Gentleman Geff was in a profound stupor when he was taken to the rectory and put to bed in the best chamber of the house—the parlor bedroom on the ground floor.
He continued in this state for several days, faithfully watched by Elspeth and Longman, and frequently visited by Mr. and Mrs. Campbell, and daily attended by Dr. Hobbs.
Jennie shrank from even going to look at him.
But he recognized no one, noticed nothing.
Medicine and highly concentrated nourishment were regularly administered to him by his nurses.
These he sometimes swallowed instinctively, mechanically, and at other times choked over, and had to be raised in bed and have his throat relieved and his mouth wiped like a helpless baby; but all unconsciously on his part. He never knew, or seemed to know, what he himself was suffering, or other people were doing.
His spirit was away, away.
Where?
In Hades, most probably, judging from his antecedents.
“Will he die in this stupor, or come out of it, do you think, sir?” inquired the rector of the doctor one morning as the two men stood by the bedside of the patient.
Dr. Hobbs never “shook his head;” doctors never do 350such stupidly disheartening things over a case, however serious—story writers to the contrary notwithstanding.
This physician also had the courage to confess that he was not omniscient, for he answered:
“I do not know.”
“But if he should come out of this stupor, will he be likely to live?” inquired the rector.
“I do not know,” again replied the doctor. “I shall be better able to judge when he recovers consciousness, if he should ever recover it.”
And the physician wrote his prescriptions and instructions for the treatment of the ill man and retired.
Not one word of this talk entered the consciousness of Gentleman Geff.
Nine days he lay in this condition, and then there passed over him a change.
He seemed to himself to be groping feebly out of nothingness into vague consciousness of horror; but what the horror was, or what he himself was, he did not even think. The first effort to do so sent him back into the state from which he had come.
After a few hours he came again out of utter oblivion into some faint consciousness of himself.
But who was he? Where was he?
All was dark and still around him. Then came faint intelligence, with imperfect memory, which mingled dreams with distorted facts. He remembered faintly what he would have called “a row,” but where, or under what circumstances, he could not find; he thought it was a drunken brawl over cards in a gambling saloon, and some one had crushed in his brain and killed him.
Yes, that was it! He had been killed last night in a drunken brawl over cards, in a gambling saloon, and now he had come to life——
Where?
In that dark lower world, without sun, moon or stars; without air, water or vegetation; that world of horror and despair of which he had heard in childhood, but in which he had never believed, and where he must wait with thieves and murderers and miscreants like himself until the general judgment day; and after that——
What?
351The eternal life of torture in the lake of fire and brimstone in which he had never believed, either in its literal or in its metaphorical meaning.
And now he was too utterly debilitated in mind and body to know or to feel anything very clearly or deeply.
He relapsed into unconsciousness.
When he came to himself the next time he was able to think with a little more clearness, and to recollect with more correctness.
He remembered now that it was at Haymore Hall the “row” had occurred, in which he still believed he had been knocked down and had succumbed to his injuries, and had now waked up in the world of darkness, horror and despair, to wait for his final doom.
His final doom?
He moaned in his helplessness, not altogether from fear of future hell, but from a feeling of present thirst, intolerable even as the rich man suffered when he cried to Father Abraham to send Lazarus to dip his finger in water and cool his parched tongue.
When he had moaned a second time he felt the approach of some huge, dark form. It stood by him, it bent over him, put out a strong arm under his shoulders and lifted him, and placed a glassful of a refreshing beverage to his lips.
He drank and breathed more freely.
Ah! how delicious it was!
The attendant replaced his head on the pillow, smoothed his bedclothes and withdrew to take away the glass.
In a moment he came back, bent over the still half-comatose man and inquired softly:
“How do you feel, Capt. Montgomery?”
“I—I—I—feel——” muttered Gentleman Geff, and then swooned into the slumber of weakness.
Some one silently opened the door and came in. It was the rector.
“How is your patient, Longman?” he inquired.
“Sir, he has just swallowed more liquid than he has since he has been ill; and he has spoken for the first time,” replied the nurse.
“Coherently?”
“Yes, sir.”
“What did he say?”
352“Well, not much. I asked him how he felt, as an experiment, you see, sir, and to find out whether he could understand anything; and he did understand, for he began to tell me, and he dropped off to sleep. You see he is sleeping naturally, sir.”
“Yes, I see. Well, Longman, it is one o’clock. Go to bed. I will relieve your watch,” said the rector, sinking into the large easy-chair beside the patient.
Longman made some resistance to this proposal, but Mr. Campbell was firm, and sent off the wearied nurse to take his much needed rest.
The ill man rested well for some hours, and then moaned in his sleep.
The watcher gave him a cooling and strengthening beverage, just as Longman had done, and the patient sank again into sleep, muttering:
“I can’t be in hell, after all, for in hell no one comes from heaven to put a cool——” Then his words became inaudible until he dropped into unconsciousness with the last word—“purgatory”—on his failing tongue.
All the remainder of the night he slept well, only occasionally muttering in his sleep:
“Not in hell, after all—only in purgatory—not such a bad place.”
In the morning when the doctor came to make his daily visit he found the ill man sleeping quietly and Mr. Campbell and Longman sitting by his bed.
He examined the patient’s pulse and temperature without waking him, and then took the two watchers’ report.
“Took nourishment with a relish and spoke consciously—both good signs, excellent signs! but I can say no more at present.”
The doctor wrote out the formulas for the day and took leave.
All that day Gentleman Geff remained in the same condition without a sign of further improvement. All the following night Longman had a repetition of the experience of the preceding night. At dawn his mother, Elspeth, relieved him and sent him to bed.
After the family breakfast Mr. Campbell came in and sent Elspeth out to get her own coffee and muffins. The sick-room was still kept very dark by the doctor’s orders. 353Darkness, he said, was the best sedative for nerves and brain in the condition of Capt. Montgomery.
When the sick man showed by moaning and moving uneasily that he was awake, the rector took some beef tea that was kept hot over a spirit lamp, poured it into an invalid’s feeding-glass and administered it to the patient.
Gentleman Geff sucked it in with a relish, and then sank back on his pillow with a sigh of satisfaction.
When Mr. Campbell had put away the cup and returned to his seat by the bedside he was startled by hearing the patient inquire:
“Who the devil are you, I wonder?”
He answered calmly, however:
“One whom you should know, Capt. Montgomery. I am James Campbell, rector of——”
But he was interrupted by an exclamation from Gentleman Geff.
“The devil you say! The curate of Medge in purgatory! a parson in purgatory! When did your reverence die?”
The rector paused a few moments before he replied, and then he spoke very quietly:
“I am not dead, nor likely to die; nor are you in purgatory as you seem to think.”
“What! are you living?”
“Yes, I thank Heaven.”
“And—I living also?”
“Yes! And I say thank Heaven for you also.”
“Where are we, then?” questioned the man in a quavering voice.
But before the rector could answer his question, and even while the question was on his lips, Gentleman Geff had fainted into forgetfulness.
In his struggling soul, striving back to consciousness from his long stupor, the wretched man had been the victim of three several hallucinations.
First, that he was dead and buried, and while in that state he made no sign.
Second, that he was in hell, and then his wail for water and the drink that was given him dispelled the illusion, which was replaced by the fancy that he was in purgatory.
Now the meeting with the living James Campbell had 354cured him of that delusion also, and left him to one more natural but not the less painful.
When next he awoke from temporary oblivion his brain was clearer and his memory more accurate than either had yet been since his illness; still, both were somewhat clouded, so that they mixed up time and space, and dreams and realities in weird phantasmagoria.
For instance, he remembered every detail of the two murders he thought he had committed, but not an item of the meeting with his two intended victims living to accuse him, not of murder, but of attempted murder.
And without reflecting, or being now able to reflect, that he could not possibly be hung in England for murders committed in America, he now thought that he was in the condemned cell of an English prison, waiting for speedy execution; that the huge giant who loomed through the shadows of the prison was his death watch, and that James Campbell had come to him in his clerical capacity to prepare him for death.
“But I will not allow him to worm any confession out of me. I have been convicted on the frailest circumstantial evidence, and they dare not hang me at the last. I will have nothing to do with the parson. I won’t even know him.”
This was the most coherent thought that Gentleman Geff had formed since he sank into stupor in the drawing-room of Haymore Hall. But the instinct of self-preservation is a wonderful stimulant to the brain.
So when James Campbell came next to him he turned his face to the wall and would not notice him.
When Longman came and gave him food and asked how he felt he answered:
“I want to see my lawyer. Send him here.”
Longman, who had been directed to humor all his whims, replied:
“Very well, sir. He shall be summoned immediately.”
“And don’t let that parson come near me again. I hate parsons. And if he thinks he is going to nag me into confessing crimes I never even dreamed of committing he must be a much bigger fool than ever I took him to be. Send my lawyer to me, do you hear?”
“All right, sir.”
355“Well, then, why the devil don’t you do it? You needn’t keep such an infernal sharp lookout on me. I am not going to commit suicide, I tell you.”
Longman laughed and left the room.
Gentleman Geff turned with his face to the wall and tried to remember the details of his supposed trial—what the lawyers had said, what “his honor” said, how he, the prisoner at the bar, had behaved; and then, failing to remember anything of what had never occurred, his diseased brain took to imagining a whole drama, in which he formed the central figure.
The doctor came in the same morning, felt his pulse and asked him how he had slept.
“None the better for you and your quackeries,” was the reply. “And if I am supposed to be sick enough to have a physician, why the devil am I not sent to a hospital, and not kept in this wretched hole?” he added, still believing himself to be in the condemned cell of the Chuxton jail.
“Why, don’t they treat you well here?” pleasantly inquired Dr. Hobbs.
But Gentleman Geff disdained to reply and turned his face to the wall.
The doctor rose to take leave.
“I think the man is getting along very well; much better than I ever thought that he would.”
“I think he is an ungrateful beast!” exclaimed Longman.
“Oh, you must not judge him harshly. His head is not clear yet. He does not know friends from foes,” replied the doctor, who knew nothing whatever of Gentleman Geff’s criminal career, so well had the secret been kept by those who possessed it.
Longman did not answer in words; but his grim silence was sufficiently expressive.
“And now you may let a little more light in the room and give him a more varied diet,” was the parting instruction of the physician.
As soon as the latter had gone and the door closed behind him Longman returned to the bedside of his charge.
Gentleman Geff was sleeping, or seemed to be so.
Longman went and opened the shutters of one window, but drew down the white linen shade and let fall the white 356lace curtains. This filled the chamber with a soft, subdued light.
Longman was getting to be an experienced nurse, and knew that it would not be well to startle the patient, who had lived so long in shadows, with too bright a light.
When he had arranged the room to his satisfaction he resumed his seat at the bedside, and fell into the reflection that, notwithstanding all the unbelief and hardness of heart that degrade this age of the world, there were still some good Christian people who lived by the golden rule.
In the midst of these reflections he was startled by seeing Gentleman Geff turn over to the front of the bed and stare out through the opening of his festooned white curtains. His eyes took in the soft, dim outlines of a moonlight-looking room, though it was now really midday, and the white window shade and the white lace curtains produced the lunar effect.
By this soft effulgence he saw that the room was very spacious, and had four lace-curtained windows, and a lovely lace-draped dressing-table, soft, white, dimity-covered chairs and sofa, and pretty Turkey rugs upon a polished yellow oak floor.
The richly carved marble mantelpiece, with its large mirror, Sèvres vases and terra cotta statuettes, and the polished steel stove, with its glowing but flameless fire of hard coal, was hidden from his sight by a tall Japan screen.
Everything in the apartment bespoke wealth, culture and luxury.
Gentleman Geff stared until his eyes stood out from their sockets. Then he muttered to himself:
“This is not a prison cell, nor yet any hospital ward; yet this man sitting here must be the same Giant Despair who was with me in jail. There can’t be two of that size in the same country.”
Longman stood up and stooped over him, saying:
“Can I do anything for you, Capt. Montgomery?”
“Oh, it is you! I thought there couldn’t be two of you in the same century, on the same planet.”
“What can I do for you, sir?”
“Confound you! you can explain things, I suppose. You can tell we where the devil I am now!”
“You are at the rectory of Haymore parish, sir, where 357you were brought on the night of that unfortunate”—Longman paused a moment for an inoffensive word, and then added—“disturbance at Haymore Hall.”
“Disturbance—at Haymore Hall!” muttered the criminal, growing pale as ashes and sinking back upon his pillow.
No revelation yet had struck him so heavily as this. And it brought back a more exact memory, though not yet a perfect one, of the recent past.
Longman hurried to the other end of the room and returned with a powerful restorative.
He held Gentleman Geff up on his left arm while he put the draught to his lips with his right hand.
The criminal drained the last drop, and then sank down upon his pillow, while Longman withdrew his arm and replaced the empty glass.
Gentleman Geff did not speak again.
He was possessed of a fear of talking, lest he should “commit” himself.
But he now reflected the more, though his deductions were still confused.
“No wonder I could not remember the details of my trial—a trial that never occurred, but was only a dream of fever. But all the same, if it has not yet come off, it is to come, unless I go!”
He laughed a little to himself at this poor joke, and then he tried to recall the incidents of that “disturbance” at Haymore Hall.
But he could not think consecutively for many minutes before his thoughts became entangled, and dreams were mingled with realities, and false inferences deduced from the union.
“I remember now,” he said to himself, “something about that row at Haymore Hall, though my illness must have made some things seem vague to me on first recovering my senses. But I remember now!”
Even as he spoke the words and tried to marshal the facts in their proper sequence, memory and imagination fled, and left his mind a vacuum again.
Some hours later, after Longman had given him a bowl of strong beef tea and a glass of fine old port wine, his mental faculties rallied again, though feebly, and he 358thought he could form a correct theory; he would not try to get help in doing this by asking any question. He was too much afraid of compromising himself in some way.
“I do recall now,” he told himself, “the cause of that row at Haymore Hall. Let me see——
“I had just arrived with my wife and my brother-in-law at Haymore, to take possession, when I was met by officers with a warrant for my arrest on the charge of murder——
“How was that, now? Let’s see—oh, yes! I was arrested upon a warrant, issued under the extradition treaty with the United States, charged with the murder of Randolph Hay in California, and of Jennie Montgomery in New York——”
Here the wretched man paused, shuddered and covered his face with his hands. The horror of his crime overcame him, as it had so often done, when it drove him to seek oblivion in strong drink, and finally made him a drunkard.
It was some time before he could resume his line of thought.
“I know,” he mused at length, “that I denied the charge and resisted the arrest, and that there was a fight. One of the officers clubbed me—on the head—and I fell like an ox, and knew no more. When I came to myself I was lying here.”
He paused again, and seemed to labor to understand his present position.
“How came I to be here?” he inquired of himself; and after a few minutes exclaimed:
“Oh, I know! I see it all now! I had given the living of Haymore to my brother-in-law, Cassius Leegh—the scoundrel! When I was brained by the club of that constable, of course I was more a dead than a living man, and in no condition to be carted off ten miles to the Chuxton jail! So I was placed under arrest and brought here in charge of constables. And here I am in my brother-in-law’s rectory, guarded by officers, and particularly by that Giant Gerion, who never leaves me, night or day—set fire to him!”
Gentleman Geff moaned and groaned and tossed until Longman brought him a glass of milk punch, which seemed to soothe him.
Then he resumed his self-communings:
359“I wonder, since I am in his rectory, which was also my gift to him, why I never see Cassius Leegh? And I wonder where his sister, my bogus wife, is? And, more than all, I wonder now—what brings James Campbell here?”
He paused in distress, and then moaned to himself:
“I give it up! I give it up! It is all past me! ‘Chaos has come again.’ But one thing is clear, even in chaos—that is, I must escape from this house. I must not wait to be taken to jail, as I should be as soon as the doctor has pronounced me well enough to be removed.”
He thought as intensely as he was capable of thinking, and then suddenly formed a plan.
“I will not get well enough to be removed while I stay here, and I will escape from the house at the first opportunity.”
From this day the patient became a puzzle to his physician as well as to his attendants. He did not seem to gain in strength, but to grow weaker and more helpless every day; notwithstanding that his appetite was good. At night he was restless and delirious.
“I confess that this case perplexes me,” Dr. Hobbs admitted to Mr. Campbell.
But the case grew out of a misunderstanding between the patient and his attendants.
Gentleman Geff, not quite in his right mind yet, believed himself to be under arrest with the prospect of a prison, a trial and conviction before him; whereas there was no intention on any one’s part of even making an accusation against him.
His physician and watchers, not knowing the delusion under which he silently and fearfully suffered, could not suspect him of playing a part to prolong his sojourn at the rectory and postpone his transfer to the prison.
This state of things continued for a week. There had been in this time two opportunities for Gentleman Geff to escape—for, after all, he was not watched as a criminal, but only as an invalid. There had been two occasions on which he had been left alone for an hour or two; but on both these the weather had been terrific with wind, snow and sleet, and he waited for weather and opportunity both to favor him together.
But one morning, after he had eaten a good breakfast, 360lain back on his pillow, and pretended to fall into a stupor, as usual, when the doctor was expected, something occurred that frightened him and hurried his operations.
The doctor came, accompanied on this occasion by Mr. Campbell, who did not often intrude his unwelcome presence into the sick-room.
The doctor leaned over the bed and inquired:
“How are you, Capt. Montgomery?”
There was no response.
The doctor then laid his hand gently on the man’s shoulder to enforce his attention and inquired:
“How are you, sir?”
Still there was no answer.
Then the doctor examined his pulse, temperature and respiration, and even lifted the eyelids and looked at the eyes.
Then he turned to Mr. Campbell and said:
“I feel like giving up the case. I honestly confess I can make nothing of it. The man’s appetite, digestion and assimilation are excellent. His pulse is strong, his temperature normal, his respiration perfect, and yet he seems too weak to leave his bed, and he falls into delirium or stupor day and night.”
“Pray do not give up the case, doctor. If there is any one you would like to have called in consultation now——”
The rector paused.
“Well, yes, sir, there is. Sir Ichabod Ingoldsby, the great authority on the diseases of the brain and nervous system. And to get him from London to the North Riding of Yorkshire would cost at least two hundred pounds, even should his engagements permit him to come.”
“Never mind what it costs, we will send for him. The young squire has specially enjoined me to spare no expense, as he insists on footing all the bills. Give me Sir Ichabod Ingoldsby’s address. I will telegraph him at once. If his engagements will permit he may be here this afternoon.”
“Scarcely this afternoon. He will have to make arrangements. Besides, he always travels in the middle of the night to save time. If all should go well we may see him to-morrow morning. Here is his address,” said Dr. Hobbs, and he tore a leaf from his tablets and handed it to the rector. Then both gentlemen left the room.
361