Dr. Hendry, once famous in the artistic world, walked out between the dark pillars of the porch that stood out against the sea; as free as the sea-gull that was swerving along the line of the cliff. He had an air of almost aggressive good taste; as if informing the whole street that he would refuse to inform anybody about the delicate professional secrets just confided to him. He made a movement as if pulling on a pair of invisible gloves, and he quite naturally stepped into the hansom cab, before he had thought of it. The conscientious cabman pulled down his top hat over his brows and rapidly drove him away up the steep and stony streets.
For the present at least, the chronicler may well maintain an awful silence about what happened between the magistrate and the doctor. And indeed Murrel’s own mind showed a curious and rather indescribable disposition to drop the whole topic and to leave it behind him. He had a reputation for playing practical jokes. But this moment of his life will be somewhat misunderstood if it be supposed that he thought of it first and foremost as a practical joke upon the foreign doctor. A hazier and yet happier feeling was in his mind, as if the real story lay rather in front of him than behind him; as if the unexpected liberation of the poor old crank, with the colour-blind monomania, were but a symbol of the liberation of many things and the opening of a brighter world. Something had snapped; if it was only a bit of red tape; and he did not know yet how much had been set free. As he turned the corner a shaft of sun shot down the steep street, seeming as solid as that from solid clouds in the old Bible pictures, and looking up at the window of the high narrow house he saw Hendry’s daughter.
The woman who looked out of the window appeared, after a fashion, for the first time in this story. Hitherto she had been cloaked in shadows, in the shades of the steep stairways and the high dark house. She had been disguised in destitution; and it is necessary to have lived in such a house to know how much destitution can disguise. She had turned pale like a plant in a narrow and shuttered house; a house in which there were no mirrors; least of all those human mirrors that we call faces. She had long ceased to think of her appearance; and she would have been more surprised than anyone else if she could have stood in the street and seen her appearance at the window. And yet, as she looked down into the street, she was something more than surprised. The beauty that unfolded from within, like some magic flower upon the balcony, was not due altogether to the burst of sun that had struck the street. It was the most beautiful thing in the world; perhaps the only really beautiful thing in the world. It was astonishment which was lost in Eden and will return with the Beatific Vision, in astonishment so strong that it will last for ever.
It was indeed only amazement at what she saw in the street; but there was in it the joy that only hails the reversal of all things in the world; what is too good to be true. To understand her astonishment it would be necessary to tell her story; and her story would be of a very different sort from this story, and more like those long scientific and realistic novels which are not stories at all. Since the day when her father had been ruined by a gang of rascals who happened to be too rich to be punished, her life had descended step after step into that world where all the people are assumed to be rascals and punished in a sort of rotation; the police regarding themselves rather as the warders of a large loose prison with the roof off. She had long given up having any sharp reaction to the tendency; it seemed perfectly natural so long as it was a downward tendency. If her father had been taken away and hanged, she would have been miserable and bitter and indignant; but she would not have been surprised.
But when she saw him coming back smiling in a hansom cab, she was completely surprised. Never had she known any living thing escape from the trap into which she thought he had fallen; never had she seen footprints coming out from that dark den of efficiency. It was as if she had seen the sun turn backwards towards the East, or the Thames stop suddenly at Greenwich and begin to go back to Oxford. But there was no doubt that it was her father, leaning back and smiling in the cab. As he had come out with the gesture of pulling on invisible gloves, so he leaned back with the gesture of smoking an invisible cigar. As she stared at him, she became conscious that the cabman had taken off his hat to her, with a remarkably fine flourish for so very deplorable a hat. The removal of the hat gave the last shock to her senses; for it revealed the colourless but carefully brushed hair of Mr. Murrel, the eccentric gentleman who had called at the house a few hours before.
Dr. Hendry leapt from the cab with quite youthful grace, and his hand went with another automatic gesture towards a totally empty pocket. He was living in the brave days of old.
“Don’t mention it,” said Murrel hastily, replacing the atrocious hat. “This is my own cab and I do it for amusement. Art for art’s sake, as your old friends used to say. I am an arrangement, as Whistler said; an arrangement in black and brown. Your friend the mad doctor is, I trust, by this time an arrangement in black and blue.”
Hendry recognised the educated voice, for there are some things a man never forgets. He recognised the voice in spite of the hat, even when it was rather obviously talking through the hat.
“My dear sir,” he said, “I owe you a great debt of gratitude. Pray come inside.”
“Oh, thank you,” said Murrel, getting down from his perch. “My Arab steed, who has slept in my tent so often in the desert, will probably keep a faithful watch outside. He does not seem to suffer from any mad impulse to gallop.”
He ascended for the second time the dark and steep stair-case, up which he had seen the worthy mental specialist mounting like some monster out of the deeps. His thoughts went back to that unfortunate expert in a momentary remorse; but he told himself that there would be little difficulty in putting the matter straight.
“But won’t that mean,” she said, “that he will come back again for my father?”
Murrel smiled and shook his head. “Not if I know anything about him,” he said, “or about old Wotton either. Wotton is a perfectly honest old gentleman; and will see at once that there couldn’t be much the matter with your father, not half so much as with the other man. And even the other man won’t be exactly anxious to proclaim to the world that he gave such a good imitation of a raving maniac that they locked him up.”
“Then you have really saved us,” she said. “It is a very wonderful thing.”
“Not so wonderful as your requiring to be saved, I should say,” said Murrell. “I really don’t know what the world is coming to. I suppose they set a lunatic to catch a lunatic on the principle of setting a thief to catch a thief.”
“I have known some thieves,” said Dr. Hendry, twirling his moustache with a sudden fierceness, “but they are not caught yet.”
Murrel looked across at him for a moment, and knew that his spirit had returned to him.
“Perhaps we shall try to catch the thieves after all,” he said; and did not know that he was uttering a sort of prophecy of the fate of his home and his friends and many things he knew. For far away in Seawood Abbey things that he would have thought utterly fantastic were taking colour and form and marching towards the climax of this history. Of these things he knew nothing; but, curiously enough, his own imagination was already clouded with new colours more glowing and romantic than Hendry’s Illumination Paints. He had a vague sensation of victory; but it had culminated when he looked up and saw the girl’s face at the window; he leaned impulsively across and said: “Do you often look out of the window like that. . . . if I should be passing some time . . . ?”
“Yes.” She said, “I often look out of the window.”