LITMIR.BIZ

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am so sorry for you, Alan,’ he murmured, ‘but you leave me no alternative. I have a letter written already. Here it is. You see the address. If you don’t help me, I must send it. If you don’t help me, I will send it. You know what the result will be. But you are going to help me. It is impossible for you to refuse now. I tried to spare you. You will do me the justice to admit that. You were stern, harsh, offensive. You treated me as no man has ever dared to treat me – no living man, at any rate. I bore it all. Now it is for me to dictate terms.’

      Campbell buried his face in his hands, and a shudder passed through him.

      ‘Yes, it is my turn to dictate terms, Alan. You know what they are. The thing is quite simple. Come, don’t work yourself into this fever. The thing has to be done. Face it, and do it.’

      A groan broke from Campbell’s lips, and he shivered all over. The ticking of the clock on the mantelpiece seemed to him to be dividing Time into separate atoms of agony, each of which was too terrible to be borne. He felt as if an iron ring was being slowly tightened round his forehead, as if the disgrace with which he was threatened had already come upon him. The hand upon his shoulder weighed like a hand of lead. It was intolerable. It seemed to crush him.

      ‘Come, Alan, you must decide at once.’

      ‘I cannot do it,’ he said mechanically, as though words could alter things.

      ‘You must. You have no choice. Don’t delay.’

      He hesitated a moment. ‘Is there a fire in the room upstairs?’

      ‘Yes, there is a gas-fire with asbestos.’

      ‘I shall have to go home and get some things from the laboratory.’

      ‘No, Alan, you must not leave the house. Write out on a sheet of notepaper what you want, and my servant will take a cab and bring the things back to you.’

      Campbell scrawled a few lines, blotted them, and addressed an envelope to his assistant. Dorian took the note up and read it carefully. Then he rang the bell and gave it to his valet, with orders to return as soon as possible, and to bring the things with him.

      As the hall door shut, Campbell started nervously, and, having got up from the chair, went over to the chimney-piece. He was shivering with a kind of ague. For nearly twenty minutes neither of the men spoke. A fly buzzed noisily about the room, and the ticking of the clock was like the beat of a hammer.

      As the chime struck one, Campbell turned round, and, looking at Dorian Gray, saw that his eyes were filled with tears. There was something in the purity and refinement of that sad face that seemed to enrage him. ‘You are infamous, absolutely infamous!’ he muttered.

      ‘Hush, Alan: you have saved my life,’ said Dorian.

      ‘Your life? Good heavens! What a life that is! You have gone from corruption to corruption, and now you have culminated in crime. In doing what I am going to do, what you force me to do, it is not of your life that I am thinking.’

      ‘Ah, Alan,’ murmured Dorian, with a sigh, ‘I wish you had a thousandth part of the pity for me that I have for you.’ He turned away as he spoke, and stood looking out at the garden. Campbell made no answer.

      After about ten minutes a knock came to the door, and the servant entered, carrying a large mahogany chest of chemicals, with a long coil of steel and platinum wire and two rather curiously-shaped iron clamps.

      ‘Shall I leave the things here, sir?’ he asked Campbell.

      ‘Yes,’ said Dorian. ‘And I am afraid, Francis, that I have another errand for you. What is the name of the man at Richmond who supplies Selby with orchids?’

      ‘Harden, sir.’

      ‘Yes – Harden. You must go down to Richmond at once, see Harden personally, and tell him to send twice as many orchids as I ordered, and to have as few white ones as possible. In fact, I don’t want any white ones. It is a lovely day, Francis, and Richmond is a very pretty place, otherwise I wouldn’t bother you about it.’

      ‘No trouble, sir. At what time shall I be back?’

      Dorian looked at Campbell. ‘How long will your experiment take, Alan?’ he said in a calm, indifferent voice. The presence of a third person in the room seemed to give him extraordinary courage.

      Campbell frowned, and bit his lip. ‘It will take about five hours,’ he answered.

      ‘It will be time enough, then, if you are back at half-past seven, Francis. Or stay: just leave my things out for dressing. You can have the evening to yourself. I am not dining at home, so I shall not want you.’

      ‘Thank you, sir,’ said the man, leaving the room.

      ‘Now, Alan, there is not a moment to be lost. How heavy this chest is! I’ll take it for you. You bring the other things.’ He spoke rapidly, and in an authoritative manner. Campbell felt dominated by him. They left the room together.

      When they reached the top landing, Dorian took out the key and turned it in the lock. Then he stopped, and a troubled look came into his eyes. He shuddered. ‘I don’t think I can go in, Alan,’ he murmured.

      ‘It is nothing to me. I don’t require you,’ said Campbell, coldly.

      Dorian half opened the door. As he did so, he saw the face of his portrait leering in the sunlight. On the floor in front of it the torn curtain was lying. He remembered that the night before he had forgotten, for the first time in his life, to hide the fatal canvas, and was about to rush forward, when he drew back with a shudder.

      What was that loathsome red dew that gleamed, wet and glistening, on one of the hands, as though the canvas had sweated blood? How horrible it was! – more horrible, it seemed to him for the moment, than the silent thing that he knew was stretched across the table, the thing whose grotesque misshapen shadow on the spotted carpet showed him that it had not stirred, but was still there, as he had left it.

      He heaved a deep breath, opened the door a little wider, and with half-closed eyes and averted head walked quickly in, determined that he would not look even once upon the dead man. Then, stooping down, and taking up the gold and purple hanging, he flung it right over the picture.

      There he stopped, feeling afraid to turn round, and his eyes fixed themselves on the intricacies of the pattern before him. He heard Campbell bringing in the heavy chest, and the irons, and the other things that he had required for his dreadful work. He began to wonder if he and Basil Hallward had ever met, and, if so, what they had thought of each other.

      ‘Leave me now,’ said a stern voice behind him.

      He turned and hurried out, just conscious that the dead man had been thrust back into the chair, and that Campbell was gazing into a glistening yellow face. As he was going downstairs he heard the key being turned in the lock.

      It was long after seven when Campbell came back into the library. He was pale, but absolutely calm. ‘I have done what you asked me to do,’ he muttered. ‘And now, good-bye. Let us never see each other again.’

      ‘You have saved me from ruin, Alan. I cannot forget that,’ said Dorian, simply.

      As soon as Campbell had left, he went upstairs. There was a horrible smell of nitric acid in the room. But the thing that had been sitting at the table was gone.

      15

      THAT evening, at eight-thirty, exquisitely dressed and wearing a large button-hole of Parma violets, Dorian Gray was ushered into Lady Narborough’s drawing-room by bowing servants. His forehead was throbbing with maddened nerves, and he felt wildly excited, but his manner as he bent over his hostess’s hand was as easy and graceful as ever. Perhaps one never seems so much at one’s ease as when one has to play a part. Certainly no one looking at Dorian Gray that night could have believed that he had passed through a tragedy as horrible as any tragedy of our age. Those finely-shaped fingers could never have clutched a

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