THE FACE OF THE LOST.
The Retreat, the abode in which Dr. Wilderson Snaffley received his
patients, was a place which seemed eminently calculated to drive the
sanest person mad.
Dismal walls of an unusual height, and ornamented at the top with
iron spikes, surrounded a dreary wilderness of tangled bushes and
tall lean poplars, which was designated a garden. In the centre
of this garden stood a high square house; a house which had once
been white, but from whose damp-stained walls the stucco had peeled
off in great patches. Long rows of curtainless windows, every one
the precise pattern of its neighbour, looked out upon the dismal
wilderness. There were not even blinds to shut out the glaring heat
of the sun; but wooden shutters, painted black, swung to and fro
before the windows with every gust of wind, and the rusty hinges
made a dreary creaking noise, that was like the groaning of a human
creature in pain.
This was the place of which Dr. Snaffley spoke so pleasantly to
the friends of his patients, describing it always as “a delightful
country mansion, standing in the midst of its own grounds.”
But the doctor knew his patrons; and he was not deluded by the
sympathetic looks or compassionate phrases of the people who
intrusted their relatives to his keeping, and who took no trouble
to ascertain the nature of the place that sheltered the afflicted
creatures, or the comforts that softened their calamity. Dr. Snaffley
knew that no one who entered the gates of the Retreat would have
committed a beloved relative to his care. The unfortunates who came
to that dark abode were people who were to be _got rid of_. No
matter how cheerless the home, how wretchedly furnished the room,
how miserable the daily fare, how chill and damp the atmosphere; the
patients were only likely to die the sooner, and the bitterly-grudged
stipend cease to be paid.
Dr. Snaffley took patients at different rates, for he varied his
charge according to the circumstances of the persons who employed
him. His policy was neither to ill-use his patients nor to starve
them; his policy was to keep them alive at the smallest possible
cost. He was not personally cruel; but he allowed the men and women
he employed to do pretty much as they liked; while he lived his
own life, and enjoyed himself after his own manner in London, only
putting in an appearance at the Retreat now and then.
In that joyless, comfortless mansion there was, it may be hoped, less
actual cruelty than in some of those dens of iniquity which have
encumbered this beautiful earth. There were padded rooms, into which
the dangerous lunatics were thrust, and kept under lock and key; but
the harmless lunatics were allowed considerable liberty. The walls
were so high, and the neighbourhood so utterly desolate, that there
was little chance either of escape or of communication being held
with the outer world.
By far the larger number of his patients, and those for whom Dr.
Wilderson Snaffley was the most liberally paid, _were not mad_, but
were the wretched victims who, for some reason or other, had been
put out of the way by their unnatural relatives upon the infamous
pretence of insanity.
These patients were very quiet. At first they were loud in
their complaints. They cried out bitterly for justice; they
threatened--they implored--they wept--they wrote letters, and tried
with piteous persistence to hold some communication with the outer
world--to find some means of reaching the ear of mercy, of enlisting
the voice of justice in their cause. But no eye save that of Heaven
saw their sufferings; no mortal ear but that of merciless gaolers
heard their complaints; and in time they were all wearied out, one
after another, and submitted with a stupid apathy to an inevitable
fate. A hopeless, changeless melancholy took possession of them. They
sat motionless at the windows, staring blankly out upon the gloomy
prospect. They rarely conversed with one another; for what could they
talk of in that living grave?
Sometimes they roamed listlessly in the dreary wilderness, staring
at those walls which shut them out from all they had ever loved
or cherished. They ate their scanty meals in despondent silence.
The wild chatter of the really mad patients tortured them with its
discordant jargon; and they had no heart to speak amidst the Babel
that surrounded them.
Thus it was not strange that many who entered that place as sane as
the wretches who sent them there became at last raving maniacs.
All Dr. Snaffley wanted was the liberty to enjoy himself abroad, and
the power to save a fortune for his old age from the profits of the
Retreat. He was already rich; but every day brought him new wealth,
and every day made him more greedy of gain.
Still, notwithstanding the _good luck_ that had attended his dreary
abode for many years, Dr. Snaffley had never before caught so rich
a prize as the patient committed to his care by Rupert Godwin the
banker.
The proprietor of the Retreat knew his power; he knew that the
patient called Lewis Wilton, who had been placed under his care, was
capable of revealing a secret that might have condemned Rupert Godwin
to a felon’s doom.
The patient once within the walls of the Retreat, the secret was
safe--as safe as if it had been buried in the grave of a second
victim.
“If Rupert Godwin had dared, he would have murdered this young man,”
thought Dr. Snaffley; “he only pays me because he hasn’t pluck enough
to play the bolder game.”
For some days and nights after his removal to the Retreat, Lionel
Westford remained still unconscious--still a prey to delirious
fancies, to terrible visions, to all the wild delusions of a violent
attack of brain-fever.
But Dr. Wilderson Snaffley, although a scoundrel and a charlatan,
was not without a certain cleverness in his professional capacity.
He prescribed for the young man with a watchful care that he did not
often bestow upon a patient, for Lionel Westford’s life was worth
five hundred pounds a year to him--more than the income derived from
five ordinary patients.
For this reason the invalid enjoyed privileges that had never before
been shown to any inmate of the Retreat.
A private bedchamber was allotted to him, instead of a miserable
truckle-bed in one of the bare wards, where twenty patients slept
side by side, with the wind whistling round them from the chinks in
the worm-eaten doors and window-frames. The battered furniture of the
dreary mansion was ransacked in order that a tolerably comfortable
bed and a dilapidated easy-chair might be found for Lionel’s private
room.
The fever-stricken young man progressed very rapidly in the hands of
his new attendant; and in little more than a week after his removal
from Wilmingdon Hall the patient had recovered consciousness.
That recovery of consciousness was the most awful hour in Lionel
Westford’s life--more awful even than the hour in which, stricken by
the revelation of his father’s murder, he fell senseless on the turf
in Wilmingdon Park.
As he opened his eyes and stared stupidly about him, trying
helplessly to remember where he was, the bare and wretched aspect of
the chamber sent a deadly chill to his heart.
Where was he? Never before had he seen those dreary, dirty walls.
That dingy paper, with its geometrical pattern in dirty yellow and
faded brown, falling in tattered shreds here and there, and looking
as if it had not been renewed for twenty years, and those bare
carpetless boards, belonged to no chamber that he could remember;
for, poor and shabby though his Lambeth lodging had been, it had at
least been clean, and here all looked dirty and disorderly. At first
the invalid’s mind was too weak to arrive at any definite conclusion.
He could only lie staring at the wretched chamber, with a vague
wonder in his mind.
He knew he had never before been in that room; but for a time that
was all he knew or sought to know. He was not terrified by its
strangeness. He did not recollect where he had last been, or what had
happened to him. His mind was almost a blank.
Then, little by little, memory came back, with all its power to
torture. He remembered his pretty bedchamber at Wilmingdon Hall--the
perfume of flowers blowing in at the open window, the luxurious
furniture, the comfort and beauty of all around him.
Then the image of Julia Godwin arose before him in all the splendour
of her beauty. Then a dark form pushed that brilliant image aside,
and the face of the banker scowled at him with hate and fear in every
lineament.
It was the countenance that had so often looked down upon him in
his delirium. It looked on him now, as it had looked then; and it
recalled the memory of the crime that had been committed in the
northern wing.
Then the picture was complete. Lionel remembered all the past--the
mystery which it had been his fate to discover; the secret which
Providence had revealed to him; the evidence that had been link by
link united into one perfect chain, identifying the Captain of the
_Lily Queen_ with the victim of Rupert Godwin.
But where was he? How had he been removed from the luxurious chamber
which had been his to this dismal and poverty-stricken room, such
as no gentleman’s servant would have occupied without complaining
bitterly of the master who allotted it to him?
He fancied that he must have been removed into some desolate and
disused chamber in Wilmingdon Hall. He was in the north wing,
perhaps, in one of the bedchambers of that forgotten building, which
ignorant people believed to be haunted by the shadows of the dead.
It was noon when Lionel Westford lay helpless in his lonely chamber,
with the anguish of consciousness, instead of the childish fancies
of delirium. The sunlight streamed into the room through the narrow
opening of a shutter which had been blown against the outside of the
window.
The window reached to the ground; and the young man was still
scrutinizing his apartment with curious eyes, when the shutter was
blown back from the window, and the chamber, which had been only
dimly lighted before, was suddenly exposed to the full glare of the
mid-day sun.
Lionel Westford turned his gaze from the chamber itself to the
prospect without.
In all this time he had never once doubted that he was still an
inmate of Wilmingdon Hall. He fancied that he had only been removed
to some remote and uninhabited part of the house, where his ravings
could not be heard--where no prying ear could listen to the ominous
words which might fall from his lips.
He believed this, and he was not disabused of his error; for, by a
strange coincidence, the scene which met his eyes beyond the window
of his room was not unlike the neglected garden which was to be seen
from the windows of the northern wing.
There all was ruin and desolation--overgrown shrubs, whose straggling
branches were strangers to the gardener’s pruning-knife, long rank
grass, ill-looking weeds, moss-grown gravel. Here were the same
weeds, the same rank grass, blown to and fro by the autumn wind, the
same weird tangled bushes, withering under the autumn sun.
The northern garden at Wilmingdon Hall was shut in by an old brick
wall; a noble mass of brickwork, with buttresses that might have
served to sustain the ramparts of some mediæval castle. Here too the
wall loomed, dark and dismal-looking, against the blue autumn sky.
“Yes,” muttered Lionel Westford; “they have removed me to the
northern wing. The murderer feared to hear himself denounced by the
lips of his victim’s son; and he has banished me here--here, where I
may lie forgotten and neglected; here, where _she_ may never know my
fate! I only wonder that he has let me live; for he must know that,
if I am ever able to leave this place, I shall devote the rest of my
life to the task of bringing my father’s assassin to justice.”
Then, as he put the story of the past together bit by bit, Lionel
Westford remembered that he had entered Wilmingdon Hall under an
assumed name. He did not think of his mother’s letter, or his
father’s miniature--two things which bore direct evidence to his
identity.
“I am only a stranger to Rupert Godwin,” thought the young man,
“unless in my delirium--for I suppose I have been delirious--I have
revealed who I am, and my knowledge of his iniquity. Surely, if I had
done so, he would have murdered me while I lay helpless in his power,
as he murdered my father; and since I live, I may be sure that I owe
my life to his ignorance.”
For some time he lay too weak to move, gazing straight before him at
the desolate garden, the neglected weeds waving drearily to and fro
in the wind.
“Strange,” he thought, “very strange, that they should have banished
me to the building within whose walls my father met his fate.”
Then, with a faint thrill of that latent superstition which lurks in
almost every breast, he remembered the ghastly stories he had heard
about that northern wing--the shrouded form which had scared ignorant
intruders, and sent them shrieking from that deserted edifice.
He remembered all this now. He had smiled at the foolish stories
when they were told him, and had laughed to scorn the servants’ talk
of ghosts and goblins; but now, weakened by his illness, prostrate,
lonely, and wretched, Lionel thought very differently of the gloomy
regions of which he fancied himself an inhabitant.
As the dreary moments crept on, intolerably long while they left him
in such miserable uncertainty with regard to his fate, the invalid’s
spirits sank lower and lower, and the agonizing tears of despair
filled his eyes.
Then a kind of superstitious horror took possession of him. His
utter loneliness, the strange quiet of the place, oppressed him to
an extreme degree. The thought of his father’s assassination became
every moment more vivid, until he pictured the scene of horror in all
its hideous detail.
“O, God!” he exclaimed, bursting into a flood of hysterical tears,
“if Rupert Godwin does know who I am, it must have been by the
instinct of a refined and hellish cruelty that he decided upon
banishing me to this deserted building. If ever the dead yet haunted
the living, surely my father’s shadow will haunt me.”
The words had scarcely escaped his lips, the tears were still wet
upon his cheeks, when a dark form suddenly came between him and the
sunlight.
A white death-like face looked in at him with a wan melancholy gaze.
Lionel Westford lifted himself from the pillow, uttered a wild
prolonged shriek, and then fell back unconscious.
It was his father’s face that had looked at him through the sunlit
window--the face of the Captain of the _Lily Queen_, the face that
had smiled upon him in the days of his careless boyhood; but changed
into the face of death.