"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 b.u.t.t 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 Sioned instead of heaven knows what jaw-breaking Welsh t.i.tle. 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 pa.s.s. 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 G.o.d!" 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 Sioned 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 G.o.d, Harold," exclaimed Hollington, "you _are_ mad. 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 Sioned 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 Sioned 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."
XIII.
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 att.i.tude 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 I _know_.
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 pa.s.s. 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, _what_ is it?"