|I led her into my back drawing-room--which apartment I use as a library
and study--and turned up the drop-light on my writing-table.
Then I looked at her, and she looked at me.
She had said that she was young. I was not surprised to see that she
was beautiful as well. I do not know that I can explain just what had
prepared me for this discovery. Perhaps, in part, her voice, which
was exquisitely sweet and melodious. Perhaps simply the tragical and
romantic circumstances under which I had found her. However that may be,
beautiful she indubitably was.
She wore no bonnet. Her hair, dark brown, curling, and abundant, was cut
short like a boy's.
Her skin was fine in texture, and deathly pale. Her eyes, large, dark,
liquid, were emotional and intelligent. Her mouth was generous in size,
sensitive in form, and in colour perfect. But over her whole countenance
was written legibly the signature of hard and fierce despair.
From throat to foot she was wrapped in a black waterproof cloak.
“Be seated,” I began. “Put yourself at ease in mind and body. And first
of all, let me offer you a glass of wine.”
“You may spare yourself that trouble, sir,” she replied. “I have no
appetite for wine.”
“But it will do you good. A single glass?”
“I will not drink a single drop.”
“Well, then, a composing draught. You are my patient for the time being,
remember. You must let me prescribe for you. You are in a state of
excessive nervous excitement, bordering upon hysteria. Drink this.”
“I assure you, sir, my disorder is not of the body,” she said wearily.
“No medicine can relieve it.”
“Nevertheless, I will beg of you to give this a trial. It is but a
thimbleful. It can't hurt you, even if it should fail to benefit you.”
“For aught I know it may contain a drug.”
“It certainly does contain a drug. I should not offer you _aqua pura_.”
“You juggle words, sir. I mean a poison.”
“Come; that is good. Do you think I would have been at such pains to
dissuade you from suicide, immediately thereafter to seek to poison
you?”
“I don't mean a deadly poison. You could do me no greater kindness than
to offer me a deadly poison. I mean--it may contain some opiate, some
narcotic, to deprive me of power over myself, so that I shall be unable
to leave your house when the time is up.”
“Madam, look at me. Have I the appearance of a man who would attempt to
get the better of you by an underhand trick like that?”
“No, you do not look deceitful,” she answered, after a moment's scrutiny
of my face.
“Then trust me enough to drink this.”
Without further protest she took the glass I proffered, and emptied it.
“Now, if you are willing, we may talk,” said I.
“What is there to talk about? I, at any rate, have nothing to say. But
I am at your mercy for the term of one hour. You, of course, may talk as
much as you desire. But at the end of one hour---- Please look at your
watch. What o'clock is it now?”
“It is twenty minutes after midnight.”
“Thank you. Five minutes have already passed. At a quarter after one I
shall be free to leave.” Therewith she let her head fall back upon the
cushion of the easy-chair in which she was seated, and closed her eyes.
“Yes,” said I, “you will then be free to leave, if you still wish it.
But I doubt if you will.”
“Your doubt is groundless, sir. However, if it pleases you to cherish
it, you may do so till the hour is finished.”
“No, I cannot think my doubt is groundless. I told you I believed I
should be able to show you a better way out of your troubles than the
desperate one that you were purposing to take; and now I will make good
my promise.”
“Being more fully acquainted with my own affairs than you are, I assure
you that your promise is one which cannot by any possibility be made
good.”
“Time will prove or disprove the truth of that assertion. To begin with,
may I ask you a question or two?”
“You may ask me twenty questions. I do not pledge myself to answer
them.”
“Well, will you answer this one? Am I right in having understood you to
say, when we were below there, on the wharf, that you have no friends
or kindred whose feelings you are bound to consider in determining your
conduct, and no worldly ties or associations which you are bound to
respect?”
“Yes, you are right in that.”
“I am right in having understood you to say that; but is what you said
true?”
“Which would imply that you suspect me of having lied,” she returned,
with an unlovely smile. “Well, I don't blame you. I am a skilful and
habitual liar, and I daresay it shows in my face. But in that case I
broke my rule, and told the truth.”
“My dear madam, I intended no such imputation. But you were agitated and
excited; and sometimes under the stress of our excitement we unwittingly
exaggerate.”
“Well, I did not exaggerate. What I told you was literally true.”
“And the rest that you said? That also you re-affirm? That you are
penniless, homeless, wretchedly unhappy, and weary of life? It seems
brutal for me to state it thus; but I must understand clearly, for a
purpose which you will presently see.”
“You need not apologise, sir. This is no occasion for mincing matters.
Yes, I am penniless, homeless, wretchedly unhappy, and weary of life.
But I am worse than that. I am bad. I am utterly base and degraded. Look
at me,” she added, fixing her eyes boldly, even defiantly, upon mine.
“Examine me. I am a rare specimen. Very probably you have never seen my
like before, and never will again. I am an example of--” she paused
and laughed; and there was something in her laughter that made me
shudder--“of total depravity,” she concluded. Then suddenly her manner
changed, and she became very grave. “Would you entertain a leper in your
house, sir? Yet I have been told that I am a moral leper. I have been
told that the corruption-spot upon me reaches in to the core. And I
think my informant put it very moderately. If you suspected the crimes
I have been guilty of, the worse crimes that I have meditated, and
only failed to commit because of material obstacles that I could not
overcome, you would not harbour me in your house for a single minute.
You would feel that my presence was a contamination: that I polluted
the chair I sit in, the floor under my feet. The glass I just drank
from--you would shatter it into bits, that no innocent man or woman
might ever put lips to it again. There! can't you see now that I am
beyond help, beyond hope? What have I to live for? I am an incumbrance
upon the face of the earth, and hateful to myself into the bargain.
Why keep me here an hour? Let us rescind our compromise.* Let me go at
once.”
* It is possible that here and elsewhere Dr. Benary, in
reporting conversations from memory, puts into the mouths of
his interlocutors words and phrases from his own vocabulary,
at the same time, without doubt, giving the substance and
the spirit of their remarks correctly. “Let us rescind our
compromise,” at any rate, falling from the lips of a woman,
has, to say the least, an unrealistic sound.---Editor.
She rose, and stood restive, as if expecting a dismissal.
“No, no; you must stay out your hour, at all events,” I insisted. “Sit
down again. I am sure you are not so black as you paint yourself; and in
any case, guilt confessed and repented of is more than half atoned for.”
“That is not so, to begin with,” she retorted; “that is the shallowest,
hollowest sort of cant. It may pass with people who know guilt only by
hearsay, but is ridiculous to those who, like myself, have a knowledge
of the subject at first hand.
“Guilt, crime, is atoned for only when it is undone, and all its
consequences are obliterated. And now, speaking from my first-hand
knowledge of the subject, I will tell you two things--first, all the
confession and repentance in the world cannot undo a crime once done,
nor obliterate its consequences; secondly, nothing can. You are a
physician; I take it, therefore, you are familiar with the first
principles of science: with what they call, I think, the Law of the
Persistence of Force, the Law of the Conservation of Energy. If you
understand that law, you will not dispute this simple application of it:
a crime once done can never be undone; its consequences are ineradicable
and eternal. Well and good. It is a puerility, in the face of the Law of
the Persistence of Force, to talk of atonement. Atonement could come
to pass only by means of a miracle--a suspension of Nature, and the
interposition of a Supernatural Power. And that is where the Christians,
with their dogma of vicarious atonement, are more rational than all
the Rationalists from _a to zed_. So much for atonement. And now, as to
repentance--who said that I repented? Repentance! Remorse! I will
give you another piece of information, also speaking from firsthand
knowledge. Repentance and Remorse are unmeaning sounds. There are no
realities, no _things_, to correspond with them. I do not repent. No
man or woman, from the beginning of time, has ever yet repented, in your
sense of the word. We regret the losses that our crimes entail upon
us: yes. We suffer because our crimes find us out, because retribution
overtakes us: yes. But repent? We do not repent. Most of us pretend to.
But I will be frank; I will not pretend.
“I suffer because the punishment which, by my crimes, I have brought down
upon myself, is greater than I can bear; I suffer, too, because the last
purpose I had left to live for, which was also a criminal purpose, has
been defeated. But I do not repent. I will not pretend to repent.”
“Be all which as it may, I will repeat what I said before: I do not
believe that you are so black as you paint yourself. You, young,
beautiful, intelligent--no, no. But even if you were ten times blacker,
it would make no difference to me. For, look you, since you have
introduced a question of science, and favoured me with a scientific
generalisation, I will pursue the question a little further, and cap
your generalisation with another: namely, good, bad, or indifferent,
we are not our own creators; we do not make ourselves; we are the
resultants of our Heredity and our Environment; and our actions,
whether criminal or the reverse, are determined not by free-will, but by
necessity. I will not enlarge upon that generalisation; I will leave its
corollaries for your own imagination to perceive. But in view of it,
I will say again: even if you were ten times blacker, it would make no
difference to me. You are no more to blame for the colour of your soul
than for the colour of your hair.”
“You are very magnanimous,” she said bitterly, “and your doctrine would
sound well in a criminal court.”
“Think of me as scornfully as you will,” I returned, “I am very
sincerely anxious to befriend you.”
“If that is true, you have it in your power to do so with marvellous
ease.”
“How so?” I queried.
“Absolve me from my agreement to stay here an hour. Sit still there in
your chair, and let me go about my business unmolested and at once.”
“No; to that agreement I must hold you, for your own sake. I have much
to say to you, if you would only let me once get started.”
“Good God, sir!” she cried, springing up in passion. “You drive me to
extremes. Do you know that you are violating the laws of the State
in harbouring me here?--that you are exposing yourself to the risk of
prosecution?”
“I know that I should be violating the laws of humanity if I suffered
you to lay violent hands upon yourself so long as I have it in my power
to restrain you. As for the laws of the State, do you mean that you can
bring an action against me for damages in interfering with your personal
liberty? I doubt if you will do so. And I am sure no jury, apprised of
the circumstances, would find against me.”
“You are still in ignorance of the situation.” said she. “Now open your
eyes.”
With that she threw off the waterproof cloak in which she was enveloped,
and stood before me in the blue and white striped uniform of a Deadlock
Island convict.