by Grant Allen
“But, Hilda,” I interposed, “we may possibly find that they cannot come away from London just now. They are busy men, and likely to be engaged.”
“They will come if I pay their fees. I do not mind how much this costs me. What is money compared to this one great object of my life?”
“And then — the delay! Suppose that we are too late?”
“He will live some days yet. I can telegraph up at once. I want no hole-and-corner confession, which may afterwards be useless, but an open avowal before the most approved witnesses. If he will make it, well and good; if not, my life-work will have failed. But I had rather it failed than draw back one inch from the course which I have laid down for myself.”
I looked at the worn face of Sebastian. He nodded his head slowly. “She has conquered,” he answered, turning upon the pillow. “Let her have her own way. I hid it for years, for science’ sake. That was my motive, Cumberledge, and I am too near death to lie. Science has now nothing more to gain or lose by me. I have served her well, but I am worn out in her service. Maisie may do as she will. I accept her ultimatum.”
We telegraphed up, at once. Fortunately, both men were disengaged, and both keenly interested in the case. By that evening, Horace Mayfield was talking it all over with me in the hotel at Southampton. “Well, Hubert, my boy,” he said, “a woman, we know, can do a great deal”; he smiled his familiar smile, like a genial fat toad; “but if your Yorke-Bannerman succeeds in getting a confession out of Sebastian, she’ll extort my admiration.” He paused a moment, then he added, in an afterthought: “I say that she’ll extort my admiration; but, mind you, I don’t know that I shall feel inclined to believe it. The facts have always appeared to me — strictly between ourselves, you know — to admit of only one explanation.”
“Wait and see,” I answered. “You think it more likely that Miss Wade will have persuaded Sebastian to confess to things that never happened than that he will convince you of Yorke-Bannerman’s innocence?”
The great Q.C. fingered his cigarette-holder affectionately.
“You hit it first time,” he answered. “That is precisely my attitude. The evidence against our poor friend was so peculiarly black. It would take a great deal to make me disbelieve it.”
“But surely a confession—”
“Ah, well, let me hear the confession, and then I shall be better able to judge.”
Even as he spoke Hilda had entered the room.
“There will be no difficulty about that, Mr. Mayfield. You shall hear it, and I trust that it will make you repent for taking so black a view of the case of your own client.”
“Without prejudice, Miss Bannerman, without prejudice,” said the lawyer, with some confusion. “Our conversation is entirely between ourselves, and to the world I have always upheld that your father was an innocent man.”
But such distinctions are too subtle for a loving woman.
“He WAS an innocent man,” said she, angrily. “It was your business not only to believe it, but to prove it. You have neither believed it nor proved it; but if you will come upstairs with me, I will show you that I have done both.”
Mayfield glanced at me and shrugged his fat shoulders. Hilda had led the way, and we both followed her. In the room of the sick man our other witnesses were waiting: a tall, dark, austere man who was introduced to me as Dr. Blake Crawford, whose name I had heard as having watched the case for Sebastian at the time of the investigation. There were present also a commissioner of oaths, and Dr. Mayby, a small local practitioner, whose attitude towards the great scientist was almost absurdly reverential. The three men were grouped at the foot of the bed, and Mayfield and I joined them. Hilda stood beside the dying man, and rearranged the pillow against which he was propped. Then she held some brandy to his lips. “Now!” said she.
The stimulant brought a shade of colour into his ghastly cheeks, and the old quick, intelligent gleam came back into his deep sunk eyes.
“A remarkable woman, gentlemen,” said he, “a very noteworthy woman. I had prided myself that my willpower was the most powerful in the country — I had never met any to match it — but I do not mind admitting that, for firmness and tenacity, this lady is my equal. She was anxious that I should adopt one course of action. I was determined to adopt another. Your presence here is a proof that she has prevailed.”
He paused for breath, and she gave him another small sip of the brandy.
“I execute her will ungrudgingly and with the conviction that it is the right and proper course for me to take,” he continued. “You will forgive me some of the ill which I have done you, Maisie, when I tell you that I really died this morning — all unknown to Cumberledge and you — and that nothing but my will force has sufficed to keep spirit and body together until I should carry out your will in the manner which you suggested. I shall be glad when I have finished, for the effort is a painful one, and I long for the peace of dissolution. It is now a quarter to seven. I have every hope that I may be able to leave before eight.”
It was strange to hear the perfect coolness with which he discussed his own approaching dissolution. Calm, pale, and impassive, his manner was that of a professor addressing his class. I had seen him speak so to a ring of dressers in the old days at Nathaniel’s.
“The circumstances which led up to the death of Admiral Scott Prideaux, and the suspicions which caused the arrest of Doctor Yorke-Bannerman, have never yet been fully explained, although they were by no means so profound that they might not have been unravelled at the time had a man of intellect concentrated his attention upon them. The police, however, were incompetent and the legal advisers of Dr. Bannerman hardly less so, and a woman only has had the wit to see that a gross injustice has been done. The true facts I will now lay before you.”
Mayfield’s broad face had reddened with indignation; but now his curiosity drove out every other emotion, and he leaned forward with the rest of us to hear the old man’s story.
“In the first place, I must tell you that both Dr. Bannerman and myself were engaged at the time in an investigation upon the nature and properties of the vegetable alkaloids, and especially of aconitine. We hoped for the very greatest results from this drug, and we were both equally enthusiastic in our research. Especially, we had reason to believe that it might have a most successful action in the case of a certain rare but deadly disease, into the nature of which I need not enter. Reasoning by analogy, we were convinced that we had a certain cure for this particular ailment.
“Our investigation, however, was somewhat hampered by the fact that the condition in question is rare out of tropical countries, and that in our hospital wards we had not, at that time, any example of it. So serious was this obstacle, that it seemed that we must leave other men more favourably situated to reap the benefit of our work and enjoy the credit of our discovery, but a curious chance gave us exactly what we were in search of, at the instant when we were about to despair. It was Yorke-Bannerman who came to me in my laboratory one day to tell me that he had in his private practice the very condition of which we were in search.
“‘The patient,’ said he, ’is my uncle, Admiral Scott Prideaux.’
“‘Your uncle!’ I cried, in amazement. ‘But how came he to develop such a condition?’
“‘His last commission in the Navy was spent upon the Malabar Coast, where the disease is endemic. There can be do doubt that it has been latent in his system ever since, and that the irritability of temper and indecision of character, of which his family have so often had to complain, were really among the symptoms of his complaint.’
“I examined the Admiral in consultation with my colleague, and I confirmed his diagnosis. But, to my surprise, Yorke-Bannerman showed the most invincible and reprehensible objection to experiment upon his relative. In vain I assured him that he must place his duty to science high above all other considerations. It was only after great pressure that I could persuade him to add an infinitesimal portion of aconitine to his prescriptions.
The drug was a deadly one, he said, and the toxic dose was still to be determined. He could not push it in the case of a relative who trusted himself to his care. I tried to shake him in what I regarded as his absurd squeamishness — but in vain.
“But I had another resource. Bannerman’s prescriptions were made up by a fellow named Barclay, who had been dispenser at Nathaniel’s and afterwards set up as a chemist in Sackville Street. This man was absolutely in my power. I had discovered him at Nathaniel’s in dishonest practices, and I held evidence which would have sent him to gaol. I held this over him now, and I made him, unknown to Bannerman, increase the doses of aconitine in the medicine until they were sufficient for my experimental purposes. I will not enter into figures, but suffice it that Bannerman was giving more than ten times what he imagined.
“You know the sequel. I was called in, and suddenly found that I had Bannerman in my power. There had been a very keen rivalry between us in science. He was the only man in England whose career might impinge upon mine. I had this supreme chance of putting him out of my way. He could not deny that he had been giving his uncle aconitine. I could prove that his uncle had died of aconitine. He could not himself account for the facts — he was absolutely in my power. I did not wish him to be condemned, Maisie. I only hoped that he would leave the court discredited and ruined. I give you my word that my evidence would have saved him from the scaffold.”
Hilda was listening, with a set, white face.
“Proceed!” said she, and held out the brandy once more.
“I did not give the Admiral any more aconitine after I had taken over the case. But what was already in his system was enough. It was evident that we had seriously under-estimated the lethal dose. As to your father, Maisie, you have done me an injustice. You have always thought that I killed him.”
“Proceed!” said she.
“I speak now from the brink of the grave, and I tell you that I did not. His heart was always weak, and it broke down under the strain. Indirectly I was the cause — I do not seek to excuse anything; but it was the sorrow and the shame that killed him. As to Barclay, the chemist, that is another matter. I will not deny that I was concerned in that mysterious disappearance, which was a seven days’ wonder in the Press. I could not permit my scientific calm to be interrupted by the blackmailing visits of so insignificant a person. And then after many years you came, Maisie. You also got between me and that work which was life to me. You also showed that you would rake up this old matter and bring dishonour upon a name which has stood for something in science. You also — but you will forgive me. I have held on to life for your sake as an atonement for my sins. Now, I go! Cumberledge — your notebook. Subjective sensations, swimming in the head, light flashes before the eyes, soothing torpor, some touch of coldness, constriction of the temples, humming in the ears, a sense of sinking — sinking — sinking!”
It was an hour later, and Hilda and I were alone in the chamber of death. As Sebastian lay there, a marble figure, with his keen eyes closed and his pinched, thin face whiter and serener than ever, I could not help gazing at him with some pangs of recollection. I could not avoid recalling the time when his very name was to me a word of power, and when the thought of him roused on my cheek a red flush of enthusiasm. As I looked I murmured two lines from Browning’s Grammarian’s Funeral:
This is our Master, famous, calm, and dead,
Borne on our shoulders.
Hilda Wade, standing beside me, with an awestruck air, added a stanza from the same great poem:
Lofty designs must close in like effects:
Loftily lying,
Leave him — still loftier than the world suspects,
Living and dying.
I gazed at her with admiration. “And it is YOU, Hilda, who pay him this generous tribute!” I cried, “YOU, of all women!”
“Yes, it is I,” she answered. “He was a great man, after all, Hubert. Not good, but great. And greatness by itself extorts our unwilling homage.”
“Hilda,” I cried, “you are a great woman; and a good woman, too. It makes me proud to think you will soon be my wife. For there is now no longer any just cause or impediment.”
Beside the dead master, she laid her hand solemnly and calmly in mine. “No impediment,” she answered. “I have vindicated and cleared my father’s memory. And now, I can live. ‘Actual life comes next.’ We have much to do, Hubert.”
The Shorter Fiction
Merton College, Oxford, 1837 — where Allen was educated in the late 1860’s
The college today
Strange Stories
Allen’s original proposed title for this collection was ‘Nightmares’, though it was published as Strange Stories in 1884. In the Introduction Allen speaks of himself as ‘by trade a psychologist and scientific journeyman… Though these stories do not profess to be anything more than mere short sensational tales, I have yet endeavoured to give most of them some slight tinge of scientific or psychological import or meaning’. The collection offers 16 stories, reprinted from various magazines, including The Cornhill and Belgravia. The tales were published under the pseudonym J. Arbuthnot Wilson. Reviews for the collection were generally positive, comparing Allen’s prose to Poe’s own tales in the same genre. For the book publication, Allen received £100 ‘in full payment for the Copyright and all interest in a book of stories . . .’
The first edition’s title page
CONTENTS
THE REVEREND JOHN CREEDY.
DR. GREATREX’S ENGAGEMENT.
MR. CHUNG.
THE CURATE OF CHURNSIDE.
AN EPISODE IN HIGH LIFE.
MY NEW YEARS EVE AMONG THE MUMMIES.
THE FOUNDERING OF THE “FORTUNA.”
THE BACKSLIDER.
THE MYSTERIOUS OCCURRENCE IN PICCADILLY.
CARVALHO.
PAUSODYNE:
A GREAT CHEMICAL DISCOVERY.
THE EMPRESS OF ANDORRA.
THE SENIOR PROCTOR’S WOOING:
A TALE OF TWO CONTINENTS.
THE CHILD OF THE PHALANSTERY.
OUR SCIENTIFIC OBSERVATIONS ON A GHOST.
RAM DAS OF CAWNPORE.
PREFACE.
It is with some little trepidation that I venture to submit to the critical world this small collection of short stories. I feel that in doing so I owe some apology both to my readers and to the regular story-tellers. Being by trade a psychologist and scientific journeyman, I have been bold enough at times to stray surreptitiously and tentatively from my proper sphere into the flowery fields of pure fiction. Some of these my divarications from the strict path of sterner science, however, having been already publicly performed under the incognito of “J. Arbuthnot Wilson,” have been so far condoned by generous and kindly critics that I am emboldened to present them to the judgment of readers under a more permanent form, and even to dispense with the convenient cloak of a pseudonym, under which one can always so easily cover one’s hasty retreat from an untenable position. I can only hope that my confession will be accepted in partial extenuation of this culpable departure from the good old rule, “Ne sutor ultra crepidam;” and that older hands at the craft of story-telling will pardon an amateur novice his defective workmanship on the general plea of his humble demeanour.
I may perhaps also venture to plead in self-defence that though these stories do not profess to be anything more than mere short sensational tales, I have yet endeavoured to give to most of them some slight tinge of scientific or psychological import and meaning. “The Reverend John Creedy,” for example, is a study from within of a singular persistence of hereditary character, well known to all students of modern anthropological papers and reports. Members of barbarous or savage races, trained for a time in civilized habits, are liable at any moment to revert naturally to their primitive condition, especially under the contagious influence of companionship with persons of their own blood, and close subjection to the ancestral circumstances. The tale which I have based upon several such hist
orical instances in real life endeavours briefly to hint at the modes of feeling likely to accompany such a relapse into barbarism in an essentially fine and sensitive savage nature. To most European readers, no doubt, such a sheer fall from the pinnacle of civilization to the nethermost abysses of savagery, would seem to call for the display of no other emotion than pure disgust and aversion; but those who know intimately the whole gamut of the intensely impressionable African mind will be able to treat its temptations and its tendencies far more sympathetically. In “The Curate of Churnside,” again, I have tried to present a psychical analysis of a temperament not uncommon among the cultured class of the Italian Renaissance, and less rare than many people will be inclined to imagine among the colder type of our own emancipated and cultivated classes. The union of high intellectual and æsthetic culture with a total want of moral sensibility is a recognized fact in many periods of history, though our own age is singularly loth to admit of its possibility in its own contemporaries. In “Ram Das of Cawnpore,” once more, I have attempted to depict a few circumstances of the Indian Mutiny as they must naturally have presented themselves to the mind and feelings of a humble native actor in that great and terrible drama. Accustomed ourselves to looking always at the massacres and reprisals of the Mutiny from a purely English point of view, we are liable to forget that every act of the mutineers and their aiders or abettors must have been fully justified in their own eyes, at the moment at least, as every act of every human being always is to his own inner personality. In his conscience of conscience, no man ever really believes that under given circumstances he could conceivably have acted otherwise than he actually did. If he persuades himself that he does really so believe, then he shows himself at once to be a very poor introspective psychologist. “The Child of the Phalanstery,” to take another case, is a more ideal effort to realize the moral conceptions of a community brought up under a social and ethical environment utterly different from that by which we ourselves are now surrounded. In like manner, almost all the stories (except the lightest among them) have their germ or prime motive in some scientific or quasi-scientific idea; and this narrow link which thus connects them at bottom with my more habitual sphere of work must serve as my excuse to the regular story-tellers for an otherwise unwarrantable intrusion upon their private preserves. I trust they will forgive me on this plea for my trespass on their legitimate domains, and allow me to occupy in peace a little adjacent corner of unclaimed territory, which lies so temptingly close beside my own small original freehold.
