Complete Works of Wilkie Collins (946 page)

Mrs. Macallan 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 Miserrimus 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. Macallan. I laid my hand, as if by accident, on the wheel-chair to keep him near me.

“You showed me how highly you esteemed that poor lady in your evidence at the Trial,” I said. “I believe, Mr. 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 used. 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!” he 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 to-night!” he said. “I would give worlds to hear it, but I daren’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 martyred dead. 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 fit is on me, I should go mad. I let myself loose. It lasts for hours. It leaves me with my energies worn out, with my sensibilities frightfully acute. Rouse any melancholy or terrible associations 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 chaise and a pony. Ariel, my delicate Ariel, can drive. She shall call at Mamma Macallan’s and fetch you. We will talk to-morrow, 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. Macallan 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. Miserrimus Dexter was working it with one hand only. In the other he held a harp of a pattern which I had hitherto only seen in pictures. The strings were few in number, 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 bards.

“Good-night, Dexter,” said Mrs. Macallan.

He held up one hand imperatively.

“Wait!” he said. “Let her hear me sing.” He turned to me. “I decline 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 which reminded me of the severer harmonies of the old Gregorian chants. The words, when they followed the prelude, were as wild, as recklessly free from all restraint of critical rules, as the music. They were assuredly 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 lost; 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, surmises, 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 strings more and more feebly as he approached the last lines. The overwrought brain needed 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 harp, as a child sleeps hugging its last new toy.

We stole out of the room on tiptoe, and left Miserrimus Dexter — poet, composer, and madman — in his peaceful sleep.

CHAPTER XXVI. 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 led the way down the dark garden walk, and locked the gate behind us. “Good-night, Ariel,” I called out to her over the paling. Nothing answered me but the tramp of her heavy footsteps returning to the house, and the dull thump, a moment afterward, of the closing door.

The footman had thoughtfully lighted the carriage lamps. Carrying one of them to serve as a lantern, he lighted us over the wilds of the brick desert, and landed us safely on the path by the high-road.

“Well!” said my mother-in-law, when we were comfortably seated in the carriage again. “You have seen Miserrimus Dexter, and I hope you are satisfied. I will do him the justice to declare that I never, in all my experience, saw him more completely crazy than he was to-night. What do
you
say?”

“I don’t presume to dispute your opinion,” I answered. “But, speaking for myself, I’m not quite sure that he is mad.”

“Not mad!” cried Mrs. Macallan, “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. Macallan, I saw everything that you mention, 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 which 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 fairies, to be queens, to be anything, in short, but what we really are. Mr. Dexter lets out the secret just as the children do, and if that is madness, he is certainly mad. But I noticed that when his imagination cooled down he became Miserrimus Dexter again — he no more believed himself than we believed him to be Napoleon or Shakespeare. Besides, some allowance is surely to be made for the solitary, sedentary life that he leads. I am not learned enough to trace the influence of that life in making him what he is; but I think I can see the result in an over-excited imagination, and I fancy I can trace his exhibiting his power over the poor cousin and his singing of that wonderful song to no more formidable cause than inordinate 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, worse still, Miserrimus Dexter really interests me.”

“Does this learned discourse on Dexter mean that you are going to see him again?” asked Mrs. Macallan.

“I don’t know how I may feel about it tomorrow 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. Macallan, 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. I know I am not prudent; but prudence won’t help a woman in my position, with my end to gain.”

Mrs. Macallan 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, you 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!”

I willingly obeyed her. Ever since she had informed me of Eustace’s 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 this 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. Macallan 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 contented to let matters rest as they were! Oh, if she had never discovered the miserable truth!