GENTLEMAN GEFF’S FATE
Gentleman Geff was in a profound stupor when he was taken to the rectory
and put to bed in the best chamber of the house—the parlor bedroom on
the ground floor.
He continued in this state for several days, faithfully watched by
Elspeth and Longman, and frequently visited by Mr. and Mrs. Campbell,
and daily attended by Dr. Hobbs.
Jennie shrank from even going to look at him.
But he recognized no one, noticed nothing.
Medicine and highly concentrated nourishment were regularly administered
to him by his nurses.
These he sometimes swallowed instinctively, mechanically, and at other
times choked over, and had to be raised in bed and have his throat
relieved and his mouth wiped like a helpless baby; but all unconsciously
on his part. He never knew, or seemed to know, what he himself was
suffering, or other people were doing.
His spirit was away, away.
Where?
In Hades, most probably, judging from his antecedents.
“Will he die in this stupor, or come out of it, do you think, sir?”
inquired the rector of the doctor one morning as the two men stood by
the bedside of the patient.
Dr. Hobbs never “shook his head;” doctors never do such stupidly
disheartening things over a case, however serious—story writers to the
contrary notwithstanding.
This physician also had the courage to confess that he was not
omniscient, for he answered:
“I do not know.”
“But if he should come out of this stupor, will he be likely to live?”
inquired the rector.
“I do not know,” again replied the doctor. “I shall be better able to
judge when he recovers consciousness, if he should ever recover it.”
And the physician wrote his prescriptions and instructions for the
treatment of the ill man and retired.
Not one word of this talk entered the consciousness of Gentleman Geff.
Nine days he lay in this condition, and then there passed over him a
change.
He seemed to himself to be groping feebly out of nothingness into vague
consciousness of horror; but what the horror was, or what he himself
was, he did not even think. The first effort to do so sent him back into
the state from which he had come.
After a few hours he came again out of utter oblivion into some faint
consciousness of himself.
But who was he? Where was he?
All was dark and still around him. Then came faint intelligence, with
imperfect memory, which mingled dreams with distorted facts. He
remembered faintly what he would have called “a row,” but where, or
under what circumstances, he could not find; he thought it was a drunken
brawl over cards in a gambling saloon, and some one had crushed in his
brain and killed him.
Yes, that was it! He had been killed last night in a drunken brawl over
cards, in a gambling saloon, and now he had come to life——
Where?
In that dark lower world, without sun, moon or stars; without air, water
or vegetation; that world of horror and despair of which he had heard in
childhood, but in which he had never believed, and where he must wait
with thieves and murderers and miscreants like himself until the general
judgment day; and after that——
What?
The eternal life of torture in the lake of fire and brimstone in which
he had never believed, either in its literal or in its metaphorical
meaning.
And now he was too utterly debilitated in mind and body to know or to
feel anything very clearly or deeply.
He relapsed into unconsciousness.
When he came to himself the next time he was able to think with a little
more clearness, and to recollect with more correctness.
He remembered now that it was at Haymore Hall the “row” had occurred, in
which he still believed he had been knocked down and had succumbed to
his injuries, and had now waked up in the world of darkness, horror and
despair, to wait for his final doom.
His final doom?
He moaned in his helplessness, not altogether from fear of future hell,
but from a feeling of present thirst, intolerable even as the rich man
suffered when he cried to Father Abraham to send Lazarus to dip his
finger in water and cool his parched tongue.
When he had moaned a second time he felt the approach of some huge, dark
form. It stood by him, it bent over him, put out a strong arm under his
shoulders and lifted him, and placed a glassful of a refreshing beverage
to his lips.
He drank and breathed more freely.
Ah! how delicious it was!
The attendant replaced his head on the pillow, smoothed his bedclothes
and withdrew to take away the glass.
In a moment he came back, bent over the still half-comatose man and
inquired softly:
“How do you feel, Capt. Montgomery?”
“I—I—I—feel——” muttered Gentleman Geff, and then swooned into the
slumber of weakness.
Some one silently opened the door and came in. It was the rector.
“How is your patient, Longman?” he inquired.
“Sir, he has just swallowed more liquid than he has since he has been
ill; and he has spoken for the first time,” replied the nurse.
“Coherently?”
“Yes, sir.”
“What did he say?”
“Well, not much. I asked him how he felt, as an experiment, you see,
sir, and to find out whether he could understand anything; and he did
understand, for he began to tell me, and he dropped off to sleep. You
see he is sleeping naturally, sir.”
“Yes, I see. Well, Longman, it is one o’clock. Go to bed. I will relieve
your watch,” said the rector, sinking into the large easy-chair beside
the patient.
Longman made some resistance to this proposal, but Mr. Campbell was
firm, and sent off the wearied nurse to take his much needed rest.
The ill man rested well for some hours, and then moaned in his sleep.
The watcher gave him a cooling and strengthening beverage, just as
Longman had done, and the patient sank again into sleep, muttering:
“I can’t be in hell, after all, for in hell no one comes from heaven to
put a cool——” Then his words became inaudible until he dropped into
unconsciousness with the last word—“purgatory”—on his failing tongue.
All the remainder of the night he slept well, only occasionally
muttering in his sleep:
“Not in hell, after all—only in purgatory—not such a bad place.”
In the morning when the doctor came to make his daily visit he found the
ill man sleeping quietly and Mr. Campbell and Longman sitting by his
bed.
He examined the patient’s pulse and temperature without waking him, and
then took the two watchers’ report.
“Took nourishment with a relish and spoke consciously—both good signs,
excellent signs! but I can say no more at present.”
The doctor wrote out the formulas for the day and took leave.
All that day Gentleman Geff remained in the same condition without a
sign of further improvement. All the following night Longman had a
repetition of the experience of the preceding night. At dawn his mother,
Elspeth, relieved him and sent him to bed.
After the family breakfast Mr. Campbell came in and sent Elspeth out to
get her own coffee and muffins. The sick-room was still kept very dark
by the doctor’s orders. Darkness, he said, was the best sedative for
nerves and brain in the condition of Capt. Montgomery.
When the sick man showed by moaning and moving uneasily that he was
awake, the rector took some beef tea that was kept hot over a spirit
lamp, poured it into an invalid’s feeding-glass and administered it to
the patient.
Gentleman Geff sucked it in with a relish, and then sank back on his
pillow with a sigh of satisfaction.
When Mr. Campbell had put away the cup and returned to his seat by the
bedside he was startled by hearing the patient inquire:
“Who the devil are you, I wonder?”
He answered calmly, however:
“One whom you should know, Capt. Montgomery. I am James Campbell, rector
of——”
But he was interrupted by an exclamation from Gentleman Geff.
“The devil you say! The curate of Medge in purgatory! a parson in
purgatory! When did your reverence die?”
The rector paused a few moments before he replied, and then he spoke
very quietly:
“I am not dead, nor likely to die; nor are you in purgatory as you seem
to think.”
“What! are you living?”
“Yes, I thank Heaven.”
“And—I living also?”
“Yes! And I say thank Heaven for you also.”
“Where are we, then?” questioned the man in a quavering voice.
But before the rector could answer his question, and even while the
question was on his lips, Gentleman Geff had fainted into forgetfulness.
In his struggling soul, striving back to consciousness from his long
stupor, the wretched man had been the victim of three several
hallucinations.
First, that he was dead and buried, and while in that state he made no
sign.
Second, that he was in hell, and then his wail for water and the drink
that was given him dispelled the illusion, which was replaced by the
fancy that he was in purgatory.
Now the meeting with the living James Campbell had cured him of that
delusion also, and left him to one more natural but not the less
painful.
When next he awoke from temporary oblivion his brain was clearer and his
memory more accurate than either had yet been since his illness; still,
both were somewhat clouded, so that they mixed up time and space, and
dreams and realities in weird phantasmagoria.
For instance, he remembered every detail of the two murders he thought
he had committed, but not an item of the meeting with his two intended
victims living to accuse him, not of murder, but of attempted murder.
And without reflecting, or being now able to reflect, that he could not
possibly be hung in England for murders committed in America, he now
thought that he was in the condemned cell of an English prison, waiting
for speedy execution; that the huge giant who loomed through the shadows
of the prison was his death watch, and that James Campbell had come to
him in his clerical capacity to prepare him for death.
“But I will not allow him to worm any confession out of me. I have been
convicted on the frailest circumstantial evidence, and they dare not
hang me at the last. I will have nothing to do with the parson. I won’t
even know him.”
This was the most coherent thought that Gentleman Geff had formed since
he sank into stupor in the drawing-room of Haymore Hall. But the
instinct of self-preservation is a wonderful stimulant to the brain.
So when James Campbell came next to him he turned his face to the wall
and would not notice him.
When Longman came and gave him food and asked how he felt he answered:
“I want to see my lawyer. Send him here.”
Longman, who had been directed to humor all his whims, replied:
“Very well, sir. He shall be summoned immediately.”
“And don’t let that parson come near me again. I hate parsons. And if he
thinks he is going to nag me into confessing crimes I never even dreamed
of committing he must be a much bigger fool than ever I took him to be.
Send my lawyer to me, do you hear?”
“All right, sir.”
“Well, then, why the devil don’t you do it? You needn’t keep such an
infernal sharp lookout on me. I am not going to commit suicide, I tell
you.”
Longman laughed and left the room.
Gentleman Geff turned with his face to the wall and tried to remember
the details of his supposed trial—what the lawyers had said, what “his
honor” said, how he, the prisoner at the bar, had behaved; and then,
failing to remember anything of what had never occurred, his diseased
brain took to imagining a whole drama, in which he formed the central
figure.
The doctor came in the same morning, felt his pulse and asked him how he
had slept.
“None the better for you and your quackeries,” was the reply. “And if I
am supposed to be sick enough to have a physician, why the devil am I
not sent to a hospital, and not kept in this wretched hole?” he added,
still believing himself to be in the condemned cell of the Chuxton jail.
“Why, don’t they treat you well here?” pleasantly inquired Dr. Hobbs.
But Gentleman Geff disdained to reply and turned his face to the wall.
The doctor rose to take leave.
“I think the man is getting along very well; much better than I ever
thought that he would.”
“I think he is an ungrateful beast!” exclaimed Longman.
“Oh, you must not judge him harshly. His head is not clear yet. He does
not know friends from foes,” replied the doctor, who knew nothing
whatever of Gentleman Geff’s criminal career, so well had the secret
been kept by those who possessed it.
Longman did not answer in words; but his grim silence was sufficiently
expressive.
“And now you may let a little more light in the room and give him a more
varied diet,” was the parting instruction of the physician.
As soon as the latter had gone and the door closed behind him Longman
returned to the bedside of his charge.
Gentleman Geff was sleeping, or seemed to be so.
Longman went and opened the shutters of one window, but drew down the
white linen shade and let fall the white lace curtains. This filled the
chamber with a soft, subdued light.
Longman was getting to be an experienced nurse, and knew that it would
not be well to startle the patient, who had lived so long in shadows,
with too bright a light.
When he had arranged the room to his satisfaction he resumed his seat at
the bedside, and fell into the reflection that, notwithstanding all the
unbelief and hardness of heart that degrade this age of the world, there
were still some good Christian people who lived by the golden rule.
In the midst of these reflections he was startled by seeing Gentleman
Geff turn over to the front of the bed and stare out through the opening
of his festooned white curtains. His eyes took in the soft, dim outlines
of a moonlight-looking room, though it was now really midday, and the
white window shade and the white lace curtains produced the lunar
effect.
By this soft effulgence he saw that the room was very spacious, and had
four lace-curtained windows, and a lovely lace-draped dressing-table,
soft, white, dimity-covered chairs and sofa, and pretty Turkey rugs upon
a polished yellow oak floor.
The richly carved marble mantelpiece, with its large mirror, Sèvres
vases and terra cotta statuettes, and the polished steel stove, with its
glowing but flameless fire of hard coal, was hidden from his sight by a
tall Japan screen.
Everything in the apartment bespoke wealth, culture and luxury.
Gentleman Geff stared until his eyes stood out from their sockets. Then
he muttered to himself:
“This is not a prison cell, nor yet any hospital ward; yet this man
sitting here must be the same Giant Despair who was with me in jail.
There can’t be two of that size in the same country.”
Longman stood up and stooped over him, saying:
“Can I do anything for you, Capt. Montgomery?”
“Oh, it is you! I thought there couldn’t be two of you in the same
century, on the same planet.”
“What can I do for you, sir?”
“Confound you! you can explain things, I suppose. You can tell we where
the devil I am now!”
“You are at the rectory of Haymore parish, sir, where you were brought
on the night of that unfortunate”—Longman paused a moment for an
inoffensive word, and then added—“disturbance at Haymore Hall.”
“Disturbance—at Haymore Hall!” muttered the criminal, growing pale as
ashes and sinking back upon his pillow.
No revelation yet had struck him so heavily as this. And it brought back
a more exact memory, though not yet a perfect one, of the recent past.
Longman hurried to the other end of the room and returned with a
powerful restorative.
He held Gentleman Geff up on his left arm while he put the draught to
his lips with his right hand.
The criminal drained the last drop, and then sank down upon his pillow,
while Longman withdrew his arm and replaced the empty glass.
Gentleman Geff did not speak again.
He was possessed of a fear of talking, lest he should “commit” himself.
But he now reflected the more, though his deductions were still
confused.
“No wonder I could not remember the details of my trial—a trial that
never occurred, but was only a dream of fever. But all the same, if it
has not yet come off, it is to come, unless I go!”
He laughed a little to himself at this poor joke, and then he tried to
recall the incidents of that “disturbance” at Haymore Hall.
But he could not think consecutively for many minutes before his
thoughts became entangled, and dreams were mingled with realities, and
false inferences deduced from the union.
“I remember now,” he said to himself, “something about that row at
Haymore Hall, though my illness must have made some things seem vague to
me on first recovering my senses. But I remember now!”
Even as he spoke the words and tried to marshal the facts in their
proper sequence, memory and imagination fled, and left his mind a vacuum
again.
Some hours later, after Longman had given him a bowl of strong beef tea
and a glass of fine old port wine, his mental faculties rallied again,
though feebly, and he thought he could form a correct theory; he would
not try to get help in doing this by asking any question. He was too
much afraid of compromising himself in some way.
“I do recall now,” he told himself, “the cause of that row at Haymore
Hall. Let me see——
“I had just arrived with my wife and my brother-in-law at Haymore, to
take possession, when I was met by officers with a warrant for my arrest
on the charge of murder——
“How was that, now? Let’s see—oh, yes! I was arrested upon a warrant,
issued under the extradition treaty with the United States, charged with
the murder of Randolph Hay in California, and of Jennie Montgomery in
New York——”
Here the wretched man paused, shuddered and covered his face with his
hands. The horror of his crime overcame him, as it had so often done,
when it drove him to seek oblivion in strong drink, and finally made him
a drunkard.
It was some time before he could resume his line of thought.
“I know,” he mused at length, “that I denied the charge and resisted the
arrest, and that there was a fight. One of the officers clubbed me—on
the head—and I fell like an ox, and knew no more. When I came to myself
I was lying here.”
He paused again, and seemed to labor to understand his present position.
“How came I to be here?” he inquired of himself; and after a few minutes
exclaimed:
“Oh, I know! I see it all now! I had given the living of Haymore to my
brother-in-law, Cassius Leegh—the scoundrel! When I was brained by the
club of that constable, of course I was more a dead than a living man,
and in no condition to be carted off ten miles to the Chuxton jail! So I
was placed under arrest and brought here in charge of constables. And
here I am in my brother-in-law’s rectory, guarded by officers, and
particularly by that Giant Gerion, who never leaves me, night or day—set
fire to him!”
Gentleman Geff moaned and groaned and tossed until Longman brought him a
glass of milk punch, which seemed to soothe him.
Then he resumed his self-communings:
“I wonder, since I am in his rectory, which was also my gift to him, why
I never see Cassius Leegh? And I wonder where his sister, my bogus wife,
is? And, more than all, I wonder now—what brings James Campbell here?”
He paused in distress, and then moaned to himself:
“I give it up! I give it up! It is all past me! ‘Chaos has come again.’
But one thing is clear, even in chaos—that is, I must escape from this
house. I must not wait to be taken to jail, as I should be as soon as
the doctor has pronounced me well enough to be removed.”
He thought as intensely as he was capable of thinking, and then suddenly
formed a plan.
“I will not get well enough to be removed while I stay here, and I will
escape from the house at the first opportunity.”
From this day the patient became a puzzle to his physician as well as to
his attendants. He did not seem to gain in strength, but to grow weaker
and more helpless every day; notwithstanding that his appetite was good.
At night he was restless and delirious.
“I confess that this case perplexes me,” Dr. Hobbs admitted to Mr.
Campbell.
But the case grew out of a misunderstanding between the patient and his
attendants.
Gentleman Geff, not quite in his right mind yet, believed himself to be
under arrest with the prospect of a prison, a trial and conviction
before him; whereas there was no intention on any one’s part of even
making an accusation against him.
His physician and watchers, not knowing the delusion under which he
silently and fearfully suffered, could not suspect him of playing a part
to prolong his sojourn at the rectory and postpone his transfer to the
prison.
This state of things continued for a week. There had been in this time
two opportunities for Gentleman Geff to escape—for, after all, he was
not watched as a criminal, but only as an invalid. There had been two
occasions on which he had been left alone for an hour or two; but on
both these the weather had been terrific with wind, snow and sleet, and
he waited for weather and opportunity both to favor him together.
But one morning, after he had eaten a good breakfast, lain back on his
pillow, and pretended to fall into a stupor, as usual, when the doctor
was expected, something occurred that frightened him and hurried his
operations.
The doctor came, accompanied on this occasion by Mr. Campbell, who did
not often intrude his unwelcome presence into the sick-room.
The doctor leaned over the bed and inquired:
“How are you, Capt. Montgomery?”
There was no response.
The doctor then laid his hand gently on the man’s shoulder to enforce
his attention and inquired:
“How are you, sir?”
Still there was no answer.
Then the doctor examined his pulse, temperature and respiration, and
even lifted the eyelids and looked at the eyes.
Then he turned to Mr. Campbell and said:
“I feel like giving up the case. I honestly confess I can make nothing
of it. The man’s appetite, digestion and assimilation are excellent. His
pulse is strong, his temperature normal, his respiration perfect, and
yet he seems too weak to leave his bed, and he falls into delirium or
stupor day and night.”
“Pray do not give up the case, doctor. If there is any one you would
like to have called in consultation now——”
The rector paused.
“Well, yes, sir, there is. Sir Ichabod Ingoldsby, the great authority on
the diseases of the brain and nervous system. And to get him from London
to the North Riding of Yorkshire would cost at least two hundred pounds,
even should his engagements permit him to come.”
“Never mind what it costs, we will send for him. The young squire has
specially enjoined me to spare no expense, as he insists on footing all
the bills. Give me Sir Ichabod Ingoldsby’s address. I will telegraph him
at once. If his engagements will permit he may be here this afternoon.”
“Scarcely this afternoon. He will have to make arrangements. Besides, he
always travels in the middle of the night to save time. If all should go
well we may see him to-morrow morning. Here is his address,” said Dr.
Hobbs, and he tore a leaf from his tablets and handed it to the rector.
Then both gentlemen left the room.