."
"Come in and see it," said Christina. "It's finished now, and, to tell
you the truth, I'm very well pleased with it myself."
"Then I know it must be good," the curate answered; "for you are always
your own harshest critic." And he turned in at the little gate with her,
and entered the village doctor's tiny drawing-room.
Christina placed the sketch on an easel near the window--a low window
opening to the ground, with long lithe festoons of faint-scented jasmine
encroaching on it from outside--and let the light fall on it aslant in
the right direction. It was a pretty and a clever sketch certainly, with
more than a mere amateur's sense of form and colour; and Walter Dene,
who had a true eye for pictures, could conscientiously praise it for its
artistic depth and fulness. Indeed, on that head at least, Walter Dene's
veracity was unimpeachable, however lax in other matters; nothing on
earth would have induced him to praise as good a picture or a sculpture
in which he saw no real merit. He sat a little while criticizing and
discussing it, suggesting an improvement here or an alteration there,
and then he rose hurriedly, remembering all at once his forgotten
promise to little Nellie. "Dear me," he said, "your daughter's picture
has almost made me overlook my proper duties, Mrs. Eliot. I promised to
send some jelly and things at once to poor little Nellie Long at her
grandmother's. How very wrong of me to let my natural inclinations keep
me loitering here, when I ought to have been thinking of the poor of my
parish!" And he went out with just a gentle pressure on Christina's
hand, and a look from his eyes that her heart knew how to read aright at
the first glance of it.
"Do you know, Christie," said her father, "I sometimes fancy when I hear
that new parson fellow talk about his artistic feelings, and so on, that
he's just a trifle selfish, or at least self-centred. He always dwells
so much on his own enjoyment of things, you know."
"Oh no, papa," cried Christina warmly. "He's anything but selfish, I'm
sure. Look how kind he is to all the poor in the village, and how much
he thinks about their comfort and welfare. And whenever he's talking
with one, he seems so anxious to make you feel happy and contented with
yourself. He has a sort of little subtle flattery of manner about him
that's all pure kindliness; and he's always thinking what he can say or
do to please you, and to help you onward. What you say about his
dwelling on enjoyment so much is really only his artistic sensibility.
He feels things so keenly, and enjoys beauty so deeply, that he can't
help talking enthusiastically about it even a little out of season. He
has more feelings to display than most men, and I'm sure that's the
reason why he displays them so much. A ploughboy could only talk
enthusiastically about roast beef and dumplings; Mr. Dene can talk about
everything that's beautiful and sublime on earth or in heaven."
Meanwhile, Walter Dene was walking quickly with his measured tread--the
even, regular tread of a cultivated gentleman--down the lane toward the
village grocer's, saying to himself as he went, "There was never such a
girl in all the world as my Christina. She may be only a country
surgeon's daughter--a rosebud on a hedgerow bush--but she has the soul
and the eye of a queen among women for all that. Every lover has
deceived himself with the same sweet dream, to be sure--how
over-analytic we have become nowadays, when I must needs half argue
myself out of the sweets of first love!--but then they hadn't so much to
go upon as I have. She has a wonderful touch in music, she has an
exquisite eye in painting, she has an Italian charm in manner and
conversation. I'm something of a connoisseur, after all, and no more
likely to be deceived in a woman than I am in a wine or a picture. And
next week I shall really propose formally to Christina, though I know by
this time it will be nothing more than the merest formality. Her eyes
are too eloquent not to have told me that long ago. It will be a
delightful pleasure to live for her, and in order to make her happy. I
frankly recognize that I am naturally a little selfish--not coarsely and
vulgarly selfish; from that disgusting and piggish vice I may
conscientiously congratulate myself that I'm fairly free; but still
selfish in a refined and cultivated manner. Now, living with Christina
and for Christina will correct this defect in my nature, will tend to
bring me nearer to a true standard of perfection. When I am by her side,
and then only, I feel that I am thinking entirely of her, and not at all
of myself. To her I show my best side; with her, that best side would
be always uppermost. The companionship of such a woman makes life
something purer, and higher, and better worth having. The one thing that
stands in our way is this horrid practical question of what to live
upon. I don't suppose Uncle Arthur will be inclined to allow me
anything, and I can't marry on my own paltry income and my curacy only.
Yet I can't bear to keep Christina waiting indefinitely till some
thick-headed squire or other chooses to take it into his opaque brain to
give me a decent living."
From the grocer's the curate walked on, carrying the two tins in his
hand, as far as the vicarage. He went into the library, sat down by his
own desk, and rang the bell. "Will you be kind enough to give those
things to Carter, John?" he said in his bland voice; "and tell her to
put the jelly in a mould, and let it set. The soup must be warmed with a
little fresh stock, and seasoned. Then take them both, with my
compliments, to old Mary Long the washerwoman, for her grandchild. Is my
uncle in?"
"No, Master Walter," answered the man--he was always "Master Walter" to
the old servants at his uncle's--"the vicar have gone over by train to
Churminster. He told me to tell you he wouldn't be back till evening,
after dinner."
"Did you see him off, John?"
"Yes, Master Walter. I took his portmantew to the station."
"This will be a good chance, then," thought Walter Dene to himself.
"Very well, John," he went on aloud: "I shall write my sermon now. Don't
let anybody come to disturb me."
John nodded and withdrew. Walter Dene locked the door after him
carefully, as he often did when writing sermons, and then lit a cigar,
which was also a not infrequent concomitant of his exegetical labours.
After that he walked once or twice up and down the room, paused a
moment to look at his parchment-covered Rabelais and Villon on the
bookshelf, peered out of the dulled glass windows with the crest in
their centre, and finally drew a curious bent iron instrument out of his
waistcoat pocket. With it in his hands, he went up quietly to his
uncle's desk, and began fumbling at the lock in an experienced manner.
As a matter of fact, it was not his first trial of skill in
lock-picking; for Walter Dene was a painstaking and methodical man, and
having made up his mind that he would get at and read his uncle's will,
he took good care to begin by fastening all the drawers in his own
bedroom, and trying his prentice hand at unfastening them again in the
solitude of his chamber.
After half a minute's twisting and turning, the wards gave way gently to
his dexterous pressure, and the lid of the desk lay open before him.
Walter Dene took out the different papers one by one--there was no need
for hurry, and he was not a nervous person--till he came to a roll of
parchment, which he recognized at once as the expected will. He unrolled
it carefully and quietly, without any womanish trembling or
excitement--"thank Heaven," he said to himself, "I'm above such nonsense
as that"--and sat down leisurely to read it in the big, low,
velvet-covered study chair. As he did so, he did not forget to lay a
notched foot-rest for his feet, and to put the little Japanese dish on
the tiny table by his side to hold his cigar ash. "And now," he said,
"for the important question whether Uncle Arthur has left his money to
me, or to Arthur, or to both of us equally. He ought, of course, to
leave at least half to me, seeing I have become a curate on purpose to
please him, instead of following my natural vocation to the Bar; but I
shouldn't be a bit surprised if he had left it all to Arthur. He's a
pig-headed and illogical old man, the vicar; and he can never forgive
me, I believe, because, being the eldest son, I wasn't called after him
by my father and mother. As if that was my fault! Some people's ideas
of personal responsibility are so ridiculously muddled."
He composed himself quietly in the arm-chair, and glanced rapidly at the
will through the meaningless preliminaries till he came to the
significant clauses. These he read more carefully. "All my estate in the
county of Dorset, and the messuage or tenement known as Redlands, in the
parish of Lode, in the county of Devon, to my dear nephew, Arthur Dene,"
he said to himself slowly: "Oh, this will never do." "And I give and
bequeath to my said nephew, Arthur Dene, the sum of ten thousand pounds,
three per cent. consolidated annuities, now standing in my name."--"Oh
this is atrocious, quite atrocious! What's this?" "And I give and
bequeath to my dear nephew, Walter Dene, the residue of my personal
estate"--"and so forth. Oh no. That's quite sufficient. This must be
rectified. The residuary legatee would only come in for a few hundreds
or so. It's quite preposterous. The vicar was always an ill-tempered,
cantankerous, unaccountable person, but I wonder he has the face to sit
opposite me at dinner after that."
He hummed an air from Schubert, and sat a moment looking thoughtfully at
the will. Then he said to himself quietly, "The simplest thing to do
would be merely to scrape out or take out with chemicals the name
Arthur, substituting the name Walter, and _vice versa_. That's a very
small matter; a man who draws as well as I do ought to be able easily to
imitate a copying clerk's engrossing hand. But it would be madness to
attempt it now and here; I want a little practice first. At the same
time, I mustn't keep the will out a moment longer than is necessary; my
uncle may return by some accident before I expect him; and the true
philosophy of life consists in invariably minimizing the adverse
chances. This will was evidently drawn up by Watson and Blenkiron, of
Chancery Lane. I'll write to-morrow and get them to draw up a will for
me, leaving all I possess to Arthur. The same clerk is pretty sure to
engross it, and that'll give me a model for the two names on which I can
do a little preliminary practice. Besides, I can try the stuff Wharton
told me about, for making ink fade on the same parchment. That will be
killing two birds with one stone, certainly. And now if I don't make
haste I shan't have time to write my sermon."
He replaced the will calmly in the desk, fastened the lock again with a
delicate twirl of the pick, and sat down in his arm-chair to compose his
discourse for to-morrow's evensong. "It's not a bad bit of rhetoric," he
said to himself as he read it over for correction, "but I'm not sure
that I haven't plagiarized a little too freely from Montaigne and dear
old Burton. What a pity it must be thrown away upon a Churnside
congregation! Not a soul in the whole place will appreciate a word of
it, except Christina. Well, well, that alone is enough reward for any
man." And he knocked off his ash pensively into the Japanese ash-pan.
During the course of the next week Walter practised diligently the art
of imitating handwriting. He got his will drawn up and engrossed at
Watson and Blenkiron's (without signing it, _bien entendu_); and he
spent many solitary hours in writing the two names "Walter" and "Arthur"
on the spare end of parchment, after the manner of the engrossing clerk.
He also tested the stuff for making the ink fade to his own perfect
satisfaction. And on the next occasion when his uncle was safely off the
premises for three hours, he took the will once more deliberately from
the desk, removed the obnoxious letters with scrupulous care, and wrote
in his own name in place of Arthur's, so that even the engrossing clerk
himself would hardly have known the difference. "There," he said to
himself approvingly, as he took down quiet old George Herbert from the
shelf and sat down to enjoy an hour's smoke after the business was over,
"that's one good deed well done, anyhow. I have the calm satisfaction of
a clear conscience. The vicar's proposed arrangement was really most
unfair; I have substituted for it what Aristotle would have rightly
called true distributive justice. For though I've left all the property
to myself, by the unfortunate necessity of the case, of course I won't
take it all. I'll be juster than the vicar. Arthur shall have his fair
share, which is more, I believe, than he'd have done for me; but I hate
squalid money-grubbing. If brothers can't be generous and brotherly to
one another, what a wretched, sordid little life this of ours would
really be!"
Next Sunday morning the vicar preached, and Walter sat looking up at him
reflectively from his place in the chancel. A beautiful clear-cut face,
the curate's, and seen to great advantage from the doctor's pew, set off
by the white surplice, and upturned in quiet meditation towards the
elder priest in the pulpit. Walter was revolving many things in his
mind, and most of all one adverse chance which he could not just then
see his way to minimize. Any day his uncle might take it into his head
to read over the will and discover the--ah, well, the rectification.
Walter was a man of too much delicacy of feeling even to think of it to
himself as a fraud or a forgery. Then, again, the vicar was not a very
old man after all; he might live for an indefinite period, and Christina
and himself might lose all the best years of their life waiting for a
useless person's natural removal. What a pity that threescore was not
the utmost limit of human life! For his own part, like the Psalmist,
Walter had no desire to outlive his own highest tastes and powers of
enjoyment. Ah, well, well, man's prerogative is to better and improve
upon nature. If people do not die when they ought, then it becomes
clearly necessary for philosophically minded juniors to help them on
their way artificially.
It was an ugly necessity, certainly; Walter frankly recognized that fact
from the very beginning, and he shrank even from contemplating it; but
there was no other way out of the difficulty. The old man had always
been a selfish bachelor, with no love for anybody or anything on earth
except his books, his coins, his garden, and his dinner; he was growing
tired of all except the last; would it not be better for the world at
large, on strict utilitarian principles, that he should go at once?
True, such steps are usually to be deprecated; but the wise man is a law
unto himself, and instead of laying down the wooden, hard-and-fast lines
that make conventional morality so much a rule of thumb, he judges every
individual case on its own particular merits. Here was Christina's
happiness and his own on the one hand, with many collateral advantages
to other people, set in the scale against the feeble remnant of a
selfish old man's days on the other. Walter Dene had a constitutional
horror of taking life in any form, and especially of shedding blood; but
he flattered himself that if anything of the sort became clearly
necessary, he was not the man to shrink from taking the needful measures
to ensure it, at any sacrifice of personal comfort.
All through the next week Walter turned over the subject in his own
mind; and the more he thought about it, the more the plan gained in
definiteness and consistency as detail after detail suggested itself to
him. First he thought of poison. That was the cleanest and neatest way
of managing the thing, he considered; and it involved the least
unpleasant consequences. To stick a knife or shoot a bullet into any
sentient creature was a horrid and revolting act; to put a little
tasteless powder into a cup of coffee and let a man sleep off his life
quietly was really nothing more than helping him involuntarily to a
delightful euthanasia. "I wish any one would do as much for me at his
age, without telling me about it," Walter said to himself seriously. But
then the chances of detection would be much increased by using poison,
and Walter felt it an imperative duty to do nothing which would expose
Christina to the shock of a discovery. She would not see the matter in
the same practical light as he did; women never do; their morality is
purely conventional and a wise man will do nothing on earth to shake it.
You cannot buy poison without the risk of exciting question. There
remained, then, only shooting or stabbing. But shooting makes an awkward
noise, and attracts attention at the moment; so the one thing possible
was a knife, unpleasant as that conclusion seemed to all his more
delicate feelings.
Having thus decided, Walter Dene proceeded to lay his plans with
deliberate caution. He had no intention whatsoever of being detected,
though his method of action was simplicity itself. It was only bunglers
and clumsy fools who got caught; he knew that a man of his intelligence
and ability would not make such an idiot of himself as--well, as common
ruffians always do. He took his old American bowie-knife, bought years
ago as a curiosity, out of the drawer where it had lain so long. It was
very rusty, but it would be safer to sharpen it privately on his own
hone and strop than to go asking for a new knife at a shop for the
express purpose of enabling the shopman afterwards to identify him. He
sharpened it for safety's sake during sermon-hour in the library, with
the door locked as usual. It took a long time to get off all the rust,
and his arm got quickly tired. One morning as he was polishing away at
it, he was stopped for a moment by a butterfly which flapped and
fluttered against the dulled window-panes. "Poor thing," he said to
himself, "it will beat its feathery wings to pieces in its struggles;"
and he put a vase of Venetian glass on top of it, lifted the sash
carefully, and let the creature fly away outside in the broad sunshine.
At the same moment the vicar, who was strolling with his King Charlie on
the lawn, came up and looked in at the window. He could not have seen in
before, because of the dulled and painted diamonds.
"That's a murderous-looking weapon, Wally," he said, with a smile, as
his glance fell upon the bowie and hone. "What do you use it for?"
"Oh, it's an American bowie," Walter answered carelessly. "I bought it
long ago for a curiosity, and now I'm sharpening it up to help me in
carving that block of walnut wood." And he ran his finger lightly along
the edge of the blade to test its keenness. What a lucky thing that it
was the vicar himself, and not the gardener! If he had been caught by
anybody else the fact would have been fatal evidence after all was over.
"Mefiez-vous des papillons," he hummed to himself, after Beranger, as he
shut down the window. "One more butterfly, and I must give up the game
as useless."
Meanwhile, as Walter meant to make a clean job of it--hacking and hewing
clumsily was repulsive to all his finer feelings--he began also to study
carefully the anatomy of the human back. He took down all the books on
the subject in the library, and by their aid discovered exactly under
which ribs the heart lay. A little observation of the vicar, compared
with the plates in Quain's "Anatomy," showed him precisely at what point
in his clerical coat the most vulnerable interstice was situated. "It's
a horrid thing to have to do," he thought over and over again as he
planned it, "but it's the only way to secure Christina's happiness." And
so, by a certain bright Friday evening in August, Walter Dene had fully
completed all his preparations.
That afternoon, as on all bright afternoons in summer, the vicar went
for a walk in the grounds, attended only by little King Charlie. He was
squire and parson at once in Churnside, and he loved to make the round
of his own estate. At a certain gate by Selbury Copse the vicar always
halted to rest awhile, leaning on the bar and looking at the view across
the valley. It was a safe and lonely spot. Walter remained at home (he
was to take the regular Friday evensong) and went into the study by
himself. After a while he took his hat, not without trembling, strolled
across the garden, and then made the short cut through the copse, so as
to meet the vicar by the gate. On his way he heard the noise of the
Dennings in the farm opposite, out rabbit-shooting with their guns and
ferrets in the warren. His very soul shrank within him at the sound of
that brutal sport. "Great heavens!" he said to himself, with a shudder;
"to think how I loathe and shrink from the necessity of almost
painlessly killing this one selfish old man for an obviously good
reason, and those creatures there will go out massacring innocent
animals with the aid of a hideous beast of prey, not only without
remorse, but actually by way of amusement! I thank Heaven I am not even
as they are." Near the gate he came upon his uncle quietly and
naturally, though it would be absurd to deny that at that supreme moment
even Walter Dene's equable heart throbbed hard, and his breath went and
came tremulously. "Alone," he thought to himself, "and nobody near; this
is quite providential," using even then, in thought, the familiar
phraseology of his profession.
"A lovely afternoon, Uncle Arthur," he said as composedly as he could,
accurately measuring the spot on the vicar's coat with his eye
meanwhile. "The valley looks beautiful in this light."
"Yes, a lovely afternoon, Wally, my boy, and an exquisite glimpse down
yonder into the churchyard."
As he spoke, Walter half leaned upon the gate beside him, and adjusted
the knife behind the vicar's back scientifically. Then, without a word
more, in spite of a natural shrinking, he drove it home up to the haft,
with a terrible effort of will, at the exact spot on the back that the
books had pointed out to him. It was a painful thing to do, but he did
it carefully and well. The effect of Walter Dene's scientific prevision
was even more instantaneous than he had anticipated. Without a single
cry, without a sob or a contortion, the vicar's lifeless body fell over
heavily by the side of the gate. It rolled down like a log into the dry
ditch beneath. Walter knelt trembling on the ground close by, felt the
pulse for a moment to assure himself that his uncle was really dead, and
having fully satisfied himself on this all-important point, proceeded to
draw the knife neatly out of the wound. He had let it fall in the body,
in order to extricate it more easily afterward, and not risk pulling it
out carelessly so as to get himself covered needlessly by tell-tale
drops of blood, like ordinary clumsy assassins. But he had forgotten to
reckon with little King Charlie. The dog jumped piteously upon the body
of his master, licked the wound with his tongue, and refused to allow
Walter to withdraw the knife. It would be unsafe to leave it there, for
it might be recognized. "Minimize the adverse chances," he muttered
still; but there was no inducing King Charlie to move. A struggle might
result in getting drops of blood upon his coat, and then, great heavens,
what a terrible awakening for Christina! "Oh, Christina, Christina,
Christina," he said to himself piteously, "it is for you only that I
could ever have ventured to do this hideous thing." The blood was still
oozing out of the narrow slit, and saturating the black coat, and Walter
Dene with his delicate nerves could hardly bear to look upon it.
At last he summoned up resolution to draw out the knife from the ugly
wound, in spite of King Charlie, and as he did so, oh, horror! the
little dog jumped at it, and cut his left fore-leg against the sharp
edge deep to the bone. Here was a pretty accident indeed! If Walter Dene
had been a common heartless murderer he would have snatched up the
knife immediately, left the poor lame dog to watch and bleed beside his
dead master, and skulked off hurriedly from the mute witness to his
accomplished crime. But Walter was made of very different mould from
that; he could not find it in his heart to leave a poor dumb animal
wounded and bleeding for hours together, alone and untended. Just at
first, indeed, he tried sophistically to persuade himself his duty to
Christina demanded that he should go away at once, and never mind the
sufferings of a mere spaniel; but his better nature told him the next
moment that such sophisms were indefensible, and his humane instincts
overcame even the profound instinct of self-preservation. He sat down
quietly beside the warm corpse. "Thank goodness," he said, with a slight
shiver of disgust, "I'm not one of those weak-minded people who are
troubled by remorse. They would be so overcome by terror at what they
had done that they would want to run away from the body immediately, at
any price. But I don't think I _could_ feel remorse. It is an incident
of lower natures--natures that are capable of doing actions under one
set of impulses, which they regret when another set comes uppermost in
turn. That implies a want of balance, an imperfect co-ordination of
parts and passions. The perfect character is consistent with itself;
shame and repentance are confessions of weakness. For my part, I never
do anything without having first deliberately decided that it is the
best or the only thing to do; and having so done it, I do not draw back
like a girl from the necessary consequences of my own act. No fluttering
or running away for me. Still, I must admit that all that blood does
look very ghastly. Poor old gentleman! I believe he really died almost
without knowing it, and that is certainly a great comfort to one under
the circumstances."
He took King Charlie tenderly in his hands, without touching the wounded
leg, and drew his pocket handkerchief softly from his pocket. "Poor
beastie," he said aloud, holding out the cut limb before him, "you are
badly hurt, I'm afraid; but it wasn't my fault. We must see what we can
do for you." Then he wrapped the handkerchief deftly around it, without
letting any blood show through, pressed the dog close against his
breast, and picked up the knife gingerly by the reeking handle. "A fool
of a fellow would throw it into the river," he thought, with a curl of
his graceful lip. "They always dredge the river after these incidents. I
shall just stick it down a hole in the hedge a hundred yards off. The
police have no invention, dull donkeys; they never dredge the hedges."
And he thrust it well down a disused rabbit burrow, filling in the top
neatly with loose mould.
Walter Dene meant to have gone home quietly and said evensong, leaving
the discovery of the body to be made at haphazard by others, but this
unfortunate accident to King Charlie compelled him against his will to
give the first alarm. It was absolutely necessary to take the dog to the
veterinary at once, or the poor little fellow might bleed to death
incontinently. "One's best efforts," he thought, "are always liable to
these unfortunate _contretemps_. I meant merely to remove a superfluous
person from an uncongenial environment; yet I can't manage it without at
the same time seriously injuring a harmless little creature that I
really love." And with one last glance at the lifeless thing behind him,
he took his way regretfully along the ordinary path back towards the
peaceful village of Churnside.
Halfway down the lane, at the entrance to the village, he met one of his
parishioners. "Tom," he said boldly, "have you seen anything of the
vicar? I'm afraid he's got hurt somehow. Here's poor little King Charlie
come limping back with his leg cut."
"He went down the road, zur, 'arf an hour zince, and I arn't zeen him
afterwards."
"Tell the servants at the vicarage to look around the grounds, then; I'm
afraid he has fallen and hurt himself. I must take the dog at once to
Perkins's, or else I shall be late for evensong."
The man went off straight toward the vicarage, and Walter Dene turned
immediately with the dog in his arms into the village veterinary's.
II.
The servants from the vicarage were not the first persons to hit upon
the dead body of the vicar. Joe Harley, the poacher, was out
reconnoitring that afternoon in the vicar's preserves; and five minutes
after Walter Dene had passed down the far side of the hedge, Joe Harley
skulked noiselessly from the orchard up to the cover of the gate by
Selbury Copse. He crept through the open end by the post (for it was
against Joe's principles under any circumstances to climb over an
obstacle of any sort, and so needlessly expose himself), and he was just
going to slink off along the other hedge, having wires and traps in his
pocket, when his boot struck violently against a soft object in the
ditch underfoot. It struck so violently that it crushed in the object
with the force of the impact; and when Joe came to look at what the
object might be, he found to his horror that it was the bruised and
livid face of the old parson. Joe had had a brush with keepers more than
once, and had spent several months of seclusion in Dorchester Gaol; but,
in spite of his familiarity with minor forms of lawlessness, he was
moved enough in all conscience by this awful and unexpected discovery.
He turned the body over clumsily with his hands, and saw that it had
been stabbed in the back once only. In doing so he trod in a little
blood, and got a drop or two on his sleeve and trousers; for the pool
was bigger now, and Joe was not so handy or dainty with his fingers as
the idyllic curate.
It was an awful dilemma, indeed, for a confirmed and convicted poacher.
Should he give the alarm then and there, boldly, trusting to his
innocence for vindication, and helping the police to discover the
murderer? Why, that would be sheer suicide, no doubt; "for who but would
believe," he thought, "'twas me as done it?" Or should he slink away
quietly and say nothing, leaving others to find the body as best they
might? That was dangerous enough in its way if anybody saw him, but not
so dangerous as the other course. In an evil hour for his own chances
Joe Harley chose that worse counsel, and slank off in his familiar
crouching fashion towards the opposite corner of the copse.
On the way he heard John's voice holloaing for his master, and kept
close to the hedge till he had quite turned the corner. But John had
caught a glimpse of him too, and John did not forget it when, a few
minutes later, he came upon the horrid sight beside the gate of Selbury
Copse.
Meanwhile Walter had taken King Charlie to the veterinary's, and had his
leg bound and bandaged securely. He had also gone down to the church,
got out his surplice, and begun to put it on in the vestry for evensong,
when a messenger came at hot haste from the vicarage, with news that
Master Walter must come up at once, for the vicar was murdered.
"Murdered!" Walter Dene said to himself slowly half aloud; "murdered!
how horrible! Murdered!" It was an ugly word, and he turned it over with
a genuine thrill of horror. That was what they would say of him if ever
the thing came to be discovered! What an inappropriate classification!
He threw aside the surplice, and rushed up hurriedly to the vicarage.
Already the servants had brought in the body, and laid it out in the
clothes it wore, on the vicar's own bed. Walter Dene went in,
shuddering, to look at it. To his utter amazement, the face was battered
in horribly and almost unrecognizably by a blow or kick! What could that
hideous mutilation mean? He could not imagine. It was an awful mystery.
Great heavens! just fancy if any one were to take it into his head that
he, Walter Dene, had done _that_--had kicked a defenceless old gentleman
brutally about the face like a common London ruffian! The idea was too
horrible to be borne for a moment. It unmanned him utterly, and he hid
his face between his two hands and sobbed aloud like one broken-hearted.
"This day's work has been too much for my nerves," he thought to himself
between the sobs; "but perhaps it is just as well I should give way now
completely."
That night was mainly taken up with the formalities of all such cases;
and when at last Walter Dene went off, tired and nerve-worn, to bed,
about midnight, he could not sleep much for thinking of the mystery. The
murder itself didn't trouble him greatly; that was over and past now,
and he felt sure his precautions had been amply sufficient to protect
him even from the barest suspicion; but he couldn't fathom the mystery
of that battered and mutilated face! Somebody must have seen the corpse
between the time of the murder and the discovery! Who could that
somebody have been? and what possible motive could he have had for such
a horrible piece of purposeless brutality?
As for the servants, in solemn conclave in the hall, they had
unanimously but one theory to account for all the facts: some poacher or
other, for choice Joe Harley, had come across the vicar in the copse,
with gun and traps in hand. The wretch had seen he was discovered, had
felled the poor old vicar by a blow in the face with the butt-end of
his rifle, and after he fell, fainting, had stabbed him for greater
security in the back. That was such an obvious solution of the
difficulty, that nobody in the servants' hall had a moment's hesitation
in accepting it.
When Walter heard next morning early that Joe Harley had been arrested
overnight, on John's information, his horror and surprise at the news
were wholly unaffected. Here was another new difficulty, indeed. "When I
did the thing," he said to himself, "I never thought of that
possibility. I took it for granted it would be a mystery, a problem for
the local police (who, of course, could no more solve it than they could
solve the _pons-asinorum_), but it never struck me they would arrest an
innocent person on the charge instead of me. This is horrible. It's so
easy to make out a case against a poacher, and hang him for it, on
suspicion. One's whole sense of justice revolts against the thing. After
all, there's a great deal to be said in favour of the ordinary
commonplace morality: it prevents complications. A man of delicate
sensibilities oughtn't to kill anybody; he lets himself in for all kinds
of unexpected contingencies, without knowing it."
At the coroner's inquest things looked very black indeed for Joe Harley.
Walter gave his evidence first, showing how he had found King Charlie
wounded in the lane; and then the others gave theirs, as to the search
for and finding of the body. John in particular swore to having seen a
man's back and head slinking away by the hedge while they were looking
for the vicar; and that back and head he felt sure were Joe Harley's. To
Walter's infinite horror and disgust, the coroner's jury returned a
verdict of wilful murder against the poor poacher. What other verdict
could they possibly have given in accordance with such evidence?
The trial of Joe Harley for the wilful murder of the Reverend Arthur
Dene was fixed for the next Dorchester Assizes. In the interval, Walter
Dene, for the first time in his placid life, knew what it was to undergo
a mental struggle. Whatever happened, he could not let Joe Harley be
hanged for this murder. His whole soul rose up within him in loathing
for such an act of hideous injustice. For though Walter Dene's code of
morality was certainly not the conventional one, as he so often boasted
to himself, he was not by any means without any code of morals of any
sort. He could commit a murder where he thought it necessary, but he
could not let an innocent man suffer in his stead. His ethical judgment
on that point was just as clear and categorical as the judgment which
told him he was in duty bound to murder his uncle. For Walter did not
argue with himself on moral questions: he perceived the right and
necessary thing intuitively; he was a law to himself, and he obeyed his
own law implicitly, for good or for evil. Such men are capable of
horrible and diabolically deliberate crimes; but they are capable of
great and genuine self-sacrifices also.
Walter made no secret in the village of his disinclination to believe in
Joe Harley's guilt. Joe was a rough fellow, he said, certainly, and he
had no objection to taking a pheasant or two, and even to having a free
fight with the keepers; but, after all, our game laws were an outrageous
piece of class legislation, and he could easily understand how the poor,
whose sense of justice they outraged, should be so set against them. He
could not think Joe Harley was capable of a detestable crime. Besides,
he had seen him himself within a few minutes before and after the
murder. Everybody thought it such a proof of the young parson's generous
and kindly disposition; he had certainly the charity which thinketh no
evil. Even though his own uncle had been brutally murdered on his own
estate, he checked his natural feelings of resentment, and refused to
believe that one of his own parishioners could have been guilty of the
crime. Nay, more, so anxious was he that substantial justice should be
done the accused, and so confident was he of his innocence, that he
promised to provide counsel for him at his own expense; and he provided
two of the ablest barristers on the Western circuit.
Before the trial, Walter Dene had come, after a terrible internal
struggle, to an awful resolution. He would do everything he could for
Joe Harley; but if the verdict went against him, he was resolved, then
and there, in open court, to confess, before judge and jury, the whole
truth. It would be a horrible thing for Christina; he knew that; but he
could not love Christina so much, "loved he not honour more;" and
honour, after his own fashion, he certainly loved dearly. Though he
might be false to all that all the world thought right, it was ingrained
in the very fibre of his soul to be true to his own inner nature at
least. Night after night he lay awake, tossing on his bed, and picturing
to his mind's eye every detail of that terrible disclosure. The jury
would bring in a verdict of guilty: then, before the judge put on his
black cap, he, Walter, would stand up, and tell them that he could not
let another man hang for his crime; he would have the whole truth out
before them; and then he would die, for he would have taken a little
bottle of poison at the first sound of the verdict. As for
Christina--oh, Christina!--Walter Dene could not dare to let himself
think upon that. It was horrible; it was unendurable; it was torture a
thousand times worse than dying: but still, he must and would face it.
For in certain phases, Walter Dene, forger and murderer as he was, could
be positively heroic.
The day of the trial came, and Walter Dene, pale and haggard with much
vigil, walked in a dream and faintly from his hotel to the court-house.
Everybody present noticed what a deep effect the shock of his uncle's
death had had upon him. He was thinner and more bloodless than usual,
and his dulled eyes looked black and sunken in their sockets. Indeed, he
seemed to have suffered far more intensely than the prisoner himself,
who walked in firmer and more erect, and took his seat doggedly in the
familiar dock. He had been there more than once before, to say the
truth, though never before on such an errand. Yet mere habit, when he
got there, made him at once assume the hang-dog look of the consciously
guilty.
Walter sat and watched and listened, still in a dream, but without once
betraying in his face the real depth of his innermost feelings. In the
body of the court he saw Joe's wife, weeping profusely and
ostentatiously, after the fashion considered to be correct by her class;
and though he pitied her from the bottom of his heart, he could only
think by contrast of Christina. What were that good woman's fears and
sorrows by the side of the grief and shame and unspeakable horror he
might have to bring upon his Christina? Pray Heaven the shock, if it
came, might kill her outright; that would at least be better than that
she should live long years to remember. More than judge, or jury, or
prisoner, Walter Dene saw everywhere, behind the visible shadows that
thronged the court, that one persistent prospective picture of
heart-broken Christina.
The evidence for the prosecution told with damning force against the
prisoner. He was a notorious poacher; the vicar was a game-preserver. He
had poached more than once on the ground of the vicarage. He was shown
by numerous witnesses to have had an animus against the vicar. He had
been seen, not in the face, to be sure, but still seen and recognized,
slinking away, immediately after the fact, from the scene of the murder.
And the prosecution had found stains of blood, believed by scientific
experts to be human, on the clothing he had worn when he was arrested.
Walter Dene listened now with terrible, unabated earnestness, for he
knew that in reality it was he himself who was upon his trial. He
himself, and Christina's happiness; for if the poacher were found
guilty, he was firmly resolved, beyond hope of respite, to tell all, and
face the unspeakable.
The defence seemed indeed a weak and feeble theory. Somebody unknown had
committed the murder, and this somebody, seen from behind, had been
mistaken by John for Joe Harley. The blood-stains need not be human, as
the cross-examination went to show, but were only known by
counter-experts to be mammalian--perhaps a rabbit's. Every poacher--and
it was admitted that Joe was a poacher--was liable to get his clothes
blood-stained. Grant they were human, Joe, it appeared, had himself once
shot off his little finger. All these points came out from the
examination of the earlier witnesses. At last, counsel put the curate
himself into the box, and proceeded to examine him briefly as a witness
for the defence.
Walter Dene stepped, pale and haggard still, into the witness-box. He
had made up his mind to make one final effort "for Christina's
happiness." He fumbled nervously all the time at a small glass phial in
his pocket, but he answered all questions without a moment's hesitation,
and he kept down his emotions with a wonderful composure which excited
the admiration of everybody present. There was a general hush to hear
him. Did he see the prisoner, Joseph Harley, on the day of the murder?
Yes, three times. When was the first occasion? From the library window,
just before the vicar left the house. What was Joseph Harley then doing?
Walking in the opposite direction from the copse. Did Joseph Harley
recognize him? Yes, he touched his hat to him. When was the second
occasion? About ten minutes later, when he, Walter, was leaving the
vicarage for a stroll. Did Joseph Harley then recognize him? Yes, he
touched his hat again, and the curate said, "Good morning, Joe; a fine
day for walking." When was the third time? Ten minutes later again, when
he was returning from the lane, carrying wounded little King Charlie.
Would it have been physically possible for the prisoner to go from the
vicarage to the spot where the murder was committed, and back again, in
the interval between the first two occasions? It would not. Would it
have been physically possible for the prisoner to do so in the interval
between the second and third occasions? It would not.
"Then in your opinion, Mr. Dene, it is physically impossible that Joseph
Harley can have committed this murder?"
"In my opinion, it is physically impossible."
While Walter Dene solemnly swore amid dead silence to this treble lie,
he did not dare to look Joe Harley once in the face; and while Joe
Harley listened in amazement to this unexpected assistance to his
case--for counsel, suspecting a mistaken identity, had not questioned
him too closely on the subject--he had presence of mind enough not to
let his astonishment show upon his stolid features. But when Walter had
finished his evidence in chief, he stole a glance at Joe; and for a
moment their eyes met. Then Walter's fell in utter self-humiliation; and
he said to himself fiercely, "I would not so have debased and degraded
myself before any man to save my own life--what is my life worth me,
after all?--but to save Christina, to save Christina, to save Christina!
I have brought all this upon myself for Christina's sake."
Meanwhile, Joe Harley was asking himself curiously what could be the
meaning of this new move on parson's part. It was deliberate perjury,
Joe felt sure, for parson could not have mistaken another person for him
three times over; but what good end for himself could parson hope to
gain by it? If it was he who had murdered the vicar (as Joe strongly
suspected), why did he not try to press the charge home against the
first person who happened to be accused, instead of committing a
distinct perjury on purpose to compass his acquittal? Joe Harley, with
his simple everyday criminal mind, could not be expected to unravel the
intricacies of so complex a personality as Walter Dene's. But even
there, on trial for his life, he could not help wondering what on earth
young parson could be driving at in this business.
The judge summed up with the usual luminously obvious alternate
platitudes. If the jury thought that John had really seen Joe Harley,
and that the curate was mistaken in the person whom he thrice saw, or
was mistaken once only out of the thrice, or had miscalculated the time
between each occurrence, or the time necessary to cover the ground to
the gate, then they would find the prisoner guilty of wilful murder. If,
on the other hand, they believed John had judged hastily, and that the
curate had really seen the prisoner three separate times, and that he
had rightly calculated all the intervals, then they would find the
prisoner not guilty. The prisoner's case rested entirely upon the
_alibi_. Supposing they thought there was a doubt in the matter, they
should give the prisoner the benefit of the doubt. Walter noticed that
the judge said in every other case, "If you believe the witness
So-and-so," but that in his case he made no such discourteous
reservation. As a matter of fact, the one person whose conduct nobody
for a moment dreamt of calling in question was the real murderer.
The jury retired for more than an hour. During all that time two men
stood there in mortal suspense, intent and haggard, both upon their
trial, but not both equally. The prisoner in the dock fixed his arms in
a dogged and sullen attitude, the colour half gone from his brown cheek,
and his eyes straining with excitement, but showing no outward sign of
any emotion except the craven fear of death. Walter Dene stood almost
fainting in the body of the court, his bloodless fingers still fumbling
nervously at the little phial, and his face deadly pale with the awful
pallor of a devouring horror. His heart scarcely beat at all, but at
each long slow pulsation he could feel it throb distinctly within his
bosom. He saw or heard nothing before him, but kept his aching eyes
fixed steadily on the door by which the jury were to enter. Junior
counsel nudged one another to notice his agitation, and whispered that
that poor young curate had evidently never seen a man tried for his life
before.
At last the jury entered. Joe and Walter waited, each in his own manner,
breathless for the verdict. "Do you find the prisoner at the bar guilty
or not guilty of wilful murder?" Walter took the little phial from his
pocket, and held it carefully between his finger and thumb. The awful
moment had come; the next word would decide the fate of himself and
Christina. The foreman of the jury looked up solemnly, and answered with
slow distinctness, "Not guilty." The prisoner leaned back vacantly, and
wiped his forehead; but there was an awful cry of relief from one mouth
in the body of the court, and Walter Dene sank back into the arms of the
bystanders, exhausted with suspense and overcome by the reaction. The
crowd remarked among themselves that young Parson Dene was too
tender-hearted a man to come into court at a criminal trial. He would
break his heart to see even a dog hanged, let alone his
fellow-Christians. As for Joe Harley, it was universally admitted that
he had had a narrow squeak of it, and that he had got off better than he
deserved. The jury gave him the benefit of the doubt.
As soon as all the persons concerned had returned to Churnside, Walter
sent at once for Joe Harley. The poacher came to see him in the vicarage
library. He was elated and coarsely exultant with his victory, as a
relief from the strain he had suffered, after the manner of all vulgar
natures.
"Joe," said the clergyman slowly, motioning him into a chair at the
other side of the desk, "I know that after this trial Churnside will not
be a pleasant place to hold you. All your neighbours believe, in spite
of the verdict, that you killed the vicar. I feel sure, however, that
you did not commit this murder. Therefore, as some compensation for the
suffering of mind to which you have been put, I think it well to send
you and your wife and family to Australia or Canada, whichever you like
best. I propose also to make you a present of a hundred pounds, to set
you up in your new home."
"Make it five hundred, passon," Joe said, looking at him significantly.
Walter smiled quietly, and did not flinch in any way. "I said a
hundred," he continued calmly, "and I will make it only a hundred. I
should have had no objection to making it five, except for the manner in
which you ask it. But you evidently mistake the motive of my gift. I
give it out of pure compassion for you, and not out of any other feeling
whatsoever."
"Very well, passon," said Joe sullenly, "I accept it."
"You mistake again," Walter went on blandly, for he was himself again
now. "You are not to accept it as terms; you are to thank me for it as a
pure present. I see we two partially understand each other; but it is
important you should understand me exactly as I mean it. Joe Harley,
listen to me seriously. I have saved your life. If I had been a man of a
coarse and vulgar nature, if I had been like you in a similar
predicament, I would have pressed the case against you for obvious
personal reasons, and you would have been hanged for it. But I did not
press it, because I felt convinced of your innocence, and my sense of
justice rose irresistibly against it. I did the best I could to save
you; I risked my own reputation to save you; and I have no hesitation
now in telling you that to the best of my belief, if the verdict had
gone against you, the person who really killed the vicar, accidentally
or intentionally, meant to have given himself up to the police, rather
than let an innocent man suffer."
"Passon," said Joe Harley, looking at him intently, "I believe as
you're tellin' me the truth. I zeen as much in that person's face afore
the verdict."
There was a solemn pause for a moment; and then Walter Dene said slowly,
"Now that you have withdrawn your claim as a claim, I will stretch a
point and make it five hundred. It is little enough for what you have
suffered. But I, too, have suffered terribly, terribly."
"Thank you, passon," Joe answered. "I zeen as you were turble anxious."
There was again a moment's pause. Then Walter Dene asked quietly, "How
did the vicar's face come to be so bruised and battered?"
"I stumbled up agin 'im accidental like, and didn't know I'd kicked 'un
till I'd done it. Must 'a been just a few minutes after you'd 'a left
'un."
"Joe," said the curate in his calmest tone, "you had better go; the
money will be sent to you shortly. But if you ever see my face again, or
speak or write a word of this to me, you shall not have a penny of it,
but shall be prosecuted for intimidation. A hundred before you leave,
four hundred in Australia. Now go."
"Very well, passon," Joe answered; and he went.
"Pah!" said the curate with a face of disgust, shutting the door after
him, and lighting a perfumed pastille in his little Chinese porcelain
incense-burner, as if to fumigate the room from the poacher's offensive
presence. "Pah! to think that these affairs should compel one to
humiliate and abase one's self before a vulgar clod like that! To think
that all his life long that fellow will virtually know--and
misinterpret--my secret. He is incapable of understanding that I did it
as a duty to Christina. Well, he will never dare to tell it, that's
certain, for nobody would believe him if he did; and he may congratulate
himself heartily that he's got well out of this difficulty. It will be
the luckiest thing in the end that ever happened to him. And now I hope
this little episode is finally over."
When the Churnside public learned that Walter Dene meant to carry his
belief in Joe Harley's innocence so far as to send him and his family at
his own expense out to Australia, they held that the young parson's
charity and guilelessness was really, as the doctor said, almost
Quixotic. And when, in his anxiety to detect and punish the real
murderer, he offered a reward of five hundred pounds from his own pocket
for any information leading to the arrest and conviction of the
criminal, the Churnside people laughed quietly at his extraordinary
childlike simplicity of heart. The real murderer had been caught and
tried at Dorchester Assizes, they said, and had only got off by the skin
of his teeth because Walter himself had come forward and sworn to a
quite improbable and inconclusive alibi. There was plenty of time for
Joe to have got to the gate by the short cut, and that he did so
everybody at Churnside felt morally certain. Indeed, a few years later a
blood-stained bowie-knife was found in the hedge not far from the scene
of the murder, and the gamekeeper "could almost 'a took his Bible oath
he'd zeen just such a knife along o' Joe Harley."
That was not the end of Walter Dene's Quixotisms, however. When the will
was read, it turned out that almost everything was left to the young
parson; and who could deserve it better, or spend it more charitably?
But Walter, though he would not for the world seem to cast any slight or
disrespect upon his dear uncle's memory, did not approve of customs of
primogeniture, and felt bound to share the estate equally with his
brother Arthur. "Strange," said the head of the firm of Watson and
Blenkiron to himself, when he read the little paragraph about this
generous conduct in the paper; "I thought the instructions were to leave
it to his nephew Arthur, not to his nephew Walter; but there, one
forgets and confuses names of people that one does not know so easily."
"Gracious goodness!" thought the engrossing clerk; "surely it was the
other way on. I wonder if I can have gone and copied the wrong names in
the wrong places?" But in a big London business, nobody notes these
things as they would have been noted in Churnside; the vicar was always
a changeable, pernickety, huffy old fellow, and very likely he had had a
reverse will drawn up afterwards by his country lawyer. All the world
only thought that Walter Dene's generosity was really almost ridiculous,
even in a parson. When he was married to Christina, six months
afterwards, everybody said so charming a girl was well mated with so
excellent and admirable a husband.
And he really did make a very tender and loving husband and father.
Christina believed in him always, for he did his best to foster and keep
alive her faith. He would have given up active clerical duty if he
could, never having liked it (for he was above hypocrisy), but Christina
was against the project, and his bishop would not hear of it. The Church
could ill afford to lose such a man as Mr. Dene, the bishop said, in
these troubled times; and he begged him as a personal favour to accept
the living of Churnside, which was in his gift. But Walter did not like
the place, and asked for another living instead, which, being of less
value--"so like Mr. Dene to think nothing of the temporalities,"--the
bishop even more graciously granted. He has since published a small
volume of dainty little poems on uncut paper, considered by some critics
as rather pagan in tone for a clergyman, but universally allowed to be
extremely graceful, the perfection of poetical form with much delicate
mastery of poetical matter. And everybody knows that the author is
almost certain to be offered the first vacant canonry in his own
cathedral. As for the little episode, he himself has almost forgotten
all about it; for those who think a murderer must feel remorse his whole
life long, are trying to read their own emotional nature into the wholly
dispassionate character of Walter Dene.
_AN EPISODE IN HIGH LIFE._
Sir Henry Vardon, K.C.B., electrician to the Admiralty, whose title, as
everybody knows, was gazetted some six weeks since, is at this moment
the youngest living member of the British knighthood. He is now only
just thirty, and he has obtained his present high distinction by those
remarkable inventions of his in the matter of electrical signalling and
lighthouse arrangements which have been so much talked about in _Nature_
this year, and which gained him the gold medal of the Royal Society in
1881. Lady Vardon is one of the youngest and prettiest hostesses in
London, and if you would care to hear the history of their courtship
here it is.
When Harry Vardon left Oxford, only seven years ago, none of his friends
could imagine what he meant by throwing up all his chances of University
success. The son of a poor country parson in Devonshire, who had
strained his little income to the uttermost to send him to college,
Vardon of Magdalen had done credit to his father and himself in all the
schools. He gained the best demyship of his year; got a first in
classical mods.; and then unaccountably took to reading science, in
which he carried everything before him. At the end of his four years, he
walked into a scientific fellowship at Balliol as a matter of course;
and then, after twelve months' residence, he suddenly surprised the
world of Oxford by accepting a tutorship to the young Earl of Surrey,
at that time, as you doubtless remember, a minor, aged about sixteen.
But Harry Vardon had good reasons of his own for taking this tutorship.
Six months after he became a fellow of Balliol, the old vicar had died
unexpectedly, leaving his only other child, Edith, alone and unprovided
for, as was indeed natural; for the expenses of Harry's coll
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