Part 7

Vernon met me on the landing by the drawing-room door. I saw at once that he was not well. His face was very pale, and had a peculiar look, as if the skin were drawn upward towards the wrinkled forehead, which I had sometimes noticed in people suffering from prolonged insomnia. It gave a horribly strained appearance to his countenance, in which the eyes looked unnaturally eager and full of curious observation.

“Were you in the hall?” he said, taking my hand for the fraction of an instant, and then dropping it as if with relief.

“I waited in the hall,” I replied evasively.

“You were there then while Cragg was up here?”

“He asked me to wait there,” I said. “While he went to see if you were well enough to receive me. I’m sorry to hear you’re seedy.”

“Oh, it’s of no consequence. Come in.”

We went into the drawing-room.

“What’s been the matter?” I asked, as we sat down.

“Oh, I don’t know. I’ve been overworking, I suppose.”

“With Gernham?” I said.

“Gernham!”—he looked at me narrowly. “You—have you seen Gernham to-day?”

“Yes.”

“Oh.”

He sat silent for a moment. I could see that he was hesitating whether to tell me about his breach with Gernham or not.

“How d’you like Gernham?” he said at length. “He likes you. He told me so.”

“I know him very slightly, but one can’t help respecting such a genuine fellow,” I replied.

“Genuine—yes, he’s that.”

“If he undertook a thing, nothing would stop him from going through with it.”

“You think so?”

He slightly smiled.

“But suppose he were to encounter an opposition as thorough as his own attack? What then?”

I knew at once that he was thinking of Gernham and himself.

“Then,” I said, “there would be a battle royal.”

“A battle royal, would there? Yes, no doubt.”

With the last words his interest seemed to fail suddenly. He slightly drooped his head, and sat like one listening for some distant sound. I watched him closely. Gernham’s declaration that if Vernon were maltreating the spaniel he must be mentally diseased was present in my mind. I was looking for symptoms that would guide me to a conclusion one way or the other. I saw a great change in Vernon—a painful change. He looked like a man suffering under some terrible distress, which had altered, for the time, his whole outlook upon life. But I felt that I was with a perfectly sane man. As I regarded him he seemed to recover his consciousness of my presence, glanced up, and met my scrutiny.

“What is it?” he said. “Why do you look at me like that?”

I felt embarrassed.

“What’s Gernham been saying to you?” he added sharply.

“Gernham—oh, you know him,” I answered. “You know where his heart is, with the animals. What an enthusiast he is!”

“He’s been talking to you about his work then. Well, did he tell you that we’ve had a quarrel, he and I?”

“He said your work together had come to a stop, for the moment. Why should it?”

“Why? Oh, well, sometimes Gernham is too blunt, says more than he, than any man ought to say to another. There is a limit to frankness; occasionally he oversteps it. He overstepped it with me, and I resented it. Don’t you think I was right?”

I felt that he was being strangely insincere with me as he had been insincere with Gernham, trying to raise a cloud which would obscure the reality of his mind, the true scope of his intentions.

“I see no reason why two such men as you should quarrel,” I answered. “Especially if it interrupts, and perhaps, to some extent, cripples a splendid work. You should sink your little differences, and go on together, hand in hand, to further the noble cause you love.”

He had been trying to play me. I was now trying to play him. Yet, as I finished, a genuine warmth came, I think, into my voice. It moved him. I could see that, for he looked up at me as if demanding my sympathy. Suddenly I felt a profound pity for him, a profound desire to help him. But how? Against what?

“Perhaps we shall be friends again,” he said. “But he misunderstands me, and you, Luttrell, perhaps you misunderstand me too.”

“I!”

“Yes—you. Are you sure that, in these last days, you have never had any cruel suspicions of me? Are you sure you have not any cruel suspicions of me now?”

“If I had, if I have, you could easily clear them up,” I answered. “By the way, how’s the dog getting on? All right?”

His face changed at once, hardened.

“Oh, yes!” he said.

“I should like to have another look at him,” I said. “Where is he?”

“He’s downstairs in the study. Didn’t you know it?”

“I—I did think I heard something scratching and whining. Why do you keep him shut up?”

“He hasn’t got accustomed to being with me yet. If I let him out he might bolt.”

“Oh!”

“I don’t want to have spent my twelve pounds for nothing,” he added.

His face had hardened. Now his voice was hard too—hard and fatal.

“May I have a look at him?” I said.

The sense of mystery was returning upon me. I tried to combat it by speaking bluntly, expressing my desire plainly. At least, I would no longer deal in subterfuge. Instead of answering my question he said, throwing a curious, wavering glance upon me, “Are you engaged to-night?”

I was, but I said at once, “I’m entirely at your service, Vernon.”

“Dine with me, then.”

“Here?”

“Yes, here.”

“Certainly.”

“That’s right. And now let’s have some music. I’ve got a new piano since last year.”

We spent the next hour with Richard Strauss and Saint-Saëns.

XI

Night had closed in. Vernon and I were seated opposite to one another at the oval dining-table. Cragg waited upon us. Now and then, as he moved softly to and fro, I glanced at him, and I thought I detected in his well-trained face a flicker of anxiety as his eyes rested upon his master, a flicker of appeal as they rested upon me. It seemed to me at such times that he wanted me to do something to help Vernon, that he was longing to have a word with me alone.

The dinner was excellent, but Vernon ate scarcely anything. He talked, however, a good deal, though hardly with his usual nerve and relish. When dessert was on the table, he said—

“Bring us our coffee here, Cragg; at least, one black coffee.”

“Yes, Sir.”

“I won’t take it,” Vernon said to me. “I’ve been sleeping wretchedly lately. Morphia would be more the thing for me than coffee.”

“I knew you had been suffering from insomnia.”

He laughed drearily.

“I don’t look up to much, do I?”

Cragg brought my coffee and cigars.

“You can leave us now, Cragg; go and have your supper; go downstairs.”

The man looked slightly surprised, but said nothing and went away.

When he had gone Vernon lit a cigar, puffed out some rings of smoke, watched them curling up towards the ceiling, then said—

“You wanted to have a look at the spaniel, didn’t you?”

“Yes,” I said.

“Well, if I bring him in, be careful with him, will you?”

“Careful with him! Why? Is he dangerous?”

“I don’t say that. But he’s got an odd temper. I keep him muzzled.”

“In the house?”

“Yes, always. I don’t want to be bitten. You remember how Deeming died? Well, I don’t want to die like that.”

His mention of Deeming gave me an opportunity of which I at once availed myself.

“That was a sad business,” I said. “Did you see much of him before he died, as you were living next door?”

“Oh,” he interrupted, “Deeming was not a friendly neighbour. Do you know that I took your advice?”

“What advice?”

“To get into his house as a patient.”

“You really did that!”

“Yes. One morning, as he never invited me in as a friend, I went in as a patient.”

“How did he take it?”

“Well, he could hardly decline to treat me. It happened that I was really unwell at the time, so I had a good excuse.”

“And—and—your strange suspicions”—I was almost stammering, conscious, painfully conscious of my own—“your strange suspicions—did you ever find out whether they were justified?”

“They were justified, fully justified. But the dog took its own part in the end and killed its persecutor.”

I felt a sensation of horror take hold upon me.

“Do you really mean that Deeming was treating his spaniel cruelly?” I asked.

“I do. He had the mania for persecution that I suspected. He was venting it upon his dog. The servants had some inkling of the truth, especially his butler. He knew, I believe, all that was going on. But—he was well paid, very well paid.”

I remembered my Sunday morning call, and the butler’s exclamation when the fox-terrier ran into the house.

“This is horrible, Vernon,” I said. “Are you sure of what you say?”

“Quite sure. I heard—well, I heard things at night, and at last I saw the dog.”

“How?”

“I got into the house when Deeming was out. I bribed his butler, paid him more than Deeming did, I suppose. Anyhow, I got in. I think the man was sympathetic; was anxious really that an end should be put to the disgusting business. I burst open the door of the room in which the spaniel was confined, and then I saw—no matter what. It was quite enough. While I was there Deeming came back unexpectedly.”

“Good God!” I exclaimed. “What a ghastly situation!”

“It was not exactly pleasant. I saw the man’s soul naked that night—stark naked. It was on that occasion the dog bit him.”

“Ouf!” I said.

Again nausea seized me.

Vernon looked at me steadily.

“Don’t you think Deeming deserved anything he got?” he asked. “Anything he could ever get?”

“But he was mad—he must have been mad!”

“I suppose that sort of thing is what might be called a form of madness. Unfortunately a good many sane people have it—people as sane as you or I in all other respects.”

When he said the words “or I” a flush, I think, came to my cheek. It seemed to me that he spoke with significance—as if he knew what Gernham and I had spoken of the day before.

“As sane as you or I,” he repeated. “This work I’ve been doing with Gernham has opened my eyes to a good deal in human nature that they were shut to before. I once said to you in Rome, to you and Deeming, that man’s cruelty sprang often from a lack of imagination. Sometimes it springs from just the opposite, from a diseased imagination that lusts for gratification in ways we won’t discuss.”

“But Deeming—that he should be such a man, he whose profession it was to make whole!”

“Yes, that made the thing more strange and, to him, more enticing.”

“Enticing!” I exclaimed.

My voice was full of the bitterness of disgust mingled with incredulity that I was feeling.

“Just that,” he said. “He healed, as it were, with one hand, and destroyed with the other. Deeming was one of the human devils who have an insatiable craze for contrast. They revel in virtue because it is so different from vice. They revel in vice because it is so different from virtue. Deeming quivered with happiness when the last patient was gone and he could steal to the room where the spaniel⸺”

“Enough! Enough!” I exclaimed. “I won’t hear any more! Thank God he’s dead! Thank God it’s all over now! Why did you do that?” Vernon had suddenly laughed.

“Why did you do that?” I repeated. “What is there to laugh at?”

“I was laughing at your certainty, Luttrell, at the calm assurance with which we—poor, ignorant beings that we are—assert this or that regarding the fate of a soul, without knowing anything of the purposes of the Creator.”

“I don’t understand.”

“And yet you say—‘Thank God, it’s all over now!’”

He looked at me so strangely that I was struck to silence. I opened my lips to speak, but, while his eyes were upon me, I could say nothing. He made me feel as if, indeed, I were plunged in a profound gulf of ignorance, as if he watched me there from some height of understanding, of knowledge.

“Now I’ll go and fetch the spaniel,” he said.

And he got up and quietly left the room.

I turned in my chair and sat facing the door. The room was softly lit by wax candles, and on the walls were the pictures of gentleness, of mercy, of goodness and adoration which had hung upon the walls of Vernon’s dining-room in Rome. My glance ran over them, while my mind dwelt upon the horrors of Vernon’s narrative—horrors that seemed all the greater because he had told me so little, had left my imagination so unfettered. Then I looked again towards the door, and listened intently. Presently I heard a door shut, the sound of a step. Vernon was coming with the spaniel. I had asked to see the dog; I had wished to see it. Yet now my wish was about to be gratified I felt an extreme repugnance invade me. I longed to escape from the fulfilment of my wish. I was seized with—was it fear? It was something cold, something that lay upon my nerves like ice, that surely turned the blood in my veins to water. But, I could do nothing now, nothing to escape. Something within me seemed to make a furious effort to take up some weapon and attack the cold heavy thing that was striving to paralyse me. I was conscious of battle. In the midst of the battle the door opened and Vernon came in.

He was carrying the black spaniel in his arms.

He walked in slowly, kicked the door backwards with his heel to shut it, came to the table and sat down, still keeping the dog in his arms.

The dog was muzzled, and had on a collar to which a steel chain was attached; but, for the first moment, the only thing that struck me was his thinness. He was excessively thin—almost emaciated. He sat on his master’s knee, with his chin on the edge of the table and his yellow eyes gazing at me. A long trembling ran through his body, ceased, and was renewed with a regularity that reminded me of the ticking of a clock. Vernon kept his two hands upon the spaniel. They shuddered on the dog’s back when he shuddered.

“Well,” Vernon said. “What do you think of him?”

“He’s horribly thin,” I said. “Horribly.”

I turned my eyes from the spaniel to Vernon’s face.

“Do you think⸺” I began and hesitated.

“What?” he asked calmly.

“Do you think you give him enough to eat?” I said.

“Oh, it’s very bad for dogs to overfeed,” he answered. “Nothing ruins their health like overeating, and spaniels are like pugs, inclined to be greedy.”

I noticed that he had not answered my question.

He lifted one hand, laid it on the spaniel’s head, and smoothed the black hair, moving his hand backwards to the neck. The dog turned its head back towards him and showed his white teeth, as if his master’s hand drew him but to a demonstration of hatred, not of affection. Vernon smiled, lifted his hand, and repeated the action. The dog gave a low growl ending in a whine.

“Now you haven’t told me what you think of him,” Vernon continued, “and I want to know. I want very much to know.”

I looked into the spaniel’s eyes, and again something cold lay upon my nerves like ice.

“Why?” I said. “What does it matter what I think?”

“Do answer my question!” Vernon said with unwonted irritation.

“There’s something about the dog,” I said, “that’s—that’s⸺”

“Yes?” he said sharply.

“That’s uncanny.”

“Ah!” The word was a long-drawn sigh. “You think that!”

“Yes, I shouldn’t care to have him about me. I shouldn’t care to sleep with him in my room.”

“Sleep! Heaven forbid!”

His exclamation was almost shrill. It startled me.

“Where does the dog sleep?” I asked. “Where do you put him at night?”

“There’s a dressing-room opening out of my bedroom. He’s shut in there.”

“And you—you say you’ve been sleeping badly lately?”

“I haven’t been sleeping at all.”

“Does he whine? Does he disturb you?”

“He never makes a sound at night. I think he’s afraid that if he did I should punish him. He’s evidently had an unkind master, poor fellow.”

There was something so hideously insincere in Vernon’s voice as he said the last words that I could not help expressing the thought, the suspicion that had been, that was haunting me.

“Has he got a kind master now?” I said.

I fixed my eyes on Vernon’s.

“Has he?” I repeated.

At that moment I wanted to force things. The entrance of the dog had deepened my sense of moving in mystery until it became absolutely intolerable. A hard determination took hold upon me to compel Vernon to explain—what? I did not know. But that there was something to be explained, some strange undercurrent of motive, of desire, of intention, deep and furtive, I seemed to be aware.

“What do you mean?” Vernon said. “Surely you know my feeling for animals.”

“I do.”

“Then what do you mean?”

“I mean that as regards this animal, this spaniel, I don’t—I can’t trust you,” I said. “I don’t know why it is, I don’t understand, I don’t understand anything. But I don’t trust you, Vernon. That’s the truth. It’s best to speak it.”

To my great surprise, he did not indignantly resent my words, nor did he look guilty or ashamed. Indeed, it seemed to me that an expression of something like relief flitted across his face as I finished speaking.

“I knew it,” he said. “I knew quite well you didn’t trust me. And Gernham? Have you spoken to him of your mistrust?”

“He knows I don’t understand why you bought this dog, and what you’re going to do to him. He knows I’m—I’m afraid of—of what you may be going to do.”

He was silent, and again drew his hand across the spaniel’s soft black coat. The dog struggled. He struck his open hand down on the dog’s head, and the dog lay still, cowering upon his master’s knees.

“Gernham doesn’t enter into this,” he said inflexibly.

“And I?”

“You! That’s different. You introduced me to Deeming.”

Again the dog began to struggle upon his knees, but this time more violently.

Vernon lifted his hand again.

“Put him down!” I said. “For God’s sake put him down! Don’t strike him!”

“Very well.”

He dropped the spaniel to the floor. The spaniel ran under the dining-table. I sprang up from my seat.

“Don’t, don’t!” I began.

“It’s all right,” said Vernon. “I’ve got him by the chain.” He dragged the spaniel out, and fastened him up to the sideboard at the far end of the room.

“Why, you’re trembling!” he said, as he came back to his chair.

“Am I?” I said, ashamed. “I’m not a coward, but—but this dog—I can’t stand him near me, close to me, when I can’t see what he’s doing.”

I cleared my throat, went to the window, threw it open, leaned out, and spat. Leaving the window open, I came back to the table. The spaniel was now lying down on the floor, close to the sideboard.

“What is it?” I said, almost fiercely, I think, in my inexplicable physical distress, “what is it that’s wrong with the dog? What is it that’s unnatural about him?”

“You have no idea?” said Vernon.

“Not the slightest. The poor beast seems harmless enough, though he’s terrified. One can see that.”

“Exactly. He is terrified.”

“And the strange thing is that his terror terrifies me.”

“Now you’re getting to it,” Vernon said. “Why should the spaniel be terrified?”

“Why? How should I know? Isn’t that for you to say?”

“Sit down again,” he said. “The dog can’t get to you now.”

As he spoke, he sat down. I glanced towards the dog, saw that what Vernon had said was true, and followed his example.

“The dog’s terror,” he said. “Think of that, Luttrell! Seek for an explanation in that.”

“I have, but I haven’t found one.”

“Whom is it terrified of?”

“Of you,” I answered. “The first time we saw him, I noticed that he was abjectly terrified of you.”

“Perfectly true. Why should that be? Is it natural?”

“Utterly unnatural,” I said. “Unless he’s been badly, brutally treated, and is afraid of everybody.”

“He is not afraid of everybody. He is only afraid of me. Was he afraid of Lord Elyn?”

“No.”

“He is only afraid of me.”

“Are you certain?”

“Would you like to test it?”

“How?” I asked.

“I will leave the room for a moment—leave you alone with the dog.”

“No!” I exclaimed.

“You are afraid?”

“I’m not a coward, but there’s something about this spaniel which horrifies my imagination as a spectre might horrify it.”

“Nevertheless, you must summon your courage. I wish it. I wish to know how the spaniel will be with you when you are alone together. Come, make the experiment.”

He got up and went towards the door. I did not try to keep him.

“I’ll be back in a moment,” he said.

And he went softly out of the room and shut the door behind him.

When he had gone, I sat where I was, looking at the black blot on the floor by the sideboard. A strong curiosity was awake in me fighting my strange physical repulsion. I longed to put the thing to the test, yet I feared to approach the spaniel. How long I sat there I do not know, how long I might have sat there I cannot tell had nothing occurred to bias me towards action. But something did occur. The spaniel suddenly whimpered softly, as if to attract my attention, whimpered again and struck his feathery tail upon the floor. Those natural sounds of an anxious dog reassured me. I got up quickly and went over to the sideboard. Instantly, with a sort of strangled wail, the spaniel sprang up, put his forepaws on my legs, and thrust his hot nose into my hand, pushing, pushing hard, as if he sought to hide himself in a friendly shelter. I felt a wetness on my hand, the wetness of an animal’s tears. Then all my horror vanished and only pity remained. I knelt down on the carpet. I put my arms round the dog. I felt his trembling body with my hands. He was thin, hideously thin. His piteous eyes begged something of me. Still holding him with one arm, I stretched out the other, and opened a door in the sideboard. Within I saw a basket with some cut bread in it. I took out the bread. The spaniel sprang upon it passionately, tore it out of my hand, and devoured it ravenously. Then a wave of hot indignation went over me. At that moment I hated Vernon with all my soul. I hated him so much that I lost all sense of everything except my fury against him. I held the dog tightly as I knelt on the floor, and, turning my head towards the door, I called out—

“Vernon! Vernon!”

Instantly the door opened and Vernon appeared. The dog looked as he had looked when he was being brought into the house.

“Vernon,” I said, “you’re a d⸺d blackguard!”

“Why?” he said.

“This dog is starving. You’re starving him! D’you hear? You’re starving him!”

“I know I am,” he answered.

I got up. The spaniel rushed against my legs and leaned against them as I stood.

“Then Gernham was right,” I said. “You are a madman.”

“Is it madness to see what is when others are blind to it?”

“To see—to see?” I exclaimed. “What is there to see but this dog, this spaniel that you are torturing?”

“There is this spaniel—yes. Look at him. Look into his eyes. Look at the soul in them.”

There was something compelling, something almost mystical, in his voice. I looked down into the yellow eyes of the spaniel. They met mine, then looked away from mine as if unable to bear my gaze.

“What is it?” I said, in a whisper. “What is it?”

Again I was assailed by the sensation which had come to me when I waited in the hall to know if Vernon would receive me, a sensation that, with the black spaniel, linked with it, mysteriously mingled with it, was something of the man who was dead—something of Deeming.

“Deeming!” I stammered. “Deeming!”

I did not know what I meant, but I was compelled to pronounce the name of my friend.

“Deeming?” I said once more, looking towards Vernon.

“Don’t you feel that he is here?” said Vernon.

“But he is dead.”

“Don’t you feel that he is here?”

“Yes,” I said. “But it can’t be. He is dead.”

“His body is dead—yes. But his soul, is that dead?”

When he said that, I understood what he meant, and I recoiled from the black spaniel as from a nameless horror.

“Vernon!” I said. “Vernon!”