The situation was rather hard on him; and the trick from which he had suffered will not be seriously defended, but only silently enjoyed, by the wise and good. He also had a very complete theory of the causes of mental breakdown among his fellow citizens. He also could trace to physiological and organic causes the mental condition of his captive. He could explain the nature of Spinal Repulsion quite as sanely and serenely as Hendry could that of Colour-Blindness. But somehow he had not had the stage set for him so satisfactorily for its exposition. At the very moment when he should have sailed into the magistrate’s room to make his report, and Hendry should have been locked up in the waiting room to wait for the result of it, the unscrupulous Mr. Murrel had rapidly reversed the positions of the two men of science, with the deplorable results that we have already seen. The official, finding himself trapped, had behaved as very full-blooded and confident people often behave when something happens to them which they never believe to be possible. For it is the man whose life goes with a smooth and swift motion, who is normally self-satisfied and smiling, who has never been made to turn aside for anything, who comes with a crash into a real obstacle. On the other hand, the history of poor Hendry had been exactly the opposite. He had clung pathetically to his polite manners, as the only relic of his social status, through a hundred humiliations; and he was used to explaining things elegantly to creditors and assuming a cultivated and slightly pedantic tone in talking to policemen. The consequence was that while the official doctor gasped and snorted and swore in unintelligible manner, the certified lunatic stood with his head gracefully on one side, making a soft clucking noise in his throat to indicate sorrow over the downfall of the human mind. The Army surgeon looked from one to the other for a moment, and then fixed his eyes upon the cursing foreigner; as he had fixed them on many homicidal maniacs before. So did these three distinguished medical men meet at last; in a rather informal consultation.
Outside, in the street that struggled crazily to the sea-cliff, Douglas Murrel sat on the top of his cab, with his face upturned to heaven like one whose work has been well and worthily done. He was wearing an exceedingly battered and shabby black top hat, which was not his own; for he had bought the hat along with the cab; though it was the sort of hat which a man might well have been paid to wear, rather than pay for wearing it. It served his particular purpose, however, with great simplicity and success. The hat dominates and defines a figure in inconspicuous and colourless clothes; and so long as he wore it he passed well enough for the driver of such an ancient vehicle. When he took it off and slipped among the officials, with his well-brushed hair and gentlemanly manner, they had no reason to doubt his claims to a different position. On the top of the cab, however, he had resumed the hat; not without pomp, as a conqueror might crown himself with laurel.
He thought he knew what would probably happen and he decided to wait for it. The end of the immediate drama of the captured government expert he did not expect to see at that stage; he promised himself that if it went too far, he would be able to communicate with the authorities later. As it was, he left it almost reverently as a rounded and perfected thing, a poem. But if all went well, one consequence was likely enough to follow; and when he had waited for about ten minutes, he was gratified to find his calculation correct.
Dr. Hendry, once famous in the artistic world, walked out between the dark pillars of the porch that stood out against the sea; as free as the sea-gull that was swerving along the line of the cliff. He had an air of almost aggressive good taste; as if informing the whole street that he would refuse to inform anybody about the delicate professional secrets just confided to him. He made a movement as if pulling on a pair of invisible gloves, and he quite naturally stepped into the hansom cab, before he had thought of it. The conscientious cabman pulled down his top hat over his brows and rapidly drove him away up the steep and stony streets.
For the present at least, the chronicler may well maintain an awful silence about what happened between the magistrate and the doctor. And indeed Murrel’s own mind showed a curious and rather indescribable disposition to drop the whole topic and to leave it behind him. He had a reputation for playing practical jokes. But this moment of his life will be somewhat misunderstood if it be supposed that he thought of it first and foremost as a practical joke upon the foreign doctor. A hazier and yet happier feeling was in his mind, as if the real story lay rather in front of him than behind him; as if the unexpected liberation of the poor old crank, with the colour-blind monomania, were but a symbol of the liberation of many things and the opening of a brighter world. Something had snapped; if it was only a bit of red tape; and he did not know yet how much had been set free. As he turned the corner a shaft of sun shot down the steep street, seeming as solid as that from solid clouds in the old Bible pictures, and looking up at the window of the high narrow house he saw Hendry’s daughter.
The woman who looked out of the window appeared, after a fashion, for the first time in this story. Hitherto she had been cloaked in shadows, in the shades of the steep stairways and the high dark house. She had been disguised in destitution; and it is necessary to have lived in such a house to know how much destitution can disguise. She had turned pale like a plant in a narrow and shuttered house; a house in which there were no mirrors; least of all those human mirrors that we call faces. She had long ceased to think of her appearance; and she would have been more surprised than anyone else if she could have stood in the street and seen her appearance at the window. And yet, as she looked down into the street, she was something more than surprised. The beauty that unfolded from within, like some magic flower upon the balcony, was not due altogether to the burst of sun that had struck the street. It was the most beautiful thing in the world; perhaps the only really beautiful thing in the world. It was astonishment which was lost in Eden and will return with the Beatific Vision, in astonishment so strong that it will last for ever.
It was indeed only amazement at what she saw in the street; but there was in it the joy that only hails the reversal of all things in the world; what is too good to be true. To understand her astonishment it would be necessary to tell her story; and her story would be of a very different sort from this story, and more like those long scientific and realistic novels which are not stories at all. Since the day when her father had been ruined by a gang of rascals who happened to be too rich to be punished, her life had descended step after step into that world where all the people are assumed to be rascals and punished in a sort of rotation; the police regarding themselves rather as the warders of a large loose prison with the roof off. She had long given up having any sharp reaction to the tendency; it seemed perfectly natural so long as it was a downward tendency. If her father had been taken away and hanged, she would have been miserable and bitter and indignant; but she would not have been surprised.
But when she saw him coming back smiling in a hansom cab, she was completely surprised. Never had she known any living thing escape from the trap into which she thought he had fallen; never had she seen footprints coming out from that dark den of efficiency. It was as if she had seen the sun turn backwards towards the East, or the Thames stop suddenly at Greenwich and begin to go back to Oxford. But there was no doubt that it was her father, leaning back and smiling in the cab. As he had come out with the gesture of pulling on invisible gloves, so he leaned back with the gesture of smoking an invisible cigar. As she stared at him, she became conscious that the cabman had taken off his hat to her, with a remarkably fine flourish for so very deplorable a hat. The removal of the hat gave the last shock to her senses; for it revealed the colourless but carefully brushed hair of Mr. Murrel, the eccentric gentleman who had called at the house a few hours before.
Dr. Hendry leapt from the cab with quite youthful grace, and his hand went with another automatic gesture towards a totally empty pocket. He was living in the brave days of old.
“Don’t mention it,” said Murrel hastily, replacing the atrocious hat. “This is my own cab and I do it for amusement. Art for art’s sake, as your old friends used to say. I am an arrangement, as Whistler said; an arrangement in black and brown. Your friend the mad doctor is, I trust, by this time an arrangement in black and blue.”