My companion turned to me suavely.
“Mr. de Crespigny?” he said. “Yes, and what about him, madam?”
“You are not he!” I cried wildly. “Let me out! He was to have met me!”
With a sort of tacit understanding, they all hemmed me in with their knees, imprisoning and controlling me at once.
“You make a mistake, madam,” said my captor. “He was not to have met you. But, be reconciled; time and judicious treatment, I have not the least doubt, will cure you of this delusion.”
In an instant the whole horror of this snare, of this most wicked scheme, opened like a black gulf before my eyes. The convent—to anticipate an analogy—had been my Elba; now my St. Helena was to be an asylum. She had discovered; or he, the dastard, had betrayed me; and, in the result, she had not hesitated, with the connivance of some sycophant doctor, to stoop to this.
It was night; the chaise drove on by back ways; I sunk back, sick and almost senseless, and abandoned myself to despair.
XIII.
I AM WOOED TO SELF-DESTRUCTION
Dr. Peel’s Asylum was known generically as “The House,” perhaps in cynical allusion to its licensed irresponsibility to any laws but its own. It was conceived on the principle of an eel-pot—the easiest thing to slip, or be driven, into; the hardest to escape from. It was not so much an asylum as an oubliette; never so much a house of correction as of annihilation. There, in addition to the constitutionally weak-minded, troublesome heirs, irreclaimable prodigals, jealous wives, importunate creditors, distinguished blackmailers, chance recipients of deadly secrets—all such, in fact, as threatened the peace of that grand seigniory which has a prescriptive monopoly in it—could be immured by lettre de cachet (it amounted to nothing less) from any accommodating physician, and afterwards “treated,” or disposed of, by private contract. Its methods were delicate, tasteful, and exceedingly sure. With rib-breaking, starvation, strait-waistcoats, all the vulgar apparatus of the ordinary médecin de fous, it had no commerce. Where the removal of undesirables was in question, it rather killed with kindness; suffocated, like Heliogabalus, with roses; persuaded to the happy despatch with a silken cord. It drove its poor Judases to suicide by putting by, as useless, their moral reparations, and took care to have at hand the seductive means. If one escaped—a rare occurrence—it possessed a kennel of highly trained bloodhounds, whose belling warned the dark nights with menace. It asked no questions, and expected to be asked none. Its formula was a hint and a cheque.
The asylum ménage was perfectly refined, and its cuisine lavish. It entertained none but the nominees of the wealthy. The extensive grounds of the house were a literal maze of beauty, the shrubberies being so disposed as to preclude all thought of restraint. It was only upon piercing them, at any point, that one found oneself opposed by a high boundary wall, which contained between itself and the estate it enclosed a waste interval incessantly patrolled, day and night, by the asylum watch. Then, indeed, one realised the iron hand in the velvet glove, and started back dismayed from the grin of the nearest sentry whom one’s movements had called light-footed to the spot.