Such authoritative brevity was for Brandon a command which he felt he must obey. But he was at once aware that he could only get to Wellwood in the teeth of a junta. Wife, doctor, nurse, all had very strong reasons to urge against a journey of nearly twenty miles in the middle of winter to such a place on such a pretext. To them the summons itself was the caprice of an unsound mind, the wish to obey it the whim of a sick man.
But in this, as they were to learn, they underrated the forces now at work. Fully set on obeying the summons, Brandon would brook no refusal. In vain Millicent dissuaded, in vain Joliffe and the nurse issued a ukase. Come what might he must see John Smith; if the heavens fell he must go to Wellwood.
Opposition raised Brandon’s will to such a pitch that at last his guardians had to consider the question very seriously. And they reluctantly saw that beyond the amount of trouble involved there was no real reason why he should not have his way. Prejudice, it was true, also entered into the matter; doctor and nurse agreed that it could not be good for a sick man to visit such a place as Wellwood. But the sick man declared he alone must be judge of that; and as a growing excitement threatened a return of fever, consent was reluctantly given for a letter to be written to the chief medical officer at Wellwood for permission to see John Smith.
Millicent Brandon wrote the letter at the invalid’s dictation, devoutly hoping the while that its purpose would fail. Alas for the frailty of human hopes in the scale of official perversity! By return of post came full permission to visit the patient at any time. In the presence of this bombshell nothing was left but to submit with a good grace to the inevitable.
Accordingly, in the gray of a December afternoon, Brandon made the journey to Wellwood by motor. It hardly took an hour. Little of the landscape was visible in the winter half-light, and the place itself was unable to reveal the beauties of its setting. Run on modern lines with accommodation for a hundred patients, it had the comforts of a home to offer and a very great deal in the way of human kindness. To one in John Smith’s rank of life it was a place of luxury; to those whose lot had been cast on more liberal lines there was little to complain of in regard to food, housing, reasonable recreation. Yet to each and all of its inmates, from the most open and amenable to the most sullen and defiant, it had one truly dreadful drawback. They were not there of their own free will, but were held by the order of the State.
That simple but terrible fact galled one and all like a chain. And few cherished any real hope of ever getting free. “Abandon hope all ye who enter here,” might have been engraved above the pleasant portals of this polite prison. Once behind those doors, the young and the old alike felt themselves caught in the meshes of a deep-laid conspiracy, of a darkness and a subtlety beyond belief. Every attempt at freedom was a struggle against fate, every effort to break the fetters of the law riveted them more securely. From time to time the patients were visited by doctors, magistrates, clergymen, commissioners in lunacy, but these came as a concession to the wisdom and humanity of an abstract conception. Insight, hope, healing, came not in their train.
Brandon felt a sudden chill of soul as he was lifted by his chauffeur and his valet from the car and carried into the light and the suffocating warmth beyond those ornate, nail-studded doors. The place was overheated, yet to Brandon it had an effect of sudden immersion in icy water. There was something in its atmosphere which struck right down to the roots of his being. It was so subtle yet so deadly that a nausea came upon him. And yet, as he was soon to realize, this emotion had its source in his own weakness, in his own state of extreme mental tension.
Brandon was carried into a private room and was there received by the chief medical officer, Dr. Thorp, to whom he was known by hearsay. And it was his privilege to have a conversation with a humane and enlightened man, which interested him profoundly.
Dr. Thorp stood very high in his profession, and his many years’ experience of mental cases was wide and deep. For him the subject with which he dealt, terrible as it was, had an all-absorbing interest. It offered to the researches of science a boundless field; moreover, this expert had a power over himself, and was therefore able to keep a sane, cool, balanced judgment in the midst of perils which too often overthrew his fellow workers. In a word, he could detach the part from the whole and so prevent the mind from being subdued to that in which it worked.
In Dr. Thorp’s cozy room, under the bust of Æsculapius, Brandon had a talk in which he learned many things. The chief medical officer spoke with a frankness, a fair-minded desire to be impartial, which Brandon somehow had not looked for. To begin with he did not hesitate to describe the case of John Smith as quite the most remarkable that had ever come into his ken. And the fact that Brandon had known him intimately for many years, that he had always been his friend and champion, and that grievously stricken as he was, he had come to see him now, appeared in the eyes of Dr. Thorp to give this visitor an importance altogether unusual.