Complete Works of Wilkie Collins (944 page)

A rough, deep voice, which I should certainly never have supposed to be the voice of a woman, hailed us from the inner side of the paling.

“Who’s there?”

“Mrs. Macallan,” answered my mother-in-law.

“What do you want?”

“We want to see Dexter.”

“You can’t see him.”

“Why not?”

“What did you say your name was?”

“Macallan. Mrs. Macallan. Eustace Macallan’s mother.
Now
do you understand?”

The voice muttered and grunted behind the paling, and a key turned in the lock of the gate.

Admitted to the garden, in the deep shadow of the shrubs, I could see nothing distinctly of the woman with the rough voice, except that she wore a man’s hat. Closing the gate behind us, without a word of welcome or explanation, she led the way to the house. Mrs. Macallan followed her easily, knowing the place; and I walked in Mrs. Macallan’s footsteps as closely as I could. “This is a nice family,” my mother-in-law whispered to me. “Dexter’s cousin is the only woman in the house — and Dexter’s cousin is an idiot.”

We entered a spacious hall with a low ceiling, dimly lighted at its further end by one small oil-lamp. I could see that there were pictures on the grim, brown walls, but the subjects represented were invisible in the obscure and shadowy light.

Mrs. Macallan addressed herself to the speechless cousin with the man’s hat.

“Now tell me,” she said. “Why can’t we see Dexter?”

The cousin took a sheet of paper off the table, and handed it to Mrs. Macallan.

“The Master’s writing,” said this strange creature, in a hoarse whisper, as if the bare idea of “the Master” terrified her. “Read it. And stay or go, which you please.”

She opened an invisible side door in the wall, masked by one of the pictures — disappeared through it like a ghost — and left us together alone in the hall.

Mrs. Macallan approached the oil-lamp, and looked by its light at the sheet of paper which the woman had given to her. I followed and peeped over her shoulder without ceremony. The paper exhibited written characters, traced in a wonderfully large and firm handwriting. Had I caught the infection of madness in the air of the house? Or did I really see before me these words?

“NOTICE. — My immense imagination is at work. Visions of heroes unroll themselves before me. I reanimate in myself the spirits of the departed great. My brains are boiling in my head. Any persons who disturb me, under existing circumstances, will do it at the peril of their lives. — DEXTER.”

Mrs. Macallan looked around at me quietly with her sardonic smile.

“Do you still persist in wanting to be introduced to him?” she asked.

The mockery in the tone of the question roused my pride. I determined that I would not be the first to give way.

“Not if I am putting you in peril of your life, ma’am,” I answered, pertly enough, pointing to the paper in her hand.

My mother-in-law returned to the hall table, and put the paper back on it without condescending to reply. She then led the way to an arched recess on our right hand, beyond which I dimly discerned a broad flight of oaken stairs.

“Follow me,” said Mrs. Macallan, mounting the stairs in the dark. “I know where to find him.”

We groped our way up the stairs to the first landing. The next flight of steps, turning in the reverse direction, was faintly illuminated, like the hall below, by one oil-lamp, placed in some invisible position above us. Ascending the second flight of stairs and crossing a short corridor, we discovered the lamp, through the open door of a quaintly shaped circular room, burning on the mantel-piece. Its light illuminated a strip of thick tapestry, hanging loose from the ceiling to the floor, on the wall opposite to the door by which we had entered.

Mrs. Macallan drew aside the strip of tapestry, and, signing me to follow her, passed behind it.

“Listen!” she whispered.

Standing on the inner side of the tapestry, I found myself in a dark recess or passage, at the end of which a ray of light from the lamp showed me a closed door. I listened, and heard on the other side of the door a shouting voice, accompanied by an extraordinary rumbling and whistling sound, traveling backward and forward, as well as I could judge, over a great space. Now the rumbling and the whistling would reach their climax of loudness, and would overcome the resonant notes of the shouting voice. Then again those louder sounds gradually retreated into distance, and the shouting voice made itself heard as the more audible sound of the two. The door must have been of prodigious solidity. Listen as intently as I might, I failed to catch the articulate words (if any) which the voice was pronouncing, and I was equally at a loss to penetrate the cause which produced the rumbling and whistling sounds.

“What can possibly be going on,” I whispered to Mrs. Macallan, “on the other side of that door?”

“Step softly,” my mother-in-law answered, “and come and see.”

She arranged the tapestry behind us so as completely to shut out the light in the circular room. Then noiselessly turning the handle, she opened the heavy door.

We kept ourselves concealed in the shadow of the recess, and looked through the open doorway.

I saw (or fancied I saw, in the obscurity) a long room with a low ceiling. The dying gleam of an ill-kept fire formed the only light by which I could judge of objects and distances. Redly illuminating the central portion of the room, opposite to which we were standing, the fire-light left the extremities shadowed in almost total darkness. I had barely time to notice this before I heard the rumbling and whistling sounds approaching me. A high chair on wheels moved by, through the field of red light, carrying a shadowy figure with floating hair, and arms furiously raised and lowered working the machinery that propelled the chair at its utmost rate of speed. “I am Napoleon, at the sunrise of Austerlitz!” shouted the man in the chair as he swept past me on his rumbling and whistling wheels, in the red glow of the fire-light. “I give the word, and thrones rock, and kings fall, and nations tremble, and men by tens of thousands fight and bleed and die!” The chair rushed out of sight, and the shouting man in it became another hero. “I am Nelson!” the ringing voice cried now. “I am leading the fleet at Trafalgar. I issue my commands, prophetically conscious of victory and death. I see my own apotheosis, my public funeral, my nation’s tears, my burial in the glorious church. The ages remember me, and the poets sing my praise in immortal verse!” The strident wheels turned at the far end of the room and came back. The fantastic and frightful apparition, man and machinery blended in one — the new Centaur, half man, half chair — flew by me again in the dying light. “I am Shakespeare!” cried the frantic creature now. “I am writing ‘Lear,’ the tragedy of tragedies. Ancients and moderns, I am the poet who towers over them all. Light! light! the lines flow out like lava from the eruption of my volcanic mind. Light! light! for the poet of all time to write the words that live forever!” He ground and tore his way back toward the middle of the room. As he approached the fire-place a last morsel of unburned coal (or wood) burst into momentary flame, and showed the open doorway. In that moment he saw us! The wheel-chair stopped with a shock that shook the crazy old floor of the room, altered its course, and flew at us with the rush of a wild animal. We drew back, just in time to escape it, against the wall of the recess. The chair passed on, and burst aside the hanging tapestry. The light of the lamp in the circular room poured in through the gap. The creature in the chair checked his furious wheels, and looked back over his shoulder with an impish curiosity horrible to see.

“Have I run over them? Have I ground them to powder for presuming to intrude on me?” he said to himself. As the expression of this amiable doubt passed his lips his eyes lighted on us. His mind instantly veered back again to Shakespeare and King Lear. “Goneril and Regan!” he cried. “My two unnatural daughters, my she-devil children come to mock at me!”

“Nothing of the sort,” said my mother-in-law, as quietly as if she were addressing a perfectly reasonable being. “I am your old friend, Mrs. Macallan; and I have brought Eustace Macallan’s second wife to see you.”

The instant she pronounced those last words, “Eustace Macallan’s second wife,” the man in the chair sprang out of it with a shrill cry of horror, as if she had shot him. For one moment we saw a head and body in the air, absolutely deprived of the lower limbs. The moment after, the terrible creature touched the floor as lightly as a monkey, on his hands. The grotesque horror of the scene culminated in his hopping away on his hands, at a prodigious speed, until he reached the fire-place in the long room. There he crouched over the dying embers, shuddering and shivering, and muttering, “Oh, pity me, pity me!” dozens and dozens of times to himself.

This was the man whose advice I had come to ask — who assistance I had confidently counted on in my hour of need.

CHAPTER XXV. MISERRIMUS DEXTER — SECOND VIEW

THOROUGHLY disheartened and disgusted, and (if I must honestly confess it) thoroughly frightened too, I whispered to Mrs. Macallan, “I was wrong, and you were right. Let us go.”

The ears of Miserrimus Dexter must have been as sensitive as the ears of a dog. He heard me say, “Let us go.”

“No!” he called out. “Bring Eustace Macallan’s second wife in here. I am a gentleman — I must apologize to her. I am a student of human character — I wish to see her.”

The whole man appeared to have undergone a complete transformation. He spoke in the gentlest of voices, and he sighed hysterically when he had done, like a woman recovering from a burst of tears. Was it reviving courage or reviving curiosity? When Mrs. Macallan said to me, “The fit is over now; do you still wish to go away?” I answered, “No; I am ready to go in.”

“Have you recovered your belief in him already?” asked my mother-in-law, in her mercilessly satirical way.

“I have recovered from my terror of him,” I replied.

“I am sorry I terrified you,” said the soft voice at the fire-place. “Some people think I am a little mad at times. You came, I suppose, at one of the times — if some people are right. I admit that I am a visionary. My imagination runs away with me, and I say and do strange things. On those occasions, anybody who reminds me of that horrible Trial throws me back again into the past, and causes me unutterable nervous suffering. I am a very tender-hearted man. As the necessary consequence (in such a world as this), I am a miserable wretch. Accept my excuses. Come in, both of you. Come in and pity me.”

A child would not have been frightened of him now. A child would have gone in and pitied him.

The room was getting darker and darker. We could just see the crouching figure of Miserrimus Dexter at the expiring fire — and that was all.

“Are we to have no light?” asked Mrs. Macallan. “And is this lady to see you, when the light comes, out of your chair?”

He lifted something bright and metallic, hanging round his neck, and blew on it a series of shrill, trilling, bird-like notes. After an interval he was answered by a similar series of notes sounding faintly in some distant region of the house.

“Ariel is coming,” he said. “Compose yourself, Mamma Macallan; Ariel with make me presentable to a lady’s eyes.”

He hopped away on his hands into the darkness at the end of the room. “Wait a little,” said Mrs. Macallan, “and you will have another surprise — you will see the ‘delicate Ariel.’“

We heard heavy footsteps in the circular room.

“Ariel!” sighed Miserrimus Dexter out of the darkness, in his softest notes.

To my astonishment the coarse, masculine voice of the cousin in the man’s hat — the Caliban’s, rather than the Ariel’s voice — answered, “Here!”

“My chair, Ariel!”

The person thus strangely misnamed drew aside the tapestry, so as to let in more light; then entered the room, pushing the wheeled chair before her. She stooped and lifted Miserrimus Dexter from the floor, like a child. Before she could put him into the chair, he sprang out of her arms with a little gleeful cry, and alighted on his seat, like a bird alighting on its perch!