I finished the strange letter, and looked at Ariel.
She stood with her eyes on the floor, and held out to me the thick walking-stick which she carried in her hand.
“Take the stick” were the first words she said to me.
“Why am I to take it?” I asked.
She struggled a little with her sluggishly working mind, and slowly put her thoughts into words.
“You’re angry with the Master,” she said. “Take it out on me. Here’s the stick. Beat me.”
“Beat you!” I exclaimed.
“My back’s broad,” said the poor creature. “I won’t make a row. I’ll bear it. Drat you, take the stick! Don’t vex him. Whack it out on my back. Beat me.”
She roughly forced the stick into my hand; she turned her poor shapeless shoulders to me; waiting for the blow. It was at once dreadful and touching to see her. The tears rose in my eyes. I tried, gently and patiently, to reason with her. Quite useless! The idea of taking the Master’s punishment on herself was the one idea in her mind. “Don’t vex him,” she repeated. “Beat me.”
“What do you mean by ‘vexing him’?” I asked.
She tried to explain, and failed to find the words. She showed me by imitation, as a savage might have shown me, what she meant. Striding to the fireplace, she crouched on the rug, and looked into the fire with a horrible vacant stare. Then she clasped her hands over her forehead, and rocked slowly to and fro, still staring into the fire. “There’s how he sits!” she said, with a sudden burst of speech. “Hours on hours, there’s how he sits! Notices nobody. Cries about you.”
The picture she presented recalled to my memory the Report of Dexter’s health, and the doctor’s plain warning of peril waiting for him in the future.
Even if I could have resisted Ariel, I must have yielded to the vague dread of consequences which now shook me in secret.
“Don’t do that!” I cried. She was still rocking herself in imitation of the “Master,” and still staring into the fire with her hands to her head. “Get up, pray! I am not angry with him now. I forgive him.”
She rose on her hands and knees, and waited, looking up intently into my face. In that attitude—more like a dog than a human being—she repeated her customary petition when she wanted to fix words that interested her in her mind.
“Say it again!”
I did as she bade me. She was not satisfied.
“Say it as it is in the letter,” she went on. “Say it as the Master said it to me.”
I looked back at the letter, and repeated the form of message contained in the latter part of it, word for word:
“I forgive him; and one day I will let him see me again.”
She sprang to her feet at a bound. For the first time since she had entered the room her dull face began to break slowly into light and life.
“That’s it!” she cried. “Hear if I can say it, too; hear if I’ve got it by heart.”
Teaching her exactly as I should have taught a child, I slowly fastened the message, word by word, on her mind.
“Now rest yourself,” I said; “and let me give you something to eat and drink after your long walk.”
I might as well have spoken to one of the chairs. She snatched up her stick from the floor, and burst out with a hoarse shout of joy. “I’ve got it by heart!” she cried. “This will cool the Master’s head! Hooray!” She dashed out into the passage like a wild animal escaping from its cage. I was just in time to see her tear open the garden gate, and set forth on her walk back at a pace which made it hopeless to attempt to follow and stop her.
I returned to the sitting-room, pondering on a question which has perplexed wiser heads than mine. Could a man who was hopelessly and entirely wicked have inspired such devoted attachment to him as Dexter had inspired in the faithful woman who had just left me? in the rough gardener who had carried him out so gently on the previous night? Who can decide? The greatest scoundrel living always has a friend—in a woman or a dog.
I sat down again at my desk, and made another attempt to write to Mr. Playmore.
Recalling, for the purpose of my letter, all that Miserrimus Dexter had said to me, my memory dwelt with special interest on the strange outbreak of feeling which had led him to betray the secret of his infatuation for Eustace’s first wife. I saw again the ghastly scene in the death-chamber—the deformed creature crying over the corpse in the stillness of the first dark hours of the new day. The horrible picture took a strange hold on my mind. I arose, and walked up and down, and tried to turn my thoughts some other way. It was not to be done: the scene was too familiar to me to be easily dismissed. I had myself visited the room and looked at the bed. I had myself walked in the corridor which Dexter had crossed on his way to take his last leave of her.
The corridor? I stopped. My thoughts suddenly took a new direction, uninfluenced by any effort of my will.
What other association besides the association with Dexter did I connect with the corridor? Was it something I had seen during my visit
