Rupert Godwin

THE FACE OF THE LOST.

The Retreat, the abode in which Dr. Wilderson Snaffley received his patients, was a place which seemed eminently calculated to drive the sanest person mad.

Dismal walls of an unusual height, and ornamented at the top with iron spikes, surrounded a dreary wilderness of tangled bushes and tall lean poplars, which was designated a garden. In the centre of this garden stood a high square house; a house which had once been white, but from whose damp-stained walls the stucco had peeled off in great patches. Long rows of curtainless windows, every one the precise pattern of its neighbour, looked out upon the dismal wilderness. There were not even blinds to shut out the glaring heat of the sun; but wooden shutters, painted black, swung to and fro before the windows with every gust of wind, and the rusty hinges made a dreary creaking noise, that was like the groaning of a human creature in pain.

This was the place of which Dr. Snaffley spoke so pleasantly to the friends of his patients, describing it always as “a delightful country mansion, standing in the midst of its own grounds.”

But the doctor knew his patrons; and he was not deluded by the sympathetic looks or compassionate phrases of the people who intrusted their relatives to his keeping, and who took no trouble to ascertain the nature of the place that sheltered the afflicted creatures, or the comforts that softened their calamity. Dr. Snaffley knew that no one who entered the gates of the Retreat would have committed a beloved relative to his care. The unfortunates who came to that dark abode were people who were to be got rid of. No matter how cheerless the home, how wretchedly furnished the room, how miserable the daily fare, how chill and damp the atmosphere; the patients were only likely to die the sooner, and the bitterly-grudged stipend cease to be paid.

Dr. Snaffley took patients at different rates, for he varied his charge according to the circumstances of the persons who employed him. His policy was neither to ill-use his patients nor to starve them; his policy was to keep them alive at the smallest possible cost. He was not personally cruel; but he allowed the men and women he employed to do pretty much as they liked; while he lived his own life, and enjoyed himself after his own manner in London, only putting in an appearance at the Retreat now and then.

In that joyless, comfortless mansion there was, it may be hoped, less actual cruelty than in some of those dens of iniquity which have encumbered this beautiful earth. There were padded rooms, into which the dangerous lunatics were thrust, and kept under lock and key; but the harmless lunatics were allowed considerable liberty. The walls were so high, and the neighbourhood so utterly desolate, that there was little chance either of escape or of communication being held with the outer world.

By far the larger number of his patients, and those for whom Dr. Wilderson Snaffley was the most liberally paid, were not mad, but were the wretched victims who, for some reason or other, had been put out of the way by their unnatural relatives upon the infamous pretence of insanity.

These patients were very quiet. At first they were loud in their complaints. They cried out bitterly for justice; they threatened—they implored—they wept—they wrote letters, and tried with piteous persistence to hold some communication with the outer world—to find some means of reaching the ear of mercy, of enlisting the voice of justice in their cause. But no eye save that of Heaven saw their sufferings; no mortal ear but that of merciless gaolers heard their complaints; and in time they were all wearied out, one after another, and submitted with a stupid apathy to an inevitable fate. A hopeless, changeless melancholy took possession of them. They sat motionless at the windows, staring blankly out upon the gloomy prospect. They rarely conversed with one another; for what could they talk of in that living grave?

Sometimes they roamed listlessly in the dreary wilderness, staring at those walls which shut them out from all they had ever loved or cherished. They ate their scanty meals in despondent silence. The wild chatter of the really mad patients tortured them with its discordant jargon; and they had no heart to speak amidst the Babel that surrounded them.

Thus it was not strange that many who entered that place as sane as the wretches who sent them there became at last raving maniacs.

All Dr. Snaffley wanted was the liberty to enjoy himself abroad, and the power to save a fortune for his old age from the profits of the Retreat. He was already rich; but every day brought him new wealth, and every day made him more greedy of gain.

Still, notwithstanding the good luck that had attended his dreary abode for many years, Dr. Snaffley had never before caught so rich a prize as the patient committed to his care by Rupert Godwin the banker.

The proprietor of the Retreat knew his power; he knew that the patient called Lewis Wilton, who had been placed under his care, was capable of revealing a secret that might have condemned Rupert Godwin to a felon’s doom.

The patient once within the walls of the Retreat, the secret was safe—as safe as if it had been buried in the grave of a second victim.

“If Rupert Godwin had dared, he would have murdered this young man,” thought Dr. Snaffley; “he only pays me because he hasn’t pluck enough to play the bolder game.”

For some days and nights after his removal to the Retreat, Lionel Westford remained still unconscious—still a prey to delirious fancies, to terrible visions, to all the wild delusions of a violent attack of brain-fever.

But Dr. Wilderson Snaffley, although a scoundrel and a charlatan, was not without a certain cleverness in his professional capacity. He prescribed for the young man with a watchful care that he did not often bestow upon a patient, for Lionel Westford’s life was worth five hundred pounds a year to him—more than the income derived from five ordinary patients.

For this reason the invalid enjoyed privileges that had never before been shown to any inmate of the Retreat.

A private bedchamber was allotted to him, instead of a miserable truckle-bed in one of the bare wards, where twenty patients slept side by side, with the wind whistling round them from the chinks in the worm-eaten doors and window-frames. The battered furniture of the dreary mansion was ransacked in order that a tolerably comfortable bed and a dilapidated easy-chair might be found for Lionel’s private room.

The fever-stricken young man progressed very rapidly in the hands of his new attendant; and in little more than a week after his removal from Wilmingdon Hall the patient had recovered consciousness.

That recovery of consciousness was the most awful hour in Lionel Westford’s life—more awful even than the hour in which, stricken by the revelation of his father’s murder, he fell senseless on the turf in Wilmingdon Park.

As he opened his eyes and stared stupidly about him, trying helplessly to remember where he was, the bare and wretched aspect of the chamber sent a deadly chill to his heart.

Where was he? Never before had he seen those dreary, dirty walls. That dingy paper, with its geometrical pattern in dirty yellow and faded brown, falling in tattered shreds here and there, and looking as if it had not been renewed for twenty years, and those bare carpetless boards, belonged to no chamber that he could remember; for, poor and shabby though his Lambeth lodging had been, it had at least been clean, and here all looked dirty and disorderly. At first the invalid’s mind was too weak to arrive at any definite conclusion. He could only lie staring at the wretched chamber, with a vague wonder in his mind.

He knew he had never before been in that room; but for a time that was all he knew or sought to know. He was not terrified by its strangeness. He did not recollect where he had last been, or what had happened to him. His mind was almost a blank.

Then, little by little, memory came back, with all its power to torture. He remembered his pretty bedchamber at Wilmingdon Hall—the perfume of flowers blowing in at the open window, the luxurious furniture, the comfort and beauty of all around him.

Then the image of Julia Godwin arose before him in all the splendour of her beauty. Then a dark form pushed that brilliant image aside, and the face of the banker scowled at him with hate and fear in every lineament.

It was the countenance that had so often looked down upon him in his delirium. It looked on him now, as it had looked then; and it recalled the memory of the crime that had been committed in the northern wing.

Then the picture was complete. Lionel remembered all the past—the mystery which it had been his fate to discover; the secret which Providence had revealed to him; the evidence that had been link by link united into one perfect chain, identifying the Captain of the Lily Queen with the victim of Rupert Godwin.

But where was he? How had he been removed from the luxurious chamber which had been his to this dismal and poverty-stricken room, such as no gentleman’s servant would have occupied without complaining bitterly of the master who allotted it to him?

He fancied that he must have been removed into some desolate and disused chamber in Wilmingdon Hall. He was in the north wing, perhaps, in one of the bedchambers of that forgotten building, which ignorant people believed to be haunted by the shadows of the dead.

It was noon when Lionel Westford lay helpless in his lonely chamber, with the anguish of consciousness, instead of the childish fancies of delirium. The sunlight streamed into the room through the narrow opening of a shutter which had been blown against the outside of the window.

The window reached to the ground; and the young man was still scrutinizing his apartment with curious eyes, when the shutter was blown back from the window, and the chamber, which had been only dimly lighted before, was suddenly exposed to the full glare of the mid-day sun.

Lionel Westford turned his gaze from the chamber itself to the prospect without.

In all this time he had never once doubted that he was still an inmate of Wilmingdon Hall. He fancied that he had only been removed to some remote and uninhabited part of the house, where his ravings could not be heard—where no prying ear could listen to the ominous words which might fall from his lips.

He believed this, and he was not disabused of his error; for, by a strange coincidence, the scene which met his eyes beyond the window of his room was not unlike the neglected garden which was to be seen from the windows of the northern wing.

There all was ruin and desolation—overgrown shrubs, whose straggling branches were strangers to the gardener’s pruning-knife, long rank grass, ill-looking weeds, moss-grown gravel. Here were the same weeds, the same rank grass, blown to and fro by the autumn wind, the same weird tangled bushes, withering under the autumn sun.

The northern garden at Wilmingdon Hall was shut in by an old brick wall; a noble mass of brickwork, with buttresses that might have served to sustain the ramparts of some mediæval castle. Here too the wall loomed, dark and dismal-looking, against the blue autumn sky.

“Yes,” muttered Lionel Westford; “they have removed me to the northern wing. The murderer feared to hear himself denounced by the lips of his victim’s son; and he has banished me here—here, where I may lie forgotten and neglected; here, where she may never know my fate! I only wonder that he has let me live; for he must know that, if I am ever able to leave this place, I shall devote the rest of my life to the task of bringing my father’s assassin to justice.”

Then, as he put the story of the past together bit by bit, Lionel Westford remembered that he had entered Wilmingdon Hall under an assumed name. He did not think of his mother’s letter, or his father’s miniature—two things which bore direct evidence to his identity.

“I am only a stranger to Rupert Godwin,” thought the young man, “unless in my delirium—for I suppose I have been delirious—I have revealed who I am, and my knowledge of his iniquity. Surely, if I had done so, he would have murdered me while I lay helpless in his power, as he murdered my father; and since I live, I may be sure that I owe my life to his ignorance.”

For some time he lay too weak to move, gazing straight before him at the desolate garden, the neglected weeds waving drearily to and fro in the wind.

“Strange,” he thought, “very strange, that they should have banished me to the building within whose walls my father met his fate.”

Then, with a faint thrill of that latent superstition which lurks in almost every breast, he remembered the ghastly stories he had heard about that northern wing—the shrouded form which had scared ignorant intruders, and sent them shrieking from that deserted edifice.

He remembered all this now. He had smiled at the foolish stories when they were told him, and had laughed to scorn the servants’ talk of ghosts and goblins; but now, weakened by his illness, prostrate, lonely, and wretched, Lionel thought very differently of the gloomy regions of which he fancied himself an inhabitant.

As the dreary moments crept on, intolerably long while they left him in such miserable uncertainty with regard to his fate, the invalid’s spirits sank lower and lower, and the agonizing tears of despair filled his eyes.

Then a kind of superstitious horror took possession of him. His utter loneliness, the strange quiet of the place, oppressed him to an extreme degree. The thought of his father’s assassination became every moment more vivid, until he pictured the scene of horror in all its hideous detail.

“O, God!” he exclaimed, bursting into a flood of hysterical tears, “if Rupert Godwin does know who I am, it must have been by the instinct of a refined and hellish cruelty that he decided upon banishing me to this deserted building. If ever the dead yet haunted the living, surely my father’s shadow will haunt me.”

The words had scarcely escaped his lips, the tears were still wet upon his cheeks, when a dark form suddenly came between him and the sunlight.

A white death-like face looked in at him with a wan melancholy gaze.

Lionel Westford lifted himself from the pillow, uttered a wild prolonged shriek, and then fell back unconscious.

It was his father’s face that had looked at him through the sunlit window—the face of the Captain of the Lily Queen, the face that had smiled upon him in the days of his careless boyhood; but changed into the face of death.