"My dear boy, I was never more serious in my life. I merely wanted to
be sure that I had got it straight. It is A.B.C. by this time to you,
but it has exploded in my face like a keg of gunpowder, and I am a
trifle dazed. But, to come down to deadly earnest, will you allow me
to speak to you from the medical point of view? You know I had some
idea at one time of afflicting the community with one more physician,
until we stumbled on those coal mines, and my prospective patients
were spared premature acquaintance with the golden stairs. May I
speak as an unfledged doctor, but still as one burdened with unused
knowledge?"
"You can say what you like."
"Very well, then. You may or may not be aware that what you are
pleased to call the blues, or moods, are, in your case, nothing more
or less than melancholia. When they are at their worst they are the
form known as melancholia attonita. In other words, you are not only
steeped in melancholy, but your brain is in, a state of stupor:
you are all but comatose. These attacks are not frequent, and are
generally the result of a powerful mental shock or strain. I
remember you had one once after you had crammed for two months for an
examination and couldn't pull through. You scared the life out of
the tutors and the boys, and it was not until I threatened to put
you under the pump that you came to. Your ordinary attacks are not so
alarming to your friends, but when indulged in too frequently, they
are a good deal more dangerous."
He paused a moment, but Dartmouth made no reply, and he went on.
"Any man who yields habitually to melancholia may expect his brain,
sooner or later, to degenerate from its original strength, and relax
the toughness and compactness of its fibre. Absolute dementia may not
be the result for some years, but there will be occasional and
painful indications of the end for a long space before it arrives. The
indications, as a rule, will assume the form of visions and dreams and
wild imaginings of various sorts. Now do you understand me?"
"You mean," said Dartmouth, wheeling about and looking him directly in
the eyes, "you mean that I am going mad?"
"I mean, my dear boy, that you will be a raving maniac inside of a
month, unless you dislodge from your brain this horrible, unnatural,
and ridiculous idea."
"Do I look like a madman?" demanded Dartmouth.
"Not at the present moment, no. You look remarkably sane. A man with
as good a brain as yours does not let it go all at once. It will slide
from you imperceptibly, bit by bit, until one day there will be a
climax."
"I am not mad," said Dartmouth; "and if I were, my madness would be an
effect, not a cause. What is more, I know enough about melancholia to
know that it does not drift into dementia until middle age at least.
Moreover, my brain is not relaxed in my ordinary attacks; my
spirits are prostrate, and my disgust for life is absolute, but my
brain--except when it has been over-exerted, as in one or two climaxes
of this experience of mine--is as clear as a bell. I have done some of
my best thinking with my hand on the butt of a pistol. But to return
to the question we are discussing. You have left one or two of the
main facts unexplained. What caused Weir's vision? She never had an
attack of melancholia in her life."
"Telepathy, induction, but in the reverse order of your solution of
the matter. Your calling her by her grandmother's name was natural
enough in your condition--you have acknowledged that your melancholia
had already taken possession of you. Miss Penrhyn had, for some reason
best known to her sleeping self, got herself up to look like her
grandmother, and, she being young and pretty, her semi-lunatic
observer addressed her as Sionèd instead of heaven knows what
jaw-breaking Welsh title. Then you went ahead and had the vision,
which was quite in keeping with your general lunar condition. I
believe you said there was a moon."
Dartmouth frowned. "I asked you not to chaff," he said. "What is more,
I have had melancholia all my life, but delusion never before. But let
that pass. The impulse to write--what do you say to that?"
"The impulse was due to the genius which you have undoubtedly
inherited from your grandfather. The inability to put your ideas
into verbal form is due to amnesic aphasia. The portion of your brain
through which your genius should find speech is either temporarily
paralyzed or else deficient in composition. You had better go up and
see Jackson. He can cure you if anyone can."
"Do you believe I can be cured?"
"You can certainly make the attempt."
Dartmouth threw back his head and covered his face with his hands. "O
God!" he exclaimed, "if you knew the agony of the longing to feel the
ecstasy of spiritual intoxication, and yet to feel as if your brain
were a cloud-bank--of knowing that you are divinely gifted, that the
world should be ringing with your name, and yet of being as mute as if
screwed within a coffin!"
"My dear boy, it will all come out right in the end. Science and your
own will can do much, and as for the rest, perhaps Miss Penrhyn
will do for you what those letters intimate Sionèd did for your
grandfather."
Dartmouth got up and leaned his elbow on the mantelpiece.
"I do not know that I shall marry Weir Penrhyn," he said.
"Why not? Because your grandfather had an intrigue with her
grandmother?--which, by the way, is by no means clearly proved. That
there was a plan on foot to that end the letters pretty well show,
but--"
"I don't care a hang about the sins of my ancestors, or of Weir's
either--if that were all. If I do not marry her it will be because I
do not care to shatter an ideal into still smaller bits. I loved her
with what little good was left in me. I placed her on a pedestal and
rejoiced that I was able so to do. Now she is the woman whose guilty
love sent us both to our death. I could never forget it. There would
always be a spot on the sun."
"My God, Harold," exclaimed Hollington, "you _are_ mad. Of all the
insane, ridiculous, idiotic speeches that ever came from man's lips,
that is the worst."
"I can't help it, Becky. The idea, the knowledge, is my very life and
soul; and when you think it all over you will see that there are many
things that cannot be explained--Weir's words in the gallery, for
instance. They coincide exactly with the vision I had four nights
later. And a dozen other things--you can think them out for yourself.
When you do, you will understand that there is but one light in which
to look at the question: Weir Penrhyn and I are Lionel Dartmouth and
Sionèd Penrhyn reborn, and that is the end of the matter."
Hollington groaned, and threw himself back in his chair with an
impatient gesture.
"Well," he said, after a few moments' silence, "accepting your
remarkable premisses for the sake of argument, will you kindly
enlighten me as to since when you became so beautifully complete
and altogether puerile a moralist? Suppose you did sin with her some
three-quarters of a century ago, have not time and suffering purified
you both--or rather her? I suppose it does not make so much difference
about you."
"It is not that. It is the idea that is revolting--that this girl
should have been my mistress at any time--"
"But, great heaven! Harold, such a sin is a thing of the flesh, not of
the spirit, and the physical part of Sionèd Penrhyn has enriched the
soil of Constantinople these sixty years. She has committed no sin in
her present embodiment."
"Sin is an impulse, a prompting, of the spirit," said Dartmouth.
Hollington threw one leg over the arm of the chair, half turning his
back upon Dartmouth.
"Rot!" he said.
"Not at all. Otherwise, the dead could sin."
"I am gratified to perceive that you are still able to have the last
word. All I can say is, that you have done what I thought no living
man could do. I once read a novel by a famous American author in which
one of the characters would not ask the heroine to marry him after her
husband's death because he had been guilty of the indelicacy of loving
her (although mutely, and by her unsuspected) while she was a married
woman. I thought then that moral senility could go no further, but you
have got ahead of the American. Allow me to congratulate you."
"You can jibe all you like. I may be a fool, but I can't help it.
I have got to that point where I am dominated by instinct, not by
reason. The instincts may be wrong, because the outgrowth of a false
civilization, but there they are, nevertheless, and of them I am the
product. So are you, and some day you will find it out. I do not say
positively that I will not marry Weir Penrhyn. I will talk it over
with her, and then we can decide."
"A charming subject to discuss with a young girl. It would be kinder,
and wiser, and more decent of you never to mention the matter to her.
Of what use to make the poor girl miserable?"
"She half suspects now, and it would come out sooner or later."
"Then for heaven's sake do it at once, and have it over. Don't stay
here by yourself any longer, whatever you do. Go to-morrow."
"Yes," said Dartmouth, "I will go to-morrow."