My life had once depended, years since, on my success in heading the arrest of an escaped prisoner. I was not conscious, then, of feeling my energies weakened by fear. But that man was not mad; and I was younger, in those days, by a good twenty years or more. At my later time of life, I could show my old friend that I was not afraid of him--but I was conscious of an effort in doing it.
I opened the paper. "Am I to read this to myself?" I asked. "Or am I to read it aloud?"
"Read it aloud!"
In these terms, his daughter addressed him:
"I have been so unfortunate, dearest father, as to displease you, and I dare not hope that you will consent to receive me. What it is my painful duty to tell you, must be told in writing.
"Grieved as I am to distress you, in your present state of health, I must not hesitate to reveal what it has been my misfortune--I may even say my misery, when I think of my mother--to discover.
"But let me make sure, in such a serious matter as this is, that I am not mistaken.
"In those happy past days, when I was still dear to my father, you said you thought of writing to invite a dearly-valued friend to pay a visit to this house. You had first known him, as I understood, when my mother was still living. Many interesting things you told me about this old friend, but you never mentioned that he knew, or that he had even seen, my mother. I was left to suppose that those two had remained strangers to each other to the day of her death.
"If there is any misinterpretation here of what you said, or perhaps of what you meant to say, pray destroy what I have written without turning to the next page; and forgive me for having innocently startled you by a false alarm."
Mr. Gracedieu interrupted me.
"Put it down!" he cried; "I won't wait till you have got to the end--I shall question you now. Give me the paper; it will help me to keep this mystery of iniquity clear in my own mind."
I gave him the paper.
He hesitated--and looked at the portrait once more. "Turn her away from me," he said; "I can't face my wife."
I placed the picture with its back to him.
He consulted the paper, reading it with but little of the confusion and hesitation which my experience of him had induced me to anticipate. Had the mad excitement that possessed him exercised an influence in clearing his mind, resembling in some degree the influence exercised by a storm in clearing the air? Whatever the right explanation may be, I can only report what I saw. I could hardly have mastered what his daughter had written more readily, if I had been reading it myself.
"Helena tells me," he began, "that you said you knew her by her likeness to her mother. Is that true?"
"Quite true."
"And you made an excuse for leaving her--see! here it is, written down. You made an excuse, and left her when she asked for an explanation."
"I did."
He consulted the paper again.
"My daughter says--No! I won't be hurried and I won't be interrupted--she says you were confused. Is that so?"
"It is so. Let your questions wait for a moment. I wish to tell you why I was confused."
"Haven't I said I won't be interrupted? Do you think you can shake my resolution?" He referred to the paper again. "I have lost the place. It's your fault--find it for me."
The evidence which was intended to convict me was the evidence which I was expected to find! I pointed it out to him.
His natural courtesy asserted itself in spite of his anger. He said "Thank you," and questioned me the moment after as fiercely as ever. "Go back to the time, sir, when we met in your rooms at the prison. Did you know my wife then?"
"Certainly not."
"Did you and she see each other--ha! I've got it now--did you see each other after I had left the town? No prevarication! You own to telling Helena that you knew her by her likeness to her mother. You must have seen her mother. Where?"
I made another effort to defend myself. He again refused furiously to hear me. It was useless to persist. Whatever the danger that threatened me might be, the sooner it showed itself the easier I should feel. I told him that Mrs. Gracedieu had called on me, after he and his wife had left the town.
"Do you mean to tell me," he cried, "that she came to you?"
"I do."
After that answer, he no longer required the paper to help him. He threw it from him on the floor.
"And you received her," he said, "without inquiring whether I knew of her visit or not? Guilty deception on your part--guilty deception on her part. Oh, the hideous wickedness of it!"
When his mad suspicion that I had been his wife's lover betrayed itself in this way, I made a last attempt, in the face of my own conviction that it was hopeless, to place my conduct and his wife's conduct before him in the true light.
"Mrs. Gracedieu's object was to consult me--" Before I could say the next words, I saw him put his hand into the pocket of his dressing-gown.
"An innocent man," he sternly declared, "would have told me that my wife had been to see him--you kept it a secret. An innocent woman would have given me a reason for wishing to go to you--she kept it a secret, when she left my house; she kept it a secret when she came back."
"Mr. Gracedieu, I insist on being heard! Your wife's motive--"
He drew from his pocket the thing that he had hidden from me. This time, there was no concealment; he let me see that he was opening a razor. It was no time for asserting my innocence; I had to think of preserving my life. When a man is without firearms, what defense can avail against a razor in the hands of a madman? A chair was at my side; it offered the one poor means of guarding myself that I could see. I laid my hand on it, and kept my eye on him.
He paused, looking backward and forward between the picture and me.
"Which of them shall I kill first?" he said to himself. "The man who was my trusted friend? Or the woman whom I believed to be an angel on earth?" He stopped once more, in a state of fierce self-concentration, debating what he should do. "The woman," he decided. "Wretch! Fiend! Harlot! How I loved her!!!"
With a yell of fury, he pounced on the picture--ripped the canvas out of the frame--and cut it malignantly into fragments. As they dropped from the razor on the floor, he stamped on them, and ground them under his foot. "Go, wife of my bosom," he cried, with a dreadful mockery of voice and look--"go, and burn everlastingly in the place of torment!" His eyes glared at me. "Your turn now," he said--and rushed at me with his weapon ready in his hand. I hurled the chair at his right arm. The razor dropped on the floor. I caught him by the wrist. Like a wild animal he tried to bite me. With my free hand--if I had known how to defend myself in any other way, I would have taken that way--with my free hand I seized him by the throat; forced him back; and held him against the wall. My grasp on his throat kept him quiet. But the dread of seriously injuring him so completely overcame me, that I forgot I was a prisoner in the room, and was on the point of alarming the household by a cry for help.