Chapter 5– Madness Half-Divine

Nothing, not even the invigorating wrath I had so carefully nursed and kept warm as I traversed London (1), prepared me for what I found there.  Edmund was a pale wraith, unkempt with his clothes hanging off a frame now gaunt.  He fixed me with the wild look of a man half mad.

"My God!" I cried, my anger giving way to horror.  "What have you been doing to yourself?"

There seemed a dim flicker of recognition as I spoke, but then he turned right back to his feverish work, ignoring me entirely.

I wandered his studio while he worked, hoping for a hint of what had transpired.  Canvasses were strewn everywhere; some with forms and color blocked in, some only sketchy scribblings in charcoal.  'Thalia' was everywhere; as a Victorian lady, a woodland spirit, a Grecian goddess in unabashed unclad splendor.  She was Athena, the Faerie Queen, Rosalind, and even, in one completed work, a mournful Blessed Mother, a pieta (2) that could have moved the very heavens to lamentations.  Scattered throughout were empty bottles, from cheap drink to every medical confectionary.  Behind the weeping Madonna, I found a depleted bottle with a tincture of wormwood (3), a particularly poor preparation judging from the foul odor.   That discovery, even without the witness of the other emptied vessels, could have explained his demeanor, if only he seemed more intoxicated and less disturbed.  Edmund was oblivious to my rummaging, meticulously twining painted strands of auburn hair, ruffled by a gentle breeze, around an outstretched arm in his latest work.  My anger returned, seeing him so consumed in perfecting his 'Thalia'.  I roughly seized his wrist, wresting the brush from his fingers.

"This is absurd, Edmund.  Stop this at once."

He first tried to wrench his wrist out of my hold, attempting to snatch the brush with his other hand.  When this resulted only in me tightening my hold and pulling him further from his work, he abruptly became violent, turning on me; viciously clawing at my face and striking out wildly, his lip curling back in a snarl.  Fortunately, his sudden passion was not augmented by any actual pugilistic skill and I held him off with ease. I threw the brush across the room and struck him soundly with the back of my hand.  After a few blows, his eyes seemed to clear of the feral gleam and he sagged against me, weeping.  He could barely form words as he sobbed.

"She's gone Dorian.  She's left me, alone.  She doesn't even come in dreams now.  I keep trying; to sleep, to bring on the dreams."

I grasped his shoulders and shook him roughly.  I had never known Edmund to become so maudlin when intoxicated, though I had also never known him to indulge in so many substances at once, and I was still earnestly hoping he was only drugged into insensibility.

"For God sake's Edmund, pull yourself together.  So the tart has moved on to greener pastures; Let her go." 

He let out a particularly wet sniffle and straightened, composing himself slightly.  Then he caught sight of the painting I had torn him away from.

"My talent is all I have left but it is enough.  This one will be my masterpiece." He sighed, scrutinizing his work.

For a moment, I truly believed he was reasonable again, that he suffered only the pains of wounded pride common to lovers scorned and that he would soon mend, but he continued speaking and my heart sank.

"This will be my final painting.  For I have done the impossible; I have captured her nature," his voice breaking as he lovingly stroked the painted face.  "It is here, her true essence.  Isn't she lovely?"

It was then that my attention turned fully from the painter to the painted.  I saw what he had wrought upon the canvass and grasped the full import of his demeanor.  His fingers moved over sharp teeth peeking out from a wicked smile, eyes slitted and malevolent, as the demonic sylph reached out with hungry claws for the armor-sheathed knight, a knight wearing the handsome, youthful visage Edmund had once worn.  I recoiled from the demented image.  Edmund laughed wildly at my pained look.  His laughter bubbled out of him; a mad, unhinged mirth.  He just stood there laughing and running his finger along her cheek, smudging the still damp paint.

There was no hope; Edmund was completely mad.  He had given his sanity over to intoxicants and this fantasy woman watching me from a thousand painted eyes.  As I turned to leave, I heard his soft whisper.

"She has me, Dorian.  There is no escape, for she has me, unredeemably, unrepentantly, and utterly in her thrall."

So shocked was I, I did not even voice the quip that immediately rose to mind, that she also had him alliteratively and somewhat redundantly in her thrall.  Instead, I simply walked out, leaving the door hanging open, and headed home.

It was the last I ever saw of him – crooning affections to his own creation, truly la belle dame sans merci (4).

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

(1) From Robert Burns' Tam o'Shanter,

                                                      "Where sits our sulky, sullen dame,
                                                       Gathering her brows like gathering storm,
                                                       Nursing her wrath to keep it warm",

(2)  A pieta is any depiction of  Mary holding the crucified body of Christ.

(3) –Or absinthe.

(4) Dorian is echoing Edmund's allusion to Keats' 'La Belle Dame sans Merci' – the beautiful lady with no mercy – wherein an evil faerie lures a young knight, seducing and, ultimately, killing him.  In her arms, he dreams,

                                                    " I saw pale kings and princes too,

                                                        Pale warriors, death-pale were they all:

                                                        They cried, 'La belle Dame sans Merci

                                                        Hath thee in thrall!'"