The lawyer came the next day, and with something like a smile on his
lips. He brought me a few lines in pencil from Mrs. Ashleigh; they were
kindly expressed, bade me be of good cheer; “she never for a moment
believed in my guilt; Lilian bore up wonderfully under so terrible a
trial; it was an unspeakable comfort to both to receive the visits of a
friend so attached to me, and so confident of a triumphant refutation of
the hideous calumny under which I now suffered as Mr. Margrave!”
The lawyer had seen Margrave again,--seen him in that house. Margrave
seemed almost domiciled there!
I remained sullen and taciturn during this visit. I longed again for the
night. Night came. I heard the distant clock strike twelve, when again
the icy wind passed through my hair, and against the wall stood the
luminous Shadow.
“Have you considered?” whispered the voice, still as from afar. “I
repeat it,--I alone can save you.”
“Is it among the conditions which you ask, in return, that I shall
resign to you the woman I love?”
“No.”
“Is it one of the conditions that I should commit some crime,--a crime
perhaps heinous as that of which I am accused?”
“No.”
“With such reservations, I accept the conditions you may name, provided
I, in my turn, may demand one condition from yourself.”
“Name it.”
“I ask you to quit this town. I ask you, meanwhile, to cease your visits
to the house that holds the woman betrothed to me.”
“I will cease those visits. And before many days are over, I will quit
this town.”
“Now, then, say what you ask from me. I am prepared to concede it. And
not from fear for myself, but because I fear for the pure and innocent
being who is under the spell of your deadly fascination. This is your
power over me. You command me through my love for another. Speak.”
“My conditions are simple. You will pledge yourself to desist from all
charges of insinuation against myself, of what nature soever. You will
not, when you meet me in the flesh, refer to what you have known of my
likeness in the Shadow. You will be invited to the house at which I may
be also a guest; you will come; you will meet and converse with me as
guest speaks with guest in the house of a host.”
“Is that all?”
“It is all.”
“Then I pledge you my faith; keep your own.”
“Fear not; sleep secure in the certainty that you will soon be released
from these walls.”
The Shadow waned and faded. Darkness settled back, and a sleep, profound
and calm, fell over me.
The next day Mr. Stanton again visited me. He had received that morning
a note from Mr. Margrave, stating that he had left L---- to pursue, in
person, an investigation which he had already commenced through another,
affecting the man who had given evidence against me, and that, if his
hope should prove well founded, he trusted to establish my innocence,
and convict the real murderer of Sir Philip Derval. In the research he
thus volunteered, he had asked for, and obtained, the assistance of the
policeman Waby, who, grateful to me for saving the life of his sister,
had expressed a strong desire to be employed in my service.
Meanwhile, my most cruel assailant was my old college friend, Richard
Strahan. For Jeeves had spread abroad Strahan’s charge of purloining the
memoir which had been entrusted to me; and that accusation had done me
great injury in public opinion, because it seemed to give probability to
the only motive which ingenuity could ascribe to the foul deed imputed
to me. That motive had been first suggested by Mr. Vigors. Cases are
on record of men whose life had been previously blameless, who have
committed a crime which seemed to belie their nature, in the monomania
of some intense desire. In Spain, a scholar reputed of austere
morals murdered and robbed a traveller for money in order to purchase
books,--books written, too, by Fathers of his Church! He was intent on
solving some problem of theological casuistry. In France, an antiquary,
esteemed not more for his learning than for amiable and gentle
qualities, murdered his most intimate friend for the possession of
a medal, without which his own collection was incomplete. These, and
similar anecdotes, tending to prove how fatally any vehement desire,
morbidly cherished, may suspend the normal operations of reason and
conscience, were whispered about by Dr. Lloyd’s vindictive partisan;
and the inference drawn from them and applied to the assumptions against
myself was the more credulously received, because of that over-refining
speculation on motive and act which the shallow accept, in their
eagerness to show how readily they understand the profound.
I was known to be fond of scientific, especially of chemical
experiments; to be eager in testing the truth of any novel invention.
Strahan, catching hold of the magistrate’s fantastic hypothesis, went
about repeating anecdotes of the absorbing passion for analysis and
discovery which had characterized me in youth as a medical student, and
to which, indeed, I owed the precocious reputation I had obtained.
Sir Philip Derval, according not only to report, but to the direct
testimony of his servant, had acquired in the course of his travels many
secrets in natural science, especially as connected with the healing
art,--his servant had deposed to the remarkable cures he had effected
by the medicinals stored in the stolen casket. Doubtless Sir Philip,
in boasting of these medicinals in the course of our conversation,
had excited my curiosity, inflamed my imagination; and thus when I
afterwards suddenly met him in a lone spot, a passionate impulse had
acted on a brain heated into madness by curiosity and covetous desire.
All these suppositions, reduced into system, were corroborated by
Strahan’s charge that I had made away with the manuscript supposed to
contain the explanations of the medical agencies employed by Sir Philip,
and had sought to shelter my theft by a tale so improbable, that a man
of my reputed talent could not have hazarded it if in his sound
senses. I saw the web that had thus been spread around me by hostile
prepossessions and ignorant gossip: how could the arts of Margrave
scatter that web to the winds? I knew not, but I felt confidence in his
promise and his power. Still, so great had been my alarm for Lilian,
that the hope of clearing my own innocence was almost lost in my joy
that Margrave, at least, was no longer in her presence, and that I had
received his pledge to quit the town in which she lived.
Thus, hours rolled on hours, till, I think, on the third day from that
night in which I had last beheld the mysterious Shadow, my door
was hastily thrown open, a confused crowd presented itself at the
threshold,--the governor of the prison, the police superintendent,
Mr. Stanton, and other familiar faces shut out from me since my
imprisonment. I knew at the first glance that I was no longer an outlaw
beyond the pale of human friendship. And proudly, sternly, as I had
supported myself hitherto in solitude and suspense, when I felt warm
hands clasping mine, heard joyous voices proffering congratulations, saw
in the eyes of all that my innocence had been cleared, the revulsion of
emotion was too strong for me,--the room reeled on my sight, I fainted.
I pass, as quickly as I can, over the explanations that crowded on me
when I recovered, and that were publicly given in evidence in court next
morning. I had owed all to Margrave. It seems that he had construed
to my favour the very supposition which had been bruited abroad to my
prejudice. “For,” said he, “it is conjectured that Fenwick committed the
crime of which he is accused in the impulse of a disordered reason. That
conjecture is based upon the probability that a madman alone could have
committed a crime without adequate motive. But it seems quite clear that
the accused is not mad; and I see cause to suspect that the accuser is.”
Grounding this assumption on the current reports of the witness’s
manner and bearing since he had been placed under official surveillance,
Margrave had commissioned the policeman Waby to make inquiries in
the village to which the accuser asserted he had gone in quest of his
relations, and Waby had there found persons who remembered to have heard
that the two brothers named Walls lived less by the gains of the petty
shop which they kept than by the proceeds of some property consigned to
them as the nearest of kin to a lunatic who had once been tried for
his life. Margrave had then examined the advertisements in the daily
newspapers. One of them, warning the public against a dangerous maniac,
who had effected his escape from an asylum in the west of England,
caught his attention. To that asylum he had repaired.
There he learned that the patient advertised was one whose propensity
was homicide, consigned for life to the asylum on account of a murder,
for which he had been tried. The description of this person exactly
tallied with that of the pretended American. The medical superintendent
of the asylum, hearing all particulars from Margrave, expressed a strong
persuasion that the witness was his missing patient, and had himself
committed the crime of which he had accused another. If so, the
superintendent undertook to coax from him the full confession of all
the circumstances. Like many other madmen, and not least those whose
propensity is to crime, the fugitive maniac was exceedingly cunning,
treacherous, secret, and habituated to trick and stratagem,--more subtle
than even the astute in possession of all their faculties, whether to
achieve his purpose or to conceal it, and fabricate appearances against
another. But while, in ordinary conversation, he seemed rational enough
to those who were not accustomed to study him, he had one hallucination
which, when humoured, led him always, not only to betray himself, but to
glory in any crime proposed or committed. He was under the belief that
he had made a bargain with Satan, who, in return for implicit obedience,
would bear him harmless through all the consequences of such submission,
and finally raise him to great power and authority. It is no unfrequent
illusion of homicidal maniacs to suppose they are under the influence
of the Evil One, or possessed by a Demon. Murderers have assigned as the
only reason they themselves could give for their crime, that “the Devil
got into them,” and urged the deed. But the insane have, perhaps, no
attribute more in common than that of superweening self-esteem. The
maniac who has been removed from a garret sticks straws in his hair
and calls them a crown. So much does inordinate arrogance characterize
mental aberration, that, in the course of my own practice, I have
detected, in that infirmity, the certain symptom of insanity, long
before the brain had made its disease manifest even to the most familiar
kindred.
Morbid self-esteem accordingly pervaded the dreadful illusion by which
the man I now speak of was possessed. He was proud to be the protected
agent of the Fallen Angel. And if that self-esteem were artfully
appealed to, he would exult superbly in the evil he held himself ordered
to perform, as if a special prerogative, an official rank and privilege;
then, he would be led on to boast gleefully of thoughts which the most
cynical of criminals in whom intelligence was not ruined would shrink
from owning; then, he would reveal himself in all his deformity with as
complacent and frank a self-glorying as some vain good man displays in
parading his amiable sentiments and his beneficent deeds.
“If,” said the superintendent, “this be the patient who has escaped from
me, and if his propensity to homicide has been, in some way, directed
towards the person who has been murdered, I shall not be with him a
quarter of an hour before he will inform me how it happened, and detail
the arts he employed in shifting his crime upon another; all will be
told as minutely as a child tells the tale of some school-boy exploit,
in which he counts on your sympathy, and feels sure of your applause.”
Margrave brought this gentleman back to L----, took him to the mayor,
who was one of my warmest supporters: the mayor had sufficient influence
to dictate and arrange the rest. The superintendent was introduced to
the room in which the pretended American was lodged. At his own desire
a select number of witnesses were admitted with him. Margrave excused
himself; he said candidly that he was too intimate a friend of mine to
be an impartial listener to aught that concerned me so nearly.
The superintendent proved right in his suspicions, and verified his
promises. My false accuser was his missing patient; the man recognized
Dr. ---- with no apparent terror, rather with an air of condescension,
and in a very few minutes was led to tell his own tale, with a gloating
complacency both at the agency by which he deemed himself exalted, and
at the dexterous cunning with which he had acquitted himself of the
task, that increased the horror of his narrative.
He spoke of the mode of his escape, which was extremely ingenious, but
of which the details, long in themselves, did not interest me, and
I understood them too imperfectly to repeat. He had encountered a
sea-faring traveller on the road, whom he had knocked down with a stone,
and robbed of his glazed hat and pea-jacket, as well as of a small
sum in coin, which last enabled him to pay his fare in a railway that
conveyed him eighty miles away from the asylum. Some trifling remnant
of this money still in his pocket, he then travelled on foot along the
high-road till he came to a town about twenty miles distant from L----;
there he had stayed a day or two, and there he said “that the Devil had
told him to buy a case-knife, which he did.” “He knew by that order that
the Devil meant him to do something great.” “His Master,” as he called
the fiend, then directed him the road he should take. He came to L----,
put up, as he had correctly stated before, at a small inn, wandered at
night about the town, was surprised by the sudden storm, took shelter
under the convent arch, overheard somewhat more of my conversation with
Sir Philip than he had previously deposed,--heard enough to excite his
curiosity as to the casket: “While he listened his Master told him he
must get possession of that casket.” Sir Philip had quitted the archway
almost immediately after I had done so, and he would then have attacked
him if he had not caught sight of a policeman going his rounds. He had
followed Sir Philip to a house (Mr. Jeeves’s). “His Master told him
to wait and watch.” He did so. When Sir Philip came forth, towards the
dawn, he followed him, saw him enter a narrow street, came up to him,
seized him by the arm, demanded all he had about him. Sir Philip tried
to shake him off,--struck at him. What follows I spare the reader. The
deed was done. He robbed the dead man both of the casket and the
purse that he found in the pockets; had scarcely done so when he heard
footsteps. He had just time to get behind the portico of a detached
house at angles with the street when I came up. He witnessed, from his
hiding-place, the brief conference between myself and the policemen,
and when they moved on, bearing the body, stole unobserved away. He was
going back towards the inn, when it occurred to him that it would be
safer if the casket and purse were not about his person; that he asked
his Master to direct him how to dispose of them: that his Master guided
him to an open yard (a stone-mason’s) at a very little distance from
the inn; that in this yard there stood an old wych-elm tree, from the
gnarled roots of which the earth was worn away, leaving chinks and
hollows, in one of which he placed the casket and purse, taking from the
latter only two sovereigns and some silver, and then heaping loose mould
over the hiding-place. That he then repaired to his inn, and left
it late in the morning, on the pretence of seeking for his
relations,--persons, indeed, who really had been related to him, but
of whose death years ago he was aware. He returned to L---- a few days
afterwards, and in the dead of the night went to take up the casket and
the money. He found the purse with its contents undisturbed; but the
lid of the casket was unclosed. From the hasty glance he had taken of it
before burying it, it had seemed to him firmly locked,--he was alarmed
lest some one had been to the spot. But his Master whispered to him not
to mind, told him that he might now take the casket, and would be guided
what to do with it; that he did so, and, opening the lid, found the
casket empty-; that he took the rest of the money out of the purse, but
that he did not take the purse itself, for it had a crest and initials
on it, which might lead to the discovery of what had been done; that
he therefore left it in the hollow amongst the roots, heaping the mould
over it as before; that in the course of the day he heard the people at
the inn talk of the murder, and that his own first impulse was to get
out of the town immediately, but that his Master “made him too wise for
that,” and bade him stay; that passing through the streets, he saw me
come out of the sash-window door, go to a stable-yard on the other side
of the house, mount on horseback and ride away; that he observed the
sash-door was left partially open; that he walked by it and saw the
room empty; there was only a dead wall opposite; the place was solitary,
unobserved; that his Master directed him to lift up the sash gently,
enter the room, and deposit the knife and the casket in a large
walnut-tree bureau which stood unlocked near the window. All that
followed--his visit to Mr. Vigors, his accusation against myself, his
whole tale--was, he said, dictated by his Master, who was highly pleased
with him, and promised to bring him safely through. And here he turned
round with a hideous smile, as if for approbation of his notable
cleverness and respect for his high employ.
Mr. Jeeves had the curiosity to request the keeper to inquire how, in
what form, or in what manner, the Fiend appeared to the narrator, or
conveyed his infernal dictates. The man at first refused to say; but
it was gradually drawn from him that the Demon had no certain and
invariable form: sometimes it appeared to him in the form of a rat;
sometimes even of a leaf, or a fragment of wood, or a rusty nail; but
that his Master’s voice always came to him distinctly, whatever shape he
appeared in; only, he said, with an air of great importance, his Master,
this time, had graciously condescended, ever since he left the asylum,
to communicate with him in a much more pleasing and imposing aspect than
he had ever done before,--in the form of a beautiful youth, or, rather,
like a bright rose-coloured shadow, in which the features of a young
man were visible, and that he had heard the voice more distinctly than
usual, though in a milder tone, and seeming to come to him from a great
distance.
After these revelations the man became suddenly disturbed. He shook from
limb to limb, he seemed convulsed with terror; he cried out that he had
betrayed the secret of his Master, who had warned him not to describe
his appearance and mode of communication, or he would surrender his
servant to the tormentors. Then the maniac’s terror gave way to fury;
his more direful propensity made itself declared; he sprang into the
midst of his frightened listeners, seized Mr. Vigors by the throat, and
would have strangled him but for the prompt rush of the superintendent
and his satellites. Foaming at the mouth, and horribly raving, he was
then manacled, a strait-waistcoat thrust upon him, and the group so
left him in charge of his captors. Inquiries were immediately directed
towards such circumstantial evidence as might corroborate the details he
had so minutely set forth. The purse, recognized as Sir Philip’s, by the
valet of the deceased, was found buried under the wych-elm. A policeman
despatched, express, to the town in which the maniac declared the knife
to have been purchased, brought back word that a cutler in the place
remembered perfectly to have sold such a knife to a seafaring man, and
identified the instrument when it was shown to him. From the chink of a
door ajar, in the wall opposite my sash-window, a maid-servant, watching
for her sweetheart (a journeyman carpenter, who habitually passed that
way on going home to dine), had, though unobserved by the murderer, seen
him come out of my window at a time that corresponded with the dates of
his own story, though she had thought nothing of it at the moment. He
might be a patient, or have called on business; she did not know that
I was from home. The only point of importance not cleared up was that
which related to the opening of the casket,--the disappearance of the
contents; the lock had been unquestionably forced. No one, however,
could suppose that some third person had discovered the hiding-place and
forced open the casket to abstract its contents and then rebury it. The
only probable supposition was that the man himself had forced it open,
and, deeming the contents of no value, had thrown them away before he
had hidden the casket and purse, and, in the chaos of his reason, had
forgotten that he had so done. Who could expect that every link in a
madman’s tale would be found integral and perfect? In short, little
importance was attached to this solitary doubt. Crowds accompanied me
to my door, when I was set free, in open court, stainless; it was
a triumphal procession. The popularity I had previously enjoyed,
superseded for a moment by so horrible a charge, came back to me tenfold
as with the reaction of generous repentance for a momentary doubt.
One man shared the public favour,--the young man whose acuteness had
delivered me from the peril, and cleared the truth from so awful a
mystery; but Margrave had escaped from congratulation and compliment; he
had gone on a visit to Strahan, at Derval Court.
Alone, at last, in the welcome sanctuary of my own home, what were my
thoughts? Prominent amongst them all was that assertion of the madman,
which had made me shudder when repeated to me: he had been guided to the
murder and to all the subsequent proceedings by the luminous shadow of
the beautiful youth,--the Scin-Laeca to which I had pledged myself. If
Sir Philip Derval could be believed, Margrave was possessed of powers,
derived from fragmentary recollections of a knowledge acquired in a
former state of being, which would render his remorseless intelligence
infinitely dire and frustrate the endeavours of a reason, unassisted
by similar powers, to thwart his designs or bring the law against his
crimes. Had he then the arts that could thus influence the minds of
others to serve his fell purposes, and achieve securely his own evil
ends through agencies that could not be traced home to himself?
But for what conceivable purpose had I been subjected as a victim to
influences as much beyond my control as the Fate or Demoniac Necessity
of a Greek Myth? In the legends of the classic world some august
sufferer is oppressed by powers more than mortal, but with an ethical
if gloomy vindication of his chastisement,--he pays the penalty of crime
committed by his ancestors or himself, or he has braved, by arrogating
equality with the gods, the mysterious calamity which the gods alone can
inflict. But I, no descendant of Pelops, no OEdipus boastful of a wisdom
which could interpret the enigmas of the Sphynx, while ignorant even of
his own birth--what had I done to be singled out from the herd of men
for trials and visitations from the Shadowland of ghosts and sorcerers?
It would be ludicrously absurd to suppose that Dr. Lloyd’s dying
imprecation could have had a prophetic effect upon my destiny; to
believe that the pretences of mesmerizers were specially favoured by
Providence, and that to question their assumptions was an offence of
profanation to be punished by exposure to preternatural agencies. There
was not even that congruity between cause and effect which fable seeks
in excuse for its inventions. Of all men living, I, unimaginative
disciple of austere science, should be the last to become the sport
of that witchcraft which even imagination reluctantly allows to the
machinery of poets, and science casts aside into the mouldy lumber-room
of obsolete superstition.
Rousing my mind from enigmas impossible to solve, it was with intense
and yet most melancholy satisfaction that I turned to the image of
Lilian, rejoicing, though with a thrill of awe, that the promise
so mysteriously conveyed to my senses had, hereto, been already
fulfilled,--Margrave had left the town; Lilian was no longer subjected
to his evil fascination. But an instinct told me that that fascination
had already produced an effect adverse to all hope of happiness for me.
Lilian’s love for myself was gone. Impossible otherwise that she--in
whose nature I had always admired that generous devotion which is
more or less inseparable from the romance of youth--should have never
conveyed to me one word of consolation in the hour of my agony and
trial; that she, who, till the last evening we had met, had ever been
so docile, in the sweetness of a nature femininely submissive to my
slightest wish, should have disregarded my solemn injunction, and
admitted Margrave to acquaintance, nay, to familiar intimacy,--at
the very time, too, when to disobey my injunctions was to embitter my
ordeal, and add her own contempt to the degradation imposed upon my
honour! No, her heart must be wholly gone from me; her very nature
wholly warped. A union between us had become impossible. My love for
her remained unshattered; the more tender, perhaps, for a sentiment of
compassion. But my pride was shocked, my heart was wounded. My love was
not mean and servile. Enough for me to think that she would be at
least saved from Margrave. Her life associated with his!--contemplation
horrible and ghastly!--from that fate she was saved. Later, she would
recover the effect of an influence happily so brief. She might form some
new attachment, some new tie; but love once withdrawn is never to be
restored--and her love was withdrawn from me. I had but to release her,
with my own lips, from our engagement,--she would welcome that release.
Mournful but firm in these thoughts and these resolutions, I sought Mrs.
Ashleigh’s house.