Complete Works of Wilkie Collins (602 page)

He threw open the door of a room at one extremity of the corridor, numbered Four. “Look in, ladies and gentlemen,” he said; “and, if you see anything remarkable, pray mention it.”

The room was not very large, but it was well lit by one broad window. Comfortably furnished as a bedroom, it was only remarkable among other rooms of the same sort in one way. It had no fireplace. The visitors having noticed this, were informed that the room was warmed in winter by means of hot water; and were then invited back again into the corridor, to make the discoveries, under professional direction, which they were unable to make for themselves.

“A word, ladies and gentlemen,” said the doctor; “literally a word, on nervous derangement first. What is the process of treatment, when, let us say, mental anxiety has broken you down, and you apply to your doctor? He sees you, hears you, and gives you two prescriptions. One is written on paper, and made up at the chemist’s. The other is administered by word of mouth, at the propitious moment when the fee is ready; and consists in a general recommendation to you to keep your mind easy. That excellent advice given, your doctor leaves you to spare yourself all earthly annoyances by your own unaided efforts, until he calls again. Here my System steps in and helps you! When
I
see the necessity of keeping your mind easy, I take the bull by the horns and do it for you. I place you in a sphere of action in which the ten thousand trifles which must, and do, irritate nervous people at home are expressly considered and provided against. I throw up impregnable moral intrenchments between Worry and You. Find a door banging in
this
house, if you can! Catch a servant in
this
house rattling the tea-things when he takes away the tray! Discover barking dogs, crowing cocks, hammering workmen, screeching children
here
— and I engage to close My Sanitarium to-morrow! Are these nuisances laughing matters to nervous people? Ask them! Can they escape these nuisances at home? Ask them! Will ten minutes’ irritation from a barking dog or a screeching child undo every atom of good done to a nervous sufferer by a month’s medical treatment? There isn’t a competent doctor in England who will venture to deny it! On those plain grounds my System is based. I assert the medical treatment of nervous suffering to be entirely subsidiary to the moral treatment of it. That moral treatment of it you find here. That moral treatment, sedulously pursued throughout the day, follows the sufferer into his room at night; and soothes, helps and cures him, without his own knowledge — you shall see how.”

The doctor paused to take breath and looked, for the first time since the visitors had entered the house, at Miss Gwilt. For the first time, on her side, she stepped forward among the audience, and looked at him in return. After a momentary obstruction in the shape of a cough, the doctor went on.

“Say, ladies and gentlemen,” he proceeded, “that my patient has just come in. His mind is one mass of nervous fancies and caprices, which his friends (with the best possible intentions) have been ignorantly irritating at home. They have been afraid of him, for instance, at night. They have forced him to have somebody to sleep in the room with him, or they have forbidden him, in case of accidents, to lock his door. He comes to me the first night, and says: ‘Mind, I won’t have anybody in my room!’ — ’Certainly not!’ — ’I insist on locking my door.’ — ’By all means!’ In he goes, and locks his door; and there he is, soothed and quieted, predisposed to confidence, predisposed to sleep, by having his own way. ‘This is all very well,’ you may say; ‘but suppose something happens, suppose he has a fit in the night, what then?’ You shall see! Hallo, my young friend!” cried the doctor, suddenly addressing the sleepy little boy. “Let’s have a game. You shall be the poor sick man, and I’ll be the good doctor. Go into that room and lock the door. There’s a brave boy! Have you locked it? Very good! Do you think I can’t get at you if I like? I wait till you’re asleep — I press this little white button, hidden here in the stencilled pattern of the outer wall — the mortise of the lock inside falls back silently against the door-post — and I walk into the room whenever I like. The same plan is pursued with the window. My capricious patient won’t open it at night, when he ought. I humour him again. ‘Shut it, dear sir, by all means!’ As soon as he is asleep, I pull the black handle hidden here, in the corner of the wall. The window of the room inside noiselessly opens, as you see. Say the patient’s caprice is the other way — he persists in opening the window when he ought to shut it. Let him! by all means, let him! I pull a second handle when he is snug in his bed, and the window noiselessly closes in a moment. Nothing to irritate him, ladies and gentlemen — absolutely nothing to irritate him! But I haven’t done with him yet. Epidemic disease, in spite of all my precautions, may enter this Sanitarium, and may render the purifying of the sick-room necessary. Or the patient’s case may be complicated by other than nervous malady — say, for instance, asthmatic difficulty of breathing. In the one case, fumigation is necessary; in the other, additional oxygen in the air will give relief. The epidemic nervous patient says, ‘I won’t be smoked under my own nose!’ The asthmatic nervous patient gasps with terror at the idea of a chemical explosion in his room. I noiselessly fumigate one of them; I noiselessly oxygenize the other, by means of a simple Apparatus fixed outside in the corner here. It is protected by this wooden casing; it is locked with my own key; and it communicates by means of a tube with the interior of the room. Look at it!”

With a preliminary glance at Miss Gwilt, the doctor unlocked the lid of the wooden casing, and disclosed inside nothing more remarkable than a large stone jar, having a glass funnel, and a pipe communicating with the wall, inserted in the cork which closed the mouth of it. With another look at Miss Gwilt, the doctor locked the lid again, and asked, in the blandest manner, whether his System was intelligible now?

“I might introduce you to all sorts of other contrivances of the same kind,” he resumed, leading the way downstairs; “but it would be only the same thing over and over again. A nervous patient who always has his own way is a nervous patient who is never worried; and a nervous patient who is never worried is a nervous patient cured. There it is in a nutshell! Come and see the Dispensary, ladies; the Dispensary and the kitchen next!”

Once more, Miss Gwilt dropped behind the visitors, and waited alone — looking steadfastly at the Room which the doctor had opened, and at the apparatus which the doctor had unlocked. Again, without a word passing between them, she had understood him. She knew, as well as if he had confessed it, that he was craftily putting the necessary temptation in her way, before witnesses who could speak to the superficially innocent acts which they had seen, if anything serious happened. The apparatus, originally constructed to serve the purpose of the doctor’s medical crotchets, was evidently to be put to some other use, of which the doctor himself had probably never dreamed till now. And the chances were that, before the day was over, that other use would be privately revealed to her at the right moment, in the presence of the right witness. “Armadale will die this time,” she said to herself, as she went slowly down the stairs. “The doctor will kill him, by my hands.”

The visitors were in the Dispensary when she joined them. All the ladies were admiring the beauty of the antique cabinet; and, as a necessary consequence, all the ladies were desirous of seeing what was inside. The doctor — after a preliminary look at Miss Gwilt — good-humoredly shook his head. “There is nothing to interest you inside,” he said. “Nothing but rows of little shabby bottles containing the poisons used in medicine which I keep under lock and key. Come to the kitchen, ladies, and honour me with your advice on domestic matters below stairs.” He glanced again at Miss Gwilt as the company crossed the hall, with a look which said plainly, “Wait here.”

In another quarter of an hour the doctor had expounded his views on cookery and diet, and the visitors (duly furnished with prospectuses) were taking leave of him at the door. “Quite an intellectual treat!” they said to each other, as they streamed out again in neatly dressed procession through the iron gates. “And what a very superior man!”

The doctor turned back to the Dispensary, humming absently to himself, and failing entirely to observe the corner of the hall in which Miss Gwilt stood retired. After an instant’s hesitation, she followed him. The assistant was in the room when she entered it — summoned by his employer the moment before.

“Doctor,” she said, coldly and mechanically, as if she was repeating a lesson, “I am as curious as the other ladies about that pretty cabinet of yours. Now they are all gone, won’t you show the inside of it to
me
?”

The doctor laughed in his pleasantest manner.

“The old story,” he said. “Blue-Beard’s locked chamber, and female curiosity! (Don’t go, Benjamin, don’t go.) My dear lady, what interest can you possibly have in looking at a medical bottle, simply because it happens to be a bottle of poison?”

She repeated her lesson for the second time.

“I have the interest of looking at it,” she said, “and of thinking, if it got into some people’s hands, of the terrible things it might do.”

The doctor glanced at his assistant with a compassionate smile.

“Curious, Benjamin,” he said, “the romantic view taken of these drugs of ours by the unscientific mind! My dear lady,” he added, turning to Miss Gwilt, “if
that
is the interest you attach to looking at poisons, you needn’t ask me to unlock my cabinet — you need only look about you round the shelves of this room. There are all sorts of medical liquids and substances in those bottles — most innocent, most useful in themselves — which, in combination with other substances and other liquids, become poisons as terrible and as deadly as any that I have in my cabinet under lock and key.”

She looked at him for a moment, and creased to the opposite side of the room.

“Show me one,” she said,

Still smiling as good-humoredly as ever, the doctor humored his nervous patient. He pointed to the bottle from which he had privately removed the yellow liquid on the previous day, and which he had filled up again with a carefully-coloured imitation in the shape of a mixture of his own.

“Do you see that bottle,” he said — ”that plump, round, comfortable-looking bottle? Never mind the name of what is beside it; let us stick to the bottle, and distinguish it, if you like, by giving it a name of our own. Suppose we call it ‘our Stout Friend’? Very good. Our Stout Friend, by himself, is a most harmless and useful medicine. He is freely dispensed every day to tens of thousands of patients all over the civilized world. He has made no romantic appearances in courts of law; he has excited no breathless interest in novels; he has played no terrifying part on the stage. There he is, an innocent, inoffensive creature, who troubles nobody with the responsibility of locking him up!
But
bring him into contact with something else — introduce him to the acquaintance of a certain common mineral substance, of a universally accessible kind, broken into fragments; provide yourself with (say) six doses of our Stout Friend, and pour those doses consecutively on the fragments I have mentioned, at intervals of not less than five minutes. Quantities of little bubbles will rise at every pouring; collect the gas in those bubbles, and convey it into a closed chamber — and let Samson himself be in that closed chamber; our stout Friend will kill him in half an hour! Will kill him slowly, without his seeing anything, without his smelling anything, without his feeling anything but sleepiness. Will kill him, and tell the whole College of Surgeons nothing, if they examine him after death, but that he died of apoplexy or congestion of the lungs! What do you think of
that
, my dear lady, in the way of mystery and romance? Is our harmless Stout Friend as interesting
now
as if he rejoiced in the terrible popular fame of the Arsenic and the Strychnine which I keep locked up there? Don’t suppose I am exaggerating! Don’t suppose I’m inventing a story to put you off with, as the children say. Ask Benjamin there,” said the doctor, appealing to his assistant, with his eyes fixed on Miss Gwilt. “Ask Benjamin,” he repeated, with the steadiest emphasis on the next words, “if six doses from that bottle, at intervals of five minutes each, would not, under the conditions I have stated, produce the results I have described?”

The Resident Dispenser, modestly admiring Miss Gwilt at a distance, started and coloured up. He was plainly gratified by the little attention which had included him in the conversation.

“The doctor is quite right, ma’am,” he said, addressing Miss Gwilt, with his best bow; “the production of the gas, extended over half an hour, would be quite gradual enough. And,” added the Dispenser, silently appealing to his employer to let him exhibit a little chemical knowledge on his own account, “the volume of the gas would be sufficient at the end of the time — if I am not mistaken, sir? — to be fatal to any person entering the room in less than five minutes.”

“Unquestionably, Benjamin,” rejoined the doctor. “But I think we have had enough of chemistry for the present,” he added, turning to Miss Gwilt. “With every desire, my dear lady, to gratify every passing wish you may form, I venture to propose trying a more cheerful subject. Suppose we leave the Dispensary, before it suggests any more inquiries to that active mind of yours? No? You want to see an experiment? You want to see how the little bubbles are made? Well, well! there is no harm in that. We will let Mrs. Armadale see the bubbles,” continued the doctor, in the tone of a parent humoring a spoiled child. “Try if you can find a few of those fragments that we want, Benjamin. I dare say the workmen (slovenly fellows!) have left something of the sort about the house or the grounds.”