Complete Works of Wilkie Collins (1738 page)

I have now told you everything that I know for certain, in relation to the man whom I brought back to life in the double-bedded room of the Inn at Doncaster. What I have next to add is matter for inference and surmise, and is not, strictly speaking, matter of fact.

I have to tell you, first, that the medical student turned out to be strangely and unaccountably right in assuming it as more than probable that Arthur Holliday would marry the young lady who had given him the water-colour drawing of the landscape. That marriage took place a little more than a year after the events occurred which I have just been relating.

The young couple came to live in the neighbourhood in which I was then established in practice. I was present at the wedding, and was rather surprised to find that Arthur was singularly reserved with me, both before and after his marriage, on the subject of the young lady’s prior engagement. He only referred to it once, when we were alone, merely telling me, on that occasion, that his wife had done all that honour and duty required of her in the matter, and that the engagement had been is broken off with the full approval of her parents. I never heard more from him than this. For three years he and his wife lived together happily. At the expiration of that time, the symptoms of a serious illness first declared themselves in Mrs. Arthur Holliday. It turned out to be a long, lingering, hopeless malady. I attended her throughout. We had been great friends when she was well, and we became more attached to each other than ever when she was ill. I had many long and interesting conversations with her in the intervals when she suffered least. The result of one of those conversations I may briefly relate, leaving you to draw any inferences from it that you please.

The interview to which I refer, occurred shortly before her death.

I called one evening, as usual, and found her s alone, with a look in her eyes which told me she had been crying. She only informed me, at first, that she had been depressed in spirits; but, by little and little, she became more communicative. and confessed to me that she had been looking over some old letters, which had been addressed to her, before she had seen Arthur, by a man to whom she had been engaged to be married. I asked her how the engagement came to be broken off. She replied that it had not been broken off, but that it had died out in a very mysterious manner. The person to whom she was engaged — her first love, she called him — was poor, and there was no immediate prospect of their being married. He followed my profession, and went abroad to study. They had corresponded regularly, until the time when, as she believed, he had returned to England. From that period she heard no more of him. He was of a fretful, sensitive temperament; and she feared that she might have inadvertently done or said something to offend him. However that might be, he had never written to her again; and, after waiting a year, she had married Arthur. I asked when the first estrangement had begun, and found that the time at which she ceased to hear anything of her first lover, exactly corresponded with the time at which I had been called in to my mysterious patient at The Two Robins Inn.

A fortnight after that conversation, she died. In s course of time Arthur married again. Of late years, he has lived principally in London, and I have seen little or nothing of him.

I have some years to pass over before I can approach to anything like a conclusion of this fragmentary narrative. And even when that later period is reached, the little that I have to say will not occupy your attention for more than a few minutes.

One rainy autumn evening, while I was still n practising as a country doctor, I was sitting alone, thinking over a case then under my charge which sorely perplexed me, when I heard a low knock at the door of my room.

“Come in,” I cried, looking up curiously to see who wanted me.

After a momentary delay, the lock moved, and a long, white, bony hand stole round the door as it opened, gently pushing it over a fold in the carpet which hindered it from working freely on the hinges. The hand was followed by a man whose face instantly struck me with a very strange sensation There was something familiar to me m the look of him, and yet it was also something that suggested the idea of change.

He quietly introduced himself as “Mr. Lorn;” presented to me some excellent professional recommendations; and proposed to fill the place, then vacant, of my assistant. While he was speaking, I noticed it as singular that we did not appear to be meeting each other like strangers; and that, while I was certainly startled at seeing him, he did not appear to be at all startled at seeing me.

It was on the tip of my tongue to say that I thought I had met with him before. But there was something in his face, and something in my recollections — I can hardly say what — which unaccountably restrained me from speaking, and which, as unaccountably, attracted me to him at once, and made me feel ready and glad to accept his proposal.

He took his assistant’s place on that very day. We got on together as if we had been old friends from the first; but, throughout the whole time of his residence in my house, he never volunteered any confidences on the subject of his past life; and I never approached the forbidden topic except by hints, which he resolutely refused to understand.

I had long had a notion that my patient at the Inn might have been a natural son of the elder Mr. Holliday’s, and that he might also have been the man who was engaged to Arthur’s first wife. And now, another idea occurred to me, that Mr. Lorn was the only person in existence who could, if he chose, enlighten me on both those doubtful points. But he never did choose — and I was never enlightened. He remained with me till I removed to London to try my fortune there, as a physician, for the second time; and then he went his way, and I went mine, and we have never seen one another since.

I can add no more. I may have been right in my suspicion, or I may have been wrong. All I know is that, in those days of my country practice, when I came home late, and found my assistant asleep, and woke him, he used to look, in coming to, wonderfully like the stranger at Doncaster, as he raised himself in the bed on that memorable night.

(Provided by Mitsuharu Matsuoka, Nagoya University, Japan,
on 21 October 1997.)

This story originally appeared in the New York Periodical
The Spirit of the Times
20 December 1879 as ‘The Magic Spectacles’. It was reprinted under the same title in
The Seaside Library
in June 1880. In the UK it appeared under Wilkie’s preferred title ‘The Devil’s Spectacles’ in local newspapers including the
Bath Herald
 in two parts 20, 27 December 1879. In January
1887 Collins wrote a note concerning ‘The Devil’s Spectacles’, ‘Love’s Random Shot’ and ‘Fie! Fie! Or, the Fair Physician’:

“These stories have served their purpose in periodicals, but are not worthy of republication in book form. They were written in a hurry, and the sooner they are drowned in the waters of oblivion the better. I desire that they shall not be republished after my death.” All of them were excluded from the collection of short stories
Little Novels
published in March 1887.
 
Collins’ own eyesight had deteriorated greatly by the time he wrote ‘The Devil’s Spectacles’. He was paid £35 for the story.

I
      MEMOIRS OF AN ARCTIC VOYAGER

He says, sir, he thinks he’s nigh to his latter end, and he would like, if convenient, to see you before he goes.’

‘Do you mean before he dies?’

‘That’s about it, sir.’

I was in no humour (for reasons to be hereafter mentioned) for seeing anybody, under disastrous circumstances of any sort; but the person who had sent me word that he was ‘nigh to his latter end’ had special claims on my consideration.

He was an old sailor, who had first seen blue water under the protection of my father, then a post-captain in the navy. Born on our estate, and the only male survivor of our head gamekeeper’s family of seven children, he had received a good education through my father’s kindness, and he ought to have got on well in the world; but he was one of those born vagabonds who set education at defiance. His term of service having expired, he disappeared for many years. During part of the time he was supposed to have been employed in the merchant navy. At the end of that long interval he turned up one day at our country house, an invalided man, without a penny in his pocket. My good father, then nearing the end of his life, was invalided too. Whether he had a fellow-feeling for the helpless creature whom he had once befriended, or whether he only took counsel of his own generous nature, it is now needless to inquire. He appointed Septimus Notman to be lodge-keeper at the second of our two park gates, and he recommended Septimus to my personal care on his deathbed. ‘I’m afraid he’s an old scoundrel,’ my father confessed; ‘but somebody must look after him as long as he lasts, and if you don’t take his part, Alfred, nobody else will.’ After this Septimus kept his place at the gate while we were in the country. When we returned to our London house the second gate was closed. The old sailor was lodged (by a strong exertion of my influence) in a room over a disused stable, which our coachman had proposed to turn into a hayloft. Everybody disliked Septimus Notman. He was said to be mad; to be a liar, a hypocrite, a vicious wretch, and a disagreeable brute. There were people who even reported that he had been a pirate during the time when we lost sight of him and who declared, when they were asked for their proof, that his crimes were written in his face. He was not in the least affected by the opinions of his neighbours; he chewed his tobacco and drank his grog, and, in the words of the old song, ‘He cared for nobody, no, not he!’ Well had my poor father said, that I didn’t take his part nobody else would. And shall I tell you a secret? Though I strictly carried out my father’s wishes, and though Septimus was disposed in his own rough way to be grateful to me, I didn’t like him either.

So I went to the room over the stables (we were in London at the time) with dry eyes and I sat down by his bed and cut up a cake of tobacco for him, and said, ‘Well, what’s the matter?’ as coolly as if he had sent me word that he thought he had caught a cold in the head. ‘I’m called away.’ Septimus answered, ‘and before I go I’ve got a confession to make, and something useful to offer you. It’s reported among the servants, Mr Alfred, that you’re in trouble just now between two ladies. You may see your way clear in that matter, sir, if death spares me long enough to say a few last words.’

‘Never mind me, Septimus. Has a doctor seen you?’

‘The doctor knows no more about me than I know myself. The doctor be — !’

‘Have you any last wishes I can attend to?’

‘None, sir.’

‘Shall I send for a clergyman?’

Septimus Notman looked at me as directly as he could — he was afflicted with a terrible squint. Otherwise he was a fine, stoutly-built man, with a ruddy face profusely encircled by white hair and whiskers, a hoarse, heavy voice, and the biggest hands I ever saw. He put one of these enormous hands under his pillow before he answered me.

‘If you think,’ he said, ‘that a clergyman will come to a man who has got the Devil’s Spectacles here, under his pillow, and who has only to put those Spectacles on to see through that clergyman’s clothes, flesh, and what not, and read everything that’s written in his secret mind as plain as print, fetch him, Master Alfred — fetch him!’