The cab was waiting at the gates as Miss Gwilt approached the Sanitarium. Mr. Bashwood got out and advanced to meet her. She took his arm and led him aside a few steps, out of the cabman’s hearing.
“Think what you like of me,” she said, keeping her thick black veil down over her face, “but don’t speak to me to-night. Drive back to your hotel as if nothing had happened. Meet the tidal train to-morrow as usual, and come to me afterward at the Sanitarium. Go without a word, and I shall believe there is one man in the world who really loves me. Stay and ask questions, and I shall bid you good-by at once and forever!”
She pointed to the cab. In a minute more it had left the Sanitarium and was taking Mr. Bashwood back to his hotel.
She opened the iron gate and walked slowly up to the house door. A shudder ran through her as she rang the bell. She laughed bitterly. “Shivering again!” she said to herself. “Who would have thought I had so much feeling left in me?”
For once in her life the doctor’s face told the truth, when the study door opened between ten and eleven at night, and Miss Gwilt entered the room.
“Mercy on me!” he exclaimed, with a look of the blankest bewilderment. “What does this mean?”
“It means,” she answered, “that I have decided to-night instead of deciding to-morrow. You, who know women so well, ought to know that they act on impulse. I am here on an impulse. Take me or leave me, just as you like.”
“Take you or leave you?” repeated the doctor, recovering his presence of mind. “My dear lady, what a dreadful way of putting it! Your room shall be got ready instantly! Where is your luggage? Will you let me send for it? No? You can do without your luggage tonight? What admirable fortitude! You will fetch it yourself to-morrow? What extraordinary independence! Do take off your bonnet. Do draw in to the fire! What can I offer you?”
“Offer me the strongest sleeping draught you ever made in your life,” she replied. “And leave me alone till the time comes to take it. I shall be your patient in earnest!” she added, fiercely, as the doctor attempted to remonstrate. “I shall be the maddest of the mad if you irritate me to-night!”
The Principal of the Sanitarium became gravely and briefly professional in an instant.
“Sit down in that dark corner,” he said. “Not a soul shall disturb you. In half an hour you will find your room ready, and your sleeping draught on the table.”—“It’s been a harder struggle for her than I anticipated,” he thought, as he left the room, and crossed to his Dispensary on the opposite side of the hall. “Good heavens, what business has she with a conscience, after such a life as hers has been!”
The Dispensary was elaborately fitted up with all the latest improvements in medical furniture. But one of the four walls of the room was unoccupied by shelves, and here the vacant space was filled by a handsome antique cabinet of carved wood, curiously out of harmony, as an object, with the unornamented utilitarian aspect of the place generally. On either side of the cabinet two speaking-tubes were inserted in the wall, communicating with the upper regions of the house, and labeled respectively “Resident Dispenser” and “Head Nurse.” Into the second of these tubes the doctor spoke, on entering the room. An elderly woman appeared, took her orders for preparing Mrs. Armadale’s bed-chamber, courtesied, and retired.
Left alone again in the Dispensary, the doctor unlocked the center compartment of the cabinet, and disclosed a collection of bottles inside, containing the various poisons used in medicine. After taking out the laudanum wanted for the sleeping draught, and placing it on the dispensary table, he went back to the cabinet, looked into it for a little while, shook his head doubtfully, and crossed to the open shelves on the opposite side of the room.
Here, after more consideration, he took down one out of the row of large chemical bottles before him, filled with a yellow liquid; placing the bottle on the table, he returned to the cabinet, and opened a side compartment, containing some specimens of Bohemian glass-work. After measuring it with his eye, he took from the specimens a handsome purple flask, high and narrow in form, and closed by a glass stopper. This he filled with the yellow liquid, leaving a small quantity only at the bottom of the bottle, and locking up the flask again in the place from which he had taken it. The bottle was next restored to its place, after having been filled up with water from the cistern in the Dispensary, mixed with certain chemical liquids in small quantities, which restored it (so far as appearances went) to the condition in which it had been when it was first removed from the shelf. Having completed these mysterious proceedings, the doctor laughed softly, and went back to his speaking-tubes to summon the Resident Dispenser next.
The Resident Dispenser made his appearance shrouded in the necessary white apron from his waist to his feet. The doctor solemnly wrote a prescription for a composing draught, and handed it to his assistant.
“Wanted immediately, Benjamin,” he said in a soft and melancholy voice. “A lady patient — Mrs. Armadale, Room No. 1, second floor. Ah, dear, dear!” groaned the doctor, absently; “an anxious case, Benjamin — an anxious case.” He opened the brand-new ledger of the establishment, and entered the Case at full length, with a brief abstract of the prescription. “Have you done with the laudanum? Put it back, and lock the cabinet, and give me the key. Is the draught ready? Label it, ‘To be taken at bedtime,’ and give it to the nurse, Benjamin — give it to the nurse.”
While the doctor’s lips were issuing these directions, the doctor’s hands were occupied in opening a drawer under the desk on which the ledger was placed. He took out some gayly printed cards of admission “to view the Sanitarium, between the hours of two and four P.M.,” and filled them up with the date of the next day, “December 10th.” When a dozen of the cards had been wrapped up in a dozen lithographed letters of invitation, and inclosed in a dozen envelopes, he next consulted a list of the families resident in the neighborhood, and directed the envelopes from the list. Ringing a bell this time, instead of speaking through a tube, he summoned the man-servant, and gave him the letters, to be delivered by hand the first thing the next morning. “I think it will do,” said the doctor, taking a turn in the Dispensary when the servant had gone out —“I think it will do.” While he was still absorbed in his own reflections, the nurse re-appeared to announce that the lady’s room was ready; and the doctor thereupon formally returned to the study to communicate the information to Miss Gwilt.
She had not moved since he left her. She rose from her dark corner when he made his announcement, and, without speaking or raising her veil, glided out of the room like a ghost.
After a brief interval, the nurse came downstairs again, with a word for her master’s private ear.
“The lady has ordered me to call her to-morrow at seven o’clock, sir,” she said. “She means to fetch her luggage herself, and she wants to have a cab at the door as soon as she is dressed. What am I to do?”
“Do what the lady tells you,” said the doctor. “She may be safely trusted to return to the Sanitarium.”
The breakfast hour at the Sanitarium was half-past eight o’clock. By that time Miss Gwilt had settled everything at her lodgings, and had returned with her luggage in her own possession. The doctor was quite amazed at the promptitude of his patient.
“Why waste so much energy?” he asked, when they met at the breakfast-table. “Why be in such a hurry, my dear lady, when you had all the morning before you?”
“Mere restlessness!” she said, briefly. “The longer I live, the more impatient I get.”
The doctor, who had noticed before she spoke that her face looked strangely pale and old that morning, observed, when she answered him, that her expression — naturally mobile in no ordinary degree — remained quite unaltered by the effort of speaking. There was none of the usual animation on her lips, none of the usual temper in her eyes. He had never seen her so impenetrably and coldly composed as he saw her now. “She has made up her mind at last,” he thought. “I may say to her this morning what I couldn’t say to her last night.”
He prefaced the coming remarks by a warning look at her widow’s dress.
“Now you have got your luggage,” he began, gravely, “permit me to suggest putting that cap away, and wearing another gown.”
“Why?”
“Do you remember what you told me a day or two since?” asked the doctor. “You said there was a chance of Mr. Armadale’s dying in my Sanitarium?”
“I will say it again, if you like.”
“A more unlikely chance,” pursued the doctor, deaf as ever to all awkward interruptions, “it is hardly possible to imagine! But as long as it is a chance at all, it is worth considering. Say, then, that he dies — dies suddenly and unexpectedly, and makes a Coroner’s Inquest necessary in the house. What is our course in that case? Our course is to preserve the characters to which we have committed ourselves — you as his widow, and I as the witness of your marriage — and, in those characters, to court the fullest inquiry. In the entirely improbable event of his dying just when we want him to die, my idea — I might even say, my resolution — is to admit that we knew of his resurrection from the sea; and to acknowledge that we instructed Mr. Bashwood to entrap him into this house, by means of a false statement about Miss Milroy. When the inevitable questions follow, I propose to assert that he exhibited symptoms of mental alienation shortly after your marriage; that his delusion consisted in denying that you were his wife, and in declaring that he was engaged to be married to Miss Milroy; that you were in such terror of him on this account, when you heard he was alive and coming back, as to be in a state of nervous agitation that required my care; that at your request, and to calm that nervous agitation, I saw him professionally, and got him quietly into the house by a humoring of his delusion, perfectly justifiable in such a case; and, lastly, that I can certify his brain to have been affected by one of those mysterious disorders, eminently incurable, eminently fatal, in relation to which medical science is still in the dark. Such a course as this (in the remotely possible event which we are now supposing) would be, in your interests and mine, unquestionably the right course to take; and such a dress as that is, just as certainly, under existing circumstances, the wrong dress to wear.”
“Shall I take it off at once?” she asked, rising from the breakfast-table, without a word of remark on what had just been said to her.
“Anytime before two o’clock to-day will do,” said the doctor.
She looked at him with a languid curiosity — nothing more. “Why before two?” she inquired.
“Because this is one of my ‘Visitors’ Days,’ And the visitors’ time is from two to four.”
“What have I to do with your visitors?”
“Simply this. I think it important that perfectly respectable and perfectly disinterested witnesses should see you, in my house, in the character of a lady who has come to consult me.”
“Your motive seems rather far-fetched, Is it the only motive you have in the matter?”
“My dear, dear lady!” remonstrated the doctor, “have I any concealments from you ? Surely, you ought to know me better than that?”
“Yes,” she said, with a we ary contempt. “It’s dull enough of me not to understand you by this time. Send word upstairs when I am wanted.” She left him, and went back to her room.
Two o’clock came; and in a quarter of an hour afterward the visitors had arrived. Short as the notice had been, cheerless as the Sanitarium looked to spectators from without, the doctor’s invitation had been largely accepted, nevertheless, by the female members of the families whom he had addressed. In the miserable monotony of the lives led by a large section of the middle classes of England, anything is welcome to the women which offers them any sort of harmless refuge from the established tyranny of the principle that all human happiness begins and ends at home. While the imperious needs of a commercial country limited the representatives of the male sex, among the doctor’s visitors, to one feeble old man and one sleepy little boy, the women, poor souls, to the number of no less than sixteen — old and young, married and single — had seized the golden opportunity of a plunge into public life. Harmoniously united by the two common objects which they all had in view — in the first place, to look at each other, and, in the second place, to look at the Sanitarium — they streamed in neatly dressed procession through the doctor’s dreary iron gates, with a thin varnish over them of assumed superiority to all unladylike excitement, most significant and most pitiable to see!
The proprietor of the Sanitarium received his visitors in the hall with Miss Gwilt on his arm. The hungry eyes of every woman in the company overlooked the doctor as if no such person had existed; and, fixing on the strange lady, devoured her from head to foot in an instant.
“My First Inmate,” said the doctor, presenting Miss Gwilt. “This lady only arrived late last night; and she takes the present opportunity (the only one my morning’s engagements have allowed me to give her) of going over the Sanitarium.— Allow me, ma’am,” he went on, releasing Miss Gwilt, and giving his arm to the eldest lady among the visitors. “Shattered nerves — domestic anxiety,” he whispered, confidentially. “Sweet woman! sad case!” He sighed softly, and led the old lady across the hall.
The flock of visitors followed, Miss Gwilt accompanying them in silence, and walking alone — among them, but not of them — the last of all.
“The grounds, ladies and gentlemen,” said the doctor, wheeling round, and addressing his audience from the foot of the stairs, “are, as you have seen, in a partially unfinished condition. Under any circumstances, I should lay little stress on the grounds, having Hampstead Heath so near at hand, and carriage exercise and horse exercise being parts of my System. In a lesser degree, it is also necessary for me to ask your indulgence for the basement floor, on which we now stand. The waiting-room and study on that side, and the Dispensary on the other (to which I shall presently ask your attention), are completed. But the large drawing-room is still in the decorator’s hands. In that room (when the walls are dry — not a moment before) my inmates will assemble for cheerful society. Nothing will be spared that can improve, elevate, and adorn life at these happy little gatherings. Every evening, for example, there will be music for those who like it.”
At this point there was a faint stir among the visitors. A mother of a family interrupted the doctor. She begged to know whether music “every evening” included Sunday evening; and, if so, what music was performed?
“Sacred music, of course, ma’am,” said the doctor. “Handel on Sunday evening — and Haydn occasionally, when not too cheerful. But, as I was about to say, music is not the only entertainment offered to my nervous inmates. Amusing reading is provided for those who prefer books.”
There was another stir among the visitors. Another mother of a family wished to know whether amusing reading meant novels.
“Only such novels as I have selected and perused myself, in the first instance,” said the doctor. “Nothing painful, ma’am! There may be plenty that is painful in real life; but for that very reason, we don’t want it in books. The English novelist who enters my house (no foreign novelist will be admitted) must understand his art as the healthy-minded English reader understands it in our time. He must know that our purer modern taste, our higher modern morality, limits him to doing exactly two things for us, when he writes us a book. All we want of him is — occasionally to make us laugh; and invariably to make us comfortable.”
There was a third stir among the visitors — caused plainly this time by approval of the sentiments which they had just heard. The doctor, wisely cautious of disturbing the favorable impression that he had produced, dropped the subject of the drawing-room, and led the way upstairs. As before, the company followed; and, as before, Miss Gwilt walked silently behind them, last of all. One after another the ladies looked at her with the idea of speaking, and saw something in her face, utterly unintelligible to them, which checked the well-meant words on their lips. The prevalent impression was that the Principal of the Sanitarium had been delicately concealing the truth, and that his first inmate was mad.
The doctor led the way — with intervals of breathing-time accorded to the old lady on his arm — straight to the top of the house. Having collected his visitors in the corridor, and having waved his hand indicatively at the numbered doors opening out of it on either side, he invited the company to look into any or all of the rooms at their own pleasure.
“Numbers one to four, ladies and gentlemen,” said the doctor, “include the dormitories of the attendants. Numbers four to eight are rooms intended for the accommodation of the poorer class of patients, whom I receive on terms which simply cover my expenditure — nothing more. In the cases of these poorer persons among my suffering fellow creatures, personal piety and the recommendation of two clergymen are indispensable to admission. Those are the only conditions I make; but those I insist on. Pray observe that the rooms are all ventilated, and the bedsteads all iron and kindly notice, as we descend again to the second floor, that there is a door shutting off all communication between the second story and the top story when necessary. The rooms on the second floor, which we have now reached, are (with the exception of my own room) entirely devoted to the reception of lady-inmates — experience having convinced me that the greater sensitiveness of the female constitution necessitates the higher position of the sleeping apartment, with a view to the greater purity and freer circulation of the air. Here the ladies are established immediately under my care, while my assistant- physician (whom I expect to arrive in a week’s time) looks after the gentlemen on the floor beneath. Observe, again, as we descend to this lower, or first floor, a second door, closing all communication at night between the two stories to every one but the assistant physician and myself. And now that we have reached the gentleman’s part of the house, and that you have observed for yourselves the regulations of the establishment, permit me to introduce you to a specimen of my system of treatment next. I can exemplify it practically, by introducing you to a room fitted up, under my own direction, for the accommodation of the most complicated cases of nervous suffering and nervous delusion that can come under my care.”
He threw open the door of a room at one extremity of the corridor, numbered Four. “Look in, ladies and gentlemen,” he said; “and, if you see anything remarkable, pray mention it.”
The room was not very large, but it was well lit by one broad window. Comfortably furnished as a bedroom, it was only remarkable among other rooms of the same sort in one way. It had no fireplace. The visitors having noticed this, were informed that the room was warmed in winter by means of hot water; and were then invited back again into the corridor, to make the discoveries, under professional direction, which they were unable to make for themselves.
“A word, ladies and gentlemen,” said the doctor; “literally a word, on nervous derangement first. What is the process of treatment, when, let us say, mental anxiety has broken you down, and you apply to your doctor? He sees you, hears you, and gives you two prescriptions. One is written on paper, and made up at the chemist’s. The other is administered by word of mouth, at the propitious moment when the fee is ready; and consists in a general recommendation to you to keep your mind easy. That excellent advice given, your doctor leaves you to spare yourself all earthly annoyances by your own unaided efforts, until he calls again. Here my System steps in and helps you! When I see the necessity of keeping your mind easy, I take the bull by the horns and do it for you. I place you in a sphere of action in which the ten thousand trifles which must, and do, irritate nervous people at home are expressly considered and provided against. I throw up impregnable moral intrenchments between Worry and You. Find a door banging in this house, if you can! Catch a servant in this house rattling the tea-things when he takes away the tray! Discover barking dogs, crowing cocks, hammering workmen, screeching children here — and I engage to close My Sanitarium to-morrow! Are these nuisances laughing matters to nervous people? Ask them! Can they escape these nuisances at home? Ask them! Will ten minutes’ irritation from a barking dog or a screeching child undo every atom of good done to a nervous sufferer by a month’s medical treatment? There isn’t a competent doctor in England who will venture to deny it! On those plain grounds my System is based. I assert the medical treatment of nervous suffering to be entirely subsidiary to the moral treatment of it. That moral treatment of it you find here. That moral treatment, sedulously pursued throughout the day, follows the sufferer into his room at night; and soothes, helps and cures him, without his own knowledge — you shall see how.”
The doctor paused to take breath and looked, for the first time since the visitors had entered the house, at Miss Gwilt. For the first time, on her side, she stepped forward among the audience, and looked at him in return. After a momentary obstruction in the shape of a cough, the doctor went on.
“Say, ladies and gentlemen,” he proceeded, “that my patient has just come in. His mind is one mass of nervous fancies and caprices, which his friends (with the best possible intentions) have been ignorantly irritating at home. They have been afraid of him, for instance, at night. They have forced him to have somebody to sleep in the room with him, or they have forbidden him, in case of accidents, to lock his door. He comes to me the first night, and says: ‘Mind, I won’t have anybody in my room!’—‘Certainly not!’—‘I insist on locking my door.’—‘By all means!’ In he goes, and locks his door; and there he is, soothed and quieted, predisposed to confidence, predisposed to sleep, by having his own way. ‘This is all very well,’ you may say; ‘but suppose something happens, suppose he has a fit in the night, what then?’ You shall see! Hallo, my young friend!” cried the doctor, suddenly addressing the sleepy little boy. “Let’s have a game. You shall be the poor sick man, and I’ll be the good doctor. Go into that room and lock the door. There’s a brave boy! Have you locked it? Very good! Do you think I can’t get at you if I like? I wait till you’re asleep — I press this little white button, hidden here in the stencilled pattern of the outer wall — the mortise of the lock inside falls back silently against the door-post — and I walk into the room whenever I like. The same plan is pursued with the window. My capricious patient won’t open it at night, when he ought. I humor him again. ‘Shut it, dear sir, by all means!’ As soon as he is asleep, I pull the black handle hidden here, in the corner of the wall. The window of the room inside noiselessly opens, as you see. Say the patient’s caprice is the other way — he persists in opening the window when he ought to shut it. Let him! by all means, let him! I pull a second handle when he is snug in his bed, and the window noiselessly closes in a moment. Nothing to irritate him, ladies and gentlemen — absolutely nothing to irritate him! But I haven’t done with him yet. Epidemic disease, in spite of all my precautions, may enter this Sanitarium, and may render the purifying of the sick-room necessary. Or the patient’s case may be complicated by other than nervous malady — say, for instance, asthmatic difficulty of breathing. In the one case, fumigation is necessary; in the other, additional oxygen in the air will give relief. The epidemic nervous patient says, ‘I won’t be smoked under my own nose!’ The asthmatic nervous patient gasps with terror at the idea of a chemical explosion in his room. I noiselessly fumigate one of them; I noiselessly oxygenize the other, by means of a simple Apparatus fixed outside in the corner here. It is protected by this wooden casing; it is locked with my own key; and it communicates by means of a tube with the interior of the room. Look at it!”
With a preliminary glance at Miss Gwilt, the doctor unlocked the lid of the wooden casing, and disclosed inside nothing more remarkable than a large stone jar, having a glass funnel, and a pipe communicating with the wall, inserted in the cork which closed the mouth of it. With another look at Miss Gwilt, the doctor locked the lid again, and asked, in the blandest manner, whether his System was intelligible now?
“I might introduce you to all sorts of other contrivances of the same kind,” he resumed, leading the way downstairs; “but it would be only the same thing over and over again. A nervous patient who always has his own way is a nervous patient who is never worried; and a nervous patient who is never worried is a nervous patient cured. There it is in a nutshell! Come and see the Dispensary, ladies; the Dispensary and the kitchen next!”
Once more, Miss Gwilt dropped behind the visitors, and waited alone — looking steadfastly at the Room which the doctor had opened, and at the apparatus which the doctor had unlocked. Again, without a word passing between them, she had understood him. She knew, as well as if he had confessed it, that he was craftily putting the necessary temptation in her way, before witnesses who could speak to the superficially innocent acts which they had seen, if anything serious happened. The apparatus, originally constructed to serve the purpose of the doctor’s medical crotchets, was evidently to be put to some other use, of which the doctor himself had probably never dreamed till now. And the chances were that, before the day was over, that other use would be privately revealed to her at the right moment, in the presence of the right witness. “Armadale will die this time,” she said to herself, as she went slowly down the stairs. “The doctor will kill him, by my hands.”
The visitors were in the Dispensary when she joined them. All the ladies were admiring the beauty of the antique cabinet; and, as a necessary consequence, all the ladies were desirous of seeing what was inside. The doctor — after a preliminary look at Miss Gwilt — good-humoredly shook his head. “There is nothing to interest you inside,” he said. “Nothing but rows of little shabby bottles containing the poisons used in medicine which I keep under lock and key. Come to the kitchen, ladies, and honor me with your advice on domestic matters below stairs.” He glanced again at Miss Gwilt as the company crossed the hall, with a look which said plainly, “Wait here.”
In another quarter of an hour the doctor had expounded his views on cookery and diet, and the visitors (duly furnished with prospectuses) were taking leave of him at the door. “Quite an intellectual treat!” they said to each other, as they streamed out again in neatly dressed procession through the iron gates. “And what a very superior man!”
The doctor turned back to the Dispensary, humming absently to himself, and failing entirely to observe the corner of the hall in which Miss Gwilt stood retired. After an instant’s hesitation, she followed him. The assistant was in the room when she entered it — summoned by his employer the moment before.
“Doctor,” she said, coldly and mechanically, as if she was repeating a lesson, “I am as curious as the other ladies about that pretty cabinet of yours. Now they are all gone, won’t you show the inside of it to me ?”
The doctor laughed in his pleasantest manner.
“The old story,” he said. “Blue-Beard’s locked chamber, and female curiosity! (Don’t go, Benjamin, don’t go.) My dear lady, what interest can you possibly have in looking at a medical bottle, simply because it happens to be a bottle of poison?”
She repeated her lesson for the second time.
“I have the interest of looking at it,” she said, “and of thinking, if it got into some people’s hands, of the terrible things it might do.”
The doctor glanced at his assistant with a compassionate smile.
“Curious, Benjamin,” he said, “the romantic view taken of these drugs of ours by the unscientific mind! My dear lady,” he added, turning to Miss Gwilt, “if that is the interest you attach to looking at poisons, you needn’t ask me to unlock my cabinet — you need only look about you round the shelves of this room. There are all sorts of medical liquids and substances in those bottles — most innocent, most useful in themselves — which, in combination with other substances and other liquids, become poisons as terrible and as deadly as any that I have in my cabinet under lock and key.”
She looked at him for a moment, and creased to the opposite side of the room.
“Show me one,” she said,
Still smiling as good-humoredly as ever, the doctor humored his nervous patient. He pointed to the bottle from which he had privately removed the yellow liquid on the previous day, and which he had filled up again with a carefully-colored imitation in the shape of a mixture of his own.
“Do you see that bottle,” he said —“that plump, round, comfortable-looking bottle? Never mind the name of what is beside it; let us stick to the bottle, and distinguish it, if you like, by giving it a name of our own. Suppose we call it ‘our Stout Friend’? Very good. Our Stout Friend, by himself, is a most harmless and useful medicine. He is freely dispensed every day to tens of thousands of patients all over the civilized world. He has made no romantic appearances in courts of law; he has excited no breathless interest in novels; he has played no terrifying part on the stage............