"And is this lady to see you, when the light comes, out of your chair?"
He lifted something bright and metallic, hanging round his neck, and blew on it a series of shrill, trilling, bird-like notes. After an interval he was answered by a similar series of notes sounding faintly in some distant region of the house.
"Ariel is coming," he said. "Compose yourself, Mamma Macallan; Ariel with make me presentable to a lady's eyes."
He hopped away on his hands into the darkness at the end of the room. "Wait a little, said Mrs. Macallan, "and you will have another surprise--you will see the 'delicate Ariel.'"
We heard heavy footsteps in the circular room.
"Ariel!" sighed Miserrimus Dexter out of the darkness, in his softest notes.
To my astonishment the coarse, masculine voice of the cousin in the man's hat--the Caliban's, rather than the Ariel's voice--answered, "Here!"
"My chair, Ariel!"
The person thus strangely misnamed drew aside the tapestry, so as to let in more light; then entered the room, pushing the wheeled chair before her. She stooped and lifted Miserrimus Dexter from the floor, like a child. Before she could put him into the chair, he sprang out of her arms with a little gleeful cry, and alighted on his seat, like a bird alighting on its perch!
"The lamp," said Miserrimus Dexter, "and the looking-glass.--Pardon me," he added, addressing us, "for turning my back on you. You mustn't see me until my hair is set to rights.--Ariel! the brush, the comb, and the perfumes!"
Carrying the lamp in one hand, the looking-glass in the other, and the brush (with the comb stuck in it) between her teeth, Ariel the Second, otherwise Dexter's cousin, presented herself plainly before me for the first time. I could now see the girl's round, fleshy, inexpressive face, her rayless and colorless eyes, her coarse nose and heavy chin. A creature half alive; an imperfectly developed animal in shapeless form clad in a man's pilot jacket, and treading in a man's heavy laced boots, with nothing but an old red-flannel petticoat, and a broken comb in her frowzy flaxen hair, to tell us that she was a woman--such was the inhospitable person who had received us in the darkness when we first entered the house.
This wonderful valet, collecting her materials for dressing her still more wonderful master's hair, gave him the looking-glass (a hand -mirror), and addressed herself to her work.
She combed, she brushed, she oiled, she perfumed the flowing locks and the long silky beard of Miserrimus Dexter with the strangest mixture of dullness and dexterity that I ever saw. Done in brute silence, with a lumpish look and a clumsy gait, the work was perfectly well done nevertheless. The imp in the chair superintended the whole proceeding critically by means of his hand-mirror. He was too deeply interested in this occupation to speak until some of the concluding touches to his beard brought the misnamed Ariel in front of him, and so turned her full face toward the part of the room in which Mrs. Macallan and I were standing. Then he addressed us, taking especial care, however, not to turn his head our way while his toilet was still incomplete.
"Mamma Macallan," he said, "what is the Christian name of your son's second wife?"
"Why do you want to know?" asked my mother-in-law.
"I want to know because I can't address her as 'Mrs. Eustace Macallan.'"
"Why not?"
"It recalls the other Mrs. Eustace Macallan. If I am reminded of those horrible days at Gleninch my fortitude will give way--I shall burst out screaming again."
Hearing this, I hastened to interpose.
"My name is Valeria," I said.
"A Roman name," remarked Miserrimus Dexter. "I like it. My mind is cast in the Roman mold. My bodily build would have been Roman if I had been born with legs. I shall call you Mrs. Valeria, unless you disapprove of it."
I hastened to say that I was far from disapproving of it.
"Very good," said Miserrimus Dexter "Mrs. Valeria, do you see the face of this creature in front of me?"
He pointed with the hand-mirror to his cousin as unconcernedly as he might have pointed to a dog. His cousin, on her side, took no more notice than a dog would have taken of the contemptuous phrase by which he had designated her. She went on combing and oiling his beard as composedly as ever.
"It is the face of an idiot, isn't it?" pursued Miserrimus Dexter! "Look at her! She is a mere vegetable. A cabbage in a garden has as much life and expression in it as that girl exhibits at the present moment. Would you believe there was latent intelligence, affection, pride, fidelity, in such a half-developed being as this?"
I was really ashamed to answer him. Quite needlessly! The impenetrable young woman went on with her master's beard. A machine could not have taken less notice of the life and the talk around it than this incomprehensible creature.
"I have got at that latent affection, pride, fidelity, and the rest of it," resumed Miserrimus Dexter. "I hold the key to that dormant Intelligence. Grand thought! Now look at her when I speak. (I named her, poor wretch, in one of my ironical moments. She has got to like her name, just as a dog gets to like his collar.) Now, Mrs. Valeria, look and listen.--Ariel!"
The girl's dull face began to brighten. The girl's mechanically moving hand stopped, and held the comb in suspense.
"Ariel! you have learned to dress my hair and anoint my beard, haven't you?"
Her face still brightened. "Yes! yes! yes!" she answered, eagerly. "And you say I have learned to do it well, don't you?"
"I say that. Would you like to let anybody else do it for you?"
Her eyes melted softly into light and life. Her strange unwomanly voice sank to the gentlest tones that I had heard from her yet.
"Nobody else shall do it for me," she said at once proudly and tenderly. "Nobody, as long as I live, shall touch you but me."
"Not even the lady there?" asked Miserrimus Dexter, pointing backward with his hand-mirror to the place at which I was standing.
Her eyes suddenly flashed, her hand suddenly shook the comb at me, in a burst of jealous rage.
"Let her try!" cried the poor creature, raising her voice again to its hoarsest notes. "Let her touch you if she dares!"
Dexter laughed at the childish outbreak. "That will do, my delicate Ariel," he said. "I dismiss your Intelligence for the present. Relapse into your former self. Finish my beard."
She passively resumed her work. The new light in her eyes, the new expression in her face, faded little by little and died out. In another minute the face was as vacant and as lumpish as before; the hands did their work again with the lifeless dexterity which had so painfully impressed me when she first took up the brush. Miserrimus Dexter appeared to be perfectly satisfied with these results.
"I thought my little experiment might interest you," he said. "You see how it is? The dormant intelligence of my curious cousin is like the dormant sound in a musical instrument. I play upon it--and it answers to my touch.