PSYCHO-ANALYSIS
It was one of those moments in which life seems to cast away the mask
of convention and spring upon us like a giant fanged and armed for our
destruction; one of those moments in which the bravest heart quails and
the strongest hope withers to despair.
My crime had been committed for nothing. Whether the death of that
despicable villain lay at my door or not, I did not know, and it hardly
seemed to matter any longer. Somewhere there was still in existence the
weapon with which he had terrorized his unhappy victim, and I could not
tell in what hands, nor when it might be employed to ruin her and me
together.
Weathered’s cunning scheme stood revealed in its full atrocity. His
patients had been divided into two classes. Those who had nothing
serious on their consciences, and those whom it was not worth his while
to blackmail received the ordinary treatment given to nervous patients
by respectable physicians. Those who came to him to be cured of vicious
propensities, on the other hand, were encouraged to indulge them
under his eye, under the pretence that they would thus be gradually
overcome; and those who sought relief from evil memories were bidden
to rid their mind of its secret burden in correspondence which could be
preserved for future use.
So far as I could judge he had fallen into those evil courses by
degrees. Sarah Neobard’s defence of her step-father might not be far
from the truth. I thought it likely that such a man as Weathered,
with no strong principle to keep him straight, might naturally have
deteriorated under the influence of his patients. All the precautions
with which the confessional is surrounded in Catholic churches were
wanting in this case. The doctor was probably a man without any
religious feeling, and without any real scruples on the subject of
morality. Instead of curing his patients he had let himself become
infected with their disease. The confessions he had listened to had
inflamed his own imagination, and made evil familiar to his thoughts.
In the end he had come to take a fiendish pleasure in gloating over
tales of guilty indulgence and innocence betrayed. He had delighted
in the analysis of women’s hearts; he had learned to play upon their
sensitive natures like instruments, and draw the notes of passion and
pain. The devils in hell must soothe their own torments with such music.
It was torture enough for me to think of my own tragedy, as well as
Violet’s, profaned by the coarse curiosity of a blackmailer. If I had
sinned--and I never could admit that she had sinned at all--if I had
sinned, at least I had not done so wilfully and basely, but swept away
on the overpowering flood of that tremendous impulse by which all
the planets move in heaven, and all the earth is wrapped in her green
garment, and all the birds burst into song, and all the race of man is
renewed for ever.
Our sad romance began in the purest innocence. I did not know of her
existence on that morning when I set out with a knapsack on my back
to explore the old borderland of England and Wales. I had formed no
fixed plans; I meant to walk where fancy took me, and stop when I felt
inclined; and the last thing I expected was that I should pass all
my holiday on one spot. It was not till I reached the village that I
heard of the ruins that lay hidden at the back of the Earl of Ledbury’s
stately seat, and was persuaded to turn aside and see them.
I was told that a footpath leading from the churchyard up the hill
would bring me past them, and, as far as I could make out, his lordship
had laid down no absolute rule against strangers going over them. I was
young and irresponsible enough to take the risk of being turned out as
a trespasser. I climbed over a gate padlocked and fortified with barbed
wire, crossed a meadow, and passed through a gap in the outer wall. I
had spent half an hour in scrambling over heaps of fallen masonry, and
was just beginning to descend a broken stairway up which I had climbed
for the sake of the view, when I saw standing on the grass near its
foot the loveliest girl I had ever seen.
She was watching me with the shy wonder of a child, and I came down
slowly, scarcely daring to breathe, lest she should turn and run away.
But no such thought was in her head. I seemed to her a boy, very little
older than herself, and it turned out that she had come to take me
under her protection.
When I lifted my cap, and expressed a hope that I wasn’t trespassing,
she gave me a cordial smile of a comrade in mischief.
“Yes, you are trespassing,” she said frankly, “but they won’t take any
notice if they see me speaking to you. I saw you from my window and I
came to prevent any of the servants driving you away.”
I hardly knew which was more delicious, the simplicity or the
friendliness of the child angel, as she was named already in my
thoughts. That night I heard her story from the good mistress of
the farm. She had lost her mother as soon as she was born, and, as
sometimes happens, she had lost her place in her father’s heart in
consequence. He was then a middle-aged man, his wife had been the only
woman he had ever cared for, and she had borne him no other child. Life
for him was closed. He resigned himself to let the earldom and the
encumbered estate pass to his brother, and shut himself up with his
grief in the one habitable corner of his desolate house.
Of Violet he took no more notice than he could help. His sense of
duty bade him engage a strict governess, and direct that his daughter
should be brought up to marry money, since he could leave her none.
The governess conceived that the way to attain this end was to keep
the girl in absolute seclusion till a suitable bridegroom was found,
and then to thrust her into his arms. The result was that her life had
actually been very much like that of a princess in a fairy tale who is
immured in a tower and kept from the sight of men. And I had been cast
unconsciously for the part of the fairy hero who scales the tower and
wins the maiden’s heart.
In the first confusion of the meeting I was far more tongue-tied than
she. I guessed, of course, that she must be the daughter of Lord
Ledbury, and this was the first time I had ever spoken to anyone of her
rank. I was in doubt whether to address her with the word ladyship. I
think the awe with which her rank inspired me had a great deal to do
with what followed. It lifted her so far above me in my own mind, that
I was blind to her growing love, and at first mistook my own love for
the devotion of a vassal to his queen.
She talked to me about the ruins, holding me there spell-bound till
neither of us could find more to say. At last, when I felt obliged
to come away, she asked me wistfully where I was going. And I, who
had made up my mind already not to go, if I could find any excuse for
staying in the neighbourhood, with any chance of meeting her again,
answered vaguely that I didn’t know. I was looking, I told her, for
some place where I could put up.
Her whole face brightened when I said that, and she cried eagerly,
“There is a farm-house on the hill where they take visitors in the
summer, and I don’t think they have anyone yet. I often go past it in
my walks, and I haven’t seen any strangers about.”
My heart exulted within me. There was to be no walking tour for me that
summer. When one has come within the gates of Paradise how can he want
to wander more?
And so I took off my knapsack in the honeysuckle porch of the little
farm-house, and stayed on. It chanced for our undoing that the strict
governess had gone away for her own holiday a day or two before I came,
and did not return till it was time for me to exile myself from Eden.
Violet was left alone. No callers had come to the Castle for many
years. There were no neighbours in her own station of life within many
miles. The clergyman was an old bachelor interested only in butterflies
and moths, of which he had a wonderful collection, and blind to
everything that went on in his parish. If our romance was watched, and
I have no doubt that it was watched by many curious eyes unknown to us,
none of the watchers dared to carry tales of his daughter to the Earl
of Ledbury. Violet saw her father twice a day at meals, and he never
dreamed of asking her how she spent her time between.
The golden month rolled by. The first few days each of us made believe
that our meetings were accidental. But soon we ceased to pretend that
it was chance that had led her steps up the hill and led mine down
them to the wood in which we came together. We explored the hills in
company, rousing the partridges from the corn and rabbits from the
fern. The wood-pigeons cooed and wheeled above our heads; the robins
peeped at us from the hedges and the squirrels from the trees. We stood
beside the lonely cromlech named after the mythical hero who held the
Saxon hosts at bay, and we looked down into the Golden Valley and saw
the peaks of the Welsh mountains far away. And we were happy....
Lightly, O lightly, broke upon me the knowledge that she loved me. What
I had never hoped for had come to pass. I had been content to worship
her in silence. Endymion might so have worshipped Artemis if he had
been the first to see her. Bottom, the weaver, might so have worshipped
Titania if the magic juice had touched his eyelids before hers. She
had been as unapproachable in my eyes as any inhabitant of the moonlit
world of sleep. It was with almost a pang, with a strange shrinking
of the heart, that I first perceived that she was mortal like myself,
and that I had awakened her. I seemed to have broken into a temple and
profaned the shrine.
I do not recollect that we said anything. One day when we were walking
side by side along a sunken lane that led to a little waterfall I
stooped suddenly and kissed her.
From that day we were sweethearts as openly as any rustic pair. To
her it was all as natural as the romances she had read, and she can
never have had the least suspicion of the misgivings that had vexed my
soul. She seemed surprised even when I touched on the social gulf that
separated us. She owned sorrowfully that her father would never hear of
such a match, but she evidently took it for granted that I should not
heed his opposition. I was her knight, and it was for me to overcome
every obstacle in the way. Her faith in me was perfect. All affection
for her father had been crushed out of her in childhood. She had loved
me more easily, and she loved me more passionately, because she had no
one else to love.
And what were we to do? I was barely of age. I was not qualified; I had
no means of support except a dwindling legacy that would be exhausted
by the time I was able to earn my first fee. The knights of old seem
never to have been troubled by such hindrances as these; the dragons
they vanquished were creatures who could be subdued by strength of arm;
they never had to ride into anything worse than an ogre’s castle or a
wizard’s cave. The terrors of the bank parlour and the house-agent’s
office were unknown to them; and they never had to face a baker or a
butcher armed with his weekly bill.
I put off as long as I could the pain of confessing to Violet that
these dragons in the way must take years to vanquish. And at first she
hardly grasped what it would mean to her. The mere waiting, I could
see, would cost her less than me. After all, courtship is the supreme
time of womanhood. Then she is queen indeed, and marriage is for her
dethronement. Her bridal is like the glorious pyre on which the Hindu
widow once expired in religious ecstasy. It was not until she realized
that I was going that Violet broke down.
There the burden was shifted to the other side. Delay is the suffering
of man, separation the suffering of woman. I had my work to go back to;
I had my friends and all the distractions of life in London. She had
nothing before her but her remote and solitary prison.
We had fallen into the way of meeting most often in the deserted barn.
Its situation assured us of a privacy more secure than that of the
lanes and woods. No one could approach us without being seen, and
no one ever did approach. No one could see through the openings--a
bare two inches wide in the thick wall; and no one could overhear. A
pile of bracken made our seat, and there we rested many a long summer
afternoon, the battered door thrown wide to let us count the windings
of the river far below, while we talked of all the coming years might
bring.
So it was there we met on that last afternoon to say good-bye. We had
put off till the last moment any consideration of what was to happen
next. We had made no plans to meet again. I did not even know that
Lord Ledbury had a house in London, to which Violet was taken at rare
intervals, when it happened to be without a tenant, but always under
strict guard and more for business than for pleasure. We had not even
discussed any plans for correspondence, though it was evident that I
could not write to her at her father’s house without everything coming
out. It was understood between us that my very existence must be kept
secret if it were possible. Beyond that we had not found courage to
face the situation.
And now we had to face it at last, and it was too much for us to bear.
It seemed to both of us like death. It was idle to think that we could
part like that, uncertain if ever we should meet again. It was a waste
of breath to pronounce the word good-bye when we were clinging to each
other in the desperation of young life in travail with its destiny. I
dare not try to recall that agony.... I stole across with the footstep
of a felon and closed the battered door.
When I had slain my love I understood too late what I had done. Her
anguish was a revelation to me of what her utter purity had been. We
passed out from that brief frenzy into a strange world. The sun had
fallen from our sky, and Joshua could not have called it back again. We
were two spectres in each other’s sight. I did not ask her to forgive
me--I could not forgive myself. Rather would I have begged her to
reproach me. But no such thought was in her mind. Her whole feeling was
one of horror at what she had destroyed in herself; and I was only
hateful to her as the mirror in which she had seen her unknown self.
She moved her lips to implore me never to let her see me again. She
shuddered past me, and went down the hill with the stumbling gait of a
wounded bird.
I know there are some men, and there may be some women, who will think
that I was a fool to let her go. They will tell me that I ought not to
have taken her at her word; that if I had waited, in a short time she
would have recovered, and the breach might have been patched up, and
the wound healed. I cannot tell if they are right; I only know that I
obeyed her, and fled from her neighbourhood with no hope of ever coming
back.
And so the lonely girl, left to herself with no one to confide in,
brooded over her secret till it became like a viper gnawing at her
heart. How she came to hear of the charlatan she had not told me.
Somehow or other during one of her stays in her father’s house in town,
the news reached her of the new science of psycho-analysis, and of
the practitioner who undertook to do what Macbeth longed for in vain,
to pluck from memory a rooted sorrow, and erase the writing from the
tablets of the brain.
She went to him, of course, without consulting those about her, and
from that moment she became his helpless prey. What arts he used to
beguile her it is easy to guess. At first she believed in him, and when
her suspicion began to be aroused she was already in his power, and
dared not break with him.
By this time the Earl of Ledbury and the duenna had put their heads
together and decided that Lady Violet must pass a season in London, and
be seen in the great world. In consequence she had much more liberty.
She made some girl friends whom she was allowed to go about with, and
among them were not a few who held modern notions on the rights of
girlhood, and were ready to encourage and to screen her in the courses
into which she was compelled by her taskmaster. Her most intimate
comrade willingly became a member of the Domino Club.
But not even to her most intimate friend dared Violet disclose the true
situation. While she still trusted in Weathered and believed in his
power to heal her soul of sin, she had written the whole story of our
love in letters which the scoundrel now refused to give up, except as
the price of a far worse surrender. There was only one being in the
world whom she could appeal to without the risk of further shame. And
thus we met again.
The medical directory gave her my address, and she wrote to me at
Sir Frank Tarleton’s. But her letter begged for a strictly private
interview in such urgent language that I thought it safer not to let
her come there. I asked her to meet me at the corner of Shaftesbury
Avenue, as though by accident, and I took her to the little room which
I could call my own.
Nearly four years had gone by since our tragic parting, but when we
stood face to face again they did not seem four hours. Violet’s
face changed from red to white and back again as she half held out a
trembling hand and dropped it woefully; and my hand trembled too as I
raised it to my hat. I thought it best to say nothing except the few
words necessary to explain where we were going, and she seemed glad to
keep silent till we were safely there.
The story she had to tell was so appalling, and the effort of telling
it cost her so much, that naturally a good deal was left out. Certainly
I quite failed to gather from her that Weathered had induced her
to make her confession to him in letters. I supposed that he had
taken it down from her lips. It is the familiar practice of West End
consultants, who see their patients at long intervals, to make a
careful entry of all the particulars of the case for future reference;
and I supposed that Weathered had taken advantage of this to make a
damning record in his case-book, which would be quite sufficient to
enable him to blast his victims’ reputation, although it might not be
evidence in a lawyer’s eyes.
The truth is that I was myself too agitated to go into the matter
carefully even if Violet had been in a state to be cross-examined. The
whole interview resolved itself into a series of wild outbreaks on her
part, and attempts to assure her on mine. Indeed, I hardly know that
we arrived at any clear understanding of what she was asking of me, or
what I was promising her. The one thing clear to me was that the only
way to save her would be for me to get at the doctor’s case-book and
destroy it. And to do that I must obtain his keys.
What Violet had told me about the Domino Club and their meetings in
that accursed place gave me my plan. I would do what I could not ask
her to do. All that was necessary was that I should be able to approach
Weathered without putting him on his guard. I must disguise myself in a
costume with which he was familiar, one which would allure him, and in
which I could play the part of the sought rather than the seeker. And
so the fatally easy plot took shape.
There was barely an inch between Violet and me in height, and that inch
would be concealed by the Zenobia helmet. It would not be too difficult
for me to imitate for an hour or two the lighter movements of a woman.
Weathered would be quite unsuspicious; the dress, the artificial light,
the noise and excitement of the revel would all be in my favour. The
doctor, I gathered, drank freely on these occasions; I had only to wait
till the night was advanced and the wine had done its work.
I told the distressed girl as little as possible of what I meant to
do, or to attempt. I said merely that I must meet Weathered, and that
it would be the best way for me to impersonate her for one night. She
consented readily enough--what else could she do? She told me the date
of the next dance, and undertook to send the mask and costume to my
room some days beforehand, so that I should have time to see that it
fitted, and to practice moving about with it on.
We did not bid each other any formal farewell. Nothing was said about
our next meeting, indeed I felt no confidence that there would be
another. She had been driven to appeal to me in her extremity, but she
showed no sign of having forgiven me. Rather she seemed to find every
moment painful that she passed with me. All the time she was struggling
with herself, trying to speak to me as if I were a stranger whom she
found herself obliged to trust, but continually faltering and letting
her voice die down to a broken whisper.
When I had let her out at the street door she hurried away blindly like
an escaping prisoner. And as soon as she was out of sight I hastened
round to Montague Street, and locked myself up in Tarleton’s arsenal of
poisons.