The Picture of Dorian Gray
world, or gratifying intellectual curiosity, or something of that kind.
What I want you to do is merely what you have often done before.
Indeed, to destroy a body must be far less horrible than what you are
accustomed to work at. And, remember, it is the only piece of evidence
against me. If it is discovered, I am lost; and it is sure to be
discovered unless you help me.”
“I have no desire to help you. You forget that. I am simply indifferent
to the whole thing. It has nothing to do with me.”
“Alan, I entreat you. Think of the position I am in. Just before you
came I almost fainted with terror. You may know terror yourself some
day. No! don’t think of that. Look at the matter purely from the
scientific point of view. You don’t inquire where the dead things on
which you experiment come from. Don’t inquire now. I have told you too
much as it is. But I beg of you to do this. We were friends once,
Alan.”
“Don’t speak about those days, Dorian—they are dead.”
“The dead linger sometimes. The man upstairs will not go away. He is
sitting at the table with bowed head and outstretched arms. Alan! Alan!
If you don’t come to my assistance, I am ruined. Why, they will hang
me, Alan! Don’t you understand? They will hang me for what I have
done.”
“There is no good in prolonging this scene. I absolutely refuse to do
anything in the matter. It is insane of you to ask me.”
“You refuse?”
“Yes.”
“I entreat you, Alan.”
“It is useless.”
The same look of pity came into Dorian Gray’s eyes. Then he stretched
out his hand, took a piece of paper, and wrote something on it. He read
it over twice, folded it carefully, and pushed it across the table.
Having done this, he got up and went over to the window.
Campbell looked at him in surprise, and then took up the paper, and
opened it. As he read it, his face became ghastly pale and he fell back
in his chair. A horrible sense of sickness came over him. He felt as if
his heart was beating itself to death in some empty hollow.
After two or three minutes of terrible silence, Dorian turned round and
came and stood behind him, putting his hand upon his shoulder.
“I am so sorry for you, Alan,” he murmured, “but you leave me no
alternative. I have a letter written already. Here it is. You see the
address. If you don’t help me, I must send it. If you don’t help me, I
will send it. You know what the result will be. But you are going to
help me. It is impossible for you to refuse now. I tried to spare you.
You will do me the justice to admit that. You were stern, harsh,
offensive. You treated me as no man has ever dared to treat me—no
living man, at any rate. I bore it all. Now it is for me to dictate
terms.”
Campbell buried his face in his hands, and a shudder passed through
him.
“Yes, it is my turn to dictate terms, Alan. You know what they are. The
thing is quite simple. Come, don’t work yourself into this fever. The
thing has to be done. Face it, and do it.”
A groan broke from Campbell’s lips and he shivered all over. The
ticking of the clock on the mantelpiece seemed to him to be dividing
time into separate atoms of agony, each of which was too terrible to be
borne. He felt as if an iron ring was being slowly tightened round his
forehead, as if the disgrace with which he was threatened had already
come upon him. The hand upon his shoulder weighed like a hand of lead.
It was intolerable. It seemed to crush him.
“Come, Alan, you must decide at once.”
“I cannot do it,” he said, mechanically, as though words could alter
things.
“You must. You have no choice. Don’t delay.”
He hesitated a moment. “Is there a fire in the room upstairs?”
“Yes, there is a gas-fire with asbestos.”
“I shall have to go home and get some things from the laboratory.”
“No, Alan, you must not leave the house. Write out on a sheet of
notepaper what you want and my servant will take a cab and bring the
things back to you.”
Campbell scrawled a few lines, blotted them, and addressed an envelope
to his assistant. Dorian took the note up and read it carefully. Then
he rang the bell and gave it to his valet, with orders to return as
soon as possible and to bring the things with him.
As the hall door shut, Campbell started nervously, and having got up
from the chair, went over to the chimney-piece. He was shivering with a
kind of ague. For nearly twenty minutes, neither of the men spoke. A
fly buzzed noisily about the room, and the ticking of the clock was
like the beat of a hammer.
As the chime struck one, Campbell turned round, and looking at Dorian
Gray, saw that his eyes were filled with tears. There was something in
the purity and refinement of that sad face that seemed to enrage him.
“You are infamous, absolutely infamous!” he muttered.
“Hush, Alan. You have saved my life,” said Dorian.
“Your life? Good heavens! what a life that is! You have gone from
corruption to corruption, and now you have culminated in crime. In
doing what I am going to do—what you force me to do—it is not of your
life that I am thinking.”
“Ah, Alan,” murmured Dorian with a sigh, “I wish you had a thousandth
part of the pity for me that I have for you.” He turned away as he
spoke and stood looking out at the garden. Campbell made no answer.
After about ten minutes a knock came to the door, and the servant
entered, carrying a large mahogany chest of chemicals, with a long coil
of steel and platinum wire and two rather curiously shaped iron clamps.
“Shall I leave the things here, sir?” he asked Campbell.
“Yes,” said Dorian. “And I am afraid, Francis, that I have another
errand for you. What is the name of the man at Richmond who supplies
Selby with orchids?”
“Harden, sir.”
“Yes—Harden. You must go down to Richmond at once, see Harden
personally, and tell him to send twice as many orchids as I ordered,
and to have as few white ones as possible. In fact, I don’t want any
white ones. It is a lovely day, Francis, and Richmond is a very pretty
place—otherwise I wouldn’t bother you about it.”
“No trouble, sir. At what time shall I be back?”
Dorian looked at Campbell. “How long will your experiment take, Alan?”
he said in a calm indifferent voice. The presence of a third person in
the room seemed to give him extraordinary courage.
Campbell frowned and bit his lip. “It will take about five hours,” he
answered.
“It will be time enough, then, if you are back at half-past seven,
Francis. Or stay: just leave my things out for dressing. You can have
the evening to yourself. I am not dining at home, so I shall not want
you.”
“Thank you, sir,” said the man, leaving the room.
“Now, Alan, there is not a moment to be lost. How heavy this chest is!
I’ll take it for you. You bring the other things.” He spoke rapidly and
in an authoritative manner. Campbell felt dominated by him. They left
the room together.
When they reached the top landing, Dorian took out the key and turned
it in the lock. Then he stopped, and a troubled look came into his
eyes. He shuddered. “I don’t think I can go in, Alan,” he murmured.
“It is nothing to me. I don’t require you,” said Campbell coldly.
Dorian half opened the door. As he did so, he saw the face of his
portrait leering in the sunlight. On the floor in front of it the torn
curtain was lying. He remembered that the night before he had
forgotten, for the first time in his life, to hide the fatal canvas,
and was about to rush forward, when he drew back with a shudder.
What was that loathsome red dew that gleamed, wet and glistening, on
one of the hands, as though the canvas had sweated blood? How horrible
it was!—more horrible, it seemed to him for the moment, than the silent
thing that he knew was stretched across the table, the thing whose
grotesque misshapen shadow on the spotted carpet showed him that it had
not stirred, but was still there, as he had left it.
He heaved a deep breath, opened the door a little wider, and with
half-closed eyes and averted head, walked quickly in, determined that
he would not look even once upon the dead man. Then, stooping down and
taking up the gold-and-purple hanging, he flung it right over the
picture.
There he stopped, feeling afraid to turn round, and his eyes fixed
themselves on the intricacies of the pattern before him. He heard
Campbell bringing in the heavy chest, and the irons, and the other
things that he had required for his dreadful work. He began to wonder
if he and Basil Hallward had ever met, and, if so, what they had
thought of each other.
“Leave me now,” said a stern voice behind him.
He turned and hurried out, just conscious that the dead man had been
thrust back into the chair and that Campbell was gazing into a
glistening yellow face. As he was going downstairs, he heard the key
being turned in the lock.
It was long after seven when Campbell came back into the library. He
was pale, but absolutely calm. “I have done what you asked me to do,”
he muttered. “And now, good-bye. Let us never see each other again.”
“You have saved me from ruin, Alan. I cannot forget that,” said Dorian
simply.
As soon as Campbell had left, he went upstairs. There was a horrible
smell of nitric acid in the room. But the thing that had been sitting
at the table was gone.
CHAPTER XV.
That evening, at eight-thirty, exquisitely dressed and wearing a large
button-hole of Parma violets, Dorian Gray was ushered into Lady
Narborough’s drawing-room by bowing servants. His forehead was
throbbing with maddened nerves, and he felt wildly excited, but his
manner as he bent over his hostess’s hand was as easy and graceful as
ever. Perhaps one never seems so much at one’s ease as when one has to
play a part. Certainly no one looking at Dorian Gray that night could
have believed that he had passed through a tragedy as horrible as any
tragedy of our age. Those finely shaped fingers could never have
clutched a knife for sin, nor those smiling lips have cried out on God
and goodness. He himself could not help wondering at the calm of his
demeanour, and for a moment felt keenly the terrible pleasure of a
double life.
It was a small party, got up rather in a hurry by Lady Narborough, who
was a very clever woman with what Lord Henry used to describe as the
remains of really remarkable ugliness. She had proved an excellent wife
to one of our most tedious ambassadors, and having buried her husband
properly in a marble mausoleum, which she had herself designed, and
married off her daughters to some rich, rather elderly men, she devoted
herself now to the pleasures of French fiction, French cookery, and
French _esprit_ when she could get it.
Dorian was one of her especial favourites, and she always told him that
she was extremely glad she had not met him in early life. “I know, my
dear, I should have fallen madly in love with you,” she used to say,
“and thrown my bonnet right over the mills for your sake. It is most
fortunate that you were not thought of at the time. As it was, our
bonnets were so unbecoming, and the mills were so occupied in trying to
raise the wind, that I never had even a flirtation with anybody.
However, that was all Narborough’s fault. He was dreadfully
short-sighted, and there is no pleasure in taking in a husband who
never sees anything.”
Her guests this evening were rather tedious. The fact was, as she
explained to Dorian, behind a very shabby fan, one of her married
daughters had come up quite suddenly to stay with her, and, to make
matters worse, had actually brought her husband with her. “I think it
is most unkind of her, my dear,” she whispered. “Of course I go and
stay with them every summer after I come from Homburg, but then an old
woman like me must have fresh air sometimes, and besides, I really wake