He went straight up to the magistrate, and said: “Good evening, Mr. Vane; I doubt if you remember me.”
Cumberland Vane screwed the eye-glass into his scowling face for an instant, and then said curtly but not uncivilly: “Yes, I remember you, sir; assault or battery, wasn’t it?–a fellow broke your window. A tall fellow–McSomething–case made rather a noise afterwards.”
“MacIan is the name, sir,” said Turnbull, respectfully; “I have him here with me.”
“Eh!” said Vane very sharply. “Confound him! Has he got anything to do with this game?”
“Mr. Vane,” said Turnbull, pacifically, “I will not pretend that either he or I acted quite decorously on that occasion. You were very lenient with us, and did not treat us as criminals when you very well might. So I am sure you will give us your testimony that, even if we were criminals, we are not lunatics in any legal or medical sense whatever. I am sure you will use your influence for us.”
“My influence!” repeated the magistrate, with a slight start. “I don’t quite understand you.”
“I don’t know in what capacity you are here,” continued Turnbull, gravely, “but a legal authority of your distinction must certainly be here in an important one. Whether you are visiting and inspecting the place, or attached to it as some kind of permanent legal adviser, your opinion must still–”
Cumberland Vane exploded with a detonation of oaths; his face was transfigured with fury and contempt, and yet in some odd way he did not seem specially angry with Turnbull.
“But Lord bless us and save us!” he gasped, at length; “I’m not here as an official at all. I’m here as a patient. The cursed pack of rat-catching chemists all say that I’ve lost my wits.”
“You!” cried Turnbull with terrible emphasis. “You! Lost your wits!”
In the rush of his real astonishment at this towering unreality Turnbull almost added: “Why, you haven’t got any to lose.” But he fortunately remembered the remains of his desperate diplomacy.
“This can’t go on,” he said, positively. “Men like MacIan and I may suffer unjustly all our lives, but a man like you must have influence.”
“There is only one man who has any influence in England now,” said Vane, and his high voice fell to a sudden and convincing quietude.
“Whom do you mean?” asked Turnbull.
“I mean that cursed fellow with the long split chin,” said the other.
“Is it really true,” asked Turnbull, “that he has been allowed to buy up and control such a lot? What put the country into such a state?”
Mr. Cumberland Vane laughed outright. “What put the country into such a state?” he asked. “Why, you did. When you were fool enough to agree to fight MacIan, after all, everybody was ready to believe that the Bank of England might paint itself pink with white spots.”
“I don’t understand,” answered Turnbull. “Why should you be surprised at my fighting? I hope I have always fought.”
“Well,” said Cumberland Vane, airily, “you didn’t believe in religion, you see–so we thought you were safe at any rate. You went further in your language than most of us wanted to go; no good in just hurting one’s mother’s feelings, I think. But of course we all knew you were right, and, really, we relied on you.”
“Did you?” said the editor of The Atheist with a bursting heart. “I am sorry you did not tell me so at the time.”
He walked away very rapidly and flung himself on a garden seat, and for some six minutes his own wrongs hid from him the huge and hilarious fact that Cumberland Vane had been locked up as a lunatic.
The garden of the madhouse was so perfectly planned, and answered so exquisitely to every hour of daylight, that one could almost fancy that the sunlight was caught there tangled in its tinted trees, as the wise men of Gotham tried to chain the spring to a bush. Or it seemed as if this ironic paradise still kept its unique dawn or its special sunset while the rest of the earthly globe rolled through its ordinary hours. There was one evening, or late afternoon, in particular, which Evan MacIan will remember in the last moments of death. It was what artists call a daffodil sky, but it is coarsened even by reference to a daffodil. It was of that innocent lonely yellow which has never heard of orange, though it might turn quite unconsciously into green. Against it the tops, one might say the turrets, of the clipt and ordered trees were outlined in that shade of veiled violet which tints the tops of lavender. A white early moon was hardly traceable upon that delicate yellow. MacIan, I say, will remember this tender and transparent evening, partly because of its virgin gold and silver, and partly because he passed beneath it through the most horrible instant of his life.
Turnbull was sitting on his seat on the lawn, and the golden evening impressed even his positive nature, as indeed it might have impressed the oxen in a field. He was shocked out of his idle mood of awe by seeing MacIan break from behind the bushes and run across the lawn with an action he had never seen in the man before, with all his experience of the eccentric humours of this Celt. MacIan fell on the bench, shaking it so that it rattled, and gripped it with his knees like one in dreadful pain of body. That particular run and tumble is typical only of a man who has been hit by some sudden and incurable evil, who is bitten by a viper or condemned to be hanged. Turnbull looked up in the white face of his friend and enemy, and almost turned cold at what he saw there. He had seen the blue but gloomy eyes of the western Highlander troubled by as many tempests as his own west Highland seas, but there had always been a fixed star of faith behind the storms. Now the star had gone out, and there was only misery.
Yet MacIan had the strength to answer the question where Turnbull, taken by surprise, had not the strength to ask it.
“They are right, they are right!” he cried. “O my God! they are right, Turnbull. I ought to be here!”
He went on with shapeless fluency as if he no longer had the heart to choose or check his speech. “I suppose I ought to have guessed long ago–all my big dreams and schemes–and everyone being against us– but I was stuck up, you know.”
“Do tell me about it, really,” cried the atheist, and, faced with the furnace of the other’s pain, he did not notice that he spoke with the affection of a father.
“I am mad, Turnbull,” said Evan, with a dead clearness of speech, and leant back against the garden seat.
“Nonsense,” said the other, clutching at the obvious cue of benevolent brutality, “this is one of your silly moods.”
MacIan shook his head. “I know enough about myself,” he said, “to allow for any mood, though it opened heaven or hell. But to see things–to see them walking solid in the sun– things that can’t be there–real mystics never do that, Turnbull.”
“What things?” asked the other, incredulously.
MacIan lowered his voice. “I saw her,” he said, “three minutes ago– walking here in this hell yard.”
Between trying to look scornful and really looking startled, Turnbull’s face was confused enough to emit no speech, and Evan went on in monotonous sincerity:
“I saw her walk behind those blessed trees against that holy sky of gold as plain as I can see her whenever I shut my eyes. I did shut them, and opened them again, and she was still there– that is, of course, she wasn’t– She still had a little fur round her neck, but her dress was a shade brighter than when I really saw her.”
“My dear fellow,” cried Turnbull, rallying a hearty laugh, “the fancies have really got hold of you. You mistook some other poor girl here for her.”
“Mistook some other–” said MacIan, and words failed him altogether.
They sat for some moments in the mellow silence of the evening garden, a silence that was stifling for the sceptic, but utterly empty and final for the man of faith. At last he broke out again with the words: “Well, anyhow, if I’m mad, I’m glad I’m mad on that.”