“Do you really mean that Deeming was treating his spaniel cruelly?” I
asked.
“I do. He had the mania for persecution that I suspected. He was
venting it upon his dog. The servants had some inkling of the truth,
especially his butler. He knew, I believe, all that was going on.
But—he was well paid, very well paid.”
I remembered my Sunday morning call, and the butler’s exclamation when
the fox-terrier ran into the house.
“This is horrible, Vernon,” I said. “Are you sure of what you say?”
“Quite sure. I heard—well, I heard things at night, and at last I saw
the dog.”
“How?”
[Illustration: “WHILE I WAS THERE DEEMING CAME BACK UNEXPECTEDLY.”]
“I got into the house when Deeming was out. I bribed his butler, paid
him more than Deeming did, I suppose. Anyhow, I got in. I think the
man was sympathetic; was anxious really that an end should be put to
the disgusting business. I burst open the door of the room in which
the spaniel was confined, and then I saw—no matter what. It was quite
enough. While I was there Deeming came back unexpectedly.”
“Good God!” I exclaimed. “What a ghastly situation!”
“It was not exactly pleasant. I saw the man’s soul naked that
night—stark naked. It was on that occasion the dog bit him.”
“Ouf!” I said.
Again nausea seized me.
Vernon looked at me steadily.
“Don’t you think Deeming deserved anything he got?” he asked. “Anything
he could ever get?”
“But he was mad—he must have been mad!”
“I suppose that sort of thing is what might be called a form of
madness. Unfortunately a good many sane people have it—people as sane
as you or I in all other respects.”
When he said the words “or I” a flush, I think, came to my cheek. It
seemed to me that he spoke with significance—as if he knew what Gernham
and I had spoken of the day before.
“As sane as you or I,” he repeated. “This work I’ve been doing with
Gernham has opened my eyes to a good deal in human nature that they
were shut to before. I once said to you in Rome, to you and Deeming,
that man’s cruelty sprang often from a lack of imagination. Sometimes
it springs from just the opposite, from a diseased imagination that
lusts for gratification in ways we won’t discuss.”
“But Deeming—that he should be such a man, he whose profession it was
to make whole!”
“Yes, that made the thing more strange and, to him, more enticing.”
“Enticing!” I exclaimed.
My voice was full of the bitterness of disgust mingled with incredulity
that I was feeling.
“Just that,” he said. “He healed, as it were, with one hand, and
destroyed with the other. Deeming was one of the human devils who have
an insatiable craze for contrast. They revel in virtue because it is so
different from vice. They revel in vice because it is so different from
virtue. Deeming quivered with happiness when the last patient was gone
and he could steal to the room where the spaniel⸺”
“Enough! Enough!” I exclaimed. “I won’t hear any more! Thank God he’s
dead! Thank God it’s all over now! Why did you do that?” Vernon had
suddenly laughed.
“Why did you do that?” I repeated. “What is there to laugh at?”
“I was laughing at your certainty, Luttrell, at the calm assurance
with which we—poor, ignorant beings that we are—assert this or that
regarding the fate of a soul, without knowing anything of the purposes
of the Creator.”
“I don’t understand.”
“And yet you say—‘Thank God, it’s all over now!’”
He looked at me so strangely that I was struck to silence. I opened my
lips to speak, but, while his eyes were upon me, I could say nothing.
He made me feel as if, indeed, I were plunged in a profound gulf of
ignorance, as if he watched me there from some height of understanding,
of knowledge.
“Now I’ll go and fetch the spaniel,” he said.
And he got up and quietly left the room.
I turned in my chair and sat facing the door. The room was softly lit
by wax candles, and on the walls were the pictures of gentleness, of
mercy, of goodness and adoration which had hung upon the walls of
Vernon’s dining-room in Rome. My glance ran over them, while my mind
dwelt upon the horrors of Vernon’s narrative—horrors that seemed all
the greater because he had told me so little, had left my imagination
so unfettered. Then I looked again towards the door, and listened
intently. Presently I heard a door shut, the sound of a step. Vernon
was coming with the spaniel. I had asked to see the dog; I had wished
to see it. Yet now my wish was about to be gratified I felt an extreme
repugnance invade me. I longed to escape from the fulfilment of my
wish. I was seized with—was it fear? It was something cold, something
that lay upon my nerves like ice, that surely turned the blood in
my veins to water. But, I could do nothing now, nothing to escape.
Something within me seemed to make a furious effort to take up some
weapon and attack the cold heavy thing that was striving to paralyse
me. I was conscious of battle. In the midst of the battle the door
opened and Vernon came in.
He was carrying the black spaniel in his arms.
He walked in slowly, kicked the door backwards with his heel to shut
it, came to the table and sat down, still keeping the dog in his arms.
The dog was muzzled, and had on a collar to which a steel chain was
attached; but, for the first moment, the only thing that struck me was
his thinness. He was excessively thin—almost emaciated. He sat on his
master’s knee, with his chin on the edge of the table and his yellow
eyes gazing at me. A long trembling ran through his body, ceased, and
was renewed with a regularity that reminded me of the ticking of a
clock. Vernon kept his two hands upon the spaniel. They shuddered on
the dog’s back when he shuddered.
“Well,” Vernon said. “What do you think of him?”
“He’s horribly thin,” I said. “Horribly.”