her again, I wonder? I will stay here a week or a month if--What
nonsense! I must have distinguished myself, staring at her like a gawk.
When she said she was the Queen of Sheba, I ought instantly to have
replied--what in the deuce is it I ought to have replied? How can a man
be witty with a ton of sole-leather pressing on his spine!"
Edward Lynde, with the girl and her mocking words in his mind, and
busying himself with all the clever things he might have said and did
not say, mechanically traversed the remaining distance to the village.
The street which had seemed thronged when he viewed it from the slope
of the hill was deserted; at the farther end he saw two or three
persons hurrying along, but there were no indications whatever of the
festival he had conjectured. Indeed, the town presented the appearance
of a place smitten by a pestilence. The blinds of the lower casements
of all the houses were closed; he would have supposed them unoccupied
if he had not caught sight of a face pressed against the glass of an
upper window here and there. He thought it singular that these faces
instantly withdrew when he looked up. Once or twice he fancied he heard
a distant laugh, and the sound of voices singing drunkenly somewhere in
the open air.
Some distance up the street a tall liberty-pole sustaining a swinging
sign announced a tavern. Lynde hastened thither; but the tavern, like
the private houses, appeared tenantless; the massive pine
window-shutters were barred and bolted. Lynde mounted the three or four
low steps leading to the piazza, and tried the front door, which was
locked. With the saddle still on his shoulders, he stepped into the
middle of the street to reconnoitre the premises. A man and two women
suddenly showed themselves at an open window in the second story. Lynde
was about to address them when the man cried out--
"Oh, you're a horse, I suppose. Well, there isn't any oats for you
here. You had better trot on!"
Lynde did not relish this pleasantry; it struck him as rather insolent;
but he curbed his irritation, and inquired as politely as he could if a
horse or any kind of vehicle could be hired in the village.
The three persons in the window nodded to one another significantly,
and began smiling in a constrained manner, as if there were something
quite preposterous in the inquiry. The man, a corpulent, red-faced
person, seemed on the point of suffocating with merriment.
"Is this a public house?" demanded Lynde severely.
"That's as may be," answered the man, recovering his breath, and
becoming grave.
"Are you the proprietor?"
"That's jest what I am."
"Then I require of you the accommodation which is the right of every
traveller. Your license does not permit you to turn any respectable
stranger from your door."
"Now, my advice to you," said the man, stepping back from the window,
"my advice to you is to trot. You can't get in here. If you try to,
I'll pepper you as sure as you live, though I wouldn't like to do it.
So trot right along!"
The man had a gun in his hands; he clutched it nervously by the stock;
his countenance worked strangely, and his small, greenish eyes had a
terrified, defiant expression. Indisputably, the tavern-keeper looked
upon Lynde as a dangerous person, and was ready to fire upon him if he
persisted in his demands.
"My friend," said Lynde through his set teeth, "if I had you down here
I'd give you a short lesson in manners."
"I dare say! I dare say!" cried the man, flourishing the shot-gun
excitedly.
Lynde turned away disgusted and indignant; but his indignation was
neutralized by his astonishment at this incomprehensible brutality. He
had no resource but to apply to some private house and state his
predicament. As that luckless saddle had excited the derision of the
girl, and drawn down on him the contumely of the tavern-keeper, he
looked around for some safe spot in which to deposit it before it
brought him into further disgrace. His linen and all his worldly
possessions, except his money, which he carried on his person, were in
the valise; he could not afford to lose that.
The sun was high by this time, and the heat would have been intolerable
if it had not been for a merciful breeze which swept down from the
cooler atmosphere of the hills. Lynde wasted half an hour or more
seeking a hiding-place for the saddle. It had grown a grievous burden
to him; at every step it added a pound to its dead weight. He saw no
way of relieving himself of it. There it was perched upon his
shoulders, like the Old Man of the Sea on the back of Sindbad the
Sailor. In sheer despair Lynde flung down his load on the curb-stone at
a corner formed by a narrow street diagonally crossing the main
thoroughfare, which he had not quitted. He drew out his handkerchief
and wiped the heavy drops of perspiration from his brows. At that
moment he was aware of the presence of a tall, cadaverous man of about
forty, who was so painfully pinched and emaciated that a sympathetic
shiver ran over Lynde as he glanced at him. He was as thin as an
exclamation point. It seemed to Lynde that the man must be perishing
with cold even in that burning June sunshine. It was not a man, but a
skeleton.
"Good heavens, sir!" cried Lynde. "Tell me where I am! What is the name
of this town?"
"Constantinople."
"Constan"--
"--tinople," added the man briskly. "A stranger here?"
"Yes," said Lynde abstractedly. He was busy running over an imaginary
map of the State of New Hampshire in search of Constantinople.
"Good!" exclaimed the anatomy, rustling his dry palms together, "I'll
employ you."
"You'll employ me? I like that!"
"Certainly. I'm a ship-builder."
"I didn't know they built vessels a hundred miles from the coast," said
Lynde.
"I am building a ship--don't say I'm not!"
"Of course I know nothing about it."
"A marble ship."
"A ship to carry marble?"
"No, a ship made of marble; a passenger ship. We have ships of iron,
why not of marble?" he asked fiercely.
"Oh, the fellow is mad!" said Lynde to himself, "as mad as a loon;
everybody here is mad, or I've lost my senses. So you are building a
marble ship?" he added aloud, good-naturedly. "When it is finished I
trust you will get all the inhabitants of this town into it, and put to
sea at once."
"Then you'll help me!" cried the man enthusiastically, with his eyes
gleaming in their sunken sockets. More than ever he looked like a
specimen escaped from some anatomical museum.
"I do not believe I can be of much assistance," answered Lynde,
laughing. "I have had so little experience in constructing marble
vessels, you see. I fear my early education has been fearfully
neglected. By the bye," continued the young man, who was vaguely
diverted by his growing interest in the monomaniac, "how do you propose
to move your ship to the seaboard?"
"In the simplest manner--a double railroad track--twenty-four
engines--twelve engines on each side to support the hull."
"That WOULD be a simple way."
Edward Lynde laughed again, but not heartily. He felt that this marble
ship was a conception of high humor and was not without its pathetic
element. The whimsicality of the idea amused him, but the sad
earnestness of the nervous, unstrung visionary at his side moved his
compassion.
"Dear me," he mused, "may be all of us are more or less engaged in
planning a marble ship, and perhaps the happiest are those who, like
this poor soul, never awake from their delusion. Matrimony was uncle
David's marble ship--he launched his! Have I one on the ways, I wonder?"
Lynde broke with a shock from his brief abstraction. His companion had
disappeared, and with him the saddle and valise. Lynde threw a hasty
glance up the street, and started in pursuit of the naval-architect,
who was running with incredible swiftness and bearing the saddle on his
head with as much ease as if it had been a feather.
The distance between the two men, some sixty or seventy yards, was not
the disadvantage that made pursuit seem hopeless. Lynde had eaten
almost nothing since the previous noon; he had been carrying that
cumbersome saddle for the last two or three hours; he was out of
breath, and it was impossible to do much running in his heavy
riding-boots. The other man, on the contrary, appeared perfectly fresh;
he wore light shoes, and had not a superfluous ounce of flesh to carry.
He was all bone and sinew; the saddle resting upon his head was hardly
an impediment to him. Lynde, however, was not going to be vanquished
without a struggle; though he recognized the futility of pursuit, he
pushed on doggedly. A certain tenacious quality in the young man
imperatively demanded this of him.
"The rascal has made off with my dinner," he muttered between his
clinched teeth. "That completes the ruin Mary began. If I should happen
to catch up with him, I trust I shall have the moral strength not to
knock his head off--his skull off; it isn't a head."
Lynde's sole hope of overtaking him, and it was a very slender hope,
was based on the possibility that the man might fall and disable
himself; but he seemed to have the sure-footedness as well as the
lightness of a deer. When Lynde reached the outskirts of the village,
on the road by which he had entered, the agile ship-builder was more
than halfway up the hill. Lynde made a fresh spurt here, and lost his
hat; but he had no time to turn back for it. Every instant widened the
space between the two runners, as one of them noticed with disgust. At
the top of the ascent the man halted a moment to take breath, and then
disappeared behind the ridge. He was on the down grade now, and of
course gaining at each stride on his pursuer, who was still toiling
upward. Lynde did not slacken his pace, however; he had got what
runners call their second wind. With lips set, elbows pressed against
his sides, and head thrown forward, he made excellent time to the brow
of the hill, where he suddenly discovered himself in the midst of a
crowd of men and horses.
For several seconds Lynde was so dazed and embarrassed that he saw
nothing; then his eyes fell upon the girl with the long hair and the
white gown. She was seated sidewise on a horse without saddle, and the
horse was Mary. A strapping fellow was holding the animal by the
head-stall.
"By Jove!" cried Lynde, springing forward joyfully, "that's my mare!"
He was immediately seized by two men who attempted to pass a cord over
his wrists. Lynde resisted so desperately that a third man was called
into requisition, and the three succeeded in tying his hands and
placing him upon a saddle vacated by one of the riders. All this
occupied hardly a minute.
"Will you go along quietly," said one of the men roughly, "or will you
be carried?"
"What is the meaning of this?" demanded Lynde, with the veins standing
out on his forehead.
He received no reply from any of the group, which seemed to be composed
of farmers and laboring-hands, with two or three persons whose social
status did not betray itself. Directly behind the girl and, like her,
mounted on a horse led by a couple of rustics, was the white-haired old
gentleman who had repulsed Lynde so rudely. Lynde noticed that his
hands were also secured by cords, an indignity which in no wise altered
the benevolent and satisfied expression of his face. Lynde's saddle and
valise were attached to the old gentleman's horse. Lynde instinctively
looked around for the ship-builder. There he was, flushed and sullen,
sitting on a black nag as bony and woe-begone as himself, guarded by
two ill-favored fellows. Not only were the ship-builder's arms
pinioned, but his feet were bound by a rope fastened to each ankle and
passed under the nag's belly. It was clear to Lynde that he himself,
the old clergyman, and the girl were the victims of some dreadful
misconception, possibly brought about by the wretch who had purloined
the saddle.
"Gentlemen!" cried Lynde, as the party began to advance, "I protest
against this outrage so far as I am concerned, and I venture to protest
on the part of the lady. I am convinced that she is incapable of any
act to warrant such treatment. I--I know her slightly," he added,
hesitating.
"Oh, yes," said the girl, folding her hands demurely in her lap, "and I
know you, too, very well. You are my husband."
This announcement struck Lynde speechless. The rough men exchanged
amused glances, and the ship-builder gave vent to a curious dry laugh.
Lynde could have killed him. The party moved on. Up to this moment the
young man had been boiling with rage; his rage now yielded place to
amazement. What motive had prompted the girl to claim that
relationship? Was it a desperate appeal to him for protection? But
brother, or cousin, or friend would have served as well. Her impulsive
declaration, which would be at once disproved, might result in serious
complications for him and her. But it had not been an impulsive
declaration; she had said it very calmly, and, he fancied, with just
the lightest touch of coquetry, "You are my husband!" For several
minutes Lynde did not dare to let his eyes wander in her direction. She
was a pace or so in the rear at his right. To see her he would be
obliged to turn slightly; this he presently did, with a movement as if
settling himself more easily in the saddle. The girl's loose hair was
blown like a black veil over her face, putting her into mourning; she
was steadying herself with one hand resting on Mary's mane; her feet
were crossed, and a diminutive slipper had fallen from one of them.
There was something so helpless and appealing in the girl's attitude
that Lynde was touched.
"May I speak with you, sir?" he said, addressing himself to a man whom
somebody had called Morton, and who appeared to issue the orders for
the party. The man came to Lynde's side.
"For Heaven's sake, sir, explain this! Who is that young woman?"
"You said you knew her," returned the man, not unpleasantly.
"Indeed I said so," replied Lynde, reddening. "What has happened? What
has she done, what have I done, what has the old clergyman done, that
we should be seized like murderers on the public highway?"
"Be quiet now," said the man, laying his hand soothingly on Lynde's
arm, and looking at him steadily. "Everything will be satisfactorily
explained by and by."
Lynde's indignation blazed up again.
"I can assure you, sir," he cried, as the man returned to his former
position, "that the result of the explanation will be far from
satisfactory to you. I shall hold to strict account every man who has
had a hand in this business. I demand to be brought before a
magistrate, or a justice of the peace, if there is one in this
God-forsaken country."
No attention was paid to Lynde's fresh outbreak. Some one picked up his
hat and set it on the back of his head, giving him quite a rakish air.
His dignity suffered until the wind took the hat again. The party
proceeded in silence, halting once to tighten a girth, and another time
to wait for a straggler. If the men spoke to one another it was in
subdued tones or whispers. Two of the horsemen trotted on a hundred
yards in advance, like skirmishers thrown out in front of an attacking
force. There was something in all this mysterious precaution and
reticence which bewildered and exasperated Lynde, who noted every
detail. Mary, in a transient spasm of backing, had fallen to the rear;
the young man could no longer see the girl, but ever before his eyes
was the piteous, unslippered little foot with its arched instep.
The party was now at the base of the declivity. Instead of following
the road to the village, the horses turned abruptly into a bridle-path
branching off to the left, and in the course of a few minutes passed
through an iron-spiked gateway in a high brick wall surrounding the
large red structure which had puzzled Lynde on first discovering the
town. The double gates stood wide open and were untended; they went to,
however, with a clang, and the massive bolts were shot as soon as the
party had entered. In the courtyard Lynde was hastily assisted from the
horse; he did not have an opportunity to observe what became of the
other three prisoners. When his hands were freed he docilely allowed
himself to be conducted up a flight of stone steps and into the
vestibule of the building, and thence, through a long corridor, to a
small room in which his guard left him. The door closed with a spring
not practicable from the inside, as Lynde ascertained on inspection.
The chamber was not exactly a cell; it resembled rather the
waiting-room of a penitentiary. The carpet, of a tasteless, gaudy
pattern, was well worn, and the few pieces of hair-cloth furniture, a
sofa, a table, and chairs, had a stiff, official air. A strongly barred
window gave upon a contracted garden--one of those gardens sometimes
attached to prisons, with mathematically cut box borders, and squares
of unhealthy, party-colored flowers looking like gangs of convicts
going to meals. On his arrival at the place Edward Lynde had offered no
resistance, trusting that some sort of judicial examination would
promptly set him at liberty. Faint from want of food, jaded by his
exertions, and chafing at the delay, he threw himself upon the sofa,
and waited.
There was a great deal of confusion in the building. Hurried footsteps
came and went up and down the passages; now and then he heard
approaching voices, which tantalizingly passed on, or died away before
reaching his door. Once a shrill shriek--a woman's shriek--rang through
the corridor and caused him to spring to his feet.
After the lapse of an hour that had given Lynde some general idea of
eternity, the door was hastily thrown open, and a small, elderly,
blue-eyed gentleman, followed by a man of gigantic stature, entered the
chamber.
"My dear sir," cried the gentleman, making a courteous, deprecatory
gesture with his palms spread outward, "we owe you a million apologies.
There has been a most lamentable mistake!"
"A mistake!" said Lynde haughtily. "Mistake is a mild term to apply to
an outrage."
"Your indignation is just; still it was a mistake, and one I would not
have had happen for the world. I am Dr. Pendegrast, the superintendent
of this asylum."
"This is an asylum!"
"An asylum for the insane," returned Dr. Pendegrast. "I do not know how
to express my regret at what has occurred. I can only account for the
unfortunate affair, and throw myself upon your generosity. Will you
allow me to explain?"
Lynde passed his hand over his forehead in a bewildered way. Then he
looked at the doctor suspiciously; Lynde's late experience had shaken
his faith in the general sanity of his species. "Certainly," he said,
"I would like to have this matter explained to me; for I'll be hanged
if I understand it. This is an asylum?"
"Yes, sir."
"And you are the superintendent?"
"Yes, sir."
"Then--naturally--you are not a lunatic?"
"Certainly not!" said the doctor, starting.
"Very well; I didn't know. I am listening to you, sir."
"Early this morning," said Dr. Pendegrast, somewhat embarrassed by
Lynde's singular manner, "a number of patients whom we had always
considered tractable seized the attendants one by one at breakfast,
and, before a general alarm could be given, locked them in the cells.
Some of us were still in our bedrooms when the assault began and were
there overpowered. We chanced to be short-handed at the time, two of
the attendants being ill, and another absent. As I say, we were all
seized--the women attendants and nurses as well--and locked up. Higgins
here, my head-man, they put into a strait-jacket."
"Yes, sir," spoke up Higgins for himself, "they did so!"
"Me," continued Dr. Pendegrast, smiling, "they confined in the padded
chamber."
Lynde looked at him blankly.
"A chamber with walls thickly cushioned, to prevent violent patients
from inflicting injury on themselves," explained the doctor. "_I_, you
see, was considered a very bad case indeed! Meanwhile, Morton, the
under-keeper, was in the garden, and escaped; but unfortunately, in his
excitement, he neglected to lock the main gate after him. Morton gave
the alarm to the people in the village, who, I am constrained to say,
did not behave handsomely. Instead of coming to our relief and
assisting to restore order, which might easily have been done even
then, they barricaded themselves in their houses, in a panic. Morton
managed to get a horse, and started for G--In the meantime the patients
who had made the attack liberated the patients still in confinement,
and the whole rushed in a body out of the asylum and spread themselves
over the village."
"That must have been the crowd I saw in the streets when I sighted the
town," said Lynde, thinking aloud.
"If you saw persons in the street," returned the doctor, "they were not
the townsfolk. They kept very snug, I assure you. But permit me to
finish, Mr."--
"My name is Lynde."
"Morton," continued the doctor, bowing, "having secured several
volunteers before reaching G--, decided to return with what force he
had, knowing that every instant was precious. On his way back he picked
up three of the poor wanderers, and, unluckily, picked up you."
"He should not have committed such a stupid error," said Lynde,
clinging stoutly to his grievance. "He ought to have seen that I was
not an inmate of the asylum."
"An attendant, my dear Mr. Lynde, is not necessarily familiar with all
the patients; he may know only those in his special ward. Besides, you
were bare-headed and running, and seemed in a state of great cerebral
excitement."
"I was chasing a man who had stolen my property."
"Morton and the others report that you behaved with great violence."
"Of course I did. I naturally resented being seized and bound."
"Your natural violence confirmed them in their natural suspicion, you
see. Assuredly they were to blame; but the peculiar circumstances must
plead for them."
"But when I spoke to them calmly and rationally"--
"My good sir," interrupted the doctor, "if sane people always talked as
rationally and sensibly as some of the very maddest of my poor friends
sometimes do, there would be fewer foolish things said in the world.
What remark is that the great poet puts into the mouth of Polonius,
speaking of Hamlet? 'How pregnant sometimes his replies are! a
happiness that often madness hits on, which reason and sanity could not
so prosperously be delivered of.' My dear Mr. Lynde, it was your
excellent good sense that convicted you! By the way, I believe you
claimed the horse which Morton found adrift on the road."
"Yes, sir, it was mine; at least I was riding it this morning when the
saddle-girth broke, and the mare got away from me."
"Then of course that was your saddle Blaisdell was running off with."
"Blaisdell?"
"One of our most dangerous patients, in fact, the only really dangerous
patient at present in the establishment. Yet you should hear HIM talk
sometimes! To-day, thank God, he happened to be in his ship-building
mood. Otherwise--I dare not think what he might have done. I should be
in despair if he had not been immediately retaken. Oddly enough, all
the poor creatures, except three, returned to the asylum of their own
will, after a brief ramble through the village."
"And the white-haired old gentleman who looked like a clergyman, is he
mad?"
"Mackenzie? Merely idiotic," replied the doctor, with the cool
professional air.
"And the young girl," asked Lynde hesitatingly, "is she"--
"A very sad case," interrupted Dr. Pendegrast, with a tenderer
expression settling upon his countenance. "The saddest thing in the
world."
"Insane?"
"Hopelessly so, I fear."
A nameless heaviness fell upon Lynde's heart. He longed to ask other
questions, but he did not know how to shape them. He regretted that
subsequently.
"And now, Mr. Lynde," said the doctor, "in your general pardon I wish
you to include my unavoidable delay in coming or sending to you. When
you were brought here I was still in durance vile, and Higgins was in
his strait-jacket. On being released, my hands were full, as you can
suppose. Moreover, I did not learn at once of your detention. The
saddle and the valise caused me to suspect that a blunder had been
committed. I cannot adequately express my regrets. In ten minutes,"
continued Dr. Pendegrast, turning a fat gold watch over on its back in
the palm of his hand, where it looked like a little yellow turtle, "in
ten minutes dinner will be served. Unless you do me the honor to dine
with me, I shall not believe in the sincerity of your forgiveness."