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.”
Turnbull murmured some clumsy deprecation, and sat stolidly smoking to collect his thoughts; the next instant he had all his nerves engaged in the mere effort to sit still.
Across the clear space of cold silver and a pale lemon sky which was left by the gap in the ilex-trees there passed a slim, dark figure, a profile and the poise of a dark head like a bird’s, which really pinned him to his seat with the point of coincidence. With an effort he got to his feet, and said with a voice of affected insouciance: “By George! MacIan, she is uncommonly like–”
“What!” cried MacIan, with a leap of eagerness that was heart-breaking, “do you see her, too?” And the blaze came back into the centre of his eyes.
Turnbull’s tawny eyebrows were pulled together with a peculiar frown of curiosity, and all at once he walked quickly across the lawn. MacIan sat rigid, but peered after him with open and parched lips. He saw the sight which either proved him sane or proved the whole universe half-witted; he saw the man of flesh approach that beautiful phantom, saw their gestures of recognition, and saw them against the sunset joining hands.
He could stand it no longer, but ran across to the path, turned the corner and saw standing quite palpable in the evening sunlight, talking with a casual grace to Turnbull, the face and figure which had filled his midnights with frightfully vivid or desperately half-forgotten features. She advanced quite pleasantly and coolly, and put out her hand. The moment that he touched it he knew that he was sane even if the solar system was crazy.
She was entirely elegant and unembarrassed. That is the awful thing about women–they refuse to be emotional at emotional moments, upon some such ludicrous pretext as there being someone else there. But MacIan was in a condition of criticism much less than the average masculine one, being in fact merely overturned by the rushing riddle of the events.
Evan does not know to this day what particular question he asked, but he vividly remembers that she answered, and every line or fluctuation of her face as she said it.
“Oh, don’t you know?” she said, smiling, and suddenly lifting her level brown eyebrows. “Haven’t you heard the news? I’m a lunatic.”
Then she added after a short pause, and with a sort of pride: “I’ve got a certificate.”
Her manner, by the matchless social stoicism of her sex, was entirely suited to a drawing-room, but Evan’s reply fell somewhat far short of such a standard, as he only said: “What the devil in hell does all this nonsense mean?”