THOROUGHLY disheartened and disgusted, and (if I must honestly confess
it) thoroughly frightened too, I whispered to Mrs. Macallan, “I was
wrong, and you were right. Let us go.”
The ears of Miserrimus Dexter must have been as sensitive as the ears of
a dog. He heard me say, “Let us go.”
“No!” he called out. “Bring Eustace Macallan’s second wife in here. I
am a gentleman--I must apologize to her. I am a student of human
character--I wish to see her.”
The whole man appeared to have undergone a complete transformation. He
spoke in the gentlest of voices, and he sighed hysterically when he had
done, like a woman recovering from a burst of tears. Was it reviving
courage or reviving curiosity? When Mrs. Macallan said to me, “The fit
is over now; do you still wish to go away?” I answered, “No; I am ready
to go in.”
“Have you recovered your belief in him already?” asked my mother-in-law,
in her mercilessly satirical way.
“I have recovered from my terror of him,” I replied.
“I am sorry I terrified you,” said the soft voice at the fire-place.
“Some people think I am a little mad at times. You came, I suppose,
at one of the times--if some people are right. I admit that I am a
visionary. My imagination runs away with me, and I say and do strange
things. On those occasions, anybody who reminds me of that horrible
Trial throws me back again into the past, and causes me unutterable
nervous suffering. I am a very tender-hearted man. As the necessary
consequence (in such a world as this), I am a miserable wretch. Accept
my excuses. Come in, both of you. Come in and pity me.”
A child would not have been frightened of him now. A child would have
gone in and pitied him.
The room was getting darker and darker. We could just see the crouching
figure of Miserrimus Dexter at the expiring fire--and that was all.
“Are we to have no light?” asked Mrs. Macallan. “And is this lady to see
you, when the light comes, out of your chair?”
He lifted something bright and metallic, hanging round his neck, and
blew on it a series of shrill, trilling, bird-like notes. After an
interval he was answered by a similar series of notes sounding faintly
in some distant region of the house.
“Ariel is coming,” he said. “Compose yourself, Mamma Macallan; Ariel
with make me presentable to a lady’s eyes.”
He hopped away on his hands into the darkness at the end of the
room. “Wait a little,” said Mrs. Macallan, “and you will have another
surprise--you will see the ‘delicate Ariel.’”
We heard heavy footsteps in the circular room.
“Ariel!” sighed Miserrimus Dexter out of the darkness, in his softest
notes.
To my astonishment the coarse, masculine voice of the cousin in the
man’s hat--the Caliban’s, rather than the Ariel’s voice--answered,
“Here!”
“My chair, Ariel!”
The person thus strangely misnamed drew aside the tapestry, so as to let
in more light; then entered the room, pushing the wheeled chair before
her. She stooped and lifted Miserrimus Dexter from the floor, like a
child. Before she could put him into the chair, he sprang out of her
arms with a little gleeful cry, and alighted on his seat, like a bird
alighting on its perch!
“The lamp,” said Miserrimus Dexter, “and the looking-glass.--Pardon me,”
he added, addressing us, “for turning my back on you. You mustn’t see
me until my hair is set to rights.--Ariel! the brush, the comb, and the
perfumes!”
Carrying the lamp in one hand, the looking-glass in the other, and the
brush (with the comb stuck in it) between her teeth, Ariel the Second,
otherwise Dexter’s cousin, presented herself plainly before me for the
first time. I could now see the girl’s round, fleshy, inexpressive
face, her rayless and colorless eyes, her coarse nose and heavy chin. A
creature half alive; an imperfectly developed animal in shapeless form
clad in a man’s pilot jacket, and treading in a man’s heavy laced boots,
with nothing but an old red-flannel petticoat, and a broken comb in
her frowzy flaxen hair, to tell us that she was a woman--such was the
inhospitable person who had received us in the darkness when we first
entered the house.
This wonderful valet, collecting her materials for dressing her
still more wonderful master’s hair, gave him the looking-glass (a
hand-mirror), and addressed herself to her work.
She combed, she brushed, she oiled, she perfumed the flowing locks and
the long silky beard of Miserrimus Dexter with the strangest mixture of
dullness and dexterity that I ever saw. Done in brute silence, with
a lumpish look and a clumsy gait, the work was perfectly well done
nevertheless. The imp in the chair superintended the whole proceeding
critically by means of his hand-mirror. He was too deeply interested
in this occupation to speak until some of the concluding touches to his
beard brought the misnamed Ariel in front of him, and so turned her
full face toward the part of the room in which Mrs. Macallan and I were
standing. Then he addressed us, taking especial care, however, not to
turn his head our way while his toilet was still incomplete.
“Mamma Macallan,” he said, “what is the Christian name of your son’s
second wife?”
“Why do you want to know?” asked my mother-in-law.
“I want to know because I can’t address her as ‘Mrs. Eustace Macallan.’”
“Why not?”
“It recalls _the other_ Mrs. Eustace Macallan. If I am reminded of those
horrible days at Gleninch my fortitude will give way--I shall burst out
screaming again.”
Hearing this, I hastened to interpose.
“My name is Valeria,” I said.
“A Roman name,” remarked Miserrimus Dexter. “I like it. My mind is cast
in the Roman mold. My bodily build would have been Roman if I had been
born with legs. I shall call you Mrs. Valeria, unless you disapprove of
it.”
I hastened to say that I was far from disapproving of it.
“Very good,” said Miserrimus Dexter “Mrs. Valeria, do you see the face
of this creature in front of me?”
He pointed with the hand-mirror to his cousin as unconcernedly as he
might have pointed to a dog. His cousin, on her side, took no more
notice than a dog would have taken of the contemptuous phrase by which
he had designated her. She went on combing and oiling his beard as
composedly as ever.
“It is the face of an idiot, isn’t it?” pursued Miserrimus Dexter! “Look
at her! She is a mere vegetable. A cabbage in a garden has as much life
and expression in it as that girl exhibits at the present moment. Would
you believe there was latent intelligence, affection, pride, fidelity,
in such a half-developed being as this?”
I was really ashamed to answer him. Quite needlessly! The impenetrable
young woman went on with her master’s beard. A machine could not
have taken less notice of the life and the talk around it than this
incomprehensible creature.
“_I_ have got at that latent affection, pride, fidelity, and the rest
of it,” resumed Miserrimus Dexter. “_I_ hold the key to that dormant
Intelligence. Grand thought! Now look at her when I speak. (I named
her, poor wretch, in one of my ironical moments. She has got to like her
name, just as a dog gets to like his collar.) Now, Mrs. Valeria, look
and listen.--Ariel!”
The girl’s dull face began to brighten. The girl’s mechanically moving
hand stopped, and held the comb in suspense.
“Ariel! you have learned to dress my hair and anoint my beard, haven’t
you?”
Her face still brightened. “Yes! yes! yes!” she answered, eagerly. “And
you say I have learned to do it well, don’t you?”
“I say that. Would you like to let anybody else do it for you?”
Her eyes melted softly into light and life. Her strange unwomanly voice
sank to the gentlest tones that I had heard from her yet.
“Nobody else shall do it for me,” she said at once proudly and tenderly.
“Nobody, as long as I live, shall touch you but me.”
“Not even the lady there?” asked Miserrimus Dexter, pointing backward
with his hand-mirror to the place at which I was standing.
Her eyes suddenly flashed, her hand suddenly shook the comb at me, in a
burst of jealous rage.
“Let her try!” cried the poor creature, raising her voice again to its
hoarsest notes. “Let her touch you if she dares!”
Dexter laughed at the childish outbreak. “That will do, my delicate
Ariel,” he said. “I dismiss your Intelligence for the present. Relapse
into your former self. Finish my beard.”
She passively resumed her work. The new light in her eyes, the new
expression in her face, faded little by little and died out. In another
minute the face was as vacant and as lumpish as before; the hands did
their work again with the lifeless dexterity which had so painfully
impressed me when she first took up the brush. Miserrimus Dexter
appeared to be perfectly satisfied with these results.
“I thought my little experiment might interest you,” he said. “You see
how it is? The dormant intelligence of my curious cousin is like the
dormant sound in a musical instrument. I play upon it--and it answers to
my touch. She likes being played upon. But her great delight is to hear
me tell a story. I puzzle her to the verge of distraction; and the more
I confuse her the better she likes the story. It is the greatest fun;
you really must see it some day.” He indulged himself in a last look
at the mirror. “Ha!” he said, complacently; “now I shall do. Vanish,
Ariel!”
She tramped out of the room in her heavy boots, with the mute obedience
of a trained animal. I said “Good-night” as she passed me. She neither
returned the salutation nor looked at me: the words simply produced
no effect on her dull senses. The one voice that could reach her was
silent. She had relapsed once more into the vacant inanimate creature
who had opened the gate to us, until it pleased Miserrimus Dexter to
speak to her again.
“Valeria!” said my mother-in-law. “Our modest host is waiting to see
what you think of him.”
While my attention was fixed on his cousin he had wheeled his chair
around so as to face me with the light of the lamp falling full on him.
In mentioning his appearance as a witness at the Trial, I find I have
borrowed (without meaning to do so) from my experience of him at this
later time. I saw plainly now the bright intelligent face and the large
clear blue eyes, the lustrous waving hair of a light chestnut color, the
long delicate white hands, and the magnificent throat and chest which I
have elsewhere described. The deformity which degraded and destroyed the
manly beauty of his head and breast was hidden from view by an Oriental
robe of many colors, thrown over the chair like a coverlet. He was
clothed in a jacket of black velvet, fastened loosely across his chest
with large malachite buttons; and he wore lace ruffles at the ends of
his sleeves, in the fashion of the last century. It may well have been
due to want of perception on my part--but I could see nothing mad in
him, nothing in any way repelling, as he now looked at me. The one
defect that I could discover in his face was at the outer corners of
his eyes, just under the temple. Here when he laughed, and in a lesser
degree when he smiled, the skin contracted into quaint little wrinkles
and folds, which looked strangely out of harmony with the almost
youthful appearance of the rest of his face. As to his other features,
the mouth, so far as his beard and mustache permitted me to see it, was
small and delicately formed; the nose--perfectly shaped on the straight
Grecian model--was perhaps a little too thin, judged by comparison with
the full cheeks and the high massive forehead. Looking at him as a whole
(and speaking of him, of course, from a woman’s, not a physiognomist’s
point of view), I can only describe him as being an unusually handsome
man. A painter would have reveled in him as a model for St. John. And a
young girl, ignorant of what the Oriental robe hid from view, would have
said to herself, the instant she looked at him, “Here is the hero of my
dreams!”
His blue eyes--large as the eyes of a woman, clear as the eyes of a
child--rested on me the moment I turned toward him, with a strangely
varying play of expression, which at once interested and perplexed me.
Now there was doubt--uneasy, painful doubt--in the look; and now again
it changed brightly to approval, so open and unrestrained that a vain
woman might have fancied she had made a conquest of him at first sight.
Suddenly a new emotion seemed to take possession of him. His eyes sank,
his head drooped; he lifted his hands with a gesture of regret. He
muttered and murmured to himself; pursuing some secret and melancholy
train of thought, which seemed to lead him further and further away
from present objects of interest, and to plunge him deeper and deeper in
troubled recollections of the past. Here and there I caught some of the
words. Little by little I found myself trying to fathom what was darkly
passing in this strange man’s mind.
“A far more charming face,” I heard him say. “But no--not a more
beautiful figure. What figure was ever more beautiful than hers?
Something--but not all--of her enchanting grace. Where is the
resemblance which has brought her back to me? In the pose of the figure,
perhaps. In the movement of the figure, perhaps. Poor martyred angel!
What a life! And what a death! what a death!”
Was he comparing me with the victim of the poison--with my husband’s
first wife? His words seemed to justify the conclusion. If I were right,
the dead woman had evidently been a favorite with him. There was no
misinterpreting the broken tones of his voice when he spoke of her: he
had admired her, living; he mourned her, dead. Supposing that I
could prevail upon myself to admit this extraordinary person into my
confidence, what would be the result? Should I be the gainer or the
loser by the resemblance which he fancied he had discovered? Would the
sight of me console him or pain him? I waited eagerly to hear more on
the subject of the first wife. Not a word more escaped his lips. A new
change came over him. He lifted his head with a start, and looked about
him as a weary man might look if he was suddenly disturbed in a deep
sleep.
“What have I done?” he said. “Have I been letting my mind drift again?”
He shuddered and sighed. “Oh, that house of Gleninch!” he murmured,
sadly, to himself. “Shall I never get away from it in my thoughts? Oh,
that house of Gleninch!”
To my infinite disappointment, Mrs. Macallan checked the further
revelation of what was passing in his mind.
Something in the tone and manner of his allusion to her son’s
country-house seemed to have offended her. She interposed sharply and
decisively.
“Gently, my friend, gently!” she said. “I don’t think you quite know
what you are talking about.”
His great blue eyes flashed at her fiercely. With one turn of his hand
he brought his chair close at her side. The next instant he caught her
by the arm, and forced her to bend to him, until he could whisper in
her ear. He was violently agitated. His whisper was loud enough to make
itself heard where I was sitting at the time.
“I don’t know what I am talking about?” he repeated, with his eyes fixed
attentively, not on my mother-in-law, but on me. “You shortsighted
old woman! where are your spectacles? Look at her! Do you see no
resemblance--the figure, not the face!--do you see no resemblance there
to Eustace’s first wife?”
“Pure fancy!” rejoined Mrs. Macallan. “I see nothing of the sort.”
He shook her impatiently.
“Not so loud!” he whispered. “She will hear you.”
“I have heard you both,” I said. “You need have no fear, Mr. Dexter, of
speaking before me. I know that my husband had a first wife, and I know
how miserably she died. I have read the Trial.”
“You have read the life and death of a martyr!” cried Miserrimus Dexter.
He suddenly wheeled his chair my way; he bent over me; his eyes filled
with tears. “Nobody appreciated her at her true value,” he said, “but
me. Nobody but me! nobody but me!”
Mrs. Macallan walked away impatiently to the end of the room.
“When you are ready, Valeria, I am,” she said. “We cannot keep the
servants and the horses waiting much longer in this bleak place.”
I was too deeply interested in leading Miserrimus Dexter to pursue
the subject on which he had touched to be willing to leave him at that
moment. I pretended not to have heard Mrs. Macallan. I laid my hand, as
if by accident, on the wheel-chair to keep him near me.
“You showed me how highly you esteemed that poor lady in your evidence
at the Trial,” I said. “I believe, Mr. Dexter, you have ideas of your
own about the mystery of her death?”
He had been looking at my hand, resting on the arm of his chair, until I
ventured on my question. At that he suddenly raised his eyes, and fixed
them with a frowning and furtive suspicion on my face.
“How do you know I have ideas of my own?” he asked, sternly.
“I know it from reading the Trial,” I answered. “The lawyer who
cross-examined you spoke almost in the very words which I have just
used. I had no intention of offending you, Mr. Dexter.”
His face cleared as rapidly as it had clouded. He smiled, and laid
his hand on mine. His touch struck me cold. I felt every nerve in me
shivering under it; I drew my hand away quickly.
“I beg your pardon,” he said, “if I have misunderstood you. I _have_
ideas of my own about that unhappy lady.” He paused and looked at me in
silence very earnestly. “Have _you_ any ideas?” he asked. “Ideas about
her life? or about her death?”
I was deeply interested; I was burning to hear more. It might encourage
him to speak if I were candid with him. I answered, “Yes.”
“Ideas which you have mentioned to any one?” he went on.
“To no living creature,” I replied--“as yet.”
“This very strange!” he said, still earnestly reading my face. “What
interest can _you_ have in a dead woman whom you never knew? Why did you
ask me that question just now? Have you any motive in coming here to see
me?”
I boldly acknowledged the truth. I said, “I have a motive.”
“Is it connected with Eustace Macallan’s first wife?”
“It is.”
“With anything that happened in her lifetime?”
“No.”
“With her death?”
“Yes.”
He suddenly clasped his hands with a wild gesture of despair, and then
pressed them both on his head, as if he were struck by some sudden pain.
“I can’t hear it to-night!” he said. “I would give worlds to hear it,
but I daren’t. I should lose all hold over myself in the state I am in
now. I am not equal to raking up the horror and the mystery of the past;
I have not courage enough to open the grave of the martyred dead. Did
you hear me when you came here? I have an immense imagination. It runs
riot at times. It makes an actor of me. I play the parts of all the
heroes that ever lived. I feel their characters. I merge myself in their
individualities. For the time I _am_ the man I fancy myself to be. I
can’t help it. I am obliged to do it. If I restrained my imagination
when the fit is on me, I should go mad. I let myself loose. It lasts
for hours. It leaves me with my energies worn out, with my sensibilities
frightfully acute. Rouse any melancholy or terrible associations in me
at such times, and I am capable of hysterics, I am capable of screaming.
You heard me scream. You shall _not_ see me in hysterics. No, Mrs.
Valeria--no, you innocent reflection of the dead and gone--I would not
frighten you for the world. Will you come here to-morrow in the daytime?
I have got a chaise and a pony. Ariel, my delicate Ariel, can drive. She
shall call at Mamma Macallan’s and fetch you. We will talk to-morrow,
when I am fit for it. I am dying to hear you. I will be fit for you
in the morning. I will be civil, intelligent, communicative, in the
morning. No more of it now. Away with the subject--the too exciting, the
too interesting subject! I must compose myself or my brains will explode
in my head. Music is the true narcotic for excitable brains. My harp! my
harp!”
He rushed away in his chair to the far end of the room, passing Mrs.
Macallan as she returned to me, bent on hastening our departure.
“Come!” said the old lady, irritably. “You have seen him, and he has
made a good show of himself. More of him might be tiresome. Come away.”
The chair returned to us more slowly. Miserrimus Dexter was working it
with one hand only. In the other he held a harp of a pattern which I had
hitherto only seen in pictures. The strings were few in number, and the
instrument was so small that I could have held it easily on my lap.
It was the ancient harp of the pictured Muses and the legendary Welsh
bards.
“Good-night, Dexter,” said Mrs. Macallan.
He held up one hand imperatively.
“Wait!” he said. “Let her hear me sing.” He turned to me. “I decline to
be indebted to other people for my poetry and my music,” he went on. “I
compose my own poetry and my own music. I improvise. Give me a moment to
think. I will improvise for You.”
He closed his eyes and rested his head on the frame of the harp. His
fingers gently touched the strings while he was thinking. In a
few minutes he lifted his head, looked at me, and struck the first
notes--the prelude to the song. It was wild, barbaric, monotonous music,
utterly unlike any modern composition. Sometimes it suggested a slow
and undulating Oriental dance. Sometimes it modulated into tones which
reminded me of the severer harmonies of the old Gregorian chants. The
words, when they followed the prelude, were as wild, as recklessly free
from all restraint of critical rules, as the music. They were assuredly
inspired by the occasion; I was the theme of the strange song. And
thus--in one of the finest tenor voices I ever heard--my poet sang of
me:
“Why does she come? She reminds me of the lost; She reminds me of the
dead: In her form like the other, In her walk like the other: Why does
she come?
“Does Destiny bring her? Shall we range together The mazes of the past?
Shall we search together The secrets of the past? Shall we interchange
thoughts, surmises, suspicions? Does Destiny bring her?
“The Future will show. Let the night pass; Let the day come. I shall see
into Her mind: She will look into Mine. The Future will show.”
His voice sank, his fingers touched the strings more and more feebly as
he approached the last lines. The overwrought brain needed and took its
reanimating repose. At the final words his eyes slowly closed. His head
lay back on the chair. He slept with his arms around his harp, as a
child sleeps hugging its last new toy.
We stole out of the room on tiptoe, and left Miserrimus Dexter--poet,
composer, and madman--in his peaceful sleep.