A Terrible Temptation: A Story of To-Day Part 47

Then they made haste, and told each other everything that had happened, and it was late in the afternoon before they parted.

Lady Ba.s.sett controlled her tears at parting as well as she could.

Mr. Coyne had slyly hid himself, but emerged when she came down to the carriage, and she shook him warmly by the hand, and he bowed at the door incessantly, with his face all in a pucker, till the cavalcade dashed away.

CHAPTER XXV.

LADY Ba.s.sETT timed her next visit so that she found Dr. Suaby at home.

He received her kindly, and showed himself a master; told her Sir Charles's was a mixed case, in which the fall, the fit, and a morbid desire for offspring had all played their parts.

He hoped a speedy cure, but said he counted on her a.s.sistance. There was no doubt what he meant.

Oh, for one thing, he said to her, rather slyly, "Coyne tells me you have been good enough to supply us with a hint as to his treatment; sedatives are opposed to his idiosyncrasy."

Lady Ba.s.sett blushed high, and said something about Dr. Willis.

"Oh, you are quite right, you and Dr. Willis; only you are not so very conversant with that idiosyncrasy. Why have you let him smoke twenty cigars every day of his life? the brain is accessible by other roads than the stomach. Well, we have got him down to four cigars, and in a month we will have him down to two. The effect of that, and exercise, and simple food, and the absence of powerful excitements--you will see.

Do your part," said he, gayly, "we will do ours. He is the most interesting patient in the house, and born to adorn society, though by a concurrence of unhappy circ.u.mstances he is separated from it for a while."

She spent the whole afternoon with Sir Charles, and they dined together at the doctor's private table, with one or two patients who were touched, but showed no signs of it on that occasion; for the good doctor really acted like oil on the troubled waters.

Sir Charles and Lady Ba.s.sett corresponded, and so kept their hearts up; but after Rolfe's hint the correspondence was rather guarded. If these letters were read in the asylum the curious would learn that Sir Charles was far more anxious about his wife's condition than his own; but that these two patient persons were only waiting a certain near event to attack Richard Ba.s.sett with acc.u.mulated fury--that smoldering fire did not smoke by letter, but burned deep in both their sore and heavy, but enduring, Anglo-Saxon hearts.

Lady Ba.s.sett wrote to Mr. Rolfe, thanking him again for his advice, and telling him how it worked.

She had a very short reply from that gentleman.

But about six weeks after her visit he surprised her a little by writing of his own accord, and asking her for a formal introduction to Sir Charles Ba.s.sett, and begging her to back a request that Sir Charles would devote a leisure hour or two to correspondence with him. "Not,"

said he, "on his private affairs, but on a matter of general interest.

I want a few of his experiences and observations in that place. I have the less scruple in asking it, that whatever takes him out of himself will be salutary."

Lady Ba.s.sett sent him the required introduction in such terms that Sir Charles at once consented to oblige his wife by obliging Mr. Rolfe.

"My DEAR SIR--In compliance with your wish, and Lady Ba.s.sett's, I send you a few desultory remarks on what I see here.

"1st. The lines,

'Great wits to madness nearly are allied, And thin part.i.tions do their bonds divide,'

are, in my opinion, exaggerated and untrue. Taking the people here as a guide, the insane in general appear to be people with very little brains, and enormous egotism.

"My next observation is, that the women have far less imagination than the men; they cannot even realize their own favorite delusions. For instance, here are two young ladies, the Virgin Mary and the Queen of England. How do they play their parts? They sit aloof from all the rest, with their noses in the air. But gauge their imaginations; go down on one knee, or both, and address them as a saint and a queen; they cannot say a word in accordance; yet they are cunning enough to see they cannot reply in character, so they will not utter a syllable to their adorers. They are like the shop-boys who go to a masquerade as Burleigh or Walsingham, and when you ask them who is Queen Bess's favorite just now, blush, and look offended, and pa.s.s sulkily on.

"The same cla.s.s of male lunatics can speak in character; and this observation has made me doubt whether philosophers are not mistaken in saying that women generally have more imagination than men. I suspect they have infinitely less; and I believe their great love of novels, which has been set down to imagination, arises mainly from their want of it. You writers of novels supply that defect for them by a pictorial style, by an infinity of minute details, and petty aids to realizing, all which an imaginative reader can do for himself on reading a bare narrative of sterling facts and incidents.

"I find a monotony in madness. So many have inspirations, see phantoms, are the victims of vast conspiracies (princ.i.p.alities and powers combined against a fly); their food is poisoned, their wine is drugged, etc., etc.

"These, I think, are all forms of that morbid egotism which is at the bottom of insanity. So is their antipathy for each other. They keep apart, because a madman is all self, and his talk is all self; thus egotisms, clash, and an antipathy arises; yet it is not, I think, pure antipathy, though so regarded, but a mere form of their boundless egotism.

"If, in visiting an asylum, you see two or three different patients b.u.t.tonhole a fourth and pour their grievances into a listening ear, you may safely suspect No. 4 of--sanity.

"On the whole, I think the doctor himself, and one of his attendants, and Jones, a keeper, have more solid eccentricity and variety about them than most of the patients."

Extract from Letter 2, written about a fortnight later:

"Some insane persons have a way of couching their nonsense in language that sounds rational, and has a false air of logical connection. Their periods seem stolen from sensible books, and forcibly fitted to incongruous bosh. By this means the ear is confused, and a slow hearer might fancy he was listening to sense.

"I have secured you one example of this. You must know that, in the evening, I sometimes collect a few together, and try to get them to tell their stories. Little comes of it in general but interruptions.

But, one night, a melancholy Bagman responded in good set terms, and all in a moment; one would have thought I had put a torch to a barrel of powder, he went off so quickly, in this style:

"'You ask my story: it is briefly told. Initiated in commerce from my earliest years, and traveled in the cotton trade. As representative of a large house in Manchester, I visited the United States.

"'Unfortunately for me, that country was then the chosen abode of spirits; the very air was thick and humming with supernaturalia. Ere long spirit-voices whispered in my ear, and suggested pious aspirations at first. That was a blind, no doubt; for very soon they went on to insinuate things profane and indelicate, and urged me to deliver them in mixed companies; I forbore with difficulty, restrained by the early lessons of a pious mother, and a disinclination to be kicked downstairs, or flung out o' window.

"'I consulted a friend, a native of the country; he said, in its beautiful Doric, "Old oss, I reckon you'd better change the air." I grasped his hand, muttered a blessing, and sailed for England.

"'On ocean's peaceful bosom the annoyance ceased. But under this deceitful calm fresh dangers brooded. Two doctors had stolen into the s.h.i.+p, unseen by human eye, and bided their time. Unable to act at sea, owing to the combined effect of wind and current, they concealed themselves on deck under a black tarpaulin--that is to say, it had been black, but wind and weather had reduced it to a dirty brown--and there, adopting for the occasion the habits of the dormouse, the bear, the caterpillar, and other ephemeral productions, they lay torpid. But the moment the vessel touched the quay, profiting by the commotion, they emerged, and signed certificates with chalk on my portmanteau; then vanished in the crowd. The Custom-house read the certificates, and seized my luggage as contraband. I was too old a traveler to leave my luggage; so then they seized me, and sent us both down here. (With sudden and short-lived fury) that old h.e.l.l-hound at the Lodge asked them where I was booked for. "For the whole journey," said a sepulchral voice unseen. That means the grave, my boys, the silent grave.'

"Notwithstanding this stern decree, Suaby expects to turn him out cured in a few months.

"Miss Wieland, a very pretty girl, put her arm in mine, and drew me mysteriously apart. 'So you are collecting the villainies,' said she, sotto voce. 'It will take you all your time. I'll tell you mine.

There's a hideous old man wants me to marry him; and I won't. And he has put me in here, and keeps me prisoner till I will. They are all on his side, especially that sanctified old guy, Suaby. They drug my wine, they stupefy me, they give me things to make me naughty and tipsy; but it is no use; I never will marry that old goat--that for his money and him--I'll die first.'

"Of course my blood boiled; but I asked my nurse, Sally, and she a.s.sured me there was not one atom of truth in any part of the story.

'The young lady was put in here by her mother; none too soon, neither.'

I asked her what she meant. 'Why, she came here with her throat cut, and strapping on it. She is a suicidal.'"

This correspondence led eventually to some unexpected results; but I am obliged to interrupt it for a time, while I deal with a distinct series of events which began about five weeks after Lady Ba.s.sett's visit to Mr. Rolfe, and will carry the reader forward beyond the date we have now arrived at.

It was the little dining-room at Highmore; a low room, of modest size, plainly furnished. An enormous fire-place, paved with plain tiles, on which were placed iron dogs; only wood and roots were burned in this room.

Mrs. Ba.s.sett had just been packed off to bed by marital authority; Ba.s.sett and Wheeler sat smoking pipes and sipping whisky-and-water.

Ba.s.sett professed to like the smell of peat smoke in whisky; what he really liked was the price.

After a few silent whiffs, said Ba.s.sett, "I didn't think they would take it so quietly; did you?"