Delphi Complete Works of Sheridan Le Fanu

by J. Sheridan le Fanu

  “Who are you?” asked Maud, who was standing now in the middle of the room; “I have been led to suppose, this is my room. What do you all want here?”

  The man stepped in.

  “By your leave, miss,” said he, looking with his shrewd quick glance at her hands, and then, with another, about the room; and then striding to the window, and shutting it down, he turned some little pins at the side, and said to Mercy: “You should ‘a fixed the window.”

  “There’s the grating, though.”

  “No matter,” he replied.

  “What do you mean by shutting my window without my leave?” inquired Maud, with a fiery glance.

  The man took no notice of the question, but asked Mercy Creswell:

  “Is there fire-irons, or anything hard and heavy, that way, here?”

  “No, nothing,” answered she.

  “But I asked you — — “ repeated Maud Vernon.

  “I’ll attend to you just now, miss,” said the man. “Nor nothing sharp?” he continued.

  “I’ll mention your conduct. Who is in the house, to whom I can make a complaint?” said the young lady, who was not accustomed to be treated so by servants.

  She had directed her question to Mercy Creswell; but the man answered it, scarcely looking at her, as he did so.

  “To the doctor, please, miss, Doctor Antomarchi,” and he continued in the same even tone. “You should not ‘a left her alone; don’t you know this ‘ere number’s entered questionable? Mr. Darkdale will put another with you if you want her. Look here.”

  And he wet his thumb in his mouth, and turned over the leaves of a little book rapidly, and showed her something inscribed upon a page.

  “Well I would like another in call. She could sit in the next room, d’ye see; I’m not fit alone,” said Mercy Creswell, with nervous earnestness.

  “I’ll not remain here, I shan’t stay, I’ll go,” said Maud, going to the wardrobe and pulling the drawers open, and beginning to place her things upon the table close by.

  “And ye shouldn’t leave a thing like that here,” said the man, with a frown and a wag of his head, availing himself of Maud’s having gone to a distant part of the room, and taking in his hand the silk cord of her dressing-gown, which lay on the back of a chair close by. “You might ‘a remembered Miss Bangles, it ain’t so long ago. Is there any more bits of cord about?”

  “No, not one.”

  “Tell some one to order me a chaise from the nearest place, as soon as possible, or go and order it yourself,” said Maud to the man.

  “But I can’t, miss; none of us, without the doctor’s orders.”

  “Then I’ll go on foot, I’ll go this moment. Tell him I’ve left.”

  The man looked away with a sheepish smile, amused, and cleared his voice, and then looked grave.

  “It won’t do, miss; you can’t go out without the doctor’s order, and you must make your mind ‘appy; for you can no more go out o’ this house, without it was allowed, than you could walk through a wall. But it is easy for you, miss, to talk to the doctor, and tell him what ye wants, and if you persuades him, it will be all right, you know; and he’s a reasonable gentleman; and anyhow, it can’t do no one no harm.”

  Maud walked about the room, agitated.

  “Very good,” she said at last, “tell him I should like to see him.”

  CHAPTER LXXI.

  MAUD AND ANTOMARCHI UNDERSTAND EACH OTHER.

  Nearly ten minutes had passed, and Maud was sitting in her room, in profound gloom, almost a stupor; without motion; with her eyes upon the floor.

  Mercy Creswell, unable to divine what her thoughts might be, was only a few steps away, standing against the wall, with her arms folded across, and her eyes turned, with a nervous side-glance on the young lady.

  In the room beyond that, sat one of the athletic housemaids, who could have lifted Maud on her feet and carried her about the house, as easily as her hat and jacket.

  At this, the sitting-room door, now came a knock.

  Doctor Antomarchi was there; Maud was on her feet in a moment.

  This doctor had the peculiar marble skin which is ascribed to the first Napoleon. Dark and colourless, his strongly pronounced underjaw, and thin lips, his delicate black eyebrows, and piercing, cold eyes, gave a character of severity and decision to his massive face, which inspired fear in all who were subjected to his authority.

  Some little sensation of this kind modified Miss Vernon’s agitated feelings as he entered the room, and made his bow of ceremony, in obedience to her summons.

  “Oh, Doctor Antomarchi!” she said, calmly, “I will try to tell you how I have been duped. I came here under the persuasion that I was on my way to Carsbrook, Lady Mardykes’s house. I find that I have been horribly deceived. I am a prisoner, and I can’t escape. I am here, helpless, in the most awful place a mortal can be committed to — a madhouse. I have not a single friend or adviser to turn to in this great danger. I am utterly alone. I have been brought up in a very lonely way, in the country, and I don’t know much of the ways of the world, or what I ought to do in this dreadful case. May God help me!” Her lip trembled. “You, sir, can have no wish to keep me here, if I am perfectly in my right mind; and, as God is my hope, I am not mad, nor ever was supposed to be! My good cousin, Maximilla Medwyn, when I write to her, will come and tell you so. And you, I have heard, are learned, and clever, and can easily decide whether I tell you truth; and if you find that I am what I describe, you will set me at liberty.”

  “What you say is reasonable,” replied Antomarchi, not one muscle of whose stern face had evinced a sign of life during Maud’s appeal, and whose dark grey eye had shown neither light nor softening. “Shall I say a word in private?” he added, glancing at the servant.

  “Do — pray.”

  He signed to Mercy Creswell to leave the room, which she did.

  He then in a low tone, with an air of very marked deference, said:

  “Your request is grounded on a supposition, which, if sustained by proof, would insure its being instantly granted. All you say is quite fair. As to the fact on which you rely, however, it is, I regret to say, more than disputed in the papers which have been placed before us; and while you remain here, which may be a very short time indeed, I need scarcely say, you shall be treated with the greatest possible consideration, and everything done to make your sojourn as little disagreeable as possible. Would you object, Miss Vernon, to accompany me to my room downstairs. I wish very much, with your permission, to call your attention to a circumstance.”

  The lady assented. Together they entered the gallery. Doctor Antomarchi took a key from his pocket and opened the iron door, which separated that portion of the long corridor, from which Miss Vernon’s rooms opened, from the remainder of the gallery, passing westward.

  In the wildest dream, no matter how fantastic the situation and strange the scenery, the dreamer follows the action of his vision with good faith and the sense of incredulity slumbers. But here was a reality strangely horrible as any dream she had ever dreamed. She heard their tread on the boards, she felt the cold smooth bannister on which her hand rested, as they went down the private spiral stair, and it was an effort to think it real.

  Now she had arrived. The door was shut. When she had placed herself in one of the great chairs in the oval room, of which she and Doctor Antomarchi were the only tenants, he touched a bell, without speaking, and Mr. Darkdale entered.

  Maud wondered what was intended. Antomarchi rose quickly, and two or three steps brought him to Darkdale’s side. That slight dark man inclined his ear; and as Antomarchi concluded a few whispered sentences, he nodded, and immediately withdrew.

  Maud heard nothing of what passed.

  The doctor returned, and sat down at the opposite side of the table.

  “I think it desirable to impress upon you, Miss Vernon, two or three facts, which, while here, you will find it very much to your advantage to bear in mind.”

  An int
imidating change had come over Doctor Antomarchi’s face, and he was speaking in stern, measured accents. His ceremonious manner was quite gone and he was talking as a cold, insolent colonel might to a defaulting drummer-boy on the parade ground.

  “The inmates of that part of the house in which apartments are assigned to you, are generally quite competent to understand what I now say. It is my duty to treat you with what skill I possess; it is yours to submit; and submit you shall. I have heard of your language, of your violence, of your covert menace of forcing an escape, or committing self-destruction. Sufficient precautions are taken in this establishment to render that crime impracticable. There are people confined here whose desire to commit suicide never leaves them. They hope for nothing else, they dream of nothing else: they are persistent and crafty, and yet all their persistence, cunning, and wickedness are daily defeated with perfect ease and certainty. Violence, here, leads necessarily to repression; contumacy, in the most trifling particulars, to increased restraint; and angry language, as tending in certain nervous states to produce corresponding action, necessarily to subjection to a treatment that is intensely disagreeable. These, you understand, are not punishments; they are precautions, and processes, though painful, strictly of a sanatory kind. And now, you distinctly comprehend, that neither unmeasured language, nor violence of temper, nor threats of suicide, or of escape, ever fail to bring down on the patient who indulges in them consequences which are deplorable.”

  All the time he thus spoke his eyes were fixed on those of the young lady, who felt the power of that indescribable coercion.

  Under it thought grew vague, and the power to will became torpid.

  “You will be so good, Miss Vernon, as to accompany me a little further,” said Antomarchi, his eye upon her, as he suddenly arose. The young lady, without answering, followed him.

  Through a door at the side of this room, a short and narrow passage, tiled and lighted by a window over the door, conducted them to a small but lofty room, also tiled, the arrangements of which were singular.

  In the corner of this room rose something that looked like a tall iron press, of some four feet square, which reached or rather seemed to pass through the ceiling. There was no other furniture except two small shelves; and a piece of thick rug lay on the floor.

  “You are here, Miss Vernon, merely as a spectator, to witness, in part, the practice to which the refractory are subjected. There is nothing more refreshing than a shower-bath. Taken in the ordinary way it is a luxurious stimulant. You will see what it is when administered in a case of morbidly over-excited energies. This is a powerful shower-bath. The patient upon whom you will see it exercised is a lady whom you have seen not an hour ago. She styles herself the Duchess of Falconbury. You shall see, in her case, how we reduce that unhappy state upon sanatory principles.”

  Darkdale opened the door and looked in.

  “The patient is coming;” and he inquired, “do you wish it now?”

  “Yes,” said Antomarchi.

  Maud heard a sound of feet descending the stairs, accompanied by a muffled noise of furious hysterics.

  “Your maid, Mercy Creswell, is to attend her,” said Antomarchi, coolly. “It will show you that she is a woman of nerve, and can do her duty.”

  This impertinence did not fire Maud’s pride, as an hour or two ago it would. A part of her nature had been reduced to a state of trance.

  “You have taken an ordinary shower-bath, I dare say, Miss Vernon, and found it quite long and heavy enough? This, from its greater height, has a fall more than twice as heavy. Yours lasted only a fraction of a minute, this will descend without interruption for exactly thirty-five minutes. Yours, probably, contained between two and three stone weight of water; this will discharge between eight and nine tons. You observe, then, that it is very different from anything you have experienced. Are you ready?”

  “Yes, sir,” answered Mercy Creswell, who looked a little pale. “How long, please, sir?”

  “Thirty-five minutes,” said the doctor.

  “But please, sir,” said Creswell, growing paler, “that is five minutes longer than the longest.”

  The doctor nodded.

  “She never had it before, sir.”

  “Better once effectually, than half-measures repeatedly,” remarked the doctor to Miss Vernon, with his watch in his hand. “Take the winch,” he said to Mercy Creswell. “When the minute-hand reaches halfpast (keep your eye on the clock), you turn it on; and when it reaches five minutes past, you turn it off. You are ready? Stay — wait — look to the minute-hand — now.”

  As the doctor uttered the final direction, at the same instant Mercy Creswell turned the handle, and a rush perceptibly louder and heavier than any heard in those toys of luxury, which don’t deserve the name of shower-bath in sight of these titanic appliances.

  The cries and shrieks of the unfortunate patient are soon hushed. No sound is heard in that torture-room but the ceaseless, thundering fall of the water, and the loud ticking of the clock as it slowly tells off the allotted time.

  At length the dreadful half-hour has passed. Five minutes remain — the hand is measuring the last minute. Antomarchi’s eye is on the second-hand of his watch — the last second is touched. “Stop,” cries his loud voice, and the winch is turned.

  The noise of the falling water has ceased. The door is open, the room is as still as the dead-house of an hospital, where no one comes to claim the dead outcast. A great silence has come. In a whisper Mercy directs the women, who obey in silence.

  The “patient” is lifted out, and placed on a chair in the midst of the room. She looks lifeless. Her long dark hair clings about her shoulders. Her arms hang helplessly and the water streams over her, over her hair, over her closed eyes, in rivulets; over her pretty face that looks in a sad sleep; over her lace and vanities; over her white slender hands that hang by her sides, and over her rings, making little rills and pools along the tiles.

  There must be the agonies of drowning in all this; worse than common drowning, drowning by a slower suffocation and with a protracted consciousness.

  And now there is the greater agony of recovery.

  The doctor had returned to the side of the poor duchess, who was now breathing, or rather sighing, heavily, and staring vaguely before her.

  His fingers were again on her pulse.

  “Give her the white mixture,” he said to Mercy Creswell, glancing at a phial which stands beside a cup on a table a little way off.

  “Oh sir, please, doctor, not this time, sir,” faltered Mercy Creswell. “She eat no breakfast, I hear, sir, and she’ll be very bad for hours after she takes the mixture.”

  “Shake it first; pour it into the cup; and administer it to the patient. Do your duty, Creswell.”

  She shook the bottle, poured its contents into the cup, and, with a frightened face, did as she was ordered.

  Antomarchi said to Darkdale: “The patient may go now. You will show them Mrs. Fish’s new rooms. Creswell, you are not to accompany her. You attend Miss Vernon now as before. Miss Vernon, you can return to your rooms.”

  He made her a bow, and in a moment more Maud and her femme de chambre had left the room.

  “Miss Vernon, a spirited young lady,” mused Antomarchi. “She has had her first lesson.”

  CHAPTER LXXII.

  QUESTION AND ANSWER.

  It is well when, even in afterlife, we can see that our sufferings have made us better — that God has purged the tree, and not cursed it — that the fire from heaven has purified, and not left all barren, for ever, like the Dead Sea plain.

  This awful time in Maud’s life will do a good work in her. Her character has suffered from the coldness of her mother, from occasional periods of parental caprice and coercion, and from long intervals of the indulgence of absolute neglect. God has found her a time and a place in which to think upon Him, and on herself. These awful days, if they lead her to see and to amend her faults, will not have passed in vain.

/>   For four-and-twenty hours Maud never opened her lips to speak one word to Mercy Creswell. But the quarrel of the two sailors in the lighthouse would not do here; and a little reflection tells Maud that Mercy Creswell, after all, has acted in this affair under orders, and in good faith, believing all representations made to her by so great and good a woman as Lady Vernon, and walking honestly in such light as she had. These silent relations would not be long endurable to Maud herself; and her anger against Mercy Creswell was not altogether reasonable.

  I do not wonder, therefore, that before the evening of the next day Maud was on speaking terms again with her maid. The situation was now distinctly before her mind; but hope, irrepressible, began to revive.

  “Do you know, Mercy,” asked the young lady, after they had talked a little, and a short silence had intervened, during which she was in deep thought, “upon what subject they say I am mad?”

  “I don’t know, indeed, miss; I don’t know at all. Only Lady Vernon told me the doctors said so; and she had no doubt of it herself.” Mercy Creswell was speaking now without the preliminary hesitation which gave, while Maud was still in the dark as to the nature of the real relations in which they stood, and of the house of which she was an inmate, an air of reserve and prevarication to all her answers. “But, miss, it mayn’t last no time. There was a lady sent away from here last week, quite right again, as had bin here only two months.”

  “But is there nothing? Why were my scissors and penknives taken away? And the breakfast knives are silver, like dessert knives?”

  “Oh, yes, miss! Yes, to be sure. It was said you threatened, different times, to take away your life, miss. That was the reason.”

  Another silence followed.