“The house they had taken was rather a lonely place, out of sight of
neighbors, which they had got cheap because it was so isolated and
inconvenient, I fancy. Of course Mrs. Ormond, with her exaggeration,
represented it as a sort of solitude which nobody but tramps of the most
dangerous description ever visited. As she said, she never went to sleep
without expecting to wake up murdered in her bed.”
“Like her,” said Minver, with a glance at me full of relish for the touch
of character which I would feel with him.
“She said,” Wanhope went on, “that she was anxious from the first for the
effect upon Ormond. In the stress of any danger, she gave me to
understand, he always behaved very well, but out of its immediate
presence he was full of all sorts of gloomy apprehensions, unless the
surroundings were cheerful. She could not imagine how he came to take the
place, but when she told him so--”
“I’ve no doubt she told him so pretty promptly,” the painter grinned.
“--he explained that he had seen it on a brilliant day in spring, when
all the trees were in bloom, and the bees humming in the blossoms, and
the orioles singing, and the outlook from the lawn down over the river
valley was at its best. He had fallen in love with the place, that was
the truth, and he was so wildly in love with it all through that he could
not feel the defect she did in it. He used to go gaily about the wide,
harking old house at night, shutting it up, and singing or whistling
while she sat quaking at the notion of their loneliness and their
absolute helplessness--an invalid and a little woman--in case anything
happened. She wanted him to get the man who did the odd jobs about the
house, to sleep there, but he laughed at her, and they kept on with their
usual town equipment of two serving-women. She could not account for his
spirits, which were usually so low when they were alone--”
“And not fighting,” Minver suggested to me.
“--and when she asked him what the matter was he could not account for
them, either. But he said, one day, that the fear of death seemed to be
lifted from his soul, and that made her shudder.”
Rulledge fetched a long sigh, and Minver interpreted, “Beginning to feel
that it’s something like now.”
“He said that for the first time within his memory he was rid of that
nether consciousness of mortality which had haunted his whole life, and
poisoned, more or less, all his pleasure in living. He had got a
reprieve, or a respite, and he felt like a boy--another kind of boy from
what he had ever been. He was full of all sorts of brilliant hopes and
plans. He had visions of success in business beyond anything he had
known, and talked of buying the place he had taken, and getting a summer
colony of friends about them. He meant to cut the property up, and make
the right kind of people inducements. His world seemed to have been
emptied of all trouble as well as all mortal danger.”
“Haven’t you psychologists some message about a condition like
that!” I asked.
“Perhaps it’s only the pathologists again,” said Minver.
“The alienists, rather more specifically,” said Wanhope. “They recognize
it as one of the beginnings of insanit--_folie des grandeurs_ as the
French call the stage.”
“Is it necessarily that?” Rulledge demanded, with a resentment which we
felt so droll in him that we laughed.
“I don’t know that it is,” said Wanhope. “I don’t know why we shouldn’t
sometimes, in the absence of proofs to the contrary, give such a fact the
chance to evince a spiritual import. Of course it had no other import to
poor Mrs. Ormond, and of course I didn’t dream of suggesting a scientific
significance.”
“I should think not!” Rulledge puffed.
Wanhope went on: “I don’t think I should have dared to do so to a woman
in her exaltation concerning it. I could see that however his state had
affected her with dread or discomfort in the first place, it had since
come to be her supreme hope and consolation. In view of what afterward
happened, she regarded it as the effect of a mystical intimation from
another world that was sacred, and could not he considered like an
ordinary fact without sacrilege. There was something very pathetic in her
absolute conviction that Ormond’s happiness was an emanation from the
source of all happiness, such as sometimes, where the consciousness
persists, comes to a death-bed. That the dying are not afraid of dying is
a fact of such common, such almost invariable observation--”
“You mean,” I interposed, “when the vital forces are beaten so low that
the natural dread of ceasing to be, has no play? It has less play, I’ve
noticed, in age than in youth, but for the same reason that it has when
people are weakened by sickness.”
“Ah,” said Wanhope, “that comparative indifference to death in the old,
to whom it is so much nearer than it is to the young, is very suggestive.
There may be something in what you say; they may not care so much because
they have no longer the strength--the muscular strength--for caring. They
are too tired to care as they used. There is a whole region of most
important inquiry in that direction--”
“Did you mean to have him take that direction?” Rulledge asked, sulkily.
“He can take any direction for me,” I said. “He is always delightful.”
“Ah, thank you!” said Wanhope.
“But I confess,” I went on, “that I was wondering whether the fact that
the dying are indifferent to death could be established in the case of
those who die in the flush of health and strength, like, for instance,
people who are put to death.”
Wanhope smiled. “I think it can--measurably. Most murderers make a good
end, as the saying used to be, when they end on the scaffold, though they
are not supported by religious fervor of any kind, or the exaltation of a
high ideal. They go meekly and even cheerfully to their death, without
rebellion or even objection. It is most exceptional that they make a
fight for their lives, as that woman did a few years ago at Dannemora,
and disgusted all refined people with capital punishment.”
“I wish they would make a fight always,” said Rulledge, with unexpected
feeling. “It would do more than anything to put an end to that
barbarity.”
“It would be very interesting, as Wanhope says,” Minver remarked. “But
aren’t we getting rather far away? From the Ormonds, I mean.”
“We are, rather,” said Wanhope. “Though I agree that it would be
interesting. I should rather like to have it tried. You know Frederick
Douglass acted upon some such principle when his master attempted to whip
him. He fought, and he had a theory that if the slave had always fought
there would soon have been an end of whipping, and so an end of slavery.
But probably it will be a good while before criminals are--”
“Educated up to the idea,” Minver proposed.
“Yes,” Wanhope absently acquiesced. “There seems to be a resignation
intimated to the parting soul, whether in sickness or in health, by the
mere proximity of death. In Ormond’s case there seems to have been
something more positive. His wife says that in the beginning of those
days he used to come to her and wonder what could be the matter with him.
He had a joy he could not account for by anything in their lives, and it
made her tremble.”
“Probably it didn’t. I don’t think there was anything that could make
Mrs. Ormond tremble, unless it was the chance that Ormond would get the
last word,” said Minver.
No one minded him, and Wanhope continued: “Of course she thought he
must be going to have a fit of sickness, as the people say in the
country, or used to say. Those expressions often survive in the common
parlance long after the peculiar mental and moral conditions in which
they originated have passed away. They must once have been more
accurate than they are now. When one said ‘fit of sickness’ one must
have meant something specific; it would be interesting to know what.
Women use those expressions longer than men; they seem to be inveterate
in their nerves; and women apparently do their thinking in their nerves
rather than their brains.”