Lucy, indeed, poor girl, was well and vigilantly guarded. No communication, whether written or otherwise, was permitted to reach her; nor, if she had been lodged in the deepest dungeon in Europe, and secured by the strongest bolts that ever enclosed a prisoner, could she have been more rigidly excluded from all intercourse, her father's and her maid's only excepted.
Her lover, on receiving the documents so often alluded to from old Corbet, immediately transmitted to her a letter of hope and encouragement, in which he stated that the object he had alluded to was achieved, and that he would take care to place such documents before her father, as must cause even him to forbid the bans. This letter, however, never reached her. Neither did a similar communication from Mrs. Mainwaring, who after three successive attempts to see either her or her father, was forced at last to give up all hope of preventing the marriage. She seemed, indeed, to have been fated.
In the meantime, the stranger, having, as he imagined, relieved Lucy's mind from her dreaded union with Dunroe, and left the further and more complete disclosure of that young nobleman's position to Mrs. Mainwaring, provided himself with competent legal authority to claim the person of unfortunate Fenton. It is unnecessary to describe his journey to the asylum in which the wretched young man was placed; it is enough to say that he arrived there at nine o'clock in the morning, accompanied by old Corbet and three officers of justice, who remained in the carriage; and on asking to see the proprietor, was shown into a parlor, where he found that worthy gentleman reading a newspaper.
This fellow was one of those men who are remarkable for thick, massive, and saturnine features. At a first glance he was not at all ill-looking; but, on examining his beetle brows, which met in a mass of black thick hair across his face, and on watching the dull, selfish, cruel eyes that they hung over—dead as they were to every generous emotion, and incapable of kindling even at cruelty itself—it was impossible for any man in the habit of observing nature closely not to feel that a brutal ruffian, obstinate, indurated, and unscrupulous, was before him. His forehead was low but broad, and the whole shape of his head such as would induce an intelligent phrenologist to pronounce him at once a thief and a murderer.
The stranger, after a survey or two, felt his blood boil at the contemplation of his very visage, which was at once plausible and diabolical in expression. After some preliminary chat the latter said:
“Your establishment, sir, is admirably situated here. It is remote and isolated; and these, I suppose, are advantages?”
“Why, yes, sir,” replied the doctor, “the further we remove our patients from human society, the better. The exhibition of reason has, in general, a bad effect upon the insane.”
“Upon what principle do you account for that?” asked the stranger. “To me it would appear that the reverse of the proposition ought to hold true.”
“That may be,” replied the other; “but no man can form a correct opinion of insane persons who has not mingled with them, or had them under his care. The contiguity of reason—I mean in the persons of those who approach them—always exercises a dangerous influence upon lunatics; and on this account, I sometimes place those who are less insane as keepers upon such as are decidedly so.”
“Does not that, sir, seem very like setting the blind to lead the blind?”