When Frank Onslow awoke from the stupor of surprise, he found to his horror that he was surrounded by gibbering madmen and crack-brained women. They sneaked round him, pulled him by the sleeve, and babbled nonsense into his ears. They believed that everyone was mad but themselves. They were deceitful, cruel, treacherous, hysterical, and maudlin.
Here was an old man driven mad by gluttony, a wild weird, wolf-like man, who, after every meal, chattered for the next like a monkey. Scarcely had he swallowed his dinner before he stamped up and down the corridor muttering, “I want my nice tea and cut bread and butter. I tell you I want my nice tea and brown bread and butter.” And after tea was swallowed he whined for his supper. Here was the young lover who was driven mad because he could not marry the girl he had met night after night in the stalls of the opera. Every night he dressed himself up in his evening clothes, put an artificial flower in his button-hole, and sitting on an old wooden chair, looked into space and warbled the music of Faust’s love scene. Here was a woman driven mad by the bad man who had deserted her, whose hair had turned gray in her long imprisonment, but who ever since wept tears all day over the love letters thrust into her bosom and reduced to a pulp with much weeping. Here was the man who believed he had a millstone on his head; here the woman who was convinced that every means was being taken to accomplish her dishonor; out they all came, mumbling, maundering, making faces at one another, pulling and picking at one another’s coat sleeves, defiant, blasphemous, hysterical, howling, and weeping, men and women cursing, men and women rending the air with their piteous cries. Men glared at him with features distorted with rage, women hissed at him with lips polluted with blasphemies. It was enough to make anyone mad to talk to them. This was no home for the afflicted. It was a veritable hell upon earth.
The worst of it was that there was no humane desire to cure the insane. In public institutions they attempt to cure, too often in private homes they do not hesitate to kill the last vestige of reason. The doctors, instead of soothing their patients, irritated them. The mad point was not avoided, it was insisted upon. The consequence was that the wards, comparatively quiet before the medical attendants went their rounds, became a pandemonium after they left them. It would never have done to cure a paying patient. The object was to make him day by day madder and madder still.
In order to save his distracted brain, Frank Onslow relapsed into solemn and sullen silence. He was tortured with their mocking laughs. If he appealed to the doctors they laughed at him; if he consulted the attendants they turned away with a grin. If he hoped to obtain sympathy from the patients, the fitful gleam of intelligence turned into the animal laughter that was hideous.
“I shall go mad,” said the wretched man to himself, “unless I hold my peace. Henceforward I will be dumb. It is my only safety.”
There were regular visiting days at this particular establishment. The proprietor of it did not dare to run counter to public opinion, and he was artful enough to encourage these visits of inspection in order to show how admirable and infallible was his system. The patients were driven mad in private, and petted in public. They were literally fawned upon and thrashed.
Frank Onslow was saved by a miracle. In his darkest hour of distress he had lost hope in everything but prayer for help, prayer for deliverance, prayer that he might be rescued in order to protect the helpless. He was sitting moodily in his room, tortured with the sense that his reason would soon be lost to him, when he remembered that this was the day when visitors were admitted. He had prayed until his brow dripped with agony. His experience of the curious visitors so far had not been very encouraging. Whenever he attempted to get into conversation with any of them, or to pass a letter into their hands, he was greeted with a smile, or one of those mocking laughs. “Poor fellow,” they whispered, “how dreadfully mad he is.” If not, they shrank from him as if he had been a wild beast.
The great iron bell pealed at the asylum gates. There were voices in the hall. Frank Onslow listened and listened again. It was an English voice talking to an American. Where had he heard that voice before? They were coming upstairs. The voices, indistinct before, became louder and louder. Yes; he knew both their voices. They were perfectly familiar to him.
“My God, is it possible? Can it be true? Are my unworthy prayers answered at last?”
The door of the room opened, and before the imprisoned man stood Lord Castleton and the very American detective who had been consulted when Frank arrived from England.