A Terrible Temptation: A Story of To-Day
is too fond of them; he is always contriving something to please them.”
At this moment Lady Bassett looked up and saw a woman watching her over
the rail of a corridor on the first floor. She recognized the face
directly. The woman made her a rapid signal, and then disappeared into
one of the rooms.
“Would there be any objection to our going upstairs, Mr. Coyne?” said
Lady Bassett, with a calm voice and a heart thumping violently.
“Oh, none whatever. I'll conduct you; but then, I am afraid I must
leave you for a time.”
He showed her upstairs, blew a whistle, handed her over to an
attendant, and bowed and smiled himself away grotesquely.
Jones was the very keeper she had feed last visit. She flushed with joy
at sight of bull-necked, burly Jones. “Oh, Mr. Jones!” said she,
putting her hands together with a look that might have melted a
hangman.
Jones winked, and watched Mr. Coyne out of sight.
“I have seen your ladyship's maid,” said Jones, confidentially. “It is
all right. Mr. Coyne have got the blinkers on. Only pass me your word
not to excite him.”
“Oh no, sir, I will soothe him.” And she trembled all over.
“Sally!” cried Jones.
The nurse came out of a room and held the door ajar; she whispered, “I
have prepared him, madam; he is all right.”
Lady Bassett, by a great effort, kept her feet from rushing, her heart
from crying out with joy, and she entered the room. Sally closed the
door like a shot, with a delicacy one would hardly have given her
credit for, to judge from appearances.
Sir Charles stood in the middle of the room, beaming to receive her,
but restraining himself. They met: he held her to his heart; she wept
for joy and grief upon his neck. Neither spoke for a long time.
CHAPTER XXIV.
THEY were seated hand in hand, comparing notes and comforting each
other. Then Lady Bassett met with a great surprise: forgetting, or
rather not realizing, Sir Charles's sex and character, she began with a
heavy heart to play the consoler; but after he had embraced her many
times with tender rapture, and thanked God for the sight of her, lo and
behold, this doughty baronet claimed his rights of manhood, and, in
spite of his capture, his incarceration, and his malady, set to work to
console her, instead of lying down to be consoled.
“My darling Bella,” said he, “don't you make a mountain of a mole-hill.
The moment you told me I should be a father I began to get better, and
to laugh at Richard Bassett's malice. Of course I was terribly knocked
over at first by being captured like a felon and clapped under lock and
key; but I am getting over that. My head gets muddled once a day, that
is all. They gave me some poison the first day that made me drunk
twelve hours after; but they have not repeated it.”
“Oh!” cried Lady Bassett, “then don't let me lose a moment. How could I
forget?” She opened the door, and called in Mr. Jones and the nurse.
“Mr. Jones,” said she, “the first day my husband came here Mr. Salter
gave him a sedative, or something, and it made him much worse.”
“It always do make 'em worse,” said Jones, bluntly.
“Then why did he give it?”
“Out o' book, ma'am. His sort don't see how the medicines work; but we
do, as are always about the patient.”
“Mr. Jones,” said Lady Bassett, “if Mr. Salter, or anybody, prescribes,
it is you who _administer_ the medicine.”
Jones assented with a wink. Winking was his foible, as puckering of the
face was Coyne's.
“Should you be offended if I were to offer you and the nurse ten
guineas a month to pretend you had given him Mr. Salter's medicines,
and not do it?”
“Oh, that is not much to do for a gentleman like Sir Charles,” said
Jones. “But I didn't ought to take so much money for that. To be sure,
I suppose, the lady won't miss it.”
“Don't be a donkey, Jones,” said Sir Charles, cutting short his
hypocrisy. “Take whatever you can get; only earn it.”
“Oh, what I takes I earns.”
“Of course,” said Sir Charles. “So that is settled. You have got to
physic those flower-pots instead of me, that is all.”
This view of things tickled Jones so that he roared with laughter.
However, he recollected himself all of a sudden, and stopped with
ludicrous abruptness.
He said to Lady Bassett, with homely kindness, “You go home
comfortable, my lady; you have taken the stick by the right end.” He
then had the good sense to retire from the room.
Then Lady Bassett told Sir Charles of her visit to London, and her
calling on Mr. Rolfe.
He looked blank at his wife calling on a bachelor; but her description
of the man, his age, and his simplicity, reconciled him to that; and
when she told him the plan and order of campaign Mr. Rolfe had given
her he approved it very earnestly.
He fastened in particular on something that Mr. Rolfe had dwelt lightly
on. “Dear as the sight of you is to me, sweet as the sound of your
loved voice is to my ears and my heart, I would rather not see you
again until our hopes are realized than jeopardize _that.”_
Lady Bassett sighed, for this seemed rather morbid. Sir Charles went
on: “So think of your own health first, and avoid agitations. I am
tormented with fear lest that monster should take advantage of my
absence to molest you. If he does, leave Huntercombe. Yes, leave it; go
to London; go, even for my sake; my health and happiness depend on you;
they cannot be much affected by anything that happens here. 'Stone
walls do not a prison make, nor iron bars a cage.'”
Lady Bassett promised, but said she could not keep away from him, and
he must often write to her. She gave him Rolfe's formula, and told him
all letters would pass that praised the asylum.
Sir Charles made a wry face.
Lady Bassett's wrist went round his neck in a moment. “Oh, Charles,
dear, for my sake--hold a little, little candle to the devil. Mr. Rolfe
says we must. Oblige me in this--I am not so noble as you--and then
I'll be very good and obedient in what your heart is set upon.”
At last Sir Charles consented.
Then they made haste, and told each other everything that had happened,
and it was late in the afternoon before they parted.
Lady Bassett 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 BASSETT 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 assistance. 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 Bassett 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 circumstances 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 Bassett 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 Bassett with accumulated fury--that smoldering
fire did not smoke by letter, but burned deep in both their sore and
heavy, but enduring, Anglo-Saxon hearts.
Lady Bassett 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 Bassett, 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 Bassett 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 Bassett'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 partitions 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 pass sulkily on.
“The same class 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 (principalities 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
buttonhole a fourth and pour their grievances into a listening ear, you
may safely suspect No. 4 of--sanity.