The fact that Turnbull had strolled away and was investigating rhododendrons may have been due to Evan’s successful prayers to the other world, or possibly to his own pretty successful experience of this one. But though they two were as isolated as a new Adam and Eve in a pretty ornamental Eden, the lady did not relax by an inch the rigour of her badinage.
“I am locked up in the madhouse,” said Evan, with a sort of stiff pride, “because I tried to keep my promise to you.”
“Quite so,” answered the inexplicable lady, nodding with a perfectly blazing smile, “and I am locked up because it was to me you promised.”
“It is outrageous!” cried Evan; “it is impossible!”
“Oh, you can see my certificate if you like,” she replied with some hauteur.
MacIan stared at her and then at his boots, and then at the sky and then at her again. He was quite sure now that he himself was not mad, and the fact rather added to his perplexity.
Then he drew nearer to her, and said in a dry and dreadful voice: “Oh, don’t condescend to play the fool with such a fool as me. Are you really locked up here as a patient–because you helped us to escape?”
“Yes,” she said, still smiling, but her steady voice had a shake in it.
Evan flung his big elbow across his forehead and burst into tears.
The pure lemon of the sky faded into purer white as the great sunset silently collapsed. The birds settled back into the trees; the moon began to glow with its own light. Mr. James Turnbull continued his botanical researches into the structure of the rhododendron. But the lady did not move an inch until Evan had flung up his face again; and when he did he saw by the last gleam of sunlight that it was not only his face that was wet.
Mr. James Turnbull had all his life professed a profound interest in physical science, and the phenomena of a good garden were really a pleasure to him; but after three-quarters of an hour or so even the apostle of science began to find rhododendrus a bore, and was somewhat relieved when an unexpected development of events obliged him to transfer his researches to the equally interesting subject of hollyhocks, which grew some fifty feet farther along the path. The ostensible cause of his removal was the unexpected reappearance of his two other acquaintances walking and talking laboriously along the way, with the black head bent close to the brown one. Even hollyhocks detained Turnbull but a short time. Having rapidly absorbed all the important principles affecting the growth of those vegetables, he jumped over a flower-bed and walked back into the building. The other two came up along the slow course of the path talking and talking. No one but God knows what they said (for they certainly have forgotten), and if I remembered it I would not repeat it. When they parted at the head of the walk she put out her hand again in the same well-bred way, although it trembled; he seemed to restrain a gesture as he let it fall.
“If it is really always to be like this,” he said, thickly, “it would not matter if we were here for ever.”
“You tried to kill yourself four times for me,” she said, unsteadily, “and I have been chained up as a madwoman for you. I really think that after that–”
“Yes, I know,” said Evan in a low voice, looking down. “After that we belong to each other. We are sort of sold to each other– until the stars fall.” Then he looked up suddenly, and said: “By the way, what is your name?”
“My name is Beatrice Drake,” she replied with complete gravity. “You can see it on my certificate of lunacy.”
XIX. THE LAST PARLEY
Turnbull walked away, wildly trying to explain to himself the presence of two personal acquaintances so different as Vane and the girl. As he skirted a low hedge of laurel, an enormously tall young man leapt over it, stood in front of him, and almost fell on his neck as if seeking to embrace him.
“Don’t you know me?” almost sobbed the young man, who was in the highest spirits. “Ain’t I written on your heart, old boy? I say, what did you do with my yacht?”
“Take your arms off my neck,” said Turnbull, irritably. “Are you mad?”
The young man sat down on the gravel path and went into ecstasies of laughter. “No, that’s just the fun of it–I’m not mad,” he replied. “They’ve shut me up in this place, and I’m not mad.” And he went off again into mirth as innocent as wedding-bells.
Turnbull, whose powers of surprise were exhausted, rolled his round grey eyes and said, “Mr. Wilkinson, I think,” because he could not think of anything else to say.
The tall man sitting on the gravel bowed with urbanity, and said: “Quite at your service. Not to be confused with the Wilkinsons of Cumberland; and as I say, old boy, what have you done with my yacht? You see, they’ve locked me up here–in this garden–and a yacht would be a sort of occupation for an unmarried man.”
“I am really horribly sorry,” began Turnbull, in the last stage of bated bewilderment and exasperation, “but really–”
“Oh, I can see you can’t have it on you at the moment,” said Mr. Wilkinson with much intellectual magnanimity.
“Well, the fact is–” began Turnbull again, and then the phrase was frozen on his mouth, for round the corner came the goatlike face and gleaming eye-glasses of Dr. Quayle.
“Ah, my dear Mr. Wilkinson,” said the doctor, as if delighted at a coincidence; “and Mr. Turnbull, too. Why, I want to speak to Mr. Turnbull.”
Mr. Turnbull made some movement rather of surrender than assent, and the doctor caught it up exquisitely, showing even more of his two front teeth. “I am sure Mr. Wilkinson will excuse us a moment.” And with flying frock-coat he led Turnbull rapidly round the corner of a path.
“My dear sir,” he said, in a quite affectionate manner, “I do not mind telling you–you are such a very hopeful case– you understand so well the scientific point of view; and I don’t like to see you bothered by the really hopeless cases. They are monotonous and maddening. The man you have just been talking to, poor fellow, is one of the strongest cases of pure idee fixe that we have. It’s very sad, and I’m afraid utterly incurable. He keeps on telling everybody”–and the doctor lowered his voice confidentially–“he tells everybody that two people have taken is yacht. His account of how he lost it is quite incoherent.”
Turnbull stamped his foot on the gravel path, and called out: “Oh, I can’t stand this. Really–”
“I know, I know,” said the psychologist, mournfully; “it is a most melancholy case, and also fortunately a very rare one. It is so rare, in fact, that in one classification of these maladies it is entered under a heading by itself–Perdinavititis, mental inflammation creating the impression that one has lost a ship. Really,” he added, with a kind of half-embarrassed guilt, “it’s rather a feather in my cap. I discovered the only existing case of perdinavititis.”
“But this won’t do, doctor,” said Turnbull, almost tearing his hair, “this really won’t do. The man really did lose a ship. Indeed, not to put too fine a point on it, I took his ship.”
Dr. Quayle swung round for an instant so that his silk-lined overcoat rustled, and stared singularly at Turnbull. Then he said with hurried amiability: “Why, of course you did. Quite so, quite so,” and with courteous gestures went striding up the garden path. Under the first laburnum-tree he stopped, however, and pulling out his pencil and notebook wrote down feverishly: “Singular development in the Elenthero-maniac, Turnbull. Sudden manifestation of Rapinavititis–the delusion that one has stolen a ship. First case ever recorded.”
Turnbull stood for an instant staggered into stillness. Then he ran raging round the garden to find MacIan, just as a husband, even a bad husband, will run raging to find his wife if he is full of a furious query. He found MacIan stalking moodily about the half-lit garden, after his extraordinary meeting with Beatrice. No one who saw his slouching stride and sunken head could have known that his soul was in the seventh heaven of ecstasy. He did not think; he did not even very definitely desire. He merely wallowed in memories, chiefly in material memories; words said with a certain cadence or trivial turns of the neck or wrist. Into the middle of his stationary and senseless enjoyment were thrust abruptly the projecting elbow and the projecting red beard of Turnbull. MacIan stepped back a little, and the soul in his eyes came very slowly to its windows. When James Turnbull had the glittering sword-point planted upon his breast he was in far less danger. For three pulsating seconds after the interruption MacIan was in a mood to have murdered his father.