Complete Works of Wilkie Collins (945 page)

“The lamp,” said Miserrimus 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. — Ariel! 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, Ariel 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; an imperfectly developed animal in shapeless form clad in a man’s pilot jacket, and treading in a man’s heavy laced boots, with nothing but an old red-flannel petticoat, and a broken comb in her frowzy 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), and addressed herself to her work.

She combed, she brushed, she oiled, she perfumed the flowing locks and the long silky beard of Miserrimus Dexter with the strangest mixture of dullness and dexterity that I ever saw. Done in brute silence, with a lumpish look and a clumsy gait, 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 Ariel in front of him, and so turned her full face toward the part of the room in which Mrs. Macallan and I were standing. Then he addressed us, taking especial care, however, not to turn his head our way while his toilet was still incomplete.

“Mamma Macallan,” he said, “what is the Christian name of your son’s second wife?”

“Why do you want to know?” asked my mother-in-law.

“I want to know because I can’t address her as ‘Mrs. Eustace Macallan.’“

“Why not?”

“It recalls
the other
Mrs. Eustace Macallan. If I am reminded of those horrible days at Gleninch my fortitude will give way — I shall burst out screaming again.”

Hearing this, I hastened to interpose.

“My name is Valeria,” I said.

“A Roman name,” remarked Miserrimus Dexter. “I like it. My mind is cast in the Roman mold. 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 hastened to say that I was far from disapproving of it.

“Very good,” said Miserrimus Dexter “Mrs. Valeria, do you see the face of this creature in front of me?”

He pointed with the 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 designated her. She went on combing and oiling his beard as composedly as ever.

“It is the face of an idiot, isn’t it?” pursued Miserrimus Dexter! “Look at her! She is a mere vegetable. A cabbage in a garden has 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, in 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 Miserrimus Dexter. “
I
hold the key to that dormant Intelligence. Grand thought! Now look at her when I speak. (I named her, poor wretch, 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. — Ariel!”

The girl’s dull face began to brighten. The girl’s mechanically moving hand stopped, and held the comb in suspense.

“Ariel! 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 life. Her strange unwomanly voice sank to the gentlest tones that I had heard from her yet.

“Nobody else shall do it for me,” she said at once proudly and tenderly. “Nobody, as long as I live, shall touch you but me.”

“Not even the lady there?” asked Miserrimus Dexter, pointing backward with his hand-mirror to 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 try!” cried the poor creature, raising her voice again to its hoarsest notes. “Let her touch you if she dares!”

Dexter laughed at the childish outbreak. “That will do, my delicate Ariel,” he said. “I dismiss your Intelligence for the present. Relapse into 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 the lifeless dexterity which had so painfully impressed me when she first took up the brush. Miserrimus 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 it some day.” He indulged himself in a last look at the mirror. “Ha!” he said, complacently; “now I shall do. Vanish, Ariel!”

She tramped out of the room in her heavy boots, 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 words 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 Miserrimus Dexter to speak to her again.

“Valeria!” 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 colour, the long delicate white hands, and the magnificent throat and chest which I have elsewhere described. The deformity which degraded and destroyed the manly beauty of his head and breast was hidden from view by an Oriental robe of many colours, 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 mustache 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 hid from view, would have 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 drooped; he lifted his hands with a gesture of regret. He muttered and murmured to himself; pursuing some secret and 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 fathom 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 martyred 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 favorite 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 and sighed. “Oh, that house of Gleninch!” he murmured, sadly, to himself. “Shall I never get away from it in my thoughts? Oh, that house of Gleninch!”

To my infinite disappointment, Mrs. Macallan checked the further revelation of what was passing in his mind.

Something in the tone and manner of his allusion 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 flashed 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 shortsighted 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 Eustace’s first wife?”

“Pure fancy!” rejoined Mrs. Macallan. “I see nothing of the sort.”

He shook her impatiently.

“Not 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 miserably she died. I have read the Trial.”

“You have read the life and death of a martyr!” cried Miserrimus 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!”