The Law and the Lady

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I consented to the proposed compromise--but not very willingly.
With a letter of introduction, I might have seen Miserrimus
Dexter that afternoon. As it was, the "little dinner" compelled
me to wait in absolute inaction through a whole week. However,
there was no help for it but to submit. Major Fitz-David, in his
polite way, could be as obstinate as I was. He had evidently made
up his mind; and further opposition on my part would be of no
service to me.

"Punctually at eight, Mr. Benjamin," reiterated the Major. "Put
it down in your book."

Benjamin obeyed--with a side look at me, which I was at no loss
to interpret. My good old friend did not relish meeting a man at
dinner who was described as "half tiger, half monkey;" and the
privilege of sitting next to Lady Clarinda rather daunted than
delighted him. It was all my doing, and he too had no choice but
to submit. "Punctually at eight, sir," said poor old Benjamin,
obediently recording his formidable engagement. "Please to take
another glass of wine."

The Major looked at his watch, and rose--with fluent apologies
for abruptly leaving the table.

"It is later than I thought," he said. "I have an appointment
with a friend--a female friend; a most attractive person. You a
little remind me of her, my dear lady--you resemble her in
complexion: the same creamy paleness. I adore creamy paleness. As
I was saying, I have an appointment with my friend; she does me
the honor to ask my opinion on some very remarkable specimens of
old lace. I have studied old lace. I study everything that can
make me useful or agreeable to your enchanting sex. You won't
forget our little dinner? I will send Dexter his invitation the
moment I get home. "He took my hand and looked at it critically,
with his head a little on one side. "A delicious hand," he said;
"you don't mind my looking at it--you don't mind my kissing it,
do you? A delicious hand is one of my weaknesses. Forgive my
weaknesses. I promise to repent and amend one of these days."

"At your age, Major, do you think you have much time to lose?"
asked a strange voice, speaking behind us.

We all three looked around toward the door. There stood my
husband's mother, smiling satirically, with Benjamin's shy little
maid-servant waiting to announce her.

Major Fitz-David was ready with his answer.

The old soldier was not easily taken by surprise.

"Age, my dear Mrs. Macallan, is a purely relative expression," he
said. "There are some people who are never young, and there are
other people who are never old. I am one of the other people. _Au
revoir!_"

With that answer the incorrigible Major kissed the tips of his
fingers to us and walked out. Benjamin, bowing with his
old-fashioned courtesy, threw open the door of his little
library, and, inviting Mrs. Macallan and myself to pass in, left
us together in the room.

CHAPTER XXIII

MY MOTHER-IN-LAW SURPRISES ME.

I TOOK a chair at a respectful distance from the sofa on which
Mrs. Macallan seated herself. The old lady smiled, and beckoned
to me to take my place by her side. Judging by appearances, she
had certainly not come to see me in the character of an enemy. It
remained to be discovered I whether she were really disposed to
be my friend.

"I have received a letter from your uncle the vicar," she began.
"He asks me to visit you, and I am happy--for reasons which you
shall presently hear--to comply with his request. Under other
circumstances I doubt very much, my dear child--strange as the
confession may appear--whether I should have ventured into your
presence. My son has behaved to you so weakly, and (in my
opinion) so inexcusably, that I am really, speaking as his
mother, almost ashamed to face you."

Was she in earnest? I listened to her and looked at her in
amazement.

"Your uncle's letter," pursued Mrs. Macallan, "tells me how you
have behaved under your hard trial, and what you propose to do
now Eustace has left you. Doctor Starkweather, poor man, seems to
be inexpressibly shocked by what you said to him when he was in
London. He begs me to use my influence to induce you to abandon
your present ideas, and to make you return to your old home at
the Vicarage. I don't in the least agree with your uncle, my
dear. Wild as I believe your plans to be--you have not the
slightest chance of succeeding in carrying them out--I admire
your courage, your fidelity, your unshaken faith in my unhappy
son, after his unpardonable behavior to you. You are a fine
creature, Valeria, and I have come here to tell you so in plain
words. Give me a kiss, child. You deserve to be the wife of a
hero, and you have married one of the weakest of living mortals.
God forgive me for speaking so of my own son; but it's in my
mind, and it must come out!"

This way of speaking of Eustace was more than I could suffer,
even from his mother. I recovered the use of my tongue in my
husband's defense.

"I am sincerely proud of your good opinion, dear Mrs. Macallan,"
I said. "But you distress me--forgive me if I own it
plainly--when I hear you speak so disparagingly of Eustace. I
cannot agree with you that my husband is the weakest of living
mortals."

"Of course not!" retorted the old lady. "You are like all good
women--you make a hero of the man you love,--whether he deserve
it or not. Your husband has hosts of good qualities, child--and
perhaps I know them better than you do. But his whole conduct,
from the moment when he first entered your uncle's house to the
present time, has been, I say again, the conduct of an
essentially weak man. What do you think he has done now by way of
climax? He has joined a charitable brotherhood; and he is off to
the war in Spain with a red cross on his arm, when he ought to be
here on his knees, asking his wife to forgive him. I say that is
the conduct of a weak man. Some people might call it by a harder
name."

This news startled and distressed me. I might be resigned to his
leaving me for a time; but all my instincts as a woman revolted
at his placing himself in a position of danger during his
separation from his wife. He had now deliberately added to my
anxieties. I thought it cruel of him--but I would not confess
what I thought to his mother. I affected to be as cool as she
was; and I disputed her conclusions with all the firmness that I
could summon to help me. The terrible old woman only went on
abusing him more vehemently than ever.

"What I complain of in my son," proceeded Mrs. Macallan, "is that
he has entirely failed to understand you. If he had married a
fool, his conduct would be intelligible enough. He would have
done wisely to conceal from a fool that he had been married
already, and that he had suffered the horrid public exposure of a
Trial for the murder of his wife. Then, again, he would have been
quite right, when this same fool had discovered the truth, to
take himself out of her way before she could suspect him of
poisoning he r--for the sake of the peace and quiet of both
parties. But you are not a fool. I can see that, after only a
short experience of you. Why can't he see it too? Why didn't he
trust you with his secret from the first, instead of stealing his
way into your affections under an assumed name? Why did he plan
(as he confessed to me) to take you away to the Mediterranean,
and to keep you abroad, for fear of some officious friends at
home betraying him to you as the prisoner of the famous Trial?
What is the plain answer to all these questions? What is the one
possible explanation of this otherwise unaccountable conduct?
There is only one answer, and one explanation. My poor, wretched
son--he takes after his father; he isn't the least like me!--is
weak: weak in his way of judging, weak in his way of acting, and,
like all weak people, headstrong and unreasonable to the last
degree. There is the truth! Don't get red and angry. I am as fond
of him as you are. I can see his merits too. And one of them is
that he has married a woman of spirit and resolution--so faithful
and so fond of him that she won't even let his own mother tell
her of his faults. Good child! I like you for hating me!"

"Dear madam, don't say that I hate you!" I exclaimed (feeling
very much as if I did hate her, though, for all that). "I only
presume to think that you are confusing a delicate-minded man
with a weak-minded man. Our dear unhappy Eustace--"

"Is a delicate-minded man," said the impenetrable Mrs. Macallan,
finishing my sentence for me. "We will leave it there, my dear,
and get on to another subject. I wonder whether we shall disagree
about that too?"

"What is the subject, madam?"

"I won't tell you if you call me madam. Call me mother. Say,
'What is the subject, mother?'"

"What is the subject, mother?"

"Your notion of turning yourself into a Court of Appeal for a new
Trial of Eustace, and forcing the world to pronounce a just
verdict on him. Do you really mean to try it?"

"I do!"

Mrs. Macallan considered for a moment grimly with herself.

"You know how heartily I admire your courage, and your devotion
to my unfortunate son," she said. "You know by this time that _I_
don't cant. But I cannot see you attempt to perform
impossibilities; I cannot let you uselessly risk your reputation
and your happiness without warning you before it is too late. My
child, the thing you have got it in your head to do is not to be
done by you or by anybody. Give it up."

"I am deeply obliged to you, Mrs. Macallan--"

"'Mother!'"

"I am deeply obliged to you, mother, for the interest that you
take in me, but I cannot give it up. Right or wrong, risk or no
risk, I must and I will try it!"

Mrs. Macallan looked at me very attentively, and sighed to
herself.

"Oh, youth, youth!" she said to herself, sadly. "What a grand
thing it is to be young!" She controlled the rising regret, and
turned on me suddenly, almost fiercely, with these words: "What,
in God's name, do you mean to do?"

At the instant when she put the question, the idea crossed my
mind that Mrs. Macallan could introduce me, if she pleased, to
Miserrimus Dexter. She must know him, and know him well, as a
guest at Gleninch and an old friend of her son.

"I mean to consult Miserrimus Dexter," I answered, boldly.

Mrs. Macallan started back from me with a loud exclamation of
surprise.

"Are you out of your senses?" she asked.

I told her, as I had told Major Fitz-David, that I had reason to
think Mr. Dexter's advice might be of real assistance to me at
starting.

"And I," rejoined Mrs. Macallan, "have reason to think that your
whole project is a mad one, and that in asking Dexter's advice on
it you appropriately consult a madman. You needn't start, child!
There is no harm in the creature. I don't mean that he will
attack you, or be rude to you. I only say that the last person
whom a young woman, placed in your painful and delicate position,
ought to associate herself with is Miserrimus Dexter."

Strange! Here was the Major's warning repeated by Mrs. Macallan,
almost in the Major's own words. Well! It shared the fate of most
warnings. It only made me more and more eager to have my own way.

"You surprise me very much," I said. "Mr. Dexter's evidence,
given at the Trial, seems as clear and reasonable as evidence can
be."

"Of course it is!" answered Mrs. Macallan. "The shorthand writers
and reporters put his evidence into presentable language before
they printed it. If you had heard what he really said, as I did,
you would have been either very much disgusted with him or very
much amused by him, according to your way of looking at things.
He began, fairly enough, with a modest explanation of his absurd
Christian name, which at once checked the merriment of the
audience. But as he went on the mad side of him showed itself. He
mixed up sense and nonsense in the strangest confusion; he was
called to order over and over again; he was even threatened with
fine and imprisonment for contempt of Court. In short, he was
just like himself--a mixture of the strangest and the most
opposite qualities; at one time perfectly clear and reasonable,
as you said just now; at another breaking out into rhapsodies of
the most outrageous kind, like a man in a state of delirium. A
more entirely unfit person to advise anybody, I tell you again,
never lived. You don't expect Me to introduce you to him, I
hope?"

"I did think of such a thing," I answered. "But after what you
have said, dear Mrs. Macallan, I give up the idea, of course. It
is not a great sacrifice--it only obliges me to wait a week for
Major Fitz-David's dinner-party. He has promised to ask
Miserrimus Dexter to meet me."

"There is the Major all over!" cried the old lady. "If you pin
your faith on that man, I pity you. He is as slippery as an eel.
I suppose you asked him to introduce you to Dexter?"

"Yes."

"Exactly! Dexter despises him, my dear. He knows as well as I do
that Dexter won't go to his dinner. And he takes that roundabout
way of keeping you apart, instead of saying No to you plainly,
like an honest man.

This was bad news. But I was, as usual, too obstinate to own
myself defeated.

"If the worst comes to the worst," I said, "I can but write to
Mr. Dexter, and beg him to grant me an interview."

"And go to him by yourself, if he does grant it?" inquired Mrs.
Macallan.

"Certainly. By myself."

"You really mean it?"

"I do, indeed."

"I won't allow you to go by yourself."

"May I venture to ask, ma'am how you propose to prevent me?"

"By going with you, to be sure, you obstinate hussy! Yes, yes--I
can be as headstrong as you are when I like. Mind! I don't want
to know what your plans are. I don't want to be mixed up with
your plans. My son is resigned to the Scotch Verdict. I am
resigned to the Scotch Verdict. It is you who won't let matters
rest as they are. You are a vain and foolhardy young person. But,
somehow, I have taken a liking to you, and I won't let you go to
Miserrimus Dexter by yourself. Put on your bonnet!"

"Now?" I asked.

"Certainly! My carriage is at the door. And the sooner it's over
the better I shall be pleased. Get ready--and be quick about it!"

I required no second bidding. In ten minutes more we were on our
way to Miserrimus Dexter.

Such was the result of my mother-in-law's visit!

CHAPTER XXIV.

MISERRIMUS DEXTER--FIRST VIEW.

WE had dawdled over our luncheon before Mrs. Macallan arrived at
Benjamin's cottage. The ensuing conversation between the old lady
and myself (of which I have only presented a brief abstract)
lasted until quite late in the afternoon. The sun was setting in
heavy clouds when we got into the carriage, and the autumn
twilight began to fall around us while we were still on the road.

The direction in which we drove took us (as well as I could
judge) toward the great northern suburb of London.

For more than an hour the carriage threaded its way through a
dingy brick labyrinth of streets, growing smaller and smaller and
dirtier and dirtier the further we went. Emerging from the
labyrinth, I noticed in the gathering darkness dreary patches of
waste ground which seemed to be neither town nor country.
Crossing these, we passed some forlorn outlying groups of houses
with dim little scattered shops among them, looking like lost
country villages wandering on the way to London, disfigured and
smoke-dried already by their journey. Darker and darker and
drearier and drearier the prospect drew, until the carriage
stopped at last, and Mrs. Macallan announced, in her sharply
satirical way, that we had reached the end of our journey.
"Prince Dexter's Palace, my dear," she said. "What do you think
of it?"

I looked around me, not knowing what to think of it, if the truth
must be told.

We had got out of the carriage, and we were standing on a rough
half-made gravel-path. Right and left of me, in the dim light, I
saw the half-completed foundations of new houses in their first
stage of existence. Boards and bricks were scattered about us. At
places gaunt scaffolding poles rose like the branchless trees of
the brick desert. Behind us, on the other side of the high-road,
stretched another plot of waste ground, as yet not built on. Over
the surface of this second desert the ghostly white figures of
vagrant ducks gleamed at intervals in the mystic light. In front
of us, at a distance of two hundred yards or so as well as I
could calculate, rose a black mass, which gradually resolved
itself, as my eyes became accustomed to the twilight, into a
long, low, and ancient house, with a hedge of evergreens and a
pitch-black paling in front of it. The footman led the way toward
the paling through the boards and the bricks, the oyster shells
and the broken crockery, that strewed the ground. And this was
"Prince Dexter's Palace!"

There was a gate in the pitch-black paling, and a
bell-handle--discovered with great difficulty. Pulling at the
handle, the footman set in motion, to judge by the sound
produced, a bell of prodigious size, fitter for a church than a
house.

While we were waiting for admission, Mrs. Macallan pointed to the
low, dark line of the old building.

"There is one of his madnesses," she said. "The speculators in
this new neighborhood have offered him I don't know how many
thousand pounds for the ground that house stands on. It was
originally the manor-house of the district. Dexter purchased it
many years since in one of his freaks of fancy. He has no old
family associations with the place; the walls are all but
tumbling about his ears; and the money offered would really be of
use to him. But no! He refused the proposal of the enterprising
speculators by letter in these words: 'My house is a standing
monument of the picturesque and beautiful, amid the mean,
dishonest, and groveling constructions of a mean, dishonest, and
groveling age. I keep my house, gentlemen, as a useful lesson to
you. Look at it while you are building around me, and blush, if
you can, for your work.' Was there ever such an absurd letter
written yet? Hush! I hear footsteps in the garden. Here comes his
cousin. His cousin is a woman. I may as well tell you that, or
you might mistake her for a man in the dark."

A rough, deep voice, which I should certainly never have supposed
to be the voice of a woman, hailed us from the inner side of the
paling.

"Who's there?"

"Mrs. Macallan," answered my mother-in-law.

"What do you want?"

"We want to see Dexter."

"You can't see him."

"Why not?"

"What did you say your name was?"

"Macallan. Mrs. Macallan. Eustace Macallan's mother. _Now_ do you
understand?"

The voice muttered and grunted behind the paling, and a key
turned in the lock of the gate.

Admitted to the garden, in the deep shadow of the shrubs, I could
see nothing distinctly of the woman with the rough voice, except
that she wore a man's hat. Closing the gate behind us, without a
word of welcome or explanation, she led the way to the house.
Mrs. Macallan followed her easily, knowing the place; and I
walked in Mrs. Macallan's footsteps as closely as I could. "This
is a nice family," my mother-in-law whispered to me. "Dexter's
cousin is the only woman in the house--and Dexter's cousin is an
idiot."

We entered a spacious hall with a low ceiling, dimly lighted at
its further end by one small oil-lamp. I could see that there
were pictures on the grim, brown walls, but the subjects
represented were invisible in the obscure and shadowy light.

Mrs. Macallan addressed herself to the speechless cousin with the
man's hat.

"Now tell me," she said. "Why can't we see Dexter?"

The cousin took a sheet of paper off the table, and handed it to
Mrs. Macallan.

"The Master's writing," said this strange creature, in a hoarse
whisper, as if the bare idea of "the Master" terrified her. "Read
it. And stay or go, which you please."

She opened an invisible side door in the wall, masked by one of
the pictures--disappeared through it like a ghost--and left us
together alone in the hall.

Mrs. Macallan approached the oil-lamp, and looked by its light at
the sheet of paper which the woman had given to her. I followed
and peeped over her shoulder without ceremony. The paper
exhibited written characters, traced in a wonderfully large and
firm handwriting. Had I caught the infection of madness in the
air of the house? Or did I really see before me these words?

"NOTICE.--My immense imagination is at work. Visions of heroes
unroll themselves before me. I reanimate in myself the spirits of
the departed great. My brains are boiling in my head. Any persons
who disturb me, under existing circumstances, will do it at the
peril of their lives.--DEXTER."

Mrs. Macallan looked around at me quietly with her sardonic
smile.

"Do you still persist in wanting to be introduced to him?" she
asked.

The mockery in the tone of the question roused my pride. I
determined that I would not be the first to give way.

"Not if I am putting you in peril of your life, ma'am," I
answered, pertly enough, pointing to the paper in her hand.

My mother-in-law returned to the hall table, and put the paper
back on it without condescending to reply. She then led the way
to an arched recess on our right hand, beyond which I dimly
discerned a broad flight of oaken stairs.

"Follow me," said Mrs. Macallan, mounting the stairs in the dark.
"I know where to find him."

We groped our way up the stairs to the first landing. The next
flight of steps, turning in the reverse direction, was faintly
illuminated, like the hall below, by one oil-lamp, placed in some
invisible position above us. Ascending the second flight of
stairs and crossing a short corridor, we discovered the lamp,
through the open door of a quaintly shaped circular room, burning
on the mantel-piece. Its light illuminated a strip of thick
tapestry, hanging loose from the ceiling to the floor, on the
wall opposite to the door by which we had entered.

Mrs. Macallan drew aside the strip of tapestry, and, signing me
to follow her, passed behind it.

"Listen!" she whispered.

Standing on the inner side of the tapestry, I found myself in a
dark recess or passage, at the end of which a ray of light from
the lamp showed me a closed door. I listened, and heard on the
other side of the door a shouting voice, accompanied by an
extraordinary rumbling and whistling sound, traveling backward
and forward, as well as I could judge, over a great space. Now
the rumbling and the whistling would reach their climax of
loudness, and would overcome the resonant notes of the shouting
voice. Then again those louder sounds gradually retreated into
distance, and the shouting voice made itself heard as the more
audible sound of the two. The door must have been of prodigious
solidity. Listen as intently as I might, I failed to catch the
articulate words (if any) which the voice was pronouncing, and I
was equally at a loss to penetrate the cause which produced the
rumbling and whistling sounds.

"What can possibly be going on," I whispered to Mrs. Macallan,
"on the other side of that door?"

"Step softly," my mother-in-law answered, "and come and see."

She arranged the tapestry behind us so as completely to shut out
the light in the circular room. Then noiselessly turning the
handle, she opened the heavy door.

We kept ourselves concealed in the shadow of the recess, and
looked through the open doorway.

I saw (or fancied I saw, in the ob scurity) a long room with a
low ceiling. The dying gleam of an ill-kept fire formed the only
light by which I could judge of objects and distances. Redly
illuminating the central portion of the room, opposite to which
we were standing, the fire-light left the extremities shadowed in
almost total darkness. I had barely time to notice this before I
heard the rumbling and whistling sounds approaching me. A high
chair on wheels moved by, through the field of red light,
carrying a shadowy figure with floating hair, and arms furiously
raised and lowered working the machinery that propelled the chair
at its utmost rate of speed. "I am Napoleon, at the sunrise of
Austerlitz!" shouted the man in the chair as he swept past me on
his rumbling and whistling wheels, in the red glow of the
fire-light. "I give the word, and thrones rock, and kings fall,
and nations tremble, and men by tens of thousands fight and bleed
and die!" The chair rushed out of sight, and the shouting man in
it became another hero. "I am Nelson!" the ringing voice cried
now. "I am leading the fleet at Trafalgar. I issue my commands,
prophetically conscious of victory and death. I see my own
apotheosis, my public funeral, my nation's tears, my burial in
the glorious church. The ages remember me, and the poets sing my
praise in immortal verse!" The strident wheels turned at the far
end of the room and came back. The fantastic and frightful
apparition, man and machinery blended in one--the new Centaur,
half man, half chair--flew by me again in the dying light. "I am
Shakespeare!" cried the frantic creature now. "I am writing
'Lear,' the tragedy of tragedies. Ancients and moderns, I am the
poet who towers over them all. Light! light! the lines flow out
like lava from the eruption of my volcanic mind. Light! light!
for the poet of all time to write the words that live forever!"
He ground and tore his way back toward the middle of the room. As
he approached the fire-place a last morsel of unburned coal (or
wood) burst into momentary flame, and showed the open doorway. In
that moment he saw us! The wheel-chair stopped with a shock that
shook the crazy old floor of the room, altered its course, and
flew at us with the rush of a wild animal. We drew back, just in
time to escape it, against the wall of the recess. The chair
passed on, and burst aside the hanging tapestry. The light of the
lamp in the circular room poured in through the gap. The creature
in the chair checked his furious wheels, and looked back over his
shoulder with an impish curiosity horrible to see.

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