BY CLEMENT SCOTT.
“WITHIN SIGHT OF HOME.”
“How will it end? In sorrow or in pain?
It all depends, sweetheart, it all depends.”
“We may be parted, we may meet again;
It all depends, it all depends.”
Of all forms of mental torture to which a sane human being can be
subjected, say which is the worst? To hear the door of your prison cell
close behind you, with hope gone, friends alienated, love ruined, home
wrecked, and the awful prospect of seven years’ unutterable silence and
solitude, knowing before God you are an innocent man? Or to discover,
and beat your brains into discord with the knowledge, that being sane,
you are the inmate of a lunatic asylum; that, having reason, you are
classed with idiots; and that every explanation you can offer will be
treated with a mocking laugh?
The borderland between sanity and insanity is slighter than many
believe or would care to own. If ever man’s brain had been tested to
its utmost limits of tension, that brain beat and throbbed in the
head of the wretched Frank Onslow. He had lost his adored wife and
had found her; he had been granted the supreme hour of reconciliation
and rapture, and it was turned into the dull agony of expected death.
He had been told that if she awakened from her dull brain stupor,
and could mingle her kisses with those of her husband and her child,
her life might be spared, and he knew that when she did awake and
discovered that her lover and her lord had vanished without a word, she
might be dead even now. He might have killed her. He who would have
died to give her life, might, for aught he knew, have struck her once
more, just as she was tottering into the very arms of death. Everything
had failed; utterly, completely failed. Frank Onslow had become gray
with grief.
The child who should have been in his arms was lost, God knows where.
The wife whose life depended upon his honor was either dying or dead.
The woman who had by him been changed from a companion into a fiend
was triumphant. And he, the hapless victim, was under lock and key,
powerless to move, impotent for good or evil.
The more the poor creature protested his sanity the more mad he seemed
to be. The very situation, the ghastly surroundings, the hideous
objects he met on every side, were enough to turn the brain of the
strongest man. Insanity is bred in the air like a pestilence. Mad
doctors become mad. Nurses, attendants, porters, and servants connected
with lunatic asylums in time are devoid of reason. Put a madhouse,
private or public, in any given neighborhood, and in the course of
years the surrounding villages and neighbors will become as cracked as
_King Lear_ himself, as suicidal as _Ophelia_.
When Frank Onslow awoke from the stupor of surprise, he found to his
horror that he was surrounded by gibbering madmen and crack-brained
women. They sneaked round him, pulled him by the sleeve, and babbled
nonsense into his ears. They believed that everyone was mad but
themselves. They were deceitful, cruel, treacherous, hysterical, and
maudlin.
Here was an old man driven mad by gluttony, a wild weird, wolf-like
man, who, after every meal, chattered for the next like a monkey.
Scarcely had he swallowed his dinner before he stamped up and down the
corridor muttering, “I want my nice tea and cut bread and butter. I
tell you I want my nice tea and brown bread and butter.” And after tea
was swallowed he whined for his supper. Here was the young lover who
was driven mad because he could not marry the girl he had met night
after night in the stalls of the opera. Every night he dressed himself
up in his evening clothes, put an artificial flower in his button-hole,
and sitting on an old wooden chair, looked into space and warbled
the music of _Faust_’s love scene. Here was a woman driven mad by the
bad man who had deserted her, whose hair had turned gray in her long
imprisonment, but who ever since wept tears all day over the love
letters thrust into her bosom and reduced to a pulp with much weeping.
Here was the man who believed he had a millstone on his head; here the
woman who was convinced that every means was being taken to accomplish
her dishonor; out they all came, mumbling, maundering, making faces
at one another, pulling and picking at one another’s coat sleeves,
defiant, blasphemous, hysterical, howling, and weeping, men and women
cursing, men and women rending the air with their piteous cries. Men
glared at him with features distorted with rage, women hissed at him
with lips polluted with blasphemies. It was enough to make anyone mad
to talk to them. This was no home for the afflicted. It was a veritable
hell upon earth.
The worst of it was that there was no humane desire to cure the insane.
In public institutions they attempt to cure, too often in private homes
they do not hesitate to kill the last vestige of reason. The doctors,
instead of soothing their patients, irritated them. The mad point was
not avoided, it was insisted upon. The consequence was that the wards,
comparatively quiet before the medical attendants went their rounds,
became a pandemonium after they left them. It would never have done to
cure a paying patient. The object was to make him day by day madder and
madder still.
In order to save his distracted brain, Frank Onslow relapsed into
solemn and sullen silence. He was tortured with their mocking laughs.
If he appealed to the doctors they laughed at him; if he consulted the
attendants they turned away with a grin. If he hoped to obtain sympathy
from the patients, the fitful gleam of intelligence turned into the
animal laughter that was hideous.
“I shall go mad,” said the wretched man to himself, “unless I hold my
peace. Henceforward I will be dumb. It is my only safety.”
There were regular visiting days at this particular establishment. The
proprietor of it did not dare to run counter to public opinion, and he
was artful enough to encourage these visits of inspection in order to
show how admirable and infallible was his system. The patients were
driven mad in private, and petted in public. They were literally fawned
upon and thrashed.
Frank Onslow was saved by a miracle. In his darkest hour of distress
he had lost hope in everything but prayer for help, prayer for
deliverance, prayer that he might be rescued in order to protect the
helpless. He was sitting moodily in his room, tortured with the sense
that his reason would soon be lost to him, when he remembered that
this was the day when visitors were admitted. He had prayed until his
brow dripped with agony. His experience of the curious visitors so
far had not been very encouraging. Whenever he attempted to get into
conversation with any of them, or to pass a letter into their hands,
he was greeted with a smile, or one of those mocking laughs. “Poor
fellow,” they whispered, “how dreadfully mad he is.” If not, they
shrank from him as if he had been a wild beast.
The great iron bell pealed at the asylum gates. There were voices in
the hall. Frank Onslow listened and listened again. It was an English
voice talking to an American. Where had he heard that voice before?
They were coming upstairs. The voices, indistinct before, became
louder and louder. Yes; he knew both their voices. They were perfectly
familiar to him.
“My God, is it possible? Can it be true? Are my unworthy prayers
answered at last?”
The door of the room opened, and before the imprisoned man stood Lord
Castleton and the very American detective who had been consulted when
Frank arrived from England.
Here was an unexpected discovery. It was a miracle of miracles. There
had been no search for the missing man. There was no hue and cry. Lord
Castleton, like most Englishmen of an inquiring turn of mind, wanted to
see the sights of New York, in order to record his impressions when
he returned home. He had employed the services of one of the sharpest
detectives in the city to show him round, and by a miracle he had
discovered and probably saved the life and reason of his old friend.
In an instant the officer of police understood and grasped the
situation. Once given the clew, and difficulties melt into thin air.
It took very little time to procure an order for the release of the
unfortunate Englishman, and before night-time the medical proprietor of
the fashionable madhouse was safely lodged in a New York prison, and
available for evidence on the subject of Mrs. Senator Clutterbuck, and,
more important still, the safety and whereabouts of the unfortunate
child Ronny.
At one time it appeared as if the troubles of Frank Onslow would end
in an unsuspected manner. The drama was becoming a tragedy. He was
released, it is true; he was safe once more. The discovery of his
child was now more than probable. The discomfiture of his enemy, Mrs.
Clutterbuck, was nearly complete, but the reaction after all this
mental and physical strain nearly cost Frank Onslow his life. The
strongest men break down at a given point, and now it was Frank’s turn
to succumb.
Once outside the asylum he appeared to be more insane than when he was
in it. He wanted to face his enemy, and swore he would kill her. He
pleaded to scour New York for the boy. He rushed off to the telegraph
office to inform the wretched mother that he was true, and she might
yet hope, but the strain was too much for even his strong constitution,
and when he had placed in the hands of the detective every atom of
information he possessed, and had almost imperatively been urged to
leave the work of discovery to the hands of others, he went back
reluctantly to his hotel, half-hysterical with excitement, but utterly
dead beat. Lord Castleton found his friend, next morning, raging in
the delirium of fever. At one time he cried piteously for Fenella,
and kissed the pillow where he believed she had rested; in another
instant he was twisting the bedclothes into a knot and imagined he was
strangling Mme. de Vigny. In the intervals he was sobbing, as if his
heart would break, “Ronny, Ronny, my boy, my boy!”
No woman could have tended a sick man with greater devotion than did
Lord Castleton. Night and day he never left his friend except to
receive reports from the head office of the detectives, who once more
proved themselves the finest officers in connection with any police
service in the world. By constant care and devoted nursing the crisis
was past. Reluctantly the doctors gave the permission for a move to be
made, and on a certain bright morning Lord Castleton, with the aid of
an invalid carriage, took his worn and wasted friend down to the docks,
where he had secured berths for England on board one of the fastest
steamers of a prominent line. The journey to the sea seemed to revive
the patient. As yet he had not been allowed to see any friends save
Castleton, or to ask any questions. But the mists gradually disappeared
from his eyes, and a smile of happiness played on his wan features.
“God bless you, old boy,” he said to Castleton as they drove slowly to
the ship. “God reward you. Never did man find a truer friend. I should
have been under the turf, old man, if it had not been for your tender
care.”
Castleton was anxious not to excite his friend too much. For the day
was not over, and he knew that the drama of it was not yet complete.
On board they found Jacynth, who had been as loyal to his trust as
Castleton.
The two men, when they met, whispered for a second to one another, and
there was a look of distressed suspense on Frank Onslow’s face.
“Is all well?” whispered Castleton.
“More than well,” answered Jacynth.
“Where is he?”
“In the cabin.”
“Do you think we dare risk it?”
“We must and shall,” muttered Lord Castleton. “He can’t break down now.
It may save his life.”
Gently these two brave gentlemen led their poor sick friend to
his cabin, placed him on his couch, but before they left him in a
half-dream they uncovered the sleeping form of a little child who
was resting in an opposite berth, the fingers of one hand twisted in
his sunny locks and the others clasped over a woman’s portrait. The
faithful Jacynth had taken it from next his heart and placed it in the
child’s hands.
It was Ronny, who had gone to sleep kissing his mother’s picture, which
had fallen from his baby hands.
For hours the sick man slept, and his friends stood, sentinel-like,
loyal hearts at the cabin door. The sun had sunk, the stars were out,
and the steamer was already miles at sea, plowing through the waves,
lessening the journey between America and dear old England.
Still the true friends watched at the sick man’s door.
Suddenly they heard a passionate cry, a wild cry of pleasurable pain, a
cry that faded into a moan of relief.
“Ronny, Ronny darling--my child, my son--oh! how good is God. Let us
thank God together.”
Quietly the two friends opened the cabin door and saw father and son on
their knees in an attitude of prayer. The child was looking up into his
father’s eyes, and the wasted man with streaming eyes was kissing his
wife’s portrait, and murmuring, “I have kept my oath. Beloved one, I’m
bringing Ronny home to his mother’s arms.”
The stars went out and darkness fell upon the sea. There was silence
in the cabin now, for father and boy were wrapped in a profound sleep.
Castleton and Jacynth had finished their cigars and turned in.
Close upon midnight two figures came upon deck from the steerage part
of the steamer, and walked backward and forward without exchanging a
single word. But they never separated.
It was a detective from Scotland Yard, and Mme. de Vigny was in his
custody, cursing her fate.
As the huge ship plunged through the green Atlantic waves, bearing
homeward the fatal lives of so many interested in this eventful
history, poor Fenella, worn almost to a shadow, sat dreaming in her
garden in “the island of carnations.”
She knew, at any rate, that Frank was faithful, and that her boy was
safe.