Dartmouth suddenly found himself standing upright, his shoulders clutched in a pair of strong hands, and Hollington's anxious face a few inches from his own.
"What the devil is the matter with you, Hal?" exclaimed Hollington. "Have you set up a private lunatic asylum, or is it but prosaic dyspepsia?"
"Becky!" exclaimed Dartmouth, as he grasped the situation. "Iamso glad to see you. Where did you come from?"
"You frightened your devoted Jones to death with one of your starvation moods, and he telegraphed for me. The idea of a man having the blues in the second month of his engagement to the most charming girl in Christendom!"
"Don't speak to me of her," exclaimed Dartmouth, throwing himself into a chair and covering his face with his hands.
"Whew! What's up? You haven't quarrelled already? Or won't the governor give his consent?"
"No," said Dartmouth, "that's not it."
"Then what the devil is the matter? Is—is she dead?"
"No."
"Was she married to some other man before?"
"No!"
"I beg your pardon; I was merely exhausting the field of conjecture.Will you kindly enlighten me?"
"If I did, you would say I was a lunatic."
"I have been inclined to say so occasionally before—"
"Becky, Weir Penrhyn is my—" And then he stopped. The ludicrous side of the matter had never appealed to him, but he was none the less conscious of how ridiculous the thing would appear to another.
"Your what? Your wife? Are you married to her already, and do you want me to break it to the old gentleman? What kind of a character is he? Shall I go armed?"
"She is not my wife, thank God! If she were—"
"For heaven's sake, Harold, explain yourself. Can it be possible thatMiss Penrhyn is like too many other women?"
Dartmouth sprang to his feet, his face white to the lips.
"How dare you say such a thing?" he exclaimed. "If it were any other man but you, I'd blow out his brains."
Hollington got up from the chair he had taken and, grasping Dartmouth by the shoulders, threw him back into his chair.
"Now look here, Harold," he said; "let us have no more damned nonsense. If you will indulge in lugubrious hints which have but one meaning, you must expect the consequences. I refuse to listen to another word unless you come out and speak plain English."
He resumed his seat, and Dartmouth clasped his hands behind his head and stared moodily at the fire. In a few moments he turned his eyes and fixed them on Hollington.
"Very well," he said, "I will tell you the whole story from beginning to end. Heaven knows it is a relief to speak; but if you laugh, I believe I shall kill you."
"I will not laugh," said Hollington. "Whatever it is, I see it has gone hard with you."
Dartmouth began with the night of the first attempt of his suppressed poetical genius to manifest itself, and gave Hollington a comprehensive account of each detail of his subsequent experiences, down to the reading of the letters and the spiritual retrospect they had induced. He did not tell the story dramatically; he had no fire left in him; he stated it in a matter-of-fact way, which was impressive because of the speaker's indisputable belief in his own words. Hollington felt no desire to laugh; on the contrary, he was seriously alarmed, and he determined to knock this insane freak of Harold's brain to atoms, if mortal power could do it, and regardless of consequences to himself.
When Dartmouth had finished, Hollington lit a cigar and puffed at it for a moment, meditatively regarding his friend meanwhile. Then he remarked, in a matter-of-fact tone:
"So you are your own grandfather, and Miss Penrhyn is her own grandmother."
Dartmouth moved uneasily. "It sounds ridiculous—but—don't chaff."
"My dear boy, I was never more serious in my life. I merely wanted to be sure that I had got it straight. It is A.B.C. by this time to you, but it has exploded in my face like a keg of gunpowder, and I am a trifle dazed. But, to come down to deadly earnest, will you allow me to speak to you from the medical point of view? You know I had some idea at one time of afflicting the community with one more physician, until we stumbled on those coal mines, and my prospective patients were spared premature acquaintance with the golden stairs. May I speak as an unfledged doctor, but still as one burdened with unused knowledge?"
"You can say what you like."
"Very well, then. You may or may not be aware that what you are pleased to call the blues, or moods, are, in your case, nothing more or less than melancholia. When they are at their worst they are the form known as melancholia attonita. In other words, you are not only steeped in melancholy, but your brain is in, a state of stupor: you are all but comatose. These attacks are not frequent, and are generally the result of a powerful mental shock or strain. I remember you had one once after you had crammed for two months for an examination and couldn't pull through. You scared the life out of the tutors and the boys, and it was not until I threatened to put you under the pump that you came to. Your ordinary attacks are not so alarming to your friends, but when indulged in too frequently, they are a good deal more dangerous."
He paused a moment, but Dartmouth made no reply, and he went on.
"Any man who yields habitually to melancholia may expect his brain, sooner or later, to degenerate from its original strength, and relax the toughness and compactness of its fibre. Absolute dementia may not be the result for some years, but there will be occasional and painful indications of the end for a long space before it arrives. The indications, as a rule, will assume the form of visions and dreams and wild imaginings of various sorts. Now do you understand me?"
"You mean," said Dartmouth, wheeling about and looking him directly in the eyes, "you mean that I am going mad?"
"I mean, my dear boy, that you will be a raving maniac inside of a month, unless you dislodge from your brain this horrible, unnatural, and ridiculous idea."
"Do I look like a madman?" demanded Dartmouth.
"Not at the present moment, no. You look remarkably sane. A man with as good a brain as yours does not let it go all at once. It will slide from you imperceptibly, bit by bit, until one day there will be a climax."
"I am not mad," said Dartmouth; "and if I were, my madness would be an effect, not a cause. What is more, I know enough about melancholia to know that it does not drift into dementia until middle age at least. Moreover, my brain is not relaxed in my ordinary attacks; my spirits are prostrate, and my disgust for life is absolute, but my brain—except when it has been over-exerted, as in one or two climaxes of this experience of mine—is as clear as a bell. I have done some of my best thinking with my hand on the butt of a pistol. But to return to the question we are discussing. You have left one or two of the main facts unexplained. What caused Weir's vision? She never had an attack of melancholia in her life."
"Telepathy, induction, but in the reverse order of your solution of the matter. Your calling her by her grandmother's name was natural enough in your condition—you have acknowledged that your melancholia had already taken possession of you. Miss Penrhyn had, for some reason best known to her sleeping self, got herself up to look like her grandmother, and, she being young and pretty, her semi-lunatic observer addressed her as Sionèd instead of heaven knows what jaw-breaking Welsh title. Then you went ahead and had the vision, which was quite in keeping with your general lunar condition. I believe you said there was a moon."
Dartmouth frowned. "I asked you not to chaff," he said. "What is more, I have had melancholia all my life, but delusion never before. But let that pass. The impulse to write—what do you say to that?"
"The impulse was due to the genius which you have undoubtedly inherited from your grandfather. The inability to put your ideas into verbal form is due to amnesic aphasia. The portion of your brain through which your genius should find speech is either temporarily paralyzed or else deficient in composition. You had better go up and see Jackson. He can cure you if anyone can."
"Do you believe I can be cured?"
"You can certainly make the attempt."
Dartmouth threw back his head and covered his face with his hands. "O God!" he exclaimed, "if you knew the agony of the longing to feel the ecstasy of spiritual intoxication, and yet to feel as if your brain were a cloud-bank—of knowing that you are divinely gifted, that the world should be ringing with your name, and yet of being as mute as if screwed within a coffin!"
"My dear boy, it will all come out right in the end. Science and your own will can do much, and as for the rest, perhaps Miss Penrhyn will do for you what those letters intimate Sionèd did for your grandfather."
Dartmouth got up and leaned his elbow on the mantelpiece.
"I do not know that I shall marry Weir Penrhyn," he said.
"Why not? Because your grandfather had an intrigue with her grandmother?—which, by the way, is by no means clearly proved. That there was a plan on foot to that end the letters pretty well show, but—"
"I don't care a hang about the sins of my ancestors, or of Weir's either—if that were all. If I do not marry her it will be because I do not care to shatter an ideal into still smaller bits. I loved her with what little good was left in me. I placed her on a pedestal and rejoiced that I was able so to do. Now she is the woman whose guilty love sent us both to our death. I could never forget it. There would always be a spot on the sun."
"My God, Harold," exclaimed Hollington, "youaremad. Of all the insane, ridiculous, idiotic speeches that ever came from man's lips, that is the worst."
"I can't help it, Becky. The idea, the knowledge, is my very life and soul; and when you think it all over you will see that there are many things that cannot be explained—Weir's words in the gallery, for instance. They coincide exactly with the vision I had four nights later. And a dozen other things—you can think them out for yourself. When you do, you will understand that there is but one light in which to look at the question: Weir Penrhyn and I are Lionel Dartmouth and Sionèd Penrhyn reborn, and that is the end of the matter."
Hollington groaned, and threw himself back in his chair with an impatient gesture.
"Well," he said, after a few moments' silence, "accepting your remarkable premisses for the sake of argument, will you kindly enlighten me as to since when you became so beautifully complete and altogether puerile a moralist? Suppose you did sin with her some three-quarters of a century ago, have not time and suffering purified you both—or rather her? I suppose it does not make so much difference about you."
"It is not that. It is the idea that is revolting—that this girl should have been my mistress at any time—"
"But, great heaven! Harold, such a sin is a thing of the flesh, not of the spirit, and the physical part of Sionèd Penrhyn has enriched the soil of Constantinople these sixty years. She has committed no sin in her present embodiment."
"Sin is an impulse, a prompting, of the spirit," said Dartmouth.
Hollington threw one leg over the arm of the chair, half turning his back upon Dartmouth.
"Rot!" he said.
"Not at all. Otherwise, the dead could sin."
"I am gratified to perceive that you are still able to have the last word. All I can say is, that you have done what I thought no living man could do. I once read a novel by a famous American author in which one of the characters would not ask the heroine to marry him after her husband's death because he had been guilty of the indelicacy of loving her (although mutely, and by her unsuspected) while she was a married woman. I thought then that moral senility could go no further, but you have got ahead of the American. Allow me to congratulate you."
"You can jibe all you like. I may be a fool, but I can't help it. I have got to that point where I am dominated by instinct, not by reason. The instincts may be wrong, because the outgrowth of a false civilization, but there they are, nevertheless, and of them I am the product. So are you, and some day you will find it out. I do not say positively that I will not marry Weir Penrhyn. I will talk it over with her, and then we can decide."
"A charming subject to discuss with a young girl. It would be kinder, and wiser, and more decent of you never to mention the matter to her. Of what use to make the poor girl miserable?"
"She half suspects now, and it would come out sooner or later."
"Then for heaven's sake do it at once, and have it over. Don't stay here by yourself any longer, whatever you do. Go to-morrow."
"Yes," said Dartmouth, "I will go to-morrow."
When Dartmouth entered the drawing-room at Rhyd-Alwyn the next evening, a half hour after his arrival, he found Sir Iltyd alone, and received a warm greeting.
"My dear boy," the old gentleman exclaimed, "I am delighted to see you. It seems an age since you left, and your brief reports of your ill-health have worried me. As for poor Weir, she has been ill herself. She looks so wretched that I would have sent for a physician had she not, in her usual tyrannical fashion, forbidden me. I did not tell her you were expected to-night; I wanted to give her a pleasant surprise. Here she is now."
The door was pushed open and Weir entered the room. Dartmouth checked an involuntary exclamation and went forward to meet her. She had on a long white gown like that she had worn the morning he had asked her to marry him, but the similarity of dress only served to accentuate the change the intervening time had wrought. It was not merely that she had lost her color and that her face was haggard; it was an indefinable revolution in her personality, which made her look ten years older, and left her without a suggestion of girlishness. She still carried her head with her customary hauteur, but there was something in its poise which suggested defiance as well, and which was quite new. And the lanterns in her eyes had gone out; the storms had been too heavy for them. All she needed was the costume of the First Empire to look as if she had stepped out of the locket he had brought from Crumford Hall.
As she saw Dartmouth, the blood rushed over her face, dyeing it to the roots of her hair, then receded, leaving it whiter than her gown. When he reached her side she drew back a little, but he made no attempt to kiss her; he merely raised her hand to his lips. As he did so he could have sworn he saw the sun flashing on the domes beneath the window; and over his senses stole the perfume of jasmine. The roar without was not that of the ocean, but of a vast city, and—hark!—the cry of the muezzin. How weird the tapestry looked in the firelight, and how the figures danced! And he had always liked her to wear white, better even than yellow. He roused himself suddenly and offered her his arm. The butler was announcing dinner.
They went into the dining-room, and Dartmouth and Sir Iltyd talked about the change of ministry and the Gladstone attitude on the Irish question for an hour and a quarter. Weir neither talked nor ate, but sat with her hands clasped tightly in her lap. Dartmouth understood and sympathized. He felt as if his own nerves were on the rack, as if his brain had been rolled into a cord whose tension was so strained that it might snap at any moment. But Sir Iltyd was considerate. He excused himself as soon as dessert was removed, on the plea of finishing an important historical work just issued, and the young people went directly to the drawing-room. As Dartmouth closed the door Weir turned to him, the color springing into her face.
"Tell me," she said, peremptorily; "have you discovered what it meant?"
He took her hand and led her over to the sofa. She sat down, but stood up again at once. "I cannot sit quietly," she said, "until Iknow. The enforced repression of the past week, the having no one to speak to, and the mystery of that dream have driven me nearly mad. It was cruel of you to stay away so long—but let that pass. There is only one thing I can think of now—do you know anything more than when you left?"
He folded his arms and looked down. "Why should you think I could have learned anything at Crumford Hall?" he demanded, with apparent evasion.
"Because of the restraint and sometimes incoherence of your letters. I knew that something had happened to you; you seemed hardly the same man. You seemed like—Oh, I do not know. For heaven's sake, tell me what it is."
"Weir," he said, raising his head and looking at her, "what do you think it is?"
She put up her hands and covered her face. "I do not know," she said, uncertainly. "If there is to be any explanation it must come from you. With me there is only the indefinable but persistent feeling that I am not Weir Penrhyn but the woman of that dream; that I have no right here in my father's castle, and no right to the position I hold in the world. To me sin has always seemed a horrible thing, and yet I feel as if my own soul were saturated with it; and what is worse, I feel no repentance. It is as if I were being punished by some external power, not by my own conscience. As if—Oh, it is all too vague to put into words—Harold,whatis it?"
"Let us sit down," he said, "and talk it over."
She allowed him to draw her down onto the sofa, and he looked at her for a moment. Then, suddenly, the purely human love triumphed. He forgot regret and disgust. He forgot the teachings of the world, and the ideal whose shattering he had mourned. He remembered nothing but that this woman so close to him was dearer than life or genius or ambition; that he loved her with all the strength and passion of which a man is capable. The past was gone, the future a blank; nothing remained but the glorious present, with its impulses which sprang straight from the heart of nature and which no creed could root out. He flung his arms about her, and the fierce joy of the moment thrilled and shook him as he kissed her. And for the moment she too forgot.
Then his arms slowly relaxed and he leaned forward, placing his elbow on his knee and covering his face with his hand. For a few moments he thought without speaking. He decided that he would tell her something to-night, but not all. He would give her a clue, and when she was alone she might work the rest out for herself. Then, together, they would decide what would be best to do. He took her hand.
"I have something to tell you," he said. "I did not tell you before I left because I thought it best not, but things have occurred since which make it desirable you should know. You do not know, I suppose, that on the night of our dream you got up in your sleep and wandered about the castle."
She leaned suddenly forward. "Yes?" she said, breathlessly. "I walked in my sleep? You saw me? Where?"
"In the gallery that overhangs the sea. I had gone there to watch the storm, and was about to return to my room when I saw you coming toward me. At first I thought you were the spirit of your grandmother—of Sionèd Penrhyn. In your sleep you had dressed yourself like the picture in the gallery, and the resemblance was complete. Then, strangely enough, I walked up to you and took your hand and called you 'Sionèd'—"
"Go on!"
"Then you told me that you were dead, and had been wandering in the hereafter and looking for me; that you could not find me there, and so had come back to earth and entered into the body of a dead child, and given it life, and grown to womanhood again, and found me at last. And then you put your cold arms about me and drew me down onto a seat. I suddenly lost all consciousness of the present, and we were together in a scene which was like a page from a past existence. The page was that of the dream we have found so difficult a problem, and you read it with me, not alone in your room—Weir! What is the matter?"
She had pushed him violently from her and sprung to her feet, and she stood before him with wide-open, terror-stricken eyes, and quivering in every limb. She tried to speak, but no words came; her lips were white and shrivelled, and her tongue clove to the roof of her mouth. Then she threw up her arms and fell heavily to the floor.
After Weir had been carried up-stairs, and he had ascertained that she was again conscious, Dartmouth went to his own room, knowing he could not see her again that night. He did not go to bed; there was no possibility of sleep for hours, and he preferred the slight distraction of pacing up and down the room. After a time he paused in front of the fireplace, and mechanically straightened one of the andirons with his foot. What had affected Weir so strangely? Had the whole thing burst suddenly upon her? He had hardly told her enough for that; but what else could it be? Poor child! And poor Sir Iltyd! How should he explain to him? What story could he concoct to satisfy him? It would be absurd to attempt the truth; no human being but himself and Weir could comprehend it; Sir Iltyd would only think them both mad. He unconsciously drew in a long breath, expelling the air again with some violence, like a man whose chest is oppressed. And how his head ached! If he could only get a few hours sleep without that cursed laudanum. Hark! what was that? A storm was coming up. It almost shook the castle, solid and of stone as it was. But he was glad. A storm was more in tune with his mood than calm. He would go out into the gallery and watch it.
He left his room and went to the gallery to which he had gone to watch a storm a little over a week ago. A week? It seemed so remote that for the moment he could not recall the events of that last visit; his head ached so that everything but physical suffering was temporarily insignificant. There was no moon to-night. The sky was covered with black, scurrying clouds, and he could only hear the angry, boiling waters, not see them. He felt suffocated. He had felt so all the evening. Besides the pain in his head there was a pressure on his brain; he must have air; and he pulled open one of the windows and stood within it. The wind beat about his head, the sea-gulls screamed in his ears, and the roar of the sea was deafening; but it exhilarated him and eased his head for the moment. What a poem it would make, that black, storm-swept sky, those mighty, thundering waters, that granite, wind-torn coast! How he could have immortalized it once! And he had it in him to immortalize it now, only that mechanical defect in his brain, no—that cruel iron hand, would not let him tell the world that he was greater than any to whom its people bent their knees. Ah, there it was at last! It had reawakened, and it was battling and struggling for speech as before. Perhaps this time it would succeed! It was strong enough to conquer in the end, and why should not the end have come? Surely the fire in his brain must have melted that iron hand. Surely, far away,theywere singing again. Where were they? Within his brain?—or battling with the storm to reach him? What were those wraith-like things—those tiny forms dancing weirdly on the roaring waters? Ah, he knew. They were the elfins of his brain that had tormented him with their music and fled at his approach. They had flown from their little cells, and were holding court on the storm-waves like fairies on the green. It was like them to love the danger and the tumult and the night. It was like them to shout and bound with the intoxication of the hour, to scream with the gale, and to kiss with frantic rapture the waves that threatened them. Each was a Thought mightier than any known to living man, and in the bosom of maddened nature it had found its element. And they had not deserted him—they had fled but for the hour—they had turned suddenly and were holding out their arms to him. Ah! he would meet them half-way—
A pair of arms, strong with terror, were suddenly thrown about him, and he was dragged to the other side of the gallery.
"Harold!" cried Weir; "what is the matter with you? Are you mad?"
"I believe I am," he cried. "Come to the light. I have something to tell you."
He caught her by the wrists and pulled her down the gallery until they were under the lantern which burned in one of the windows on nights like this as a warning to mariners. She gave a faint scream of terror, and struggled to release herself.
"You look so strange," she cried. "Let me go."
"Not any more strange than you do," he said, rapidly. "You, too, have changed since that night in here, when the truth was told to both of us. You did not understand then, nor did I; but I know all now, and I will tell you."
And then, in a torrent of almost unintelligible words, he poured forth the tale of his discovery: what had come to him in the study at Crumford Hall, the locket he had found, the letters he had read, the episode of his past he had lived over, the poem which had swept him up among the gods in its reading—all the sequence of facts whose constant reiteration during every unguarded moment had mechanically forced themselves into lasting coherence. She listened with head bent forward, and eyes through which terror, horror, despair, chased each other, then returned and fought together. "It is all true," he cried, in conclusion. "It is all true. Why don't you speak? Cannot you understand?"
She wrenched her hands from his grasp and flung her arms above her head. "Yes," she cried, "I understand. I am a woman for whose sin Time has no mercy; you are a madman, and I am alone!"
"What are you saying?" he demanded, thickly. "You are alone? There is no hope, then?"
"No, there is no hope," she said, "nor has the worst—" She sprang suddenly forward and caught him about the neck. "Oh, Harold!" she cried, "you are not mad. It cannot be! I cannot think of the sin, or care; I only know that I love you! love you! love you! and that if we can be together always the past can go; even—Oh, Harold, speak to me; don't look at me in that way!"
But his arms hung inertly at his sides, and he looked down into her agonized face with a smile. "No hope!" he whispered.
The poor girl dropped in a heap to the floor, as if the life had suddenly gone out of her. Harold gave a little laugh. "No hope!" he said.
She sprang to her feet and flew down the gallery. But he stood where she had left him. She reached the open window, then turned and for a moment faced him again. "No," she cried, "no hope, and no rest or peace;" and then the storm and the night closed over her.
He moved to the window after a moment, and leaning out, called her name. There was no answer but the shrieking of the storm. The black waters had greedily embraced her, and in their depths she would find rest at last. How would she look down there, in some quiet cave, with the sea-weed floating over her white gown, and the pearls in her beautiful hair? How exquisite a thing she would be! The very monsters of the deep would hold their breath as they passed, and leave her unmolested. And the eye of mortal man would never gaze upon her again. There was divinest ecstacy in the thought! Ah! how lovely she was! What a face—what a form!
He staggered back from the window and gave a loud laugh. At last it had been vanquished and broken—that iron hand. He had heard it snap that moment within his brain. And it was pouring upward, that river of song. The elfins had come back, and were quiring like the immortals. She would hear them down there, in her cold, nameless grave, with the ceaseless requiem of the waters above her, and smile and rejoice that death had come to her to give him speech. His brain was the very cathedral of heaven, and there was music in every part of it. The glad shout was ringing throughout nave and transept like the glorious greeting of Christmas morning. "Her face! Her form!" No, no; not that again. They were no part of the burning flood of song which was writhing and surging in his brain. They were not the words which would tell the world—Ah! what was it? "Her face! Her form!—"
He groped his way to and fro like a blind man seeking some object to guide him. "Her eyes! Her hair!" No, no. Oh, what was this? Why was he falling—falling?—What was that terror-stricken cry? that wild, white face of an old man above him? Where had this water come from that was boiling and thundering in his ears? What was that tossed aloft by the wave beyond? If he could but reach her!—She had gone! Cruel Night had caught her in its black arms and was laughing at his efforts to reach her. That mocking, hideous laughter! how it shrieked above the storm, its dissonance as eternal as his fate! There she was again!—Sionèd! No, she had gone, and he was beating with impotent fury those devouring—But who was this bending over him?—the Night Queen, with the stars in her hair? And what was she pressing into his arms? At last! Sionèd! Sionèd!