“Cable what boat you start by and I’ll meet you at Port Said. I don’t know how I keep myself sitting in this chair. I could turn head over heels for joy! (And poor Grumper only just buried and his Will read!) He didn’t lose quite all his grim humour in that wonderful week of softening, relenting and humanizing. What do you think he solemnly gave and bequeathed to the poor Haddock? His wardrobe!!! And nothing else, but if the Haddock wears only Grumper’s clothes, including his boots, shirts, ties, collars and everything else, for one full and complete year, and wears absolutely nothing else, he is to have five thousand pounds at the end of it—and he is to begin on the day after the funeral! And even at the last poor Grumper was a foot taller and a foot broader (not to mention thicker) than the Haddock! It appears that he systematically tried to poison Grumper’s mind against you—presumably with an eye on this same last Will and Testament. He hasn’t been seen since the funeral. I wonder if he is going to try to win the money by remaining in bed for a year in Grumper’s pyjamas!
“Am I not developing ‘self-control and balance’? Here I sit writing news to you while my heart is screaming aloud with joy, crying ‘Dam is coming home. Dam’s troubles are over. Dam is saved!’ Because if you are ever so ‘ill,’ Darling, there is nothing on earth to prevent your coming to your old home at once—and if we can’t marry we can be pals for evermore in the dear old place of our childhood. But of course we can marry. Hurry home, and if any Harley Street doctor gives you even a doubtful look, throw him up his own stairs to show how feeble you are, or tie his poker round his neck in a neat bow, and refuse to undo it until he apologizes. I’m sure you could! ‘Ill’ indeed! If you can’t have a little fit, on the rare occasions when you see a snake, without fools saying you are ill or dotty or something, it is a pity! Anyhow there is one small woman who understands, and if she can’t marry you she can at any rate be your inseparable pal—and if the Piffling Little World likes to talk scandal, in spite of Auntie Yvette’s presence—why it will be amusing. Cable, Darling! I am just bursting with excitement and joy—and fear (that something may go wrong at the last moment). If it saved a single day I should start for Motipur myself at once. If we passed in mid-ocean I should jump overboard and swim to your ship. Then you’d do the same, and we should ‘get left,’ and look silly…. Oh, what nonsense I am talking—but I don’t think I shall talk anything else again—for sheer joy!
“You can’t write me a lot of bosh now about ‘spoiling my life’ and how you’d be ten times more miserable if I were your wife. Fancy—a soldier to-day and a ‘landed proprietor’ to-morrow! How I wish you were a landed traveller, and were in the train from Plymouth—no, from Dover and London, because of course you’d come the quickest way. Did my cable surprise you very much?
“I enclose fifty ten-pound notes, as I suppose they will be quicker and easier for you to cash than those ‘draft’ things, and they’ll be quite safe in the insured packet. Send a cable at once, Darling. If you don’t I shall imagine awful things and perhaps die of a broken heart or some other silly trifle.
“Mind then:—Cable to-day; Start to-morrow; Get here in a fortnight—and keep a beady eye open at Port Said and Brindisi and places—in case there has been time for me to get there.
“Au revoir. Darling Dam,
“Your
“LUCILLE.
“Three cheers! And a million more!”
Yes, a long letter, but he could almost say it backwards. He couldn’t be anything like mad while he could do that?… How had she received his answer—in which he tried to show her the impossibility of any decent man compromising a girl in the way she proposed in her sweet innocence and ignorance. Of course he, a half-mad, epileptic, fiend-ridden monomaniac—nay, dangerous lunatic,—could not marry. Why, he might murder his own wife under some such circumstances as those under which he attacked Captain Blake. (Splendid fellow Blake! Not every man after such a handling as that would make it his business to prove that his assailant was neither drunk, mad, nor criminal—merely under a hallucination. But for Blake he would now be in jail, or lunatic asylum, to a certainty. The Colonel would have had him court-martialled as a criminal, or else have had him out of the regiment as a lunatic. Nor, as a dangerous lunatic, would he have been allowed to buy himself out when Lucille’s letter and his money arrived. Blake had got him into the position of a perfectly sober and sane person whose mind had been temporarily upset by a night of horror—in which a coffin-quitting corpse had figured, and so he had been able to steer between the cruel rocks of Jail and Asylum to the blessed harbour of Freedom.)
Yes—in spite of Blake’s noble goodness and help, Dam knew that he was not normal, that he was dangerous, that he spent long periods on the very border-line of insanity, that he stood fascinated on that border-line and gazed far into the awful country beyond—the Realms of the Mad….