 Chapter 20 The Calling of the New Witness provoked a burst of laughter among the audience due partly no doubt to the strange name by which he had been summoned, partly also to the instinctive desire of all crowded assemblies, when their interest is painfully excited, to cease on any relief in the shape of the first subject of merriment which may present itself. A severe rebuke from the bench restored order among the audience. The Lord Justice Clerk declared that he would clear the court if the interruption to the proceedings were renewed. During the silence which followed this announcement the new witness appeared, gliding self-propelled in his chair on wheels, through the opening made for him among the crowd, a strange and startling creature, literally the half of a man, revealed himself to the general view. A coverlet which had been thrown over his chair had fallen off during his progress through the throng. The loss of it exposed to the public curiosity, the head, the arms, and the trunk of a living human being, absolutely deprived of the lower limbs. To make his deformity all the more striking and all the more terrible, the victim of it was, as to his face and his body, an unusually handsome and an unusually well-made man. His long silky hair of a bright and beautiful chestnut colour fell over shoulders that were the perfection of strength and grace. His face was bright with vivacity and intelligence. His large clear blue eyes and as long delicate white hands were like the eyes and hands of a beautiful woman. He would have looked effeminate but for the manly proportions of his throat and chest, aided in their effect by his flowing beard and long moustache, of a lighter chestnut shape than the colour of his hair. Never had a magnificent head and body been more hopelessly ill-be-stow'd than in this instance. Never had nature committed a more careless or a more cruel mistake than in the making of this man. He had sworn, seated, of course, in his chair. Having given his name, he bowed to the judges and requested their permission to pre-face his evidence with a word of explanation. People generally laugh when they first hear my strange Christian name, he said, in a low, clear, resonant voice which penetrated to the remotest corners of the court. I may inform the good people here that many names still coming among us have their significations, and that mine is one of them. Alexander, for instance, means in the Greek, a helper of men. David, means in Hebrew, well-beloved. Francis, means in German, free. My name, Miserimus, means in Latin, most unhappy. It was given to me by my father, in allusion to the deformity which you all see, the deformity with which it was my misfortune to be born. You won't laugh at Miserimus again, will you? We turn to the dean of faculty, waiting to examine him for the defense. Mr. Dean, I am at your service. I apologise for delaying, even for a moment, the proceedings of the court. He delivered his little address with perfect grace and good humour. Examined by the dean, he gave us evidence clearly, without the slightest appearance of hesitation or reserve. I was staying at Glen Inch as a guest in the house at the time of Mrs. Eustace MacGallon's death, he began. Dr. de Rome and Mr. Gale desire to see me at a private interview. The prisoner being then in a state of prostration which made it impossible for him to attend to his duties as master of the house. At this interview the two doctors astonished and horrified me by declaring that Mrs. Eustace MacGallon had died poisoned. They left it to me to communicate their dreadful news to her husband, and they warned me that a post-mortem examination must be held on the body. If the fiscal had seen my old friend when I communicated the doctor's message, I doubt if he would have ventured to charge the prisoner with the murder of his wife. To my mind the charge was nothing less than an outrage. I resisted the seizure of the prisoner's diary and letters animated by that feeling. Now that the diary has been produced, I agree with the prisoner's mother in denying that it is fair evidence to bring against him. A diary, when it extends beyond a bear record of facts and dates, is nothing but an expression of the poorest and weakest side and the character of the person who keeps it. It is, in nine cases out of ten, the more or less contemptible outpouring of vanity and conceit which the right had dare not exhibit to any mortal but himself. I am the prisoner's oldest friend. I solemnly declare that I never knew he could write down right nonsense until I heard his diary read in this court. He! Kill his wife! He! Treat his wife with neglect and cruelty! A venture to say from twenty years' experience of him that there is no man in this assembly who is constitutionally more incapable of crime and more incapable of cruelty than the man who stands at the bar. While I am about it, I go further still. I even doubt whether a man capable of crime and capable of cruelty could have found it in his heart to do evil to the woman whose untimely death is the subject of this inquiry. I have heard what the ignorant and prejudiced nurse Christina Olmsey has said of the deceased lady. From my own personal observation I contradict every word of it. Mrs. Eustace MacEllen, granting her personal defects, was nevertheless one of the most charming women I ever met with. She was highly bred, in the best sense of the word. I never saw in any other person so sweet a smile as hers or such grace and beauty of movement as hers. If you liked music, she sang beautifully, and few professed musicians had such a touch on the piano as hers. If you prefer talking, I never yet met with a man or even the woman which is saying a great deal more whom her conversation could not charm. To say that such a wife as this could be first cruelly neglected and then barbarously murdered by the man, no by the murtire, who stands there, is to tell me that the sun never shines at noonday and that the heaven is not above the earth. Oh, yes, I know that the letters of her friends show that she wrote to them in bitter complaint of her husband's conduct to her. But remember what one of those friends, the wisest and the best of them, says in reply. I own to thinking, she writes, that your sensitive nature exaggerates or misinterprets the neglect that you experience at the hands of your husband. There in that one sentence is the whole truth. Mrs. Eustace MacEllen's nature was the imaginative, self-tomanting nature of a poet. No mortal love could ever have been refined enough for her. Trifles that women of a coarser moral fibre would have passed over without notice were causes of downright agony to their exquisitely sensitive temperament. There are persons born to be unhappy, that poor lady was one of them. When I have said this I have said all. No, there is one word more still to be added. It may be as well to remind the prosecution that Mrs. Eustace MacEllen's death, both in the pecuniary sense a serious loss to her husband. He had insisted on having the whole of her fortune settled on herself, and on her relatives after her when he married. Her income from that fortune helped to keep and splendour the house and grounds at Glenendre. The prisoners' own resources, aided even by his mother's jointure, were quite inadequate fitly to defray the expenses of living at his splendid country-seat. Taking all the circumstances, I can positively assert that the wife's death has deprived the husband of two-thirds of his income. And the prosecution, viewing him as the basest and cruelest of men, declares that he deliberately killed her, with all his pecuniary interests pointing to the preservation of her life. It is useless to ask me whether I noticed anything in the conduct of the prisoner or Mrs. Bowley which might justify a wife's jealousy. I never observed Mrs. Bowley with any attention, and I never encouraged the prisoner in talking to me about her. He was a general admirer of pretty women so far as I know in a perfectly innocent way. That he could prefer Mrs. Bowley to his wife is inconceivable to me unless he were out of his senses. I never had any reason to believe that he was out of his senses. As to the question of the arsenic, I mean the question of tracing that poison to the possession of Mrs. Ustaz MacAllen, I am able to give evidence which may perhaps be worthy of the attention of the court. I was present in the Fiscal's office during the examination of the papers and of the other objects discovered at Glyn Inge. The dressing-case belonging to the deceased lady was shown to me after its contents had been officially investigated by the Fiscal himself. I happened to have a very sensitive sense of touch. In handling the lid of the dressing-case, on the inner side, I felt something at a certain place which induced me to examine the whole structure of the lid very carefully. The result was the discovery of a private repository concealed on the space between the outer wood and the lining. In that repository I found the bottle which I now produce. The further examination of the witness was suspended while the hidden bottle was compared with the bottle's properly belonging to the dressing-case. These last were of the finest cut glass, and of a very elegant form, entirely unlike the bottle found in the private repository, which was of the Communist manufacture and of the shape ordinarily in use among chemists. Not a drop of liquid, not the smallest item of any solid substance remained in it. No smell exhaled from it, and, more unfortunately still, for the interest of the defense, no label was found attached to the bottle when it had been discovered. The chemist who had sold the second supply of arsenic to the prisoner was called and examined. He declared that the bottle was exactly like the bottle in which he had placed the arsenic. It was, however, equally like hundreds of other bottles in his shop, in the absence of the label on which he had himself written the word poison. It was impossible for him to identify the bottle. The dressing-case and the deceased lady's bedroom had been vainly searched for the chemist's missing label, on the chance that it might have become accidentally detached from the mysterious empty bottle. In both instances, the search had been without result. Morally, it was a fair conclusion that this might be really the bottle which had contained the poison. Legally, there was not the slightest proof of it. This ended the last effort of the defense to trace the arsenic purchased by the prisoner to the possession of his wife. The book relating the practices of the sterian peasantry found in the deceased lady's room had been produced. But could the book prove that she had asked her husband to buy arsenic for her? The crumpled paper with the grains of powder left in it had been identified by the chemist and had been declared to contain grains of arsenic. But where was the proof that Mrs. Eustace McAllen's hand had placed the packet in the cabinet, and had emptied it of its contents? No direct evidence anywhere, nothing but conjecture. The renewed examination of Miss Arrimus Dexter touched on matters of no general interest. The cross-examination resolved itself in substance into a mental trial of strength between the witness and the Lord Advocate. The struggle terminating, according to the general opinion, in favour of the witness. One question and one answer only, I will repeat here. They appeared to me to be of serious importance to the object that I had in view in regarding the trial. I believe, Mr. Dexter, the Lord Advocate remarked, in his most ironical manner, that you have a theory of your own which makes the death of Mrs. Eustace McAllen no mystery to you. I may have my own ideas on that subject, as on other subjects, the witness replied, but let me ask their Lordships the judges, am I here to declare theories, or to state facts? I made a note of that answer. Mr. Dexter's ideas were the ideas of a true friend to my husband, and of a man of far more than average ability. They might be of inestimable value to me in the coming time, if I could prevail on him to communicate them. I may mention, while I am writing on the subject, that I added to this first note a second, containing an observation of my own. In alluding to Mrs. Bowley, while he was giving his evidence, Mr. Dexter had spoken of her so slightingly, so rudely, I might almost say, as to suggest he had some strong private reason for disliking, perhaps for distrusting this lady. Here again it might be of vital importance to me to see Mr. Dexter, and to clear up, if I could, what the dignity of the court had passed over without notice. The last witness had been now examined. The chair on wheels glided away with a half-man in it, and was lost in a distant corner of the court. The Lord Advocate rose to address the jury for the prosecution. I do not scruple to say that I never read anything so infamous as this great lawyer's speech. He was not ashamed to declare at starting that he firmly believed the prisoner to be guilty. What right had he to say anything of the sort? Was it for him to decide? Was he the judge and jury both, I should like to know? Having begun by condemning the prisoner on his own authority, the Lord Advocate proceeded to pervert the most innocent actions of that unhappy man so as to give them as a violent aspect as possible. Thus, when Eustace kissed his poor wife's forehead on her deathbed, he did it to create a favourable impression in the minds of the doctor and the nurse. Again, when his grief under his bereavement completely overwhelmed him, he was triumphant in secret and acting the part. If you looked into his heart you would see there a diabolical hatred for his wife and an infatuated passion for Mrs. Bowley. In everything he said he had lied. In everything he had done he had acted like a crafty and heartless rich. So the chief counsel for the prosecution spoke of the prisoner standing helpless before him at the bar. In my husband's place, if I could have done nothing more, I would have thrown something at his head. As it was I tore the pages which contained the speech from the prosecution out of the report and trampled them under my feet, and felt all the better too for having done it. At the same time I feel a little ashamed of having revenged myself on the harmless printed leaves now. The fifth day of the trial opened with the speech for the defense. Ah! What a contrast to the infamies uttered by the Lord Advocate was the grand burst of eloquence by the dean of faculty speaking on my husband's side. This illustrious lawyer struck the right note at starting. I yield to no one, he began, in the pity I feel for the wife. But I say the meritorious in this case, from first to last, is the husband. Whatever the poor woman may have endured, that unhappy man at the bar has suffered and is now suffering, more. If he had not been the kindest of men, the most docile and most devoted of husbands, he would never have occupied his present dreadful situation. A man of a meaner and harder nature would have felt suspicions of his wife's motives when he asked him to buy poison, would have seen through the wretchedly commonplace excuses she made for wanting it, and would have wisely and cruelly said, No. The prisoner is not that sort of man. He is too good to his wife, too innocent of any evil thought toward her or toward anyone, to foresee the inconveniences and the dangers to which his fatal compliance may expose him. And what is the result? He stands there, branded as a murderer, because he was too home-minded and too honourable to suspect his wife. Speaking thus of the husband, the dean was just as eloquent and just as unanswerable when he came to speak of the wife. The Lord Advocate, he said, has asked, with a bitter irony for which he is celebrated at the Scottish Bar, why we have failed entirely to prove that the prisoner placed the two packets of poison in the possession of his wife. I say in answer we have proved, first, that the wife was passionately attached to the husband, secondly, that she felt bitterly the defects in her personal appearance, and especially the defects in her complexion, and thirdly, that she was informed of arsenic as a supposed remedy for those defects taken internally. To men who know anything of human nature, there is proof enough. Does my learned friend actually suppose that women are in the habit of mentioning the secret artifices and applications by which they improve their personal appearance? Is it in his experience of the sex that a woman who is eagerly bent on making herself attractive to a man would tell that man, or tell anybody else who might communicate with him, that the charm by which he hoped to win his heart, say the charm of a pretty complexion, had been artificially acquired by the perilous use of a deadly poison? The bare idea of such a thing is absurd. Of course nobody ever heard Mrs. Eustace MacEllen speak of arsenic. Of course nobody ever surprised her in the act of taking arsenic. It is in the evidence that she would not even confide her intention to try the poison to the friends who had told her of it as a remedy, and who had got her the book. She actually begged them to consider their brief conversation on the subject as strictly private. From first to last poor creature she kept her secret, just as she would have kept her secret if she had wore false hair, or if she had been indebted to the dentist for her teeth. And there you see her husband in peril of his life, because a woman acted like a woman, as your wife's gentleman of the jury would in a similar position act toward you. After such glories oratory as this, I wish I had room to quote more of it, the next and last speech delivered at the trial that is to say the charge of the judge to the jury is dreary your reading, indeed. His lordship first told the jury that they could not expect to have direct evidence of the poisoning. Such evidence hardly ever occurred in cases of poisoning. They must be satisfied with the best circumstantial evidence. Or quite true, I daresay, but having told the jury they might accept circumstantial evidence, he turned back again on his own words and warned them against being too ready to trust it. You must have evidence satisfactory and convincing to your own minds, he said, in which you find no conjectures, but only irresistible and just inferences. Who is to decide what is a just inference, and what is circumstantial evidence but conjecture? After this specimen, I need give no further extracts from the summoning up. The jury thoroughly bewildered, no doubt, took refuge in a compromise. They occupied an hour in considering and debating among themselves in their own room. A jury of women would not have taken a minute. Then they returned into court and gave their timid and trimming scotch verdict in these words. Not proven. A slight applause followed among the audience, which was instantly checked. The prisoner was dismissed from the bar. He slowly retired, like a man in deep grief. His head sunk on his breast, not looking at any one and not replying when his friend spoke to him. He knew, poor fellow, the slur that the verdict left on him. We don't say you are innocent of the crime charged against you. We only say there is not evidence enough to convict you. In that lame and impotent conclusion the proceedings ended at the time, and there they would have remained for all time, but for me. CHAPTER XXI I see my way. In the grey light of the new morning I closed the report of my husband's trial for the murder of his first wife. No sense of fate he overpowered me. I had no wish after my long hours of reading and thinking to lay down and sleep. It was strange, but it was so. I felt as if I had slept, and had now just awakened, a new woman with a new mind. I could now at last understand Eustace's decision of me. To a man of his refinement it would have been a murderdom to meet his wife after she had read the things published of him to all the world in the report. I felt that as he would have felt it. At the same time I thought he might have trusted me to make amends to him for the murderdom, and might have come back. Perhaps it might yet end in his coming back. In the meanwhile and in that expectation I pitied and forgave him with my whole heart. Some little matter only dwelt on my mind disagreeably in spite of my philosophy. Did Eustace still secretly love Mrs. Bowley, or had I extinguished that passion in him? To what order of beauty did this lady belong? Were we by any chance the least in the world like one another? The window of my room looked to the east. I drew up the blind and saw the sun rising grandly in the clear sky. The temptation to go out and breathe the fresh morning air was irresistible. I put on my hat and trawl and took the report of the trial under my arm. The bolts of the back door were easily drawn. In another minute I was out in Benjamin's pretty little garden. Composed and strengthened by the inviting solitude and the delicious air I found courage enough to face the serious question that now confronted me, the question of the future. I had read the trial. I had vowed to devote my life to the sacred object of vindicating my husband's innocence. A solitary defenseless woman, I stood pledged to myself to carry that desperate resolution through to an end. How was I to begin? The bold way of beginning was surely the wise way in such a position as mine. I had good reasons, found it, as I have already mentioned, on the important part played by this witness at the trial, for believing that the fittest person to advise and assist me was Miserimus Dexter. He might disappoint the expectations that I had fixed on him, or he might refuse to help me, or, like my uncle Stark, whether he might think I had taken leave of my senses. All these events were possible. Nevertheless I held to my resolution to try the experiment. If he were in the land of the living I decided that my first step at starting should take me to the deformed man with a strange name. Seeing he received me, sympathised with me, understood me, what would he say? The nurse in her evidence had reported him as speaking in an offhand manner. He would say in all probability, What do you mean to do? And how can I help you to do it? Had I answers ready if those two plain questions were put to me? Yes, if I did own to any human creature what was at that very moment secretly fermenting in my mind, yes, if I could confide to a stranger a suspicion roused in me by the trial which I have been thus far afraid to mention even in these pages, it must nevertheless be mentioned now. My suspicion led to results which are part of my story and part of my life. Let me own, then, to begin with, that I closed the record of the trial actually agreeing in one important particular with the opinion of my enemy and my husband's enemy, the Lord Advocate. He had characterised the explanation of Mrs. Eustace MacAllen's death offered by the defense as a clumsy subterfuge in which no reasonable being could discern the smallest fragment of probability. Without going quite so far as this, I too could see no reason whatever in the evidence for assuming that the poor woman had taken an overdose of the poison by mistake. I believed that she had the arsenic secretly in her possession and that she had tried or intended to try the use of it internally for the purpose of improving her complexion. But further than this I could not advance. The more I thought of it, the more plainly justified the lures for the prosecution seemed to me to be in declaring that Mrs. Eustace MacAllen had died by the hand of a poisoner, although they were entirely and certainly mistaken in charging my husband with a crime. My husband being innocent, somebody else on my own sharing must be guilty. Who among the persons inhabiting the house at the time had poisoned Mrs. Eustace MacAllen? My suspicion in answering that question pointed straight to a woman, and the name of that woman was Mrs. Bowley. Yes, to that startling conclusion I had arrived. It was to my mind the inevitable result of reading the evidence. Look back for a moment to the letter produced in court signed Helena and addressed to Mr. MacAllen. No reasonable person can doubt, though the judges excused her from answering the question that Mrs. Bowley was the writer. Very well. The letter offers, as I think, trustworthy evidence to show the state of the woman's mind when she paid her visit to Glen Inge. Frighting to Mr. MacAllen at a time when she was married to another man, a man to whom she had engaged herself before she met with Mr. MacAllen, what does she say? She says, When I think of your life sacrificed to that wretched woman, my heart bleeds for you. And again she says, If it had been my unutterable happiness to love and cherish the best, the dearest of men, what a paradise of our own we might have lived in, what delicious hours we might have known. If this is not the language of a woman shamelessly and furiously in love with a man, not her husband, what is? She is so full of him that even her idea of another world, see the letter, is the idea of embracing Mr. MacAllen's soul. In this condition of mind and morals, the lady one day finds herself and her embrace is free, through the death of her husband. As soon as she can decently visit, she goes visiting, and in due course of time she becomes the guest of the man whom she adores. His wife is ill in bed. The one other visitor at Glen Inge is a cripple who can only move in his chair on wheels. The lady has the house and the one beloved object in it all to herself. No obstacle stands between her and the unutterable happiness of loving and cherishing the best, the dearest of men, but a poor, sick, ugly wife, for whom Mr. MacAllen never has felt and never can feel the smallest particle of love. Is it perfectly absurd to believe that such a woman as this, impelled by these motives and surrounded by these circumstances, would be capable of committing a crime if the safe opportunity offered itself? What does her own evidence say? She admits that she had a conversation with Mrs. Eustace MacAllen, in which that lady questioned her on the subject of cosmetic applications to the complexion. Did nothing else take place at that interview? Did Mrs. Bolle make no discoveries afterwards turn to fatal account of the dangerous experiment which her hostess was then trying to improve her ugly complexion? All we know is that Mrs. Bolle said nothing about it. What does the under gardener say? He heard a conversation between Mr. MacAllen and Mrs. Bolle, which shows that the possibility of Mrs. Bolle becoming Mrs. Eustace MacAllen had certainly presented itself to that lady's mind and was certainly considered by her to be too dangerous a topic of discourse to be pursued. Innocent Mr. MacAllen would have gone on talking. Mrs. Bolle is discreet and stops him. And what does the nurse, Christina Ormsay, tell us? On the day of Mrs. Eustace MacAllen's death, the nurses dismissed from attendance and sent downstairs. She leaves the sick woman, recovered from her first attack of illness, and able to amuse herself with writing. The nurse remains away for half an hour, and then gets uneasy at not hearing the invalid's bell. She goes to the morning room to consult Mr. MacAllen, and there she hears that Mrs. Bolle is missing. Mr. MacAllen doesn't know where she is, and asks Mr. Dexter if he has seen her. Mr. Dexter had not set eyes on her. At what time does the disappearance of Mrs. Bolle take place? At the very time when Christina Ormsay had left Mrs. Eustace MacAllen alone in her room. Meanwhile the bell rings at last, rings violently. The nurse goes back to the sick room at five minutes to eleven or thereabouts, and finds that the bad symptoms of the morning have returned in a gravely aggravated form. A second dose of poison, larger than the dose administered in the early morning, has been given during the absence of the nurse, and observed during the disappearance also of Mrs. Bolle. The nurse, looking out into the corridor for help, encounters Mrs. Bolle herself. Innocently on her way from her own room, just up, we are to suppose at eleven in the morning to inquire after the sick woman. A little later Mrs. Bolle accompanies Mr. MacAllen to visit the invalid. The dying woman casts a strange look at both of them, and tells them to leave her. Mr. MacAllen understands this as the fretful outbreak of a person in pain, and waits in the room to tell the nurse that the doctor is sent for. What does Mrs. Bolle do? She runs out panic-striking the instant Mrs. Eustace MacAllen looks at her. Even Mrs. Bolle, it seems, has a conscience. Is there nothing to justify suspicion in such circumstances as these? Circumstances sworn to on the oaths of the witnesses. To me the conclusion is plain. Mrs. Bolle's hand gave that second dose of poison. Admit this, and the inference follows that she also gave the first dose in the early morning. How could she do it? Look again at the evidence. The nurse admits that she was asleep from past two in the morning to six. She also speaks of a locked door of communication with the sick room, the key of which had been removed nobody knew by whom. Some person must have stolen that key. Why not Mrs. Bolle? One word more, and all that I had in my mind at that time will be honestly revealed. Zerimus Dexter, under cross-examination, had indirectly admitted that he had ideas of his own on the subject of Mrs. Eustace MacAllen's death. At the same time he had spoken of Mrs. Bolle in a tone which plainly betrayed that he was no friend to that lady. Did he suspect her too? My chief motive in deciding to ask his advice before I applied to anyone else was to find an opportunity of putting that question to him. If he really thought of her as I did, my cause was clear before me. The next step to take would be carefully to conceal my identity, and then to present myself and the character of a harmless stranger to Mrs. Bolle. There were difficulties, of course, in my way. The first and greatest difficulty was to obtain an introduction to Zerimus Dexter. The composing influence of the fresh air in the garden had by this time made me ready to lie down and rest, then to occupy my mind in reflecting on my difficulties. Little by little I grew too drowsy to think, then too lazy to go on walking. My bed looked wonderfully inviting as I passed by the open window of my room. In five minutes more I had accepted the invitation of the bed and had said farewell to my anxieties and my troubles. In five minutes more I was fast asleep. A discreetly gentle knock at my door was the first sound that aroused me. I heard the voice of my good old Benjamin speaking outside. My dear, I am afraid you will be starved if I let you sleep any longer. It is half past one o'clock, and a friend of yours has come to lunch with us. A friend of mine? What friends had I? My husband was far away, and my uncle Starkweather had given me up in despair. Who is it? I cried out from my bed through the door. Major Fitz-David, Benjamin answered, by the same medium. I sprang out of bed. The very man I wanted was waiting to see me. Major Fitz-David, as the phrase is, knew everybody. Intimate with my husband, he would certainly know my husband's old friend, Miserie Mostexter. Shall I confess that I took particular pains with my toilet, and that I kept the lunch and waiting? The woman doesn't live who would have done otherwise, when she had a particular favour to ask of Major Fitz-David. CHAPTER 22 The Major makes difficulties. As I opened the dining-room door, the Major hastened to meet me. He looked the brightest and the youngest of living elderly gentlemen, with his smart blue frock coat, his winning smile, his ruby ring, and his ready compliment. It was quite cheering to meet the modern Don Juan once more. I don't ask after your health, said the old gentleman. Your eyes answer me, my dear lady, before I can put the question. At your age, a long sleep is the true beauty drewed. Plenty of bed. There is the simple secret of keeping you good looks and living a long life. Plenty of bed. I have not been so long in my bed, Major, as you suppose, to tell the truth I've been up all night reading. Major Fitz-David lifted his well-painted eyebrows and polite surprise. What is the happy book which has interested you so deeply? He asked. The book, I answered, is the trial of my husband for the murder of his first wife. Don't mention that horrid book, he exclaimed. Don't speak of that dreadful subject! What if beauty and grace to do with trials, poisonings, horrors? Why, my charming friend, profane your lips by talking of such things? Why frighten away the loves and the graces that lie hidden in your smile? Humour an old fellow who adores the love and the graces, and who asks nothing better than to sun himself in your smiles? Launcheon is ready. Let us be cheerful. Let us laugh and blunch. He led me to the table and filled my plate and my glass with the ear of a man who considered himself to be engaged in one of the most important occupations of his life. Benjamin kept the conversation going in the interval. Major Fitz-David brings you some news, my dear. He said, Your mother-in-law, Mrs. McAllen, is coming here to see you today. My mother-in-law, coming to see me, I turned eagerly to the major for further information. Has Mrs. McAllen heard anything of my husband? I asked. Is she coming here to tell me about him? She has heard of him, I believe, said the major. And she has also heard from your uncle, the vicar. Our excellent stark weather has written to her, to what purpose I have not been informed. I only know that on receipt of his letter she has decided on paying you a visit. I met the old lady last night at a party, and I tried hard to discover whether she were coming to you as your friend or your enemy. My powers of persuasion were completely thrown away on her. The fact is, said the major, speaking in the character of a youth of five and twenty making a modest confession, I don't get on well with old women. Take the will for the deed, my sweet friend. I have tried to be of some use to you and have failed. Those words offered me the opportunity for which I was waiting. I determined not to lose it. You can be of the greatest use to me, I said. If you will allow me to pursue major on your past kindness. I want to ask you a question, and I may have a favour to beg when you have answered me. Major Fitz-David sat down his wine-glass on its way to his lips, and looked at me with an appearance of breathless interest. Come on, me, my dear lady. I am yours and yours own, Lacea, the gallant old gentleman. What do you wish to ask me? I wish to ask if you know Miserimus Dexter. Good heavens! cried the major. That is an unexpected question. No, Miserimus Dexter. I have known him for more years than I like to reckon up. What can be your object? I can tell you what my object is in two words, I interposed. I want you to give me an introduction to Miserimus Dexter. My impression is that the major turned pale under his paint. This at any rate is certain. His sparkling little grey eyes looked at me in undisguised bewilderment and alarm. You want to know Miserimus Dexter? He repeated. The air of a man who doubted the evidence of his own senses. Mr. Benjamin, have I taken too much of your excellent wine? Am I the victim of a delusion, or did our fair friend really ask me to give you an introduction to Miserimus Dexter? Benjamin looked at me in some bewilderment on his side and answered quite seriously. I think you said so, my dear. I certainly said so, I rejoined. What is there so very surprising in my request? The man is mad, cried the major. In all England you could not have picked out a person more essentially unfit to be introduced to a lady, to a young lady especially than Dexter. Have you heard of his horrible deformity? I have heard of it, and it doesn't taunt me. Doesn't taunt you? My dear lady, the man's mind is as deformed as his body. What Voltaire said satirically of the character of his countrymen in general is literally true of Miserimus Dexter. He is a mixture of the tiger and the monkey. At one moment he would frighten you, and at the next he would set you screaming with laughter. I don't deny that he is clever in some respects, brilliantly clever, I admit, and I don't say that he has ever committed any acts of violence or ever willingly injured anybody. But for all that he is mad. If ever a man were mad yet, forgive me if the inquiry is impertinent. What can your motive possibly be for wanting an introduction to Miserimus Dexter? I want to consult him. May I ask on what subject? On the subject of my husband's trial. Major Fitz-David groaned and sought a momentary consolation in his friend Benjamin's clarray. Their dreadful subject again, he exclaimed, Mr. Benjamin, why does she persist in dwelling on that dreadful subject? I must dwell on what is now the one employment and the one hope of my life, I said. I have reason to hope that Miserimus Dexter can help me to claim a husband's character of the stain which the Scotch verdict has left on it, tiger and monkey, as he may be. I am ready to run the risk of being introduced to him. And I ask you again, rashly and obstinately, as I fear you will think, to give me the introduction. It will put you to no inconvenience. I won't trouble you to escort me, a letter to Mr. Dexter will do. The Major looked piteously at Benjamin and shook his head. Benjamin looked piteously at the Major, and shook his head. "'She appears to insist on it,' said the Major. "'Yes,' said Benjamin. "'She appears to insist on it. "'I won't take the responsibility, Mr. Benjamin, of sending her alone to Miserimus Dexter. Shall I go with her, sir?' The Major reflected. Benjamin and the capacity of Protector did not appear to inspire our military friend with confidence. After a moment's consideration a new idea seemed to strike him. He turned to me. "'My charming friend,' he said, "'be more charming than ever, consent to a compromise. Let us treat this difficulty about Dexter from a social point of view. What do you say here to a little dinner?' "'A little dinner,' I repeated, not in the least understanding him. "'A little dinner,' the Major reiterated. "'At my house. You insist on my introducing you to Dexter, and I refuse to trust your loan with that correct-brained personage. The only alternative under the circumstances is to invite him to meet you and to let you form your own opinion of him under the protection of my roof. "'Who shall we have to meet you besides?' pursued the Major, brightening with hospitable intentions. We want a perfect galaxy of beauty around the table as a species of compensation when we have got Miss Errimal's Dexter as one of the guests. Madame Mirley-Flor is still in London. You would be sure to like her, she is charming. She possesses your firmness, your extraordinary tenacity of purpose. Yes, we will have Madame Mirley-Flor. Who else? Shall we say, Lady Clarinda? Another charming person, Mr. Benjamin. You would be sure to admire her, she is host and pathetic. She resembles in so many respects our fair friend here. Yes, Lady Clarinda shall be one of us, and you shall sit next to her, Mr. Benjamin, as a proof of my sincere regard for you. Shall we have my young prima donna to sing to us in the evening? I think so. She is pretty. She will assist in obscuring the deformity of Dexter. Very well, there's our party complete. I will shut myself up this evening and approach the question of dinner with my cook. Shall we say, this day weak, asked the major, taking out his book at eight o'clock? I consented to the proposed compromise, but not very willingly. With a letter of introduction, I might have seen Miss Errimal's Dexter that afternoon. As it was, the little dinner compelled me to wait in absolute inaction through a whole week. However, there was no help for it but to submit. Major Fitz-David, in his polite way, could be as obstinate as I was. He had evidently made up his mind, and further opposition on my part would be of no service to me. Functually at eight, Mr. Benjamin, reiterated the major, put it down in your book. Benjamin obeyed with a side-look at me, which I was at no loss to interpret. My good old friend did not relish meeting a man at dinner who was described as half tiger, half monkey, and the privilege of sitting next to Lady Clarinda rather daunted than delighted him. It was all my doing, and he too had no choice but to submit. Functually at eight, sir, said poor old Benjamin, obediently recording his formidable engagement, pleased to take another glass of wine. The major looked at his watch and rose, with fluent apologies for abruptly leaving the table. It is later than I thought, he said, I have an appointment with a friend, a female friend, a most attractive person. You a little remind me of her, my dear lady, you resemble her in complexion, the same creamy paleness. I adore creamy paleness. As I was saying I have an appointment with my friend, she does me the honour to ask my opinion on some very remarkable specimens of old lace. I have studied old lace. I study everything that can make me useful or agreeable to your enchanting sex. You won't forget our little dinner. I will send Dexter his invitation the moment I get home. He took my hand and looked at it critically, with his head a little on one side. A delicious hand, he said, you don't mind me looking at it, you don't mind my kissing it, do you? A delicious hand is one of my weaknesses. Forgive my weaknesses. I promise to repent and amend one of these days. At your age, Major, do you think you have much time to lose? Asked a strange voice speaking behind us. We all three looked around toward the door. There stood my husband's mother, smiling satirically, with Benjamin's shy little maid servant waiting to announce her. Major Fitz-David was ready with his answer. The old soldier was not easily taken by surprise. Age, my dear Mrs. McAllen, is a purely relative expression, he said. There are some people who are never young, and there are other people who are never old. I am one of the other people. Au revoir! With that answer the incorrigible Major kissed the tips of his fingers to us and walked out. Benjamin, bowing with his old-fashioned courtesy, threw open the door of his little library and inviting Mrs. McAllen and myself to pass in, left us together in the room. CHAPTER XXII My mother-in-law surprises me. I took a chair at a respectful distance from the sofa on which Mrs. McAllen seated herself. The old lady smiled and beckoned to me to take my place by her side. Judging by appearances, she had certainly not come to see me and the character of an enemy. It remained to be discovered whether she were really disposed to be my friend. I have received a letter from your uncle the vicar. She began. He asks me to visit you, and I am, for reasons which you shall presently hear, to comply with his request. Under other circumstances I doubt very much, my dear child, strange as the confession may appear whether I should have ventured into your presence. My son has behaved to you so weakly yet, in my opinion so inexcusably, that I am really speaking as his mother almost ashamed to face you. Was she an earnest? I listened to her and looked at her in amazement. Your uncle's letter, pursued Mrs. McAllen, tells me how you have behaved under your hard trial and what you propose to do now your stances left you. Dr. Starkweather, poor man, seems to be inexpressibly shocked by what you said to him when he was in London. He begs me to use my influence to induce you to abandon your present ideas and to make you return to your old home in the vicarage. I don't in the least agree with your uncle, my dear. Wild as I believe your plans to be, you have not the slightest chance of succeeding in carrying them out. I admire your courage, your fidelity, your unshaken faith in my unhappy son after his unpardonable behaviour to you. You are a fine creature, Valeria, and I have come here to tell you so in plain words. Give me a kiss, child. You deserve to be the vibe of a hero, and you have married one of the weakest of living mortals. God forgive me for speaking so of my own son, but it's in my mind and it must come out. This way of speaking of you, Starrs, was more than I could suffer even from his mother. I recovered the use of my tongue in my husband's defence. I am sincerely proud of your good opinion, dear Mrs. McAllen, I said, but you distress me. Forgive me if I own it plainly, when I hear you speak so despairingly of you, Starrs. I cannot agree with you that my husband is the weakest of living mortals. Of course not, retorted the lady. You are like all good women. You make a hero of the men you love, whether he deserves it or not. Your husband has hosts of good qualities, child, and perhaps I know them better than you do. But his whole conduct, from the moment when he first entered your uncle's house to the present time, has been, I say again, the conduct of an essentially weak man. What do you think he has done now, by way of climax? He has joined a charitable brotherhood, and he is off to the war in Spain with a red cross on his arm, when he ought to be here on his knees, asking his wife to forgive him. I say that is the conduct of a weak man. Some people might call it by a harder name. This news startled and distressed me. I might be resigned to his leaving me for a time, but all my instincts as a woman revolted at his placing himself in a position of danger during his separation from his wife. He had now deliberately added to my anxieties. I thought it cruel of him, but I would not confess what I thought to his mother. I effected to be as cool as she was, and disputed her conclusions with all the firmness that I could summon to help me. The terrible old woman only went on abusing him more vehemently than ever. What I complain of in my son, proceeded Mrs. MacAllen, is that he has entirely failed to understand you. If he had married a fool, his conduct would be intelligible enough. He would have done wisely to conceal from a fool that he had been married already, and that he had suffered the horrid public exposure of a trial for the murder of his wife. Then again he would have been quite right when this same fool had discovered the truth to take himself out of her way before she could suspect him of poisoning her for the sake of the peace and quiet of both parties. But you are not a fool. I can see that after only a short experience of you. Why can't he see it too? Why didn't he trust you with his secret from the first instead of stealing his way into your affections under an assumed name? Why did he plan, as he confessed to me, to take you away to the Mediterranean, and to keep you abroad, for fear of some of fish's friends at home betraying him to you as the prisoner of the famous trial? What is the plain answer to all these questions? What is the one possible explanation of this otherwise unaccountable conduct? There is only one answer and one explanation. My poor wretched son, he takes after his father, he isn't the least like me, he's weak. Weak in his way of judging, weak in his way of acting, and like or weak people, had strong and unreasonable to the last degree. There is the truth. Don't get red and angry, I am as fond of him as you are. I can see his marriage too, and one of them is that he has married a woman of spirit and resolution, so faithful and so fond of him that you won't even let his own mother tell her of his faults. Good child, I like you for hating me. Dear Madame, don't say that I hate you, I exclaimed, feeling very much as if I did hate her, though, for all that. I only presumed to think that you are confusing a delicate-minded man with a weak-minded man. Our dear unhappy, you starse, is a delicate-minded man, said the impenetrable Mrs. McEllen, finishing my sentence for me. We will leave it there, my dear, and get on to another subject. I wonder whether we shall disagree about that, too. What is the subject, madame? I won't tell you if you call me madame. Call me mother. Say, what is the subject, mother? Your notion of turning yourself into a court of appeal for a new trial of his stares, and forcing the world to pronounce a just verdict on him. Do you really mean to try it? I do. Mrs. McEllen considered for a moment grimly with herself. You know how heartily I admire your courage, and your devotion to my unfortunate son, she said, you know by this time that I don't count. But I cannot see your attempt to perform impossibilities. I cannot let you uselessly risk your reputation and your happiness without warning you before it is too late. My child, the thing you have got it in your head to do is not to be done by you or by anybody. Give it up. I am deeply obliged to you, Mrs. McEllen. Mother. I am deeply obliged to you, mother, for the interest that you take in me, but I cannot give it up. Whether or wrong, risk or no risk, I must, and I will try it. Mrs. McEllen looked at me very attentively, and sighed to herself. Oh, youth, youth, she said to herself, sadly, what a grand thing it is to be young. She controlled the rising regret and turned on me suddenly, almost fiercely, with these words. What in God's name do you mean to do? At the instant when she put the question, the idea crossed my mind that Mrs. McEllen could introduce me, if she pleased, to Miserimus Dexter. She must know him, and know him well, as a guest at Glen Inge and an old friend of her son. I mean to consult Miserimus Dexter, I answered boldly. Mrs. McEllen started back from me with a loud exclamation of surprise. Are you out of your senses? She asked. I told her, as I had told Major Fitz-David, that I had reason to think Mr. Dexter's advice might be of real assistance to me at starting. And I, rejoined Mrs. McEllen, have reason to think that your whole project is a mad one, and that in asking Dexter's advice on it, you appropriately consult a madman. You needn't start, child. There is no harm in the creature. I don't mean that he will attack you or be rude to you. I only say that the last person whom a young woman placed in your painful and delicate position ought to associate herself with is Miserimus Dexter. Strange! Here was the Major's warning repeated by Mrs. McEllen almost in the Major's own words. Well, it shared the fate of most warnings, that only made me more and more eager to have my own way. You surprised me very much, I said. Mr. Dexter's evidence, given that the trial seems as clear and reasonable as evidence can be. Of course it is, answered Mrs. McEllen. The shorthand writers and reporters put his evidence into presentable language before they printed it. If you had heard what he really said, as I did, he would have been either very much disgusted with him or very much amused by him according to your way of looking at things. He began fairly enough with a modest explanation of his absurd Christian name, which at once checked the merriment of the audience. But as he went on the mad side of him showed itself. He mixed up sense and nonsense and the strangest confusion. He was caught to order over and over again. He was even threatened with fine and imprisonment for contempt of court. In short he was just like himself, a mixture of the strangest and the most opposite qualities. At one time perfectly clear and reasonable, as you said just now, at another breaking out into rhapsodies of the most outrageous kind, like a man in a state of delirium. A more entirely unfit person to advise any body, I tell you again, never lived. You don't expect me to introduce you to him, I hope." I did think of such a thing, I answered. But after what you have said, dear Mrs. McEllen, I give up the idea, of course. It is not a great sacrifice. It only obliges me to wait a week for Major Fitz-David's dinner-party. He has promised to ask Miserie Mustextor to meet me. There is the Major all over, cried the old lady. If you pin your faith on that man, I pity you. He is as slippery as an eel. I suppose you asked him to introduce you to Dexter? Yes. Exactly. Dexter despises him, my dear. He knows as well as I do that Dexter won't go to his dinner. And he takes that roundabout way of keeping you apart instead of saying no to you plainly like an honest man. This was bad news. But I was as usual to obstinate to own myself defeated. If the worst comes to the worst, I said, I can but write to Mr. Dexter and back him to grant me an interview. And go to him by yourself if he does grant it, inquired Mrs. McEllen. Certainly by myself. You really mean it. I do indeed. I won't allow you to go by yourself. May I venture to ask, ma'am, how you propose to prevent me? By going with you to be sure you obstinate Hussie. Yes, yes. I can be as headstrong as you are when I like. Mind, I don't want to know what your plans are. I don't want to be mixed up with your plans. My son is resigned to the Scotch verdict. I am resigned to the Scotch verdict. It is you who won't let matters rest as they are. You are a vain and foolhardy young person. But, somehow, I have taken a liking to you and I won't let you go to Mrs. Dexter by yourself. Put on your bonnet. Now, I asked. Certainly, my carriage is at the door, and the sooner it's over the better I shall be pleased. Get ready and be quick about it. I required no second bidding. In ten minutes more we were on our way to Mrs. Erema's Dexter. Such was the result of my mother-in-law's visit. End of Chapter 23 Chapter 24 of the Law and the Lady. This is a LibriVox recording. Your LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. Recording by Vipka Mulla. The Law and the Lady by Wilkie Collins. Chapter 24 Miserie Must Dexter. First View We had dawdled over our luncheon before Mrs. MacAllen arrived at Benjamin's Cottage. The ensuing conversation between the old lady and myself, of which I have only presented the brief abstract, lasted until quite late in the afternoon. The sun was setting in heavy clouds when we got into the carriage, and the autumn twilight began to fall around us while we were still on the road. The direction in which we drove took us as well as I could judge toward the great northern suburb of London. For more than an hour the carriage threaded its way through a dingy brick labyrinth of streets, growing smaller and smaller and dirtier and dirtier the further we went. Going from the labyrinth, I noticed in the gathering darkness dreary patches of waste ground which seemed to be neither town nor country. Crossing these we passed some forlorn outlying groups of houses, with dim little scattered drops among them, looking lost like country villages wandering on the way to London, disfigured and smoke-dried already by their journey. Darker and darker in dreary area the prospect grew, until the carriage stopped at last, and Mrs. MacEllen announced in her sharply satirical way that we had reached the end of our journey. Prince Dexter's palace, my dear, she said, what do you think of it? I looked around me, not knowing what to think of it, if the truth must be told. We had got out of the carriage, and we were standing on a rough half-made gravel path. Right and left of me, in the dim light, I saw the half-completed foundations of new houses in their first stage of existence. Boards and bricks was gathered about us. Yet places gone, stifled in poles rose like the branchless trees of the brick desert. Behind us, on the other side of the high road, stretched another plot of waste-ground, as yet not built on. Over the surface of this second desert the ghostly white figures of vagrant ducks gleamed at intervals in the mystic light. In front of us set a distance of two hundred yards or so, as well as I could calculate, rose a black mass, which gradually resolved itself, as my eyes became accustomed to the twilight, into a long, low, and ancient house, with a hedge of ever-greens and a pitch-black paling in front of it. The footmen led the way toward the paling through the boards and the bricks, the oyster shells and the broken crockery that strewn the ground. And this was Prince Dexter's Palace. There was a gate in the pitch-black paling, and a bell-handle, discovered with great difficulty. Pulling at the handle the footmen sat in motion to judge by the sound produced a bell of prodigious size, fitter for a church than a house. While we were waiting for admission Mrs. MacAllen pointed to the low, dark line of the old building. There is one of his mattresses. She said, The speculators in this new neighbourhood have offered him I don't know how many thousand pounds for the ground that house stands on. It was originally the manor-house of the district. Dexter purchased it many years since, in one of his freaks of fancy. He has no old family associations with the place. The wards are all but tumbling about his ears, and the money offered would really be of use to him. But, no, he refused the proposal of the enterprising speculators by letters in these words. My house is standing monument of the picturesque and beautiful amid the mean, dishonest and groveling constructions of a mean, dishonest and groveling age. I keep my house, gentlemen, as a useful lesson to you. Look at it while you're building around me, and blush, if you can, for your work. Was there ever such an absurd letter written yet? Hush! I hear footsteps in the garden. Here comes his cousin. His cousin is a woman. I may as well tell you that, for you might mistake her for a man on the dark. A rough, deep voice, which I should certainly never have supposed to be the voice of a woman, hailed us from the inner side of the pailing. Who's there? Mrs. MacAllen answered my mother-in-law. What do you want? We want to see Dexter. You can't see him. Why not? What did you say your name was? MacAllen. Mrs. MacAllen. You stole MacAllen's mother. Now do you understand? The voice muttered and grunted behind the pailing, and a key turned in the look of the gate. Admitted to the garden and the deep shadow of the shrubs, I could see nothing distinctly of the woman with a rough voice except that she wore a man's hat. Seeing the gate behind us, without a bit of welcome or explanation, she led the way to the house. Mrs. MacAllen followed her easily, knowing the place, and I walked in Mrs. MacAllen's footsteps as closely as I could. This is a nice family, my mother-in-law whispered to me. Dexter's cousin is the only woman in the house, and Dexter's cousin is an idiot. We entered a spacious hall with a low ceiling, dimly lighted at its further end by one small oil-lump. I could see that there were pictures on the grim brown walls, but the subjects represented were invisible in the obscure and shadowy light. Mrs. MacAllen addressed herself to the speechless cousin with a man's hat. Now tell me, she said, why can't we see Dexter? The cousin took a sheet of paper off the table, and handed it to Mrs. MacAllen. The mast is frightened, said the strange creature, in a hoarse whisper, as if the bare idea of the master terrified her. Read it, and stay your go, which you please. She opened an invisible side-door in the wall, masked by one of the pictures, disappeared through it like a ghost, and left us together alone in the hall. Mrs. MacAllen approached the oil-lump, and looked by its light at the sheet of paper which the woman had given to her. I followed and beeped over her shoulder, without ceremony. The paper exhibited written characters, traced in a wonderfully large and firm handwriting. Had I caught the infection of madness in the air of the house, or did I really see before me these words? Notice! My immense imagination is at work. Visions of heroes unroll themselves before me. I reanimate in myself the spirits of the departed great. My brains are boiling in my head. Any persons who disturb me, under existing circumstances, will do it at the peril of their lives. Dexter! Mrs. MacAllen looked around at me quietly, with her sadonic smile. Do you still persist in wanting to be introduced to him? She asked. The mockery and the tone of the question roused my pride. I determined that I would not be the first to give way. Not if I am putting you in peril of your life, ma'am. I answered, hurtly enough, pointing to the paper in her hand. My mother-in-law returned to the hall-table, and put the paper back on it, without condescending to reply. She then led the way to an arch-recess on our right hand, beyond which I dimly discerned a broad flight of oaken stairs. Follow me, said Mrs. MacAllen, mounting the stairs in the dark. I know where to find him. We groped our way up the stairs to the first landing. The next flight of steps, turning in the reverse direction, was faintly illuminated, like the hall below, by one oil lamp, placed in some invisible position above us. Ascending the second flight of stairs, and crossing a short corridor, we discovered the lamp through the open door of a quaintly shaped circular room, burning on the mantelpiece. Its light illuminated a strip of thick tapestry, hanging loose from the ceiling to the floor, on the wall opposite to the door by which we had entered. Mrs. MacAllen drew aside the strip of tapestry, and, signing me to follow her, passed behind it. Listen, she whispered. Standing on the inner side of the tapestry, I found myself in a dark recess or passage, at the end of which a ray of light from the lamp showed me a close door. I listened, and heard on the other side of the door a shouting voice, accompanied by an extraordinary rumbling and whistling sound, travelling backward and forward, as well as I could judge over a great space. Now the rumbling and the whistling would reach their climax of loudness, and would overcome the resonant notes of the shouting voice. Then again, as louder sounds gradually retreated into distance, and the shouting voice made itself heard as the more audible sound of the two. The door must have been of prodigious solidity. Listeners intently, as I might, I failed to catch the articulate words, if any, which the voice was pronouncing, and I was equally at a loss to penetrate the calls which produced the rumbling and whistling sounds. What can possibly be going on? I whispered to Mrs. McAllen, on the other side of their door. Steps softly, my mother-in-law answered, and come and see. She arranged the tapestry behind us so as completely to shut out the light in the circular room. Then noiselessly turning the handle, she opened the heavy door. We kept ourselves concealed in the shadow of the recess, and looked through the open doorway. I saw, or fancied, I saw in the obscurity, a long room with a low ceiling. The dying gleam of an ill-capped fire formed the only light by which I could judge of objects and distances. Redly illuminating the central portion of the room, opposite to which we were standing, the fire-life left the extremity shadowed in almost total darkness. I had barely time to notice this before I heard the rumbling and whistling sounds approaching me. A high chair on wheels moved by, through the field of red light, carrying a shadowy figure with floating hair and arms furiously raised and lowered working the machinery that propelled the chair at its utmost rate of speed. I am Napoleon at the sunrise of Austerlitz. Shouted the man in the chairs, he swept past me on his rumbling and whistling wheels in the red glow of the fire-light. I give the word and thrones rock and kings fall, and nations tremble and minn by tens of thousands fight and bleed and die. The chair rushed out of sight, and the shouting man in it became another hero. I am Nelson, the ringing voice cried now. I am leading the fleet at Trafalgar. I issue my commands prophetically conscious of victory and death. I see my own apotheosis, my public funeral, my nation's tears, my burial and the glorious church. The ages remember me, and the poets sing my praise in immortal verse. The strident wheels turned at the far end of the room and came back. The fantastic and frightful apparition, man at machinery blended in one. The new kentower, half-man half-chair, flew by me again in the dying light. I am Shakespeare, cried the frantic creature now. I am writing Lear, the tragedy of tragedies. Ancients and moderns, I am the poet who towers over them all. Light, light, the lines flow out like a lava from the eruption of my volcanic mind. Light, light, for the poet of all time to write the words that live for ever. He ground and tore his way back toward the middle of the room, as he approached the fire-place, a last morsel of unburned coal or wood burst into momentary flame and showed the open doorway. In that moment he saw us. The wheelchair stopped with a shock that shook the crazy old floor of the room, altered its course, and flew at us with the rush of a wild animal. We drew back just in time to escape it, against the wall of the recess. The chair passed on and burst aside the hanging tapestry. The light off the lamp in the circular room poured in through the gap. The creature and the chair checked his furious wheels, and looked back over his shoulder with an impish curiosity, horrible to see. Have I run over them? Have I ground them to powder for presuming to intrude on me? He said to himself. As the expression of this amiable doubt passed his lips, his eyes lighted on us. His mind instantly veered back again to Shakespeare and King Lear. Goneril and Reagan, he cried. My two unnatural daughters, my she-devil children, come to mock at me. Nothing of this sort, said my mother-in-law, as quietly as if she were addressing a perfectly reasonable being. I am your old friend, Mrs. MacAllen, and I have brought Ustals MacAllen's second wife to see you. The instant she pronounced those last words, Ustals MacAllen's second wife, the man and the chair sprang out of it with a shrill cry of horror, as if she had shot him. For one moment we saw a hidden body in the air, absolutely deprived of the lower limbs. The moment after the terrible creature touched the floor as lightly as a monkey on his hands. The grotesque horror of the scene culminated in his hopping away on his hands, at a prodigious speed, until he reached the fireplace in the long room, that he crouched over the dying empress, shuddering and shivering and muttering. Oh pity me, pity me! Dozens and dozens of times to himself. This was the man whose advice I had come to ask, whose assistance I had confidently countered on in my hour of need. CHAPTER 25 MISERIMOS DEXTER, SECOND YEAR Thoroughly disheartened and disgusted, and, if I must confess it, thoroughly frightened too, I whispered to Mrs. MacAllen, I was wrong, and you were right, let us go. The ears of Miserimus Dexter must have been as sensitive as the ears of a dog. He heard me say, let us go. No, he called out, bring Ustals MacAllen's second wife in here. I am a gentleman. I must apologise to her. I am a student of human character. I wish to see her. The whole man appeared to have undergone a complete transformation. He spoke in the gentlest of voices, and he sighed hysterically when he had done, like a woman recovering from a burst of tears. Was it reviving courage or reviving curiosity? When Mrs. MacAllen said to me, the fit is over now, do you still wish to go away? I answered, no, I am ready to go in. Have you recovered your belief in him already, asked my mother-in-law in her mercilessly satirical way? I have recovered from my terror of him," I replied. I am sorry I terrified you," said the soft voice at the fireplace. Some people think I am a little mad at times. You came, I suppose, at one of the times, if some people are right. I admit that I am a visionary. My imagination runs away with me, and I say and do strange things. On those occasions, anybody who reminds me of that horrible trial throws me back again into the past, and causes me unutterable nervous suffering. I am a very tenderhearted man. As the necessary consequence in such a world as this, I am a miserable rich, except my excuses. Come in, both of you, come in and pity me. A child would not have been frightened of him now. A child would have gone in and pitied him. The room was getting darker and darker. We could just see the crouching figure of Miserimus Dex throughout the expiring fire, and that was all. Are we to have no light?" asked Mrs. MacAllan. And is this lady to see you when the light comes out of your chair? He lifted something bright and metallic, hanging round his neck, and blew on it a series of shrill, thrilling, bird-like notes. After an interval he was answered by a similar series of notes sounding faintly in some distant region of the house. Arial is coming, he said. Compose yourself, Mama MacAllan. Arial will make me presentable to a lady's eyes. He hopped away on his hands into the darkness at the end of the room. Wait a little, said Mrs. MacAllan, and you will have another surprise. You will see the delicate Arial. We heard heavy footsteps in the circular room. Arial, sighed Miserimus Dex throughout of the darkness in his softest notes. To my astonishment the coarse masculine voice of the cousin in the man's head, the Calibans rather than the Arial's voice answered, Here! My chair, Arial! The person thus strangely misnamed, drew aside the tapestry, so as to let in more light, then entered the room, pushing the wheeled chair before her. She stooped and lifted Miserimus Dexter from the floor like a child. Before she could put him into the chair he sprang out of her arms with a little gleeful cry, and alighted on his seat like a bird alighting on its perch. The lamp, said Miserimus Dexter, and the looking-glass. Pardon me, he added, addressing us, for turning my back on you. You mustn't see me until my hair is set to rights. Arial, the brush, the comb, and the perfumes. Carrying the lamp in one hand, the looking-glass in the other, and the brush, with the comb stuck in it, between her teeth, Arial, the second otherwise Dexter's cousin, presented herself plainly before me for the first time. I could now see the girl's round, fleshy, inexpressive face, her rayless and colourless eyes, her coarse nose and heavy chin, a creature half alive and imperfectly developed animal in shapeless form, clad in a man's pilot jacket, and dreading in a man's heavy-laced boots, with a nothing but an old rat-flannel patty coat and a broken comb, and her frowsy, flaxen hair, to tell us that she was a woman. Such was the inhospitable person who had received us in the darkness when we first entered the house. This wonderful valet, collecting her materials for dressing her still more wonderful master's hair, gave him the looking-glass, a hand-mirror, that addressed herself to her work. She combed, she brushed, she oiled, she perfumed, the flowing lox and the long, silky beard of a miserimous Dexter with a strangest mixture of dullness and dexterity that I ever saw. Done in brute silence, with a lumpish look and a clumsy gay, the work was perfectly well done nevertheless. The imp in the chair superintended the whole proceeding critically by means of his hand-mirror. He was too deeply interested in this occupation to speak until some of the concluding touches to his beard brought the misnamed aerial in front of him, and so turned her full face toward the part of the room in which Mrs. McAllen and I were standing. Then he addressed us, taking a special care, however, not to turn his head our way, while his toilet was still incomplete. Mama McAllen, he said, What is the Christian name of your son's second wife? Why do you want to know? I asked my mother-in-law. I want to know, because I can't address her as Mrs. Eustace McAllen. Why not? It recalls the other Mrs. Eustace McAllen. If I am reminded of those horrible days at Glen Inge, my fortitude will give way. I shall burst out screaming again. Hearing this, I hasten to interpose. My name is Valeria, I said. A Roman name, remarked Miss Errimus Dexter. I like it. My mind is cast in the Roman mould. My bodily build would have been Roman if I had been born with legs. I shall call you Mrs. Valeria, unless you disapprove of it. I hasten to say that I was far from disapproving of it. Very good, said Miss Errimus Dexter. Mrs. Valeria, do you see the face of this creature in front of me? He pointed with a hand mirror to his cousin, as unconcernedly as he might have pointed to a dog. His cousin, on her side, took no more notice than a dog would have taken of the contemptuous phrase by which he had re-designated her. She went on, combing and oiling his beard as compositely as ever. It is the face of an idiot, isn't it? pursued Miss Errimus Dexter. Look at her. She is a mere vegetable. A cabbage in a garden is as much life and expression in it as that girl exhibits at the present moment. Would you believe there was latent intelligence, affection, pride, fidelity, and such a half-developed being as this? I was really ashamed to answer him. Quite needlessly, the impenetrable young woman went on with her master's beard. A machine could not have taken less notice of the life and the talk around it than this incomprehensible creature. I have got at that latent affection, pride, fidelity, and the rest of it, resumed Miss Errimus Dexter. I hold the key to that dormant intelligence. Grand thought. Now look at her when I speak. I named her poor vretch in one of my ironical moments. She has got to like her name, just as a dog gets to like his collar. Now Mrs. Valeria, look and listen. Aerial. The girl's dull face began to brighten. The girl's mechanically moving hand stopped and held the comb in suspense. Aerial, you have learned to dress my hair and anoint my beard, haven't you? Her face still brightened. Yes, yes, yes, she answered eagerly, and you say I have learned to do it well, don't you? I say that. Would you like to let anybody else do it for you? Her eyes melted softly into light and fire. Her strange, unwomanly voice synced the gentlest tones that I had heard from her yet. Nobody else shall do it for me, she said it once proudly and tenderly. Nobody, as long as I live, shall touch you but me. Not even the lady there, asked Miss Aerimus Dexter, pointing backward with his hand mirrored at the place at which I was standing. Her eyes suddenly flashed. Her hand suddenly shook the comb at me in a burst of jealous rage. Let her dry, cried the poor creature, raising her voice again to its hoarseest notes. Let her touch you if she dares. Dexter laughed at the childish outbreak. That will do, my delicate Ariel, he said. I dismiss you, intelligence, for the presence. Relapse unto your former self. Finish my beard. She passively resumed her work. The new light in her eyes, the new expression in her face, faded little by little and died out. In another minute the face was as vacant and as lumpish as before. The hands did their work again with a lifeless dexterity which had so painfully impressed me when she first took up the brush. Miss Aerimus Dexter appeared to be perfectly satisfied with these results. I thought my little experiment might interest you, he said. You see how it is? The dormant intelligence of my curious cousin is like the dormant sound in a musical instrument. I play upon it, and it answers to my touch. She likes being played upon. But her great delight is to hear me tell a story. I puzzle her to the verge of distraction, and the more I confuse her, the better she likes the story. It is the greatest fun you really must see at some day. He indulged himself in a last look at the mirror. Ha! he said complacently. Now I shall do. Fannish Ariel. She frammed out of the room in her heavy boats with the mute obedience of a trained animal. I said, good night, as she passed me. She neither returned the salutation nor looked at me. The word simply produced no effect on her dull senses. The one voice that could reach her was silent. She had relapsed once more into the vacant inanimate creature who had opened the gate to us, until it pleased Miss Aerimus Dexter to speak to her again. Villaria, said my mother-in-law. Our modest host is waiting to see what you think of him. While my attention was fixed on his cousin, he had wheeled his chair around so as to face me with the light of the lamp falling full on him. In mentioning his appearance as a witness at the trial, I find I have borrowed without meaning to do so from my experience of him at this later time. I saw plainly now the bright intelligent face and the large clear blue eyes, the lustrous waving hair of a light-chestnut color, the long delicate white hands, and the magnificent throat and chest, which I have elsewhere described. The deformity which degraded and destroyed the merely beauty of his head and breast was hidden from view by an orient robe of many colors thrown over the chair like a coverlet. He was clothed in a jacket of black velvet, fastened loosely across his chest with large malachite buttons, and he wore lace ruffles at the ends of his sleeves in the fashion of the last century. It may well have been due to want of perception on my part, but I could see nothing mad in him, nothing in any way repelling as he now looked at me. The one defect that I could discover in his face was at the outer corners of his eyes, just under the temple. Here when he laughed and in a lesser degree when he smiled, the skin contracted into quaint little wrinkles and folds which looked strangely out of harmony with the almost youthful appearance of the rest of his face. As to his other features, the mouth, so far as his beard and moustache permitted me to see it was small and delicately formed, the nose, perfectly shaped on the straight Grecian model, was perhaps a little too thin, judged by comparison with the full cheeks and the high massive forehead. Looking at him as a whole and speaking of him, of course, from a woman's not a physiognomist's point of view, I can only describe him as being an unusually handsome man. A painter would have reveled in him as a model for St John, and a young girl ignorant of what the oriental robe hit from view, what I've said to herself the instant she looked at him, here is the hero of my dreams. His blue eyes, large as the eyes of a woman, clear as the eyes of a child, rested on me the moment I turned toward him with a strangely varying play of expression which at once interested and perplexed me. Now there was doubt, uneasy, painful doubt in the look, and now again it changed brightly to approval, so open and unrestrained that a vain woman might have fancied she had made a conquest of him at first sight. Suddenly a new emotion seemed to take possession of him. His eyes sank, his head rubbed, he lifted his hands with a gesture of regret. He muttered and murmured to himself, pursuing some secretant melancholy train of thought which seemed to lead him further and further away from present objects of interest and to plunge him deeper and deeper in troubled recollections of the past. Here and there I caught some of the words, little by little I found myself trying to fade them what was darkly passing in this strange man's mind. A far more charming face, I heard him say, but no, not a more beautiful figure. What figure was ever more beautiful than hers? Something but not all of her enchanting grace. Where is the resemblance which has brought her back to me? In the pose of the figure, perhaps, in the movement of the figure, perhaps. Poor, murdered angel, what a life and what a death, what a death! Was he comparing me with the victim of the poison with my husband's first wife? His words seemed to justify the conclusion. If I were right, the dead woman had evidently been a favourite with him. There was no misinterpreting the broken tones of his voice when he spoke of her. He had admired her living, he mourned her dead. Supposing that I could prevail upon myself to admit this extraordinary person into my confidence, what would be the result? Should I be the gainer or the loser by the resemblance which he fancied he had discovered? Would the sight of me console him or pain him? I waited eagerly to hear more on the subject of the first wife. Not a word more escaped his lips. A new change came over him. He lifted his head with a start, and looked about him as a weary man might look if he was suddenly disturbed in a deep sleep. What have I done, he said? Have I been letting my mind drift again? He shuddered on side. Oh, that house of Gleninge! He murmured sadly to himself. Shall I never get away from it in my thoughts? Oh, that house of Gleninge! To my infinite disappointment, Mrs. MacAllen checked the further revelation of what was passing in his mind. Something in the tone and manner of his illusion to her son's country house seemed to have offended her. She interposed sharply and decisively. Gently, my friend, gently, she said, I don't think you quite know what you are talking about. His great blue eyes fleshed at her fiercely. With one turn of his hand he brought his chair close at her side. The next instant he caught her by the arm and forced her to bend to him until he could whisper in her ear. He was violently agitated. His whisper was loud enough to make itself heard where I was sitting at the time. I don't know what I am talking about, he repeated, with his eyes fixed attentively, not on my mother-in-law, but on me. You short-sighted old woman, where are your spectacles? Look at her! Do you see no resemblance? The figure, not the face. Do you see no resemblance there to your star's first wife? Pure fancy rejoined Mrs. MacAllen. I see nothing of the sort. He shook her impatiently. But so loud he whispered, she will hear you. I have heard you both, I said. You need have no fear, Mr. Dexter, of speaking before me. I know that my husband had a first wife, and I know how mis-rubblish he died. I have read the trial. You have read the life and death of a matire, cried Miss Eremus Dexter. He suddenly wheeled his chair my way. He bent over me, his eyes filled with tears. Nobody appreciated her at her true value, he said. But me! Nobody but me! Nobody but me! Mrs. MacAllen walked away impatiently to the end of the room. When you are ready, Valeria, I am, she said, we cannot keep the servants and the horses waiting much longer in this bleak place. I was too deeply interested in leading Miss Eremus Dexter to pursue the subject on which he had touched to be willing to leave him at that moment. I pretended not to have heard, Mrs. MacAllen. I lay at my hand as if by accident on the wheelchair to keep him near me. He showed me how highly you esteemed that poor lady in your evidence at the trial, I said. I believe, Miss Dexter, you have ideas of your own about the mystery of her death. He had been looking at my hand, resting on the arm of his chair until I ventured on my question. At that he suddenly raised his eyes and fixed them with a frowning and furtive suspicion on my face. How do you know I have ideas of my own? he asked sternly. I know it from reading the trial, I answered. The lawyer who cross-examined you spoke almost in the very words which I have just said. I had no intention of offending you, Mr. Dexter. His face cleared as rapidly as it had clouded. He smiled and laid his hand on mine. His touch struck me cold. I felt every nerve in me shivering under it. I drew my hand away quickly. I beg your pardon, he said, if I have misunderstood you. I have ideas of my own about that unhappy lady. He paused and looked at me in silence very earnestly. Have you any ideas, he asked? Ideas about her life or about her death? I was deeply interested. I was burning to hear more. It might encourage him to speak if I were candid with him. I answered, Yes. Ideas which you have mentioned to any one, he went on? To no living creature, I replied, as yet. This very strange, she said, still earnestly reading my face. What interest can you have in a dead woman whom you never knew? Why did you ask me that question just now? Have you any motive in coming here to see me? I boldly acknowledged the truth. I said, I have a motive. Is it connected with Eustace MacAllan's first wife? It is. With anything that happened in her lifetime? No. With her death? Yes. He suddenly clasped his hands with a wild gesture of despair, and then pressed them both on his head as if he were struck by some sudden pain. I can't hear it tonight, he said. I would give worlds to hear it, but I didn't. I should lose all hold over myself in the state I am in now. I am not equal to raking up the horror and the mystery of the past. I have not courage enough to open the grave of the murder I did. Did you hear me when you came here? I have an immense imagination. It runs riot at times. It makes an actor of me. I play the parts of all the heroes that ever lived. I feel their characters. I merge myself in their individualities. For the time I am the man I fancy myself to be. I can't help it. I am obliged to do it. If I restrained my imagination when the fittest on me, I should go mad. I let myself lose. It lasts for hours. It leaves me with my energies worn out, with my sensibilities frightfully acute. Browse any melancholy or terrible association in me at such times, and I am capable of hysterics. I am capable of screaming. You heard me scream. You shall not see me in hysterics. No, Mrs. Valeria. No, you innocent reflection of the dead and gone. I would not frighten you for the world. Will you come here to morrow in the daytime? I have got a chase and a pony. Ariel, my delicate Ariel, can drive. She shall call at Mama Magellan's and fetch you. We will talk to Moray when I am fit for it. I am dying to hear you. I will be fit for you in the morning. I will be civil, intelligent, communicative in the morning. No more of it now. Away with the subject, the too exciting, the too interesting subject. I must compose myself or my brains will explode in my head. Music is the true narcotic for excitable brains. My harp, my harp! He rushed away in his chair to the far end of the room, passing Mrs. McAllen as she returned to me, bent on hastening our departure. Come! said the old lady irritably. You have seen him, and he has made a good show of himself. More of him might be tiresome. Come away! The chair returned to us more slowly. Miseramus Dexter was working it with one hand only. In the other, he held a harp of a pattern, which I had hit herto only seen in pictures. The strings were few in numbers, and the instrument was so small, that I could have held it easily on my lap. It was the ancient harp of the pictured muses and the legendary Welsh bars. Good-night, Dexter! said Mrs. McAllen. He held up one hand imperatively. Wait! he said. Let her hear me sing. He turned to me. I declined to be indebted to other people for my poetry and my music, he went on. I compose my own poetry and my own music. I improvise. Give me a moment to think. I will improvise for you. He closed his eyes and rested his head on the frame of the harp. His fingers gently touched the strings while he was thinking. In a few minutes he lifted his head, looked at me, and struck the first notes, the prelude to the song. It was wild, barbaric, monotonous music, utterly unlike any modern composition. Sometimes it suggested a slow and undulating oriental dance. Sometimes it modulated into tones but reminded me of the severe harmonics of the old Gregorian chants. The words, when they followed the prelude, were as wild as recklessly free from all restrained of critical rules as the music. They were resurably inspired by the occasion. I was the theme of the strange song. And thus, in one of the finest tenor voices I ever heard, my poet sang of me. Why does she come? She reminds me of the loss. She reminds me of the dead. In her form like the other. In her walk like the other. Why does she come? Does destiny bring her? Shall we range together the mazes of the past? Shall we search together the secrets of the past? Shall we interchange thoughts, services, suspicions? Does destiny bring her? The future will show. Let the night pass. Let the day come. I shall see into her mind. She will look into mine. The future will show. His voice sank. His fingers touched the string more and more feebly as he approached the last lines. The overbroad brain kneaded and took its reanimating repose. At the final words his eyes slowly closed. His head lay back on the chair. He slept with his arms around his heart, as a child sleeps hugging its last new toy. We stole out of the room on tiptoe, and left Miserimus Dexter, Howard, composer and madman, in his peaceful sleep. End of Chapter 25 Chapter 26 of The Law and the Lady This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. Recording by Vipgamulla. The Law and the Lady by Wilkie Collins. Chapter 26. More of my obstinacy Ariel was downstairs in the shadowy hall, half asleep, half awake, waiting to see the visitors clear of the house. Without speaking to us, without looking at us, she lit the way down the dark garden walk and blocked the gate behind us. Good night Ariel, I called out to her over the pailing. Nothing answered me, but the tram of her heavy footsteps returning to the house and the dull thumb a moment afterwards of the closing door. The footmen had thoughtfully lighted the carriage-lamps. Carrying one of them to serve as a lantern, he lighted us over the wiles of the brick-ed desert and blended us safely in a path by the high road. Well, said my mother-in-law, when we were comfortably seated in the carriage again, you have seen Miserimus Dexter, and I hope you are satisfied. I will do him the justice to declare that I never in all my experience wore him more completely crazy than he was to-night. What do you say? I don't presume to dispute your opinions, I answered, but speaking for myself, I'm not quite sure that he is mad. Not mad, cried Mrs. McAllen, after those frantic performances in his chair, not mad after the exhibition he made of his unfortunate cousin, not mad after the song that he sang in your honour, and the falling asleep by way of conclusion. Oh Valeria, Valeria, well said the wisdom of our ancestors, there are none so blind as those who won't see. Pardon me, dear Mrs. McAllen, I saw everything that you mentioned, and I never felt more surprised or more confounded in my life, but now I have recovered from my amazement and can think it over quietly. I must still venture to doubt whether this strange man is really mad in the true meaning of the word. It seems to me that he only expresses, I admit in a very reckless and boisterous way, thoughts and feelings what most of us are ashamed of as weaknesses, and which we keep to ourselves accordingly. I confess I have often fancied myself transformed into some other person, and have felt a certain pleasure in seeing myself in my new character. One of our first amusements as children, if we have any imagination at all, is to get out of our own characters and to try the characters of other personages as a change, to theories, to be queens, to be anything, in short, but what we really are. Mr. Dexter lets out the secret just as the child does, and if that is madness, he is certainly mad. But I noticed that when his imagination cooled down, he became Mrs. Dexter again. He no more believed himself than we believed him to be Napoleon or Shakespeare. Besides, some allowance is truly to be made for the solitary, sedentary life that he leads. I'm not learned enough to trace the influence of that life and making him what he is, but I think I can see the result in an overexcited imagination, and I fancy I can trace his exhibiting his power over the poor cousin, and his singing of that wonderful song, to know more formidable course than in ordinary self-conceit. I hope the confession will not lower me seriously in your good opinion, but I must say I have enjoyed my visit, and, we're still, Miss Eremus Dexter really interests me. Does this learnest discourse on Dexter mean that you are going to see him again? asked Mrs. MacAllen. I don't know how I may feel about it to-morrow morning, I said, but my impulse at this moment is decidedly to see him again. I had a little talk with him while you were away at the other end of the room, and I believe he really can be of use to me— of use to you in what? interposed my mother-in-law. In the one object which I have in view, the object, dear Mrs. MacAllen, which I regret to say you do not approve, and you are going to take him into your confidence, to open your whole mind to such a man as the man we have just left? Yes, if I think of it to-morrow, as I think of it to-night, I dare say it is a risk, but I must run risks, and oh I am not prudent, but prudence won't help a woman in my position with my end to gain. Mrs. MacAllen made no further remonstrance in words. She opened a capacious pocket in front of the carriage, and took from it a box of matches and a railway reading-lamp. You provoke me, said the old lady, into showing you what your husband thinks of this new whim of yours. I have got his letter with me, his last letter from Spain. You shall judge for yourself, your poor deluded young creature, whether my son is worthy of the sacrifice, the useless and hopeless sacrifice, which you are bent on making of yourself for his sake. Strike a light! A willingly obeyed her. Ever since she had informed me of your stasis departure to Spain, I had been eager for more news of him, for something to sustain my spirits, after so much that had disappointed and depressed me. Thus far I did not even know whether my husband thought of me sometimes in his self-imposed exile, as to his regretting already the rash act which had separated us, it was still too soon to begin hoping for that. The lamp having been lighted and fixed in its place between the two front windows of the carriage, Mrs. MacAllen produced her son's letter. There is no folly like the folly of love. It cost me a hard struggle to restrain myself from kissing the paper on which the dear hand had rested. There, said my mother-in-law, begin on the second page, the page devoted to you. Read straight down to the last line at the bottom, and in God's name, come back to your senses, child, before it is too late. I followed my instructions and read these words. Can I trust myself to write of Valeria? I must write of her. Tell me how she is, how she looks, what she is doing. I am always thinking of her. Not a day passes, but I mourn the loss of her. Oh, if she had only been contended to let matters rest as they were. Oh, if she had never discovered the miserable truth. She spoke of reading the trial when I saw her last. Has she persisted in doing so? I believe, I say this seriously, mother, I believe the shame and the horror of it would have been the death of me if I had met her face to face when she first knew of the ignominy that I have suffered of the infamous suspicion of which I have been publicly made the subject. Think of those pure eyes looking at a man who has been accused, and never wholly absolved of the foulest and the vilest of all murders, and then think of what that man must feel if he have any heart and any sense of shame left in him. I sicken as I have write of it. Does she still meditate that hopeless project, the offspring-poor angel of her artless unthinking generosity? Does she still fancy that it is in her powers to assert my innocence before the world? Oh, mother, if she does use your utmost influence to make her give up the idea, spare her the humiliation, the disappointment, the insult, perhaps to which she may innocently expose herself. For her sake, for my sake, leave no means untry to attain this rightest, this merciful end. I sent her no message. I dare not do it. Say nothing when you see her, which can recall me to her memory. On the contrary, help her to forget me as soon as possible. The kindest thing I can do, the one atonement I can make to her is to drop out of her life. With those wretched words it ended. I handed his letter back to his mother in silence. She said but little on her side. If this doesn't discourage you, she remarked, slowly folding up the letter. Nothing will. Let us leave it there and say no more. I made no answer. I was crying behind my veil. My domestic prospect looked so dreary. My unfortunate husband was so hopelessly misguided, so pitiably wrong. The one chance for both of us, and the one consolation for poor me, was to hold to my desperate resolution more firmly than ever. If I had wanted anything to confirm me in this view, and to arm me against the remonstrances of every one of my friends, Hustars's letter would have proved more than sufficient to answer the purpose. At least he had not forgotten me. He thought of me, and he mourned the loss of me every day of his life. That was encouragement enough for the present. If Ariel calls for me in the pony-chase tomorrow, I thought to myself, with Ariel I go. Mrs. MacEllen sat me down at Benjamin's door. I mentioned to her at parting, I stood sufficiently in awe of her to put it off till the last moment, that Miserie must dexter had arranged to send his cousin and his pony-chase to her residence on the next day, and I inquired thereupon whether my mother-in-law would permit me to call at her house to wait for the appearance of the cousin, or whether she would prefer sending the chase on to Benjamin's cottage. I fully expected an explosion of anger to follow this bolder vowel of my plans for the next day. The old lady agreeably surprised me. She proved that she had really taken a liking to me. She kept her temper. If you persist in going back to dexter, you certainly shall not go to him from my door, she said. But I hope you will not persist. I hope you will awake a wiser woman to-morrow morning. The morning came. A little before noon, the arrival of the pony-chase was announced at the door, and a letter was brought in to me from Mrs. MacEllen. I have never had to control your movements, my mother-in-law wrote. I sent the chase to Mr. Benjamin's house, and I sincerely trust that you will not take your place in it. I wish I could persuade you, Valeria, how truly I am your friend. I have been thinking about you anxiously in the wakeful hours of the night. How anxiously you will understand when I tell you that I now reproach myself for not having done more than I did to prevent your unhappy marriage. And yet, what more I could have done I don't really know. My son admitted to me that he was courting your under-insumed name, but he never told me what the name was. Or who you were, or where your friends lived. Perhaps I ought to have taken measures to find this out. Perhaps if I had succeeded, I ought to have interfered and enlightened you even at the sacrifice of making an enemy of my own son. I honestly thought I did my duty in expressing my disapproval and in refusing to be present at the marriage. Was I too easily satisfied? It is too late to ask. Why do I trouble you with an old woman's vain misgivings and regrets? My child, if you come to any harm, I shall feel indirectly responsible for it. It is this uneasy state of mind which sets me righting with nothing to say that can interest you. Don't go to Dexter. The fear has been pursuing me all night that you are going to Dexter will end badly. Write him an excuse. Valeria, I firmly believe you will repent it if you return to that house. Was every woman more plainly warned, more carefully advised than I? And yet warning and advice were both thrown away on me. Let me say for myself that I was really touched by the kindness of my mother-in-law's letter, though I was not shaken by it in the smallest degree. As long as I lived, moved, and thought, my one purpose now was to make Miserimus Dexter confide to me his ideas on the subject of Mrs. Eustace MacAllan's death. To those ideas I looked as my guiding stars along the dark way on which I was going. I wrote back to Mrs. MacAllan as I really felt gratefully and penitently. And then I went out to the chase. End of Chapter 26