CHAPTER XLI.
The lawyer came the next day, and with something like a smile on his lips.
He brought me a few lines in pencil from Mrs. Ashleigh; they were kindly
expressed, bade me be of good cheer; "she never for a moment believed in
my guilt; Lilian bore up wonderfully under so terrible a trial; it was an
unspeakable comfort to both to receive the visits of a friend so attached
to me, and so confident of a triumphant refutation of the hideous calumny
under which I now suffered as Mr. Margrave!"
The lawyer had seen Margrave again,--seen him in that house. Margrave
seemed almost domiciled there!
I remained sullen and taciturn during this visit. I longed again for the
night. Night came. I heard the distant clock strike twelve, when again
the icy wind passed through my hair, and against the wall stood the
luminous Shadow.
"Have you considered?" whispered the voice, still as from afar. "I repeat
it,--I alone can save you."
"Is it among the conditions which you ask, in return, that I shall resign
to you the woman I love?"
"No."
"Is it one of the conditions that I should commit some crime,--a crime
perhaps heinous as that of which I am accused?"
"No."
"With such reservations, I accept the conditions you may name, provided I,
in my turn, may demand one condition from yourself."
"Name it."
"I ask you to quit this town. I ask you, meanwhile, to cease your visits
to the house that holds the woman betrothed to me."
"I will cease those visits. And before many days are over, I will quit
this town."
"Now, then, say what you ask from me. I am prepared to concede it. And
not from fear for myself, but because I fear for the pure and innocent
being who is under the spell of your deadly fascination. This is your
power over me. You command me through my love for another. Speak."
"My conditions are simple. You will pledge yourself to desist from all
charges of insinuation against myself, of what nature soever. You will
not, when you meet me in the flesh, refer to what you have known of my
likeness in the Shadow. You will be invited to the house at which I may
be also a guest; you will come; you will meet and converse with me as
guest speaks with guest in the house of a host."
"Is that all?"
"It is all."
"Then I pledge you my faith; keep your own."
"Fear not; sleep secure in the certainty that you will soon be released
from these walls."
The Shadow waned and faded. Darkness settled back, and a sleep, profound
and calm, fell over me.
The next day Mr. Stanton again visited me. He had received that morning a
note from Mr. Margrave, stating that he had left L---- to pursue, in
person, an investigation which he had already commenced through another,
affecting the man who had given evidence against me, and that, if his
hope should prove well founded, he trusted to establish my innocence, and
convict the real murderer of Sir Philip Derval. In the research he thus
volunteered, he had asked for, and obtained, the assistance of the
policeman Waby, who, grateful to me for saving the life of his sister, had
expressed a strong desire to be employed in my service.
Meanwhile, my most cruel assailant was my old college friend, Richard
Strahan. For Jeeves had spread abroad Strahan's charge of purloining the
memoir which had been entrusted to me; and that accusation had done me
great injury in public opinion, because it seemed to give probability to
the only motive which ingenuity could ascribe to the foul deed imputed to
me. That motive had been first suggested by Mr. Vigors. Cases are on
record of men whose life had been previously blameless, who have committed
a crime which seemed to belie their nature, in the monomania of some
intense desire. In Spain, a scholar reputed of austere morals murdered
and robbed a traveller for money in order to purchase books,--books
written, too, by Fathers of his Church! He was intent on solving some
problem of theological casuistry. In France, an antiquary, esteemed not
more for his learning than for amiable and gentle qualities, murdered his
most intimate friend for the possession of a medal, without which his own
collection was incomplete. These, and similar anecdotes, tending to prove
how fatally any vehement desire, morbidly cherished, may suspend the
normal operations of reason and conscience, were whispered about by Dr.
Lloyd's vindictive partisan; and the inference drawn from them and applied
to the assumptions against myself was the more credulously received,
because of that over-refining speculation on motive and act which the
shallow accept, in their eagerness to show how readily they understand the
profound.
I was known to be fond of scientific, especially of chemical experiments;
to be eager in testing the truth of any novel invention. Strahan,
catching hold of the magistrate's fantastic hypothesis, went about
repeating anecdotes of the absorbing passion for analysis and discovery
which had characterized me in youth as a medical student, and to which,
indeed, I owed the precocious reputation I had obtained.
Sir Philip Derval, according not only to report, but to the direct
testimony of his servant, had acquired in the course of his travels many
secrets in natural science, especially as connected with the healing
art,--his servant had deposed to the remarkable cures he had effected by
the medicinals stored in the stolen casket. Doubtless Sir Philip, in
boasting of these medicinals in the course of our conversation, had
excited my curiosity, inflamed my imagination; and thus when I afterwards
suddenly met him in a lone spot, a passionate impulse had acted on a brain
heated into madness by curiosity and covetous desire.
All these suppositions, reduced into system, were corroborated by
Strahan's charge that I had made away with the manuscript supposed to
contain the explanations of the medical agencies employed by Sir Philip,
and had sought to shelter my theft by a tale so improbable, that a man of
my reputed talent could not have hazarded it if in his sound senses. I
saw the web that had thus been spread around me by hostile prepossessions
and ignorant gossip: how could the arts of Margrave scatter that web to
the winds? I knew not, but I felt confidence in his promise and his
power. Still, so great had been my alarm for Lilian, that the hope of
clearing my own innocence was almost lost in my joy that Margrave, at
least, was no longer in her presence, and that I had received his pledge
to quit the town in which she lived.
Thus, hours rolled on hours, till, I think, on the third day from that
night in which I had last beheld the mysterious Shadow, my door was
hastily thrown open, a confused crowd presented itself at the
threshold,--the governor of the prison, the police superintendent, Mr.
Stanton, and other familiar faces shut out from me since my imprisonment.
I knew at the first glance that I was no longer an outlaw beyond the pale
of human friendship. And proudly, sternly, as I had supported myself
hitherto in solitude and suspense, when I felt warm hands clasping mine,
heard joyous voices proffering congratulations, saw in the eyes of all
that my innocence had been cleared, the revulsion of emotion was too
strong for me,--the room reeled on my sight, I fainted. I pass, as
quickly as I can, over the explanations that crowded on me when I
recovered, and that were publicly given in evidence in court next morning.
I had owed all to Margrave. It seems that he had construed to my favour
the very supposition which had been bruited abroad to my prejudice.
"For," said he, "it is conjectured that Fenwick committed the crime of
which he is accused in the impulse of a disordered reason. That
conjecture is based upon the probability that a madman alone could have
committed a crime without adequate motive. But it seems quite clear that
the accused is not mad; and I see cause to suspect that the accuser is."
Grounding this assumption on the current reports of the witness's manner
and bearing since he had been placed under official surveillance, Margrave
had commissioned the policeman Waby to make inquiries in the village to
which the accuser asserted he had gone in quest of his relations, and Waby
had there found persons who remembered to have heard that the two brothers
named Walls lived less by the gains of the petty shop which they kept than
by the proceeds of some property consigned to them as the nearest of kin
to a lunatic who had once been tried for his life. Margrave had then
examined the advertisements in the daily newspapers. One of them, warning
the public against a dangerous maniac, who had effected his escape from an
asylum in the west of England, caught his attention. To that asylum he
had repaired.
There he learned that the patient advertised was one whose propensity was
homicide, consigned for life to the asylum on account of a murder, for
which he had been tried. The description of this person exactly tallied
with that of the pretended American. The medical superintendent of the
asylum, hearing all particulars from Margrave, expressed a strong
persuasion that the witness was his missing patient, and had himself
committed the crime of which he had accused another. If so, the
superintendent undertook to coax from him the full confession of all the
circumstances. Like many other madmen, and not least those whose
propensity is to crime, the fugitive maniac was exceedingly cunning,
treacherous, secret, and habituated to trick and stratagem,--more subtle
than even the astute in possession of all their faculties, whether to
achieve his purpose or to conceal it, and fabricate appearances against
another. But while, in ordinary conversation, he seemed rational enough
to those who were not accustomed to study him, he had one hallucination
which, when humoured, led him always, not only to betray himself, but to
glory in any crime proposed or committed. He was under the belief that he
had made a bargain with Satan, who, in return for implicit obedience,
would bear him harmless through all the consequences of such submission,
and finally raise him to great power and authority. It is no unfrequent
illusion of homicidal maniacs to suppose they are under the influence of
the Evil One, or possessed by a Demon. Murderers have assigned as the
only reason they themselves could give for their crime, that "the Devil
got into them," and urged the deed. But the insane have, perhaps, no
attribute more in common than that of superweening self-esteem. The
maniac who has been removed from a garret sticks straws in his hair and
calls them a crown. So much does inordinate arrogance characterize mental
aberration, that, in the course of my own practice, I have detected, in
that infirmity, the certain symptom of insanity, long before the brain had
made its disease manifest even to the most familiar kindred.
Morbid self-esteem accordingly pervaded the dreadful illusion by which the
man I now speak of was possessed. He was proud to be the protected agent
of the Fallen Angel. And if that self-esteem were artfully appealed to,
he would exult superbly in the evil he held himself ordered to perform, as
if a special prerogative, an official rank and privilege; then, he would
be led on to boast gleefully of thoughts which the most cynical of
criminals in whom intelligence was not ruined would shrink from owning;
then, he would reveal himself in all his deformity with as complacent and
frank a self-glorying as some vain good man displays in parading his
amiable sentiments and his beneficent deeds.
"If," said the superintendent, "this be the patient who has escaped from
me, and if his propensity to homicide has been, in some way, directed
towards the person who has been murdered, I shall not be with him a
quarter of an hour before he will inform me how it happened, and detail
the arts he employed in shifting his crime upon another; all will be told
as minutely as a child tells the tale of some school-boy exploit, in
which he counts on your sympathy, and feels sure of your applause."
Margrave brought this gentleman back to L----, took him to the mayor, who
was one of my warmest supporters: the mayor had sufficient influence to
dictate and arrange the rest. The superintendent was introduced to the
room in which the pretended American was lodged. At his own desire a
select number of witnesses were admitted with him. Margrave excused
himself; he said candidly that he was too intimate a friend of mine to be
an impartial listener to aught that concerned me so nearly.
The superintendent proved right in his suspicions, and verified his
promises. My false accuser was his missing patient; the man recognized
Dr. ---- with no apparent terror, rather with an air of condescension, and
in a very few minutes was led to tell his own tale, with a gloating
complacency both at the agency by which he deemed himself exalted, and at
the dexterous cunning with which he had acquitted himself of the task,
that increased the horror of his narrative.
He spoke of the mode of his escape, which was extremely ingenious, but of
which the details, long in themselves, did not interest me, and I
understood them too imperfectly to repeat. He had encountered a
sea-faring traveller on the road, whom he had knocked down with a stone,
and robbed of his glazed hat and pea-jacket, as well as of a small sum in
coin, which last enabled him to pay his fare in a railway that conveyed
him eighty miles away from the asylum. Some trifling remnant of this
money still in his pocket, he then travelled on foot along the high-road
till he came to a town about twenty miles distant from L----; there he had
stayed a day or two, and there he said "that the Devil had told him to buy
a case-knife, which he did." "He knew by that order that the Devil meant
him to do something great." "His Master," as he called the fiend, then
directed him the road he should take. He came to L----, put up, as he had
correctly stated before, at a small inn, wandered at night about the town,
was surprised by the sudden storm, took shelter under the convent arch,
overheard somewhat more of my conversation with Sir Philip than he had
previously deposed,--heard enough to excite his curiosity as to the
casket: "While he listened his Master told him he must get possession of
that casket." Sir Philip had quitted the archway almost immediately after
I had done so, and he would then have attacked him if he had not caught
sight of a policeman going his rounds. He had followed Sir Philip to a
house (Mr. Jeeves's). "His Master told him to wait and watch." He did
so. When Sir Philip came forth, towards the dawn, he followed him, saw
him enter a narrow street, came up to him, seized him by the arm, demanded
all he had about him. Sir Philip tried to shake him off,--struck at him.
What follows I spare the reader. The deed was done. He robbed the dead
man both of the casket and the purse that he found in the pockets; had
scarcely done so when he heard footsteps. He had just time to get behind
the portico of a detached house at angles with the street when I came up.
He witnessed, from his hiding-place, the brief conference between myself
and the policemen, and when they moved on, bearing the body, stole
unobserved away. He was going back towards the inn, when it occurred to
him that it would be safer if the casket and purse were not about his
person; that he asked his Master to direct him how to dispose of them:
that his Master guided him to an open yard (a stone-mason's) at a very
little distance from the inn; that in this yard there stood an old
wych-elm tree, from the gnarled roots of which the earth was worn away,
leaving chinks and hollows, in one of which he placed the casket and
purse, taking from the latter only two sovereigns and some silver, and
then heaping loose mould over the hiding-place. That he then repaired to
his inn, and left it late in the morning, on the pretence of seeking for
his relations,--persons, indeed, who really had been related to him, but
of whose death years ago he was aware. He returned to L---- a few days
afterwards, and in the dead of the night went to take up the casket and
the money. He found the purse with its contents undisturbed; but the lid
of the casket was unclosed. From the hasty glance he had taken of it
before burying it, it had seemed to him firmly locked,--he was alarmed
lest some one had been to the spot. But his Master whispered to him not
to mind, told him that he might now take the casket, and would be guided
what to do with it; that he did so, and, opening the lid, found the casket
empty-; that he took the rest of the money out of the purse, but that he
did not take the purse itself, for it had a crest and initials on it,
which might lead to the discovery of what had been done; that he therefore
left it in the hollow amongst the roots, heaping the mould over it as
before; that in the course of the day he heard the people at the inn talk
of the murder, and that his own first impulse was to get out of the town
immediately, but that his Master "made him too wise for that," and bade
him stay; that passing through the streets, he saw me come out of the
sash-window door, go to a stable-yard on the other side of the house,
mount on horseback and ride away; that he observed the sash-door was left
partially open; that he walked by it and saw the room empty; there was
only a dead wall opposite; the place was solitary, unobserved; that his
Master directed him to lift up the sash gently, enter the room, and
deposit the knife and the casket in a large walnut-tree bureau which
stood unlocked near the window. All that followed--his visit to Mr.
Vigors, his accusation against myself, his whole tale--was, he said,
dictated by his Master, who was highly pleased with him, and promised to
bring him safely through. And here he turned round with a hideous smile,
as if for approbation of his notable cleverness and respect for his high
employ.
Mr. Jeeves had the curiosity to request the keeper to inquire how, in what
form, or in what manner, the Fiend appeared to the narrator, or conveyed
his infernal dictates. The man at first refused to say; but it was
gradually drawn from him that the Demon had no certain and invariable
form: sometimes it appeared to him in the form of a rat; sometimes even
of a leaf, or a fragment of wood, or a rusty nail; but that his Master's
voice always came to him distinctly, whatever shape he appeared in; only,
he said, with an air of great importance, his Master, this time, had
graciously condescended, ever since he left the asylum, to communicate
with him in a much more pleasing and imposing aspect than he had ever done
before,--in the form of a beautiful youth, or, rather, like a bright
rose-coloured shadow, in which the features of a young man were visible,
and that he had heard the voice more distinctly than usual, though in a
milder tone, and seeming to come to him from a great distance.
After these revelations the man became suddenly disturbed. He shook from
limb to limb, he seemed convulsed with terror; he cried out that he had
betrayed the secret of his Master, who had warned him not to describe his
appearance and mode of communication, or he would surrender his servant to
the tormentors. Then the maniac's terror gave way to fury; his more
direful propensity made itself declared; he sprang into the midst of his
frightened listeners, seized Mr. Vigors by the throat, and would have
strangled him but for the prompt rush of the superintendent and his
satellites. Foaming at the mouth, and horribly raving, he was then
manacled, a strait-waistcoat thrust upon him, and the group so left him
in charge of his captors. Inquiries were immediately directed towards
such circumstantial evidence as might corroborate the details he had so
minutely set forth. The purse, recognized as Sir Philip's, by the valet
of the deceased, was found buried under the wych-elm. A policeman
despatched, express, to the town in which the maniac declared the knife to
have been purchased, brought back word that a cutler in the place
remembered perfectly to have sold such a knife to a seafaring man, and
identified the instrument when it was shown to him. From the chink of a
door ajar, in the wall opposite my sash-window, a maid-servant, watching
for her sweetheart (a journeyman carpenter, who habitually passed that way
on going home to dine), had, though unobserved by the murderer, seen him
come out of my window at a time that corresponded with the dates of his
own story, though she had thought nothing of it at the moment. He might
be a patient, or have called on business; she did not know that I was from
home. The only point of importance not cleared up was that which related
to the opening of the casket,--the disappearance of the contents; the lock
had been unquestionably forced. No one, however, could suppose that some
third person had discovered the hiding-place and forced open the casket to
abstract its contents and then rebury it. The only probable supposition
was that the man himself had forced it open, and, deeming the contents of
no value, had thrown them away before he had hidden the casket and purse,
and, in the chaos of his reason, had forgotten that he had so done. Who
could expect that every link in a madman's tale would be found integral
and perfect? In short, little importance was attached to this solitary
doubt. Crowds accompanied me to my door, when I was set free, in open
court, stainless; it was a triumphal procession. The popularity I had
previously enjoyed, superseded for a moment by so horrible a charge, came
back to me tenfold as with the reaction of generous repentance for a
momentary doubt. One man shared the public favour,--the young man whose
acuteness had delivered me from the peril, and cleared the truth from so
awful a mystery; but Margrave had escaped from congratulation and
compliment; he had gone on a visit to Strahan, at Derval Court.
Alone, at last, in the welcome sanctuary of my own home, what were my
thoughts? Prominent amongst them all was that assertion of the madman,
which had made me shudder when repeated to me: he had been guided to the
murder and to all the subsequent proceedings by the luminous shadow of the
beautiful youth,--the Scin-Laeca to which I had pledged myself. If Sir
Philip Derval could be believed, Margrave was possessed of powers, derived
from fragmentary recollections of a knowledge acquired in a former state
of being, which would render his remorseless intelligence infinitely dire
and frustrate the endeavours of a reason, unassisted by similar powers, to
thwart his designs or bring the law against his crimes. Had he then the
arts that could thus influence the minds of others to serve his fell
purposes, and achieve securely his own evil ends through agencies that
could not be traced home to himself?
But for what conceivable purpose had I been subjected as a victim to
influences as much beyond my control as the Fate or Demoniac Necessity of
a Greek Myth? In the legends of the classic world some august sufferer
is oppressed by powers more than mortal, but with an ethical if gloomy
vindication of his chastisement,--he pays the penalty of crime committed
by his ancestors or himself, or he has braved, by arrogating equality with
the gods, the mysterious calamity which the gods alone can inflict. But
I, no descendant of Pelops, no OEdipus boastful of a wisdom which could
interpret the enigmas of the Sphynx, while ignorant even of his own
birth--what had I done to be singled out from the herd of men for trials
and visitations from the Shadowland of ghosts and sorcerers? It would be
ludicrously absurd to suppose that Dr. Lloyd's dying imprecation could
have had a prophetic effect upon my destiny; to believe that the pretences
of mesmerizers were specially favoured by Providence, and that to question
their assumptions was an offence of profanation to be punished by exposure
to preternatural agencies. There was not even that congruity between
cause and effect which fable seeks in excuse for its inventions. Of all
men living, I, unimaginative disciple of austere science, should be the
last to become the sport of that witchcraft which even imagination
reluctantly allows to the machinery of poets, and science casts aside into
the mouldy lumber-room of obsolete superstition.
Rousing my mind from enigmas impossible to solve, it was with intense
and yet most melancholy satisfaction that I turned to the image of Lilian,
rejoicing, though with a thrill of awe, that the promise so mysteriously
conveyed to my senses had, hereto, been already fulfilled,--Margrave had
left the town; Lilian was no longer subjected to his evil fascination.
But an instinct told me that that fascination had already produced an
effect adverse to all hope of happiness for me. Lilian's love for myself
was gone. Impossible otherwise that she--in whose nature I had always
admired that generous devotion which is more or less inseparable from the
romance of youth--should have never conveyed to me one word of consolation
in the hour of my agony and trial; that she, who, till the last evening we
had met, had ever been so docile, in the sweetness of a nature femininely
subinissive to my slightest wish, should have disregarded my solemn
injunction, and admitted Margrave to acquaintance, nay, to familiar
intimacy,--at the very time, too, when to disobey my injunctions was to
embitter my ordeal, and add her own contempt to the degradation imposed
upon my honour! No, her heart must be wholly gone from me; her very
nature wholly warped. A union between us had become impossible. My love
for her remained unshattered; the more tender, perhaps, for a sentiment of
compassion. But my pride was shocked, my heart was wounded. My love was
not mean and servile. Enough for me to think that she would be at least
saved from Margrave. Her life associated with his!--contemplation
horrible and ghastly!--from that fate she was saved. Later, she would
recover the effect of an influence happily so brief. She might form some
new attachment, some new tie; but love once withdrawn is never to be
restored--and her love was withdrawn from me. I had but to release her,
with my own lips, from our engagement,--she would welcome that release.
Mournful but firm in these thoughts and these resolutions, I sought Mrs.
Ashleigh's house.
