Flames Part 81

Another matter that puzzled him greatly was this: As the days went on, and as Valentine grew--and he did grow--more certain of his own power for evil over Julian, and as, consequently, he took less and less pains to hide the truth of his personality from the knowledge of the doctor, the latter was frequently seized with the appalled sensation which had long ago overtaken him when he was followed in Regent Street and in Vere Street. This recurrence of sensation, and the certainty forced gradually upon the doctor that it was caused by the presence of Valentine, naturally led him to wonder whether it were possible that the man who had dogged his steps, and eventually fled from him, could have been Valentine himself. If that were indeed so, then this madness--if it did exist--must surely have come upon Valentine before the trance. Nothing but a madness could have led him thus in the night hours to steal out in pursuit of the friend who had just left his house and company. But the doctor knew of no means by which he could satisfy himself of Valentine's movements on the night in question. To ask Valentine himself would be to court a lie. Once the doctor thought for a moment of having recourse to Wade. But then he remembered that the butler did not sleep in the flat, and had no doubt long gone home before the event of the night in question. So, again, he was confronted with a dead-wall, beyond which he could see no clear view or comprehensible country.

About this time there happened an event which struck strongly upon the doctor's mind. He was one day, as usual, in his consulting-room, receiving a mult.i.tude of patients, when his man-servant entered with a card on a salver.

"A lady, sir, who wishes to see you. She has no appointment."

The doctor took the card. On it was printed merely "Mrs. Wilson."

"I cannot see the lady to-day," he said, "unless she can call again after five o'clock. But I can see her then, or to-morrow morning at ten. Ask her which she would prefer."

After a moment's absence Lawler returned.

"The lady will come at five o'clock this evening, sir."

"Very well."

And the doctor bent his mind once more steadily upon his work.

At five o'clock the door opened, and a tall, square, and strong-looking woman, dressed in black, walked quietly into the room. She bowed to the doctor and sat down.

"I am glad you could see me to-day," she said. "I leave London early to-morrow morning. I hate London."

She spoke in a full and rather rich voice, with a slightly burring accent, and looked the doctor full in the face with a pair of large and sensible grey eyes. Nature had certainly built her to be one of those towers of women, strong for themselves, for their s.e.x, and often for men also, who possess a peculiar power, given in quite full measure to no male creature, of large sympathy and lofty composure. But the doctor saw at a glance that some adverse fate had disagreed with the intentions of nature, and fought against them with success. Circ.u.mstances must have arisen in this woman's life to break down her unusual equipment of courage and resolution, or if not to break it down, to dint and batter the s.h.i.+eld she carried over her heart and life. For her fine face was lined with care, her naturally firm mouth was tormented by an apparently irresistible quivering, that, once prompted by long and painful emotion, had now become habitual and mechanical, and her eyes, although they met the eyes of the doctor with a peculiar large reception and return of scrutiny, held in their depths that hunted expression which is only developed by long agony, either physical or mental. So much the doctor read in a glance before his patient began to detail her symptoms. She detailed them with a certain obvious shame and a slow conquering of reticence that made her speak very deliberately.

She began by saying, in no insulting manner, that she had kept clear of doctors during almost the whole of her life; that she had meant to keep clear of them till her death.

"For I was born with a const.i.tution of iron," she said, "and I have always lived on the most sanitary principles, and with the utmost simplicity. So I hoped to go to my grave without much suffering.

Certainly I never expected to have to consult any one on the ground of nervous breakdown. Yet that is exactly why I am here with you at this moment. The circ.u.mstances of my life have been too much for me, I suppose."

There was a grave pathos in her voice as she uttered the last words.

"At any rate," she continued, after a pause, "I would like you to help me if you can. The cause of my breakdown is remote enough, several years old. I had a tremendous burden to bear then, and I bore it, as I thought bravely, for a long time. At last it grew intolerable, and then I succeeded at last in getting it removed, in getting rid of it, you understand, altogether. The odd thing is, that while I was bearing my burden my strength did not fail me, my courage did not utterly give way.

Only when the burden was removed did I faint because of it. My trouble was partially physical--I had to endure grave physical cruelty at that time--but chiefly mental. My agony of mind ran a race with my agony of body, and won easily. It's generally so with women, I believe?"

She waited as if for a reply.

"Yes, it is often so," Doctor Levillier answered.

"Ever since the burden was lifted from my shoulders," she continued, "I have been getting steadily worse. Each month, each year, I became more and more degraded in my cowardice, my fear of trifles, even of things which have no existence at all. All this is perhaps--perhaps--peculiarly painful to me because I am naturally, you must understand, what sane people call a strong-minded woman. I had originally complete physical courage, didn't know the meaning of the word 'fear,' despised those who did, I am afraid. So you see this is very bad for me; it cuts so deep into my mind, you see. It makes me hate and loathe myself so. I sleep badly, and have the usual symptoms of nervous collapse, I believe. I'm strong one moment, feeble, no good at all, the next. My appet.i.te has long been bad, and so on. But it isn't that sort of thing I mind. I could fight with that well enough. It's my horrible deterioration of mind that troubles me, that has brought me here, to you, in spite of my hatred of London, of every city. It was in a city, though not in London, that I bore that burden I told you of. It doesn't seem possible to me, but I'm told, and I read, that my mind diseased may be an effect, and that the cause may lie in my body. That's why I come to you. Doctor Levillier, root out the disease if you can."

She ended speaking almost with pa.s.sion, her lips trembling all the time and her eyes never leaving his face. Then she added with a curious characteristic abruptness:

"I will tell you that I've plenty of money. Lack of funds is no weapon against my return to health--if my return is in any way possible."

Doctor Levillier smiled slightly.

"You are antic.i.p.ating the usual 'long-sea voyage' formula, I see," he said.

"Possibly."

"I should not prescribe it for you off-hand," he said. "Sea air is not a specific for all nervous complaints, as some people seem to think. You have no bodily pain?"

"No. I often wish I had."

"What you tell me about your gradual collapse coming on after the crisis of your troubles was over, and not during it, does not surprise me. Nor am I puzzled by your malady increasing if, as I suppose, you are living idly."

"I am. I have no courage to do anything or see anybody."

"Exactly. You live in a sort of hiding."

"Why--yes. You see, once I was well known to a good many people. My troubles became known to them too. I could not get rid of that burden I told you of except by blazoning them abroad. I shrink from meeting any people now. Therefore I live very quietly. I--"

Suddenly she seemed to grow tired of the half measures in frankness that had so far governed her communications. She spread forth her hands with a very characteristic, ample gesture of sudden confidence.

"I think I'll tell you exactly what it was," she said. "You may have read of me. Long ago, some years at least, I was obliged to take action against my husband, a Mr. Wilson, who afterwards a.s.sumed the name of Marr. I charged him with cruelty, won my case, and obtained a judicial separation."

Then Dr. Levillier knew that he looked on the former wife of the strange, cruel, dead man, whose influence had entered into the lives of his two friends.

"You may have heard of my case?" Mrs. Wilson said.

"Certainly I have."

"It was bad, even from a newspaper point of view, I believe. People congratulated me on getting rid of a brute, and thought I was all right and ought to be happy. But the newspapers and the world never knew what I had gone through, the real horrors, before I insisted on release. You started when I called my husband a brute just now, Dr. Levillier; I noticed it. The phrase hurt you, coming from any wife about any husband.

I know why, a boy once told me that his mother was always drunk. He hurt me then into hating him for the rest of my days. But I called a stranger a brute, not the man I loved and married, not the man I loved after I married him. Dr. Levillier, do you believe in possessions?"

She had been gradually getting excited while she spoke, and, on the last words, she leaned forward in her chair and struck her hand down in her lap.

"Do you mean possession by the devil?" said the doctor, very quietly, opposing a strong calm to her intensity.

"Yes. I do. My experience obliges me to. I knew, for a year before I married him, I married, I lived for two years after I married him, with a man who was my conception of what a man should be, strong, gentle, tender, brave, a hero to me. I got rid of a devil, after I had endured two years of torture at his hands. It is no use to tell me those two distinct men I knew were one and the same man. My soul, my heart, declare that it's a lie. There were such differences. My husband loved music; this man hated it; yet had the power to use it as a means of tormenting me. But I needn't dwell on the evidences of change. Suffice it to say that the thing that crushed me, the thing that has brought me down into the dust where I am, dust of cowardice, and weakness, and impotence to do or to be anything, was the horror of awakening to a knowledge of that change, of having to live as wife with this devil, whom I knew not, who was a stranger to me. Only the features were my husband's, nothing else.

I got rid of a stranger. The man found dead in the Euston Road was a stranger whom I hated, nothing more to me than that."

As she spoke, in a deep, resonant voice that pulsated through the room, Dr. Levillier recalled, almost with a thrill, Julian's words to him in Harley Street, on the night of the _fracas_ with the mastiffs, words spoken about the dead Marr: "His face dead was the most absolutely direct contradiction possible to his face alive. He was not the same man." He recalled these words and the thought shot through his mind: "Did the man this woman loved return at the moment of death?"

And that change in Valentine!

He said to Mrs. Wilson, betraying none of the excitement that he really felt:

"You spoke of cruelty. You had to endure physical cruelty?"

"Worse, to see it endured by others, dumb, helpless creatures, by my own dog."

A great shudder ran through her.

"I can't talk of it," she said. "But it made me what I am. Can you do anything for me? Why do you look at me like that?"

For, at her word about the dog, the doctor had fallen into a tense reverie, looking steadily upon her, yet as one who sees little or nothing. He roused himself quickly.

"Tell me something of the symptoms of your mental malady," he said.

"These fancies that distress you, of what nature are they?"