Part 12

“O, indeed!” said the old gentleman, with a kindly, nervous lift of his eyes. “Mr. Cibber is it? A very gratifying accident. I must live remote beyond conception, sir, to be ignorant of that name. Thank you, Mr. Cibber. You were saying, sir, as I alighted----?”

“I was saying, sir,” said the Laureate, “that a fabulous monarch, like him above, fittingly adorns the portal to pretence.”

“Meaning----?” said the old gentleman, pointing forward with his stick.

“Yes, sir,” said Mr. Cibber--“meaning the vast but ineffective fane towards which we are now directing our steps.”

“Ah!” said the old gentleman. “It will have its faults, no doubt.”

“We will consider them,” said the poet loftily. “Is this possibly your first visit, sir? Well, better late than never, as old Heywood has it. You will find much to surprise and more to disapprove, or I am mistaken in myself. I am doing showman at the moment, sir, to a party of country cousins”--he whispered, “plain, unsophisticated folk, but respectable--and if you care to join us----”

“With pleasure, Mr. Cibber,” said the old fellow. “It is a most happy chance for me--and not less for the support of your arm than of your opinion. I thought I should like to approach the Cathedral on foot--to have its dimensions gradually revealed to me; but I find in good truth the hill trying to my old bones. I am eighty-nine, Mr. Cibber. Would you believe it?”

“It is a creditable venture, sir,” said the poet. “Ulysses himself in his old age never made a bolder.”

They approached, as he spoke, the extended space on which the building stood, and divers exclamations of wonder broke from the lips of the little party--“My stars!” “Prodigious fine, on my word!” “’Tis mighty likeable!” “Why--why, the sweetest regale!” “Are you not properly struck, Barney, my boy?” “Mum, mum,” and so on. Mr. Cibber, with the air of one magnificently responsible for the show, stood leaning familiarly against one of the posts which encompassed the paved area before the west door, and remained silent pending the recovery of his company. But he took snuff, and laughed patronisingly from time to time over the fervour of its ejaculations.

“Rat me, my dears,” he said by and by, when the volume of enthusiasm had spent itself; “but your artlessness refreshes me--upon my soul and honour, it refreshes me. This is the very respectable work of a journeyman builder, and as full of holes as poor Tom’s coat.”

“La, Mr. Cibber!” said the sweet Corinna, with a giggle, “I always thought the gentleman was at the top of his trade.”

“‘They say best men are moulded out of faults,’” murmured Mr. Bellingham, with a wink at the heavy mother.

The poet saw the wink, and waxed a little emphatic. It was Dr. Johnson who had once said of his art of conversation that “he had but half to furnish, since one-half was oaths.” But he was after all a good-natured man.

“Then, God judge me,” he cried, straining his voice, which was none of the strongest, “if he hadn’t a title to be called perfection!”

Mrs. Lightfoot, alarmed by his heat, stopped a levity on her lips half-way, and addressed the great man very soberly.

“I prithee, sir,” she said, “to correct our untutored visions, naturally dazzled in their first contemplation of so unaccustomed a sight.”

“Why, my dear,” said the Laureate, mollified at once, “I can quite understand your naïve enthusiasm; but it is a fact that in order to criticise an achievement one must know something of the principles of the art which designed it.”

“No greater architect of his own fortune than King Colley!” cried Mr. Bellingham.

“I thank you, sir,” answered Mr. Cibber stiffly; then added, blazing out again, “You will oblige me by holding your damned tongue!”

The old gentleman, anxious and conciliatory, put in a word:

“Your professional knowledge, sir, must make your comments doubly instructive. Pray inform us to what details of the building you take particular exception.”

“That is a very reasonable demand, sir,” answered the Laureate, daring the offending and rather elated low comedian from the corner of his eye. “I have no doubt that to the uninformed in such matters the magnitude of this conception palliates, or even overpowers, the meretriciousness of its details. But you mistake me on one point. My _profession_, though it embodies all the arts, specialises in none, and if I claim a dictatorial right in this instance, it is simply because as an actor I represent the trinity in unity of the creative faculty.”

“I see, I see,” said the old gentleman. “It is merely accident which has kept dormant your architectural proclivities.”

“Well, sir,” said the poet, with a smile, “I flatter myself I could have evolved, under compulsion, a more faultless erection than this.”

The stranger nodded with an air of satisfied acquiescence.

“I shall be really grateful to Mr. Cibber,” he said, “if he will help me to the right point of view. To my uninstructed intelligence, I confess, the pile seems to stand well.”

The poet laughed tolerantly.

“A good fortune it owes to its site. O, you must really pardon me, sir! It is in truth a cold, heavy, tasteless affair, imposing in no more than bulk, lacking the inspiration of sacramentality. Bear with me, now bear with me, while I strip off for your edification a little of the monster’s pretence. You will observe its most prominent feature, the dome? Very well, sir; that dome sums up in itself the hollowness of the entire conception. It violates the first principles of the art it professes, with a monstrous impertinence, to crown. Its height bears no relation to the proportions of the structure within, and is fixed thus arbitrarily for no other purpose than effect.”

“But is not the effect good?” ventured the old gentleman.

“Why, stap my vitals, sir!” said Mr. Cibber, “have you the assurance to condone a whited sepulchre? The greater the audacity, the worse the pretence. The cupola proper to this design lies within that external sham like a head under a steel basinet. What we look on is a mere exuberance, supporting nothing but itself. Will you tell me that that is in accordance with the principles of art, which demand that each part should naturally progress in lines of beauty from the parent stock?”

“No,” said the stranger--“no. You teach me much, sir.”

“That pretence,” continued the poet triumphantly, “is not confined to the head, though naturally it finds there its most swollen expression.”

“By the Lord, that’s true,” murmured Mr. Bellingham, and the sweet Corinna choked a little laugh into her handkerchief.

“Those side elevations, for instance,” went on Mr. Cibber, with a doubtful glance askance at the lady, “concealing as they do the buttresses and clerestory windows of the nave, constitute in their upper order a mere mask to the real form and construction of the building. Now, in a perfect design there should be no screening of structural necessities, but an ingenious adaptation of all such to the general conception. These, sir, are a few of the most patent defects, upon which, saving your patience, I could enlarge at pleasure. But I trust I have said enough to correct your point of view to its necessary focus; and if some disenchantment is the result----”

“Well, well, Mr. Cibber,” interrupted the old gentleman--“well, well. But I don’t know that I can quite confess to that.”

“O, very good, sir!” cried the poet ironically. “And according to what impenetrable illusion, if you please, do you persist in your faith?”

“Why,” said the old gentleman--“why, you see, Mr. Cibber, I designed the thing myself.”

“Sir Christopher, Sir Christopher!” cried a breathless gentleman who came hurrying up at the moment. “We had lost you, sir. This was naughty of you to venture up the hill alone.”

Mr. Bellingham, with one look at the rueful Laureate, sat flat down upon the pavement and delivered himself to hysterics.

THE SURGEON OF GOUGH SQUARE

He was a young man, but appearing careworn and prematurely aged. His face had a spoiled and dingy look such as an actor’s bears by daylight, when for the paint and glow and glamour of the boards are substituted the grey and gripping realities of existence. The fruitlessness of all hope, of all cheery effort, seemed typified for him in the stagnant November fog which brooded over the City without. As he gazed through his window into the dreary murk, the dull roar which reached his ears from Fleet Street and its adjacent market sounded to him like the boom of surf to a castaway in a desolate land. He was stranded, he felt, among the waste places of life, and no prospect of release was ever more to be his.

He had started his professional career with high expectations and a confidence born of capital possession. They had all, hopes and confidence and capital, gone to wreck on the shoals of a giant fraud. What solace to him was it that the law had ended by claiming its own? It had been a greater mercy had it remained eternally blind, and left him, one of many victims, to live on content in his fool’s paradise. Though his substance had been dissipated, the interest, regularly paid, had served him for his needs. It had been all the sinews he desired in his wrestle with fortune. Was it not in the bitter irony of things that his high rectitude should be expected to rejoice in that vindication of justice which had left him a pauper?

He recalled, in a sudden impotent fury, the occasion, or the suspected occasion, which had marked him down for ruin. His capital had been all invested in Bank of England stock, and the securities had been deposited with Fauntleroy, the now notorious banker of Berners Street. It had been this villain’s practice to forge powers of attorney enabling him to dispose of his clients’ property, and the man’s cool audacity had even, it was said, carried him so far as to the occasional appending of a customer’s name to a fraudulent deed in the customer’s own presence, and the then sending it, with its ink still wet, as though from the visitor’s hand, into the clerks’ department.

Such, he fully believed, had been the case with him during a business call he had made one day upon the head of the house. He remembered, cursing the memory, the sleek, plausible figure in its black tights and broadcloth, the spotless frill at its bosom, the smile on its prosperous face, the pen travelling in its plump fingers while the voice went on, even, polite, and interested. To be signing away so inhumanly the fortune, the happiness, the soul of a fellow-creature, and never all the while to flush or falter. Damn him!

Well, he was damned maybe. A glutton, a sybarite, a voluptuary, he had come to the end of his feasting, and only for Lazarus remained the scraps and dregs of the banquet.

A rap at the door broke in upon his miserable reverie, and a small servant entered the room. Two gentlemen, she said, desired particularly to see him. Who were they? She did not know, they would give no name. Where were they? In the surgery, which opened on the back. They had brought _something_ with them, _something_ on a hand-cart, and then other men, who had deposited the something, had left. She was used to the traffic, or had been, and showed no agitation or alarm.

Resurrection-men! He had no desire to pay their price, and, if he had, no means. The very house in which he lived, an inheritance, was already under treaty for sale. Frowning and compressing his lips, he descended to the room below. The _something_, stark and obvious under a black cloth, was laid already on the dissecting-table. Two gentlemen turned to greet him.

They were both grave, formal, unconvincing; yet perfectly refined in manner. One, who constituted himself the spokesman, began to address him at once in a low voice:

“You will please to pardon, sir, on the ground of extreme urgency, this unceremonious visit. I must say at once that we do not wish to state our names, and I will admit unhesitatingly that we are disguised. This”--he signified the silent shape--“is the subject of our visit. We desire your acceptance of it in the interests of science. No return is required, and no condition made, save that you undertake to convince yourself, beyond the possibility of a doubt, and before proceeding to extremities, that no flicker of life survives to it.”

Professionally self-possessed, the young doctor had yet to rally all his nerve-power to meet so amazing a charge. He delayed to answer for some moments.

“And if it did?” he said.

“Then you will have no reason to regret your caution,” answered the gentleman.

“I cannot pretend to understand you.”

“I must urge upon you the necessity of a quick decision,” said the stranger. “Will it satisfy you to be told that the subject”--he again pointed to the hidden form--“expressly desired that this task should be deputed to you?”

“Are you mad?” said the young surgeon, “or am I, or do you think me so? What task--and who desired it?”

“The task,” said the gentleman, “of ascertaining, in the first instance, that life is indisputably extinct, and of then devoting the remains, at your complete discretion, to the interests of science. I may tell you”--he seemed to hesitate a moment--“that the subject suffered under a morbid apprehension of premature burial.”

“His apprehensions,” said the surgeon, “could be easily set at rest.”

“I hope so,” answered the stranger.

“But--but,” cried the surgeon in desperation--he made a movement as if clutching at his hair--“you must see, gentlemen, that I cannot possibly undertake the responsibility on these vague premises.”

“Question me, sir, if you will, and I will endeavour to answer to your satisfaction.”

“Tell me then. Who is this man? What was his complaint--presumably mortal? Was he a patient of mine that he selected me for this extraordinary business?”

The gentleman again seemed to hesitate.

“He was,” he said, “--yes, I may call him a patient of yours, inasmuch as you attended him during the course of a distemper or aberration with which he was seized. He considered that he owed you a return for his somewhat cavalier exploitation of your services, and, at the last, these were the only means he could devise for giving some effect to--well, shall we call it his remorse? The sentiment, combined with the fact that his demise, or his assumed demise, occurred in this neighbourhood, decided our choice.”

The young surgeon, forcing all his wits to a focus, fixed his eyes searchingly on the speaker.

“He was murdered,” he said. “Is that it?”

The other shrugged his shoulders, with a scarce perceptible smile.

“O, sir,” he said, “if you take that view! But a moment’s examination will convince you.”

“Let me make it, then.”

The stranger interposed his body, quietly but resolutely.

“After we are gone.”

“Why will you not give me your names?”

“Because, sir, we do not wish to associate ourselves with an act which might prove difficult of explanation, and which, given publicity, must most certainly defeat its own object. You must accept our word for it that we were both close personal friends of the deceased, and that we have undertaken this difficult charge out of pure regard for an intimacy which contains for us many endearing recollections.”

“What was the cause of death? Will you tell me so much?”

“It was the result of a fall.”

The surgeon, wavering between conscience and professional acquisitiveness, gnawed his forefinger in an agitated way.

“But why,” he said--“why should not a post-mortem examination at his own house have sufficed for his apprehensions?”

“There is no calculating,” answered the stranger, “the lengths to which such diseased imaginativeness will carry a man. Safety, no doubt, to his mind, consisted in nothing short of dismemberment.” He looked at his watch in a hurried way. “Time, sir,” he said, “presses. If our natural scruples shrink, as I say, from association with this business, no such sentiment need apply to you. Gentlemen of your profession, I understand, are not expected to be over-inquisitive as to the material provided for their anatomical studies. You may rest completely satisfied that nothing discreditable to ourselves or harmful to you attaches to this case. Very well. Subjects, I believe, are costly. Here is one to your hand for nothing. But should our friend’s terrors prove actually justified, and this to be a case of suspended animation, in that event, sir, I will answer for it that the patient’s gratitude would take a form upon which you would have plentiful reason to congratulate yourself. And in the meantime every wasted minute is a reproach to us. Answer, sir, will you accept the conditions or not?”

“You will not tell me your name?”

“No.”

“Nor his there?”

“I must not, indeed.”

“Nor where to communicate with you, in case----?”

“No purpose would be served thereby. We have done what he desired of us, and there our duty to him ends. The rest lies between you and him.”

The surgeon, with a gesture which might have implied resignation or repudiation, turned his back. When he looked round again he was alone.

He made a movement towards the door, as if in a pretence to himself to recall his visitors, but stopped on the instant, biting his lip.

“I will not be such a hypocrite,” he muttered. He knew perfectly well, indeed, what was at the bottom of his heart--hope; a vague, indefinable feeling that all here was not as intimated; that out of the very strangeness and mystery of the affair might come profit and perhaps salvation to himself, a desperate man.

With a somewhat haggard face he moved on tiptoe to lock both the surgery door and that leading into the yard at the back. Then, feeling awed against his will, he turned to the hidden form.

It was still early morning, but the fog made a thick, dingy twilight in the room. Not a sound broke the dead stillness; nothing moved.

Yes, something--the thing under the cloth!

Was he overwrought--victim to some wild delusion? He could have sworn it; and yet the motion had been so slight, so hardly perceptible, it might have been the mere contraction or dilation of a shadow.

Again!

With a gasp of horror he leaped to the table, tore away the cloth, and revealed the face, blotched and livid, of Fauntleroy the forger.

The truth rushed upon him as he stood there, pallid and staring, and with it an understanding of each one of his visitor’s studied ambiguities. The great criminal, he remembered now, was to have been executed that morning. Where had he heard it--that whisper, that incredible rumour, hinting of a hangman extravagantly bribed by friends of the criminal, and of a silver tube to be passed into the condemned gullet? A thing impracticable--preposterous--he had dismissed it as a canard; yet, somehow, it appeared, accomplished. Either that way or another--what did it matter? The man had been hanged, patently on the evidences before him, and as patently he still lived--only as yet the merest flicker of vitality, expressed in the pulsing of the purple œdematous swelling about the throat. A little either way, and the spark were coaxed into flame or quenched for ever.

Which way, then? He stood for minutes, quite rigid, battling with his emotions. His wrongs; his diabolical opportunity; his perfect immunity from detection; his justification, inasmuch as this life was already forfeit to the law. Hyde roared in him, and Jekyll pleaded. The very clothes of the thing, unaltered in their black neatness, sleekness, hypocrisy, filled him with an indescribable loathing. He stepped forward, his fingers crooked.

At that moment the laugh of a baby sounded in the yard outside. He paused, and stood listening. Suddenly his face lightened:

“Not guilty!” he cried, “not guilty, little one!” and hurried to the succour of his enemy.

THE PRIOR OF ST. COME

A cadaverous, hump-shouldered man paced a walk of the Louvre garden. He would have been pronounced old, though, in fact, his years were no more than fifty. In form and expression he was the typical miser, lean and grey from abstinence, morose from suspicion, bent from persistent crouching over insufficient embers. His face was tallow grey; the whites of his eyes and the orifices of his long, pinched nose were tinged with red. He was dressed in a short, waistless jerkin, once black, and trimmed at the hem with mangy fur, once brown. Black, ill-gartered hose covered to the hips a couple of legs like hurdle-stakes, and his stooped head was cased in a greasy calotte, surmounted by that form of cap known as the cap of maintenance, the brim of which, peaking to the front and raised behind, supported a number of little cheap leaden figures of saints. In contradiction to all this ostentatious shabbiness, a collar of gold shells and costly jewels hung about his neck.

As he paced deliberately, his hands clasped behind his back, his lips perpetually working without sound, he would glance up with a stealthy leer from time to time at a figure that walked beside him. This figure, sufficiently jocund and prosperous for contrast, was that of a healthy priest in cape and cassock, with a crisp, golden beard and blue eyes, a certain craft in which rather belied their conscious merriment. An odd broadness of the skull above the ears, which were gross and misshapen, betokened in this person a development of what Spurzheim would have called an “affective propensity to acquisitiveness.” He was, however, a notoriously holy man, and one of the King’s chaplains to boot. The other was the King himself, Louis XI.

Presently the latter, pausing beside a pedestal on which stood a statuette, none too unsuggestive, of the Paphian Venus, looked up in an abstracted way.

“Still vacant, still vacant?” he said, lisping a little between his toothless gums. “That was what you remarked, was it not, Père Bonaventure?”

“Not in so many words, son Louis,” answered the chaplain. “But in very truth the Priory of St. Come remains to this day a body without a head. The severance, moreover, hath endured so long that I doubt if any reunion of the parts, were that conceivable, could restore its healthy circulation to the community. The good prior and his monks have become estranged in this dull interval. His authority is out of date. Were he yet to return--a wild hypothesis--he would think to take them up where he left them, and, being disillusioned, chaos would result.”

“You are convinced he is dead?”

“Either that, or held by the infidels in a captivity doomed to be perpetual. No reasonable man can doubt it.”

“_Pasque-Dieu!_” said Louis, “that same reason is a good servant to one’s interests. I myself am never so reasonable as when I cut off a head that annoys me.”

He glanced, rasping his frosted chin, at the chaplain and down. He could gauge this jocund suitor well enough; he knew him to be at heart a libertine and self-seeker; but, inasmuch as his own faith was a conglomeration of hypocrisy and abject superstition, he dreaded always to question the casuistries of its anointed ministers. One could never tell what might befall.