Cecil Dreeme

by Theodore Winthrop

  “Poor fellow! I don’t wonder he has but a hermit’s appetite.” I am ashamed to say that interest in this determined withdrawal from the world made me forget for a moment that the exile might be in urgent need of relief.

  “Mrs. Locksley,” continued the janitor, “has never seen him. He has had the children up, and drawn their likenesses, like as they can be. But women he don’t seem to want to have anything to do with.”

  “Ah!” cried I. “Here we have a clew! Some woman has wronged him; so he is going through a despair. That is an old story. He edits it with unusual vigor.”

  “That’s what my wife and I think,” says Locksley. “He loved some girl, she went crooked, and so things look black to him.”

  “What!” thought I. “Is he passing through Churm’s ‘dark waters’? Strange if I should encounter at once another illustration of that sorrow!”

  After my dramatic fashion of identifying myself with others, I put myself in Mr. Dreeme’s place, and shrank from so miserable a solution of his exile.

  “Perhaps,” I propounded, “some flirt has victimized the poor fellow, and he does not yet realize that we all must take our Bachelor of Arts at a flirt’s school, to become Master of the Arts to know and win a true woman.”

  Locksley smiled, then shook his head, and his worried look returned.

  “No,” said he; “that kind of a girl makes a man want to be among folks and forget her. Mr. Dreeme has had a worse hurt than that. But whatever wounded him, for the last two weeks he’s been growing paler and punier every day. Some says the smell of paint is poison. I don’t believe there’s any strychnine so bad as moping off alone, and never seeing a laugh, and never playing at give and take, rough and smooth, out in the world.”

  “You’re right,” said I; “but let us get through our talk, and see what is to be done.”

  “To-night,” continued Locksley, “just as I was wrastling to get off my wet boots,—they stuck like all suction, did them boots, but I couldn’t go to bed in ’em,—just then my wife began talking to me about Mr. Dreeme. ‘What do you suppose has come to him?’ says she. ‘No answer when Dora went up with his breakfast; no answer when she knocked with his dinner. I mistrust he’s sick,’ says she. While she was talking, a scare—the biggest kind of a scare—come to me about him. ‘Wife,’ says I, ‘a scare has come to me about Mr. Dreeme.’ ‘Is it a prickly scare, William?’ says she. ‘Prickly outside and in,’ says I; ‘I feel as if I’d swallowed a peck of teazles, and was rolling in a bin of ’em.’ ‘William,’ says she, ‘scares is sent, and the prickly scares calls for hurries. Just you run up, and lay your fist hard against Mr. Dreeme’s door, and if he don’t speak, and you can’t hear him snore through the keyhole, go to Mr. Churm, and whatever he says do, you do! Mr. Churm always threads the eye the first shove.’ So I went up, and rapped, and the more I knocked, the emptier and deader it sounded. Mr. Churm is gone. What shall we do, Mr. Byng? The young man may be up there on his back with a knife into him, or too weak to call out, and panting for brandy or opodildoc. My scare gets worse and worse.”

  “I begin to share it. We will go and break in at once. Light your candle, while I find a bottle of Mr. Stillfleet’s brandy.”

  10

  Overhead, Without

  Among the other treasures of Rubbish Palace, I had inherited Stillfleet’s liqueur-case. It was on a generous scale,—a grand old oaken chest, bristling with griffins’ heads and claws, armed with massive iron handles, and big enough to hold all the favorite tipples of a royal household, or to hide a royal pair if they heard a Revolution coming up the stairs.

  Stillfleet had traced the pedigree of his chest to within three generations of Ginevra, in her family. He had no doubt that this was the identical coffer which that sportive lady had made her coffin.

  “Clip!” said Stillfleet, shutting down the lid as he told me this legend in the afternoon. “Clip! listen to that snap-lock! Fancy her feelings! Taste that gin! ‘Geniévre’ from Ginevra’s box. I like to keep my nectars in a coffin; it’s my edition of the old plan of drinking from a skull. Life is short. ‘Come, my lad, and drink some beer!’ ”

  To this grand sarcophagus I proceeded to seek a restorative for Cecil Dreeme. Locksley’s alternative, “opodildoc,” was not at hand.

  Lifting the heavy lid, instead of poor Ginevra’s bare bones, I found a joyous array of antique flasks and goblets. They flashed at me as the gas-light struck them, each with the merry wink of a practised bacchanal. I saw the tawny complexion of the brandy shining through a tall bottle, old enough to have figured at the banquet of the Borgia. Around this stately personage, and gaping for the generous juices he might impart, was a circle of glasses, the finest work of the best days of Venice, clear and thin as bubbles, and graceful as the cups of opening flowers.

  I took the decanter and a glass, and, thus armed, followed Locksley into the corridor.

  His prickly scare had so teazled the poor fellow that he was now quite like a picture of Remorse or Despair. It was entirely dark in the building. Our single candle carried its little sphere of light along with it. Beyond and overhead might have been the vaults and chambers of a cavern, for all we could see.

  Passing Densdeth’s padlocked door, we turned toward the side staircase. I looked up and down the well of the stairs. No oubliette ever showed a blacker void. It almost seemed to my excited imagination that we ought to hear the gurgle of a drowning prisoner, flung down into that darkness by us, his executioners.

  “Awful black!” said Locksley, and the shadow of his bristly hair on the wall stiffened with alarm.

  By the dim gleam of the candle, the paint of the wood and stucco of the walls of Chrysalis changed to oak and marble. The sham antique vanished. It became an actual place, not mere theatrical scenery. Seen by daylight, the whole edifice was so unreal and incongruous, that I should not have been surprised to see a squad of scene-shifters at work sliding it off and rolling it up, and leaving Ailanthus Square nothing but its bald brick houses to stare at. Now, as we climbed up the stairs, torch-bearer ahead, cupbearer behind, Chrysalis passed very well for a murky old castle of the era of plots, masks, poison, and vendetta.

  “Yes,” thought I, “Locksley’s three knocks did announce a new act in my drama. Cecil Dreeme is the new actor. He follows Densdeth and Churm, he precedes Emma Denman. Is he in the plot? Is he underplot, counterplot, or episode? I hope, poor lonely fellow, that he has not already passed off the stage, as Locksley dreads. That would be a dismal opening of my life in Chrysalis.”

  The janitor now pushed open the partition-door from the upper landing into the northern corridor.

  The haggard moon, in its last quarter, hung just above a chimney of Mannering Place opposite, like a pale flame struggling up from a furnace. Its weird light slanted across the mullion of the narrow window.

  There was just enough of this feeble pallor to nullify the peering light of Locksley’s candle. Ghostly, indeed, the spot appeared! My anxiety and my companion’s alarm were lively enough to shape a score of ghosts out of a streak of moonshine.

  “To Let,” the tenant of the left-hand rooms, had no business with us, nor we with him. On the other side was the modest little card:—

  CECIL DREEME,

  PAINTER.

  Destiny had brought us together. I was about to know him, alive or dead.

  Alive or dead! That doubt in both our minds made us hesitate an instant. Locksley looked up to me for orders.

  “Knock!” whispered I.

  He knocked gently. If there were a sick man within, his hearing, sharpened by silence, would abhor a noise.

  We both listened, without whisper or sigh. Locksley deposited his candle on the floor and put his ear to the keyhole. The low light flung a queer, distorted shadow of him on the wall. It seemed a third person, of impish aspect, not meddling with our proceedings, but watching them scornfully.

  No answer. Not even the weak “Come in” of an invalid.

  Locksley “laid his f
ist to the door,” without respect to his knuckles.

  “Nothing,” whispered he, “except a sound of emptiness.”

  We now both knocked loudly, and gave the door a rough shake, as if it merited ungentle handling for obstructing the entrance of well-wishers.

  After this uproar, dead silence again, except a low grumble of echoes, turning over in their sleep, to mutter anathemas at the disturbers of their repose.

  “Locksley,” I whispered, “we are wasting time. Try your pass-key.”

  He introduced the key. His shadow, exaggerated and sinister, bent over him as he worked.

  “I must pick it,” said he, turning to me with a dogged burglar-look on his honest face. “His key is in the lock inside. But I haven’t been poking into keyholes ever since I was knee-high to a katydid for nothing.”

  He took from his pocket a pair of delicate pincers. He manipulated for a moment. Presently I heard the key rattle and then drop inside. That unlawful noise should awake any sleeper! We paused and listened. No sound. Awe flowed in and filled the silent stillness. Again we looked at each other, shrinking from an interchange of apprehension.

  “I’m afraid he is—not living,” Locksley breathed at last.

  “Don’t stop! Open!”

  He put in his pass-key and turned. The bolt of the latch also yielded to this slight pressure. The door opened a crack without warning. Our candle, standing on the floor, bent its flame over, peering through into the darkness within. Before I could snatch it up, the inquisitive little bud of fire had been dragged from its stem by the draught. The candle was out.

  By the pallid moonlight we could just see each other’s anxious faces. We could also see, through the narrow crack of the door, that the same faint, unsubstantial glimmer filled the room. This ghostly light repelled me more than the darkness. It could show the form, but not the expression of objects; and form without expression is death.

  “I have matches,” whispered Locksley.

  He drew one across the sole of his shoe. It flashed phosphoric, illuminated the breadth of sturdy cowhide upon which the janitor trod, and went out.

  “Take time with the next,” said I. “I must go in at once.”

  11

  Overhead, Within

  The same door which we had battered and shaken so rudely I now pushed open with quiet, almost reverent hand.

  Was I entering into the presence of Death? No sleep but that, it seemed to me, could hug a sleeper so close as to silence his answer or his protest at our noise.

  So I stole into the tacit chamber, eagerly, and yet with my nerves in that timorous tremor when they catch influences, as lifting ripples catch sunrise before the calms.

  I pushed back the door against the close, repellent atmosphere within. Holding it, still, as if it were a shield against some sorrowful shock I was to encounter, I paused a breath to see my way.

  The force of the faint moonlight brought it only as far as the middle of the room. There there was a neutral ground, not light, not dark, a vague in which forms could be discerned by intent vision.

  I involuntarily closed my eyes, to give sight the recoil before the leap. When I opened them, and flung my look forward to grapple with what it could find, the first object it seized was a small splash of white light, half drowned in the dimness.

  The moonbeams were also, without much vigor, diving to examine this sunken object. Their entrance, or perhaps my own trembling eagerness, seemed to make a little fluctuation about it. I steadied and accustomed my glance, and presently deciphered the spot as a mass of white drapery in a picture, standing upon an easel.

  While I was making this out, I heard behind me the crack and fizz of Locksley’s second failure with his matches.

  The little sound was both ally and stimulant. I advanced another step, and my groping sight detected a large arm-chair posted before the easel.

  Hanging over the arm of the chair, where the moonlight could not reach, I saw another faint, pale spot. It was where a hand would rest. Was it a hand?

  Beckoned forward by this doubt, I moved on and saw, flung back in the arm-chair, a shadowy figure. A man? Yes; dim form and deathly face,—a man!

  The air of the room was close and sickly. I choked for breath. Life needs a double portion at such moments.

  Dead? Is he dead? I seemed to scream the unspoken question to my heart.

  It cost me an effort to master the involuntary human shudder at such an encounter. I sprang forward where the pale hand without motion beckoned, and the pale face pleaded for succor.

  Nothing of the repellent magnetism of a corpse as my hand approached the forehead.

  But as little the responsive thrill of life wakening at life’s touch, and renewing with a start the old delicious agony of conscious being.

  I laid my hand upon the brow.

  Cold! But surely not the cold of death! This was no dead man whom I anxiously, and the moon impassively, were studying. Tranced, not dead, so instinct told me. Life might be latent, but it was there.

  I felt tears of relief start into my eyes. Whoever has lived knows that timely death is the great prize of life; who can regret when a worthy soul wins it? But this untimely perishing of a brother-man, alone and helpless in the dark and cold, was pure waste and ruin.

  Locksley now came to my side, sheltering his lighted candle.

  “Dead?” gasped he, and stopped silent before the arm-chair.

  “No, no,” I whispered, and the curdling whisper showed me how deep my horror had been.

  “No; only fainted, I trust. Open the window! Fresh air is the first want.”

  “Fresh air he shall have, if there’s any blowing,” says Locksley, briskly. “Fresh air beats the world for stiddy vittles.”

  While he worked at the window, I poured a compacter restorative than air out of Stillfleet’s flask. I gently forced a few drops of the brandy down the unconscious man’s throat, and expended a few sprinkles to bathe his forehead.

  “It is the painter, Locksley?” I asked.

  “Yes sir.”

  And so began my acquaintance with Cecil Dreeme.

  12

  Dreeme, Asleep

  A current of wintry wind flowed in as Locksley lifted the sash.

  “Fresh air is prime for the inside,” said he. “But warm air for the outside is the next best thing. Shall I light a fire in the stove?”

  “Do; but first hand me that plaid.”

  I wrapped my unresisting patient in the shawl. He was a mere dead weight in my hands. I shuddered to think that his life might be drifting away, just out of my reach.

  “I hope we are not too late,” I said.

  “Shall I fetch a doctor?” asked Locksley.

  “Fire first. Then doctor—if he does not revive.”

  “There’s no kindling-wood,” says Locksley, from the closet. “I’ll run down to your place, Mr. Byng, and get some.”

  “Pray do!”

  He hurried off. I was left alone with the tranced man. I repeated the little dose of brandy, and stood aside to let the light of the candle fall upon his face.

  “Stop!” said Delicacy. “Respect the young man’s resolute incognito.”

  “Too late!” I thought in reply. “Incognito has nearly murdered him. I shall knock it in the head without ceremony. Besides, Fate has appointed me his physician; how can I doctor him intelligently without feeling the pulse of his soul by studying his face?”

  The first question I asked the pale, voiceless countenance was, whether I was not committing the impertinence of trying to force a man to live who had wished to kill himself. Suicide? No; I don’t see any blood. I smell no laudanum. Here has been unhappiness, but no despair, no self-disgust. A pure life and a clear intellect,—so the face publishes. Such a youth might wear out with work or a wound; he would never abdicate his birthright to live and learn, to suffer and be strong. Clearly no suicide.

  “No,” my thought continued rapidly, “Locksley has supplied the theory of Mr. Dreeme’s case.
His face illustrates and confirms it. A man of genius, ardent, poor, and nursing a wound. The wound may be merely a scratch, he may merely have had the poet’s quarrel with vulgar life; but, great or small, the hurt has consigned him to this unwholesome solitude, and here he has lavished his mind and body on his art. No, Cecil Dreeme, you are dying because you have ignorantly lived too intensely. But the world does not willingly let such faces die. I myself feel the need of you. Even with your eyes closed, the light gone, your countenance tells me of the presence of a character and an experience riper and deeper than my own. What have you been taught by suffering, what have you divined by genius, that you wear maturity so patiently upon your sad young face?”

  I took the candle and held it to his lips. Did he breathe? The flame flickered. But the air flowing in from without might have caused that; and I would not close the window until the keen northern blast had scourged out every breath of languor from the stifling room.

  I withdrew the candle. Curiosity urged me to study the face more in detail. But that seemed disloyal to the sleeper. I had made up my mind that my patient was worthy of all my care. He was not dead, that I should dissect him. While a face can protect itself by the eye,—which is shield to ward, blade to parry, and point to assail,—one feels not much scruple in staring. But what right had I to profit by this chance lifting of the visor of a disarmed man, who wished to do his battle of life unknown?

  I therefore stopped intentionally short of a thorough analysis of his countenance. Fair play and my anxiety both made me content with my general impressions. It is error to waste the first look and the first few moments, if one wishes to comprehend a face,—to see into it. No after observations are so sharp and so unprejudiced.

  Roughly then,—Cecil Dreeme’s face was refined and sensitive, the face of a born artist. Separately, the features were all good, well cut and strong. Their union did not produce beauty. It was a face not harmonized by its construction, but by expression,—by the impression it gave of a vigorous mind, controlling varied and perhaps discordant elements of character into unison. There was force, energy, passion, and no lack of sweetness. Short, thick, black hair grew rather low over a square forehead. The eyebrows were heavy and square. The hollow cheeks were all burnt away by the poor fellow’s hermit life. He wore no beard, so that he was as far from the frowzy Düsseldorfer of my fancy as from the pretty, poetic young Raphael. This was a man of another order, not easy to classify. His countenance seemed to interpret his strange circumstances. The face and the facts were consistent, and both faithful to their mystery.