CHAPTER III.—WHENCE SHE CAME.
I led her into my back drawing-room—which apartment I use as a library and study—and turned up the drop-light on my writing-table.
Then I looked at her, and she looked at me.
She had said that she was young. I was not surprised to see that she was beautiful as well. I do not know that I can explain just what had prepared me for this discovery. Perhaps, in part, her voice, which was exquisitely sweet and melodious. Perhaps simply the tragical and romantic circumstances under which I had found her. However that may be, beautiful she indubitably was.
She wore no bonnet. Her hair, dark brown, curling, and abundant, was cut short like a boy's.
Her skin was fine in texture, and deathly pale. Her eyes, large, dark, liquid, were emotional and intelligent. Her mouth was generous in size, sensitive in form, and in colour perfect. But over her whole countenance was written legibly the signature of hard and fierce despair.
From throat to foot she was wrapped in a black waterproof cloak.
“Be seated,” I began. “Put yourself at ease in mind and body. And first of all, let me offer you a glass of wine.”
“You may spare yourself that trouble, sir,” she replied. “I have no appetite for wine.”
“But it will do you good. A single glass?”
“I will not drink a single drop.”
“Well, then, a composing draught. You are my patient for the time being, remember. You must let me prescribe for you. You are in a state of excessive nervous excitement, bordering upon hysteria. Drink this.”
“I assure you, sir, my disorder is not of the body,” she said wearily. “No medicine can relieve it.”
“Nevertheless, I will beg of you to give this a trial. It is but a thimbleful. It can't hurt you, even if it should fail to benefit you.”
“For aught I know it may contain a drug.”
“It certainly does contain a drug. I should not offer you aqua pura.”
“You juggle words, sir. I mean a poison.”
“Come; that is good. Do you think I would have been at such pains to dissuade you from suicide, immediately thereafter to seek to poison you?”
“I don't mean a deadly poison. You could do me no greater kindness than to offer me a deadly poison. I mean—it may contain some opiate, some narcotic, to deprive me of power over myself, so that I shall be unable to leave your house when the time is up.”
“Madam, look at me. Have I the appearance of a man who would attempt to get the better of you by an underhand trick like that?”
“No, you do not look deceitful,” she answered, after a moment's scrutiny of my face.
“Then trust me enough to drink this.”
Without further protest she took the glass I proffered, and emptied it.
“Now, if you are willing, we may talk,” said I.
“What is there to talk about? I, at any rate, have nothing to say. But I am at your mercy for the term of one hour. You, of course, may talk as much as you desire. But at the end of one hour—— Please look at your watch. What o'clock is it now?”
“It is twenty minutes after midnight.”
“Thank you. Five minutes have already passed. At a quarter after one I shall be free to leave.” Therewith she let her head fall back upon the cushion of the easy-chair in which she was seated, and closed her eyes.
“Yes,” said I, “you will then be free to leave, if you still wish it. But I doubt if you will.”
“Your doubt is groundless, sir. However, if it pleases you to cherish it, you may do so till the hour is finished.”
“No, I cannot think my doubt is groundless. I told you I believed I should be able to show you a better way out of your troubles than the desperate one that you were purposing to take; and now I will make good my promise.”
“Being more fully acquainted with my own affairs than you are, I assure you that your promise is one which cannot by any possibility be made good.”
“Time will prove or disprove the truth of that assertion. To begin with, may I ask you a question or two?”
“You may ask me twenty questions. I do not pledge myself to answer them.”
“Well, will you answer this one? Am I right in having understood you to say, when we were below there, on the wharf, that you have no friends or kindred whose feelings you are bound to consider in determining your conduct, and no worldly ties or associations which you are bound to respect?”
“Yes, you are right in that.”
“I am right in having understood you to say that; but is what you said true?”
“Which would imply that you suspect me of having lied,” she returned, with an unlovely smile. “Well, I don't blame you. I am a skilful and habitual liar, and I daresay it shows in my face. But in that case I broke my rule, and told the truth.”
“My dear madam, I intended no such imputation. But you were agitated and excited; and sometimes under the stress of our excitement we unwittingly exaggerate.”
“Well, I did not exaggerate. What I told you was literally true.”
“And the rest that you said? That also you re-affirm? That you are penniless, homeless, wretchedly unhappy, and weary of life? It seems brutal for me to state it thus; but I must understand clearly, for a purpose which you will presently see.”
“You need not apologise, sir. This is no occasion for mincing matters. Yes, I am penniless, homeless, wretchedly unhappy, and weary of life. But I am worse than that. I am bad. I am utterly base and degraded. Look at me,” she added, fixing her eyes boldly, even defiantly, upon mine. “Examine me. I am a rare specimen. Very probably you have never seen my like before, and never will again. I am an example of—” she paused and laughed; and there was something in her laughter that made me shudder—“of total depravity,” she concluded. Then suddenly her manner changed, and she became very grave. “Would you entertain a leper in your house, sir? Yet I have been told that I am a moral leper. I have been told that the corruption-spot upon me reaches in to the core. And I think my informant put it very moderately. If you suspected the crimes I have been guilty of, the worse crimes that I have meditated, and only failed to commit because of material obstacles that I could not overcome, you would not harbour me in your house for a single minute. You would feel that my presence was a contamination: that I polluted the chair I sit in, the floor under my feet. The glass I just drank from—you would shatter it into bits, that no innocent man or woman might ever put lips to it again. There! can't you see now that I am beyond help, beyond hope? What have I to live for? I am an incumbrance upon the face of the earth, and hateful to myself into the bargain. Why keep me here an hour? Let us rescind our compromise.* Let me go at once.”
* It is possible that here and elsewhere Dr. Benary, in
reporting conversations from memory, puts into the mouths of
his interlocutors words and phrases from his own vocabulary,
at the same time, without doubt, giving the substance and
the spirit of their remarks correctly. “Let us rescind our
compromise,” at any rate, falling from the lips of a woman,
has, to say the least, an unrealistic sound.—-Editor.
She rose, and stood restive, as if expecting a dismissal.
“No, no; you must stay out your hour, at all events,” I insisted. “Sit down again. I am sure you are not so black as you paint yourself; and in any case, guilt confessed and repented of is more than half atoned for.”
“That is not so, to begin with,” she retorted; “that is the shallowest, hollowest sort of cant. It may pass with people who know guilt only by hearsay, but is ridiculous to those who, like myself, have a knowledge of the subject at first hand.
“Guilt, crime, is atoned for only when it is undone, and all its consequences are obliterated. And now, speaking from my first-hand knowledge of the subject, I will tell you two things—first, all the confession and repentance in the world cannot undo a crime once done, nor obliterate its consequences; secondly, nothing can. You are a physician; I take it, therefore, you are familiar with the first principles of science: with what they call, I think, the Law of the Persistence of Force, the Law of the Conservation of Energy. If you understand that law, you will not dispute this simple application of it: a crime once done can never be undone; its consequences are ineradicable and eternal. Well and good. It is a puerility, in the face of the Law of the Persistence of Force, to talk of atonement. Atonement could come to pass only by means of a miracle—a suspension of Nature, and the interposition of a Supernatural Power. And that is where the Christians, with their dogma of vicarious atonement, are more rational than all the Rationalists from a to zed. So much for atonement. And now, as to repentance—who said that I repented? Repentance! Remorse! I will give you another piece of information, also speaking from firsthand knowledge. Repentance and Remorse are unmeaning sounds. There are no realities, no things, to correspond with them. I do not repent. No man or woman, from the beginning of time, has ever yet repented, in your sense of the word. We regret the losses that our crimes entail upon us: yes. We suffer because our crimes find us out, because retribution overtakes us: yes. But repent? We do not repent. Most of us pretend to. But I will be frank; I will not pretend.
“I suffer because the punishment which, by my crimes, I have brought down upon myself, is greater than I can bear; I suffer, too, because the last purpose I had left to live for, which was also a criminal purpose, has been defeated. But I do not repent. I will not pretend to repent.”
“Be all which as it may, I will repeat what I said before: I do not believe that you are so black as you paint yourself. You, young, beautiful, intelligent—no, no. But even if you were ten times blacker, it would make no difference to me. For, look you, since you have introduced a question of science, and favoured me with a scientific generalisation, I will pursue the question a little further, and cap your generalisation with another: namely, good, bad, or indifferent, we are not our own creators; we do not make ourselves; we are the resultants of our Heredity and our Environment; and our actions, whether criminal or the reverse, are determined not by free-will, but by necessity. I will not enlarge upon that generalisation; I will leave its corollaries for your own imagination to perceive. But in view of it, I will say again: even if you were ten times blacker, it would make no difference to me. You are no more to blame for the colour of your soul than for the colour of your hair.”
“You are very magnanimous,” she said bitterly, “and your doctrine would sound well in a criminal court.”
“Think of me as scornfully as you will,” I returned, “I am very sincerely anxious to befriend you.”
“If that is true, you have it in your power to do so with marvellous ease.”
“How so?” I queried.
“Absolve me from my agreement to stay here an hour. Sit still there in your chair, and let me go about my business unmolested and at once.”
“No; to that agreement I must hold you, for your own sake. I have much to say to you, if you would only let me once get started.”
“Good God, sir!” she cried, springing up in passion. “You drive me to extremes. Do you know that you are violating the laws of the State in harbouring me here?—that you are exposing yourself to the risk of prosecution?”
“I know that I should be violating the laws of humanity if I suffered you to lay violent hands upon yourself so long as I have it in my power to restrain you. As for the laws of the State, do you mean that you can bring an action against me for damages in interfering with your personal liberty? I doubt if you will do so. And I am sure no jury, apprised of the circumstances, would find against me.”
“You are still in ignorance of the situation.” said she. “Now open your eyes.”
With that she threw off the waterproof cloak in which she was enveloped, and stood before me in the blue and white striped uniform of a Deadlock Island convict.