“It’s nicer to be a healthy sinner. Her fulsomeness makes me sick. And
how did you get leave to come and see me?”
“I didn’t get leave at all,” she said. “I daren’t even ask it, feeling
sure she’d refuse. I slipped out without telling, hearing cook had
something to send. I expect she’ll be very angry when she hears.”
“_If_ she hears,” I corrected her.
She looked at me with sad, puzzled eyes, the comical dear.
“How shall I ever bear with it all after you are gone, Diana?” she
said. “You’ll let me come and stay with you sometimes, when you’re
married?”
“Now, Patty,” I said, “tell me the truth. Is the creature still making
eyes at you?”
“No,” she answered stoutly; then added, conscience-stricken, “At
least, I don’t know. I never look at him. But--but--O, Diana! I wish
he’d go altogether, and leave us, you and me, as we were.”
“That’s perhaps not a very kind wish, child,” said I. “But you shall
come and stay with us when once I’ve got him under control, never
fear.” Then, as I heard the step of the Mother returning, “Hush!” I
whispered; “tell him I’ve no idea of being buried alive here: that he
must arrange it very quickly, or I shall return and give everything
away.”
She answered silently, with a hug and a gush of tears. She looked
haggard and distraught, poor little wretch; yet I had no alternative
but to use her.
I waited two days longer, in an anxiety that rose to distraction.
Still no message came from him; and at last I made up my mind, and
sent him an upbraiding letter by a misbegotten old beldame, with a
leery eye, who helped in the convent laundry. She brought me back an
answer--that he would be waiting for me, with a postchaise, in the
lane without, at nine o’clock that very night. O, my friend! how
dreadful is the first realisation of perfidy in those whom our
inexperience trusts! This cursed Hecate was all the time in the pay of
the authorities whom my innocence thought to hoodwink. When the time
came, I wondered, indeed, to find Fortune so blind in my interest. So
far seemed there from being the least suggestion of suspicion, of
uneasiness abroad, chance appeared to invite me with open portals.
What Sisters I encountered, even the Mother herself, manœuvred, I
could have thought, to leave me my way unobstructed. Miserable
parasites of power, subordinating their consciences to the lusts of
their abominable little stomachs! To pamper those, they were lending
themselves without scruple to a deed of unutterable darkness--the
consigning of their innocent sister to a living death.
I found the chaise waiting in a dusk corner beneath trees. A cloaked
and sombre figure, engaging me in the shadow, hurried me within, leapt
after, slammed the door, and gave the word to proceed. In a moment we
were tearing through the night.
So great was the flurry of my nerves, I had not, until the lamp at the
convent gate flashed upon us and was gone, noticed that we were four
in company. Then, all at once, I started. The man who sat beside me
had removed his hat and was wiping his brow. Two thick-set, motionless
figures sat facing me.
“Easy done, sir,” said one of these.
“Ha!” said my companion, “yes.”
In a sudden terror, I struggled to rise. He restrained me.
“Mr. de Crespigny!” I exclaimed.
“Ha!” said my companion again. “You hear that, Willing?”
“I hear,” responded the second of the others gruffly.
My companion turned to me suavely.
“Mr. de Crespigny?” he said. “Yes, and what about him, madam?”
“You are not he!” I cried wildly. “Let me out! He was to have met me!”
With a sort of tacit understanding, they all hemmed me in with their
knees, imprisoning and controlling me at once.
“You make a mistake, madam,” said my captor. “He was not to have met
you. But, be reconciled; time and judicious treatment, I have not the
least doubt, will cure you of this delusion.”
In an instant the whole horror of this snare, of this most wicked
scheme, opened like a black gulf before my eyes. The convent--to
anticipate an analogy--had been my Elba; now my St. Helena was to be
an asylum. She had discovered; or he, the dastard, had betrayed me;
and, in the result, she had not hesitated, with the connivance of some
sycophant doctor, to stoop to this.
It was night; the chaise drove on by back ways; I sunk back, sick and
almost senseless, and abandoned myself to despair.
XIII.
I AM WOOED TO SELF-DESTRUCTION
Dr. Peel’s Asylum was known generically as “The House,” perhaps in
cynical allusion to its licensed irresponsibility to any laws but its
own. It was conceived on the principle of an eel-pot--the easiest
thing to slip, or be driven, into; the hardest to escape from. It was
not so much an asylum as an oubliette; never so much a house of
correction as of annihilation. There, in addition to the
constitutionally weak-minded, troublesome heirs, irreclaimable
prodigals, jealous wives, importunate creditors, distinguished
blackmailers, chance recipients of deadly secrets--all such, in fact,
as threatened the peace of that grand seigniory which has a
prescriptive monopoly in it--could be immured by _lettre de cachet_
(it amounted to nothing less) from any accommodating physician, and
afterwards “treated,” or disposed of, by private contract. Its methods
were delicate, tasteful, and exceedingly sure. With rib-breaking,
starvation, strait-waistcoats, all the vulgar apparatus of the
ordinary _médecin de fous_, it had no commerce. Where the removal of
undesirables was in question, it rather killed with kindness;
suffocated, like Heliogabalus, with roses; persuaded to the happy
despatch with a silken cord. It drove its poor Judases to suicide by
putting by, as useless, their moral reparations, and took care to have
at hand the seductive means. If one escaped--a rare occurrence--it
possessed a kennel of highly trained bloodhounds, whose belling warned
the dark nights with menace. It asked no questions, and expected to be
asked none. Its formula was a hint and a cheque.
The asylum _ménage_ was perfectly refined, and its cuisine lavish. It
entertained none but the nominees of the wealthy. The extensive
grounds of the house were a literal maze of beauty, the shrubberies
being so disposed as to preclude all thought of restraint. It was only
upon piercing them, at any point, that one found oneself opposed by a
high boundary wall, which contained between itself and the estate it
enclosed a waste interval incessantly patrolled, day and night, by the
asylum watch. Then, indeed, one realised the iron hand in the velvet
glove, and started back dismayed from the grin of the nearest sentry
whom one’s movements had called light-footed to the spot.
“A fine view, mum,” he might say, stepping up between ingratiatory and
insolent. “Was you looking for anything?”
Whereupon one would do best to retire, and precipitately; because
there was no appeal from any brutality offered, in his own domain, by
any servant of, or partner in, this lawless oligarchy.
Rising from my little bed, and mattresses full of fragrance and down,
on the morning first after my arrival--rising, fevered and exhausted,
to the full realisation of my awful position, my eyes encountered the
vision of a wholesome, even luxurious, little chamber, and through an
unbarred window a most heavenly prospect. I could hardly believe in
the reality of my fate. This was no prison, but an inn, to escape from
which it seemed only necessary to pay the score, and have the landlord
cry “Bon voyage!” I remembered him the night before--a little tough,
square man, drily courteous in manner, with the head and depressed
forehead of a burglar. He had been already on the steps to receive me,
when we drove up, standing in a patch of light with an expression on
his face as if we had caught him in the act of breaking into his own
premises. Those we had reached, within two hours of my first
kidnapping, by dark and devious roads. They stood, remote from all
other homesteads, a little colony self-contained, some six miles south
of Shole.
On the way thither I had soon abandoned all thought of resistance, or
of appeal to my captors. They may have heard my sobs and prayers with
a certain emotion: virtuous distress had no chance to prevail with
cupidity. I sunk into a sullen apathy, my heart smouldering with rage,
principally against the craven who had either betrayed me to this
living death, or, at least, had weakly acquiesced in my doom. The
prospect of revenge, though alternating with despair, alone preserved
me from a condition of the last prostration. And in this state I was
driven up to the House, and to it consigned, the sold slave of
madness.
In the first terror, with staring eyes, a storm in my breast that
would not rise and break, dishevelled hair, and, it may be, a look of
the part I was called upon to play, I shrunk into a corner of the room
into which I was introduced, and stood there panting. Dr. Peel went
into a thin chuckle of laughter, curiously small and inward from so
thick-set a frame.
“Brava!” said he. “Very well observed, madam! But, if you will look
round, you will see there are no bolts, no bars, no locks here, save
as the ordinary appurtenances of a domestic household.”
There were not, indeed, to the common view. To most doors, as I came
to discover, the locks were inside; and, where it was otherwise, it
was--mark this!--to insure from any chance insane attack, especially
at night, the lives of those which it was particularly desired should
be preserved. To be given the full freedom of the House was always a
significant privilege, implying, as it did, one of two things: either
that the proprietor had accepted at the outset a round sum down for
one’s perpetual incarceration, or a hint that one’s accidental removal
would be handsomely acknowledged by those interested.
Now, as I said, waking on that first morning to free prospects, my
spirit experienced a rebound to the most delightful reassurance.
Surely, I thought, no worse harm could be designed me than the
punishment implied in my enforced temporary detention in this charming
home, where, it seemed likely, a nominal deprivation of one’s liberty
was used to convey a gentle moral or adorn a kindly tale of reproval.
I waxed jubilant. If a meek acquiescence in my fate delayed to move my
jailers to liberate me, I was confident that my wits would soon find
me a way to free myself from so indulgent a thraldom. And in the
meantime I would resign myself to the enjoyment of a very novel
experience.
A loud bell summoned us all to breakfast, _à la table d’hôte_, in a
pleasant refectory. Dr. Peel took the head of the table, and a plenty
of attentive lackeys waited. There was no restriction, nor
interference with one’s individual tastes. I accepted silently the
place assigned me between a gaunt, supernaturally solemn gentleman,
with mended clothes, a wigless head, and prominent fixed eyes, and the
tiniest, most conceited-looking creature with humped shoulders I have
ever seen. An uproarious gabble of conversation, interspersed with
occasional hoots and groans, accompanied the meal throughout.
Occasionally my solemn neighbour would turn to me and remark,
fiercely, as though daring a contradiction, “Enough is as good as a
feast; but more than enough is less than nothing.”
On the third repetition of this formula, the little man on my other
side addressed me with an ill-tempered chuckle--
“Bring him down, ma’am, bring him down, or the creature will scorch
his head in the moon.”
While I was shrinking back in confusion, Dr. Peel bent to the
solemnity.
“Captain,” says he, with an ingratiatory grin, “you’re drinking
nothing.”
“I don’t want anything,” said the other, in a loud, bullying voice.
“Nonsense,” answered the doctor. “You must keep up your character.
Here, John.”
He spoke to a lackey, who was ready on the moment with a decanter. To
my amazement, the man filled up the gentleman’s breakfast cup with raw
brandy.
He shifted, glared, hesitated, and caught up the pungent stuff.
“Enough is as good as a feast, but more than enough is less than
nothing,” howled he, and swallowed the fire at a draught.
He had hardly consumed it, when he cast the cup into splinters on the
board, staggered to his feet, and, moaning to himself, left the room.
The conversation died down for a moment, and was instantly resumed
more recklessly than ever. I felt suddenly sick.
“He-he!” sniggered my little companion. “He’s been long taking his
hint, the fool, and outstaying his welcome. But Peel’s done it at
last, I do believe.”
I did not ask him what. My spirit felt engulfed in deep waters of
terror. I sat dumb and shivering, till the meal ended, and the company
broke up and dispersed itself about the grounds. Many, rude, curious,
fantastic, came about me to inquire, mockingly or fulsomely, into my
malady. To all their solicitations my little companion, who had
appropriated me, turned a rough shoulder and rougher tongue.
“The lady has confided her case to me, you pestilent cranks!” he
screamed, and succeeded in extricating and convoying me to a remoter
part of the grounds. On the way we encountered two men, like
gamekeepers, carrying a ghastly sheet-covered burden on a litter.
“Ho-ho!” said my friend, stopping. “It was arranged for the tower, was
it?”
“Now, lookee here, Jimmy,” said one of the carriers, while the two
paused for a moment, “you’re too precious fond of poking your nose
where you ain’t wanted, you are. You go along to your games, and leave
your elders to theirs till you’re growed up.”
“Grown up!” screeched my companion, whose chin, indeed, was thick with
a grey bristle, “grown up, you puppy, you calf, you insolent lout!”
Crazy in a moment, he danced in the path, screaming and shaking his
fists. The men resumed their way, laughing. Suddenly he caught himself
to a sort of reason, white and shaking.
“They want to drive me to it,” he said. “They want me to break a
blood-vessel; but I see through them, and I won’t be drawn.”
He wiped his forehead, and looked anxiously up in my face.
“You see it, don’t you?” he said. “The fools are envious of my inches.
But you ain’t, are you, being a woman?”
“No, no,” I said, smiling, in a sort of ghastly spasm, in full
understanding of his mania. “No, no; or should I select you for my
champion in this? Let us go on, _please_. Was that--?”
“Yes,” he answered, the question that my fainting spirit shrunk from
formulating, “yes, it was the Captain--good riddance to a conceited
ass.”
He strutted along, pluming himself on my praise. All that I have
stated--the truth about this smiling, damned Gehenna--I drew from him
then or thereafter. I cannot recall it now without a shudder like
death’s.
Once that morning we came, in a retired corner, upon the prettiest,
greenest graveyard--the sweetest God’s-acre, God pity it! in all the
sad world. It was studded with quiet flowers, screened with fragrant
shrubs, thick with graves, _each a nameless grassy barrow_. What depth
of tragedy in it all! I cannot, I vow, dwell any longer on the
picture, but must cover the details of it at a gallop.
I was nine weeks, before I found release, in this appalling hell--a
time the most stupendous of my life. I will acquit the Lady Sophia of
intending the worst; I cannot acquit her of implying it. Whether from
jealousy, or a true conviction as to the unpardonable nature of my
recreancy, she failed, at least, to assure the instruments of her
cruelty that my death-sentence was not intimated in the bond. It is
possible she may have been totally ignorant of the real character of
the place to which she condemned me. She is none the less responsible
for the conclusions the Rhadamanthus of that inferno elected to draw
from her dubiety. Anyhow, I am convinced that my destruction was
designed, before I had been there many days.
In the meantime--O, my Alcide, pity thy Diane! What had she done to
merit this fate, the most awful that could befall a brilliant sanity?
Very, very soon that early buoyancy was like nothing but the memory of
a bright star, that had exploded and scattered as soon as realised. A
sickness, a deadly apprehension, took its place; a sense of some
creeping, circumventing terror, which hemmed me in, stealthy and
pitiless, concentrating my thoughts on a single point in this cursed
paradise. I was inoculated with the disease of the morbid intellects
about me. My reason suffered deliberate contamination by the
remorseless ghoul my keeper. No fewer than three times during my short
sojourn in his inferno did the corpse of a self-destroyer witness to
the success of his methods. They went to swell the bloody tally of
shrouds under the grass in the little graveyard; and, thinking of them
there, their awful waiting testimony, I would look up to find the evil
eye of their murderer fixed upon me in covert, lustful speculation.
For long I remained incredulous that my wit could be utterly impotent
to devise a means to escape. Gradually, only, the sinister
watchfulness which guarded every outlet of this green prison, and the
fiendish incorruptibility of its warders, was bitten into my brain.
Pleas and graces were accepted for nothing but an encouragement to
unwelcome attentions, indeed. It was not supposed that one could be
insane and modest. Many sold their virtue for a little surcease from
tyranny, bartered their dearer than life for a poor extension of
living. At the same time, and for the same reason, a most rigid
embargo was placed on all communications with the outside world. Worse
than a Russian censorship doomed these utter exiles from hope.
In the worst of my despair I had written to Patty, to de Crespigny,
begging them to intercede for me with the cruel woman, who yet _could_
not be aware of the inhuman character of her revenge. Finally, I wrote
to madam herself--an appeal that would have melted a heart of stone.
My cries were uttered into space. They were never allowed, in spite of
all specious pretence, to penetrate the boundaries of my doom. They
recoiled only upon my own fated head, precipitating its calamity, and
the swifter because I was persistent in justifying my birth-name to my
hateful would-be destroyer.
The little craze they called Jimmy was my sole stay and buckler. He
attached himself to me vigorously, and by his quickness and
waspishness more than made up for his lack of inches. I never knew who
he was, or immured at whose instigation. There was warrant, anyhow,
for his detention; yet not sufficient, it appeared, for his “removal.”
His philosophy of madness was just a counterbuff to that of the
deceased Captain. If, in short, more than enough was less than
nothing, then less than nothing was more than enough; wherefore Jimmy,
twitted with being less than nothing, knew himself really to be
greatly better than most, though he could never get over the envy of
smaller souls in refusing him the credit of his stature. What is
apparently little is relatively great, he often assured me, while
bemoaning his inability to knock the truism into the thin asparagus
heads that shot above his own sturdy one. He spent the most of his
time, and I with him, in what was known as the workshop--a detached
ivy-grown shed, buried amongst trees, very private, and with a deep
well in it, and furnished with all sorts of dangerous tools for cranks
of a mechanical turn. There he wrought incessantly, for he was a
capable carpenter; and there, watching and helping him, I strove to
forget something of my misery. One morning, entering this shed, we
found a little group of employés gathered about the well, talking and
laughing, and fishing with a long grapnel. A partition separated us
from the obscene crew, whose movements, unobserved by them, we
crouched to watch.
“A thousand to one it’s old Star-jelly,” whispered my companion.
“’Twas plain from the first the creature was booked.”
They hauled it to the surface while he muttered--a sodden body caught
by its waistband and doubled backwards--and slopped their hideous
burden on the floor. The white sightless face settled backwards, as if
with a sigh of rest, and I could hardly refrain from a scream of
terror. I had known this poor thing for the few days since he had been
admitted--a wreck so torn, so noisome, so straining the remnant of
life through fretted lungs, it should have seemed a mockery to
precipitate its end. I had known, and never, till now seeing it
clothed in the white uniform of death, had recognised it. It was the
mad incubus of “Rupert’s Folly,” caught somehow tripping at last and
consigned to his doom. The red earl had succeeded by long waiting in
curing himself of this itch. He was one of a deadly persistent family.
That night I could not even cry myself to sleep.
I don’t know how it was that I was at last driven to visit the Suicide
Tower. I had caught glimpses, remote in the grounds, of a picturesque,
creeper-hung pagoda set in flowering thickets; but had always, since
that first morning of deadly association with it, turned with loathing
from the sight. Now, somehow, by degrees, the thing began to impress
itself with a certain fascination on me. I felt drawn to it by a
horrible curiosity, none the less morbidly self-indulgent because I
knew that my jailer, a proselyte of the subtle Mesmer, had long been
practising to master my will and get me entirely under his influence.
Snuffing here, nibbling there, as it were, like a heifer approaching
in pretended unconsciousness the stranger in the field, I gradually
lost my power of resistance, the circumference of my orbit slowly
lessened, until, behold! one day the attraction found me helpless to
oppose it, and, with a little cry to myself, I yielded and went
rapidly towards the tower. As I approached the spot, I could hardly
feel my limbs; my soul, penetrated with a sort of exquisite nausea,
seemed already straining to leave the earth; a mist, luminous, vaguely
peopled, eddied before my eyes. Perhaps a confidence derived from the
possession of my duck-stone--which all this time I had been jealous to
preserve, using it even occasionally, in moments of prostration, for a
drug to my nerves--conduced to my undervaluing the force of
temptations to which I owned such a counter-charm. In any case, I made
so little resistance in the end, that the evil thing concealed amongst
the thick bushes by the tower, whence and whither he had drawn me by
his spells, must have chuckled to see me so easily netted.
The place was perfectly silent and beautiful. A tinkle of water, a
twitter of birds reached my ears from some remote height. The tower
sprang from a circular platform of stone, went up loftily, and broke
at near its top into two or three little tiled flounces. Under the
lowest I could see an opening pierced through a rose trellis; and
right before me the unlatched door of the building was reached by a
shallow flight of steps.
My heart was fluttering like a netted butterfly as I mounted them.
What sinister design could possibly obtain in this still and fragrant
enclosure? A flight of spiral stairs, going up the interior, was set
in a very bower of plumy palms, and ferns, and clambering rich mosses,
made greener by the light which entered through green _jalousies_.
Here and there tiny rills of water, lowering themselves down miniature
precipices, were fretted into spray that hung in the twinkling emerald
atmosphere and was showered on the leaves. Caged cunningly amidst the
foliage, birds of brilliant plumage chirped and flirted; or red
squirrels sprang and clung, staring at me with glossy eyes; or
lizards, liquid green as the sun through lime leaves, raised their
pulsing throats, and whisked and were gone. Once a snake, raising a
gorgeous enamelled head, lashed its thread of tongue on the glaze of
its little prison, seeming to taste my passing beauty in a wicked
lust. I felt quite secure and happy. Up and up I climbed, and
presently started singing softly, irresistibly, in response to the
growing rapture of my flight. New beauties were revealed with every
step, until in a moment, passing, at an angle, through a very thicket
of blossoms into white daylight, I saw the meaning, and tottered on
the brink of it all.
I had emerged upon a little ledge, a foot in width, which ringed the
outside of the tower just below the first roof. I was standing there,
suddenly, instantly, with not so much as an inch of parapet between my
feet and the edge. Behind was the wall of the tower; below, a reeling
abyss and the bare, merciless pavement. Dazzled, irresistibly drawn
forward, I longed only to reach the stones and be at rest. But in that
terrible moment my talisman occurred to me. Swaying, half fainting,
fighting for every movement, I succeeded in drawing it from my pocket
and lifting it to my nostrils--and instantly my resistance was
relaxed, and I floated down on the wings of enchantment.
When I opened my eyes, drugged and smiling, it was to the vision of
Dr. Peel standing before me like an awed and baffled demon. He dressed
his twitching features, and came and cringed.
“Are--are you much hurt?” he stammered.
“No, sir,” I murmured. “Not at all, I thank you.”
“It was your skirts ballooned,” he said. “I could not have thought it
possible.”