“Yes,” he answered, the question that my fainting spirit shrunk from formulating, “yes, it was the Captain—good riddance to a conceited ass.”
He strutted along, pluming himself on my praise. All that I have stated—the truth about this smiling, damned Gehenna—I drew from him then or thereafter. I cannot recall it now without a shudder like death’s.
Once that morning we came, in a retired corner, upon the prettiest, greenest graveyard—the sweetest God’s-acre, God pity it! in all the sad world. It was studded with quiet flowers, screened with fragrant shrubs, thick with graves, each a nameless grassy barrow. What depth of tragedy in it all! I cannot, I vow, dwell any longer on the picture, but must cover the details of it at a gallop.
I was nine weeks, before I found release, in this appalling hell—a time the most stupendous of my life. I will acquit the Lady Sophia of intending the worst; I cannot acquit her of implying it. Whether from jealousy, or a true conviction as to the unpardonable nature of my recreancy, she failed, at least, to assure the instruments of her cruelty that my death-sentence was not intimated in the bond. It is possible she may have been totally ignorant of the real character of the place to which she condemned me. She is none the less responsible for the conclusions the Rhadamanthus of that inferno elected to draw from her dubiety. Anyhow, I am convinced that my destruction was designed, before I had been there many days.
In the meantime—O, my Alcide, pity thy Diane! What had she done to merit this fate, the most awful that could befall a brilliant sanity? Very, very soon that early buoyancy was like nothing but the memory of a bright star, that had exploded and scattered as soon as realised. A sickness, a deadly apprehension, took its place; a sense of some creeping, circumventing terror, which hemmed me in, stealthy and pitiless, concentrating my thoughts on a single point in this cursed paradise. I was inoculated with the disease of the morbid intellects about me. My reason suffered deliberate contamination by the remorseless ghoul my keeper. No fewer than three times during my short sojourn in his inferno did the corpse of a self-destroyer witness to the success of his methods. They went to swell the bloody tally of shrouds under the grass in the little graveyard; and, thinking of them there, their awful waiting testimony, I would look up to find the evil eye of their murderer fixed upon me in covert, lustful speculation.
For long I remained incredulous that my wit could be utterly impotent to devise a means to escape. Gradually, only, the sinister watchfulness which guarded every outlet of this green prison, and the fiendish incorruptibility of its warders, was bitten into my brain. Pleas and graces were accepted for nothing but an encouragement to unwelcome attentions, indeed. It was not supposed that one could be insane and modest. Many sold their virtue for a little surcease from tyranny, bartered their dearer than life for a poor extension of living. At the same time, and for the same reason, a most rigid embargo was placed on all communications with the outside world. Worse than a Russian censorship doomed these utter exiles from hope.
In the worst of my despair I had written to Patty, to de Crespigny, begging them to intercede for me with the cruel woman, who yet could not be aware of the inhuman character of her revenge. Finally, I wrote to madam herself—an appeal that would have melted a heart of stone. My cries were uttered into space. They were never allowed, in spite of all specious pretence, to penetrate the boundaries of my doom. They recoiled only upon my own fated head, precipitating its calamity, and the swifter because I was persistent in justifying my birth-name to my hateful would-be destroyer.
The little craze they called Jimmy was my sole stay and buckler. He attached himself to me vigorously, and by his quickness and waspishness more than made up for his lack of inches. I never knew who he was, or immured at whose instigation. There was warrant, anyhow, for his detention; yet not sufficient, it appeared, for his “removal.” His philosophy of madness was just a counterbuff to that of the deceased Captain. If, in short, more than enough was less than nothing, then less than nothing was more than enough; wherefore Jimmy, twitted with being less than nothing, knew himself really to be greatly better than most, though he could never get over the envy of smaller souls in refusing him the credit of his stature. What is apparently little is relatively great, he often assured me, while bemoaning his inability to knock the truism into the thin asparagus heads that shot above his own sturdy one. He spent the most of his time, and I with him, in what was known as the workshop—a detached ivy-grown shed, buried amongst trees, very private, and with a deep well in it, and furnished with all sorts of dangerous tools for cranks of a mechanical turn. There he wrought incessantly, for he was a capable carpenter; and there, watching and helping him, I strove to forget something of my misery. One morning, entering this shed, we found a little group of employés gathered about the well, talking and laughing, and fishing with a long grapnel. A partition separated us from the obscene crew, whose movements, unobserved by them, we crouched to watch.
“A thousand to one it’s old Star-jelly,” whispered my companion. “’Twas plain from the first the creature was booked.”
They hauled it to the surface while he muttered—a sodden body caught by its waistband and doubled backwards—and slopped their hideous burden on the floor. The white sightless face settled backwards, as if with a sigh of rest, and I could hardly refrain from a scream of terror. I had known this poor thing for the few days since he had been admitted—a wreck so torn, so noisome, so straining the remnant of life through fretted lungs, it should have seemed a mockery to precipitate its end. I had known, and never, till now seeing it clothed in the white uniform of death, had recognised it. It was the mad incubus of “Rupert’s Folly,” caught somehow tripping at last and consigned to his doom. The red earl had succeeded by long waiting in curing himself of this itch. He was one of a deadly persistent family.