“But Lord bless us and save us!” he gasped, at length; “I’m not here as an official at all. I’m here as a patient. The cursed pack of rat-catching chemists all say that I’ve lost my wits.”
“You!” cried Turnbull with terrible emphasis. “You! Lost your wits!”
In the rush of his real astonishment at this towering unreality Turnbull almost added: “Why, you haven’t got any to lose.” But he fortunately remembered the remains of his desperate diplomacy.
“This can’t go on,” he said, positively. “Men like MacIan and I may suffer unjustly all our lives, but a man like you must have influence.”
“There is only one man who has any influence in England now,” said Vane, and his high voice fell to a sudden and convincing quietude.
“Whom do you mean?” asked Turnbull.
“I mean that cursed fellow with the long split chin,” said the other.
“Is it really true,” asked Turnbull, “that he has been allowed to buy up and control such a lot? What put the country into such a state?”
Mr. Cumberland Vane laughed outright. “What put the country into such a state?” he asked. “Why, you did. When you were fool enough to agree to fight MacIan, after all, everybody was ready to believe that the Bank of England might paint itself pink with white spots.”
“I don’t understand,” answered Turnbull. “Why should you be surprised at my fighting? I hope I have always fought.”
“Well,” said Cumberland Vane, airily, “you didn’t believe in religion, you see–so we thought you were safe at any rate. You went further in your language than most of us wanted to go; no good in just hurting one’s mother’s feelings, I think. But of course we all knew you were right, and, really, we relied on you.”
“Did you?” said the editor of The Atheist with a bursting heart. “I am sorry you did not tell me so at the time.”
He walked away very rapidly and flung himself on a garden seat, and for some six minutes his own wrongs hid from him the huge and hilarious fact that Cumberland Vane had been locked up as a lunatic.
The garden of the madhouse was so perfectly planned, and answered so exquisitely to every hour of daylight, that one could almost fancy that the sunlight was caught there tangled in its tinted trees, as the wise men of Gotham tried to chain the spring to a bush. Or it seemed as if this ironic paradise still kept its unique dawn or its special sunset while the rest of the earthly globe rolled through its ordinary hours. There was one evening, or late afternoon, in particular, which Evan MacIan will remember in the last moments of death. It was what artists call a daffodil sky, but it is coarsened even by reference to a daffodil. It was of that innocent lonely yellow which has never heard of orange, though it might turn quite unconsciously into green. Against it the tops, one might say the turrets, of the clipt and ordered trees were outlined in that shade of veiled violet which tints the tops of lavender. A white early moon was hardly traceable upon that delicate yellow. MacIan, I say, will remember this tender and transparent evening, partly because of its virgin gold and silver, and partly because he passed beneath it through the most horrible instant of his life.
Turnbull was sitting on his seat on the lawn, and the golden evening impressed even his positive nature, as indeed it might have impressed the oxen in a field. He was shocked out of his idle mood of awe by seeing MacIan break from behind the bushes and run across the lawn with an action he had never seen in the man before, with all his experience of the eccentric humours of this Celt. MacIan fell on the bench, shaking it so that it rattled, and gripped it with his knees like one in dreadful pain of body. That particular run and tumble is typical only of a man who has been hit by some sudden and incurable evil, who is bitten by a viper or condemned to be hanged. Turnbull looked up in the white face of his friend and enemy, and almost turned cold at what he saw there. He had seen the blue but gloomy eyes of the western Highlander troubled by as many tempests as his own west Highland seas, but there had always been a fixed star of faith behind the storms. Now the star had gone out, and there was only misery.
Yet MacIan had the strength to answer the question where Turnbull, taken by surprise, had not the strength to ask it.
“They are right, they are right!” he cried. “O my God! they are right, Turnbull. I ought to be here!”
He went on with shapeless fluency as if he no longer had the heart to choose or check his speech. “I suppose I ought to have guessed long ago–all my big dreams and schemes–and everyone being against us– but I was stuck up, you know.”
“Do tell me about it, really,” cried the atheist, and, faced with the furnace of the other’s pain, he did not notice that he spoke with the affection of a father.
“I am mad, Turnbull,” said Evan, with a dead clearness of speech, and leant back against the garden seat.
“Nonsense,” said the other, clutching at the obvious cue of benevolent brutality, “this is one of your silly moods.”
MacIan shook his head. “I know enough about myself,” he said, “to allow for any mood, though it opened heaven or hell. But to see things–to see them walking solid in the sun– things that can’t be there–real mystics never do that, Turnbull.”
“What things?” asked the other, incredulously.
MacIan lowered his voice. “I saw her,” he said, “three minutes ago– walking here in this hell yard.”
Between trying to look scornful and really looking startled, Turnbull’s face was confused enough to emit no speech, and Evan went on in monotonous sincerity:
“I saw her walk behind those blessed trees against that holy sky of gold as plain as I can see her whenever I shut my eyes. I did shut them, and opened them again, and she was still there– that is, of course, she wasn’t– She still had a little fur round her neck, but her dress was a shade brighter than when I really saw her.”
“My dear fellow,” cried Turnbull, rallying a hearty laugh, “the fancies have really got hold of you. You mistook some other poor girl here for her.”
“Mistook some other–” said MacIan, and words failed him altogether.
They sat for some moments in the mellow silence of the evening garden, a silence that was stifling for the sceptic, but utterly empty and final for the man of faith. At last he broke out again with the words: “Well, anyhow, if I’m mad, I’m glad I’m mad on that.”
Turnbull murmured some clumsy deprecation, and sat stolidly smoking to collect his thoughts; the next instant he had all his nerves engaged in the mere effort to sit still.
Across the clear space of cold silver and a pale lemon sky which was left by the gap in the ilex-trees there passed a slim, dark figure, a profile and the poise of a dark head like a bird’s, which really pinned him to his seat with the point of coincidence. With an effort he got to his feet, and said with a voice of affected insouciance: “By George! MacIan, she is uncommonly like–”
“What!” cried MacIan, with a leap of eagerness that was heart-breaking, “do you see her, too?” And the blaze came back into the centre of his eyes.
Turnbull’s tawny eyebrows were pulled together with a peculiar frown of curiosity, and all at once he walked quickly across the lawn. MacIan sat rigid, but peered after him with open and parched lips. He saw the sight which either proved him sane or proved the whole universe half-witted; he saw the man of flesh approach that beautiful phantom, saw their gestures of recognition, and saw them against the sunset joining hands.
He could stand it no longer, but ran across to the path, turned the corner and saw standing quite palpable in the evening sunlight, talking with a casual grace to Turnbull, the face and figure which had filled his midnights with frightfully vivid or desperately half-forgotten features. She advanced quite pleasantly and coolly, and put out her hand. The moment that he touched it he knew that he was sane even if the solar system was crazy.
She was entirely elegant and unembarrassed. That is the awful thing about women–they refuse to be emotional at emotional moments, upon some such ludicrous
pretext as there being someone else there. But MacIan was in a condition of criticism much less than the average masculine one, being in fact merely overturned by the rushing riddle of the events.
Evan does not know to this day what particular question he asked, but he vividly remembers that she answered, and every line or fluctuation of her face as she said it.
“Oh, don’t you know?” she said, smiling, and suddenly lifting her level brown eyebrows. “Haven’t you heard the news? I’m a lunatic.”
Then she added after a short pause, and with a sort of pride: “I’ve got a certificate.”
Her manner, by the matchless social stoicism of her sex, was entirely suited to a drawing-room, but Evan’s reply fell somewhat far short of such a standard, as he only said: “What the devil in hell does all this nonsense mean?”
“Really,” said the young lady, and laughed.
“I beg your pardon,” said the unhappy young man, rather wildly, “but what I mean is, why are you here in an asylum?”
The young woman broke again into one of the maddening and mysterious laughs of femininity. Then she composed her features, and replied with equal dignity: “Well, if it comes to that, why are you?”
The fact that Turnbull had strolled away and was investigating rhododendrons may have been due to Evan’s successful prayers to the other world, or possibly to his own pretty successful experience of this one. But though they two were as isolated as a new Adam and Eve in a pretty ornamental Eden, the lady did not relax by an inch the rigour of her badinage.
“I am locked up in the madhouse,” said Evan, with a sort of stiff pride, “because I tried to keep my promise to you.”
“Quite so,” answered the inexplicable lady, nodding with a perfectly blazing smile, “and I am locked up because it was to me you promised.”
“It is outrageous!” cried Evan; “it is impossible!”
“Oh, you can see my certificate if you like,” she replied with some hauteur.
MacIan stared at her and then at his boots, and then at the sky and then at her again. He was quite sure now that he himself was not mad, and the fact rather added to his perplexity.
Then he drew nearer to her, and said in a dry and dreadful voice: “Oh, don’t condescend to play the fool with such a fool as me. Are you really locked up here as a patient–because you helped us to escape?”
“Yes,” she said, still smiling, but her steady voice had a shake in it.
Evan flung his big elbow across his forehead and burst into tears.
The pure lemon of the sky faded into purer white as the great sunset silently collapsed. The birds settled back into the trees; the moon began to glow with its own light. Mr. James Turnbull continued his botanical researches into the structure of the rhododendron. But the lady did not move an inch until Evan had flung up his face again; and when he did he saw by the last gleam of sunlight that it was not only his face that was wet.
Mr. James Turnbull had all his life professed a profound interest in physical science, and the phenomena of a good garden were really a pleasure to him; but after three-quarters of an hour or so even the apostle of science began to find rhododendrus a bore, and was somewhat relieved when an unexpected development of events obliged him to transfer his researches to the equally interesting subject of hollyhocks, which grew some fifty feet farther along the path. The ostensible cause of his removal was the unexpected reappearance of his two other acquaintances walking and talking laboriously along the way, with the black head bent close to the brown one. Even hollyhocks detained Turnbull but a short time. Having rapidly absorbed all the important principles affecting the growth of those vegetables, he jumped over a flower-bed and walked back into the building. The other two came up along the slow course of the path talking and talking. No one but God knows what they said (for they certainly have forgotten), and if I remembered it I would not repeat it. When they parted at the head of the walk she put out her hand again in the same well-bred way, although it trembled; he seemed to restrain a gesture as he let it fall.
“If it is really always to be like this,” he said, thickly, “it would not matter if we were here for ever.”
“You tried to kill yourself four times for me,” she said, unsteadily, “and I have been chained up as a madwoman for you. I really think that after that–”
“Yes, I know,” said Evan in a low voice, looking down. “After that we belong to each other. We are sort of sold to each other– until the stars fall.” Then he looked up suddenly, and said: “By the way, what is your name?”
“My name is Beatrice Drake,” she replied with complete gravity. “You can see it on my certificate of lunacy.”
XIX. THE LAST PARLEY
Turnbull walked away, wildly trying to explain to himself the presence of two personal acquaintances so different as Vane and the girl. As he skirted a low hedge of laurel, an enormously tall young man leapt over it, stood in front of him, and almost fell on his neck as if seeking to embrace him.
“Don’t you know me?” almost sobbed the young man, who was in the highest spirits. “Ain’t I written on your heart, old boy? I say, what did you do with my yacht?”
“Take your arms off my neck,” said Turnbull, irritably. “Are you mad?”
The young man sat down on the gravel path and went into ecstasies of laughter. “No, that’s just the fun of it–I’m not mad,” he replied. “They’ve shut me up in this place, and I’m not mad.” And he went off again into mirth as innocent as wedding-bells.
Turnbull, whose powers of surprise were exhausted, rolled his round grey eyes and said, “Mr. Wilkinson, I think,” because he could not think of anything else to say.
The tall man sitting on the gravel bowed with urbanity, and said: “Quite at your service. Not to be confused with the Wilkinsons of Cumberland; and as I say, old boy, what have you done with my yacht? You see, they’ve locked me up here–in this garden–and a yacht would be a sort of occupation for an unmarried man.”
“I am really horribly sorry,” began Turnbull, in the last stage of bated bewilderment and exasperation, “but really–”
“Oh, I can see you can’t have it on you at the moment,” said Mr. Wilkinson with much intellectual magnanimity.
“Well, the fact is–” began Turnbull again, and then the phrase was frozen on his mouth, for round the corner came the goatlike face and gleaming eye-glasses of Dr. Quayle.
“Ah, my dear Mr. Wilkinson,” said the doctor, as if delighted at a coincidence; “and Mr. Turnbull, too. Why, I want to speak to Mr. Turnbull.”
Mr. Turnbull made some movement rather of surrender than assent, and the doctor caught it up exquisitely, showing even more of his two front teeth. “I am sure Mr. Wilkinson will excuse us a moment.” And with flying frock-coat he led Turnbull rapidly round the corner of a path.
“My dear sir,” he said, in a quite affectionate manner, “I do not mind telling you–you are such a very hopeful case– you understand so well the scientific point of view; and I don’t like to see you bothered by the really hopeless cases. They are monotonous and maddening. The man you have just been talking to, poor fellow, is one of the strongest cases of pure idee fixe that we have. It’s very sad, and I’m afraid utterly incurable. He keeps on telling everybody”–and the doctor lowered his voice confidentially–“he tells everybody that two people have taken is yacht. His account of how he lost it is quite incoherent.”
Turnbull stamped his foot on the gravel path, and called out: “Oh, I can’t stand this. Really–”
“I know, I know,” said the psychologist, mournfully; “it is a most melancholy case, and also fortunately a very rare one. It is so rare, in fact, that in one classification of these maladies it is entered under a heading by itself–Perdinavititis, mental inflammation creating the impression that one has lost a ship. Really,” he added, with a kind of half-embarrassed guilt, “it’s rather a feather in my cap. I discovered the only existing case of perdinavititis.”
“But this won�
�t do, doctor,” said Turnbull, almost tearing his hair, “this really won’t do. The man really did lose a ship. Indeed, not to put too fine a point on it, I took his ship.”
Dr. Quayle swung round for an instant so that his silk-lined overcoat rustled, and stared singularly at Turnbull. Then he said with hurried amiability: “Why, of course you did. Quite so, quite so,” and with courteous gestures went striding up the garden path. Under the first laburnum-tree he stopped, however, and pulling out his pencil and notebook wrote down feverishly: “Singular development in the Elenthero-maniac, Turnbull. Sudden manifestation of Rapinavititis–the delusion that one has stolen a ship. First case ever recorded.”
Turnbull stood for an instant staggered into stillness. Then he ran raging round the garden to find MacIan, just as a husband, even a bad husband, will run raging to find his wife if he is full of a furious query. He found MacIan stalking moodily about the half-lit garden, after his extraordinary meeting with Beatrice. No one who saw his slouching stride and sunken head could have known that his soul was in the seventh heaven of ecstasy. He did not think; he did not even very definitely desire. He merely wallowed in memories, chiefly in material memories; words said with a certain cadence or trivial turns of the neck or wrist. Into the middle of his stationary and senseless enjoyment were thrust abruptly the projecting elbow and the projecting red beard of Turnbull. MacIan stepped back a little, and the soul in his eyes came very slowly to its windows. When James Turnbull had the glittering sword-point planted upon his breast he was in far less danger. For three pulsating seconds after the interruption MacIan was in a mood to have murdered his father.
And yet his whole emotional anger fell from him when he saw Turnbull’s face, in which the eyes seemed to be bursting from the head like bullets. All the fire and fragrance even of young and honourable love faded for a moment before that stiff agony of interrogation.
“Are you hurt, Turnbull?” he asked, anxiously.
The Ball and the Cross Page 22