Chapter 6. Alresca's Fate

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_ CHAPTER VI. ALRESCA'S FATE

The house was large, and its beautiful facade fronted a narrow canal. To say that the spot was picturesque is to say little, for the whole of Bruges is picturesque. This corner of the Quai des Augustins was distinguished even in Bruges. The aspect of the mansion, with its wide entrance and broad courtyard, on which the inner windows looked down in regular array, was simple and dignified in the highest degree. The architecture was an entirely admirable specimen of Flemish domestic work of the best period, and the internal decoration and the furniture matched to a nicety the exterior. It was in that grave and silent abode, with Alresca, that I first acquired a taste for bric-a-brac. Ah! the Dutch marquetry, the French cabinetry, the Belgian brassware, the curious panellings, the oak-frames, the faience, the silver candlesticks, the Amsterdam toys in silver, the Antwerp incunables, and the famous tenth-century illuminated manuscript in half-uncials! Such trifles abounded, and in that antique atmosphere they had the quality of exquisite fitness.

And on the greenish waters of the canal floated several gigantic swans, with insatiable and endless appetites. We used to feed them from the dining-room windows, which overhung the canal.

I was glad to be out of London, and as the days passed my gladness increased. I had not been pleased with myself in London. As the weeks followed each other, I had been compelled to admit to myself that the case of Alresca held mysteries for me, even medical mysteries. During the first day or two I had thought that I understood it, and I had despised the sayings of Rosetta Rosa in the carriage, and the misgivings with which my original examination of Alresca had inspired me. And then I gradually perceived that, after all, the misgivings had been justified. The man's thigh made due progress; but the man, slowly failing, lost interest in the struggle for life.

Here I might proceed to a technical dissertation upon his physical state, but it would be useless. A cloud of long words will not cover ignorance; and I was most emphatically ignorant. At least, such knowledge as I had obtained was merely of a negative character. All that I could be sure of was that this was by no means an instance of mysterious disease. There was no disease, as we understand the term. In particular, there was no decay of the nerve-centres. Alresca was well--in good health. What he lacked was the will to live--that strange and mystic impulse which alone divides us from death. It was, perhaps, hard on a young G.P. to be confronted by such a medical conundrum at the very outset of his career; but, then, the Maker of conundrums seldom considers the age and inexperience of those who are requested to solve them.

Yes, this was the first practical proof that had come to me of the sheer empiricism of the present state of medicine.

We had lived together--Alresca and I--peaceably, quietly, sadly. He appeared to have ample means, and the standard of luxury which existed in his flat was a high one. He was a connoisseur in every department of art and life, and took care that he was well served. Perhaps it would be more correct to say that he had once taken care to be well served, and that the custom primarily established went on by its own momentum. For he did not exercise even such control as a sick man might have been expected to exercise. He seemed to be concerned with nothing, save that occasionally he would exhibit a flickering curiosity as to the opera season which was drawing to a close.

Unfortunately, there was little operatic gossip to be curious about. Rosa had fulfilled her engagement and gone to another capital, and since her departure the season had, perhaps inevitably, fallen flat. Of course, the accident to and indisposition of Alresca had also contributed to this end. And there had been another factor in the case--a factor which, by the way, constituted the sole item of news capable of rousing Alresca from his torpor. I refer to the disappearance of Sir Cyril Smart.

Soon after my cousin Sullivan's reception, the papers had reported Sir Cyril to be ill, and then it was stated that he had retired to a remote Austrian watering-place (name unmentioned) in order to rest and recuperate. Certain weekly papers of the irresponsible sort gave publicity to queer rumors--that Sir Cyril had fought a duel and been wounded, that he had been attacked one night in the streets, even that he was dead. But these rumors were generally discredited, and meanwhile the opera season ran its course under the guidance of Sir Cyril's head man, Mr. Nolan, so famous for his diamond shirt-stud.

Perhaps I could have thrown some light upon the obscurity which enveloped the doings of Sir Cyril Smart. But I preferred to remain inactive. Locked away in my writing-case I kept the jewelled dagger so mysteriously found by me outside the Devonshire Mansion.

I had mentioned the incidents of that night to no one, and probably not a soul on the planet guessed that the young doctor in attendance upon Alresca had possession of a little toy-weapon which formed a startling link between two existences supposed to be unconnected save in the way of business--those of Sir Cyril and Rosetta Rosa. I hesitated whether to send the dagger to Rosa, and finally decided that I would wait until I saw her again, if ever that should happen, and then do as circumstances should dictate. I often wondered whether the silent man with the fixed gaze, whom I had met in Oxford Street that night, had handled the dagger, or whether his presence was a mere coincidence. To my speculations I discovered no answer.

Then the moment had come when Alresca's thigh was so far mended that, under special conditions, we could travel, and one evening, after a journey full of responsibilities for me, we had arrived in Bruges.

Soon afterwards came a slight alteration.

Alresca took pleasure in his lovely house, and I was aware of an improvement in his condition. The torpor was leaving him, and his spirits grew livelier. Unfortunately, it was difficult to give him outdoor exercise, since the roughly paved streets made driving impossible for him, and he was far from being able to walk. After a time I contrived to hire a large rowing boat, and on fine afternoons it was our custom to lower him from the quay among the swans into this somewhat unwieldy craft, so that he might take the air as a Venetian. The idea tickled him, and our progress along the disused canals was always a matter of interest to the towns-people, who showed an unappeasable inquisitiveness concerning their renowned fellow citizen.

It was plain to me that he was recovering; that he had lifted himself out of the circle of that strange influence under which he had nearly parted with his life. The fact was plain to me, but the explanation of the fact was not plain. I was as much puzzled by his rise as I had been puzzled by his descent. But that did not prevent me from trying to persuade myself that this felicitous change in my patient's state must be due, after all, to the results of careful dieting, a proper curriculum of daily existence, supervision of mental tricks and habits--in short, of all that minute care and solicitude which only a resident doctor can give to a sick man.

One evening he was especially alert and gay, and I not less so. We were in the immense drawing-room, which, like the dining-room, overlooked the canal. Dinner was finished--we dined at six, the Bruges hour--and Alresca lay on his invalid's couch, ejecting from his mouth rings of the fine blue smoke of a Javanese cigar, a box of which I had found at the tobacco shop kept by two sisters at the corner of the Grande Place. I stood at the great central window, which was wide open, and watched the whiteness of the swans moving vaguely over the surface of the canal in the oncoming twilight. The air was warm and heavy, and the long, high-pitched whine of the mosquito swarms--sole pest of the city--had already begun.

"Alresca," I said, "your days as an invalid are numbered."

"Why do you say that?"

"No one who was really an invalid could possibly enjoy that cigar as you are enjoying it."

"A good cigar--a glass of good wine," he murmured, savoring the perfume of the cigar. "What would life be without them?"

"A few weeks ago, and you would have said: 'What is life even with them?'"

"Then you really think I am better?" he smiled.

"I'm sure of it."

"As for me," he returned, "I confess it. That has happened which I thought never would happen. I am once more interested in life. The wish to live has come back. I am glad to be alive. Carl, your first case has been a success."

"No thanks to me," I said. "Beyond seeing that you didn't displace the broken pieces of your thigh-bone, what have I done? Nothing. No one knows that better than you do."

"That's your modesty--your incurable modesty."

I shook my head, and went to stand by his couch. I was profoundly aware then, despite all the efforts of my self-conceit to convince myself to the contrary, that I had effected nothing whatever towards his recovery, that it had accomplished itself without external aid. But that did not lessen my intense pleasure in the improvement. By this time I had a most genuine affection for Alresca. The rare qualities of the man--his serenity, his sense of justice, his invariable politeness and consideration, the pureness of his soul--had captured me completely. I was his friend. Perhaps I was his best friend in the world. The singular circumstances of our coming together had helped much to strengthen the tie between us. I glanced down at him, full of my affection for him, and minded to take advantage of the rights of that affection for once in a way.

"Alresca," I said quietly.

"Well?"

"What was it?"

"What was what?"

I met his gaze.

"What was that thing that you have fought and driven off? What is the mystery of it? You know--you must know. Tell me."

His eyelids fell.

"Better to leave the past alone," said he. "Granting that I had formed an idea, I could not put it into proper words. I have tried to do so. In the expectation of death I wrote down certain matters. But these I shall now destroy. I am wiser, less morbid. I can perceive that there are fields of thought of which it is advisable to keep closed the gates. Do as I do, Carl--forget. Take the credit for my recovery, and be content with that."

I felt that he was right, and resumed my position near the window, humming a tune.

"In a week you may put your foot to the ground; you will then no longer have to be carried about like a parcel." I spoke in a casual tone.

"Good!" he ejaculated.

"And then our engagement will come to an end, and you will begin to sing again."

"Ah!" he said contemplatively, after a pause, "sing!"

It seemed as if singing was a different matter.

"Yes," I repeated, "sing. You must throw yourself into that. It will be the best of all tonics."

"Have I not told you that I should never sing again?"

"Perhaps you have," I replied; "but I don't remember. And even if you have, as you yourself have just said, you are now wiser, less morbid."

"True!" he murmured. "Yes, I must sing. They want me at Chicago. I will go, and while there I will spread abroad the fame of Carl Foster."

He smiled gaily, and then his face became meditative and sad.

"My artistic career has never been far away from tragedy," he said at length. "It was founded on a tragedy, and not long ago I thought it would end in one."

I waited in silence, knowing that if he wished to tell me any private history, he would begin of his own accord.

"You are listening, Carl?"

I nodded. It was growing dusk.

"You remember I pointed out to you the other day the little house in the Rue d'Ostende where my parents lived?"

"Perfectly."

"That," he proceeded, using that curiously formal and elaborate English which he must have learned from reading-books, "that was the scene of the tragedy which made me an artist. I have told you that my father was a schoolmaster. He was the kindest of men, but he had moods of frightful severity--moods which subsided as quickly as they arose. At the age of three, just as I was beginning to talk easily, I became, for a period, subject to fits; and in one of these I lost the power of speech. I, Alresca, could make no sound; and for seven years that tenor whom in the future people were to call 'golden-throated,' and 'world-famous,' and 'unrivalled,' had no voice." He made a deprecatory gesture. "When I think of it, Carl, I can scarcely believe it--so strange are the chances of life. I could hear and understand, but I could not speak.

"Of course, that was forty years ago, and the system of teaching mutes to talk was not then invented, or, at any rate, not generally understood. So I was known and pitied as the poor dumb boy. I took pleasure in dumb animals, and had for pets a silver-gray cat, a goat, and a little spaniel. One afternoon--I should be about ten years old--my father came home from his school and sitting down, laid his head on the table and began to cry. Seeing him cry, I also began to cry; I was acutely sensitive.

"'What is the matter?' asked my good mother.

"'Alas!' he said, 'I am a murderer!'

"'Nay, that cannot be,' she replied.

"'I say it is so,' said my father. 'I have murdered a child--a little girl. I grumbled at her yesterday. I was annoyed and angry--because she had done her lessons ill. I sent her home, but instead of going home she went to the outer canal and drowned herself. They came and told me this afternoon. Yes, I am a murderer!'

"I howled, while my mother tried to comfort my father, pointing out to him that if he had spoken roughly to the child it was done for the child's good, and that he could not possibly have foreseen the catastrophe. But her words were in vain.

"We all went to bed. In the middle of the night I heard my dear silver-gray cat mewing at the back of the house. She had been locked out. I rose and went down-stairs to let her in. To do so it was necessary for me to pass through the kitchen. It was quite dark, and I knocked against something in the darkness. With an inarticulate scream, I raced up-stairs again to my parents' bedroom. I seized my mother by her night-dress and dragged her towards the door. She stopped only to light a candle, and hand-in-hand we went down-stairs to the kitchen. The candle threw around its fitful, shuddering glare, and my mother's eyes followed mine. Some strange thing happened in my throat.

"'Mother!' I cried, in a hoarse, uncouth, horrible voice, and, casting myself against her bosom, I clung convulsively to her. From a hook in the ceiling beam my father's corpse dangled. He had hanged himself in the frenzy of his remorse. So my speech came to me again."

All the man's genius for tragic acting, that genius which had made him unique in "Tristan" and in "Tannhauser," had been displayed in this recital; and its solitary auditor was more moved by it than superficially appeared. Neither of us spoke a word for a few minutes. Then Alresca, taking aim, threw the end of his cigar out of the window.

"Yes," I said at length, "that was tragedy, that was!"

He proceeded:

"The critics are always praising me for the emotional qualities in my singing. Well, I cannot use my voice without thinking of the dreadful circumstance under which Fate saw fit to restore that which Fate had taken away."

And there fell a long silence, and night descended on the canal, and the swans were nothing now but pale ghosts wandering soundlessly over the water.

"Carl," Alresca burst out with a start--he was decidedly in a mood to be communicative that evening--"have you ever been in love?"

In the gloom I could just distinguish that he was leaning his head on his arm.

"No," I answered; "at least, I think not;" and I wondered if I had been, if I was, in love.

"You have that which pleases women, you know, and you will have chances, plenty of chances. Let me advise you--either fall in love young or not at all. If you have a disappointment before you are twenty-five it is nothing. If you have a disappointment after you are thirty-five, it is--everything."

He sighed.

"No, Alresca," I said, surmising that he referred to his own case, "not everything, surely?"

"You are right," he replied. "Even then it is not everything. The human soul is unconquerable, even by love. But, nevertheless, be warned. Do not drive it late. Ah! Why should I not confess to you, now that all is over? Carl, you are aware that I have loved deeply. Can you guess what being in love meant to me? Probably not. I am aging now, but in my youth I was handsome, and I have had my voice. Women, the richest, the cleverest, the kindest--they fling themselves at such as me. There is no vanity in saying so; it is the simple fact. I might have married a hundred times; I might have been loved a thousand times. But I remained--as I was. My heart slept like that of a young girl. I rejected alike the open advances of the bold and the shy, imperceptible signals of the timid. Women were not for me. In secret I despised them. I really believe I did.

"Then--and it is not yet two years ago--I met her whom you know. And I--I the scorner, fell in love. All my pride, my self-assurance crumbled into ruin about me, and left me naked to the torment of an unrequited passion. I could not credit the depth of my misfortune, and at first it was impossible for me to believe that she was serious in refusing me. But she had the right. She was an angel, and I only a man. She was the most beautiful woman in the world."

"She was--she is," I said.

He laughed easily.

"She is," he repeated. "But she is nothing to me. I admire her beauty and her goodness, that is all. She refused me. Good! At first I rebelled against my fate, then I accepted it." And he repeated: "Then I accepted it."

I might have made some reply to his flattering confidences, but I heard some one walk quickly across the foot-path outside and through the wide entrance porch. In another moment the door of the salon was thrown open, and a figure stood radiant and smiling in the doorway. The antechamber had already been lighted, and the figure was silhouetted against the yellow radiance.

"So you are here, and I have found you, all in the dark!"

Alresca turned his head.

"Rosa!" he cried in bewilderment, put out his arms, and then drew them sharply back again.

It was Rosetta. She ran towards us, and shook hands with kind expressions of greeting, and our eyes followed her as she moved about, striking matches and applying them to candles. Then she took off her hat and veil.

"There! I seemed to know the house," she said. "Immediately I had entered the courtyard I felt that there was a corridor running to the right, and at the end of that corridor some steps and a landing and a door, and on the other side of that door a large drawing-room. And so, without ringing or waiting for the faithful Alexis, I came in."

"And what brings you to Bruges, dear lady?" asked Alresca.

"Solicitude for your health, dear sir," she replied, smiling. "At Bayreuth I met that quaint person, Mrs. Sullivan Smith, who told me that you were still here with Mr. Foster; and to-day, as I was travelling from Cologne to Ostend, the idea suddenly occurred to me to spend one night at Bruges, and make inquiries into your condition--and that of Mr. Foster. You know the papers have been publishing the most contradictory accounts."

"Have they indeed?" laughed Alresca.

But I could see that he was nervous and not at ease. For myself, I was, it must be confessed, enchanted to see Rosa again, and so unexpectedly, and it was amazingly nice of her to include myself in her inquiries, and yet I divined that it would have been better if she had never come. I had a sense of some sort of calamity.

Alresca was flushed. He spoke in short, hurried sentences. Alternately his tones were passionate and studiously cold. Rosa's lovely presence, her musical chatter, her gay laughter, filled the room. She seemed to exhale a delightful and intoxicating atmosphere, which spread itself through the chamber and enveloped the soul of Alresca. It was as if he fought against an influence, and then gradually yielded to the sweetness of it. I observed him closely--for was he not my patient?--and I guessed that a struggle was passing within him. I thought of what he had just been saying to me, and I feared lest the strong will should be scarcely so strong as it had deemed itself.

"You have dined?" asked Alresca.

"I have eaten," she said. "One does not dine after a day's travelling."

"Won't you have some coffee?"

She consented to the coffee, which Alexis John Smedley duly brought in, and presently she was walking lightly to and fro, holding the tiny white cup in her white hand, and peering at the furniture and bric-a-brac by the light of several candles. Between whiles she related to Alresca all the news of their operatic acquaintances--how this one was married, another stranded in Buenos Ayres, another ill with jealousy, another ill with a cold, another pursued for debt, and so on through the diverting category.

"And Smart?" Alresca queried at length.

I had been expecting and hoping for this question.

"Oh, Sir Cyril! I have heard nothing of him. He is not a person that interests me."

She shut her lips tight and looked suddenly across in my direction, and our eyes met, but she made no sign that I could interpret. If she had known that the little jewelled dagger lay in the room over her head!

Her straw hat and thin white veil lay on a settee between two windows. She picked them up, and began to pull the pins out of the hat. Then she put the hat down again.

"I must run away soon, Alresca," she said, bending over him, "but before I leave I should like to go through the whole house. It seems such a quaint place. Will you let Mr. Foster show me? He shall not be away from you long."

"In the dark?"

"Why not? We can have candles."

And so, a heavy silver candlestick in either hand, I presently found myself preceding Rosa up the wide branching staircase of the house. We had left the owner with a reading-lamp at the head of his couch, and a copy of "Madame Bovary" to pass the time.

We stopped at the first landing to examine a picture.

"That mysterious complaint that he had, or thought he had, in London has left him, has it not?" she asked me suddenly, in a low, slightly apprehensive, confidential tone, moving her head in the direction of the salon below.

For some reason I hesitated.

"He says so," I replied cautiously. "At any rate, he is much better."

"Yes, I can see that. But he is still in a very nervous condition."

"Ah," I said, "that is only--only at certain times."

As we went together from room to room I forgot everything except the fact of her presence. Never was beauty so powerful as hers; never was the power of beauty used so artlessly, with such a complete unconsciousness. I began gloomily to speculate on the chances of her ultimately marrying Alresca, and a remark from her awoke me from my abstraction. We were nearing the top of the house.

"It is all familiar to me, in a way," she said.

"Why, you said the same down-stairs. Have you been here before?"

"Never, to my knowledge."

We were traversing a long, broad passage side by side. Suddenly I tripped over an unexpected single stair, and nearly fell. Rosa, however, had allowed for it.

"I didn't see that step," I said.

"Nor I," she answered, "but I knew, somehow, that it was there. It is very strange and uncanny, and I shall insist on an explanation from Alresca." She gave a forced laugh.

As I fumbled with the handle of the door she took hold of my hand.

"Listen!" she said excitedly, "this will be a small room, and over the mantelpiece is a little round picture of a dog."

I opened the door with something akin to a thrill. This part of the house was unfamiliar to me. The room was certainly a small one, but there was no little round picture over the mantelpiece. It was a square picture, and rather large, and a sea-piece.

"You guessed wrong," I said, and I felt thankful.

"No, no, I am sure."

She went to the square picture, and lifted it away from the wall.

"Look!" she said.

Behind the picture was a round whitish mark on the wall, showing where another picture had previously hung.

"Let us go, let us go! I don't like the flicker of these candles," she murmured, and she seized my arm.

We returned to the corridor. Her grip of me tightened.

"Was not that Alresca?" she cried.

"Where?"

"At the end of the corridor--there!"

"I saw no one, and it couldn't have been he, for the simple reason that he can't walk yet, not to mention climbing three flights of stairs. You have made yourself nervous."

We descended to the ground-floor. In the main hall Alresca's housekeeper, evidently an old acquaintance, greeted Rosa with a curtsy, and she stopped to speak to the woman. I went on to the salon.

The aspect of the room is vividly before me now as I write. Most of the great chamber was in a candle-lit gloom, but the reading-lamp burnt clearly at the head of the couch, throwing into prominence the fine profile of Alresca's face. He had fallen asleep, or at any rate his eyes were closed. The copy of "Madame Bovary" lay on the floor, and near it a gold pencil-case. Quietly I picked the book up, and saw on the yellow cover of it some words written in pencil. These were the words:

"Carl, I love her. He has come again. This time it is ----"

I looked long at his calm and noble face, and bent and listened. At that moment Rosa entered. Concealing the book, I held out my right hand with a gesture.

"Softly!" I enjoined her, and my voice broke.

"Why? What?"

"He is dead," I said.

It did not occur to me that I ought to have prepared her. _

Read next: Chapter 7. The Vigil By The Bier

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