Chapter XIII: I Am Wooed to Self-Destruction

Dr. Peel’s Asylum was known generically as “The House,” perhaps in cynical allusion to its licensed irresponsibility to any laws but its own. It was conceived on the principle of an eel-pot--the easiest thing to slip, or be driven, into; the hardest to escape from. It was not so much an asylum as an oubliette; never so much a house of correction as of annihilation. There, in addition to the constitutionally weak-minded, troublesome heirs, irreclaimable prodigals, jealous wives, importunate creditors, distinguished blackmailers, chance recipients of deadly secrets--all such, in fact, as threatened the peace of that grand seigniory which has a prescriptive monopoly in it--could be immured by _lettre de cachet_ (it amounted to nothing less) from any accommodating physician, and afterwards “treated,” or disposed of, by private contract. Its methods were delicate, tasteful, and exceedingly sure. With rib-breaking, starvation, strait-waistcoats, all the vulgar apparatus of the ordinary _médecin de fous_, it had no commerce. Where the removal of undesirables was in question, it rather killed with kindness; suffocated, like Heliogabalus, with roses; persuaded to the happy despatch with a silken cord. It drove its poor Judases to suicide by putting by, as useless, their moral reparations, and took care to have at hand the seductive means. If one escaped--a rare occurrence--it possessed a kennel of highly trained bloodhounds, whose belling warned the dark nights with menace. It asked no questions, and expected to be asked none. Its formula was a hint and a cheque.

The asylum _ménage_ was perfectly refined, and its cuisine lavish. It entertained none but the nominees of the wealthy. The extensive grounds of the house were a literal maze of beauty, the shrubberies being so disposed as to preclude all thought of restraint. It was only upon piercing them, at any point, that one found oneself opposed by a high boundary wall, which contained between itself and the estate it enclosed a waste interval incessantly patrolled, day and night, by the asylum watch. Then, indeed, one realised the iron hand in the velvet glove, and started back dismayed from the grin of the nearest sentry whom one’s movements had called light-footed to the spot.

“A fine view, mum,” he might say, stepping up between ingratiatory and insolent. “Was you looking for anything?”

Whereupon one would do best to retire, and precipitately; because there was no appeal from any brutality offered, in his own domain, by any servant of, or partner in, this lawless oligarchy.

Rising from my little bed, and mattresses full of fragrance and down, on the morning first after my arrival--rising, fevered and exhausted, to the full realisation of my awful position, my eyes encountered the vision of a wholesome, even luxurious, little chamber, and through an unbarred window a most heavenly prospect. I could hardly believe in the reality of my fate. This was no prison, but an inn, to escape from which it seemed only necessary to pay the score, and have the landlord cry “Bon voyage!” I remembered him the night before--a little tough, square man, drily courteous in manner, with the head and depressed forehead of a burglar. He had been already on the steps to receive me, when we drove up, standing in a patch of light with an expression on his face as if we had caught him in the act of breaking into his own premises. Those we had reached, within two hours of my first kidnapping, by dark and devious roads. They stood, remote from all other homesteads, a little colony self-contained, some six miles south of Shole.

On the way thither I had soon abandoned all thought of resistance, or of appeal to my captors. They may have heard my sobs and prayers with a certain emotion: virtuous distress had no chance to prevail with cupidity. I sunk into a sullen apathy, my heart smouldering with rage, principally against the craven who had either betrayed me to this living death, or, at least, had weakly acquiesced in my doom. The prospect of revenge, though alternating with despair, alone preserved me from a condition of the last prostration. And in this state I was driven up to the House, and to it consigned, the sold slave of madness.

In the first terror, with staring eyes, a storm in my breast that would not rise and break, dishevelled hair, and, it may be, a look of the part I was called upon to play, I shrunk into a corner of the room into which I was introduced, and stood there panting. Dr. Peel went into a thin chuckle of laughter, curiously small and inward from so thick-set a frame.

“Brava!” said he. “Very well observed, madam! But, if you will look round, you will see there are no bolts, no bars, no locks here, save as the ordinary appurtenances of a domestic household.”

There were not, indeed, to the common view. To most doors, as I came to discover, the locks were inside; and, where it was otherwise, it was--mark this!--to insure from any chance insane attack, especially at night, the lives of those which it was particularly desired should be preserved. To be given the full freedom of the House was always a significant privilege, implying, as it did, one of two things: either that the proprietor had accepted at the outset a round sum down for one’s perpetual incarceration, or a hint that one’s accidental removal would be handsomely acknowledged by those interested.

Now, as I said, waking on that first morning to free prospects, my spirit experienced a rebound to the most delightful reassurance. Surely, I thought, no worse harm could be designed me than the punishment implied in my enforced temporary detention in this charming home, where, it seemed likely, a nominal deprivation of one’s liberty was used to convey a gentle moral or adorn a kindly tale of reproval. I waxed jubilant. If a meek acquiescence in my fate delayed to move my jailers to liberate me, I was confident that my wits would soon find me a way to free myself from so indulgent a thraldom. And in the meantime I would resign myself to the enjoyment of a very novel experience.

A loud bell summoned us all to breakfast, _à la table d’hôte_, in a pleasant refectory. Dr. Peel took the head of the table, and a plenty of attentive lackeys waited. There was no restriction, nor interference with one’s individual tastes. I accepted silently the place assigned me between a gaunt, supernaturally solemn gentleman, with mended clothes, a wigless head, and prominent fixed eyes, and the tiniest, most conceited-looking creature with humped shoulders I have ever seen. An uproarious gabble of conversation, interspersed with occasional hoots and groans, accompanied the meal throughout. Occasionally my solemn neighbour would turn to me and remark, fiercely, as though daring a contradiction, “Enough is as good as a feast; but more than enough is less than nothing.”

On the third repetition of this formula, the little man on my other side addressed me with an ill-tempered chuckle--

“Bring him down, ma’am, bring him down, or the creature will scorch his head in the moon.”

While I was shrinking back in confusion, Dr. Peel bent to the solemnity.

“Captain,” says he, with an ingratiatory grin, “you’re drinking nothing.”

“I don’t want anything,” said the other, in a loud, bullying voice.

“Nonsense,” answered the doctor. “You must keep up your character. Here, John.”

He spoke to a lackey, who was ready on the moment with a decanter. To my amazement, the man filled up the gentleman’s breakfast cup with raw brandy.

He shifted, glared, hesitated, and caught up the pungent stuff.

“Enough is as good as a feast, but more than enough is less than nothing,” howled he, and swallowed the fire at a draught.

He had hardly consumed it, when he cast the cup into splinters on the board, staggered to his feet, and, moaning to himself, left the room. The conversation died down for a moment, and was instantly resumed more recklessly than ever. I felt suddenly sick.

“He-he!” sniggered my little companion. “He’s been long taking his hint, the fool, and outstaying his welcome. But Peel’s done it at last, I do believe.”

I did not ask him what. My spirit felt engulfed in deep waters of terror. I sat dumb and shivering, till the meal ended, and the company broke up and dispersed itself about the grounds. Many, rude, curious, fantastic, came about me to inquire, mockingly or fulsomely, into my malady. To all their solicitations my little companion, who had appropriated me, turned a rough shoulder and rougher tongue.

“The lady has confided her case to me, you pestilent cranks!” he screamed, and succeeded in extricating and convoying me to a remoter part of the grounds. On the way we encountered two men, like gamekeepers, carrying a ghastly sheet-covered burden on a litter.

“Ho-ho!” said my friend, stopping. “It was arranged for the tower, was it?”

“Now, lookee here, Jimmy,” said one of the carriers, while the two paused for a moment, “you’re too precious fond of poking your nose where you ain’t wanted, you are. You go along to your games, and leave your elders to theirs till you’re growed up.”

“Grown up!” screeched my companion, whose chin, indeed, was thick with a grey bristle, “grown up, you puppy, you calf, you insolent lout!”

Crazy in a moment, he danced in the path, screaming and shaking his fists. The men resumed their way, laughing. Suddenly he caught himself to a sort of reason, white and shaking.

“They want to drive me to it,” he said. “They want me to break a blood-vessel; but I see through them, and I won’t be drawn.”

He wiped his forehead, and looked anxiously up in my face.

“You see it, don’t you?” he said. “The fools are envious of my inches. But you ain’t, are you, being a woman?”

“No, no,” I said, smiling, in a sort of ghastly spasm, in full understanding of his mania. “No, no; or should I select you for my champion in this? Let us go on, _please_. Was that--?”

“Yes,” he answered, the question that my fainting spirit shrunk from formulating, “yes, it was the Captain--good riddance to a conceited ass.”

He strutted along, pluming himself on my praise. All that I have stated--the truth about this smiling, damned Gehenna--I drew from him then or thereafter. I cannot recall it now without a shudder like death’s.

Once that morning we came, in a retired corner, upon the prettiest, greenest graveyard--the sweetest God’s-acre, God pity it! in all the sad world. It was studded with quiet flowers, screened with fragrant shrubs, thick with graves, _each a nameless grassy barrow_. What depth of tragedy in it all! I cannot, I vow, dwell any longer on the picture, but must cover the details of it at a gallop.

I was nine weeks, before I found release, in this appalling hell--a time the most stupendous of my life. I will acquit the Lady Sophia of intending the worst; I cannot acquit her of implying it. Whether from jealousy, or a true conviction as to the unpardonable nature of my recreancy, she failed, at least, to assure the instruments of her cruelty that my death-sentence was not intimated in the bond. It is possible she may have been totally ignorant of the real character of the place to which she condemned me. She is none the less responsible for the conclusions the Rhadamanthus of that inferno elected to draw from her dubiety. Anyhow, I am convinced that my destruction was designed, before I had been there many days.

In the meantime--O, my Alcide, pity thy Diane! What had she done to merit this fate, the most awful that could befall a brilliant sanity? Very, very soon that early buoyancy was like nothing but the memory of a bright star, that had exploded and scattered as soon as realised. A sickness, a deadly apprehension, took its place; a sense of some creeping, circumventing terror, which hemmed me in, stealthy and pitiless, concentrating my thoughts on a single point in this cursed paradise. I was inoculated with the disease of the morbid intellects about me. My reason suffered deliberate contamination by the remorseless ghoul my keeper. No fewer than three times during my short sojourn in his inferno did the corpse of a self-destroyer witness to the success of his methods. They went to swell the bloody tally of shrouds under the grass in the little graveyard; and, thinking of them there, their awful waiting testimony, I would look up to find the evil eye of their murderer fixed upon me in covert, lustful speculation.

For long I remained incredulous that my wit could be utterly impotent to devise a means to escape. Gradually, only, the sinister watchfulness which guarded every outlet of this green prison, and the fiendish incorruptibility of its warders, was bitten into my brain. Pleas and graces were accepted for nothing but an encouragement to unwelcome attentions, indeed. It was not supposed that one could be insane and modest. Many sold their virtue for a little surcease from tyranny, bartered their dearer than life for a poor extension of living. At the same time, and for the same reason, a most rigid embargo was placed on all communications with the outside world. Worse than a Russian censorship doomed these utter exiles from hope.

In the worst of my despair I had written to Patty, to de Crespigny, begging them to intercede for me with the cruel woman, who yet _could_ not be aware of the inhuman character of her revenge. Finally, I wrote to madam herself--an appeal that would have melted a heart of stone. My cries were uttered into space. They were never allowed, in spite of all specious pretence, to penetrate the boundaries of my doom. They recoiled only upon my own fated head, precipitating its calamity, and the swifter because I was persistent in justifying my birth-name to my hateful would-be destroyer.

The little craze they called Jimmy was my sole stay and buckler. He attached himself to me vigorously, and by his quickness and waspishness more than made up for his lack of inches. I never knew who he was, or immured at whose instigation. There was warrant, anyhow, for his detention; yet not sufficient, it appeared, for his “removal.” His philosophy of madness was just a counterbuff to that of the deceased Captain. If, in short, more than enough was less than nothing, then less than nothing was more than enough; wherefore Jimmy, twitted with being less than nothing, knew himself really to be greatly better than most, though he could never get over the envy of smaller souls in refusing him the credit of his stature. What is apparently little is relatively great, he often assured me, while bemoaning his inability to knock the truism into the thin asparagus heads that shot above his own sturdy one. He spent the most of his time, and I with him, in what was known as the workshop--a detached ivy-grown shed, buried amongst trees, very private, and with a deep well in it, and furnished with all sorts of dangerous tools for cranks of a mechanical turn. There he wrought incessantly, for he was a capable carpenter; and there, watching and helping him, I strove to forget something of my misery. One morning, entering this shed, we found a little group of employés gathered about the well, talking and laughing, and fishing with a long grapnel. A partition separated us from the obscene crew, whose movements, unobserved by them, we crouched to watch.

“A thousand to one it’s old Star-jelly,” whispered my companion. “’Twas plain from the first the creature was booked.”

They hauled it to the surface while he muttered--a sodden body caught by its waistband and doubled backwards--and slopped their hideous burden on the floor. The white sightless face settled backwards, as if with a sigh of rest, and I could hardly refrain from a scream of terror. I had known this poor thing for the few days since he had been admitted--a wreck so torn, so noisome, so straining the remnant of life through fretted lungs, it should have seemed a mockery to precipitate its end. I had known, and never, till now seeing it clothed in the white uniform of death, had recognised it. It was the mad incubus of “Rupert’s Folly,” caught somehow tripping at last and consigned to his doom. The red earl had succeeded by long waiting in curing himself of this itch. He was one of a deadly persistent family.

That night I could not even cry myself to sleep.

I don’t know how it was that I was at last driven to visit the Suicide Tower. I had caught glimpses, remote in the grounds, of a picturesque, creeper-hung pagoda set in flowering thickets; but had always, since that first morning of deadly association with it, turned with loathing from the sight. Now, somehow, by degrees, the thing began to impress itself with a certain fascination on me. I felt drawn to it by a horrible curiosity, none the less morbidly self-indulgent because I knew that my jailer, a proselyte of the subtle Mesmer, had long been practising to master my will and get me entirely under his influence. Snuffing here, nibbling there, as it were, like a heifer approaching in pretended unconsciousness the stranger in the field, I gradually lost my power of resistance, the circumference of my orbit slowly lessened, until, behold! one day the attraction found me helpless to oppose it, and, with a little cry to myself, I yielded and went rapidly towards the tower. As I approached the spot, I could hardly feel my limbs; my soul, penetrated with a sort of exquisite nausea, seemed already straining to leave the earth; a mist, luminous, vaguely peopled, eddied before my eyes. Perhaps a confidence derived from the possession of my duck-stone--which all this time I had been jealous to preserve, using it even occasionally, in moments of prostration, for a drug to my nerves--conduced to my undervaluing the force of temptations to which I owned such a counter-charm. In any case, I made so little resistance in the end, that the evil thing concealed amongst the thick bushes by the tower, whence and whither he had drawn me by his spells, must have chuckled to see me so easily netted.

The place was perfectly silent and beautiful. A tinkle of water, a twitter of birds reached my ears from some remote height. The tower sprang from a circular platform of stone, went up loftily, and broke at near its top into two or three little tiled flounces. Under the lowest I could see an opening pierced through a rose trellis; and right before me the unlatched door of the building was reached by a shallow flight of steps.

My heart was fluttering like a netted butterfly as I mounted them. What sinister design could possibly obtain in this still and fragrant enclosure? A flight of spiral stairs, going up the interior, was set in a very bower of plumy palms, and ferns, and clambering rich mosses, made greener by the light which entered through green _jalousies_. Here and there tiny rills of water, lowering themselves down miniature precipices, were fretted into spray that hung in the twinkling emerald atmosphere and was showered on the leaves. Caged cunningly amidst the foliage, birds of brilliant plumage chirped and flirted; or red squirrels sprang and clung, staring at me with glossy eyes; or lizards, liquid green as the sun through lime leaves, raised their pulsing throats, and whisked and were gone. Once a snake, raising a gorgeous enamelled head, lashed its thread of tongue on the glaze of its little prison, seeming to taste my passing beauty in a wicked lust. I felt quite secure and happy. Up and up I climbed, and presently started singing softly, irresistibly, in response to the growing rapture of my flight. New beauties were revealed with every step, until in a moment, passing, at an angle, through a very thicket of blossoms into white daylight, I saw the meaning, and tottered on the brink of it all.

I had emerged upon a little ledge, a foot in width, which ringed the outside of the tower just below the first roof. I was standing there, suddenly, instantly, with not so much as an inch of parapet between my feet and the edge. Behind was the wall of the tower; below, a reeling abyss and the bare, merciless pavement. Dazzled, irresistibly drawn forward, I longed only to reach the stones and be at rest. But in that terrible moment my talisman occurred to me. Swaying, half fainting, fighting for every movement, I succeeded in drawing it from my pocket and lifting it to my nostrils--and instantly my resistance was relaxed, and I floated down on the wings of enchantment.

When I opened my eyes, drugged and smiling, it was to the vision of Dr. Peel standing before me like an awed and baffled demon. He dressed his twitching features, and came and cringed.

“Are--are you much hurt?” he stammered.

“No, sir,” I murmured. “Not at all, I thank you.”

“It was your skirts ballooned,” he said. “I could not have thought it possible.”

I sat up, reordering my hair.

“Do you now?” I said quietly. “Such an escape could hardly come within your calculations, I think.”

“What do you mean?” he began loudly, and as instantly collapsed again. “You had no right to be there at all,” he said.

“Nor should I,” I replied, “but to show you that virtue may have a familiar as well as vice, and one, too, capable of answering to a wicked challenge.”

I got to my feet as I spoke. He stared at me utterly disconcerted, and, as I withdrew, followed me like a scourged dog.

From that time he sought rather to preserve than to destroy me, and I found myself, as one of the elect, locked into my room at night. He had realised, I suppose, that wickedness could over-reach itself in the chance entertainment of spirits potent beyond the worst it could of itself evoke; and, though he still clung to me as a sort of hostage for his own miserable salvation, made many abject efforts towards my conciliation, amongst which I had great reason to reckon a relaxation in the watchfulness which had hitherto dogged my every movement.