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STRANGE STORY ,
AND THI
HAUNTED AND THE HAUNTERS
BY
SIR EDWARD EULWER LYTTON, BART.
“To doubt and to be astonished is to recognize our ignorance. Hence it is that
the lover of wisdom is in I cal-min sort a lover of myth! (WMWM‘ m“), for {11.
luldoct of myth! in the Astonishing and mmellou."—Sm W. Ilnnuou (1M
Aristotle), Lcduru on Idaphytics, vol. I. p. 78.
COMPLETE IN ONE VOLUME


PHILADELPHIA
J. B. LIPPINCOTT 8; CO.
1880.
F...\ .
‘ﬁ'


__
_ THE NEW 1011}
‘ PUBLIC LIBRARY
v2958683
ASTOR. LENOX AND
TIL-DIN FOUNDATIONS
I 1


PREFACE.
OF the many illustrious thinkers whom the schools
of France have contributed to the intellectual phi—
losophy of our age, Victor Cousin, the most accom-
plished, assigns to Maine de Biran the rank of the
most original.
In the successive developments of his own mind
Maine de Biran may, indeed, be said to represent
the change that has been silently at work through-
out the general mind of Europe since the close of
the last century. He begins his career of philosopher
with blind faith in Condillac and Materialism. As
an intellect severely conscientious in the pursuit of
truth expands amidst the perplexities it revolves,
phenomena which cannot be accounted for by Con-
dillac's sensuous theories open to his eye. To the
ﬁrst rudimentary life of man, the animal life, “ char-
acterized by impressions, appetites, movements, or-
ganic in their origin and ruled by the Law of News
1* ' (v)


vi summon.
sity," * he is compelled to add “ the second or human
life, from which Free-will and Self-consciousness
emerge." He thus arrives at the union of mind and
matter; but still a something is wanted—some key
to the marvels which neither of these conditions of
vital being sufﬁces to explain. And at last the grand
self-completing Thinker attains to the Third Life of
Man in Man's Soul.
“There are not," says this philosopher, towards
the close of his last and loftiest work— “ There are
not only two principles opposed to each other in
Man, there are three. For there are, in him, three
lives and three orders of faculties. Though all
should be in accord and in harmony between the
Sensitive and the active faculties which constitute
Man, there would still be a nature superior, a third
life which would not be satisﬁed ; which would make
felt (ferait sentir) the truth that there is another
happiness, another wisdom, another perfection, at
once above the greatest human happiness, above the
highest wisdom, or intellectual and moral perfection
of which the human beingr is susceptible.” 1“
Now, as Philosophy and Romance both take their
origin in the Principle of Wonder, so in the Strange
Story submitted to the Public, it will be seen that
* (Euvres inédites de Maine (is Birnn, vol. i. See Introduction.
1 (Euvres inédites de Maine de Bil-an, vol. iii. p. 646 (Anthro-
pologie).


PREFACE vi!
Romance, through the freest exercise of its wildest
vagaries, conducts its bewildered hero towards the
same goal to which Philosophy leads its luminous
Student, through far grander portents of Nature,
far higher visions of Supernatural Power than Fable
can yield to Fancy. That goal is deﬁned in these
noble words: “The relations (rapporta) which exist
between the elements and the products of the three
lives of Man are the subjects of meditation, the
fairest and ﬁnest, but also the most difﬁcult. The
Stoic Philosophy shows us all which can be most
elevated in active life;- but it makes abstraction of
the animal nature, and absolutely fails to recognize
all which belongs to the life of the spirit. Its prac-
tical morality is beyond the forces of humanity.
Christianity alone embraces the whole Man. It dis-
simulates none of the sides of his nature, and avails
itself of his miseries and his weakness in order to
conduct him to his end in showing him all the want
that he has of a succor more exalted." *
In the passages thus quoted I imply one of the
objects for which this tale has been written; and I
cite them, with a wish to acknowledge one of those
priceless obligations which writings the lightest and
most fantastic often incur to reasoners the most
serious and profound.
l‘ (Euvres inédites de Maine de Birun, vol. iii. p. 524.


viii PREFACE.
But I here construct a romance which should
have, as a romance, some interest for the general
reader.’ I do not elaborate a treatise submitted to
the logic of sages. And it is only when “in fairy
ﬁction drest" that Romance gives admission to
“ truths severe."
I venture to assume that none will question my
privilege to avail myself of the marvellous agencies
which have ever been at the legitimate command of
the fabulist.
To the highest form of romantic narrative, the
Epic, critics, indeed, have declared that a super-
natural machinery is indispensable. That the Drama
has availed itself of the same license as the Epic, it
would be unnecessary to say to the countrymen of
Shakespeare, or to the generation that is yet study-
ing the enigmas of Goethe’s Faust. Prose Romance
has immemorially asserted, no less than the Epic or
the Drama, its heritage in the Realm of the Mar-
vellous. The interest which attaches to the super-
natural is sought in the earliest Prose Romance which
modern times take from the ancient, and which, per-
haps, had its origin in the lost Novels of Miletus; "‘
and the right to invoke such interest has, ever since,
been maintained by Romance through all varieties
of form and fancy—from the majestic epopee of
* The Golden Ass of Apuleius.
_ /
'4 I_~i-.,_


PREFACE. ix
Télémaque to the graceful phantasies of Undine, or
the mighty mockeries of Gulliver’s Travels, down to
such comparatively commonplace elements of wonder
as yet preserve from oblivion the Castle of Otranto
and the old English Baron.
Now, to my mind, the true reason why a super-
natural agency is indispensable to the conception of
the Epic, is that the Epic is the highest and the
completest form in which Art can express either
Man or Nature, and that without some gleams of
the supernatural, Man is not man, nor Nature,
nature. '
It is said, by a writer to .whom an eminent phi-
losophical critic justly applies the epithets of “ pious
and profound:"*-—“Is it unreasonable to confess.
that we believe in God, not by reason of the Nature
which conceals Him, but by reason of the Super-
natural in Man, which alone reveals and proves Him
to exist? * * * Man reveals God; for Man, by
his intelligence, rises above Nature; and in virtue
of this intelligence is conscious of himself as a power
not only independent of, but opposed to, Nature,
and capable of resisting, conquering, and controlling
her."1'
If the meaning involved in the argument of which
* Sir William Hamilton. Lectures on Metaphysics, p. 40.
f Jacobi—Von dvr Gb'lﬂichcn Dingen; Werlce, pp. 424—6.


! PREFACE.
I have here made but scanty extracts be carefully
studied, I think that we shall ﬁnd deeper reasons
than the critics who dictated canons of taste to the
last century discovered—why the supernatural is
indispensable to the Epic, and why it is allowable to
all works of imagination, in which Art looks on
Nature with Man’s inner sense of a. something beyond
and above her.
But the Writer who, whether in verse or prose,
would 'avail himself of such sources of pity or terror
as ﬂow from the Marvellous, can only attain his object
in proportion as the wonders he narrates are of a
kind to excite the curiosity of the age he addresses.
In the brains of our time, the faculty of Causation
is very markedly developed. People, nowadays, do
not delight in the Marvellous according to the old
childlike spirit. They say in one breath, “Very
extraordinary!” and in the next breath, ask, “How
do you account for it ?" If the Author of this work
has presumed to borrow from science some elements
of interest for Romance, he ventures to hope that
no thoughtful reader—and certainly no true son of
science—will be disposed to reproach him. In fact.
such illustrations from the masters of Thought were
essential to the completion of the purpose which
pervades the work.
That purpose, I trust, will develop itself in pro-


PREFACE. xi
portion as the story approaches the close; and what-
ever may appear violent or melodramatic in the
catastrophe, will perhaps be found, by a reader
capable of perceiving the various symbolical mean-
ings conveyed in the story, essential to the end in
which those meanings converge, and towards which
the incidents that give them the character and in- _
terest of ﬁction have been planned and directed from
the commencement.
Of course, according to the most obvious principles
of art, the narrator of a ﬁction must be as thoroughly
in earnest as if he were the narrator of facts. One
could not tell the most extravagant fairy-tale so as
to rouse and sustain the attention of the most in-
fantine listener, if the tale were told as if the tale-
teiler did not believe in it. But when the reader
lays down this Strange Story, perhaps he will detect,
through all the haze of Romance, the outlines of
these images suggested to his reason: Firstly, the
image of sensuous, soulless Nature, such as the
Materialist had conceived it. Secondly, the image
of Intellect, obstinately separating all its inquiries
from the belief in the spiritual essence and destiny
of man, and incurring all kinds of perplexity, and
resorting to all kinds of visionary speculation before
it settles at last into the simple faith which unites
the philosopher and the infant. And, Thirdly, the


xii PREFACE.
image of the erring but pure-thoughted visionary,
seeking overmuch on this earth to separate soul from
mind, til] innocence itself is led astray by a phantom,
and reason is lost in the space between earth and
the stars. Whether in these pictures there be any
truth worth the implying, every reader must judge
for himself; and if he doubt or deny that there be
any such truth, still, in that process of thought which
the doubt or denial enforces, he may chance on a
truth which it pleases himself to discover.
“ Most of the Fables of Esop "— thus says Mon-
’ taigne in his charming essay “ Of Books" *—' “ have
several senses and meanings, of which the Mytholo-
gists choose some one that tallies with the fable. But
for the most part 'tis only what presents itself at the
ﬁrst view, and is superﬁcial; there being others more
lively, essential, and internal, into which they have
not been able to penetrate; and "—adds Montaigne
—” the case is the very same with me."
* Translation 1776, vol. ii. p. 108.


A STRANGE STORY.
CHAPTER I.
IN the year 18— I settled as a physician at one of
the wealthiest of our great English towns, which I will

designate by the initial L I was yet young, but
I had acquired some reputation by a professional work,
which is, I believe, still amongst the received authorities
on the subject of which it treats. I had studied at
Edinburgh and at Paris, and had borne away from both
those illustrious schools of medicine whatever guaran-
tees for future distinction the praise of professors may
concede to the ambition of students. On becoming a
member of the College of Physicians, I made a tour of
the principal cities of Europe, taking letters of intro-
duction to eminent medical men; and gathering, from
many theories and modes of treatment, hints to enlarge
the foundations of unprejudiced and comprehensive
practice. I had resolved to ﬁx my ultimate residence
2 (18)


14 A s'raauon s'roar.
in London. But before this preparatory tour was com-
pleted, my resolve was changed by one of those unex‘
pected events which determine the fate man in vain
would work out for himself. In passing through the
Tyrol, on my way into the north of Italy, I found in a
small inn, remote from medical attendance, an English
traveller, seized with acute inﬂammation of the lungs,
and in a state of imminent danger. I devoted myself
to him night and day; and, perhaps, more through care-
ful nursing than active remedies, I had the happiness to
effect his complete recovery. The traveller proved to
be Julius Faber, a physician of great distinction, con-
tented to reside, where he was born, in the provincial
city of L—, but whose reputation as a profound and
original pathologist was widely spread; and whose
writings had formed no unimportant part of my special
studies. It was during a short holiday excursion, from
which he was about to return with renovated vigor,
that he had been thus stricken down. The patient so
accidentally met with became the founder of my pro-
fessional fortunes. He conceived a warm attachment
for me; perhaps the more aﬂ'ectionate because he was a
childless bachelor, and the nephew who would succeed
to his wealth evinced no desire to succeed to the toils
by which the wealth had been acquired. Thus, having
an heir for the one, he had long looked about for an heir
t0‘the other, and now resolved on ﬁnding that heir in
me. So when we parted, Dr. Faber made me promise
to correspond with him regularly, and it was not long


a srnancs STORY. 15
before he disclosed by letter the plans he had formed in
my favor. He said that he was growing old; his prac-
tice was beyond his strength; he needed a partner; he
was not disposed to put up to sale the health of patients
whom he had learned to regard as his children; money
was no object to him, but it was an object close at his
heart that the humanity he had served, and the repu-
tation he had acquired, should suffer no loss in his choice
of a successor. In ﬁne, he proposed that I should at
once come to L -

as his partner, with the view of
succeeding to his entire practice at the end of two years,
when it was his intention to retire.
The opening into fortune thus aﬁ'orded to me was one
that rarely presents itself to a young man entering upon
an overcrowded profession. And to an aspirant less
allured by the desire of fortune than the hope of dis-
tinction, the fame of the physician who thus generously
oﬁ'ered to me the inestimable beneﬁts of his long expe-
rience and his cordial introduction, was in itself an
assurance that a metropolitan practice is not essential
to a national renown.
I went then to L
my partnership had expired, my success justiﬁed my
:and before the two years of

kind friend’s selection, and far more than realized my
own expectations. I was fortunate in effecting some
notable cures in the earliest cases submitted to me, and
it is everything in the career of a physician when good
luck wins betimes for him that conﬁdence which patients
rarely'accord except to lengthened experience. To the


16 A era/men s'roar.
rapid facility with which my way was made, some cir-
cumstances apart from professional skill probably con-
tributed. I was saved from the suspicion of a medical
adventurer by the accidents of birth and fortune. I
belonged to an ancient family (a branch of the once
powerful border clan of the Fenwicks) that had for
many generations held a fair estate in the neighborhood
of Winde'rmere. As an only son I had succeeded to
that estate on attaining my majority, and had sold it to
pay off the debts which had been made by my father,
who had the costly tastes of an antiquary and collector.
The residue on the sale insured me a modest independ-
ence apart from the proﬁts of a profession; and as I had
not been legally bound to defray my father’s debts, so I
obtained that character for disinterestedness and in-
tegrity which always in England tends to propitiate the
public to the successes achieved by industry or talent.
Perhaps, too, any professional ability I might possess
was the more readily conceded, because I had cultivated
with assiduity the sciences and the scholarship which
are collaterally connected with the study of medicine.
Thus, in a word, I established a social position which
came in aid of my professional repute, and silenced much
of that envy which usually embitters and sometimes
impedes success.
Dr. Faber retired at the end of the twd years agrmd
upon. He went abroad; and being, though advanced
in years, of a frame still robust, and habits of mind
still inquiring and eager, be commenced a lengthened


a sraauon srosr. 17
course of foreign travel, during which our correspond-
ence, at ﬁrst frequent, gradually languished, and ﬁnally
died away. .
I succeeded at once to the larger part of the practice
which the labors of thirty years had secured to my pre
decessor. My chief rival was a Dr. Lloyd, a benevolent.
fervid man, not without genius—if genius be present
where judgment is absent; not without science, if that
may be science which fails in precision. One of those
clever, desultory men who, in adopting a profession, do
not give up to it the whole force and heat of their minds.
Men of that kind habitually accept a mechanical routine,
because, in the exercise of their ostensible calling, their
imaginative faculties are drawn away to pursuits more
alluring. Therefore, in their proper vocation they are
seldom bold or inventive—out of it they are sometimes
both to excess. And when they do take up a novelty
in their own profession, they cherish it with an obstinate
tenacity and an extravagant passion unknown to those
quiet philosophers who take up novelties every day,
examine them with the sobriety of practised eyes, to
lay down altogether, modify in part, or accept in whole,
according as inductive experiment supports or destroys
conjecture.
Dr. Lloyd had been esteemed a learned naturalist
long before he was admitted to be a tolerable physician.
Amidst the privations of his youth he had contrived to
form. and with each succeeding year he had persever-
ingly increased, a zoological collection of creatures not
2* B


18 A s'raasea s'roar.
alive, but, happily for the beholder, stuﬁ'ed or em
balmed. From what I have said, it will be truly in-
ferred that Dr. Lloyd’s earlier career as a physician
had not been brilliant; but of late years he had gradu-
ally rather aged, than worked himself, into that pro-
fessional authority and station which time confers on
a thoroughly respectable man, whom no one is disposed
to envy, and all are disposed to like. _
Now in L there were two distinct social circles.
That of the wealthy merchants and traders, and that
of a few privileged families inhabiting a part of the

town aloof from the marts of commerce, and called the
Abbey Hill. These superb Areopagites exercised over
the wives and daughters of the inferior citizens to
whom all of L , except the Abbey Hill, owed its
prosperity, the same kind of mysterious inﬂuence which
the ﬁne ladies of May Fair and Belgravia are reported
to hold over the female denizens of Bloomsbury and

Marylebone.
Abbey Hill was not opulent; but it was powerful by
a concentration of its resources in all matters of patron-
age. Abbey Hill had its own milliner and its own
draper, its own confectioner, butcher, baker, and tea-
dcalcr; and the patronage of Abbey Hill was like the
patronage of royalty, less lucrative in itself than as a
solemn certiﬁcate of general merit. The shops on
which Abbey Hill conferred its custom were certainly
not the cheapest, possibly not the best. But they were
undeniably the most imposing. The proprietors were


a srssnon sroar. 19
decorously pompous—the shopmen superciliously polite,
They could not be more so if they had belonged to the
State, and been paid by a public which they beneﬁted
and despised. The ladies of Low Town (as the city
subjacent to the Hill had been styled from a date
remote in the feudal ages) entered those shops with a
certain awe, and left them with a certain pride. There
they had learned what the Hill approved. There they
had bought what the Hill had purchased. It is much
in this life to be quite sure that we are in the right,
whatever that conviction may cost us. Abbey Hill
had been in the habit of appointing, amongst other
objects of patronage, its own physician. But that habit
had fallen into disuse during the latter years of my
predecessor’s practice. His superiority over all other
medical men in the town had become so incontestable,
that, though he was emphatically the doctor of Low'
Town, the head of its hospitals and inﬁrmaries, and by
birth related to its principal traders, still as Abbey Hill
was occasionally subject to the physical inﬁrmities of
meaner mortals, so on those occasions it deemed it best ‘
not to push the point of honor to the wanton sacriﬁce
of life. Since Low Town possessed one of the most
famous physicians in England, Abbey Hill magnani-
mously resolved not to crush him by a rival. Abbey
Hill let him feel its pulse.
When my predecessor retired, I had presumptuoust
expected that the Hill would have continued to suspend
its normal right to a special physician, and shown to


20 A STRANGE s'roav.
me the same generous favor it had shown to him who
I
had the more excuse for this presumption because the
Hill had already allowed me to visit a fair proportion
had declared me worthy to succeed to his honors.
of its invalids, had said some very gracious things to
me about the great respectability 0f the Fenwick family,
and sent me some invitations to dinner, and a great
many invitations to tea.
But my self-conceit received a notable check. Abbey
Hill declared that the time had come to reassert its
dormant privilege—it must have a doctor of its own
choosing—a doctor who might, indeed, be permitted to
visit Low Town from motives of humanity or gain, but
who must emphatically assert his special allegiance to
Abbey Hill by ﬁxing his home on that venerable
promontory. Miss Brabazon, a spinster of uncertain
age, but undoubted pedigree, with small fortune, but
high nose, which she would pleasantly observe was a
proof of her descent from Humphrey Duke of Gloucester
(with whom, indeed, I have no doubt, in spite of chro-
nology, that she very often dined), was commissioned
to inquire of me diplomatically, and without committing
Abbey Hill too much by the overture, whether I would
take a large and antiquated mansion, in which abbots
were said to have lived many centuries ago, and which
was still popularly styled Abbots’ House, situated on
the verge of the Hill, as in that case the “Hill,” would
think of me.
“ It is a large house for a single man, I allow,” said


A STRANGE STORY. ~ 21
Miss Brabszon, candidly; and then added, with a side-
long glance of alarming sweetness, “But when Dr.
Fenwick has taken his true position (so old a family!)
amongst us, he need not long remain single, unless he
prefer it.”
I replied, with more asperity than the occasion called
for, that I had no thought of changing my residence at
present. And if the Hill wanted me, the Hill must
send for me. ‘
Two days afterwards Dr. Lloyd took Abbots’ House,
and in less than aweek was proclaimed medical adviser
to the Hill. The election had been decided by the ﬁat
of a great lady, who reigned supreme on the sacred emi-
nence, under the name and title of Mrs. Colonel Poyntz.
“ Dr. Fenwick,” said this lady, “is a clever young
man and a gentleman, but he gives himself airs—the
Hill does not allow any airs but its own. Besides, he
is a new comer; resistance to new comers, and, indeed,
to all things new, except caps and novels, is one of the
bonds that keep old established societies together.
Accordingly, it is by my advice that Dr. Lloyd has
taken Abbots‘ House; the rent would be too high for
his means if the Hill did not feel bound in honor to
justify the trust he has placed in its patronage. I told
him that all my friends, when they were in want of a
doctor, would send for him; those who are my friends
will do so. What the Hill does, plenty of common
people down there will do also:—so that question is
settledl”


22 A STRANGE STORY
And it was settled.
Dr. Lloyd, thus taken by the hand, soon extended
the range of his visits beyond the Hill, which was not
precisely a mountain of gold to doctors, and shared
with myself, though in a comparatively small degree,
the much more lucrative practice of Low Town.
I had no cause to grudge his success, nor did I. But
to my theories of medicine 'his diagnosis was shallow,
and his prescriptions obsolete. When we were sum-
moned to a joint consultation, our views as to the pro-
per course of treatment seldom agreed. Doubtless he
thought I ought to have deferred to his seniority in
years; but I held the doctrine which youth deems a
truth and age a paradox, namely, that in science the
young men are the practical elders, inasmuch as they
are schooled in the latest experiences science has
gathered up, while their seniors are cramped by the
dogmas they were schooled to believe when the world
was some decades the younger.
Meanwhile my reputation continued rapidly to ad
vance; it became more than local; my advice was
sought even by patients from the metropolis. That
ambition which, conceived in early youth, had decided
my career and sweetened all its labors—the ambition
to take a rank and leave a name as one of the great
pathologists, to whom humanity accords a grateful, if
calm, renown—saw before it a level ﬁeld and a certain
goal.
I know not whether a success far beyond that usually


A srsanoa near. 23
attained at the age I had reached served to increase,
but it seemed to myself to justify, the main character-
istic of my moral organization -intellectual pride.
Though mild and gentle to the sufferers under my
care, as a necessary element of professional duty, I was
intolerant of contradiction from those who belonged to
my calling, or even from those who, in general opinion,
opposed my favorite theories.
I had espoused a school of medical philosophy severely
rigid in its inductive logic. My creed was that of stern
materialism. I had a contempt for the understanding
of men who accepted with credulity what they could
not explain by reason. My favorite phrase was “ com-
mon sense.” At the same time I had no prejudice
against bold discovery, and discovery necessitates con-
jecture, but I dismissed as idle all conjecture that could
not be brought to a practical test.
As in medicine I had been the pupil of Brenssais, so
in metaphysics I was the disciple of Condillac. I
believed with that philosopher that “ all our knowledge
we owe to Nature, that in the beginning we can only
instruct through her lessons, and that the whole art of
reasoning consists in continuing as she has compelled
us to commence.” Keeping natural philosophy apart
from the doctrines of revelation, I never assailed the
last, but I contended that by the ﬁrst no accurate rea-
soner could arrive at the existence of the soul as a third
principle of being equally distinct from mind and body.
That by a miracle man might live again, was a question


24 A STRANGE sroar.
of faith and not of understanding. I left faith to religion
and banished it from philosophy. How deﬁne.with a
precision to satisfy the logic of philosophy, what was to
live again? The body? We know that the body rests
in its grave till by the process of decomposition its ele-
mental parts enter into other forms of matter. The
mind? But the mind was as clearly the result of the
bodily organization as the music of the harpsichord is
the result of the instrumental mechanism. The mind
shared the decrepitude of the body in extreme old age,
and in the full vigor of youth a sudden injury to the
brain might forever destroy the intellect of a Plato or a
Shakspeare. But the third principle-the soul—the
something lodged within the body, which yet was to
survive it? Where was that soul hidden out of the
ken of the anatomist? When philosophers attempted
to deﬁne it, were they not compelled to confound its
nature and its actions with those of the mind? Could
they reduce it to the mere moral sense, varying accord
ing to education, circumstances, and physical constitu-
tion? But even the moral sense in the most virtu-
ous of men may be swept away by a fever. Such at
the time I now speak of were the views I held. Views
certainly not original or pleasing; but I cherished
them with as fond a tenacity as if they had been conso-
Iatory truths of which I was the ﬁrst discoverer. I was
intolerant to those who maintained opposite doctrines
-desPised them as irrational, or disliked them as insin-
cere. Certainly it I had fulﬁlled the career which my
——=:~;-1->—>mv*' .—


A sraaser: sroar. 25
ambition predicted—become the founder of a new school
in pathology, and summed up my theories in academical
lectm'es, I should have added another authority, how-
ever feeble, to the sects which circumscribe the interest
of man to the life that has its close in his grave.
Possibly that which I have called my intellectual
pride was more nourished than I should have been
willing to grant by the self-reliance which an unusual
degree of physical power is apt to bestow. Nature had
blessed me with the thews of an athlete. Among the
hardy youths of the Northern Athens I had been
pro-eminently distinguished for feats of activity and
strength. My mental labors, and the anxiety which is
inseparable from the conscientious responsibilities of the
medical profession, kept my health below the par of
keen enjoyment, but had in no way diminished my rare
muscular force. I walked through the crowd with the
ﬁrm step and lofty crest of the mailed knight of old,
who felt himself, in his casement of iron, 9. match against
numbers. Thus the sense of a robust individuality,
strong alike in disciplined reason and animal vigor—
habituated to aid others, needing no aid for itself-con-
tributed to render me imperious in will and arrogant in
opinion. Nor were such defects injurious to me in my
profession; on the contrary, aided as they were by a
calm manner, and a presence hot without that kind of
dignity which is the livery of self-esteem, they served
to impose respect and to inspire trust.
8


6 A s'rnanoa s'roar
CHAPTER II.
I HAD been about six years at L when I became
suddenly involved in a controversy with Dr. Lloyd.
Just as this ill-fated man appeared at the culminating
point of his professional fortunes, he had the impru-
dence to proclaim himself not only an enthusiastic
advocate of mesmerism, as a curative process, but an
ardent believer of the reality of somnambular clairvoy-
ance as an invaluable giﬁ of certain privileged organi-
zations. To these doctrines I sternly opposed myself
-the more sternly, perhaps, because on these doctrines
Dr. Lloyd founded an argument for the existence of soul,
independent of mind as of matter, and built thereon a
superstructure of physiological phantasies, which, could
it be substantiated, would replace every system of
metaphysics on which recognized philosophy conde-
scends to dispute.
About two years before he became a disciple rather
of Puysegur than Mesmer (for Mesmer had little faith
in that gift of clairvoyance of which Puysegur was, I
believe, at least in modern times, the ﬁrst audacious
asserter), Dr. Lloyd had been aﬂiicted with the loss of
a wife many years younger than himself, and to whom
he had been tenderly attached. And this bereavement,
in directing the hopes that consoled him to a world
beyond the grave, had served perhaps to render him


\
's
\
A sraxuca sroar. 2'!
more credulous of the phenomena in which be greeted
additional proofs of purely spiritual existence. Cer
tainly, if, in controverting the notions of another
physiologist, I had restricted myself to that fair antago-
nism which belongs to scientiﬁc disputants, anxious only
for the truth, I should need no apology for sincere
conviction and honest argument; but when, with con-
descending good nature, as if to a man much younger
than himself, who was ignorant of the phenomena
which he nevertheless denied, Dr. Lloyd invited me to
attend his séances and witness his cures, my amour
propre became roused and nettled, and it seemed to me
necessary to put down what I asserted to be too gross
an outrage on common sense to justify the ceremony of
examination. I wrote, therefore, a small pamphlet on
the subject, in which I exhausted all the weapons that
irony can lend to contempt. Dr. Lloyd replied, and as
he was no very skilful arguer, his reply injured him
perhaps more than my assault. Meanwhile, I had
made some inquiries as to the moral character of his
favorite clairvoyants. I imagined that I had learned
enough to justify me in treating them as ﬂagrant cheats
-—and himself as their egregious dupe.
Low Town soon ranged itself, with very few excep-
tions, on my side. The Hill at ﬁrst seemed disposed to
rally round its insulted physician, and to make the
dispute a party question, in which the Hill would have
been signally worsted, when suddenly the same lady
paramount, who had secured to Dr. Llcyd the smile


2_8 a sraauon srosr.
of the Eminence, spoke forth against him, and the
Eminence frOWned.
“Dr. Lloyd,” said the Queen of the Hill, “is an
amiable creature, but on this subject decidedly cracked.
Cracked poets may be all the better for being cracked
—cracked doctors are dangerous. Besides, in deserting
that old-fashioned routine, his adherence to which made
his claim to the Hill’s approbation, and unsettling the
mind of the Hill with wild revolutionary theories, Dr.
Lloyd has betrayed the principles on which the Hill
itself rests its social foundations. Of those principles
Dr. Fenwick has made himself champion; and the Hill
is bound to support him. There, the question is settled i”
And it was settled. I
From the moment Mrs. Colonel Poyntz thus issued
the word of command, Dr. Lloyd was demolished. His
practice was gone, as well as his repute. Mortiﬁcation
or anger brought on a stroke of paralysis which, disa-
bling my opponent, put an end to our controversy. An '
obscure Dr. Jones, who had been the special pupil and
protégé of Dr. Lloyd, offered himself as a candidate for
the Hill’s tongues and pulses. The Hill gave him little
encouragement. It once more suspended its electoral
privileges, and, without insisting on calling me up to it,
the Hill quietly called me in whenever its health needed
other advice than that of its visiting apothecary. Again,
it invited me, sometimes to dinner, often to tea. And
again, Miss Brabazon assured me by a sidclong glance
that it was no fault of hers if I was still single.


A s'rnauen smear. 29
I had almost forgotten the dispute which had obtained
for me so conspicuous a triumph, when one winter’s
night I was roused from sleep by a summons to
attend Dr. Lloyd, who, attacked by a second stroke a
few hours previously, had, on recovering, expressed a
vehement desire to consult the rival by whom he had
suﬁ‘ered so severely. I dressed myself in haste and
hurried to his house.
A February night, sharp and bitter. An iron-grey
frost below—a spectral melancholy moon above. I
had to ascend the Abbey Hill by a steep, blind lane
between high walls. I passed through stately gates,
which stood wide open, into the garden ground that
surrounded the old Abbots' House. At the end of a
short carriage-drive, the dark and gloomy building
cleared itself from leaﬂess, skeleton trees; the moon
resting keen and cold on its abrupt gables and lofty
chimney-stacks. An old woman-servant received me
at the door, and, without saying a word, led me through
a long low hall, and up dreary oak stairs, to a broad
landing, at which she paused for a momeut, listening.
Round and about hall, staircase, and landing were
ranged the dead specimens of the savage world which
it had been the pride of the naturalist’s life to collect.
Close where I stood yawned the open jaws of the fell
anaconda—its lower coils hidden, as they rested on
the ﬂoor below, by the winding of the massive stairs.
Against the dull wainscot walls were pendent cases
stored with grgotesque unfamiliar mummies, seen imper-


80 A s'raasor: sroar.
fectly by the moon that shot through the window-panes,
and the candle in the old woman’s hand. And as now
she turned towards me, nodding her signal to follow,
ani went on up the shadowy passage, rows of gigantic
birds-ibis and vulture, and huge sea-glaucus— glared
at me in the false liglit of their hungry eyes.
So I entered the sick-room, and the ﬁrst glance told
me that my art was powerless there.
The children of the stricken widower were grouped
round.his bed, the eldest apparently about ﬁfteen, the
youngest four; one little girl—the only female child-
was clinging to her father’s neck, her face pressed to
his bosom, and in that room her sobs alone were loud.
As I passed the threshold, Dr. Lloyd lifted his face,
which had been bent over the weeping child, and gazed
on me with an aspect of strange glee, which I failed to
interpret. Then, as I stole towards him softly and
slowly, be pressed his lips on the long fair tresses that
streamed wild over his breast, motioned to a nurse who
stood beside his pillow to take the child away, and, in
a voice clearer than I could have expected in one on
whose brow lay the unmistakable dead of death, he
bade the, nurse and the children quit the room. All
went sorrowfully, but silently, save the little girl, who,
borne-off in the nurse’s arms, continued to sob as if her
heart were breaking.
I was not prepared for a scene so aﬁ'ecting; it moved
me to the quick. My eyes wistfully followed the
children so soon to be orphans, as one after one went


A STRANGE STORY. 31
out into the dark, chill shadow, and amidst t..e bloodless
forms of the dumb brute nature, ranged in grisly vista
beyond the death-room of man. And when the last
infant shape had vanished, and the d00r closed with a
jarring click, my sight wandered loiteringly around the
chamber before I could bring myself to ﬁx it on the
broken form, beside which I now stood in all that
glorious vigor of frame which had fostered the pride of
my mind.
In the moment consumed by my mournful survey,
the whole aspect of the place impressed itself ineﬂ'ace-
ably on life-long remembrance. Through the high,
deep-sunken casement, across which the thin, faded
curtain was but half drawn, the.moonlight rushed, and
then settled on the ﬂoor in one shroud of white glimmer,
lost under the gloom of the death-bed. The roof was low,
and seemed lower still by heavy, intersecting beams,
which I might have touched with my lifted hand. And
the tall, guttering candle by the bedside, and the ﬂicker
from the ﬁre struggling out through the fuel but newly
heaped on-it, threw their reﬂection on the ceiling just
over my head i:.__. reek of quivering blackness, like an
angry cloud. '
Suddenly I felt my arm grasped: with his left hand
(the right side was already lifeless) the dying man drew
me towards him nearer and nearer, till his lips almost
touched my ear. And, in a voice now ﬁrm, now split
ting into gasp and hiss, thus he said:
“I have summoned you to gaze on your own work]


32 A s'rasuos s'ronv.
You have stricken down my life at the moment when
it was most needed by my children, and most service-
able to mankind. Had I lived a few years longer, my
children would have entered on manhood, safe from the
temptations of want and undejected by the charity of
strangers. Thanks to you, they will be penniless
orphans. Fellow-creatures afﬂicted by maladies your
pharmacopceia had failed to reach, came to me for relief,
and they found it. ‘The eﬂ'ect of imagination,’ you
say. What matters, if I directed the imagination to
cure? Now you have mocked the unhappy ones out of
their last chance of life. They will suffer and perish;
Did you believe me in error? Still you knew that my
object was research into truth. You employed against
your brother in art venomous drugs and a poisoned
probe. Look at me! Are you satisﬁed with your
work Y” ‘ l
I sought to draw back and pluck my arm from the
dying man’s grasp. I could not do so without using a
force that would have been inhuman. His lips drew
nearer still to my ear:
“ Vain pretender, do not boast that you brought a
genius for epigram to the service of science. Science
is lenient to all who offer experiment as the test of con-
jecture. You are of the ~stuli' of which inquisitors are
made. You cry that truth is profaned when your dog-
mas are questioned. In your shallow presumption you
have meted the dominions of nature, and where your
eye halts its vision, you say, ‘There, nature must close ;’


A s'raanon s'ronr. 33
in the bigotry which adds crime to presumption, you
would stone the discoverer who, in annexing new
realms to her chart, unsettlcs your arbitrary landmarks.
Verily, retribution shall await you. In those spaces
which your sight has disdained to explore you shall
yourself be a lost and bewildered straggler. Hist! I
see them already! The gibbering phantoms are gather~
ing round you i”
The man’s voice stopped abruptly; his eye ﬁxed in a
glazing stare; his hand relaxed its hold; he fell back
on his pillow. I stole from the room; on the landing-
place I met the nurse and the old woman-servant.
Happily the children were not there. But I heard the
wail of the female child from some room not far distant.
I whispered hurriedly to the nurse, “All is over!”—
passed again under the jaws of the vast anaconda, and,
on through the blind lane between the dead walls, on
through the ghastly streets, under the ghastly moon,
went back to my solitary home.


34 A STRANGE sronr.
venar'rsa III.
11' was some time before I could shake oﬂ' the im-
pression made on me by the words and the look of that
dying man.
It was not that my conscience upbraided me. What
had I done? Denounced that which I held, in common
with most men of sense in or out of my profession, to
be one of those illusions by which quackery draws
proﬁt from the wonder of ignorance. Was I to blame
if I refused to treat with the grave respect due to
asserted discovery in legitimate science pretensions to
powers akin to the fables of wizards? was I to descend
from the Academe of decorous science to examine
whether a slumbering sibyl could read from a book
what at that
moment was being done by my friend at the Antipodes?
And what though Dr. Lloyd himself might be a
worthy and honest man, and a. sincere believer in the

placed at her back, or tell me at L
extravagances for which he demanded an equal credulity
in others, do not honest men every day incur the
penalty of ridicule if, from a defect of good sense, they
make themselves ridiculous? Could I have foreseen
that a satire so justly provoked would inﬂict so deadly
a wound? Was I inhumanly barbarous because the
antagonist destroyed was morbidly sensitive? My


A s'raauon away. 35
conscience, therefore, made no reproach, and the public
was as little Severe as my conscience. The public hao
been with me in our contest—the public knew nothing
of my opponent’s death-bed accusations—the public
knew only that I attended him in his last moments —it
saw me walk beside the bier that bore him to his grave
—- it admired the respect to his memory which I evinced
in the simple tomb that I placed over his remains, in-
scribed with an epitaph that did justice to his unques-
tionable benevolence and integrity; _— above all, it
praised the energy with which I set on foot 8. subscrip-
tion for his orphan children, and the generosity with
which I headed that subscription by a sum that was
large in proportion to my means.
To that sum I did not, indeed, limit my contribution.
The sobs of the poor female child rang still on my
heart. As her grief had been keener than that of her
brothers, so she might be subjected to sharper trials
than they, when the time came for her to'ﬁght her own
Way through the world; therefore I secured to her, but
with such precautions that the gift could not be traced
to my hand, a sum to accumulate till she was of mar-
riageable age, and which then might sufﬁce for a small
wedding-portion; or if she remained single, for an
income that would place her beyond the temptation of
want, or the bitterness of a servile dependence.
That Dr. Lloyd should have died in poverty was a
matter of surprise at ﬁrst, for his proﬁts during the last
few years had been considerable, and his mode of life


38 A STRANGE s'rosr.
far frcm extravagant. But just before the date of our
controversy he had been induced to assist the brother
of his lost wife, who was a junior partner in a London
bank, with the loan of his accumulated savings. This
man proved dishonest; he embezzled that and other
sums intrusted to him, and ﬂed the country. The
same sentiment of conjugal aﬂ‘ection which had cost
Dr. Lloyd his fortune kept him silent as to the cause of
the loss. It was reserved for his executors to discover
the treachery of the brother-in-law, whom he, poor
man, would have generously screened from additional
disgrace. -
The Mayor of L—-, a wealthy and public-spirited
merchant, purchased the museum' which Dr. Lloyd’s
passion for natural history had induced him to form;
and the sum thus obtained, together with that raised
by subscription, suﬁiced, not only to discharge all debts
due by the deceased, but to insure t0 the orphans the
beneﬁts of an education that might ﬁt at least the boys
to enter fairly armed into that game, more of skill than
of chance, in which Fortune is really so little blinded
that we see, in each turn of her wheel, wealth and its
honors pass away from the lax ﬁngers of ignorance and
sloth, to the resolute grasp of labor and knowledge.
Meanwhile, a relation in a distant county undertook
the charge of the orphans; they disappeared from the
scene, and the tides of life in a commercial community
soon ﬂowed over the place which the dead man had
occupied in the thoughts of his bustling townsfolk.


A STRANGE s'ronv. 37
One person at L

, and only one, appeared to share
and inherit the rancor with which the poor physician
had denounced me on his death-bed. It was a gentle-
man named Vigors, distantly related to the deceased,
and who had been, in point of station, the most emi-
nent of Dr. Lloyd’s partisans in the controversy with
myself; a man of no great scholastic acquirements, but
of respectable abilities. He had that kind of power
which the world concedes to respectable abilities when
accompanied with a temper more than usually stern,
and a moral character more than usually austere. His
ruling passion was to sit in judgment upon others; and,
being a magistrate, he was the most active and the
most rigid of all the magistrates L had ever

known.
Mr. Vigors at ﬁrst spoke of me with great bitterness,
as having ruined, and in fact killed, his friend, by the
uncharitable and' unfair acerbity which he declared I
had brought into what ought to have been an unpreju-
diced examination of simple matter of fact. But ﬁnd-
ing no sympathy in these charges, he had the discretion
to cease from making them, contenting himself with a
solemn shake of his head if he heard my name men-
tioned in terms of praise, and an oracular sentence or
two, such as “Time will show ;” “ Ali’s well that ends
well,” &0. Mr. Vigors, however, mixed very little in
the more convivial intercourse of the townspeople. He
called himself domestic; but, in truth, be was ungenial.
A stiﬁ‘ man, starched with self-esteem. He thought
4


88 A summer; swear.
that his dignity of station was not suﬂiciently acknow-
ledged by the merchants of Low Town, and hi
superiority of intellect not suﬁiciently recognized by
the exclusives of the Hill. His visits were, therefore,
chieﬂy conﬁned to the houses of neighboring squires,
to whom his reputation as a magistrate, conjoined with
his solemn exterior, made him one of those oracles by
which men consent to be awed on condition that the
awe is not often inﬂicted. And though he opened his
house three times a week, it was only to a select few,
whom he ﬁrst fed and then biologized. Electro-biology
was Very naturally the special entertainment of a man
whom no intercourse ever pleased in which his will was
not imposed upon others. Therefore he only invited
to his table persons whom he could stare into the
abnegation of their senses, willing to say that beef was
lamb, or brandy was coﬁ'ee, according as he willed
them to say. And, no doubt, the persons asked would
have said anything he willed, so long as they had, in
substance, as well as in idea, the beef and the brandy,
the lamb and the coﬁ'ee. I did not, then, often meet
Mr. Vigors at the houses in which I occasionally spent
my evenings. I heard of his enmity as a man safe in
his home hears the sough of a wind on a common
without. If now and then we chanced to pass in the
streets, he looked up at me (he was a small man walk-
ing on tiptoe) with the sullen scowl of dislike. And,
from the height of my stature, I dropped upon the
small man and sullen scowl the aﬁ'able smile of supreme
indifference.


A s'raauoa sroar. 89
CHAPTER IV.
I HAD now arrived at that age when an ambitious
man, satisﬁed with his progress in the world without,
begins to feel, in the cravings of unsatisﬁed affection,
the void of a solitary hearth. I resolved to marry, and
looked out for a wife. I had never hitherto admitted
into my life the passion of love. In fact, I had regarded
that passion, even in my earlier youth, with a certain
superb contempt—as a malady engendered by an
eﬂ'eminate idleness, and fostered by a sickly imagi<
‘ nation.
I wished to ﬁnd in a wife a rational companion, an
affectionate 'hnd trustworthy friend. N 0 views of matri-
mony could be less romantic, more soberly sensible, than
those which I conceived. Nor were my requirements
mercenary or presumptuous. I cared not for fortune;
I asked nothing from connections. My ambition was
exclusively professional; it could be served by no titled
kindred, accelerated by no wealthy dower. I was no
slave to beauty. I did not seek in a wife the accom-
plishments of a ﬁnishing school-teacher.
Having decided that the time had come to select my
helpmate, I imagined that I should ﬁnd no difﬁculty in
a choice that my reason would approve. But day upon
day, week upon week, passed away, and though among
the families I visited there were many young Iadies


40 A s'raanen areas.
who possessed more than the qualiﬁcations with which
I conceived that I should be amply contented, and by
whom I might ﬂatter myself that my proposals would
not be disdained, I saw not one to whose life-long com-
panionship I should not inﬁnitely have preferred the
solitude I found so irksome.
One evening, in returning home from visiting a poor
female patient whom I attended gratuitously, and whose
case demanded more thought than that of any other in
my list—for though it had been considered hopeless in
the hospital, and she had come home to die, I felt certain
that I could save her, and she seemed recOvering under
my care—one evening, it was the ﬁfteenth of May, I
found myselfjust before the gates of the house that had
been inhabited by Dr.~Lloyd. Since his death the house
had been unoccupied; the rent asked for it by the pro-
prietor was considered high; and from the sacred Hill
on which it was situated, shyness or pride banished the
wealthier traders. The garden gates stood wide open,
as they had stood in the winter night on which I had
passed through them to the chamber of deatn. The
remembrance of that death~bed came vividly before me,
and the dying man’s fantastic threat rang again in my
startled ears. An irresistible impulse, which I could .
not then account for, and which I cannot account for
now—an impulse the reverse of that which usually
makes us turn away with quickened step from a spot
that recalls associations of pain—urged me on through
the open gates up the neglected, grass-grown road. urged


A s'raanen sroar. 4|
me to look, under the westering sun of the joyous spring,
at that house which I had never seen but in the gloom
of a winter night, under the melancholy moon. As the
building came in sight, with dark-red bricks, partially
overgrown with ivy, I perceived that it was no longer
unoccupied. I saw forms passing athwart the open
windows; a van laden with articles of furniture stood
before the door; a servant in livery was beside it giving
directions to the men who were unloading. Evidently
some family was just entering into possession. I felt
somewhat ashamed of my trespass, and turned round
quickly to retrace my steps. I had retreated but a few
yards, when I saw before me at the entrance gates Mr.
Vigors, walking beside a lady apparently of middle
age; while, just at hand, a path cut through the shrubs
gave view of a small wicketgate at the end of the
grounds. I felt unwilling not only to meet the lady,
whom I guessed to be the new occupier, and to whom
I should have to make a somewhat awkward apology
for intrusion, but still more to encounter the scornful
look of Mr. Vigors, in what appeared to my pride 9.
false or undigniﬁed position. Involuntarily, therefore,
I turned down the path which would favor my escape
unobserved. When about half way between the house
and the wicket-gate, the shrubs that had clothed the
path on either side suddenly opened to the left, bringing
into view a circle of sward, surrounded by irregular
fragments of old brickwork partially covered with ferns,
creepers, or rock-plants, weeds, or wild ﬂowers; and, in
4*


42 A s'raanea swear.
the centre of the circle, a fountain, or rather well, over
which was built a Gothic, monastic dome or canopy,
resting on small Norman columns, time-worn, dilapi-
dated. A large willow overhung this unmistakable relic
of the ancient abbey. There was an air of antiquity,
romance, legend about this spot, so abruptly disclosed
amidst the delicate green of the young shrubberies.
But it was not the ruined wall nor the Gothic well that
chained my footstep and charmed my eye.
It was a solitary human form, seated amidst the
mournful ruins.
The form was so slight, the face so young, that at the
ﬁrst glance I murmured to myself, “What a loveiy
child!” But as my eye lingered, it recognized in the
upturned, thoughtful brow, in the sweet, serious aspect,
in the rounded outlines of that slender shape, the inex-
pressible dignity of virgin woman.
A book was on her lap, at her feet a little basket,
half ﬁlled with violets and blossoms culled from the
rock-plants that nestled amidst the ruins. Behind her
the willow, like an emerald waterfall, showered down
its arching abundant green, bough after bough, from
the tree-top to the award, descending in wavy verdure,
bright towards the summit, in the smile of the setting
sun, and darkening into shadow as it neared the earth
She did not notice, she did not see me; her eyes
were ﬁxed upon the horizon, where it sloped farthest
into space, above the tree-tops and the ruins; ﬁxed so
intently that mechanically I turned my own gaze to


s snares sroar. 43
follow the ﬂight of hers. It was as if she watched for
some expected, familiar sign to grow out from the depths
of heaven; perhaps to greet, before other eyes beheld
it, the ray of the earliest star.
The birds dropped from the boughs on the turf
around her, so fearlessly that one aligbted amidst the
ﬂowers in the little basket at her feet. There is a
famous German poem, which I had read in my youth,
called the Maiden from Abroad, variously supposed to
be an allegory of Spring or of Poetry, according to the
choice of commentators; it seemed to me as if the poem
had been made for her. Verily, indeed, in her, poet or
painter might have seen an image equally true to either
of those adorners of the earth; both outwardly a delight
to sense, yet both wakcning up thoughts within us, not
sad, but akin to sadness.
I heard now a step behind me, and a voice which I
recognized to be that of Mr. Vigors. I broke from the
charm by which I had been so lingeringly‘spell-bound,
hurried on confusedly, gained the wicketgate, from
which a short ﬂight of stairs descended into the com-
mon thoroughfare. And there the every-day life lay
again before me. On the opposite side, houses, shops,
church spires; a few steps more, and the bUStling
streets l How immeasurably far from, yet how familiarly
near to, the world in which we move and have being is
that fairy land of romance which opens out from the
hard earth before us, when Love steals at ﬁrst to our
side; fading back into the hard earth again as Love
smiles or sighs its farewell!


44 a sraauen s'roar;
CHAPTER V
AND before that evening I had looked on Mr. Vigora
with supreme indiﬁ'erencel—what importance he now
assumed in my eyes! The lady with whom I had seen
him was doubtless the new tenant of that house in
which the young creature by whom my heart was so
strangely moved evidently had her home. Most probap
bly the relation between the two ladies was that of
mother and daughter. Mr. Vigors, the friend'of one,
might himself be related to both—might prejudice them
against me -might—- here, starting up, I snapped the
thread of conjecture, for right before my eyes, on the
table beside which I had seated myself on entering my
room, lay a card of invitation :
Mas. Porn'rz,
At Home,
Wednesday, May 15th.
Early.
Mrs. Poyntz—Mrs. Colonel Poyntz? the Queen of
the Hill. There, at her house, I could not fail to learn
all abdut the new comers, who could never without her
sanction have settled on her domain.
I hastily changed my dress, and, with beating heart,
wound my way up the venerable eminence.
I did not pass through the lane which led direct to
Abbots’ House (for that old building stood solitary


A s'raanea sroar. 45
amidst its grounds, a little apart from the spacious plat-
form on which the society of the Hill was concentrated),
but up the broad causeway, with vistaed gas-lamps;
the gayer shops still unclosed, the tide of busy life only
slowly ebbing from the still animated street, on to a
square, in which the four main thoroughfares of the city
converged, and which formed the boundary of Low
Town. A huge dark archway, popularly called Monk’s
Gate, at the angle of this square, made the entrance to _
Abbey Hill. When the arch was passed, one felt at
once that one was in the town of a former day. The
pavement was narrow, and rugged; the shops small,
their upper stories projecting, with, here and there,
plastered fronts, quaintly arabesqued. An ascent, short,
but steep and tortuous, conducted at once to the old
Abbey Church, nobly situated in a vast quadrangle,
round which were the genteel and gloomy dwellings of
the Areopagites of they Hill. More genteel and less
gloomy than the rest—lights at the windows and ﬂowers
on the balcony-stood forth, ﬂanked by a garden wall
at either side, the mansion of Mrs. Colonel Poyntz.
As I entered the drawing-room, I heard the voice of
the hostess; it was a voice clear, decided, metallic, bell-
like, uttering these words: “ Taken Abbots’ House?
I will tell you.” '


46 A s'raaxoz sroaY.
CHAPTER VI.
Mns. POYNTZ was seated on the sofa; at her right
sat fat Mrs. Bruce, who was a Scotch lord’s grand-
daughter; at her left thin Miss Brabazon, who was an
Irish baronet's neice. Around her—a few seated, many
standing—had grouped all the guests, save two old
gentlemen, who remained aloof with Colonel Poyntz
near the whist-table, waiting for the fourth old gentle-
man, who was to make up the rubber, but who was at
that moment spell-bound in the magic circle; which
curiosity, that strongest of social demons, had attracted
round the hostess.
“Taken Abbots’ House? I will tell you -—- Ah,
Dr. Fenwick, charmed to see you. You know Abbots’
House is let at last? Well, Miss Brabazon, dear, you
ask who has taken it. I will inform yon-a particular
friend of mine.”
“ Indeedl Dear me 1” said Miss Brabazon, looking

confused. “I hope I did not say anything to ”
"Wound my feelings. Not in the least. You said
your uncle, Sir Phelim, employed a coacbmaker named
Ashleigh, that Ashleigh was an uncommon name, though
Ashley was a common one; you intimated an appalling
suspicion that the Mrs. Ashleigh who had come to the
Hill was the coachmaker’s widow. _I relieve your mind
' -she is not; she is the widow of Gilbert Ashleigh, of
Kirby Hall.”


A sraanea s'ronr. 4'1
“ Gilbert Ashleigh,” said one of the guests, a bachelor,
whose parents had reared him for the Church, but who,
like poor Goldsmith, did not think himself good enough
It). it—a mistake of over-modesty, for he matured into
a very harmless creature: “Gilbert Ashleigh. I was
at Oxford with him—a gentleman commoner of Christ
Church. Good-looking man—very; capped ”
“ Sappedl what’s that?— Oh, studied. That he did
all his life. He married young—Anne Chaloner; she
and I were girls together; married the same year.
They settled at Kirby Hall _ nice place, but dull.
Poyntz and I spent a Christmas there. Ashleigh when
he talked was charming, but he talked very little.
Anne. when she talked, was commonplace, and she
talked very much. Naturally, poor thing, she was so
happy. Poyntz and I did not-spend another Christmas
there. Friendship is long, but life is short. Gilbert
Ashleigh’s life was short, indeed; he died in the seventh
year of his marriage, leaving only one child, a girl.
Since then, though I never spent another Christmas at
Kirby Hall, I have frequently spent a day there, doing
my best to cheer up Anne. She was no longer talka-
tive, poor dear. Wrapt up in her child, who has now
grown into a beautiful girl of eighteen—such eyes, her
father’s—the real dark-blue—rare; sweet creature, but
delicate; not, I hope, consumptive, but delicate; quiet
—wants life. My girl Jane adores her. Jane has life

enough for two.”
“Is Miss Ashleigh the heiress to Kirby Hall ?” asked
Mrs. Bruce. who had an unmarried son.


48 a summer: near.
“N0. Kirby Hall passed to Ashleigh Sumner, the
male heir, a cousin. And the luckiest of cousins!
Gilbert’s sister, showy woman (indeed all show), had
contrived to marry her kinsman, Sir Walter Ashleigh
Haughton, the head of the Ashleigh family—just the
man made to be the reﬂector of a showy womanl He
died years ago, leaving an only son, Sir James, who
was killed last winter, by a fall from his horse. And
here, again, Ashleigh Sumner proved to be the male
heir-at-law. During the minority of this fortunate
youth, Mrs. Ashleigh had rented Kirby Hall of his
guardian. He is now just coming of age, and that is
why she leaves. Lilian Ashleigh will have, however,
a very good fortune-is what we genteel paupers call
an heiress. Is there anything more you want to
know?”
Said thin Miss Brabazon, who took advantage of her
thinness to wedge herself into every one’s affairs, “A
most interesting account. What a nice place Abbots'
House could be made with a little taste! So aristo-
craticl Just what I should like if I could afford it!
The drawing-room should be done up in the Moorish
style, with geranium-colored silk curtains like dear
Lady L-—-’s boudoir at Twickenham. And Mrs.
Ashleigh has taken the house! on lease, too, I sup-
pose !” Here Miss Brabazon ﬂuttered her fan angrily,
and then exclaimed, “But what on earth brings Mrs.
Ashleigh here Y”
Answered Mrs. Colonel Poyntz, with the military


a s'rnasoa sroaw. 49
frankness by which she kept her company in good
humor, as well as awe:
“Why do any of us come here? Can any one tell
me ?”
There was a blank silence, which the hostess herself
was ﬁrst to break.
“ None of as present can say why we came here. I
can tell you why Mrs. Ashleigh came. Our neighbor,
Mr. Vigors, is a distant connection of the late Gilbert
Ashleigh, one of the executors to his will, and the
guardian to the heir-at-law. About ten days ago Mr.
Vigors called on me, for the ﬁrst time since I felt it my
duty to express my disapprobation of the strange vaga-
ries so nnhappily conceived by our poor dear friend Dr.
Lloyd. And when he had taken the chair, just where
you now sit, Dr. Fenwick, he said, in a sepulchral
voice, stretching out two ﬁngers, so- as if I was one
of the whatrdo-you-calllems who go to sleep when he
bids them: ‘Marm, you know Mrs. Ashleigh? You
correspond with her.’ ‘Yes, Mr. Vigors; is there any
crime in that? You look as if there were.’ ‘No
crime, marm,’ said the man, quite seriously. ‘Mrs.
Ashleigh is a lady of amiable temper, and you are a
woman of masculine understanding. "’
Here there was a general titter. Mrs. Colonel Poyntz
hushed it with a look of severe surprise: “What is
there to laugh at? All women would be men if they
could. If my understanding is masculine, so much the
better for me. I thanked Mr. Vigors for his very
5 D


50 A s'raaue: s'roar.
handsome compliment, and he then went on to say,
'that though Mrs. Ashleigh would now have to leave
Kirby Hall in a very few weeks, she seemed quite
unable to make up her mind where to go; that it had
occurred to him that, as Miss Ashleigh was of an age
to see a little of the world, she ought not to remain
buried in the country; while, being of a quiet mind, she
recoiled from the dissipations of London. Between the
seclusion of the one and the turmoil of the other, the
society of L— was a happy medium. He should be
glad of my opinion. He had put off asking for it,
because he owned his belief that I had behaved
unkindly to his lamented friend, Dr. Lloyd; but he
now found himself in rather an awkward position. His
ward, young Sumner, had prudently resolved on ﬁxing
his country residence at Kirby Hall, rather than at
Haughton Park, the much larger seat, which had so
suddenly passed to his inheritance, and which he could
not occupy without a vast establishment, that to a
single man, so young, would be but a cumbersome and
costly trouble. Mr. Vigors'was pledged to his ward to
obtain him possession of Kirby Hall the precise day
agreed upon, but Mrs. Ashleigh did not seem disposed
to stir—could not decide where else to go. Mr. Vigors
was loth to press hard on his old friend’s widow and
child. It was a thousand pities Mrs. Ashleigh could
not make up her mind; she had had ample time for
preparation. A word from me at this moment, would
be an eﬁ'ective kindness. Abbots’ House was vacant,


a STD-LNG! sweet. 61
with a garden so extensive that the ladies would not
miss the country. Another party was after it, but—’
‘Say no more,’ I cried; ‘no party but my dear old
friend A‘nne Ashleigh shall have Abbots’ House. So
that question is settled.’ I dismissed Mr. Vigors, sent
for my carriage-that is, for Mr. Barker’s yellow ﬂy
and his best horses—and drove that very day to Kirby
Hall, which, though not in this county, is only twenty-
ﬁve miles distant. I slept there that night. By nine
o’clock the next morning I had secured Mrs. Ashleigh’s
consent, on the promise to save her all trouble; came
back, sent for the landlord, settled the rent, lease,
agreement; engaged Forbes’ vans to remove the furni-
ture from Kirby Hall; told Forbes to begin with the
beds. When her own bed came, which was last night,
Anne Ashleigh came too. I have seen her this morn-
ing. She likes the place, so does Lilian. I asked
them to meet you all here to-night; but Mrs. Ashleigh
was tired. The last of the furniture was to arrive
to-day; and though dear Mrs. Ashleigh is an undecided
character, she is not inactive. But it is not only the
planning where to put tables and chairs that would
have tired her to-day; she has had Mr. Vigors on her
hands all the afsrnoon, and he has been—here’s hel
little note—what are the words? no doubt, ‘most
overpowering and oppressive’—no, ‘most kind and
attentive’-—diﬂ'erent words, but, as applied to Mr.
Vigors, they mean the same thing.
“And now, next Monday—we must leave them in


52 A era/mes STORY.
peace till then-you will all call on the Ashleighs.
The Hill knows what is due to itself; it cannot dele-
gate to Mr. Vigors, a respectable man indeed, but who
does not belong to its set, its own proper course of
action towards those who would shelter themselves on
its bosom. The Hill cannot be kind and attentive,
overpowering or oppressive, by proxy. To those new-
born into its family circle it cannot be an indifferent
godmother; it has towards them all the feelings of a
mother, or of a stepmother, as the case may be.
Where it says, ‘This can be no child of mine,’ it is a
stepmother, indeed; but, in all those whom I have
presented to its arms, it has hitherto, I am proud to
say, recognised desirable acquaintances, and to them
the Hill has been a mother. And now, my dear Mr.
Slornan, go to your rubber; Poyntz is impatient,
though he don’t show it. Miss Brabazon, love, we all
long to see you seated at the piano—you play so
divinelyl Something gay, if you please; something
gay, but not very noisy—Mr. Leopold Smythe will
turn the leaves for you. Mrs. Bruce, your own favorite
set at vingt-un, with four new recruits. Dr. Fenwick,
you are like me, don’t play cards, and don’t care for
music; sit here, and talk or not, as you please, while
I knit.”
The other guests thus disposed of, some at the card-
tables, some round the piano, I placed myself at Mrs.
Poyntz’s side, on a seat niched in the recess of a
window which an evening unusually warm for the


A s'raauea s'roar. 53
month of May permitted to be left open. I was next
to one who had known Lilian as a child, one from
whom I had learned by what sweet name to call the
image which my thoughts had already shrined. How
much that I still longed to know she could tell me!
But in what form of question could II lead to the
subject, yet not betray my absorbing interest in it?
Longing to speak, I felt as if stricken dumb; stealing
an unquiet glance towards the face beside me, and deeply
impressed with that truth which the Hill had long
ago reverently acknowledged, viz., that Mrs. Colonel
Poyntz was a very superior woman- a very powerful
creature.
And there she sat knitting—rapidly, ﬁrmly; a
woman somewhat on the other side of forty, complex-
ion a bronzed paleness, hair a bronzed brown, in
strong ringlets cropped short behind—handsome hair
for a man; lips that, when closed, showed inﬂexible
decision, when speaking, became supple and ﬂexile with
an easy humor and a vigilant ﬁnesse; eyes of a red
hazel, quick but steady; observant, piercing, dauntless
eyes; altogether a ﬁne countenance—would have been
a very ﬁne countenance in a man; proﬁle sharp,
straight, clear-cut, with an expression, when in repose,
.ike that of a sphinx; a frame robust, not corpulent, of
middle height, but with an air and carriage that made
her appear tall; peculiarly white ﬁrm, hands, indicative
of vigorous health, not a vein visible on the surface.
There she sat knitting, knitting, and I by her side,
6*


54 A STRANGE s'roav.
gazing now on herself, now on her work, with a vague
idea that the threads in the skein of my own Web of
love or of life were passing quick through those noise-
less ﬁngers. And, indeed, in every web of romance,
the fondest one of the Parcae is sure to be some matter-
of-fact She, Social Destiny, as little akin to romance
herself-as was this worldly Queen of the Hill.
CHAPTER VIIv
I HAVE given a sketch of the outward woman of Mrs.
Colonel Poyntz. The inner woman was a recondite
mystery, deep as that of the sphinx, whose features her
own resembled. But between the outward and the
inward woman there is ever a third woman-the con-
ventional woman—such as the whole human being
appears to the world—always mantled, sometimes
masked.
I am told that the ﬁne people of London do not
recognize the title of “Mrs. Colonel.” If that be true,
the ﬁne people of London must be clearly in the wrong,
for no people in the universe could be ﬁner than the
ﬁne people of Abbey Hill; and they considered their
sovereign had as good a right to the title of Mrs.
Colonel as the Queen of England has to that of “our
Gracious Lady.” But Mrs. Poyntz, herself. ncver


A sraasen s'roar. 55
assumed the title of Mrs. Colonel; it never appeared
on her cards any more than the title of “ Gracious
Lady ” appears on the cards which convey the invita-
tion that a Lord Steward or Lord Chamberlain is
commanded by her Majesty to issue. To titles, indeed,
Mrs. Poyntz evinced no superstitious reverence. Two
peeresses, related to her, not distantly, were in the
habit of paying her a yearly visit, which lasted two or
three days. The Hill considered these visits an honor
to its eminence. Mrs. Poyntz never seemed to esteem
them an honor to herself; never boasted of them;
never sought to show 06 her grand relations, nor put
herself the least out of the way to receive them. Her
mode of life was free from ostentation. She had the
advantage of being a few hundreds a year richer than
any other inhabitant of the Hill; but she did not
devote her superior resources to the invidious exhibi-
tion of superior splendor. Like a wise sovereign the
revenues of her exchequer were applied to the beneﬁt
of her subjects, and not to the vanity of egotistical
parade. As no one else on the Hill kept a carriage,
she declined to keep one. Her entertainments were
simple, but numerous. Twice a Week she received the
Hill, and was genuinely at home to it. She contrived
to make her parties proverbially agreeable. The re-
freshments were of the same kind as those which the
poorest of her old maids of honor might prefer; but
they were better of their kind, the best of their kind-
the best tea, the‘best lemonade, the best cakes. Her


56 A STRANGE scroar.
rooms had an air of comfort, which was peculiar to
them. They looked like rooms accustomed to receive,
and receive in a friendly way; well warmed, well
light-ed, card-tables and piano each in the place that
made cards and music inviting. On the walls a few
old family portraits, and three or four other pictures
said to be valuable and certainly pleasing, two Wat-
teaus, a Canaletti, a Weenix—plenty of easy-chairs and
settees covered with a cheerful chintz. In the arrange-
ment of the furniture generally, an indescribable care-
less elegance. She herself was studiously plain in
dress, more conspicuously free from jewellery and trink-
ets than any married lady on the Hill. But I have
heard from those who were authorities on such a sub-
ject, that she was never seen in a dress of the last
year’s fashion. She adopted the mode as it came out,
just enough to show that she was aware it was out;
but with a sober reserve, as much as to say, “I adopt
the fashion as far as it suits myself; I do not permit the
fashion to adopt me.” In short, Mrs. Colonel Poyntz
was sometimes ongh, sometimes coarse, always mascu-
line, and yet somehow or other masculine in a womanly
way; but she was never vulgar because never affected.
It was impossible not to allow that she was a thorough
gentlewoman, and she could do things that lower other
gentlewomen, without any loss of dignity. Thus she
was an admirable mimic, certainly in itself the least lady-
like condescension of humor. BuLwhen she mimicked,
it was with so tranquil a gravity, or so royal a good


a sraauon s'roar 5'!
humor, that one could only say, “What talents for
society dear Mrs. Colonel has i” As she was a gentle
woman emphatically, so the other colonel, the he-
colonel, was emphatically a gentleman; rather shy, but
not cold; hating trouble of every kind, pleased to seem
a cipher in his own house. If the sole study of Mrs.
Colonel had been to make her husband comfortable, she
could not have succeeded better than by bringing friends
about him and then taking them off his hands. Colonel
Poyntz, the he-colonel, had seen, in his youth, actual
service; but had retired from his profession many years
ago, shortly after his marriage. He was a younger
brother of one of the principal squires in the county;
inherited the house he lived in, with some other valu-
able property in and about L—-, from an uncle; was
considered a good landlord ; and popular in Low Town,
though 'he never interfered in its aﬂ'airs. He was
pnnctiliously neat in his dress; a thin, youthful ﬁgure,
crowned with a thick, youthful wig. He never seemed
to read anything but the newspapers and the Meteoro-
logical Journal ; was supposed to be the most weather-
wise man in all L-—-. He had another intellectual
predilection—whist But in that he had less reputa-
tion for wisdom. Perhaps it requires a rarér combina-
tion of mental faculties to win an odd trick than to
divine a fall in the glass. For the rest, the he-colonel,
many years older than his wife, despite the thin, youth-
ful ﬁgure, was an admirable aide-de—camp to the general
in command, Mrs. Colonel; and she could not have


58 A summer; s'roaY.
found one more obedient, more devoted, or more proud
of a distinguished chief
In giving to Mrs. Colonel Poyntz the appellation of
Queen of the Hill, let there be no mistake. She was
not a constitutional sovereign; her monarchy was abso-
lute. All her proclamations had the force of laws.
Such ascendancy could not have been attained with-
out considerable talents for acquiring and keeping it.
Amidst all her oﬁ-hand, brisk, imperious frankness, she
had the ineifable discrimination of tact. Whether civil
or rude, she was never civil or rude but what she
carried public opinion along with her. Her knowledge
of general society must have been limited, as must be
that of all female sovereigns. But she seemed gifted
with an intuitive knowledge of human nature, which
she applied to her special ambition of ruling it. I have
not a doubt that if she had been' suddenly traﬁsferred,
a perfect stranger, to the World of London, she would
have soon forced her way to its selectcst circles, and,
when once there, held her own against a duchess.
I have said that she was not affected; this might be
one cause of her away over a set in which nearly every
other woman was trying rather to seem, than to be, a
somebody.'
But if Mrs. Colonel Poyntz was not artiﬁcial, she
was artful, or perhaps I might more justly say, artistic.
In all she said and did there were conduct, system,
plan. She could be a most serviceable friend, a most
damaging enemy; yet I believe she seldom indulged in


A s'raanoa STORY. 59
strong likings or strong hatreds. All was policy—a
policy akin to that of a grand party chief, determined
to raise up those whom, for any reason of state, it was
prudent to favor, and to put down those whom, for any
reason of state, it was expedient to humble or to crush.
Ever since the controversy with Dr. Lloyd, this lady
had honored me with her benignest countenance. And
nothing could be more adroit than the manner in which,
while imposing me on others as an oracular authority,
she sought to subject to her will the oracle itself.
She was in the habit of addressing me in a sort of
motherly way, as if she had the deepest interest in my
welfare, happiness, and reputation. And thus, in every
compliment, in every seeming mark of respect, she
maintained the superior dignity of one who takes from
responsible station the duty to encourage rising merit;
so that, somehow or other, despite all that pride which
made me believe that I needéd no helping hand to
advance or to .clear my way through the world, I could
not shake off from my mind the impression that I was
mysteriously patronized by Mrs. Colonel Poyntz.
We might have sat together ﬁve minutes, side by
side—in silence as complete as if in the cave of Tro
phonius—when, without looking up from her work,'.
Mrs. Poyntz said, abruptly:
"I am thinking about you, Dr. Fenwick. And you
-—are thinking about some other woman. Ungrateful
man!”
"Unjust accusation! My very silence should prove


60 A sraanen s'roav.
how intently my thoughts were ﬁxed on you, and on
the weird web which springs under your hand in meshes
that bewilder the gaze and snare; the attention.”
Mrs. Poyntz looked up at me for a moment—one
rapid glance of the bright red hazel eye—and said:
“Was I really in your thoughts? Answer truly."
“Truly, I answer, you were.”
“That is strangel Who can it be F”
“Who can it be? What do you mean i”
“If you were thinking of me, it was in connection
with some other person—some other person of my
own sex. It is certainly not poor dear Miss Brabazon.
Who else can it be ?”
Again the red eye shot over me, and I felt my cheek
redden beneath it.
“Hush!” she said, lowering her voice; “you are in
love!”
“In lovel—Il Permit me to ask you why you
think so i”
“ The signs are unmistakable; you are altered in
your manner, even in the expression of your face, since
I last saw you; your manner is generally quiet and
observant, it is now restless and distracted; your
- expression of face is generally proud and serene, it is
now humbled and troubled. You have something on
your mind! It is not anxiety for your reputation, that '
is established; nor for your fortune, that is made; it is
not anxiety for a patient, or you would scarcely be
here. But anxiety it is, an anxiety that is remote from


A STRANGE STORY 61
your profession, that touches your heart and is new
to it!” _ _
I was startled, almost awed. But I tried to cover
my confusion with a forced laugh. ~
“ Profound observer! Subtle analyst! You have
convinced me that I must be in love, though I did not
suspect it before. But when I strive to conjecture the
object, I am as much perplexed as yourself; and with
you, I ask, who can it be f”
“ Whoever it be,” said Mrs. Poyntz, who had paused,
while I spoke, from her knitting, and now resumed it
very slowly and very carefully, as if her mind and her
knitting worked in unison together; “whoever it be,
love in you would be serious; and, with or without love,
marriage is a serious thing to us all. It is not every
pretty girl that would suit Allen Fenwick."
“Alasl is there any pretty girl whom Allen Fenwick
would suit Y"
“Tutl You should be above the fretful vanity that
lays traps for a compliment. Yes; the time has come
in your life and your career when you would do well
to marry. I give my consent to that,” she added, with
a smile as if in jest, and a slight nod as if in earnest.
The knitting here went on more decidedly, more quickly.
“ But I do not yet see the person. Nol ’Tis a pity,
Allen Fenwick” (whenever Mrs. Poyntz called me by
my Christian name, she always assumed her majestic,
motherly manner)-“ a pity that, with your birth,
energies, perseverance, talents, and, let me add, your
6


62 a s'rnason s'roar.
advantages of manner and person-a pity that you did
not choose a career that might achieve higher fortunes
and louder fame than the most brilliant success can
give .to a provincial physician. But in that very choice
you interest me. My choice has been much the same.
A small circle, but the ﬁrst in it. Yet, had I been a
man, or had my dear colonel been a man whom it was
in the power of a woman’s art to raise one step higher
in that metaphorical ladder which is not the ladder of
the angels, why, then—what then? No matter! I am
contented. I transfer my ambition to Jane. Do you
not think her handsome ?”
“There can be no doubt of that,” said I, carelessly
and naturally.
“ I have settled Jane's lot in my own mind,” resumed
Mrs. Poyntz, striking ﬁrm into another row of knitting.
“She will marry a country gentleman of large estate.
He will go into parliament. She will study his advance-
ment as I study Poyntz’s comfort. If he be clever, she
will help to make him a minister; if he be not clever,
his wealth will make her a personage, and lift him into
a personage’s husband. And, now that you see I have
no matrimonial designs on you, Allen Fenwick, think
if it will be worth while to conﬁde in me. Possibly I
may be useful ---”
l “I know not how to thank you. But as yet, I have
nothing to conﬁde.”
While thus saying, I turned my eyes towards the
open window beside which I sat. It was a beautiful


A STRANGE sroar. 63
soft night The May moon in all her splendor. The
town stretched, far and wide, below with all its num-
berless lights; below—but somewhat distant; an
intervening space was covered, here, by the broad
quadrangle (in the midst of which stood, massive and
lonely, the grand old church); and, there by the
gardens and scattered cottages or mansions that clothed
the sides of the hill.
“ Is not that house,” I said, after a short pause,
“ yonder, with the three gables, the one in which—in
which poor Dr. Lloyd lived—Abbots’ House 7”
I spoke abruptly, as if to intimate my desire to
change the subject of conversation. My hostess stopped
her knitting, half rose, looked forth.
“Yes. But what a lovely night! How is it that
the moon blends into harmony things of which the sun
only marks the contrast? That stately, old church—
tower, grey with its thousand years—those vulgar
tile-roofs and chimney-pots raw in the freshness of
yesterday; now, under the moonlight, all melt into one
indivisible charm I”
As my hostess thus spoke, she had left her seat,
taking her work with her, and passed from the window
into the balcony. It was not often that Mrs. Poyntz
condescended to admit what is called “ sentiment ” into
the range of her sharp, practical, worldly talk, but she
did so at times; always when she did, giving me the
notion of an intellect much too comprehensive not to
allow that sentiment has a place in this life, but keeping


64 a smarter: s'roar.
It in its proper place, by that mixture of aﬁ‘ability and
indifference with which some high-born beauty allows
the genius, but checks the presumption, of a charming
and penniless poet. For a few minutes her eyes roved
over the scene in evident enjoyment; then, as they
slowly settled upon the three gables of Abbots’ House,
her face regained that something of hardness which
belonged to its decided character; her ﬁngers again
mechanically resumed her knitting, and she said, in her
clear, unsoftened, metallic chime of voice, “ Can you
yfuess why I took so much trouble to oblige Mr. Vigors
and locate Mrs. Ashleigh yonder ?”
“You favored us with a full explanation of your
reasons.”
“Some of my reasons; not the main one. People
who undertake the task of governing others, as I do,
be their rule a kingdom or a hamlet, must adopt a
principle of government and adhere to it. The princi-
ple that suits best with the Hill is respect for the
Proprieties. We have not much money, entre nous,
we have no great rank. Our policy is, then, to set up
the Proprieties as an inﬂuence which money must
court and rank is afraid of. I had learned just before
Mr. Vigors called on me that Lady Sarah Bellasis
entertained the idea of hiring Abbots’ House. London
has set its face against her; a provincial town would
be more charitable. ' An earl’s daughter, with a good
income and an awfully bad name, of the best manners
and of the worst morals, would have made sad havoc


" A sraaxor: sroar. 65
among the Proprieties. How many of our primmest
old maids would have deserted tea and Mrs. Poyntz
for champagne and her ladyship? The Hill was never
in so imminent a danger. Rather than Lady Sarah
Bellasis should have taken that house, I would have
taken it myself, and stocked it with owls.
“ Mrs. Ashleigh turned up just in the critical mo-
ment. Lady Sarah is foiled, the Proprieties safe, and
so that question is settled.”
“ And it will be pleasant to have your early friend
so near you.” I,
Mrs. Poyntz lifted her eyes full upon me:
“ Do you know Mrs. Ashleigh ?”
“ Not in the least.”
“ She has many virtues and few ideas. She is
commonplace weak, as I am commonplace strong. But
commonplace weak can be very lovable. Her hus-
band, a man of genius and learning, gave her his
whole heart—a heart worth having, but he was not
ambitious, and he despised the world.”
“I think you said your daughter was very much
attached to Miss Ashleigh ?‘ Does her character re
semble her mother’s ?” '
I was afraid while I spoke that I should again meet
Mrs. Poyntz’s searching gaze, but‘she did not this
time look up from her work.
“ N0; Lilian is anything but commonplace.”
“You described her as having delicate'health; you
implied a hope that she was not consumptive. I trust
6 * ‘


66 A s'raauea s'roar. -
that there is no serious reason for apprehending a
constitutional tendency which at her age would reqtire
the most careful watching!”
“I trust not. If she were to die-Dr. Fenwick,
what is the matter?”
So terrible had been the picture which this woman’s
words had brought before me, that I started as if my
own life had received a shock.
“I beg pardon,” I said, falteringly, pressing my hand
to my heart; “a sudden spasm here—it is over now.
You were saying that—that-”
“ I was about to say—" and here Mrs. Poyntz laid
her hand lightly on mine. “ I was about to say, that
if Lilian Ashleigh were to die, I should mourn for her
less than I might for one who valued the things of the
earth more. But I believe there is no cause for the
alarm my words so inconsiderately excited in you.
Her mother is watchful and devoted; and if the least
thing ailed Lilian, she would call in medical advice.
Mr. Vigors would, I know, recommend Dr. J ones.”
Closing our conference with those stinging words,
Mrs. Poyntz here turned back into the drawing-room.
I remained some minutes on the balcony, discon-
certed, enraged. With what consummate art had this
practised diplomatist wound herself into my secret.
That she had read my heart better than myself was
evident from that Parthian shaft, barbed with Dr.
Jones, which she had shot over her shoulder in retreat
That, from the ﬁrst moment in which she had deeoyed


a STRANGE mom. 6'!
me to her side, she had detected “the something” on
my mind was, perhaps, but the ordinary quickness of
female penetration. But it was with no ordinary craft
that her whole conversation afterwards had been so
shaped as to learn the something, and lead me to reveal
the some one to whom the something was linked. For
what purpose? What was it to her? What motive
could she have beyond the mere gratiﬁcation of curiosity?
Perhaps, at ﬁrst, she thought I had been caught by her
daughter’s showy beauty, and hence the half-friendly,
half-cynical frankness with which she had avowed her
ambitious projects for that young lady’s matrimonial
advancement. Satisﬁed by my manner that I cherished
no presumptuous hopes in that quarter, her scrutiny
was doubtless continued from that pleasure in the
exercise of a wily intellect which impels schemers and
politicians to an activity for which, without that pleasure
itself, there would seem no adequate inducement; and,
besides, the ruling passion of this petty sovereign was
power. And if knowledge be power, there is no better
instrument of power over a contumacious subject than
that hold on his heart which is gained in the knowledge
of its secret.
But “ secret i ” Had it really come to this? Was it
possible that the mere sight of a human face, never
beheld before, could disturb the whole tenor of my life
-— a stranger of whose mind and character I knew
nothing, whose very voice I had never heard? It was
only by the intolerable pang of anguish that had rent


68 A s'raasen near.
my heart in the words, carelessly, abruptly spoken, “ if
she were to die,” that I had felt how the world would
be changed to me, if indeed that face were seen in it
no more! Yes, secret it was no longer to myself—I
loved! And like all on whom love descends, some-
times softly, slowly, with the gradual wing of the
cushat settling down into its nest, sometimes with the
swoop of the eagle on his unsuspecting quarry, I
believed that none ever before loved as I loved—that
such love was an abnormal wonder, made solely for
me, and I for it. Then my mind insensibly hushed its
angrier and more turbulent thoughts, as my gaze rested
upon the roof-tops of Lilian’s home, and the shimmer-
ing silver of the moonlit willow, under which I had
seen her gazing into the roseate heavens.
CHAPTER VIII.
WHEN I returned to the drawing-room, the party was
evidently about to break up. Those who had grouped
round the piano were now assembled roundthe refresh-
ment table. The card players had risen, and were
settling or discussing gains and losses. While I was
searching for my hat, which I had somewhere mislaid,
a poor gentleman, tormented by tic-douloreux, crept
timidly up to me-the proudest and the poorest of ail


a sraauen arena 69
the hidalgoes settled on the Hill. He could not afford
a fee for a physician’s advice, but pain had humbled his
pride, and I saw at a glance that he was considering
how to take a surreptitious advantage of social inter-
course, and obtain the advice without paying the fee.
The old man discovered the but before I did, stooped,
took it up, extended it to me with the profound bow of
the old school, while the other hand, clenched and
quivering, was pressed into the hollow of his cheek,
and his eyes met mine with wistful, mute entreaty.
The instinct of my profession seized me at once. I
could never behold suﬂ'ering without forgetting all else
in the desire to relieve it.
“ You are in pain,” said I, softly. “ Sit down and
describe the symptoms. Here, it is true, I am no pro-
fessional doctor, but I am a friend who is fond-of
doctoring, and knows something about it.”
So we sat down a little apart from the other guests,
and after a few questions and answers, I was pleased
to ﬁnd that his “tic” did not belong to the less curable
kind of that agonizing neuralgia. I was especially
successful in my treatment of similar suﬂ'erings, for
which I had discovered an anodyne that was almost
speciﬁc. I wrete on a leaf of my pocket-book a pre-
scription which I felt sure would be eﬁicacious, and as
I tore it out and placed it in his hand, I chanced to
look up, and saw the hazel eyes of my hostess ﬁxed
upon me with a kinder and softer expression than they
oﬂen condescended to admit into their cold and pene~


70 A err-sues sroav.
trating lustre. At that moment, however, her attention
was drawn from me to a servant, who entered with a
note, and I heard him say, though in an undertone,
“From Mrs. Ashleigh.”-
She opened the note, read it hastily, ordered the
servant to wait without the door, retired to her writing
table, which stood near the place at which I stil!
lingered, rested her face on her hand, and seemed
musing. Her meditation was very soon over. She
turned her head, and, to my surprise, beckoned to me.
I approached. I
“ Sit here,” she whispered; “turn your back towards
those people, who are no doubt watching us. Read
this.”
She placed in my hand the note she had just received.
It contained but a few words to this effect:
“ DEAR Maaosan'rn—I am so distressed. Since I
wrote to you, a few hours ago, Lilian is taken suddenly
ill, and I fear seriously. What medical man should
I send for? Let my servant have his name and
address. A. A."
I sprang from my seat.
“ Stay,” said Mrs. Poyntz. " Would you much care
if I sent the servant to Dr. Jones ?"
“ Ah, madam, you are cruel! What have I done
that you should become my enemy ‘2”
"Enemy! N 0. You have just befriended one of
my friends. In this world of fools intellect Should ally


a STRAND! storm. 71
itself with intellect. No; I am not your enemy! But
you have not yet asked me to be your friend.”
Here she put into my hands a note she had written
while thus speaking: “Receive your credentials. If
there be any cause for alarm, or if I can be of use, send
for me.” Resuming the work she had suspended, but
with lingering, uncertain ﬁngers, she added, “So far,
then, this is settled. Nay, no thanks! it is but little
that is settled as yet.” I '
CHAPTER IX.
IN a very few minutes I was once more in the grounds
of that old gable house; the servant, who went before
me, entered them by the stairs and the wicket-gate of
the private entrance; that way was the shortest. So
again I passed by the circling glade and the monastic
well—award, trees, and ruins, all suﬂ'used in the limpid
moonlight.
And now I was in the house; the servant took
upstairs the note with which I was charged, and a
minute or two afterwards returned and conducted me
to the corridor above, in which Mrs. Ashleigh received
me. I was the ﬁrst to speak: “Your daughter—is—
is—not seriously ill, I hope. What is it ?”
“Hush!” she said, under her breath. “Will you
step this way for a moment?” She passed through a


72 A STRANGE sroar.
doorway to the right. I followed her, and as she placed
on the table the light she had been holding, I looked
round with a chill at the heart-it was the room in
which Dr. Lloyd had died. Impossible to mistake.
The furniture, indeed, was changed -there was no bed
in the chamber; but the shape of the room, the position
of the high casement, which was now wide open, and
through which the moonlight streamed more softly than
on that drear winter night, the great square beams
intersecting the low cciling- all were impressed vividly
on my memory. The chair to which Mrs. Ashleigh
beckoned me was placed just on the spot where I had
stood by the bed-head of the dying man.
I shrank back— I could not have seated myself
there. So, I remained leaning against the chimney-
. piece, while Mrs. Ashleigh told her story.
She said that on their arrival the day before, Lilian
had been in more than usually good health and spirits,
delighted with the old house, the grounds, and especially
the neck by the Monk’s Well, at which Mrs. Ashleigh
had left her that evening in order to make some pur-
chases iu the town, in company with Mr. Vigors.
When Mrs. Ashleigh returned, she and Mr. Vigors had
sought Lilian in that nook, and Mrs. Ashleigh then
detected, with a mother’s eye, some change in Lilian,
which alarmed her. She seemed listless and dejected,
and was very pale; but she denied that she felt unwell.
On regaining the house she had sat down in the room
in which we then were — “ which," said Mrs. Ashleigh.


A summer: s'ronr. 'i
" as it is not required for a sleeping-room, my daughter,
who is fond of reading, wished to ﬁt up as her own
morning-room, or study. I left her _here and went into
the drawing-room below with Mr. Vigors. When he
quitted me, which he did very soon, I remained for
nearly an hour giving directions about the .placing of
furniture, which had just arrived from our late residence.
1 then went upstairs to join my daughter, and to my
terror found her apparently lifeless in her chair. She
had fainted away.”
I interrupted Mrs. Ashleigh here: “Has Miss Ash-
leigh been subject to fainting ﬁts f”
“ N 0, never. When she recovered she Seemed be~
wildered-disinclined to speak. I got her to bed, and
as she then fell quietly to sleep, my mind was relieved.
I thought it only a passing effect of excitement, in a
change of abode; or caused by something like malaria
in the atmosphere of that part of the grounds in which
I had found her seated.”
“Very likely. The hour of sunset at this time of
year is trying to delicate constitutions. Go on."
“ About three-quarters of an hour ago she woke up
with a loud cry, and has been ever since in a state of
great agitation, weeping violently, and answering none
of my questions. Yet she does not seem light-headed,
but rather what we call hysterical.”
“ You will permit me now to see her. Take comfort
—-in all you tell me I see nothing to warrant serious
alarm ”


H A sraarma sroav.
CHAPTER X.
To the true physician there is an inexpressibla
sanctity in the sick-chamber. At its threshold the
more human passions quit their hold on his heart.
Love there would be profanation. Even the grief per-
mitted to others he must put aside. He must enter
that room— a calm intelligence. He is disabled for his
mission if he suﬁ‘cr aught to obscure the keen, quiet
glance of his science. Age or youth, beauty or
deformity, innocence or guilt, merge their distinctions
in one common attribute-human suffering appealing
to human skill. ~
Woe to the households in which the trusted Healer
feels not on his conscience the solemn obligations of
his glorious art. Reverently, as in a temple, I stood in
the virgin’s chamber. When her mother placed her
hand in mine, and I felt the throb of its pulse, I was
aware of no quicker beat of my own heart. I looked
with a steady eye on the face, more beautiful from the
ﬂush that deepened the delicate hues of the young
cheek, and the lustre that brightened the dark blue of
the wandering eyes. She did not at ﬁrst heed me; did
not seem aware of my presence; but kept murmuring
to herself words which I could not distinguish.
At length, when I spoke to her, in that low, soothing
tone which we learn at the sick-bed, the expression of


A sraauoa “Jar. ’ 75
her face altered suddenly; she passed the hand I did
not hold over her forehead, turned round, looked at me
full and long, with unmistakable surprise, yet not as if
the surprise displeased her; less the surprise which
recoils from .the sight of a stranger than that which
seems doubtfully to recognize an unexpected friend.
Yet on the surprise there seemed to creep something
of apprehension—of fear—her hand trembled, her
voice quivered, as she said:
“ Can it be, can it be? Am I awake? Mother, who
is this!”
“Only a kind visitor, Dr. Fenwick, sent by Mrs.
Poyntz, for I was uneasy about you, darling. How are
you now?”
“ Better. Strangely better."
She removed her hand gently from mine, and with
an involuntary, modest shrinking, turned towards Mrs.
Ashleigh, drawing her mother towards herself, so that
she became at once hidden from me.
Satisﬁed that there was here no delirium, nor even
more than the slight and temporary fever which often
accompanies a sudden nervous attack in constitutions
peculiarly sensitive, I retired noiselessly from the room,
and went, not into that which had been occupied by the
ill-fated Naturalist, butdown stairs into the drawing-
room, to write my prescription. I had already sent the
servant oil“ with it to the chemist’s before Mrs: Ashleigh
joined me.
“ She seems recovering surprisingly; her forehead is


76 A summer; STORY.
cooler; she is perfectly self-possessed, only she cannot
account for her own seizure, cannot account either for
the fainting or the agitation with which she awoke
from sleep."
“ I think I can account for both. The ﬁrst room in
which she entered—that in which she fainted—had
its window open; thesides of the window are over-
grown with rank creeping-plants in full blossom. Miss
Ashleigh had already predisposed herself to injurious
eﬂ'ects from the efﬂuvia, by fatigue, excitement, impru-
dence in sitting out at the fall of a heavy dew. The
sleep after the fainting ﬁt was the more disturbed,
because Nature, always alert and active in subjects so
young, was making its own effort to right itself from
an injury. Nature has nearly succeeded: What I
have prescribed will a little aid and accelerate that
which Nature has yet to do, and in a day or two I do
not doubt that your daughter will be perfectly restored.
Only let me recommend care to avoid exposure to the
open air during the close of day. Let her avoid also the
room in which she was ﬁrst seized, for it is a strange
phenomenon in nervous temperaments that a nervous
attack may, without visible cause, be repeated in the
same place where it was ﬁrst experienced. You had
better shut up the chamber for at least some weeks,
burn ﬁres in it, repaint and paper it, sprinkle chloro-
form. You are not, perhaps, aware that Dr. Lloyd
died in that room after a prolonged illness. Suﬁ‘er me
to wait till your servant returns with the medicine, and


A sranses sroaY. 71
let me employ_the interval in asking you a few ques-
tions. Miss Ashleigh, you say, never had a fainting
ﬁt before. I should presume that she is not what we
call strong. But has she ever had any illness that
alarmed you i”
“Never.”
“ No great liability to cold and cough, to attacks of
the chest or lungs?”
“Certainly not. Still I have feared that she may
have a tendency to consumption. Do you think so?
Your questions alarm me I ”
“ I do not think so; but before I pronounce a positive
opinion, one question more. You say you have feared
a tendency to consumption. Is that disease in her
family? _ She certainly did not inherit it from you.
But on her father’s side? ”
“Her father,” said Mrs. Ashleigh, with tears in her
eyes, “died young, but of brain fever, which the medi-
cal men said was brought on by over-study."
“ Enough, my dear madam. What you say conﬁrms
my belief that your daughter’s constitution is the very
opposite to that in which the seeds of consumption lurk.
It is rather that far nobler constitution, which the keen-
ness of the nervous susceptibility renders delicate 'but
elastic—as quick to recover as it is to suffer.”
“ Thank you, thank you, Dr. Fenwick, for what you
say. You take a load from my heart. For Mr. Vigors,
I know, thinks Lilian consumptive, and Mrs. Poyntz
has rather frightened me at times by hints to the same
7 'I'


78 A screams s'roar.
effect. But when you speak of nervous susceptibility,
I do not quite understand you. My daughter is not
what; is commonly called nervous. Her temper is
singularly even.”
“ But if not excitable, should you also say that she is
not impressionable? The things which do not disturb
her temper, may, perhaps, deject her spirits. Do I
make myself understood?”
“ Yes, I think I understand your distinction. But I
am not quite sure it applies. To most things that
affect the spirits she is not more sensitive than other
girls, perhaps less so. But she is certainly very impres-
sionable in some things.”
“ In what?”
“She is more moved than any one I ever knew by
objects in external nature, rural scenery, rural sounds,
by music, by the books that she reads—even books
that are not works of imagination. Perhaps in all this
she takes after her poor father, but in a more marked
degree—at least, I observe it more in her. For he was
very silent and reserved. And perhaps also her pecnii~
arities have been fostered by the seclusion in which she
has been brought up. It was with a view to make her
a little more like girls of her own age that our friend,
Mrs. Poyntz, induced me to come here. Lilian was
reconciled to this change; but she shrank from the
thoughts of London, which I should have preferred.
Her poor father could not endure London.”
“ Miss Ashleigh is fond of reading?”


A s'raanes sroav. '(9
“ Yes, she is fond of reading, but more fond of
musing. She will sit by herself for hours without
book or work, and seem as abstracted as if in a dream.
She was so even in her earliest childhood. Then she
would tell me what she had been conjuring up to her-
self. She would say that she had seen—positively seen
—-beautiful lands far away from earth; ﬂowers and
trees not like- ours. As she grew older this visionary
talk displeased me, and I scolded her, and said that if
others heard her, they would think that she was not
only silly but very untruthful. So of late years she
never ventures to tell me what, in such dreamy mo-
ments, she suﬁ'ers herself to imagine; but the habit of
musing continues still. Do you not agree with Mrs.
Poyntz, that the best cure would be a little cheerful
society amongst other young people l’ ”
“ Certainly,” said I, honestly, though with a jealous
pang. “ But here comes the medicine. Will you take
it up to her, and then sit with her half an hour or so?
By that time I expect she will be asleep. I will wait
here till you return. Oh, I can amuse myself with the
newspapers and books on the table. Stay! one caution:
be sure there are nov ﬂowers in Miss Ashleigh’s sleeping-
room. I think I saw a treacherous rose-tree in a stand
by the window. If»so, banish it.”
Left alone, I examined the room in which, 0h thought
of joyl I had surely now won the claim to become a
privileged guest I touched the books Lilian must
save touched, in the articles of furniture, as yet so


80 A sraANes STORY.
hastily disposed that the settled look of home was not
about them, I still knew that I was gazing on things
which her mind must associate with the history of her
young life. That lute-harp—must be surely hers, and
the scarf, with a girl’s favorite colors, pure white and
pale blue, and the bird-cage, and the childish ivory
work-case, with implements too pretty for use 3—all
spoke of her.
It was a blissful, intoxicating reverie, which Mrs.
Ashleigh’s entrance disturbed.
Lilian was sleeping calmly. I had no excuse to
linger there any longer.
“I leave you, I trust, with your mind quite at ease,’,’
said I. “You will allow me to call to-morrow, in the
afternoon I”
“ Oh yes, gratefully.”
Mrs. Ashleigh held out her hand as I made towards
the door.
Is there a physician who has not felt at times how
that ceremonious fee throws him back from the garden-
land of humanity into the market-place of money-
seems to put him out of the pale of equal friendship,
and say, “ True, you have given health and life. Adieul
there, you are paid for it.” With a poor person there
would have been no dilemma, but Mrs. Ashleigh was
aﬂiuent; to depart from custom here was almost imper-
tinence. But had the penalty of my refusal been the
doom of never again beholding Lilian, I could not have
taken her mother’s gold. So I did not appear to notice


A STRANGE STORY. 81
the hand held out to me, and passed by with a quick
ened step.
" But, Dr. Fenwick, stop I”
“No, ma’am, nol Miss Ashleigh would have re
covered as soon without me. Whenever my aid is '
really wanted, then—but heaven grant that time may
never come! We will talk again about her to-morrow.”
I was gone. Now in the garden ground, odorous
with blossoms; now in the lane, enclosed by the narrow
walls; now in the deserted streets, over which the
moon shone full as in that winter night when I hurried
from the chamber of death. But the streets were not
ghastly now, and the moon was no longer Hecate, that
dreary goddess of awe and spectres, but the sweet,
simple Lady of the Stars, on whose gentle face lovers
have gazed ever since (if that guess of astronomers be
true) she-was parted from earth to rule the tides of its
deeps from afar, even as love, from love divided, rules
:he heart that yearns towards it with mysterious lawl
CHAPTER XI.
WITH what increased benignity I listened to the
patients who visited me the next morning. The whole
human race seemed to be worthier of love, and I longed
to diﬂ'use amongst all some rays of the glorious hope
I'


82 A STRANGE STORY.
that had dawned upon my heart. My ﬁrst call, when
I went forth, was on the poor young woman from whom
I had been returning the day before, when an impulse,
which seemed like a fate, had lured me into the grounds
where I had'ﬁrst seen Lilian. I felt grateful to this
poor patient; without her, Lilian herself might be yet
unknowh to me.
The girl’s brother, a young man employed in the
police, and whose pay supported a widowed mother
and the suﬁering sister, received me at the threshold
of the cottage.
“Oh, sirl she is so much better to-day; almost free
from pain. Will she live now? can she live?”
“ If my treatment has really done the good you say;
if she be really better under it, I think her recovery
may be pronounced. But I must ﬁrst see her.”
The girl was indeed wonderfully better. I- felt that
my skill was achieving a. signal triumph; but that day
even my intellectual pride was forgotten in the luxurious
unfolding of that sense of heart which had so newly
waked into blossom.
As I recrossed the threshold, I smiled on the‘brother,
who was still lingering there:
“Your sister is saved, Waby. She needs now chieﬂy
wine, and good though light nourishment; these you
will ﬁnd at my house; call there for them every day ”
“God bless you, sir! If ever I can serve you "

His tongue faltered— he could say no more.
Serve me—Allen Fenwick—that poor policemanl


A s'raanen STORY. 83
Me, whom a king could not serve! What did I ask
from earth but Fame and Lilian’s heart? Thrones and
bread man wins from the aid of others. Fame and
woman’s heart he can only gain through himself.
So I strode gain up the hill, through the iron gates
into the fairy ground, and stood before Lilian’s home.
The man-servant, on opening the door, seemed some-
what confused, and said hastily, before I spoke:
“ Not at home, sir; a. note for you.”
I turned the note mechanically in my hand; I felt
stunned.
“ Not at home! Miss Ashleigh cannot be out. How
is she T ”
“Better, sir, thank you.”
I still could not open the note; my eyes turned wist-
fully towards the windows of the house, and there—at
the drawing-room window—I encountered the scowl
of Mr. Vigors. I colored with resentment, divined that
I was dismissed, and walked away with a proud crest
and a ﬁrm step.
When I was out of the gates, in the blind lane, I
opened the note. It began formally: “ Mrs. Ashleigh
presents her compliments,” and went on to thank me,
civilly enough, for my attendance the night before;
would not give me the trouble to repeat my visit, and
enclosed a fee, double the amount of the fee prescribed by
custom. I ﬂung the money, as an asp that had stung
me, over the high wall, and tore the note into shreds.
Having thus idly vented my rage, a dull gnawing sor-


84 A s'raaxes s'ronv.
row came heavily down upon all other emotions, stiﬂing
and replacing them. At the mouth of the lane I halted.
I shrank from the thought of the crowded streets
beyond. I shrank yet more from the routine of duties,
which stretched before me in the desert into which
daily life was so suddenly smitten. I sat down by the
roadside, shading my dejected face with a nerveless
band. I looked up as the sound of steps reached my
ear, and saw Dr. Jones coming briskly along the lane,
evidently from Abbots’ House. He must have been
there at the very time I had called. I was not only
dismissed, but supplanted. I rose before he reached the
spot on which I had seated myself, and went my way
into the town, went through my allotted round of pro-
fessional visits; but my attentions were not so tenderly
devoted, my skill so genially quickened by the glow of
benevolence, as my poorer patients had found them in
the morning. I have said how the physician should
enter the sick-room. “A Calm Intelligence!” But if
you strike a blow on the heart, the intellect suffers.
Little worth, I suspect, was my “calm intelligence ”
that day. Bichat, in his famous book upon Life and
Death, divides life into two classes—animal and
organic. Man’s intellect, with the brain for its centre,
belongs to life animal; his passions to life organic,
centred in the heart, in'the viscera. Alasl if the
noblest passions through which alone we lift ourselves
into the moral realm of the sublime and beautiful really
have their centre in the life which the very vegetable,


A s'raanos near. 85
that lives organically, shares with us! And, alasl if
it be that life which we share with the vegetable, that
can cloud, obstruct, suspend, annul that life centred in
the brain, which we share with every being howsoever
angelic, in every star howsoever remote, on whom the
Creator bestows the faculty of thought!
CHAPTER XII.
Bur suddenly I remembered Mrs. Poyntz. I ought
to call on her. So I closed my round of visits at her
door. The day was then far advanced, and the servant
politely informed me that Mrs. Poyntz was at dinner.
I could only leave my card, with a message that I
would pay my respects to her the next day. That
evening I received from her this note:
“ Dana DB. anwwxz— I regret much that I cannot
have the pleasure of seeing you to-morrow. Poyntz
and I are going to visit his brother, at the other end of
the county, and we start early. We shall be away some
days. Sorry to hear from Mrs. Ashleigh that she has
been persuaded by Mr. Vigors to consult Dr. Jones
about Lilian. Vigors and Jones both frighten the poor
mother, and insist upon consumptive tendencies. Un~
luckily, you seemed to have said there was little the
8


86 A' s'rasnes s'roaY.
matter. Some doctors gain their practice, as some
preachers ﬁll their churches, by adroit use of the
appeals to terror. You do not want patients, Dr. Jones
does. And, after all, better perhaps as it is.
Yours, &c. M. Porsrz.”
To my more selﬁsh grief anxiety for Lilian was now
added. I had seen many more patients die from being
mistreated for consumption than from consumption
itself. And Dr. Jones was a mercenary, cunning,
needy man, with much crafty knowledge of human '
foibles, but very little skill in the treatment of human
maladies. My fears were soon conﬁrmed. A few
days after I heard from Miss Brabazon that Miss
Ashleigh was seriously ill;kept her room. Mrs. Ash-
leigh made this excuse for not immediately returning
the visits which the Hill had showered upon her. Miss
Brabazon had seen Dr. Jones, who had shaken his
head, said it was a serious case; but that time and
care (his time and his care i) might effect wonders.
How stealthily at the dead of the night I wodld climb
the Hill, and look toward the windows of the old sombre
house—one window, in which a light burnt dim and
mournful, the light of a sick-room—of hersl
At length Mrs. Poyntz came back, and I entered her
house, having fully resolved beforehand on the line of
policy to be adopted towards the potentate whom I
heped to secure as an ally. It was clear that neither
disguise nor half-conﬁdence would battle the penetration


a srsauon small. 87
of so keen an intellect, nor propitiate the good will of
so imperious and resolute a temper. Perfect frankness
here was the wisest prudence; and, after all, it was
most agreeable to my own nature, and most worthy of
my own honor.
Luckily, I found Mrs. Poyntz alone, and taking in
both mine the hand she somewhat coldly extended to
me, I said, with the earnestness of suppressed emotion:
“You observed when I last saw you, that I had not
yet asked you to be my friend. I ask it nowl Listen
to me with all the indulgence you can vouchsafe, and
let me at least proﬁt by your counsel, if you refuse to
give me your aid.”
Rapidly, brieﬂy, I went on to say how I had ﬁrst seen
Lilian, and how sudden, how‘ strange to myself, had
been the impression which that ﬁrst sight of her had
produced.
“ You remarked the change that had come over me,”
said I; “ you divined the cause before I divined it my-
self; divined it as I sat there beside you, thinking that
through you I might see, in the freedom of social inter-
course, the face that was then haunting me. You know
what has since passed. Miss Ashleigh is ill; her case
is, I am convinced, wholly misunderstood. All other
feelings are merged in one sense of anxiety—of alarm.
but it has become due to me, due to all, to incur the
risk of your ridicule even more than of your reproof, by
stating to you thus candidly, plainly, bluntly, the senti-
ment which renders alarm so poignant, and which, if


88 A summon s'roar.
scarcely admissible to the romance of some wild dreamy
boy, may seem an unpardonable folly in a. man of my
years and my sober calling; due to me, to you, to Mrs.
Ashleigh ; because still the dearest thing in life to me
is honor. And if you who know Mrs. Ashleigh so
intimately, who must be more or less aware of her
plans or wishes for her daughter’s future ; if you believe
that those plans or wishes lead to alot far more am-
bitious than an alliance with me could offer to Miss
Ashleigh, then aid Mr. Vigors in excluding me from
the house; aid me in suppressing a presumptuous,
visionary passion. I cannot enter that house without
love and hope at my heart. And the threshold of that
house I must not cross it such love and such hope be a
sin and a treachery in the eyesot' its owner. I might
restore Miss Ashleigh to health; her gratitude might—
I cannot continue. This danger must not be to me nor
to her, if her mother has views far above such a son-in
law. And I am the more bound to consider all this
while it is yet time, because I heard you state that Miss
Ashleigh had a fortune— was what would be here
termed an heiress. And the full consciousness that
whatever fame one in my profession may live to acquire,
does not open those vistas of social power and grandeur
which are opened by professions to my eyes less noble
in themselves — that full consciousness, I say, was
forced upon me by certain words of your own. For the
rest, you know my descent is suﬂiciently recognized as
that amidst well-born gentry to have rendered me no


a srnanen near. 89
mosalliance to families the most proud of their ancestry,
if I had kept my hereditary estate and avoided the
career that makes me useful to man. But I acknowl-
edge that on entering a profession such as mine—enter-
ing any profession except that of arms or the senate-
all leave their pedigree at its door, an erased or dead
letter. All must come as equals, high-born or low-
born, into that arena in which men ask aid from a man
as he makes himself; to them his dead forefathers are
idle dust. Therefore, to the advantage of birth I cease
to have a claim. I am but a provincial physician,
whose station would be the same had he been a
cobbler’s son. But gold retains its grand privilege in
all ranks. He who has gold is removed from the sus-
picion that attaches to the greedy fortune-hunter. My
private fortune, swelled by my savings, is suﬁicient to
secure to any one I marry a larger settlement than
many a wealthy squire can make. I. need no fortune
with a wife; if she have one, it would be settled on
herself. Pardon these vulgar details. New, have I
made myself understood ?” .
“Fully/"answered the Queen of the Hill, who had
listened to me quietly, watchfully, and without one
interruption. “Fully. And you have done well to
conﬁde in me with so generous an unreserve. But
before I any further, let me ask, what would be your
advice for Lilian, supposing that you ought not to
attend her? You have no trust in Dr. Jones; neither
have I. And Anne Ashleigh’s note received to-day,
8i


90 A STRANGI s'ronr.
begging me to call, justiﬁes your alarm. Still you think
there is no tendency to consumption ?”
"Of that I am certain, so far as my slight glimpse
of a case that to me, however, seems a simple and not
uncommon one, will permit. But in the alternative you
put—that my own skill, whatever its worth, is forbidden
— my earnest advice is, that Mrs. Ashleigh should take
her daughter at once to London, and consult there
those great authorities to whom I cannot compare my
own opinion or experience ; and by their counsel abide.”
Mrs. Poyntz shaded her eyes with her hand for a few
moments, and seemed in deliberation with herself.
Then she said, with her peculiar smile, half grave,
half ironical:
“ In matters more ordinary you would have won me
to your side long ago. That Mr. Vigors should have
presumed to cancel my recommendation to a settler on
the Hill, was an act of rebellion, and involved the
honor of my prerogative. But I suppressed my indig-
nation at an affront so unusual, partly out of pique
,against yourself, but much more, I think, out of regard
for you.” _ ' _
“I understand. You detected the secret of my heart;
you knew that Mrs. Ashleigh would not wish to see her
daughter the wife of a provincial physician.”
“Am I sure, or are you sure, that the daughter her-
self would accept that fate; or if she accepted it, would
not repent Y”
“Do not think me the vainest of men when I say


A sraanoa s'roav. 91
this—that I cannot believe I should be so enthralled
by a feeling at war with my reason, nnfavored by any-
thing I can detect in my habits of mind, or even by the
dreams of a youth which exalted science and excluded
love, unless I was intimately convinced that Miss Ash-
leigh’s heart was free—that I could win, and that I
could keep it! Ask me why I am convinced of this,
and I can tell you no more why I think that she could
love me, than I can tell you why I love her!”
“I am of the world, worldly. But I am a woman,
womanly—though I may not care to be thought it.
And, therefore, though what you say is, regarded in a
worldly point of view, sheer nonsense, regarded in a
womanly point of view, it is logically sound. But still
you cannot know Lilian as I do. Your nature and here
are in strong contrast. I do not think she is a safe
Wife for you. The purest, the most innocent creature
imaginable, certainly that, but always in the seventh
heaven. And you in the seventh heaven, just at this
moment, but with an irresistible gravitation to the solid
earth, which will have its way again when the honey-
moon is over. I do not believe you two would har-
monize by intercourse. I do not believe Lilian would
sympathize with you, and I am sure you could not sym-
pathize with her throughout the long dull course of
this workday life. And, therefore, for your sake as
well as hers, I was not displeased to ﬁnd that Dr. Jones
had replaced you; and now, in return for your frank-
ness 1 say frankly—do not go again to that house


92 A summer s'roav.
Conquer this sentiment, fancy, passion, whatever it be.
And I will advise Mrs. Ashleigh to take Lilian to town.
Shall it be so settled?”
I could not speak. I buried my face in my hands-
misery, misery, desolation!
I know not how long I remained thus silent, perhaps
many minutes. At length I felt a cold, ﬁrm, but not
ungentle, hand placed upon mine ; and a clear, full, but
not discouraging, voice said to me:
“Leave me to think well over this conversation, and
to ponder well the value of all you have shown that
you so deeply feel. The interests of life do not ﬁll both
scales of the balance. The heart which does not always
go in the same scale with the interests, still has its
weight in the scale opposed to them. I have heard a
few wise men say, as many a silly woman says, ‘Better
be unhappy with one we love, than be happy with one
we love not.’ Do you say that, too 7”
“ With every thought of my brain, every beat of my
pulse, I say it.”
“After that answer, all my questionings cease. You
shall hear from me to-morrow. By that time I shall
have seen Anne and Lilian. I shall have weighed both
scales of the balance, and the heart here, Allen Fen-
wick, seems very heavy. G0, now. i I hear feet on the
stairs, Poyntz bringing up some friendly gossiper;
gOBSlpel'S are spies.” 4
I passed my hand over my eyes, tearless, but how
tears would have relieved the anguish that burdened


A ensues s'ronr. _ 93
theml and, without a word, went down the stairs,
meeting at the landing-place Colonel Poyntz and the
old man whose pain my prescription had cured. The
old man was whistling a merry tune, perhaps ﬁrst
learned on the playground. He broke from it to thank,
almost to embrace me, as I slid by him. I seized his
jocund blessing as a good omen, and carried it with me
as I passed into the broad sunlight. Solitary—solitary!
Should I be so evermore?
CHAPTER XIII.
THE next day I had just dismissed the last of my
patients, and was about to enter my carriage and com-
mence my round, when I received a twisted note
containing but these words :
_ “ Call on me today, as soon as you can. M. Porsrz."
A few minutes afterwards I was in Mrs. Poyntz’s
drawing-room.
“Well, Allen Fenwick,” said she, “I do not serve
friends by halves. No thanks! I but adhere to a
principle I have laid down for myself. I spent last
evening with the Ashleighs. Lilian is certainly much
altered—very Weak, I fear very ill, and I believe very
unskilfully treated by Dr. Jones. I felt that it was my


94 A sraanos s'roar.
duty to insist on a change of physician, but there was
something else to consider before deciding who that
physician should be. I was bound, as your conﬁdante,
to consult your own scruples of honor. Of course I
could not say pointblank to Mrs. Ashleigh, ‘Dr. Fen-
wick admires your daughter, would you object to him
as a son-in-law ?’ Of course I could not touch at all
on the secret with which you intrusted me; but I have
not the less arrived at a conclusion, in agreement with
my previous belief, that not being a woman of the
world, Anne Ashleigh has none of the ambition which
women of the world would conceive for a daughter who
has a good fortune and considerableAbeauty; that her
predominant anxiety is for her child’s happiness, and
her predominant fear is that her child will die. She
would never oppose any attachment which Lilian might
form; and if that attachment were for one who had
preserved her daughter’s life, I believe her own heart
would gratefully go with her daughter’s. So far, then,
as honor is concerned, all scruples vanish.”
I sprang from my seat, radiant with joy. Mrs.
Poyntz dryly continued: “ You value yourself on your
common sense, and to that I address a few words 0'
counsel which may not be welcome to your romance
I said that I did not think you and Lilian would suit
each other in the long run; reﬂection conﬁrms me in
that supposition. Do not look at me so incredulously,
and so sadly.“ Listen, and take heed. Ask yourself
what, as a man whose days are devoted to a laborious


A s'raasus near. 95
profession, whose ambition is entwined with its success,
whose mind must be absorbed in its pursuits—ask
yourself what kind of a wife you would have sought to
win, had not this sudden fancy for a charming face
rushed over your better reason, and obliterated all
previous plans and resolutions. Surely some one with
whom your heart would have been quite at rest; by
whom your thoughts would have been undistracted
from the channels into which your calling should con-
centrate their ﬂow; in short, a serene companion in the
quiet holiday of a trustful home! Is it not so ?”
“ You interpret my own thoughts when they have
turned towards marriage. But what is there in Lilian
Ashleigh that should mar the picture you have drawn ?”
“ What is there in Lilian Ashleigh which in the least
accords with the picture? In the ﬁrst place, the wife
of a young physician should not be his perpetual
patient. The more he loves her, and the more worthy
she may be of love, the more her case will haunt him
wherever he goes. When he returns home, it is not to
a holiday; the patient he most cares for, the anxiety
that most gnaws him, awaits him there.” .
“But, good Heavens! why should Lilian Ashleigh
be a perpetual patient? The sanitary resources of
youth are incaleulable. And -——”
“Let me stop you; I cannot argue against a physi-
cian in love! I will give up that point in dispute,
remaining convinced that there is something in Lilian’s
constitution which will perplex, torment, and baﬂle you.


96 a summer. most.
It was so with her father, whom she resembles in face
and in character. He showed no symptoms of any
grave malady. His outward form was, like Lilian’s, a
model of symmetry, except in this, that like hers it was
too exquisitely delicate; but, when seemingly in the
midst of perfect health, at any slight jar on the nerves
he would become alarmingly ill. I was sure that he
would die young, and he did.”
“ Ay, but Mrs. Ashleigh said that his death was from
brain fever, brought on by over~stu'dy. Rarely, indeed,
do women so fatigue the brain. No female patient, in
the range of my practice, ever died of purely mental
exertion.”
“Of purely mental exertion, no; but of heart emo-
tion, many female patients, perhaps? Oh, you own
that! I know nothing about nerves. But I suppose
that, whether they act on the brain or the heart, the
result to life is much the same if the nerves be too
ﬁnely strung for life’s daily wear and tear. And this
is what I mean, when I say you and Lilian will not
suit. As yet, she is a mere child; her nature unde-
veloped, and her affections, therefore, untried. You
might suppose that you had won her heart; she might
believe that she gave it to you, and both be deceived.
If fairies nowadays condescended to exchange their
oﬂ'spring with those of mortals, and if the popular
tradition did not represent a fairy changeling as an ugly,
peevish creature, with none of the grace of its parents,
I should be half inclined to suspect that Lilian was one


A swaanen wear. 9'!
of the elﬁn people. She never seems at home on earth;-
and I do not think she will ever be contented with a
prosaic earthly lot. Now I have told you why I do not
think she will suit you. I must leave it to yourself to
conjecture how far you would suit her. I say this in
due season, while you may set a guard upon your
impulse; while you may yet watch, and weigh, and
meditate ; and from this moment on that subject I say
no more. 1 lend advice, but I never throw it away.”
She came here to a dead pause, and began putting
on her bonnet and scarf, which lay on the table beside
her. I was a little chilled by her words, and yet more
by the blunt, shrewd, hard look and manner which aided
the effect of their delivery. But the chill melted away
in the sudden glow of my heart when she again turned
towards me and said:
“ Of course you guess, from these preliminary cau-
tions, that you are going into danger? Mrs. Ashleigh
wishes to consult you about Lilian, and I propose to
take you to her house.”
“Oh, my friend, my dear friend, how can I ever
repay you ? ” I caught her hand, the white, ﬁrm hand,
and lifted it to my lips.
She drew it somewhat hastily away, and laying it
gently on my shoulder, said, in a soft voice, “Poor
Allen, how little the world knows either of us! But
how little perhaps we know ourselves! Come, your
carriage is here? That is right; we must put down
Dr. Jones publicly and in all our state.”
9 o


98 a smarter: s'roav.
In the carriage Mrs. Poyntz told me the purport of
that conversation with Mrs. Ashleigh to which I owed
my re-introduction to Abbots’ House. It seems that
Mr. Vigors had called early the morning after my ﬁrst
visit; had evinced much discomposure on hearing that
I had been summoned; dwelt much on my injurious
treatment of Dr. Lloyd, whom, as distantly related to
himself, and he (Mr. Vigors) being distantly connected
with the late Gilbert Ashleigh, he endeavored to fasten
upon his listener as one of her husband’s family, whose
quarrel she was bound in honor to take up. He spoke
of me as an infidel “tainted with French doctrines,”
and as a practitioner rash and presumptuous; proving
his own freedom from presumption and rashness by
ﬂatly deciding that my opinion must be wrong. Pre-
, Mr.
Vigors had interested her in the pretended phenomena
viously to Mrs. Ashleigh’s migration to L

of mesmerism. He had consulted a clairvoyaute, much
esteemed by poor Dr. Lloyd, as to Lilian’s health, and
the clairvoyante had declared her to be constitutionally
predisposed to consumption. Mr. Vigors persuaded
Mrs. Ashleigh to come at once with him and see this
(lairvoyante herself, armed with a lock of Lilian’s hair
and a glove she had worn, as the media of mesmerical
rapport.
The clairvoyante, one of those I had publicly dc-
aounced as an impostor, naturally enough denounced
me in return. On being asked solemnly by Mr. Vigors
to “look at Dr. Fenwick and see if his inﬂuence would


A s'raaaen sroar. 99
be beneﬁcial to the subject," the sibyl had become
violently agitated and said that, “ when she looked at
us together, we were enveloped in a black cloud; that
this portended aﬁliction and sinister consequences; that
our rapport was antagonistic.” Mr. Vigors then told
her to dismiss my image, and conjure up that of Dr.
Jones. Therewith the somnambulc became more tran-
quil and said: “Dr. Jones would do well if he would
be guided by higher lights than his own skill, and con-
sult herself daily as to the proper remedies. The best
remedy of all would be mesmerism. But since Dr.
Lloyd’s death, she did not know of a mesmerist, suﬁi-
ciently gifted, in aﬂinity with the patient.” In ﬁne,
she impressed and awed Mrs. Ashleigh, who returned
in haste, summoned Dr. Jones, and dismissed myself.
“I could not have conceived Mrs. Ashleigh to be so
utterly wanting in common‘ sense,” said I. “ She
talked rationally enough when I saw her.”
“ She has common sense in general, and plenty of the
sense most common,” answered Mrs. Poyntz. _ “But
she is easily led and easily frightened wherever
her aﬂ’ections are concerned, and, therefore, just as
easily as she had been persuaded by Mr. Vigors and
terriﬁed by the somnambule, I persuaded her against
the one, and terriﬁed her against the other. I had
positive experience on my side, since it was clear that
Lilian had been getting rapidly worse under Dr. Jones’s
care. The main obstacles I had to encounter in induc-
ing Mrs. Ashleigh to consult you again, were, ﬁrst, her


100 A STRANGE sronr.
reluctance to disoblige Mr. Vigors, as a friend and con-
nection of Lilian’s father; and, secondly, her sentiment
of shame in reinviting your opinion after having treated
you with so little respect. Both these diﬂiculties I took
on myself. I bring you to her house, and, on leaving
you, I shall go on to Mr. Vigors, and tell him what is
done is my doing, and not to be undone by him; so
that matter is settled. Indeed, if you were out of
the question, I should not suffer Mr. Vigors to re-intro-
duce all these mummeries of clairvoyance and mess
merism into the precincts of the Hill. I did not
demolish a man I really liked in Dr. Lloyd, to set up a
Dr. Jones, whom I despise, in his stead. Clairvoyance
on Abbey Hill, indeed! I saw enough of it before.”
“True; your strong intellect detected at once the
absurdity of the whole pretence—the falsity of mesmer-
ism—the impossibility of clairvoyance."
“ No, my strong intellect did nothing of the kind. I
do not know whether mesmerism be false or clairvoy-
ance impossible; and I don’t wish to know. All I do
know is, that I saw the Hill in great danger; young
Iadios allowing themselves to be put to sleep by gentle-
men, and pretending they had no will of their own
against such fascination! Improper and shocking!
And Miss Brabazon beginning to prophesy, and Mrs.
Leopold Smythe questioning her maid (whom Dr.
Lloyd declared to be highly gifted) as to all the secrets
of her friends. When I saw this, I said, ‘The Hill is
becoming demoraliZed ; the Hill is making itself ridicu-


A STRANGE sroav. 101
lens; the Hill must be savedl’ I remonstrated with
Dr. Lloyd, as a friend; he remained obdurate. I anni-
hilated him as an enemy, not to me but to the State.
I slew my best lover for the good of Rome. Now you
know why I took your part—not because I have any
opinion, one way or the other, as to the truth or false-
hood of what Dr. Lloyd asserted; but I have a strong
opinion that, whether they be true or false, his notions
Were those which are not to be allowed on the Bill.
And so, Allen Fenwick, that matter was settled."
Perhaps at another time I might have felt some little
humiliation to learn that I had been honored with the
inﬂuence of this great potentate, not as a champion of
truth, but as an instrument of policy; and I might have
owned to some twinge of conscience in having assisted
to sacriﬁce a fellow-seeker after science—misled. no
doubt, but preferring his independent belief to his
worldly interest—and sacriﬁce him to those deities
with Whom science is ever at war—the Prejudice of a
Clique sanctiﬁed into the Proprieties of the World.
But at that moment the words I heard made no per-
ceptible impression on my mind. The gables of
Abbots’ House were visible above the eyergreens and
lilacs; another moment, and the carriage stopped at
the door.


102 a sraanoa s'roar.
CHAPTER XIV.
Mas. Asuncion received as in the dining-room.
Her manner to me, at ﬁrst, was a little confused and
shy. But my companion soon communicated some
thing of her own happy ease to her gentler friend.
After a short conversation we all three went to Lilian,
who was in a little room on the ground-ﬂoor, ﬁtted up
as her study. I was glad to perceive that my interdict
of the death-chamber had been respected.
She reclined on a sofa near the window, which was,
l-Jwever, jealously closed; the light of the bright May-
day obscured by blinds and curtains; a large ﬁre on
the hearth; the air of the room that of a hot-house—
the ignorant, senseless, exploded system of nursing into
consumption those who are conﬁned on suspicion of it!
She did not heed us as we entered noiselessly; her eyes
were drooped languidly 0n the ﬂoor, and with difﬁculty
I suppressed the exclamation that rose to my lips on
seeing her. She seemed within the last few days so
changed, and on the aspect of the countenance there
was so profound a melancholy] But as she slowly
turned at the sound of our footsteps, and her eyes met
mine, a quick blush came into the wan cheek, and she
half rose, but sank back as if the effort exhausted her.
There was a struggle for breath, and a low hollow
cough. Was it possible that I had been mistaken, and
that in that cough was heard the warning knell of the
most insidious enemy to youthful life?


A sraasos STORY. 103
I sat down by her side; I lured her on to talk of in-
different subjects—the weather, the gardens, the bird
in the cage, which was placed on the table near her.
Her voice, at ﬁrst low and feeble, became gradually
stronger, and her face lighted up with a child’s innocent,
playful smile. No, I had not been mistaken! That
was no lymphatic, nerveless temperament, on which
consumption fastens as its lawful prey—here there was
no hectic pulse, no hurried waste of the vital ﬂame.
Quietly and gently I made my observations, addressed
my questions, applied my stethoscope; and when ,I
.turned my face towards her mother’s anxious,,,eager
eyes, that face told my opinion; for her mother sprzmg
forward, clasped my hand, and said, through her strug-
gling tears:
“You smile! You see nothing to fear Y”
“ Fear! N0, indeed! You will soon be again your-
self, Miss Ashleigh, will you not ? ”
“Yes,” she said, with her sweet laugh, “I shall be
well now, very soon. But may I not have the window
open—may I not go into the garden? I so long for
fresh air.”
“No, no, darling!” exclaimed Mrs. Ashleigh, “not
while the east winds last. Dr. Jones said on no ac-
count. On no account, Dr. Fenwick, eh ? ”
“Will you take my arm, Miss Ashleigh, for a few
turns up and down the room?” said I. “ We will then
see how far we may rebel against Dr. Jones.”
She rose with some little effort, but there was no


104 a s'raanes STORY.
cough. At ﬁrst her step was languid—it became
lighter and more elastic after a few moments.
“ Let her come out,” said I to Mrs. Ashleigh. “ The
wind is not in the east, and, while we are out, pray bid
your servant lower to the last bar in the grate that ﬁre
-only ﬁt for Christmas.”
(4 But _17
“Ah, no buts! He is a poor doctor who is not a
stern despot.”
So the straw hat and mantle were sent for. Lilian
was wrapped with unnecessary care, and we all went
forth into the garden. Involuntarin we took the way
to the Monk’s Well, and at every step Lilian seemed to
revive under the bracing air and temperate sun. We
paused by the well.
“ You do not feel fatigued, Miss Ashleigh 7 ”
H No.”
“ But your face seems changed. It is grown sadder.”
“ Not sadder.”
“ Sadder than when I ﬁrst saw it—saw it when you
were seated here!” I said this in a whisper. I felt
her hand tremble as it lay on my arm.
“ You saw me seated here 1 ”
“ Yes. I will tell you how some day.”
Lilian lifted her eyes to mine, and there was in them
that same surprise which I had noticed on my ﬁrst visit
--a surprise that perplexed me, blended with no dis-
pleasure, but yet with a something of vague alarm.
We soon returned to the house.


A sraanen s'ronr. 105
Mrs. Ashleigh made me a sign to follow her into the
drawing-room, leaving Mrs Poyntz with Lilian.
“ Well ? ” said she, tremblingly.
“ Permit me to see Dr. J ones’s prescriptions. Thank
you. Ay, I thought so. My dear madam, the mistake
here has been in depressing nature instead of strength-
ening; in narcotics instead of stimulants. The main
stimulants which leave no reaction are air and light.
Promise me that I may have my own way for a week
—that all I recommend will be implicitly heeded? ”
“ I promise. But that cough; you noticed it i ”
“ Yes. The nervous system is terribly lowered, and
nervous exhaustion is a strange impostor; it imitates
all manner of complaints with which it has no connec-
tion. The cough will soon disappear! But pardon my
question: Mrs. Poyntz tells me that you consulted a
clairvoyante about your daughter—does Miss Ashleigh
know that you did so ? ”
“ No; I did not tell her.”
“I am glad of that. And pray, for Heaven’s sake,
guard her against all that may set her thinking on such
subjects. Above all, guard her against concentrating
attention on any malady that your fears erroneously
ascribe to her. It is amongst the phenomena of our
organization that you cannot closely rivet your con-
sciousness on any part of the frame, however healthy,
but it will soon begin to exhibit morbid sensibility.
Try to ﬁx all your attention on your little ﬁnger for
half an hour, and before the half-hour is over the little


106 A s'raanoa s'roar.
ﬁnger will be uneasy, probably even painful. How
serious, then, is the danger to a young girl, at the age
in which imagination is most active, most intense, if
you force upon her a belief that she is in danger of a
mortal disease; it is a peculiarity of youth to brood
over the thought of early death much more resignedly,
much more eomplacently, than we do in maturer years.
Impress on a young, imaginative girl, as free from pul-
monary tendencies as you and I are, the conviction that
she must fade away into the grave, and though she may
not actually die of consumption, you instil slow poison
into her system. Hope is the natural aliment of youth.
You impoverish nourishment where you discourage
hope. As soon as this temporary illness is over, reject
for your daughter the melancholy care which seems to
her own mind to mark her out from others at her age.
Rear her for the air—which is the kindest life-giver;
to sleep with open windows; to be out at sunrise.
Nature will do more for her than all our drugs can do.
You have been hitherto fearing Nature; now trust
to her.”
Here Mrs. Poyntz joined us, and having, while I had
been speaking, written my prescription and some gene-
ral injunctions, I closed my advice with an appeal to
that powerful protectress:
“This, my dear madam, is a case in which I need
your aid, and I ask it. Miss Ashleigh should not be
left with no other companion than her mother. A
change of faces is often as salutary as a change of air.


a smarter: s'roar. 107
If ye _ could devote an hour or two this very evening
to sit with Miss Ashleigh, to talk to her with your
usual cheerfulness, and -”
“Anne,” interrupted Mrs. Poyntz, “I will come and
drink tea with you at half-past seven, and bring my
knitting; and perhaps, if you ask him, Dr. Fenwick
will come tool He can be tolerably entertaining when
he likes it.”
“ It is too great a tax on his kindness, I fear,” said
Mrs. Ashleigh. “ But,” she added, cordially, “ I should
be grateful indeed if he would spare us an hour of his
time.”
I murmured an assent, which I endeavoured to make
not too joyous.
" So that matter is settled,” said Mrs. Poyntz; “and
now I shall go to Mr. Vigors and prevent his further
interference.”
“ Oh! but, Margaret, pray don’t offend him—a con-
nection of my poor dear Gilbert’s. And so tetchyl I
am sure I do not know how you’ll manage to --”
“To get rid of him? Never fear. As I manage
everything and everybody, said Mrs. Poyntz, bluntly.
So she kissed her friend on the forehead, gave me a
gracious nod, and, declining the offer of my carriage,
walked with her usual brisk, decided tread down the
short path towards the town.
Mrs. Ashleigh timidly approached me, and again the
furtive hand bashfully insinuated the hateful fee.
“Stay,” said I; “this is a case which needs the most


[08 A s'raaaoa s'roar.
constant watching. I wish to call so often that I should
seem the most greedy of doctors if my visits were to be
computed at guineas. Let me be at ease to effect my
cure; my pride of science is involved in it. And when
amongst all the young ladies of the Hill you can point
to none with a fresher bloom, or a fairer promise of
healthful life, than the patient you intrust to my care,
why, then the fee and the dismissal. Nay, nay; I must
refer you to our friend Mrs. Poyntz. It was so settled
with her before she brought me here to displace Dr
J ones.” Therewith I escaped.
CHAPTER XV.
IN less than a week Lilian was convalescent; in less
than a fortnight she regained her usual health; nay,
Mrs. Ashleigh declared that she had never known her
daughter appear so cheerful and look so well. I had
established a familiar intimacy at Abbots’ House; most
of my evenings-were spent there. As horse exercise
formed an important part of my advice, Mrs. Ashleigh
had purchased a pretty and quiet horse for her daughter;
and, except the weather was very unfavorable, Lilian
now rode daily with Colonel Poyntz, who was a notable
equestrian. and often accompanied by Miss Jane Poyntz,


A STRANGE s'roar. 109
and other young ladies of the Hill. I was generally
relieved from my duties in time to join her as she
returned homewards. Thus we made innocent appoint-
ments, openly, frankly, in her mother’s presence, she
telling me beforehand in what direction excursions had
been planned with Colonel Poyntz, and I promising to
fall in with the party-if my avocations would permit.
At my suggestion, Mrs. Ashleigh now opened her house
almost every evening to some of the neighboring fami-
lies; Lilian was thus habituated to the intercourse of
young persons of her own age. Music and dancing and
childlike games made the old house gay. And the Hill
gratefully acknowledged to Mrs. Poyntz, “ that the
Ashleigbs were indeed a great acquisition.”
But my happiness was not unchequered. In thus
unselﬁshly surrounding Lilian with others, I felt the
anguish of that jealousy which is inseparable from these
earlier stages of love, when the lover as yet has won
no right to that self-conﬁdence which can only spring
from the assurance that he is loved.
In these social re-unions I remained aloof from Lilian.
I saw her courted by'the gay young admirers whom her
beauty and her fortune drew around her; her soft face
brightening in the exercise of the dance, which the
gravity of my profession rather than my years forbade
me to join—and her laugh, so musically subdued,
ravishing my ear and fretting my heart as if the laugh
were a mockery on my sombre self and my presump-
tuous dreams. But no, suddenly, shyly, her eyes would
10


"0 A STRANGE STORY.
steal away from those about her, steal to the corner in
which I sat, as if they missed me, and, meeting my
own gaze, their light softened before they turned away;
and the color on her cheek would deepen, and to her lip
there came 'a smile diﬁ'erent from the smile that it shed
on others. And then-and then—all jealousy, all sad-
ness vanished, and I felt the glory which blends with
the growing belief that we are loved.
In that diviner epoch of man’s mysterious passion,
when ideas of perfection and purity, vague and fugitive
before, start forth and concentre themselves round one
virgin shape —that rises out from the sea of creation
welcomed by the Hours and adorned by the Graces-
how the thought that this archetype of sweetness and
beauty singles himself from the millions, singles himself
for her choice, ennobles and lifts up his being! Though
after-experience may rebuke the mortal’s illusion, that
mistook for a daughter of Heaven a creature of clay like
himself, yet for a while the illusion has grandeur.
Though it comes from the senses which shall later
oppress and profane it, the senses at ﬁrst shrink into
shade, awed and hushed by the presence that charms
them. All that is brightest and best in the man has
soared up like long-dormant instincts of Heaven, to
greet and to hallow what to him seems life’s fairest
dream of the heavenly! Take the wings from the
image of Love, and the god disappears from the form!
Thus, if at moments jealous doubt made my torture,
so the moment’s relief from it sufﬁced for my rapture


it messes near. 111
But I had a cause for disquiet less acute but less vary-
ing than jealousy.
Despite Lilian’s recovery from the special illness
which had more immediately absorbed my care, I
remained perplexed as to its cause and true nature.
To her mother I gave it the convenient epithet of
“nervous.” But the epithet did not explain to myself
all the symptoms I classiﬁed by it. There was still, at
times, when no cause was apparent or'conjecturable, a
sudden change in the expression of her countenance-—
in the beat of her pulse; the eye would become ﬁxed,
the bloom would vanish, the pulse would sink feebler
and feebler till it could be scarcely felt; yet there was
no indication of heart disease, of which such sudden
lowering of life is in itself sometimes a warning indica-
tion. The change would pass away after a few minutes,
during which she seemed unconscious, or, at least,
never spoke—never appeared to heed what was said
to her. But in the expression of her countenance there
was no character of suffering or distress; on the con-
trary a wondrous serenity, that made her beauty more
beanteous, her very youthfulness younger; and when
this spurious or partial kind of syncope passed, she
recovered at once without effort, without acknowledging
that she had felt faint or unwell, but rather with a sense
of recruited vitality, as the weary obtain from a sleep.
For the rest her spirits were more generally light and
joyous than I should have premised from her mother’s
previous description. She would enter mirthfully into


112 A STRANGE wow.
the mirth of young companions around her; she had
evidently quick perception of the sunny sides of life;
an infantine gratitude for kindness; an infantine joy in
the triﬂes that amuse only those who delight in tastes
pure and simple, But when talk rose into graver and
more contemplative topics, her attention became earnest
and absorbed; and, sometimes, a rich eloquence, such
as I have never before nor since heard from lips so
young, would startle me ﬁrst into a wondering silence,
and soon into a disapproving alarm; for the thoughts
she then uttered seemed to me too fantastic, too vision- -
ary, too much akin to the vagaries of a wild though
beautiful imagination. And then I would seek to check,
to sober, to distract fancies with which my reason had
no sympathy, and the indulgence of which I regarded
as injurious to the normal functions of the brain.
When thus, sometimes with a chilling sentence,
sometimes with a half-sarcastic laugh, I would repress
outpourings frank and musical as the songs of a forest-
bird, she Would look at me with a kind of plaintive
sorrow—often sigh and shiver as she turned away.
Only in these modes did she show displeasure; other-
wise ever sweet and docile, and ever, if, seeing that I
had pained her, I asked forgiveness, humbling herself
rather to ask mine, and brightening our reconciliation
with her angel smile. As yet I had net dared to speak
of love; as yet I gazed on her as the captive gazes on
the ﬂowers and the stars through the gratings of his cell,
murmuring to himself, " When shall the doors unclose 1"


A summer. STORY. 113
CHAPTER XVI
IT was with a. wrath suppressed in the presence of
the fair ambassadress that Mr. Vigors had received
from Mrs. Poyntz the intelligence that I had replaced
Dr. Jones at Abbots’ House, not less abruptly than Dr.
' Jones had previously supplanted me. As Mrs. Poyntz
took upon herself the whole responsibility of this
change, Mr. Vigors did not venture to condemn it to
her face; for the Administrator of Laws was at heart
no little in awe of the Autocrat of Proprieties; as
Authority, howsoever established, is in awe of Opinion,
howsoever capricious.
To the mild Mrs. Ashleigh the magistrate’ anger
was more decidedly manifested. He ceased his visits;
and in answer to a long and deprecatory letter with
which she endeavored to soften his resentment and win
him back to the house, he replied by an elaborate com-
bination of homily and satire. He began by excusing'
himself from accepting her invitations, on the ground
that his time was valuable, his habits domestic; and
though ever willing to sacriﬁce both time and habits
where he could do good, he owed it to himself and to
mankind to sacriﬁce neither where his advice was
rejected and his opinion contemned. He glanced brieﬂy,
but not hastily, at the respect with which her late hus-
band had deferred to his judgment, and the beneﬁts
10* R


[14 a s'raaucn sroax
which that deference had enabled him to bestow. He
contrasted the husband’s deference with the widow’s
contumely, and hinted at the evils which the contumely
would not permit him to prevent. He could not pre-
sume to say what women of the world might think due
to deceased husbands, but even women of the world
generally allowed the claims of living children, and did
not act with levity where their interests were concerned,
still less where their lives were at stake. As to Dr.
Jones, be, Mr. Vigors, had the fullest conﬁdence in his
skill. Mrs. Ashleigh must judge for herself whether
Mrs. Poyntz was as good an authority upon medical
science as he had no doubt she was upon shawls and
ribbons. Dr. Jones was a man of caution and modesty ;
he did not indulge in the hollow boasts by which char-
latans decoy their dupes; but Dr. Jones had privately
assured him that, though the case was one that admitted
of no rash experiments, he had no fear of the result if
his own prudent system were persevered in. What
might be the consequences of any other system, Dr.
Jones would not say, because he was too high-minded
to express his distrust of the rival who had made use
of underhand arts to supplant him. But Mr. Vigors
was convinced, from other sources of information (mean-
ing, I presume, the oracular prescience of his clairvoy-
ants), that the time would come when the poor young
lady would herself insist on discarding Dr. Fenwick,
and when “that person” would appear in a very differ-
ent light to many who now so fondly admired and so


A sraanon areas. 115
reverentially trusted him. When that time arrived
he, Mr. Vigors, might again be of use; but, meanwhile,
though he declined to renew his intimacy at Abbots'
House, or to pay unavailing visits of mere ceremony,
his interest in the daughter of his old friend remained
undiminished, nay, was rather increased by compassion ;
that he should silently keep his eye upon her; and
whenever anything to her advantage suggested itself to
him, he should not be deterred by the slight with which
Mrs. Ashleigh had treated his judgment, from calling
on her, and placing before her conscience as a mother
his ideas for her child’s beneﬁt, leaving to herself then,
as now, the entire responsibility of rejecting the advice
which he might say, without vanity, was deemed of
some value by those who could distinguish between
sterling qualities and specious pretences. a
Mrs. Ashleigh’s was that thoroughly womanly nature
which instinctively leans upon others. She was diﬂi-
dent, trustful, meek, aﬁ'ectionate. Not quite justly bad
Mrs. Poyntz described her as “commonplace weak,”
for though she might be called weak, it was not because
she was commonplace; she had a goodness of heart, a
sweetness of disposition, to which that disparaging
deﬁnition could not apply. She could only be called
commonplace, inasmuch as in the ordinary daily affairs
of life she had a great deal of ordinary daily common-
place good sense. Give her a routine to follow, and no
routine could be better adhered to. In the allotted
sphere of a woman’s duties she never seemed in fault


[16 A STRANGE sroar.
N0 household, not even Mrs. Poyntz’s, was more happily
managed. The old Abbots’ House had merged its
original antique gloom in the softer character of pleasing
repose. All her servants adored Mrs. Ashleigh; all
found it a pleasure to please her; her establishment
had the harmony of clockwork; comfort diffused itself
round her like quiet sunshine round a sheltered spot.
T0 gaze on her pleasing countenance, to listen to the
simple talk that lapsed from her guileless lips, in even,
slow, and lulling murmur, was in itself a respite from
“ eating cares.” She was to the mind what the color
of green is to'the eye. She had, therefore, excellent
sense in all that relates to every-day life. There she
needed not to consult another; there the wisest might
have consulted her with proﬁt. But the moment any-
thing, however trivial in itself, jarred on the routine to
which her mind had grown wedded—the moment an
incident hurried her out of the beaten track of woman’s
daily life, then her conﬁdence forsook her—then she
needed a conﬁdant, an adviser; and by that conﬁdant
or adviser she could be credulously lured or submisp
sively controlled. Therefore, when she lost in Mr.
Vigors the guide she had been accustomed to consult
whenever she needed guidance, she turned, helplessly
and piteously, ﬁrst to Mrs. Poyntz, and then yet more
imploringly to me, because a woman of that character
is never quite satisﬁed without the advice of a man.
And when an intimacy more familiar than that of his
formal visits is once established with a physician. com


A STRANGE s'ronr. 111
ﬁdence in him grows fearless and rapid, as the natural
result of sympathy concentred on an object of anxiety
in common between himself and the home which opens
its sacred recess to his observant but tender eye. Thus
Mrs. Ashleigh had shown me Mr. Vigors’s letter, and,
forgetting that I might not be as amiable as herself,
besought me to counsel her how to conciliate and soften
her lost husband’s friend and connection. That char-
acter clothed him with dignity and awe in her soft,
forgiving eyes. So, smothering my own resentment,
less perhaps at the tone of offensive insinuation against
myself than at the arrogance with which this prejudiced
intermeddler implied to a mother the necessity of his
guardian-watch over a chlld under her own care, I
sketched a reply which seemed to me both digniﬁed
and placatory, abstaining from all discussion, and con-
veying the assurance that Mrs.Ashleigh would be at
all times glad to hear, and disposed to respect, what-
ever suggestion so esteemed a friend of her husband’s
would kindly submit to her for the welfare of her
daughter.
There all communication had stopped for about a
month since the date of my reintroduction to Abbots’
House. One afternoon I unexpectedly met Mr. Vigors
at the entrance of the blind lane, I on my" way to
Abbots’ House, and my ﬁrst glance at his face told me
that he was coming from it, for the expression of that
face was more than usually sinister; the sullen scowl
was lit into signiﬁcant menace by a sneer of unmis~


.18 a sraanon sronv.
takable triumph. I felt at once that he had succeeded
in some machination against me, and with ominous mis~
givings quickened my steps.
I found Mrs. Ashleigh seated alone in front of the
house, under a large cedar-tree that formed a natural
arbor in the centre of the sunny lawn. She was per-
ceptibly embarrassed as I took my seat beside her.
“I hope,” said I, forcing a smile, “that Mr. Vigors
has not been telling you that I shall kill my patient, or
that she looks much worse than she did under Dr.
J ones’s care f”
“No,” she said. “ He owned cheerfully that Lilian
had grown quite strong, and said, without any dis-
pleasure, that he had heard how gay she had been,
riding out and even dancing—which is very kind in
him, for-he disapproves of dancing, on principle.”
“ But still I can see he has said something to vex or
annoy you; and, to judge by his countenance when I
met him in the lane, I should conjecture that that
something was intended to lower the conﬁdence you so
kindly repose in me.” '
“I assure you not; he did not mention your name,
either to me or to Lilian. I never knew him more
friendly; quite like old times. He is a good man at
heart, very, and was much attached to my poor hus-
band.”
“ Did Mr. Ashleigh profess a very high opinion of
Mr. Vigors ?”
“Well,'I don’t quite know that, because my dear


A STRANGE s'roav. 119
Gilbert never spoke to me much about him Gilbert
was naturally very silent. But he shrank from all
trouble—all worldly affairs—and Mr. Vigors managed
his estate, and inspected his steward’s books, and pro-
tected him through a long lawsuit which he had inherited
from his father. It killed his father. I don’t know
what we should have done without Mr. Vigors, and I
am so glad he has forgiven me.”
“ Hem! Where is Miss Ashleigh? Indoors ?”
“No; somewhere in the grounds. But, my dear Dr.
Fenwick, do not leave me yet; you are so very, very
kind, and somehow I have grown to look upon you
quite as an old friend. Something has happened which
has put me out-quite put me out.”
She said this wearily and feebly, closing her eyes
as if she Were indeed put out in the sense of ex-
tinguished.
“ The feeling of friendship you express,” said I, with
earnestness, “is reciprocal. On my side it is accom-
panied by a peculiar gratitude. I am a lonely man, by
a lonely ﬁreside—no parents, no near kindred, and in
this town, since Dr. Faber left it, without cordial
intimacy till I knew you. In admitting me so familiarly
to your hearth, you have given me what I have never
known before since I came to man’s estate — a glimpse
of the happy domestic life; the charm and reliefto eye,
heart and spirit, which is never known but in house-
holds cheered by the face of woman; thus my senti-
ment for you and yours is indeed that of an old friend;


120 A summer: sroar.
and in any private conﬁdence you show me, I feel as
if I were no longer a lonely man, without kindred,
without home.”
Mrs. Ashleigh seemed much moved by these words,
which my heart had forced from my lips, and, after
replying to me with simple unaffected warmth of kind-
ness, she rose, took my arm, and continued thus as we
walked slowly to and fro the lawn:
“You know, perhaps, that my poor husband left a
sister, now a. widow like myself, Lady Haughton.”
“I remember that Mrs. Poyntz said you had such a
sister-in-law, but I never heard you mention Lady
Haughton till now. Well 1”
“ Well, Mr. Vigors has brought me a letter from her,
and it is that which has put me out. I dare say you
have not heard me speak before of Lady Haughton, for
I am ashamed to say I had almost forgotten her exist-
ence. She is many years older than my husband was --
of a very different character. Only came once to see
him after our marriage. Hurt me by ridiculing him as
abookworm. Offended him by looking a little down
on me, as a nobody without spirit and fashion, which
was quite true. And, except by a cold and unfeeling
letter of formal condolence after I lost my dear Gilbert,
I have never heard from her since I have ‘been a widow,
till to-day. But, after all, she is my poor husband’s
sister, and his eldest sister, and Lilian’s aunt; and, as
Mr. Vigors says, ‘ Duty is duty.’ ”
Had Mrs. Ashleigh said “ Duty is torture,” she could


A s'raarws sroar. 121
not have uttered the maxim with more mournful and
despondent resignation.
" And what does this lady require of you, which Mr.
Vigors deems it your duty to comply with ?"
“ Dear me! What penetration 1 You have guessed
the exact truth. But I think you will agree with Mr.
Vigors. Certainly I have no option; yes, I must do it."
“ My penetration is in fault now. Do'what? Pray;
explain.”
“ Poor Lady Haughton, six months ago, lost her only
son,FSir James. Mr. Vigors says he was a very ﬁne
young man, of whom any mother would have been
proud. I had heard he was wild; Mr. Vigors says,
however, that he was just going to reform, and marry
a young lady whom his mother chose for him, when,
unluckily, he would ride a steeplechase, not being quite
sober at the time, and broke his neck. Lady Haughton
has been, of course, in great grief. She has retired to
Brighton; and she wrote to me from thence, and Mr.
Vigors brought the letter. He will go back to her
to-day.”
“ Will go back to Lady Haughton? What! Has
he been to her? Is he, then, as intimate with Lady
Haughton as he was with her brother?”
“ No; but there has been a long and constant cor-
respondence. She had a settlement on the Kirby
Estate— a sum which was not paid off during Gilbert’s
life ; and a very small part of the property went to Sir
James, which part Mr. Ashleigh Sumner, the heir-at-
11


122 A STRANGE s'roar.
law to the rest of the estate, wished Mr. Vigors, as hi
guardian, to buy during his minority, and as it we
mixed up with Lady Haughton’s settlement her con
sent was necessary as well as Sir Jamcs’s. So then
was much negotiation, and, since then, Ashleigh Sum
ner has come into the Haughton property, on poor Si
J amcs’s dcccase; so that complicated all aﬁ‘airs betweei
Mr. Vigors arid Lady Haughton, and he has just bee
to Brighton to see her. And poor Lady Haughton, i
short, wants me and Lilian to go and visit her.
don’t like it at all. But you said the other day yo
thought sea air might be good for Lilian during th
heat of the summer, and she seems well enough nor
for the change: What do you think?”
“ She is well enough, certainly. But Brighton is 11:
the place I would recommend for the summer; it want
shade, and is much hotter than L——-.”
“ Yes, but unluckily Lady Haughton foresaw thz
objection, and she has ajointure-house some miles fro!
Brighton, and near the sea. She says the grounds a:
well wooded, and the place is proverbially cool an
healthy, not far from St. Leonard’s Forest. And, i
short, I have written to say we will come. So w
must, unless, indeed, you positively forbid it.”
“When do you think of going?”
“ Next Monday. Mr. Vigors would make me ﬁx tl:
day. If you knew how I dislike moving when I a1
once settled; and I do so dread Lady Haughton, she '
so ﬁne, and so satirical! But Mr. Vigors says she


A srnauon STORY. 123
very much altered, poor thingl I should like to show
you her letter, but I had just sent it to Margaret—Mrs.
Poyntz— a minute or two before you came. She knows
something of Lady Haughton. Margaret knows every-
body. And we shall have to go in mourning for poor
Sir James, I suppose; and Margaret will choose it, for
I am sure I can’t guess to what extent we should be
supposed to mourn. I ought to have gone in mourning
before—poor Gilbert’s nephew—but I am so stupid,
and I had never seen him. And but oh, this is
kind 1 Margaret herself —— my dear Margaret l”
We had just turned away from the house, in our up-
and-down Walk; and Mrs. Poyntz stood immediately

fronting us.
“ So, Anne, you have actually accepted this invi-
tation—and for Monday next Y”
“Yes. Did I do wrong?”
“ What does Dr. Fenwick say? Can Lilian go with
safety ?”
I could not honestly say she might not go with safety,
but my heart sank like lead as I answered: !
“ Miss Ashleigh does not now need merely medical
care; but more than half her cure has depended on
keeping her spirits free from depression. She may
miss the cheerful companionship of your daughter, and
other young ladies of her own age. A very melan-
cLoly house, saddened by a recent bereavement, with-
out other guests; a hostess to whom she is a stranger,
and whom Mrs. Ashleigh herself appears to deem


124 A summer: STORY.
formidable—certainly these do not make that change
'of scene which a physician would recommend. When
I spoke of sea. air being good for Miss Ashleigh, I
thought of our own northern coasts at a later time of
the year, when I could escape myself for a few weeks
and attend her. The journey to a northern watering-
place would be also shorter and less fatiguing; the air
there more invigorating.”
“ No doubt that would be better,” said Mrs. P0) ntz,
dryly; “but so far as your objections ’00 visiting I ady
Haughtou have been stated, they are groundless. Her
house will not be melancholy; she will have ether
guests, and Lilian will ﬁnd companions, young like her-
self—young ladies—and young gentlemen too i ”
There was something ominous, something compas-
sionate, in the look which Mrs. Poyntz cast upon me,
in concluding her speech, which in itself was calculated
to rouse the fears of a lover. Lilian away from me, in
the house of a worldly-ﬁne lady—such as I judged
Lady Haughton to be— surrounded by young gentle-
men, as well as young ladies— by admirers, no doubt
of a higher rank and- more brilliant fashion than she
had yet known! I closed my eyes, and with strong
eﬁ'ort Suppressed a groan.
“ My dear Anne, let me satisfy myself that Dr. Fen-
wick really does consent to this journey. He will say
to me what he may not to you. Pardon me, then, if I
take him aside for a few minutes. Let me ﬁnd you
here again under this cedar-tree.”


A STRANGE STORY. 125
Placing her arm in mine, and without waiting for
Mrs. Ashleigh’s answer, Mrs. Poyntz drew me into the
more sequestered walk that belted the lawn; and, when
we were out of Mrs. Ashleigh’ssight and hearing, said:
“ From what you have now seen of Lilian Ashleigh,
do you still desire to gain her as your wife Y”
“Still? 01]! with an intensity proportioned to the
fear with which I now dreaded that she is about to pass
away from my eyes — from my life I ”
“Does your judgment conﬁrm the choice of your
heart? Reﬂect before you answer."
“Such selﬁsh judgment as I had before I knew her
would not conﬁrm, but oppose it. The nobler judgment
that now expands all my reasonings, approves and
seconds my heart. N o, no; do not smile so sarcastically.
This is not the voice of a blind and egotistical passion.
Let me explain myself if I can. I’ concede to you that
Lilian’s character is undeveloped. I concede to you
that, amidst the childlike freshness and innocence of
her nature, there is at times a strangeness, a mystery,
which I have not yet traced to its cause. But I am
certain that the intellect is organically as sound as the
heart, and that intellect and heart will ultimately—if
under happy auspices—blend in that felicitous union
which constitutes the perfection of woman. But it
' is because she does, and may for years, may perhaps
always, need a more devoted, thoughtful care than
natures less tremulously sensitive, that my judgment
sanctions my choice; for whatever is best for her is
11*


126 A STRANGE s'roar.
best for me. And who would watch over her as 1
should? ”
“ You have never yet spoken to Lilian as lovers
speak ? ”
“Oh, no, indeed.”
“And, nevertheless, you believe that your aﬁ'ection
would not be unreturned?”
“I thought so once—I doubt now—yet, in doubting,
hope. But why do you alarm me with these ques-
tions? You, too, forbode that in this visit I may lose
her forever? ”
“ If you fear that, tell her so, and perhaps her answer
may dispel your fear.”
“What now, already, when she has scarcely known
me a month. Might I not risk all if too premature ? ”
“ There is no almanac for love. With many women
love is born the moment they know they are beloved.
All wisdom tells us that a moment once gone is irreon
cable. Were I in your place, I should feel that I ap-
proached a moment that I must not lose. I have said
enough; now I shall rejoin Mrs. Ashleigh."
“ Stay-tell me ﬁrst what Lady Haughton’s letter
really contains to prompt the advice with which you so,
tranSport, and yet so daunt, me when you proﬁ‘er it.”
“ Not now—later, perhaps—not now. If you wish to
see Lilian alone, she is by the Old Monk’s Well; I saw _
her seated there as I passed that way to the house."
“ One word more—only one. Answer this question
frankly, for it is one of honor. Do you still believe that


A summer. near. 127
my suit to her daughter would not be disapproved of
by Mrs. Ashleigh? ”
“At this moment, I am sure it would not; a week
hence I might not give you the same answer.”
So she passed on with her quick but measured tread,
back through the shady walk, on to the open lawn, till
the last glimpse of her pale gray robe disappeared under
the boughs of the cedar-tree. Then, with a start, I
broke the irresolute, tremulous suspense in which I had
vainly endeavored to analyze my own mind, solve my
own doubts, concentrate my own will, and went the
way, skirtingthe circle of that haunted ground; as now,
on one side its lofty terrace, the houses of the neighbor-
ing city came full and close into view, divided fnom my
fairyland of life but by the trodden murmurous thorough-
fare winding low beneath the ivied parapets; and as
now, again, the world of men abruptly vanished behind
the screening foliage of luxuriant June.
At last the enchanted glade opened out from the
verdure, its borders fragrant with syringa, and rose, and
woodbine; and there, by the grey memorial of the gone
Gothic ago, my eyes seemed to close their unquiet wan-
derings, resting spell-hound on that image which had be-
come to me the incarnation of earth’s bloom and youth.
She stood amidst the Past, hacked by the fragments
of walls which man had raised to seclude him from
human passion, locking, under those lids so downoast
the secret of the only knowledge I asked from the
boundless Future


128 a sraanos sronr.
Ah! what mockery there is in that grand word, the
world’s ﬁerce war-cry—Freedom I Who has not known
one period of life, and that so solemn that its shadows
may rest over all life hereafter, when one human crea-
ture has over him a sovereignty more supreme and
absolute than Orient servitude adores in the symbols
of diadem and sceptre? What crest so haughty that
has not bowed before a hand which could exalt or
humble! What heart so dauntless that has not
trembled to call forth the voice at whose sound ope the
gates of rapture or despair! That life alone is free
which rules, and sufﬁces for itself. That life we forfeit
when we love!
CHAPTER XVII.
How did I utter it? By what words did my heart
make itself known? I remember not. All was a dream
that falls upon a restless, feverish night, and fades away
as the eyes unclose on the peace of a cloudless heaven,
on the bliss of a golden sun. A new sorrow seemed
indeed upon the earth when I woke from a life-long
yesterday—her dear hand in mine, her sweet face
bowed upon my breast.
And then there was that melodious silence in which
there is no sound audible from without; yet within us
there is heard a lulling celestial music, as if our whole


A sraanon s'roar. 129
being, grown harmonious with the universe, joined ‘rom
its happy deeps in the hymn that unites the stars.
In that silence our two hearts seemed to make each
other understand, to be drawing nearer and nearer,
blending by mysterious concord into the complete-
ness of a solemn union, never henceforth to be rent
asunder.
At length I said softly :' “ And it was here on this
spot that I ﬁrst saw you—here that I for the ﬁrst time
knew what power to change our world and to rule our
future goes forth from the charm of a human face l”
Then Lilian asked me timidly, and without lifting her
eyes, how I had so seen her, reminding me that I prom-
ised to tell her, and had never yet done so.
And then I told her of the strange impulse that had
led me into the grounds, and by what chance my steps
had been diverted down the path that wound to the
glade; how suddenly her form had shone upon my eyes,
gathering round itself the rose hues of the setting sun,
and how wistfully those eyes had followed her own
silent gaze into the distant heaven.
As I spoke, her hand pressed mine eagerly, convul-
sively, and, raising her face from my breast, she looked
at me with an intent, anxious earnestness. That lookl
-twice before it had thrilled and perplexad me.
“What is there in that look, oh! my Lilian, which
tells me that there is something that startles you—-
something you wish to conﬁde, and yet shrink from
explaining? See how, already, I study the fair book
1


130 A sraanas s'roar.
from which the seal has been lifted, but as yet you
must aid me to construe its language.”
“If\I shrank from explaining, it is only because I
fear that I cannot explain so as to be understood or
believed. But you have a right to know the secrets of
a life which you would link to your own. Turn your
face aside from me; a reproving look, an incredulous
smile, chill—oh! you cannot guess how they chill me,
when I would approach that which to me is so serious
and so solemnly strange.”
I turned my face away, and her voice grew ﬁrmer, as
after a brief pause, she resumed:
“As far back as I can remember in my infancy, there
have been moments when there seems to fall a soft,
hazy veil between my sight and the things around it,
thickening and deepening till it has the likeness of one
of those white, ﬂeecy clouds which gather on the verge
of the horizon when the air is yet still, but the winds
are about to rise ; and then this vapor or veil will sud-
denly open, as clouds open and let in the blue sky.”
“ Go on,” I said gently, for here she came to a stop.
She continued, speaking somewhat more hurriedly:
“ Then, in that opening, strange appearances present
themselves to me as in a vision. In my childhood
these were chieﬂy landscapes of wonderful beauty. I
could but faintly describe them then ; I could not
attempt to describe them now, for they are almost gone
from my memory. My dear mother chid me for telling
her what I saw, so I did not impress it on my mind by


A STRANGE s'roav. l3]
repeating it. As I grew up, this kind of vision—if I
may so call it—became much less frequent, or much
less distinct; I still saw the soft veil fall, the pale cloud
form and open, but often what may then have appeared
was entirely forgotten when I recovered myself, waking
as from a sleep. Sometimes, however, the recollection
would be vivid and complete; sometimes I saw the face
of my lost father; sometimes I heard his very voice, as I
had seen and heard him in my early childhood, when he
would let me rest for hours beside him as he mused 0r
studied, happy to be so near him—for I loved him, oh,
so dearly! and I remember him so distinctly, though I
was only in my sixth year when he died. Much more
recently—indeed, within the last few months—the
images of things to come are reﬂected on the space that
I gaze into as clearly as in a glass. Thus, for weeks
before I came hither, or knew that such a place existed,
II saw distinctly the old House, yon trees, this sward,
this moss-grown Gothic fount, and, with the sight, an
impression was conveyed to me that in the scene before
me my old childlike life would pass into some solemn
change. So that when I came here, and recognized the
picture in my vision, I took an affection for the spot—
an affection not without awe—a powerful, perplexing
interest, as one who feels under the inﬂuence of a fate
of which a prophetic glimpse has been vouchsafed.
And in that evening, when you ﬁrst saw me seated
H

here
“ Yes, Lilian, on that evening—f”


132 a sraauds sronv.
“1 saw yot. also, but in my vision—yonder, far in
the deeps of space—and—my heart was stirred as it
had never been before; and near where your image
grew out from the cloud I saw my father’s face, and I
heard his veice, not in my ear, but as in my heart, whis-

pering ”
“ Yes, Lilian — whispering -what 7”
“These words—only these—‘Ye will need one
another.’ But then, suddenly, between my upward
eyes and the two forms they had beheld, there rose
from the earth, obscuring the skies, a vague, dusky
vapor, undulous, and ceiling like a vast serpent, noth-
ing, indeed, of its shape and ﬁgure deﬁnite, but of its
face one abrupt glare; a ﬂash from two dread, luminous
eyes, and a young head, like the Medusa’s, changing,
more rapidly than I could have drawn breath, into a
grinning skull. Then my terror made me bow my
head, and when I raised it againfall that I had seen
was vanished. But the terror still remained, even
when I felt my mother’s arm around me and heard her
voice. And then, when I entered the house, and sat
dOWn again alone, the recollection of what I had seen
——those eyes—that face—that skull—grew on me
stronger and stronger till I fainted, and remember no
more, until my eyes, opening, saw you by my side, and
in my wonder there was not terror. No, a sense of
joy, protection, hope, yet still shadowed by a kind of
fear or awe, in recognizing the countenance which had
gleamed on me from the skies before the dark vapor had


A STRANGE s'roav. 133
risen, and while my father’s voice had murmured, ‘Ye
will need one another.’ And now—and now—will
you love me less that you know a secret in my being
which I have told to no other—cannot construe to
myself? Only—only, at least, do not mock me-do
not disbelieve me i Nay, turn from me no longer now
—-now I ask to meet your eyes. Now, before our
bands can join again, tell me that you do not despise
me as untruthful, do not pity me as insane.”
“Hush—bush!” I said, drawing her to my breast
“ Of all you tell me we will talk hereafter. The scales
of our science have no weights ﬁne enough for the
gossamer threads of a maiden’s pure fancies. Enough
for me-for us both—if out from all such illusions
starts one truth, told to you, lovely child, from the
heavens; told to me, ruder man, on the earth ; repeated
by each pulse of this heart that woos you to hear and
to trust— now and henceforth, through life unto death.
‘Each has need of the other’-1 of you—I of youl
my Lilian—my Lilian l ”

CHAPTER XVIII.
IN spite of the previous assurance of Mrs. Poyntz,
it was not without an uneasy apprehension that I
approached the cedar-tree, under which Mrs.Ashleigh
still sat, her friend beside her. I looked on the fair
12


134 A sraauos sToaY.
creature whose arm was linked in mine. So young, so
singularly .lovely, and with all the gifts of birth and
fortune which bend avarice and ambition the more sub-
missively to youth and beauty, I felt as if I had wronged
what a parent might justly deem her natural lot.
“ Oh, if your mother should disapprove l ” said I,
falteringly.
Lilian leant on my arm less lightly: “ If I had
thought so,” she said, with her soft blush, “should I be
thus by your side i”
So we passed under the boughs of the dark tree, and
Lilian left me, and kissed Mrs. Ashleigh’s cheek; then.
seating herself on the turf, laid her head on her mother’s
lap. I looked on the Queen of the Hill, whose keen
eye shot over me. I thought there was a momentary
expression of pain or displeasure on her countenance;
but it passed. Still there seemed to me something of
irony, as well as of triumph or congratulation, in the
half-smile with which she quitted her seat, and in the
tone with which she whispered, as she glided by me to
the open sward, “ So, then, it is settled.”
She walked lightly and quickly down the lawn.
When she was out of sight I breathed more freely. I
took the seat which she had left, by Mrs. Ashleigh’s
side, and said: “A little while ago I spoke of myself
as a man without kindred, without home, and now I
come to you and ask for both.”
Mrs. Ashleigh looked at me benignly, then raised her
daughter’s face from her lap, and whispered, “Lilian l l‘


A sraauoz sroav. 135
and Lilian’s lips moved, but I did not hear her answer.
Her mother did. She took Lilian’s hand, simply placed
it in mine, and said: “As she chooses, I choose; whom
she loves, I love.”
CHAPTER XIX
FROM that evening till the day Mrs. Ashleigh and
Lilian went on the dreaded visit, I was always at their
house, when my avocations allowed me to steal to it;
and during those few days, the happiest I had ever
known, it seemed to me that years could not have more
deepened my intimacy with Lilian’s exquisite nature —
made me more reverential of its purity, or more enamored
of its sweetness. I could detect in her but one fault,
and I rebuked myself for believing that it was a fault.
We see many who neglect the minor duties of life, who
lack watchful forethought and considerate care for
others, and we recognize the cause of this failing in
levity or egotism. Certainly neither of those tendencies
of character could be ascribed to Lilian. Yet still in
daily triﬁes there was something of that neglect, some
lack of that care and forethought. She loved her
mother with fondness and devotion, yet it never occurred
to her to aid in those petty household cares in which
her mother centred so much of habitual interest. She
was full of tenderness and pity to all want and suﬂ'er'


136 A STRANGE s'roav.
ing, yet many a young lady on the Hill was more
actively beneﬁcent—visiting the poor in their sickness,
or instructing their children in the Infant Schools. I
was persuaded that her love for me was deep and
truthful; it was clearly void of all ambition; doubtless
she would have borne, unﬂinching and contented, what-
ever the world considers to be sacriﬁce and privation;
yet I should never have expected her to take her share
in the troubles of ordinary life. I could never have
applied to her the homely but signiﬁcant name of help-
mate. I reproach myself, while I write, for noticing
such defect—if dcfect it were—in what may be called
the practical routine of our positive, trivial, human
existence. N o doubt it was this that had caused Mrs.
Poyntz’s harsh judgment against the wisdom of my
choice. But such chiller shade upon Lilian’s charming
nature was reﬂected from no inert, unamiable self-love.
It was but the consequence of that self-absorption
which the habit of reverie had fostered. I cautiously
abstained from all allusion to those visionary deceptions,
which she had conﬁded to me as the truthful impres-
sions of spirit, if not of sense. To me any approach
to what I termed superstition was displeasing; any
indulgence of phantasies, not within the measured and
beaten tracks of healthful imagination, more than dis-
pleased me in her—it alarmed. I would not by a
word encourage her in persuasions which I felt it would
be at present premature to reason against, and cruel,
indeed, to ridicule. I was convinced that of themselves


a sraazvos sroav. 137
these mists round her native intelligence, engendered
by a solitary and musing childhood, would subside in
the fullerdaylight of wedded life. She seemed pained
when she saw how resolutely I shunned a subject dear
to her thoughts. She made one or two timid attempts
to renew it, but my grave looks sufﬁced to check her.
Once or twice, indeed, on such occasions, she would
turn away and leave me, but she soon came back; that
gentle heart could not bear one unkindlier shade between
itself and what it loved. It was agreed that our
engagement should be, for the present, conﬁded only
to Mrs. Poyntz. When Mrs. Ashleigh and Lilian re-
turned, which would be in a few weeks at furthest, it
should be proclaimed; and our marriage could take
place in the autumn, when I should be most free for a
brief holiday from professional toils.
So we parted—as lovers part. I felt none of those
jealous fears which, before we were afﬁanced, had made
me tremble at the thought of separation, and had con-
jured up irresistible rivals. But it was with a settled
heavy gloom that I saw her depart. From earth was
gone a glory; from life a blessing! '
12'


138 A s'raanoa s'roar.
CHAPTER XX.
DURING the busy years of my professional career, I
had snatched leisure for some professional treatises,
which had made more or less sensation, and one of
them entitled The Vital Principle; its Waste and Sup-
ply, had gained a wide circulation among the general
public. This last treatise contained the results of
certain experiments, then new in chemistry, which
were adduced in support of a theory I entertained as to
the re-invigoration of the human system by principles
similar to those which Liebig has' applied to the re-
plenishment of an exhausted soil—viz., the giving back
to the frame those essentials to its nutrition, which it
has lost by the action or accident of time ; or supplying
that special pabulum or energy in which the individual
organism is constitutionally deﬁcient; and neutralizing
or counterbalancing that in which it superabounds—a
theory upon which some eminent physicians have more
recently improved with signal success. But on these
essays, slight and suggestive, rather than dogmatic, I
set no value. I had been for the last two years en-
gaged on a work of much wider range, endeared to me
by far bolder ambition—a work upon which I fondly
hoped to found an enduring reputation as a severe and
original physiologist. It was an Inquiry into Organic
Life, similar in comprehensiveness of survey to that by
which the illustrious Miiller, of Berlin, has enriched the


A s'raauoa sroaY. 189
science of our age; however inferior, alasl to that
august combination of thought and learning, in the
judgment which checks presumption, and the genius
which adorns speculation. But at that day I was
carried away by the ardor of composition, and I ad-
mired my performance because I loved my labor. This
work had been entirely laid aside for the last agitated
month; now that Lilian was gone, I resumed it earn-
estly, as the sole occupation that had power and charm
enough to rouse me from the aching sense of void
and loss. _
The very night of the day she went, I re-opened my
MS. I had left off at the commencement of a chapter
“ Upon Knowledge as derived from our Senses." As
my convictions on this head were founded on the well-
known arguments of Locke and Condillac against innate
ideas, and on the reasonings by which Hume has re-
solved the combination of sensations into a general
idea to an impulse arising merely out of habit, so I set
myself to oppose, as a dangerous concession to the
sentimentalities or mysticism of a pseudo-philosophy,
the doctrine favored by most of our recent physiologists,
and of which some of the most eminent of German meta-
physicians have accepted the substance, though reﬁning
into a subtlety its positive form—I mean the doctrine
which Miiller himself has expressed in these words:
“ That innate ideas may exist, cannot in the slightest
degree be denied; it is, indeed, a fact. IAll the ideas
of animals, which are induced by instinct, are innate


140 A sraanes worn.
and immediate; something presented to the mind, a
desire to attain which is at the same time given. The
new-born lamb and foal have such innate ideas, which
lead them to follow their mother and suck the teats.
Is it not in some measure the same with the intellectual
ideas of man ? ”*
To this question I answered with an indignant
"No!" A “Yes” would have shaken my creed of
materialism to the dust. I wrote on rapidly, warmly.
I deﬁned the properties and meted the limits of natural
laws, which I would not admit that a Deity himself
could alter. I clamped and soldered dogma to dogma
in the links of my tinkered logic, till out from my page,
to my own complacent eye, grew Intellectual Man, as
the pure formation of his material senses; mind, or
what is called soul, born from and nurtured by them
alone; through them to act, and to perish with the
machine they moved. Strange, that at the very time
my love for Lilian might have taught me that there are
mysteries in the core of the feelings which my analysis
of ideas could not solve, I should so stubbornly have
opposed as unreal all that could be referred to the
spiritual! Strange, that, at the very time when the
thought that I might lose from this life the being I had
known scarce a month had just before so appalled
me, I should thus complacently sit down to prove that,
according to the laws of the nature which my passion
* Miiller’s Elements of Physiology, vol. ii., p. 134. Translated
by Dr. Buley.


a manner: sroav. 141
obeyed, I must lose for eternity the blessing I now
hoped I had won to my life! But how distinctly dis-
similar is man in his conduct from man in his systems!
See the poet reclined under forest-boughs, conning odes
to his mistress; follow him out into the world; no
mistress ever lived for him there ! * See the hard man
of science, so austere in his passionless problems;
follow him now where the brain rests from its toil,
where the heart ﬁnds its Sabbath—what child is so
tender, so yielding and soft?
But I had proved to my own satisfaction that poet
and sage are dust, and no more, when the pulse ceases
to beat. And on that consolatory conclusion my pen
stopped.
Suddenly, beside me I distinctly heard a sigh—a
compassionate, mournful sigh. The sound was unmis-
takable. I started from my seat, looked round, amazed
to discover no one-no living thing! The windows
were closed, 'the nigit was still. That sigh was not
the wail of the wind. But there, in the darker angle
of the room, what was that? A silvery whiteness—-
vaguely shaped as a human form—receding, fading,
gone! Why, I know not-for no face was visible, no
form, if form it were, more distinct than the colorless
outline-why, I know not, but I cried aloud, “Lilian!
Lilian!” My voice came strangely back to my own
* Cowley; who wrote so elaborate a series of amatory poems,
is said “ never to have been in love but once, and then he never
had resolution to tell his passion.”—Johman’| Livu of ﬂu
Poets.- Cowuv.


142 A sraases s-roar.
ear; I paused, then smiled and blushed at my folly.
“ So I, too, have learned what is superstition,” I mub
tered to myself. “And here is an anecdote at my own
eXpense (as Miiller frankly tells us anecdotes of the
illusions which would haunt his eyes, shut or open)—
an anecdote I may quote when I come to my Chapter
on the Cheats of the Senses and Spectral Phantasms."
I went on with my book, and wrote till the lights
waned in the grey of the dawn. And I said then, in
the triumph of my pride, as I laid myself down to rest,
“ I have written that which allots with precision man’s
place in the region of nature; written that which will
found a school—form disciples; and race after race of
those who cultivate truth through pure reason shall
accept my bases if they enlarge my building." And
again I heard the sigh, but this time it caused no sur-
prise. “Certainly,” I murmured, “a very strange thing
is the nervous system!” So I turned on my pillow,
and, wearied out, fell asleep.
CHAPTER XXI.
THE next day, the last of the visiting patients to
whom my forenoons were devoted had just quitted me.
when I was summoned in haste to attend the steward
of a Sir Philip Derval, not residing at his family scat,
which was about ﬁve miles from l.——. It was rarely,


A summer; s'rosv. 143
indeed, that persons so far from the town, when of no
higher rank than this applicant, asked my services.
But it was my principle to go wherever Iwas sum-
moned; my profession was not gain, it was healing, to
which gain was the incident, not the essential. This
case the messenger reported as urgent. I went on
horseback, and rode fast; but swiftly as I--'eantered
through the village that skirted the approach to Sir
Philip Derval’s park, the evident care bestowed on the
accommodation of the cottagers forcibly struck me. I
felt that I was on the lands of a rich, intelligent, and
beneﬁcent proprietor. Entering the park, and passing
before the manor-house, the contrast between the neglect
and decay of the absentee’s stately hall and the smiling
homes of his villagers was diseonsolately mournful.
An imposing pile, built apparently by Vanbrugh,
with decorated pilasters, pompous portico, and grand
perron (or double ﬂight of stairs to the entrance),
enriched with urns and statues, but discolored, mil-
dewed, chipped, half hidden with uupruned creepers
and ivy. Most of the windows were closed with shut-
ters, decaying for want of paint; in some of the case-
ments the panes were broken; the peacock perched on
the shattered balustrade, that fenced a garden over-
grown with weeds. The sun glared hotly on the place,
and made its ruinous condition still more painfully
apparent. I was glad when a winding in the park road
shut the house from my sight. Suddenly I eme'gcd
through a copse of ancient yew-trees, and beforl me


[44 A sraanon sroar.
there gleamed, in abrupt whiteness, a building evidently
designed for the family mausoleum—classical in its
outline, With the blind iron door niched into stone walls
of_ massive thickness, and surrounded by a funereal
farden of roses and evergreens, fenced with an iron
rail, parti-gilt.
The suddenness with which this House of the Dead
came upon me heightened almost into pain, if not into
awe, the dismal impression which the aspect of the
deserted home in its neighborhood had made. I spurred
my horse, and soon arrived at the door of my patient,
who lived in a fair brick house at the other extremity
of the park.
I found my patient, a man somewhat advanced in
years, but of a robust conformation, in bed; he had
been seized with a ﬁt, which was supposed to be
apoplectic, a few hours before ; but was already sensible
and out of immediate danger. After I had prescribed
a few simple remedies, I took aside the patient’s wife,
and went with her to the parlor below stairs, to make
some inquiry about her husband’s ordinary regimen
and habits of life. These seemed suﬁiciently regular;
[ could discover no apparent cause for the attack, which
presented symptoms not familiar to my experience.
“ Has your husband ever had such ﬁts before f”
“Never!”
“ Had he experienced any sudden emotion? Had he
heard any unexpected news ? or had anything happened
to put him out?”


A sraanon sroaY. 145
The woman looked much disturbed at these inquiries
I pressed them more urgently. At last she burst into
tears, and clasping my hand, said: “Oh! doctor, I
ought to tell you—I sent for you on purpose—yet I
fear you will not believe me: my good man has seen a
ghost!”
“A ghost!” said I, repressing a smile. “Well, tell
me all, that I may prevent the ghost coming again.”
The woman’s story was prolix. Its substance was
this: Her husband, habitually-an early riser, had left
his bed that morning still earlier than usual, to give
directions about some cattle that were to be sent for
sale to a neighboring fair. An hour afterwards he had
been found by a shepherd near the mausoleum, appa-
rently lifeless. On being removed to his own‘house,
be had recovered speech, and bidding all except his
wife leave the room, he then told her that on walking
across the park towards the cattle-sheds, he had seen,
what appeared to him at ﬁrst, a pale light by the iron
door of the mausoleum. On approaching nearer, this
light changed into the distinct and visible form of his
master, Sir Philip Derval, who was then abroad—sup-
posed to be in the East, where he had resided for many
years. The impression on the steward’s mind was so
strong, that he called out, “Oh! Sir Philipl" when,
looking still more intently, he perceived that the face
was that of a corpse As he continued to gaze, the
apparition seemed gradually to recede, as if vanishing
‘into the sepulchre itself. He knew no more; he became
13 x


146 A sraancr: s'roaY.
nnconscious.- It was the excess of the poor woman’s
alarm, on hearing this strange tale, that made her
resolve to send for me instead of the parish apothecary.
She fancied so astounding a cause for her husband’s
seizure could only be properly dealt with by some
medical man reputed to have more than ordinary learn-
ngi And the steward himself objected to the apothe-
cary in the immediate neighborhood, as more likely to
annoy him by gossip than a physician from a compara-
tive distance.
I took care not to lbse the conﬁdence of the good
wife by parading too quickly my disbeliefin the phan-
tom her husband declared that he had seen; but as the
story itself seemed at once to decide the nature of the
ﬁt to be epileptic, I began to tell her of similar delu-
sions which, in my experience, had occurred to those
subjected to epilepsy, and ﬁnally soothed her into the
conviction that the apparition was clearly reducible to
natural causes. Afterwards, I led her on to talk about
Sir Philip Derval, less from any curiosity I felt about
the absent proprietor than from a desire to re-familiarize
her own mind to his image as a living man. The
steward had been in the service of Sir Philip’s father,
and had known Sir Philip himself from a child. He
was warmly attached to his master, whom the old
woman described as a man of rare benevolence and
great eccentricity, which last she imputed to his studi-
ous habits. He had succeeded to the title and estates
as a minor. For the ﬁrst few years after attaining his-


A sraanes email. 147
majority, he had mixed much in the world. When at
Derval Court his house had been ﬁlled with gay com~
panions, and was the scene of lavish hospitality. But
the estate was not in proportion to the grandeur of the
mansion, still less to the expenditure of the owner. He
had become greatly embarrassed; and some love dis-
appointment (so it was rumored) occurring simulta-
neously with his pecuniary difﬁculties, he had suddenly
changed his way of life, shut himself up from his old
friends, lived in seclusion, taking to books and scientiﬁc
pursuits, and as the old woman said, vaguely and ex-
pressively, “to old ways.” He had gradually by an
economy that, towards himself, was penurious, but
which did not preclude much judicious generosity to
others, cleared off his debts, and once more rich, he had
suddenly quitted the country, and taken to a life of
travel. He was now about forty-eight years old, and
had been eighteen years abroad. He wrote frequently
to his steward, giving him minute and thoughtful in-
structions in regard to the employment, comforts, and
homes of the peasantry, but peremptorily ordering him
to spend no money on the grounds and mansion, stating
as a reason why the latter might be allowed to fall into
decay, his intention to pull it down whenever he
returned to England.
I stayed sometime longer than my engagements well
warranted at my patient’s house, not leaving till the
sufferer, after a quiet sleep, had removed from his bed
to his arm-chair, taken food, and seemed perfectly re-
covered from his attack.


148 A s'rnanoa swear.
Riding homeward, I mused on the diﬂ’erence that
education makes, even pathologically, between man and
man. Here was a brawny inhabitant of rural ﬁelds,
leading the healthiest of lives, not conscious of the
faculty we call imagination, stricken down almost to
Death’s door by his fright at an optical illusion, expli-
cable, if examined, by the same simple causes which
had impressed me the night before with a moment’s
belief in a sound and a spectre-me who, thanks to
sublime education, went so quietly to sleep a few
minutes after, convinced that no phantom, the ghostli-
est that ear ever heard or eye ever saw, can be any-
thing else but a nervous phenomenon.

CHAPTER XXII.
THAT evening I went to Mrs. Poyntz’s; it was one
of her ordinary “ reception nights,” and I felt that she '
would naturally expect my attendance as “a proper
attention.”
I joined-a group engaged in general conversation, of
which Mrs. Poyntz herself made the centre, knitting as
usual, rapidly while she talked, slowly when she
listened.
Without mentioning the visit I had paid that morn-
Ing, I turned the conversation on the different country
places in the neighborhood, and then incidentally asked,


a STRANGE sToaY. 149
" What sort of a man is Sir Philip Derval? Is it not
strange that he should suffer so ﬁne a place to fall into
decay?” The answers I received added little to the
information I had already obtained. Mrs. Poyntz knew
nothing of Sir Philip Derval, except as a man of large
estates, whose rental had been greatly increased by a
rise in the value of property he possessed in the town
of L , and which lay contiguous to that of her hus-
band. Two or three of the older inhabitants of the Hill
had remembered Sir Philip in his early days, when he
was gay, high-spirited, hospitable, lavish. One ob-
served that the only person in L— whom he had
admitted to his subsequent seclusion was Dr. Lloyd,
who was then without practice, and whom he had
employed as an assistant in certain chemical experi-

ments.
Here a gentleman struck into the conversation. He
was a stranger to me and to L-—, a visitor to one of
the dwellers on the Hill, who had asked leave to present
him to its queen as a great traveller and an accom-
plished antiquary.
Said this gentleman: “Sir Philip Dervall I know
him. I met him in the East. He was then still, I
believe, very fond of chemical science; a clever, odd,
philanthropical man; had studied medicine, or at least
practised it; was said to have made many marvellous
cures. I became acquainted with him in Aleppo. He
had come to that town, not much frequented by Eng-
lish travellers, in order to inquire into the murder of
13*


150 A srasnes s'roar.
two men, of whom one was his friend and the other his
countryman." .
“ This is interesting," said Miss Poyntz, dryly.
" We who live on'this innocent Hill all love stories of
crime; murder is the pleasantest subject you could have
hit on. Pray give us the details.”
“ So encouraged,” said the traveller, good-humoredly,
“ I will not hesitate to communicate the little I know.
In Aleppo, there had lived for some years a man whc
was held by the natives in great reverence. He had
the reputation of extraordinary wisdom, but was diﬂi-
cult of access; the lively imagination of the Orientals
invested his character with the fascinations of fable;
in short, Haroun of Aleppo was popularly considered
a magician. Wild stories were told of his powers, of
his preternatural age, of his boarded treasures. Apart
from such disputable titles to homage, there seemed no
question, from all I heard, that his learning was con-
siderable, his charities extensive, his manner of life irre~
proachably ascetic. He appears to have resembled
those Arabian sages of the Gothic age to whom modern
science is largely indebted—a mystic enthusiast, but an
earnest scholar. A wealthy and singular Englishman,
‘ong resident in another part of the East, afﬂicted by
some languishing disease, took a journey to Alleppo to
consult this sage, who, among his other acquirements,
was held to have discovered rare secrets in medicine-
his countrymen said in ‘charrns.’ One morning, not
long after the Englishman’s arrival, Haroun was found


A sfraanoa STORY. 15
dead in his bed, apparently strangled, and the English-
man, who lodged in another part of the town, had dis-
appeared; but some of his clothes, and a crutch on
which he habitually supported himself, were found a
few miles distant from Aleppo, near the roadside.
There appeared no doubt that he, too, had been mur-
dered, but his corpse could not be discovered. Sir
Philip Derval had been a loving disciple of this Sage
of Aleppo, to whom he assured me he owed not only
that knowledge of medicine which, by report, Sir Philip
possessed, but the insight into various truths of nature,
on the promulgation of which, it was evident, Sir Philip
cherished the ambition to found a philosophical celebrity
for himself.”
"‘ Of what description were those truths of nature? ”
I asked, somewhat sarcastically.
“ Sir, I am unable to tell you, for Sir Philip did not
inform me, nor did I much care to ask; for what may
be revered as truths in Asia are usually despised as
dreams in Europe. To return to my story. Sir Philip
had been in Aleppo a little time before the murder; had
left the Englishman under the care of Haroun; he
returned to Aleppo on hearing the tragic events I have
related, and was busied in collecting such evidence as
could be gleaned, and instituting inquiries after our mis-
sing countryman, at the time I myself chanced to arrive
in the city. I assisted in his researches, but without
avail. The assassins remained undiscovered. I do not
myself doubt that they were more vulgar robbers. Sir


152 A STRANGE s'roar.
Philip had a darker suspicion, of which he made no
secret to me; but as I confess that I thought the sus-
picion groundless, you will pardon me if I do not repeat
it. Whether, since I left the East, the Englishman’s
remains have been discovered, I know not. Very
probably; for I understand that his heirs have got hold
of what fortune he left—less than was generally sup-
posed. But it was reported that he had buried great
~ treasures, a rumor, however absurd, not altogether
inconsistent with his character.”
“What was his character?” asked Mrs. Poyntz.
“One of evil and sinister repute. He was regarded
with terror by the attendants who had accompanied
him to Alleppo. But he had lived in a very remote
part of the East, little known to Europeans, and, from
all I could learn, had there established an extraordinary
power, strengthened by superstitious awe. He was
said to have studied deeply that knowledge which the
philosophers of old called ‘occult,’ not, like the Sage of
Aleppo, for benevolent, but for malignant ends. He
was accused of conferring with evil spirits, and ﬁlling
his barbaric court (for he lived in a kind of savage
royalty) with charmers and sorcerers. I suspect, after
all, that he was only, like myself, an ardent antiquary,
and cunningly made use of the fear he inspired in order
to secure his authority, and prosecute in safety re-
searches into ancient sepulchres or temples. His
great passion was, indeed, in excavating such remains,
in his neighborhood; with what result I know not,


A sraanoa sroar. 153
never having penetrated so far into regions infested by
robbers and pestiferous with malaria. He wore the
Eastern dress, and always carried jewels about him. I
came to the conclusion that for the sake of these jewels
he was murdered, perhaps by some of his own servants
(and, indeed, two at least of his suite were missing),
who then at once buried his body, and kept their own
secret. He was old, very inﬁrm; could never have got
very far from the town without assistance.”
“ You have not yet told us his name,” said Mrs.
Poyntz
“His name was Grayle.”
“ Grayle ! ” exclaimed Mrs. Poyntz, dropping her
work, “ Louis érayle ? ”
“ Yes; Louis Grayle. You could not have known
him P ”
“ Known him! No. But I have often heard my
father speak of him. Such was then the tragic end of
that strange dark creature, for Whom, as a young girl in
the nursery, I used to feel a kind of fearful, admiring
interest .7 ” ' -
" It is your turn to narrate now,” said the traveller.
And we all drew closer round our hostess, who
remained silent some moments, her brow thoughtful,
her work suspended.
“Well,” said she at last, looking round us with a lofty
air, which seemed half-defying, “ force and courage are
always fascinating, even when they are quite in the
wrong. I go with the world, because the world goes


154 ‘ A STRANGE wear.
with me; if it did not -—.” Here she stopped for a
moment, clenched the ﬁrm, white hand, and then scorn-
fully waved it, left the sentence unﬁnished, and broke
into another:
“ Going With the world, of course we must march
over those who stand against it. But when one man
stands single-handed against our march, we do not
despise him; it is enough to crush. I am very glad I
did not see Louis Grayle when I was a girl of sixteen.”
Again she paused a moment—and resumed: “ Louis
Grayle was the only son of a usurer, infamous for the
rapacity with which he had acquired enormous wealth.
Old Grayle desired to rear his heir as a gentleman;
sent him to Eton; boys are always aristocratic; his
birth was soon tthWn in his teeth; he was ﬁerce;
he struck boys bigger than himself -f0ught till he was
half-killed. My father was at school with him; described
him as a. tiger-whelp. One day he—still a fag-struck
a sixth-form boy. Sixth-form boys do not ﬁght fags;
they punish them. Louis Grayle was ordered to hold
out his hand to the cane; he received the blow, drew
forth his school-boy knife, and stabbed the punisher.
After that he left Eton. I don’t think he was publicly
expelled—too more a child for that honor—but he was
taken or sent away; educated with great care under
the ﬁrst masters at home; when he was of age to enter
the University, old Grayle was dead. Louis was sent
by his guardians to Cambridge, with acquirements far
exceeding the average of young men, and with unlim‘


A STRANGE STORY: 155
[ted command of money. My father was at the same
college, and described him again—haughty, quarrel-
some, reckless, handsome, aspiring, brave. Does that
kind of creature interest you, my dears ? ” (appealing to
the ladies).
“ La 1” said Miss Brabazon ; “ a horrid usurer’s son l”
“Ay, true; the vulgar proverb says it is good to be
born with a silver spoon in one’s mouth; so it is when
one has one’s own family crest on it; but when it is a
spoon on which people recognize their family crest, and
cry out, ‘ Stolen from our plate-chest,’ it is a heritage
that outlaws a babe in his cradle. However, young
men at college who want money are less scrupulous
about descent than boys at Eton are. Louis Grayle
found, while at college, plenty of well-born acquaint
ances willing to recover from him some of the plunder
his father had extorted from theirs. He was too wild
to distinguish himself by academical honors, but my
father said that the tutors of the college declared there
were not six undergraduates in the University who
knew as much hard and dry science as wild Louis
Grayle. He went into the world, no doubt, hoping to
shine; but his father’s name was too notorious to admit
the son into good society. The Polite World, it is true,
does not examine a seutcheon with the nice eye of a
herald, nor look upon riches with the stately contempt
of a stoic-still the Polite World has its family pride
and its moral sentiment. It does not like to be cheated
._I mean, in money matters; and when the son of the


' 156 a surnames STORY.
man who has emptied its purse and foreclosed on its
acres, rides by its club-windows, hand on haunch, and
head in the air, no lion has a scowl more awful, no
hymna a laugh more dread, than that same easy, good-
tempered, tolerant, polite, well-bred World which is so
pleasant an acquaintance, so languid a friend, and—so
remorseless an enemy. In short, Louis Grayle claimed
the right to be} courted- he was shunned; to be
admired — he was loathed. Even his old college
acquaintances were shamed out of knowing him. Per-
haps he could have lived through all this had he sought
to glide quietly into position; but he wanted the tact
of the well-bred, .and strove to storm his way, not to
steal it. Reduced for companions to needy parasites,
he braved and he shocked all decorous opinion by that
ostentation of excess, which made Richelieus and
Lauzuns the rage. But then Richelieus and Lauzuns
were dukes! He now very naturally took the Polite
World into hate—gave it scorn for scorn. He would
ally himself with Democracy; his wealth could not get
him into a club, but it would buy him into parliament;
he could not be a Lauzun, nor, perhaps, a Mirabeau,
but he might be a Danton. He had plenty of know-
ledge and audacity, and with knowledge and audacity a
good hater is sure to be eloquent. Possibly, then, this
poor Louis Grayle might have made a great ﬁgure, left
his mark on his age and his name in history; but in
contesting the borough, which he was sure to carry, he
had to face an opponent in a real line gentleman whom


A STRANGE STORY. 15'!
his father had ruined, cool and high-bred, with a tongue
like a rapier, a sneer like an adder. A—quarrel of course;
Louis Grayle sent a challenge. The ﬁne gentleman,
known to be no coward (ﬁne gentlemen never are), was
at ﬁrst disposed _to refuse with contempt. But Grayle
had made himself the idol of the mob ; and at a word
from Grayle, the ﬁne gentleman might have been ducked
at a pump, or tossed in a blanket—that would have
made him ridiculous;—to be_shot at is a triﬂe, to he
laughed at is serious. He therefore condescended to
accept the challenge, and my father was his second.
“ It was settled, of course, according to English
custom, that both combatants should ﬁre at the same
time, and by signal. The antagonist ﬁred at the right
moment; his ball grazed Louis Grayle’s temple. Louis
'Grayle had not ﬁred. He now seemed to the seconds
to take slow and deliberate aim. They called out to
him not to ﬁre—they were rushing to prevent him—
when the trigger was pulled, and his opponent fell
dead on the ﬁeld. The ﬁght was, therefore, considered
unfair; Louis Grayle was tried for his life; he did not
stand the trial in person.* He escaped to the Conti-
nent; hurried on to some distant, uncivilized lands;
could not be traced; reappeared in England no more.
The lawyer who conducted his defence pleaded skil-
fully He argued that the delay in ﬁring was not
4" Mrs. Poyntz here makes a mistake in law, which, though~
very evident, her listeners do not seem to have noticed. Her
mistake will he referred to later.
14


I58 A sraases sroar.
intentional, therefore not criminal—the eﬁ‘ect of the
stun which the wound in the temple had occasioned.
The judge was a gentleman, and summed up the evi-
dence so as to direct the jury to a verdict against the
low wretch who had murdered a gentleman. But the
jurors were not gentlemen, and Grayle’s advocate had
of course excited their sympathy for a son of the
people whom a gentleman had wantonly insulted—the
verdict was manslaughter. But the sentence emphati-
cally marked the aggravated nature of the homicide —
three years’ imprisonment. Grayle eluded the prison,
but he was a man disgraced and an exile—his ambition
blasted, his career an outlaw’s, and his age not yet-
twenty-three. My father said that he was supposed to
have changed his name; none knew what had become
of him. And so this creature, brilliant and daring,
whom if born under better auspices we might now be
all fawning on, cringing to— after living to old age, no
one knows how—dies murdered at Aleppo, no one, you
say, knows by whom.”
“I saw some account of his death in the papers about
three years ago,” said one of the party; “but the name
was misspelt, and I had no idea that it was the same
man who had fought the duel which Mrs. Colonel
Poyntz has so graphically described. I have a very
vague recollection of the trial; it took place when‘ I
was a boy, more than forty years since. The affair
made a stir at the time, but was soon forgotten.”
“ Soon forgotten," said Mrs. Poyntz; “ay, what is


A STRANGE STORY. 159
not? Leave your place in the world for ten minutes,
and when you come back somebody else has taken it;
but when you leave the world for good, who remem-
bers that you had ever a place even in the parish
register?’
“ Nevertheless,” said I, “ a great poet has said, ﬁnely
and truly,
‘ The sun of Homer shines upon us still.’ ”
“ But it does not shine upon Homer; and learned
folks tell me that we know no more who and what
Homer was, if there was ever a single Homer at all, or,
rather, a whole herd of Homers, than we know about
the man in the moon—if there be one man there, or
' millions of men. Now, my dear Miss Brabazon, it will
be very kind in you to divert our thoughts into chan-
nels less gloomy. Some pretty French air— Dr.
Fenwick, I have something to say to you.” She drew
me towards the window. “So Anne Ashleigh writes
me word that I am not to mention your engagement.
Do you think it quite prudent to keep it a. secret ?”
“ I do not see how prudence is concerned in keeping
it secret one way or the other—it is a mere matter of
feeling. Most people wish to abridge, as far as they
can, the time in which their private arrangements are
the topic of public gossip.”
“Public gossip is sometimes the best security for the
due completion of private arrangements. As long as a
girl is not known to be engaged, her betrothed must be


160 A s'raasoa sroav.
prepared for rivals. Announce the engagement, and
rivals are warned oﬂ'.”
“ I fear no rivals.”
“ Do you not f” Bold man! I suppose you will
write to Lilian?”
“ Certainly.”
“ Do so, and constantly. By-the-way, Mrs. Ashleigh,
before she went, asked me to send her back Lady
Haughton’s letter of invitation. What for? to show
to you F”
“Very likely. Have you the letter still? May I
see it ?”
“Not just at present. When Lilian or Mrs. Ash-
leigh writes to you, come and tell me how they like
their visit, and what other guests form the party.”
Therewith she turned away and conversed apart with
the traveller.
Her words disquieted me, and I felt that they were
meant to do so_wherefore I could not guess. But '
there is no language on earth which has more words
with a double meaning than that spoken by the Clever
Woman, who is never so guarded as when she appears
to be frank.
As I walked home thoughtfully, I was accosted by a
young man, the son of one of the wealthiest merchants
in the town. I had attended him with success, some
months before, in a rheumatic fever; he and his family
were much attached to me.
“Ah, my dear Fenwick, I am so glad to see you ; I


A srsasos sroav. 161
owe you an obligation of which you are not aware——
an exceedingly pleasant travelling companion. I came
with him to-day from London, where I have been sight-
seeing and holiday-making for the last fortnight.”
“I suppose you mean that you kindly bring me a
patient 7”
“No, only an admirer. I was staying at Fenton’s
Hotel. It so happened one day that I had left in the
coﬁ'ee-room your last work on the Vital Principle, which,
by-the~by, the bookseller assures me is selling immensely
among readers as non-professional as myself. Coming
into the coffee-room again, I found a gentleman reading
the book. I claimed it politely; he as politely tendered
his excuse for taking it. We made acquaintance on the
spot. The next day we were intimate. He expressed
great interest and curiosity about your theory and your
experiments. I told him I knew you. You may guess
if I described you as less clever in your practice than
you are in your writings. And, in short, he came with
me to L-‘—, partly to see our ﬂourishing town, princi-
' pally on my promise to introduce him to you. My
mother, you know, has what she calls a déjeuner to-
morrow-déjeuner and dance. You will be there ?”
“ Thank you for reminding me of her invitation. I
will avail myself of it if I can. Your new friend
will be present? Who and what is he? A medical
student ?”
“No, a mere gentleman at case; but seems to have
a good deal of general information. Very young;
14 * x.


162 A sraauoa sroar.
apparently very rich; wonderfully good looking. I am
sure you will like him; everybody must.”
" It is quite enough to prepare me to like him that he
is a friend of yours.” And so we shook hands and
parted.

CHAPTER XXIII.
IT was late in the afternoon of the following day
before I was able to join the party assembled at the
merchant’s house; it was a villa about two miles out
of the town, pleasantly situated, amidst ﬂower-gardens,
celebrated in the neighborhood for their beauty. The
breakfast had been long over; the company was scat-
tered over the lawn ; some formed into a dance on the
smooth lawn; some seated under shady awnings;
others gliding amidst parterres, in which all the glow of
color took a glory yet more vivid under the ﬂush of a
brilliant sunshine, and the ripple of a soft, western
breeze. Music, loud and lively, mingled with the
laughter of happy children, who formed much the
larger number of the party.
Standing at the entrance of an arched trellis, that
led from the hardier ﬂowers of the lawn to a rare col-
lection of tropical plants under a lofty glass dome
(connecting, as it were, the familiar vegetation of the
North with that of the remotest East,) was a form
that instantaneously caught and ﬁxed my gaze. The


A STRANGE sToaY. 163
entrance of the arcade was ﬁlled with parasite creepers,
in prodigal luxuriance, of variegated, gorgeous tints-
scarlet, golden, purple; and the form, an idealized pic-
ture of man’s youth fresh from the hand of Nature,
stood literally in a frame of blooms.
Never have I seen human face so radiant as that
young man’s. There was in the aspect an indescriba-
ble something that literally dazzled. As one continued
to gaze, it was with surprise; one was forced to acknow~
ledge that in the features themselves there was no
faultless regularity; nor was the young man’s stature
imposing — about the middle height. But the eﬁ'ect 0f
the whole was not less transcendent. Large eyes,
unspeakably lustrous ; a most harmonious coloring; an
expression of contagious animation and joyousness;
and the form itself so critically ﬁne, that the welded
strength of its sinews was best shown in the lightness
and grace of its movements.
He was resting one hand carelessly on the golden
locks of a child that had nestled itself against his knees,
looking up in his face in that silent, loving wonder with
which children regard something too strangely beauti-
ful for noisy admiration; he himself was conversing
with the host, an old, grey-haired, gouty man, propped
on his crutched stick, and listening with a look of
mournful envy. To the wealth of the old man all the
ﬂowers in that garden owed their renewed delight in
the summer air and sun. Oh! that his wealth could
renew to himself one hour of the youth whose incarna-


164 ' A s'raanen STORY.
tion stood beside him, Lord, indeed, of Creation; its
splendor woven into his crown of beauty, its enjoy-
ments subject to his sceptre of hope and gladness.
I was startled by the hearty voice of the merchant’s
son: “Ah, my dear Fenwick, I was afraid you would
not come-you are late. There is the new friend of -
whom I spoke to you last night; let me now make you
acquainted with him.” He drew my arm in his, and
led me up to the young man, where he stood under the
arching ﬂowers, and whom he then introduced to me
by the name of Margrave.
Nothing could be more frankly cordial than Mr. Mar~
grave’s manner. In a few minutes I found myself
conversing with him familiarly, as if we had been
reared in the same home, and sported together in the
same playgrounds. His vein of talk was peculiar, olf-
hand, careless, shifting from topic to topic with a bright
rapidity.
He said that he liked the place ; proposed to stay in
it some weeks; asked my address, which I gave to
him; promised to call soon at an early hour, while
my time was yet free from professional visits. I en-
deavored, when I went away, to analyze to myself the
fascination which this young stranger so notably exer-
cised over all who approached him; and it seemed to
me, ever seeking to ﬁnd material causes for all moral
eﬁects, that it rose from the contagious vitality of that
rarest of all rare gifts in highly-civilized circles—perfect
health; that health which is in itself the most exquisite


A STRANGE s'roar. 165
luxury; which, ﬁnding happiness in the mere sense of
existence, diﬁ'uses round it, like an atmosphere, the
harmless hilarity of its bright animal being. Health,
to the utmost perfection, is seldom known after child-
hood ; health to the utmost cannot be enjoyed by those
who overwork the brain, or admit the sure wear and
tear of the passions. The creature I had just seen gave
me the notion of youth in the golden age of the poets—-
the youth of the careless Arcadian, before nymph or
shepherdess had vexed his heart with a sigh.
CHAPTER XXIV.
Tan house I occupied at L was a quaint, old-
fashioned building-a corner-house. One side, in which
was the front entrance, looked upon a street which, as
there were no shops in it, and it was no direct thorough-
,fare to the busy centres of the town, was always quiet,
and at some hours of the day almost deserted. The
other side of the house fronted a lane; opposite to it
was the long and high wall of the garden to a Young
Ladies’ Boarding-School. My stables adjoined the
house, abutting on a row of smaller buildings, with
little gardens before them, chieﬂy occupied by mercan-
tile clerks and retired tradesmen. By the lane there
was a short and ready access both to the high turnpike-


166 a summer; sroaY.
road, and to some pleasant walks through green mead-
ows and along the banks of a river.
This house I had inhabited since my arrival at
L , and it had to me so many attractions, in a situa~
tion suﬁicicntly central to be convenient for patients,
and yet free from noise, and favorable to ready outlet into

the country for such foot or horse exercise as my pro-
fessional avocations would allow me to carve for myself
out of what the Latin poet calls the “ solid day,” that I
had refused to change it for one better suited to my
increased income; but it was not a house which Mrs.
Ashleigh would have liked for Lilian. The main objec-
tion to it in the eyes of the “ genteel ” was, that it had
formerly belonged to a member of the healing profession,
who united the shop of an apothecary to the diploma of
a surgeon ; but that shop had given the house a special
attraction to me; for it had been built out on the side
of the house which fronted the lane, occupying the
greater portion of a small gravel court, fenced from the
road by a low iron palisade, and separated from the
body of the house itself by a short and narrow corridor
that communicated with the entrance-hall. This shop
I turned into a rude study for scientiﬁc experiments, in
which I generally spent some early hours of the morn-
ing, before my visiting patients began to arrive. I
enjoyed the stillness of its separation from the rest of
the house; I enjoyed the glimpse of the great chestnut
trees, which overtopped the wall of the school-garden;
I enjoyed the ease with which, by opening the glazed


A sraanos sroav. 16'!
sash-door, I could get out, if disposed for -a short walk,
into the pleasant ﬁelds; and so completely had I made
this sanctuary my own, that not only my man-servant
knew that I was never to be disturbed when in it,
except by the summons of a patient, but even the house-
maid was forbidden to enter it with broom or duster,
except upon special invitation. The last thing at night,
before retiring to rest, it was the man-servant’s business
to see that the sash-window was closed, and the gate
to the iron palisade locked; but during the day-time I
so often went out of the house by that private way that
the gate was then very seldom locked, nor the sash-
door bolted from within. In the town of L— there
was little apprehension of house-robberies—especially
in the daylight—and certainly in this room, cut off from
the main building, there was nothing to attract a vulgar
cupidity. A few of the apothecary’s shelves and cases
still remained on the walls, with, here and there, a
bottle of some chemical preparation for experiment.
Two or three worm-eaten, wooden chairs; two or three
shabby old tables; an old walnut-tree bureau, without
a lock, into which odds and ends were confusedly
thrust, and sundry ugly-louking inventions of mechani-
cal science, were, assuredly, not the articles which a
timid pr0prietor would guard with jealous care from the
chances of robbery. It will be seen later why I have
been thus prolix in description. The morning after I
had met the young stranger by whom Iliad been so
favorably impressed, I was up as usual, a little before


168 A s'raanoa sroar.
the sun, and long before any of my servants were astir.
I went ﬁrst into the room I have mentioned, and which
I shall henceforth designate as my study, opened the
window, unlocked the gate, and sauntered for some
minutes up and down the silent lane skirting the oppo-
site wall, and overhung by the chestnut-trees rich in
the garniture of a glorious summer; then, refreshed for
work, I re-entered my study and was soon absorbed in
the examination of that now well-known machine, which
was then, to me at least, a novelty; invented, if I
remember right, by Dubois-Reymond, so distinguished
by his researches into the mysteries of organic elec-
tricity. It is a wooden cylinder ﬁxed against the edge
of a table; on the table two vessels ﬁlled with salt and
water are so placed that, as you close your hand on the
cylinder, the fore-ﬁnger of each hand can drop into the
water; each of the vessels has a metallic plate, and
communicates by wires with a galvanometer' with its
needle. Now the theory is, that if you clutch the
cylinder ﬁrmly with the right hand, leaving the left
perfectly passive, the needle in the galvanometer will
move from west to south; if, in like manner, you exert
the left arm, leaving the right arm passive, the needle
will deﬂect from west to north. Hence, it is argued
that the electric current is induced through the agency
of the nervous system, and that, as human Will pro-
duces the muscular contraction requisite, so is it human
Will that causes the deﬂection of the needle. I im-
agined that if this theory were substantiated by experi-


a s'rnanoa near. 169
ment, the discovery might lead to some sublime and
unconjectured secret of science. For human Will, thus
actively effective on the electric current, and all matter,
animate or inanimate, having more or less of electricity,
a vast ﬁeld became opened to conjecture. By what
series of patient experimental deduction might not
science arrive at the solution of problems which the
Newtonian law of gravitation does not sufﬁce to solve;
and But here I halt. At the date which my story
has reached my mind never lost itself long in the Cloud-

land of Guess.
I was dissatisﬁed with my experiment. The needle
stirred, indeed, but erratically, and not in directions
which, according to the theory, should correspond to
my movement. I was about to dismiss the trial with
. some uncharitable contempt of the foreign philosopher’s
dogmas, when I heard a loud ring at my street door.
While I paused to conjecture whether my servant was
yet up to attend to the door, and which of my patients
was the most likely to summon me at so unseasonable
an hour, a shadow darkened my window. I looked up,
and to my astonishment beheld the brilliant face of
Mr. Margrave. The sash to the door was already par-
tially opened; he raised it higher, and walked into the
room. “Was it you who rang at the street door, and
at this hour f" said I.
“Yes; and observing, after I had rung, that all the
shutters were still closed, I felt ashamed of my own
rash action, and made off rather than brave the reproach-
15


170 A sraanoa s'roav.
fu! face of some injured housemaid, robbed of let
morning dreams. I turned down that pretty lane—
lured by the green of the chestnut-trees—caught sight
of you through the window, took courage, and here I
am! You forgive me?” While thus speaking, he
continued to move along the littered ﬂoor of the dingy
room, with the undulating restlessness of some wild
animal in the conﬁnes of its den, and he now went on,
in short, fragmentary sentences, very slightly linked
together, but smoothed, as it were, into harmony by a
voice musical and fresh as a sky-lark’s warble. “Morn-
ing dreams, indeed! dreams that waste the life of such
a morning. Rosy magniﬁcence of a summer dawn!
Do you not pity the fool who prefers to lie a-bed, and
to dream rather than to live? What! and you, strong
man, with those noble limbs, in this den! Do, you not .
long for a rush through the green of the ﬁelds, a bath
in the blue of the river ?” '
Here he came to a pause, standing, still in the grey
light of the growing day, with eyes whose joyous lustre
forestalled the sun’s, and lips which seemed to laugh
even in repose. '
But presently those eyes, as quick as they were
bright, glanced over the walls, the ﬂoor, the shelves,
the phials, the mechanical inventions, and then rested
full on my cylinder ﬁxed to the table. He approached,
examined it curiously, asked what it was? I explained.
To gratify him, I sat down and renewed my experi-
ment, with equally ill success. The needle, which


a sraauos sroar. I'll
should have moved from west to south, describing an
angle of from 30 degrees to 40 or even 50 degrees, only
made a few troubled, undecided oscillations.
“Tut,” cried the young man, “ I see what it is; you
have a wound in your right hand.”
That was true. I had burnt my hand a few days be-
fore in a chemical experiment, and the sore had not healed.
“ Well,” said I, “and what does that matter f”
“ Everything; the least scratch in the skin of the
hand produces chemical actions on the electric current,
independently of your will. Let me try.”
He took my place, and in a moment the needle in the
galvanometer responded to his grasp on the cylinder,
exactly as the inventive philosopher had stated to be
the due result of the experiment.
I was startled.
“But how came you, Mr. Margrave, to be so well
acquainted with a scientiﬁc process little known, and
but recently discovered?”
“I well acquainted! not so. But I am fond of all
experiments that relate to animal life. Electricity,
especially, is full of interest.”
On that I drew him out (as I thought), and he talked
volubly. I was amazed to ﬁnd that this young man, in
whose brain I had conceived thought kept one care-
less holiday, was evidently familiar with the physical
sciences, and especially with chemistry, which was my
own study by predilection. But never had I met with
a student in whom a knowledge so extensive was


172 A sranner: STORY.
mixed up with notions so obsolete or so erotchety. In
one sentence he showed that he had mastered some
late discovery by Faraday or Liebig; in the next
sentence he was talking the wild fancies of Cardan or
Van Helmont. I burst out laughing at some paradox
about sympathetic powders, which he cnounced as if it
were a recognized truth.”
“Pray tell me,” said I, “who was your master in
physics, for a cleverer pupil never had a more crack-
brained teacher.”
“ No,” he answered, with his merry laugh, “it is not
the teacher’s fault. I am a mere parrot; just cry out a
few scraps of learning picked up here and there. But,
however, I am fond of all researches into Nature; all
guesses at her riddles. To tell you the truth, one
reason why I have taken to you so heartily is not only
that your published work caught my fancy in the dip
which I took into its contents (pardon me if I say dip,
I never do more than dip into any book), but also
because young * * * * tells me that which all whom
I have met in this town conﬁrm; viz., that you are one
of those few practical chemists who are at once exceed-
ingly cautious and exceedingly bold— willing to try
every new experiment, but submitting experiment to
rigid tests. Well, I have an experiment running wild
in this giddy head of mine, and I want you, some day
when at leisure, to catch it, ﬁx it as you have ﬁxed
that cylinder; make something of it. I am sure you can.”
“What is it Y”
“ Something akin to the theories in your work. You


A s'raaner. sroav. 173
would replenish or preserve to each special constitution
the special substance that may fail to the equilibrium
of its health. But you own that in a large proportion
of cases the best cure of disease is less to deal with
the disease itself than to support and stimulate the
whole system, so as to enable Nature to cure the
disease and restore the impaired equilibrium by her
own agencies. Thus, if you ﬁnd that in certain cases
of nervous debility a substance like nitric acid is efﬁ-
cacious, it is because the nitric acid has a virtue in
locking up, as it were, the nervous energy—that is,
preventing all undue waste. Again, in some cases of
what is commonly called feverish cold, stimulants like
ammonia assist Nature itself to get rid of the disorder
that oppresses its normal action; and, on the same
principle, I apprehend, it is contended that a large
aVerage of human lives is saved in those hospitals
which have adopted the supporting system of ample
nourishment and alcoholic stimulants.”
“ Your medical learning surprises me,” said I, smiling,
" and without pausing to notice where it deals some
what superﬁcially with disputable points in general, and
my own theory in particular, I ask you for the deduc-
tion you draw from your premises.”
“ It .is simply this: that to all animate bodies, how-
ever various, there must be one principle in common-
the vital principle itself. What, if there be one certain
means of recruiting that principle? and what if that
secret can be discovered?”
16 *


174 A STRANGE s'roar.
“ Pshaw! The old illusion of the medieval empirics.”
"Not so. But the mediaaval empirics were great
discoverers. You sneer at Van Helmont, who sought,
in water, the principle of all things; but Van Helmont
discovered in his search those invisible bodies called
gases. Now the principle of life must be certainly
ascribed to a gas.* And whatever is a gas, chemistry
* “According to the views we have mentioned, we must ascribe
life to a gas, that is, to an aeriform body."— Llama, Organic
Chemistry, Playfuir’s translation, p. 863. It is perhaps not less
superﬂuous to add that Liebig does not support the views
“according to which life must be ascribed to a gas," than it
would be to state, had Dugald Stewart been quoted as writing,
“According to the views we have mentioned the mind is but a
bundle of impressions," that Dugald Stewart was not supporting,
but opposing, the views of David Hume. The quotation is
merely meant to show, in the shortest possible compass, that
there are views entertained by speculative reasoners of our day
which, according to Lisbig, would lead to the inference at which
Margrave so boldly arrives. Margrave is, however, no doubt,
led to his belief by his reminiscences of Van Helmont, to whose
discovery of gas he is referring. Van Helmont plainly afﬁrms
“that the arterial spirit of our life is of the nature of a gas;”
and in the same chapter (on the ﬁction of elementary complexion!
and mixtures) says, “ Seeing that the spirit of our life, since it
is a gas, is most mightily and swiftly aﬂ'ected by any other gas,"
8:0. He repeats the same dogma in his treatise on Long Life,
and indeed very generally throughout his writings, observing, in
his Chapter on the "Vital Air,” that the spirit of life is a salt,
sharp vapor, made of the arterial blood, 8w. Liebig, therefore,
in confuting some modern notions as to the nature of mntagion
by miasma, is lending their reasonings back to that assumption
in the dawn of physiological science by which the discoverer of
gas exalted into the principle of life the, substance to which he
ﬁrst gave the name now so familiarly known. It is nevertheless
Just to Van Helmont to add that his conception of the vital prin-


A sraaxor: sroar. l75
should not despair of producingl But I can argue no
longer now—never can argue long at a. stretch-we
are wasting the morning; and, joy! the sun is up!
See! Out! come out! out! and greet the great Life-
giver face to face.”
I could not resist the young man’s invitation. In a
few minutes we were in the quiet lane under the glint-
ing chestnut-trees. Margrave . was chanting, low, a
wild tune—words in a strange language.
“What words are those? no European language, 1
think; for I know a little of most of the languages
which are spoken in our quarter of the globe, at least
by its more civilized races.”
“ Civilized race l What is civilization? Those words
were uttered by men who founded empires when
Europe itself was not civilized! Hush, is it not a grand
old air?" and lifting his eyes towards the sun, he gave
vent to a voice clear and deep as a mighty bell! The
ciplewas very farfrom being as purely materialistic as it would
seem to those uuaequainted with his writings; for he carefully
distinguishes that principle of life which he ascribes to a gas.
and by which he means the sensuous animal life, from the intel-
lectual, immortal principle of soul. Van Helmont, indeed, was a
sincere believer of Divine Revelation. “The Lord Jesus is the
way, the truth, and the life,” says with earnest humility this
daring genius, in that noble Chapter “ on the completing of- the
mind by the ‘ prayer of silence,’ and the. loving oﬂ'ering up of the
heart, soul, and strength to the obedience of the Divine wil "
from which some of the most eloquent of recent philosophers,
arguing against materialism, have borrowed largely in support
and in ornament of their lofty cause.


176 A s'raasos s'roar.
air was grand—the words had a sonorous swell that
suited it, and they seemed to me jubilant and yet
solemn. He stopped abruptly, as a path from the lane
had led us into the ﬁelds, already half-bathed in sun-
light—dews glittering on the hedgerows.
“Your song,” said I, “ would go well with the clash
of cymbals or the peal of the organ. I am no judge of
melody, but this strikes me as that of a religious
hymn."
“I compliment you on the guess. It is a Persian
ﬁre-worshipper’s hymn to the sun. The dialect is very
diﬁ‘erent from modern Persian. Cyrus the Great might
have chanted it on his march upon Babylon.”
“And where did you learn it?”
“ In Persia itself."
“ You have travelled much—learned much—and
are so young and so fresh. Is it an impertinent ques-
tion if I ask whether your parents are yet living, or are
you wholly lord of yourself? ”
“ Thank you for the question—pray make my answer
known in the town. Parents I have not—never had.”
“ Never had parents l”
“ Well, I ought rather to say that no parents ever
owned me. I am a natural son-a vagabond—a
nobody. When I came of age I received an anonymous
letter, informing me that a sum—I need not say what-
but more than enough for all- I need, was lodged at an
English banker’s in my name; that my mother had
died in my infancy; that my father was also dead—


a s'raauea sroav. 177
but recently; that as I was a child of love, and he was
unwilling that the secret of my birth should ever be
traced, he had provided for me, not by will, but in his
life, by a sum consigned to the trust of the friend who
now wrote to me; I need give myself no trouble to
learn more; faith, I never did. I_ am young, healthy,
rich-yes, richl Now you know all, and you had
better tell it, that I may win no man’s courtesy and no
maiden’s love upon false pretences. I have not even a
right, you see, to the name I bear. Histl let me catch
that squirrel.”
With what a panther-like bound he sprang! The
squirrel eluded his grasp, and was up the oak-tree; in
a moment he was up the oak-tree too. In amazement
I saw him rising from bough to bough —- saw his bright
eyes and glittering teeth through the green leaves;
presently I heard the sharp piteous cry of the squirrel-
echoed by the youth’s merry laugh—and down, through
that maze of green, Margrave came, dropping on the
grass and bounding up, as Mercury might have bounded
with his wings at his heels. I
“ I have caught him —— what pretty brown eyes 1”
Suddenly the gay expression of his face changed to
that of a savage; the squirrel had wrenched itself half-
loose, and bitten him. The poor brutel In an instant
its neck was wrung—its body dashed on the ground;
and that fair young creature, every feature quivering
with rage, was stamping his foot on his victim again
and againl it was horrible. I caught him by the arm
I


178 A sraauor. sroar.
indignantly. He turned round on me like a wild beast
disturbed from its prey' His teeth set, his hand lifted,
his eyes like balls of ﬁre.
“ Shame!” said I, calmly; “ shame on you i ”
He continued to gaze on me a moment or so; his
eye glaring-his breath panting—and then, as if master-
ing himself with an involuntary eﬁ‘ort, his arm dropped
to his side, and he said quite humbly, “I beg your
pardon; indeed I do. I was beside myself for a mo-
ment; I cannot bear pain ;” and he looked in deep com-
passion for himself at his wounded hand. “ Venomous
brute!” And he stamped again on the body of the
squirrel, already crushed out of shape.
I moved away in disgust, and walked on.
But presently I felt my arm softly drawn aside, and
a voice, dulcet as the coo of a dove, stole its way into
my ears. There was no resisting the charm with
which this extraordinary mortal could fascinate even
the hard and the cold; nor them, perhaps, the least.
For as you see in extreme old age, when the heart
seems to have shrunk into itself, and to leave but
meagre and nipped aﬂ'ections for the nearest relations
if grown up, the indurated egotism softens at once
towards aplayful child; or as you see in middle life,
some misanthrope, whose nature has been soured by
wrong and sorrow, shrink from his own species, yet
make friends with inferior races and respond to the
caress of a dog—so, for the worldling or the cynic, there
was an attraction in the freshness of this joyous favorite


A summer: s'roaY. 179-
of Nature-an attraction like that of a beautiful child,
spoilt and'wayward, or of a graceful animal, half docile,
half ﬁerce.
“But’,’ said I, with a smile, as I felt all displeasure
gone, “such indulgence of passion for such a triﬂe is
surely unworthy a student of philosophy!”
“Triﬂe,” he said, dolorously. “But I tell you it is
pain; pain is no triﬂe. I sutfer. Look! ”
I looked at the hand, which I took in mine. The
bite no doubt had been sharp; but the hand that lay in
my own was that which the Greek sculptor gives to a
gladiator; not large (the extremities are never large in
persons whose strength comes from the just proportion
of all the members, rather than the factitious and
partial force which continued muscular exertion will
give to one part of the frame, to the comparative
weakening of the rest), but the ﬁrm-knit joints, the
solid ﬁngers, the ﬁnished nails, the massive palm, the
supple, polished skin, in which we recognize what
Nature designs the human hand to be-the skilled,
swift, mighty doer of all those marvels which win
Nature herself from the wilderness.
“ It is strange,” said I, thoughtfully; “ but your sus-
ceptibility to suffering conﬁrms my opinion, 'which is
diﬁ'erent from the popular belief, viz., that pain is most
acutely felt by those in whom the animal organization
being perfect, and the sense of vitality exquisitely keen,
every injury or lesion ﬁnds the whole system rise, as it
were, to repel the mischief and communicate the con-


- ISO A s'raauos sroaY.
sciousness of it to all those nerves which are the senti-
nels to the garrison of life. Yet my theory is scarcely
borne out by general fact. The Indian savages must
have a health as perfect as yours; a nervous system as
ﬁne. Witness their marvellous accuracy of ear, of eye,
of scent, probably also of touch, yet they are indiﬂ‘erent
to physical pain; or must I mortify your pride by say-
ing that they have some moral quality defective in you
which enables them to rise superior to it? ”
“ The Indian savages,” said Margrave, sullenlyI
“ have not a health as perfect as mine, and in what you
call vitality-the blissful consciousness of life—they are
as sticks and stones compared to me.”
“ How do you know?”
“ Because I have lived with them. It is a fallacy
to suppose that the savage has a health superior to that
of the civilized man —if the civilized man be but tem-
perate; and even if not, he has the stamina that can
resist for years the eﬁ‘ect of excesses which would
destroy the savage in a month. As to the savage’s
ﬁne perceptions of sense, such do not come from exqui-
site equilibrium of system, but are hereditary attributes
transmitted from race to race, and strengthened by
training from infancy. But is a pointer stronger and
healthier than a mastiﬁ', because the pointer through
long descent and early teaching creeps stealtbily to his
game and stands to it motionless? I will talk. of this
later; now 1 suﬂ'erl Pain, pain 1 Has life any ill but
pain ? ”


A summer: s'roav. 181
It so- happened that I had about me some roots of the
white lily, which I meant, before returning home, to
leave with a patient suffering from one of those acute
local inﬁammations, in which that simple remedy often
affords great relief. I cut up one of these roots, and
bound the cooling leaves to the wounded hand with my
handkerchief.
“There,” said I. “ Fortunately, if you feel pain
more sensibly than others, you will recover from it more
quickly.” ‘
And in a few minutes my companion felt perfectly
relieved, and poured out his gratitude with an extrava-
gance of expression and a beaming delight of counte-
nance which positively touched me.
“ I almost feel,” said I, “ as I do when I have stilled
an infant’s wailing, and restored it smiling to its
mother’s breast.”
“ You have done so. I am an infant, and Nature is _
my mother. Oh, to be restored to the full joy of life,
the scent of wild ﬂowers, the song of birds, and this
air—summer air— summer air l ”
I know not why it was, but at that moment, looking
at him and hearing him, I rejoiced that Lilian was not
at L——.
“But I came out to bathe. Can we not bathe in
that stream? ”
“ No. You would derange the bandage round your
hand; and for all bodily ills, from the least to the
gravest, there is nothing like leaving Nature at rest the
16


182 A STRANGE s'ronv.
moment we have hit on the means which assists her
own eﬁ'orts at cure.”
“ I obey, then ; but I so love the water.”
“ You swim, of course ? ”
“Ask the ﬁsh if it swim. Ask the ﬁsh if it can
escape me 1 I delight to dive down—down ; to plunge
after the startled trout, as an otter does; and then to
get amongst those cool, fragrant reeds and bulrushes,
or that forest of emerald weed which one sometimes
ﬁnds waving under clear rivers. Man! man! could
you live but an hour of my life you would know how
horrible a thing it is to die l”
“Yet the dying do not think so; they pass away
calm and smiling, as you will one day.”
“1—1! die one day-die!” and he sank on the
grass, and buried his face amongst the herbage, sobbing
aloud.
Before I could get through half a dozen words, meant
to soothe, he had once more bounded up, dashed the
tears from his eyes, and was again singing some wild,
barbaric chant. Abstracting itself from the appeal to
its outward sense by melodies of which the language
was unknown, my mind soon grew absorbed in medi-
tative conjectures on the singular nature, so wayward,
so impulsive, which had forced intimacy on a man
grave and practical as myself.
I was puzzled how to reconcile so passionate a child-
isnness, so undisciplined a want of self-control, with an
experience of mankind so extended by travel, with an


A srnanos arm“. [83
education, desultory and irregular indeed, but which
must, at some time or other, have been familiarized to
'Severe reasonings and laborious studies. In Margravc
there seemed to be wanting that mysterious something
which is needed to keep our faculties, however severally
brilliant, harmoniously locked together—as the string
by which a child mechanically binds the wild ﬂowers it
gathers; shaping them at choice into the garland or
the chain.
\
CHAPTER XXV.
MY intercourse with Margrave grew habitual and
familiar. He came to my house every morning before
sunrise; in the evenings we were again brought to.
gather; sometimes in the houses to which we were
both invited, sometimes at his hotel, sometimes in my
own home. '
Nothing more perplexed me than his aspect of ex-
treme youthfulness, contrasted with the extent of the
travels, which, if he were to be believed, had left little
of the known world unexplored. One day I asked him,
bluntly, how old he was?
“ How old do I look ? How old should you suppose
me to be ? ”
“ I should have guessed you to be about twenty, till
you spoke of having come of age some years ago.”


184 A s'rnases s'roar.
“Is it a sign of longevity when a man looks much
younger than he is f ”
“ Conjoined with other signs, certainly.”
“Have I the other signs ? ”
“ Yes, a magniﬁcent, perhaps a matchless, constitu-
tional organization. But you have evaded my question
as to your age; was it an impertinence to put it?”
“ No. I came of age—let me see—three years ago.”
“So long since? Is it possible? I wish I had your
. secret I ”
“ Secrctl What secret? ”
“ The secret of preserving so much of the boyish
freshness in the wear and tear of man-like passions and
man-like thoughts.”
“ You are still young yourself—under forty?”
“ Oh, yes! some years under forty.”
“And nature gave you a grander frame and a ﬁner
symmetry of feature than she bestowed on me.”
“ Poohl poohl You have the beauty that must
charm the eyes of women, and that beauty in its sunny
forenoon of youth. Happy manl if you love-and wish
to be sure that you are loved again.”
“ What you call love—the unhealthy sentiment, the
feverish folly— I left behind me, I think forever,
when -— ”
“Ay, indeed-when ?”
“ I came of agel”
“ Hoary cynicl and you despise love! So did I once
Your time may come.”


A smauon STORY. 185
“ I think not. Does any animal, except man, love its
fellow she-animal as man loves woman 17”
“As man loves woman? No, I suppose not.”
" And why should the subject animals be wiser than
their king? But, to return—you would like to have
my youth and my careless enjoyment of youth 1'”
“ Can you ask-who would not?” Margrave looked
at me for a moment with unusual seriousness, and then,
in the abrupt changes common to his capricious tempe-
rament, began to sing softly one of his barbaric chants
—a chant, different from any I had heard him sing
before-made, either by the modulation of his voice or
the nature of the tune, so sweet that, little as music
generally aﬁ'ected me, this thrilled to my very heart’s
core. I drew closer and closer to him, and murmured
when he paused.
“ Is not that a love-song ? ”
“ No,” said he, “ it is the song by which the serpent-
charmer charms the serpent.”

CHAPTER XXVI.
Incanasnn intimacy with my new acquaintance did
not diminish the charm of his society, though it brought
to light some startling defects, both in his mental and
moral organization. I have before said that his know-
edge, though it had swept over a wide circuit and
16*


186 A sraanoa swear.
dipped into curious nnfrequented recesses, was des.
ultory and erratic. It certainly was not that know-
ledge, sustained and aspiring, which the poet assures us
is “the wing on which we mount to heaven.” So, in
his faculties themselves there were singular inequalities,
or contradictions. His power of memory in some things
seemed prodigious, but when examined it was seldom
accurate; it could apprehend, but did not hold together
with a binding grasp what metaphysicians call “com-
plex ideas.” He thus seemed unable to put it to any
steadfast purpose in the sciences of which it retained,
vaguely and loosely, many recondite principles. For
the sublime and beautiful in literature he had no taste
whatever. A passionate lover of nature, his imagina-
tion had no response to the arts by which nature is ex-
pressed or idealized; wholly unaffected by poetry or
painting. Of the ﬁne arts, music alone attracted and
pleased him. His conversation was often eminently
suggestive, touching on much, whether in books or
mankind, that set one thinking, but I never remember
him to have uttered any of those lofty or tender senti-
ments which form the connecting links between youth
and genius. For if poets sing to the young, and the
young hail their own interpreters in poets, it is because
the tendency of both is to idealize the realities of life;
ﬁnding everywhere in the Real a something that is
noble or fair, and making the fair yet fairer, and the
noble nobler still.
In Margrave’s character there seemed no special


A sraanem s'roar. 187
vices, no special virtues; but a wonderful vivacity
joyousness, animal good humor. He was singularly
temperate, having a dislike to wine, perhaps from that
purity of taste which belongs to health absolutely per-
fect. No healthful child likes alcohols, no animal except
man, prefers wine to water.
But his main moral defect seemed to me, in a want
of sympathy, even where he professed attachment. He
who could feel so acutely for himself, he unmanned by
the bite of a squirrel, and sob at the thought that he
should one day die, was as callous to the snﬂ'erings of
another as a deer who deserts and butts from him a
wounded comrade.
I give an instance of this hardness of heart where I
should have least expected to ﬁnd it in him:
He had met and joined me as I was walking to visit
a patient on the outskirts of the town, when we fell in
with a group of children, just let loose for an hour or
two from their day-school. Some of these children
joyously recognized him as having played with them
at their homes; they ran up to him, and he seemed as
glad as themselves at the meeting.
He suffered them to drag him along with them, and
became as merry and sportive as the youngest of the
troop.
“Well, said I, laughing, “ if you are going to play at
leap-frog, pray don’t let it be on the high road, or you
will be run over by carts and draymen; see that meadow
just in front to the left-off with you there I”


188 A sraaaos STORY.
“With all my heart,” cried Margrave, “ while you
pay your visit. Come along, boys.”
A little urchin, not above six years old, but who was
lame, began to cry, he could not run-he should be left
behind.
Margrave stooped: “Climb on my shoulder, little
one, and I’ll be your horse.”
The child dried its tears, and delightedly obeyed.
“Certainly,” said I to myself“, “ Margrave, after all,
must have a nature as gentle as it is simple. What
other young man, so courted by all the allurements that
steal innocence from pleasure, would stop in the thor-
oughfare to play with children ?" Q
The thought had scarcely-passed through my mind
when I heard a scream of agony. Margrave had leaped
the railing that divided the meadow from the road, and,
in so doing, the poor child, perched on his shoulder, had,
perhaps from surprise or fright, loosened its hold and
fallen heavily— its cries were piteous. Margrave
clapped his hands to his ears—uttered an exclamation
of anger—and not even stopping to lift up the boy, or
examine what the hurt was, called to the other children
to come on, and was soon rolling with them on the
grass, and pelting them with daisies. When I came up,
only one child remained by the suli'erer—his little
brother, a year older than himself. The child had fallen
on his arm, which was not broken, but violently con-
tused. The pain must have been intense. I carried
the child to his home, and had to remain there some


A sraauea sroay. 189
time. I did not see Margrave till the next morning.
When he then called, I felt so indignant that I could
scarcely speak to him. When at last Irebuked him for
his inhumanity, he seemed surprised; with difﬁculty
remembered the circumstance, and then merely said—
as if it were the most natural confession; in the world—
“Oh, nothing so discordant as a child’s wail. _ I hate
discords. I am pleased-with the company of children;
but they must be children who laugh and play. Well!
why do you look at me so sternly? What have I said
to shock you?”
“Shock me—you shock manhood itselfl Go; I can-
not talk to you now. 1 am busy.”
But he did not go; and his voice was so sweet, and
his ways so winning, that disgust insensibly melted
into that sort of forgiveness one accords (let me repeat
the illustration) to the deer that forsakes its comrade.
The poor thing knows no better. And what a grace-
ful, beautiful thing this was!
The fascination—I can give it no other name-
which Margrave exercised was not conﬁned to me, it
was universal-old, young, high, low, man, woman,
child, all felt it. Never in Low Town had stranger,
even the most distinguished, met with a reception so
cordial—so ﬂattering. His frank confession that he
Was a natural son, far from being to his injury, served
to interest people more in him, and to prevent all those
inquiries in regard to his connections and antecedents,
which would otherwise have been aﬂoat. To be sure.


190 A sraarms STORY.
he was evidently rich; at least he had plenty of money.
He lived in the best rooms in the principal hotel; was
very hospitable; entertained the families with whom
he had grown intimate; made them bring their chil-
dren—music and dancing after dinner. Among the
houses in which he had established familiar acquaint-
tnce was that of the mayor of the town, who had
bought Dr. Lloyd’s collection 'of subjects in natural
history. To that collection the mayor had added largely
by a very recent purchase. He had arranged these
various specimens, which his last acquisitions had
enriched by the interesting carcasses of an elephant and
a hippopotamus, in a large wooden building contiguous
to his dwelling, which had been constructed by a former
proprietor (a retired fox-hunter) as a riding-house. And
being a man who much affected the diifusion of know-
ledge, he proposed to open the museum to the admira-
tion of the general public, and at his death, to bequeath
it to the Athenaaum or Literary Institute of his native
town. Margrave, seconded by the inﬂuence of the
mayor’s daughter, had scarcely been three days at L—
before he had persuaded this excellent and public spir-
ited functionary to inaugurate the opening of his museum
by the popular ceremony of a ball. A temporary corri-
dor should unite the drawing-rooms, which were on the
ground ﬂoor, with the building that contained the
collection; and thus the féte would be elevated above
the frivolous character of a fashionable amusement, and
consecrated to the solemnization of an intellectual i nsti-


a srnanes sroav. 191
lute. Dazzled by the brilliancy of this idea, the mayor
announced his intention to give a ball that should include
the surrounding neighborhood, and be worthy, in all
expensive respects, of the dignity of himself and the
occasion. A night had been ﬁxed for the ball—a night
that became memorable indeed to mel The entertain-
ment was anticipated with a lively interest, in which
even the Hill condescended to share. The Hill did not
patronize mayors in general; but when a mayor gave a
ball for a purpose so patriotic, and on a scale so splen-
did, the Hill liberally acknowledged that Commerce
was, on the whole, a thing which the Eminence might,
now and then, condescend to acknowledge without
absolutely derogating from the rank which Providence
had assigned to it amongst the High Places of earth.
Accordingly, the Hill was permitted by its Queen to
honor the ﬁrst magistrate of Low Town by a promise
to attend his ball. Now, as this festivity had origi-
nated in the suggestion of Margrave, so, by a natural
association of ideas, every one,'in talking of the ball,
talked also of Margrave.
The Hill had at ﬁrst aﬂ‘ected to ignore a stranger
whese début had been made in the mercantile circle of
Low Town. But the Queen of the Hill now said,
sententiously, “This new man in a few days has become
a Celebrity. It is the policy of the Hill to adopt
Celebrities, if the Celebrities pay respect to the Pro-
prieties. Dr.lFenwick is requested to procure Mr. Mar-
grave the advantage of being known to the Hill.”


192 A srnanen sworn.
I found it somewhat difﬁcult to persuade Margrave
to accept the Hill’s condescending overture. He seemed
to have a dislike to all societies pretending to aristo-
cratic distinction-a dislike expressed with a ﬁerceness
so unwonted, that it made one suppose he had, at some
time or other, been subjected to mortiﬁcation by the
supercilious airs that blow upon heights so elevated.
However, he yielded to my instances, and accompanied
me one evening to Mrs. Poyntz’s house. The Hill
was encamped there for the occasion. Mrs. Poyntz
was exceedingly civil to him, and after a few common-
place speeches, hearing that he was fond of music, con~
signed him to the caressing care of Miss Brabazon, who
was at the head of the musical department in the Queen
of the Hill’s administration.
Mrs. Poyntz retired to her favorite seat near the
window, inviting me to sit beside her; and while she
knitted in silence, in silence my eye glanced toward
Margrave in the midst of the group assembled round
the piano.
Whether he was in more than usually high spirits,
or whether he was actuated by a malign and impish
desire to upset the established laws of decorum by
which the gaieties of the Hill were habitually subdued
into a serene and somewhat pensive pleasantness, I
know not; but it was not many minutes before the
orderly aspect of the place was grotesquely changed.
Miss Brabazon having come to the close of a 0mm
plicated and dreary sonata, I heard Margrave abruptly


A STRANGE near. 193
ask her if she could play the Tarantella, that famous
Neapolitan air which is founded on the legendary belief
that the bite of the tarantula excites an irresistible
desire to dance. On that high-bred spinster’s confession
that she was ignorant of the air, and had not even
heard of the legend, Margrave said, “Let me play it
to you, with variations of my own.” Miss Brabazon
graciously yielded her place at the instrument. Mar-
grave seated himself—there was great curiosity to
hear his performance. Margrave’s ﬁngers rushed over
the keys, and there was a general start, the prelude
was so unlike any known combination of harmonious
sounds. Then he began a chant—song I can scarcely
call it—words certainly not in Italian, perhaps in some
uncivilized tongue, perhaps in impromptu gibberish.
And the torture of the instrument now commenced in
good earnest; it shrieked, it groaned, wilder and noisier.
Beethoven’s Storm, roused by the fell touch of a German
pianist, were mild in comparison; and the mighty voice,
dominating the anguish of the cracking keys, had the
full diapason of a chorus. Certainly I am no judge of
music, but to my ear the discord was terriﬁc—to the
ears of better informed amateurs it seemed ravishing.
All were spellbound; even Mrs. Poyntz paused from
her knitting, as the Fates paused from their web at the
lyre of Orpheus. To this breathless delight, however,
soon succeeded a general desire for movement. To my
amazement I beheld these formal matrons and sober
fathers of families forming themselves into a dance,
17 n


194 a STRANGE s'roar.
turbulent as a children’s ball at Christmas. And when.
suddenly desisting from his music, Margrave started
up, caught the skeleton hand of lean Miss Brabazon,
and whirled her into the centre of the dance, I could
have fancied myself at a witch’s sabbat. My eye
turned in scandalous alarm towards Mrs. Poyntz. That
great creature seemed as much astounded as myself
Her eyes were ﬁxed on the scene in a stare of positive
stupor. For the ﬁrst time, no doubt, in her life, she
was overcome, deposed, dethroned. The awe of her
presence was literally whirled away. The dance ceased
as suddenly as it had begun. Darting from the galvan‘
ized mummy whom he had selected as his partner,
Mar-grave shot to Mrs. Poyntz’s side, and said, “Ten
thousand pardons for quitting you so soon, but the
clock warns me that I have an engagement elsewhere.’
In another moment he was gone.
The dance halted, people seemed slowly returning to
their senses, looking at each other bashfully and ashamed.
“ I could not help it, dear,” sighed Miss Brabazon at
last, sinking into a chair, and casting her deprecating.
fainting eyes upon the hostess.
“ It is witchcraft,” said fat Mrs. Bruce, wiping her
forehead.
“ Witchcraft! ” echoed Mrs. Poyntz; “it does indeed
look like it. An amazing and portentous exhibition
of animal spirits, and not to be endured by the Pro-
prieties. Where on earth can that young savage have
come from?”


a s'raauen sroar. 195
“From savage lands,” said I. “So he says.”
“Do not bring him here again,” said Mrs. Poyntz.
“He would soon turn the Hill topsy-tnrvy. But how
charming! I should like to see more of him,” she
added, in an under-voice, “if he would call on me some
morning, and not in the presence of those for whose
Proprieties I am responsible. Jane must be out in her
ride with the Colonel.”
Margrave never again attended the patrician fes-
tivities of the Hill. Invitations were poured upon him,
especially by Miss Brabazon and the other old maids,
but in vain.
“ Those people,” said he, “ are too tamed and civil-
ized for me; and so few young persons among them.
Even that girl Jane is only young on the surface;
inside, as old as the World, or her mother. I like youth,
real youth—I am young, I am young!”
And, indeed, I observed he would attach himself to
some young person, often to some child, as if with
cordial and special favor, yet for not more than an hour
or so, never distinguishing them by the same preference
when be next met them. I made that remark to him,
in rebuke of his ﬁckleness, one evening when he had
' found me at work on my Ambitious Book, reducing to
rule and measure the Laws of Nature.
“ It is not ﬁckleness,” said he, “ it is necessity.”
“ Necessity! Explain yourself.”
“ I seek to ﬁnd what I have not found,” said he; “ it
is my necessity to seek it, and among the young; and


196 A sraauea sroar.
disappointed in one, I turn to another. Neces:
again. But ﬁnd it at last I must.”
“I suppose you mean what the young usually s
in the young; and if, as you said the other day,;
have left love behind you, you now wander back
re-ﬁnd it.”
“Tushl If I may judge by the talk of young fo
love may be found every day by him who looks out
it. What I seek is among the rarest of all discover
You might aid me to ﬁnd it, and in so doing aid Y(
self to a knowledge far beyond all that your for
experiments can bestow.”
“ Prove your words, and command my services," a
I, smiling somewhat disdainfully.
“ You told me that you had examined into the alle
phenomena of animal magnetism, and proved s(
persons who pretend to the gift which the Scotch
second sight to be bungling impostors. You a
right. I have seen the clairvoyants who drive t
trade in this town; a common gipsy could beat then
their own calling. But your experience must b
shown you that there are certain temperaments
which the gift of the Pythoness is stored, unknow:
the possessor, undetected by the common observer;
the signs of which should be as apparent to the met
physiologist as they were to the ancient priest.”
“I at least, as a physiologist, am ignorant of
signs — what are they ?”
“ I should despair of making you comprehend t


A sraanoa sroav. 19'!
by mere verbal description. I could guide your obser~
vation to distinguish them unerringly were living sub-
jects before us. But not one in a million has the gift
to an extent available for the purposes to which the
wise would apply it. Many have imperfect glimpses,
few, few indeed, the unveiled, lucent sight. They who
have but the imperfect glimpses, mislead and dupe the
minds that consult them, because, being sometimes
marvellously right, they excite a credulous belief in
their general accuracy; and as they are but translators
of dreams in their own brain, their assurances are no
more to be trusted than are the dreams of commonplace
sleepers. But where the gift exists to perfection, he
who knows how to direct and to proﬁt by it should be
able to discover all that he desires to know for the
guidance and preservation of his own life. He will be
forewarned of every danger, forearmed in the means by
which danger is avoided. For the eye of the true
Pythoness matter has no obstruction, space no conﬁnes,
time no measurement."
“ My dear Margrave, you may well say that creatures
so gifted are rare; and, for my part, I would as soon
search for a unicorn, as, to use your aﬂ'ected expression,
for a Pythoness.”
“ Nevertheless, whenever there comes across the
course of your practice some young creature to whom
all the evil of the world is as yet unknown, to whom
the ordinary cares and duties of the world are strange
and unwelcome; who, from the earliest dawn of reason,
17*


198 A STRANGE STORY.
has loved to sit apart and to muse; before whose eyes
visions pass unsolicited; who converses with those who
are not dwellers on the earth, and beholds in the space
landscapes which the earth does not reﬂect.”
“ Margrave, Margrave! of whom do you speak Y"
“ Whose frame, though exquisitely sensitive, has still
a health and a soundness in which you recognize no
disease; whose mind has a truthfulness that you know
cannot deceive you, and a simple intelligence too clear
to deceive itself; who is moved to a mysterious degree
by all the varying aspects of external nature—inno-
cently joyous 0r nnaccountably sad—When, I say,
such a being comes across your experience, inform me;
and the chances are that the true Pythoness is found.”
I had listened with vague terror, and with more
than one exclamation of amazement, to descriptions
which brought Lilian Ashleigh before me; and I now
sat mute, bewildered, breathless, gazing upon Mar-
grave, and rejoicing that, at least, Lilian he had never
seen.
He returned my own gaze steadily, searchingly, and
then, breaking into a slight laugh, resumed:
“You call my word ‘Pythoness’ affected. I know
of no better. My recollections of classic anecdote and
history are confused and dim; but somewhere I have
read or heard that the priests of~Dclphi were accus-
tomed to travel chieﬂy into Thrace or Thessaly in
search of the virgins who might ﬁtly administer their
oracles, and that the oracles gradually ceased in repute


A s'raarmn s'roaY. 199
Is the priests became unable to discover the organize.-
tion requisite in the priestesses, and supplied by craft
and imposture, or by such imperfect fragmentary de-
velopments as belong now to professional clairvoyants,
the gifts which Nature failed to afford. Indeed, the
demand was one that must' have rapidly exhausted so
limited 0. supply. The constant strain upon faculties
so wearing to the vital functions in their relentless
exercise, under the artful stimulants by which the priests
heightened their power, was mortal, and no Pythoness
ever retained her life more than three years from the
time that her gift was elaborately trained and de
veloped.”
“Pooh! I'know of no classical authority for the
details you so conﬁdently cite. Perhaps some such
legends may be found in the Alexandrian Platonists,
but those mysteries are no authority on such a subject.
After all,” I added, recovering from my ﬁrst surprise,
or awe, “the Delphic oracles were proverbially am-
biguous, and their responses might be read either way;
a proof that the priests dictated the verses, though
their arts on the unhappy priestess might throw her
into real convulsions, and the real convulsions, not the
false gift, might shorten her life. Enough of such idle
subjects! Yet no! one question more. If you found
your Pythoncss, what then P”
“What then? Why, through her aid I might dis-
cover the process of an experiment which your practical
science would assist me to complete.”


200 A s'raanon s'roav.
“ Tell me of what kind is your experiment; and pre-
cisely because such little science as I possess is exclu-
sively practical, I may assist you without the help of
the Pythoness.”
Margrave was silent for some minutes, passing his
hand several times across his forehead, which was a
frequent gesture of his, and then rising, he answered,
in listless accents:
“I cannot say more now, my brain is fatigued; and
you are not yet in the right mood to hear me. By the
way, how close and reserved you are with me! ”
“ How so 7”
“ You never told me that you were engaged to be
married. You leave me, who thought to have won
your friendship, to hear what concerns you so intimately
from a comparative stranger.”
“ Who told you ? ”
“That woman with eyes that pry and lips that
scheme, to whose house you took me.”
“Mrs. Poyntz! is it possible? When?”
“ This afternoon. I met her in the street- she
stopped me, and, after some unmeaning talk, asked ‘if
I had seen you lately; if I did not ﬁnd you very absent
and distracted; no wonder— you were in love. The
young lady was away on a visit, and wooed by a
dangerous rival l ’ ”
“ Wooed by a dangerous rival I”
“ Very rich, good looking, young. Do you fear him!
You turn pale l ”


a smarter: sroav. 201
“I do not fear, except so far as he who loves truly,
loves humbly, and fears not that another may be pre-
ferred, but that another may be wcrthier of preference
than himself. But that Mrs. Poyntz should tell you all
this does amaze me. Did she mention the name of
the young lady ? ”
“Yes; Lilian Ashleigh. Henceforth be more frank
with me. Who knows? I may help you. Adieu!”

CHAPTER XXVII.
“WHEN Margrave had gone, I glanced at the clock
_not yet nine. I resolved to go at once to Mrs.
Poyntz. It was not an evening on which she received,
but doubtless she would see me. She owed me an
explanation. How thus carelessly divulge a secret she
had been enjoined to keep? and this rival, of whom I
was ignorant? It was no longer a matter of wonder
that Margrave should have described Lilian’s peculiar
idiosyncrasies in his sketch of his fabulous Pythoness.
Doubtless, Mrs. Poyntz had, with unpardonable levity
of indiscretion, revealed all of which she disapproved
in my choice. But for what object? Was this her
boasted friendship for me? Was it consistent with the
regard she professed for Mrs. Ashleigh and Lilian?
Occupied by these perplexed and indignant thoughts, I
arrived at Mrs. Poyntz’s house, and was admitted to


202 A s'raanea s'roav.
her presence. She was fortunately alone; her daughter
and the Colonel had gone to some party on the Hill.
I would not take the hand she held out to me on
entrance; seated myself in stern displeasure, and pro-
ceeded at once to inquire if she had really betrayed to
Mr. Margrave the secret of my engagement to Lilian.
“ Yes, Allen Fenwick; I have this day told, not only
Mr. Margrave, but every person I met who is likely to
tell it to some one else, the secret of your engagement
to Lilian Ashleigh. I never promised to conceal it; on
the contrary, I wrote word to Anne Ashleigh that I
would therein act as my own judgment counselled me.
I think my words to you were that ‘public gossip was
sometimes the best security for the completion of private
engagements.’ -"
“Do you mean that Mrs. or Miss Ashleigh recoils
from the engagement with me, and that I should meanly
compel them both to fulﬁl it by calling in the public to
censure them —if—if-— Oh, madam, this is worldly
artiﬁce indeedl ”
“ Be good enough to listen to me quietly. I have
never yet shown you the letter to Mrs. Ashleigh, writ-
ten by Lady Haughton, and delivered by Mr. Vigors.
That letter I will now show to you; but before doing
so I must enter into a preliminary explanation. Lady
Haughton is one of those women who love power,
and cannot obtain it except through wealth and station
-by her own intellect she could never obtain it.
When her husband died she was reduced from an


A s'raasos sroar. 203
income of twelve thousand a year to a jointure of twelve
hundred, but with the exclusive guardianship of a young
son, a minor, and adequate allowances for the charge;
she continued, therefore, to preside as mistress over the
establishments in town and country; still had the ad-
ministration of her son’s wealth and rank. She stinted
his education, in order to maintain her ascendancy over
him. He became a brainless prodigal—spendthrift
alike of health and fortune. Alarmed, she saw that,
probably, he would die young and a beggar; his only
hope of reform was in marriage. She reluctantly re-
solved to marry him to a penniless, well-born, soft-
minded young lady whom she knew she could control;
just before this marriage was to take place he was
killed by a fall from his horse. The Haughton estate
passed to his cousin, the luckiest young man alive; the
same Ashleigh Sumner who had already succeeded, in
default of male issue, to poor Gilbert Ashleigh’s landed
possessions. Over this young man Lady HaughtOu
could expect no inﬂuence. She would be a stranger in
his house. But she had a niece! Mr. Vigors assured
her the niece was beautiful. And if the niece could
become Mrs. Ashleigh Sumner, then Lady Haughton
Would be a less unimportant Nobody in the world, be_
cause she would still have her nearest relation in a
Somebody at Haughton Park. Mr. Vigors had his
own pompous reasons for approving an alliance which
he might help to accomplish. The ﬁrst step towards
that alliance was obviously to bring into reciprocal


204 A STRANGE s'roav.
attraction the natural charms of the young lady and
the acquired merits of the young gentleman. Mr.
Vigors could easily induce his ward to pay a visit to
Lady Haughton, and Lady Haughton had only to ex-
tend her invitations to her niece; hence the letter to
Mrs. Ashleigh, of which Mr. Vigors was the bearer,
and hence my advice to you, of which you can now
understand the motive. Since you thought Lilian Ash-
leigh the only woman you could love, and since I
thought there were other women in the world who
might do as well for Ashleigh Sumner, it seemed to me
fair for all parties that Lilian should not go to Lady
Haughton’s in ignorance of the sentiments with which
she had inspired you. A girl can seldom be sure that
she loves until she is sure that she is loved. And
now,” added Mrs. Poyntz, rising and walking across
the room to her bureau -“ now I will show you Lady
Haughton’s invitation to Mrs. Ashleigh. Here it is!”
I ran my eye over the letter, which she thrust into
my hand, resuming her knitwork while I read.
The letter was short, couched in conventional terms
of hollow aﬁ'ection. The writer blamed herself for
having so long neglected her brother’s widow and'child;
her heart had been w'rappcd up too much in the son she
had lost; that loss had made her turn to' the ties of
blood still left to her: she had heard much of Lilian
from their common friend, Mr. Vigors; she longed to
embrace so charming a niece. Then followed the invi-
tation and the postscript. The postscript ran thus, so


A summer: s'roar. 205
far as I can remember: “Whatever my own grief at
my irreparable bereavement, I am no egotist, I keep
my sorrow to myself. You will ﬁnd some pleasant
guests at my house, among others our joint connection,
young Ashleigh Sumner ”
“Women’s postscripts are proverbial for their signiﬁ-
cance,” said Mrs. Poyntz, when I had concluded the
letter and laid it on the table; “ and if I did not at
once show you this hypocritical eﬁ'usion, it was simply
because at the name Ashleigh Sumner its object became
transparent, not perhaps to poor Anne Ashleigh nor to
innocent Lilian, but to my knowledge of the parties
concerned, as it ought to be to that shrewd intelligence
which you derive partly from nature, partly from the
insight into life which a true physician cannot fail to
acquire. And if I know anything of you, you would
have romantically said, had you seen the letter at ﬁrst,
and understood its covert intention, ‘ Let me not shackle
the choice of the woman I love, and to whom an
alliance so coveted in the eyes of the world might, if
she were left free, be proﬂ'ered.’ ”
“ I should not have gathered from the postscript all
that you see in it, but had its purpdrt been so suggested
to me, you are right, I should have so said. Well, and
as Mr. Margrave tells me that you informed him that I
have a rival, I am now to conclude that the rival is Mr.
Ashleigh Sumner?”
“ Has not Mrs. Ashleigh or Lilian mentioned him is
writing to you i”
18


206 a s'raanoa s'roar.
“Yes, both; Lilian very slightly; Mrs. Ashleigh
with some praise, as a young man of high character
and very courteous to her.”
“ Yet, though I asked you to come and tell me who
, were the guests at Lady Haughton’s, you never did
so.”
“Pardon me; but of the guests I thought nothing,
and letters addressed to my heart seemed to me too
sacred to talk about. And Ashleigh Sumner then
courts Lilian! How do you know i”
“ I know everything that concerns me ; and here, the
explanation is simple. My aunt, Lady Delaﬁeld, is
staying with Lady Haughton. Lady Delaﬁeld is one
of the women of fashion who shine by their own light;
Lady Haughton shines by borrowed light, and borrows
every ray she can find.”
“ And Lady Delaﬁeld writes you word
“ That Ashleigh Sumner is caught by Lilian’s
beauty.”
“ And Lilian herself ”
“ Women like Lady Delaﬁeld do not readily believe
that any girl could refuse Ashleigh Sumner; considered
’1


in himself, he is steady and good-looking; considered
as owner of Kirby Hall and Haughton Park, he has, in
the 'eyes of any sensible mother, the virtues of Cato
and the beauty of Antinous.”
I pressed my hand to my heart—close to my heart
lay a letter from Lilian—and there was no word in
that letter which showed that her heart was gone from


A s'rnanes STORY. ' 207
mine. I shook my head gently, and smiled in conﬁding
triumph. _
Mrs. Poyntz surveyed me with a bent brow and a
compressed lip.
“I understand your smile,” she said, ironically.
“ Very likely Lilian may be quite untouched by this
young man’s admiration, but Anne Ashleigh may be
dazzled by so brilliant a prospect for her daughter.
And, in short, I thought it desirable to let your engage-
ment be publicly known throughout the town to-day;
that information will travel—it will reach Ashleigh
Sumner through Mr. Vigors, or others in this neighbor-
hood, with whom I know that he corresponds. It will
bring aifairs to a crisis, and before it may be too late.
I think it well that Ashleigh Sumner should leave that
house; if he leave it'for good, so much the better.
And, perhaps, the sooner Lilian returns to L— the
lighter your own heart will be.”
“ And for these reasons you have published the secret
of 1,
I “ Your engagement? Yes. Prepare to be congratu-
lated wherever you go. And now, if you hear either
from mother or daughter, that Ashleigh Sumner has
proposed, and been, let us say, refused, I do not doubt
that, in the pride of your heart, you will come and

tell me.”
“ Rely upon it, I will; but before I take leave, allow
me to ask, why you described to a young man like Mr.
Margrave --whose wild and strange humors you have


208 a srasuon sroav.
witnessed and not approved -any of those traits of
character in Miss Ashleigh which distinguish her from
other girls of her age ?”
“I? You mistake. I said nothing to him of her
character. I mentioned her name, and said she was
beautiful—that was all.”
“ Nay, you said that she was fond of musing, of soli-
tude; that in her fancies she believed in the reality of
visions which might ﬂit before her eyes as they ﬂit
before the eyes of all imaginative dreamers."
“Not a Word did I say to Mr. Margrave of such
peculiarities in Lilian; not a word more than what I
have told you, on my honor!”
Still incredulous, but disguising my incredulity with
that convenient smile by which we accomplish so much
of the polite dissimulation indispensable to the decencies
of civilized life, I took my departure, returned home,
and wrote to Lilian.

CHAPTER XXVIII.
THE conversation with Mrs. Poyntz left my mind
restless and disquieted. I had no doubt, indeed, of
Lilian’s truth, but could I be sure that the attentions
of a young man, with advantages of fortune so brilliant,
would not force on her thoughts the contrast of the
humbler lot and the duller walk of life in which she


A sraason sromr. 209
had accepted as companion a man removed from her
romantic youth less by disparity of years than by gravity
of pursuits? And would my suit now be as welcomed
as it had been by a mother even so unworldly as Mrs.
Ashleigh? Why, too, should both mother and daughter
have left me so unprepared to hear that I had a rival?
Why not have implied some consoling assurance that
such rivalry need not cause me alarm? Lilian’s letters,
it is true, touched but little on any of the persons round
her—they were ﬁlled with the outpourings of an
ingenuous heart, colored by the glow of a golden fancy.
They were written as if in the wide world we two stood
apart alone, consecrated from the crowd by the love
that, in linking us together, had hallowed each to the
other. Mrs. Ashleigh’s letters were more general and
diffusive, detailed the habits of the household, sketched
the guests, intimated her continued fear of Lady Haugh-
ton, but had said nothing more of Mr. Ashleigh Sumner
than I had repeated to Mrs. Poyntz. However, in my
letter to Lilian I related the intelligence that had
reached me, and impatiently I awaited her reply.
Three days after the interview with Mrs. Poyntz,
and two days before the long-anticipated event of the
mayor’s ball, I was summoned to attend a nobleman
who had lately been added to my list of patients, and
whose residence was about twelve miles from L-—--
The nearest way was through Sir Philip Derval’s park.
I went on horseback, and proposed to stop on the way
to inquire after the steward, whom I had seen but once
13* °


210 A s'raason sroav.
since his ﬁt, and that was two days after it, when he
called himself at my house to thank me for my attend-
ance, and to declare that he was quite recovered.
As I rode somewhat fast through the park, I came,
however, upon the steward, just in front of the house.
I reined in my horse and accosted him. He looked
very cheerful.
“Sir,” said he, in a whisper, “I have heard from Sir
Philip; his letter is dated since—since—my good
woman told you what I saw—well, since then. So
that it must have been all a delusion of. mine, as you
told her. And yet, well—well—we will not talk
of it, doctor. But I hope you have kept the secret.
Sir Philip would not like to hear of it if he comes
back.”
“ Your secret is quite safe with me. But is Sir Philip
likely to come back ? ”
“I hope so, doctor. His letter is dated Paris, and
that’s nearer home than he has been for many years ;
and—but bless me—some one is coming out of the
house? a young gentleman 1 Who can it be i”
I looked, and to my surprise I saw Margrave descend-
ing the stately stairs that led from the front door. The
steward turned towards him, and I mechanically fol-
lowed, for I was curious to know what had brought
Margrave to the house of the long-absent traveller.
It was easily explained. Mr. Margrave had heard at
L— much of the pictures and internal decorations of
the mansion. He had, by dint of coaxing (he said,


A summer: s'ronv. 211
with his enchanting laugh), persuaded the old house.
keeper to show him the rooms.
“ It is against Sir Philip’s positive orders to show the
house to any stranger, sir; and the housekeeper has
done very wrong,” said the steward.
“ Pray don’t scold her. I dare say Sir Philip would
not have refused me a permission he might not give to
every idle sightseer. Fellow-travellers have a free-
masonry with each other; and I have been much 'in
the same far countries as himself. I heard of him there,
and could tell you more about him, I dare say, than
you know yourself.”
“ You, sir! pray do, then.”
“ The next time I come," said Margrave, gaily; and,
with a nod to me, he glided 011' through the trees of
the neighboring grove, along the winding footpath that
led to the lodge.
“A very cool gentleman," muttered the steward;
“ but what pleasant ways he has! You seem to know
him, sir. Who is he —may I ask l”
“ Mr. Margrave. A visitor at L , and he has
been a great traveller, as he says; perhaps he met Sir
Philip abroad.”
“I must go and hear what he said to Mrs.
Gates; excuse me, sir, but I am so anxious about Sir
Philip.”
“ If it be not too great a favor, may I be allowed

the same privilege granted to Mr. Margrave? To judge
by the outside of the house, the inside must be worth


912 a s'raasos sroar.
seeing; still, if it be against Sir Philip’s positive
orders -———”
“ His orders were, not to let the Court become a
show-house—to admit none without my consent—but
I should be ungrateful indeed, doctor, if I refused that
consent to you.”
1 tied my horse to the rusty gate of the terrace-walk,
and followed the steward up the broad stairs of the
terrace. The great doors were unlocked. We entered
a lofty hall with a domed ceiling; at the back of the
hall the grand staircase ascended by a double ﬂight.
The design was undoubtedly Vanbrugh’s, an architect
who, beyond all others, sought the effect of grandeur
less in space than in proportion. But Vanbrugh’s
designs need the relief of costume and movement, and
the forms of a more pompous generation, in the bravery
of velvets and laces, glancing amid those gilded columns,
or descending with stately tread those broad palatial
stairs. His halls and chambers are so made for festival
and throng, that they become like deserted theatres,
inexpressibly desolate, as we miss the glitter of the
lamps and the movement of the actors.
The housekeeper had now appeared; a quiet, timid
old woman. She excused herself for admitting Mar-
grave—not very intelligibly. It was plain to see that
she had, in truth, been unable to resist what the steward
termed his “ pleasant ways.”
As if to escape from a scolding she talked volubly
all the time, bustling nervously through the rooms,


A sraanos sroav. 213
along which I followed her guidance with a hushed
footstep. The principal apartments were on the ground
ﬂoor, or rather a ﬂoor raised some ten or ﬁfteen feet
above the ground ; they had not been modernized since
the date in which they were built. Hangings of faded
silk; tables of rare marble and mouldered gilding;
comfortless chairs at drill against the walls; pictures,
of which connoisseurs alone could estimate the value,
darkened by dust or blistered by sun and damp, made a
general character of discomfort. On not one room, on
not one nook, still lingered some old smile of home.
Meanwhile I gathered from the housekeeper’s ram-
bling“ answers to questions put to her by the steward,
as I moved on, glancing at the pictures, that Margrave’s
visit that day was not his ﬁrst. He had been to the
house twice before; his ostensible excuse that he was
an amateur in pictures (though, as I had before observed,
for that department of art he had no taste); but each
time he had talked much of Sir Philip. He said, that
though not personally known to him, he had resided in
the same towns abroad, and had friends equally intimate
with Sir Philip; but when the steward inquired if the
visitor had given any information as to the absentee,
it became very clear that Margrave had been rather
asking questions than volunteering intelligence.
We had not come to the end of the state apartments,
the last of which was a library. “ And,” said the old
woman, “ I don’t wonder the gentleman knew Sir
Philip, for he seemed a scholar, and looked very hard
c


214 A s'raanoa sroar.
over the books, especially those old ones by the ﬁre
place, which Sir Philip, Heaven bless him, was always
poring into.”
Mechanically I turned to the shelves by the ﬁreplace,
and examined the volumes ranged in that department.
[ found they contained the works of those writers
whom we may class together under the title of mystics
-— Iamblichus and Plotinus; Swedenborg and Behmen;
Sandivogius, Van Helmont, Paracelsus, Cardan. Works,
too, were there, by writers less renowned, on astrology,
geomancy, chiromancy, &c. I began to understand
among what class of authors Margrave had picked up
the strange notions with which he was apt to iumrpo-
late the doctrines of practical philosophy.
“I suppose this library was Sir Philip’s usual sitting
room 1’” said I.
“No, sir; he seldom sat here. This was his study ;”
and the old woman opened a small door, masked by
false book-backs. I followed her into a room of mode-
rate size; and evidently of much earlier date than the
rest of the house. “ It is the only room left of an older
mansion,” said the steward, in answer to my remark.
“ I have heard it was spared on account of the chimney-
pieee. But there is a Latin inscription which will tell
you all about it. I don’t know Latin myself.”
The chimney-piece reached to the ceiling. The frieze
of the lower part rested on rude stone caryatides; the
upper part was formed of oak-panels very curiously
carved in the geometrical designs favored by the taste
a


a s'raauoa s'ronr. 215
prevalent in the reigns of Elizabeth and James, but
different from any I had ever seen in the drawings of
old houses. And I was not quite unlearned in such
matters, for my poor father was a passionate antiquary
in all that relates to medizeval art. The design in the
oak panels was composed of triangles interlaced with
varied ingenuity, and enclosed in circular bands in-
scribed with the signs of the Zodiac.
On the stone frieze supported by the caryatides, im-
mediately under the wood-work, was inserted a metal
plate, on which was written, in Latin, a few lines to the
effect that “in this room, Simon Forman, the seeker of
hidden truth, taking refuge from unjust persecution,
made those discoveries in nature which he committed,
for the beneﬁt of a wiser age, to the charge of his pro-
tector and patron, the worshipful Sir Miles Derval,
knight.”
Formanl The name was not quite unfamiliar to me;
but it was not without an effort that my memory enabled
me to assign it to one of the most notorious of those
astrologers or soothsayers whom the superstition of an
earlier age alternately persecuted and honored.
The general character of the room was more cheerful
than the statelier chambers I had hitherto passed,
through, for it had still the look of habitation. The
arm-chair by the ﬁre-place; the knee-hole writing-table
beside it; the sofa near the recess of a large bay-
window, with book-prop and candlestick screwed to its
back; maps, coiled in their cylinder, ranged under the


216 A s'rsarzon s'ronv.
cornice; low strong safes, skirting two sides of the
room, and apparently intended to hold papers and title-
deeds; seals carefully afﬁxed to their jealous locks.
Placed on the top of these oldfashioned receptacles
were articles familiar to modern use; a fowling-piece
here; ﬁshing-rods there; two or three simple ﬂower
vases; a pile of music books; a box of crayons. All
in this room seemed to speak of residence and owner-
ship—0f the idiosyncrasies of a lone single man, it is
true, but of a man of one’s own time—a country gentle-
man of plain habits but not uncultivated tastes.
I moved to the window ; it opened by a sash upon a
large balcony, from which a wooden stair wound to a
little garden, not visible in front of the house, sur-
rounded by a thick grove of evergreens, through which
one broad vista was cut; and that vista was closed by
a view of the mausoleum.
I stepped out into the garden—a patch of sward
with a fountain in the centre-and parterres, now more
ﬁlled with weeds than ﬂowers. At the left corner was
a tall wooden summer-house or pavilion—its door wide
open. “ Oh, that’s where Sir Philip used to study
many along summer’s night,” said the steward.
“ What! in that damp pavilion f”
“It was a pretty place enough then, sir; but it is
very old. They say as old as the room you have just
left.”
“ Indeed, I must look at it then."
The walls of this summer-house had once been


A summer: s'roar. 21'!
painted in the arabesques of the Renaissance period;
but the ﬁgures were now scarcely traceable. The
wood-work had started in some plums, and the sun~
beams stole through the chinks and played on the ﬂoor,
which was formed from old tiles quaintly tesselated and
in triangular patterns, similar to those I had observed
in the chimney-piece. The room in the pavilion was
large, furnished with old worm-eaten tables and settles.
“ It was not only here that Sir Philip studied, but
sometimes in the room above,” said the steward
“ How do you get to the room above ? Oh I I see;
astaircase in the angle.” I ascended the stairs with
some caution, for they were crooked and decayed ; and,
on entering the room above, comprehended at once why
Sir Philip had favored it.
The cornice of the ceiling rested on pilasters, within
which the compartments were formed into open un-
glazed arches, surrounded by a railed balcony. Through
these arches, on three sides of the room, the eye com-
manded a magniﬁcent extent of prospect. On the fourth
side the view was bounded by the mausoleum. In this
room was a large telescope, and on stepping into the
balcony, I saw that a winding stair mounted thence to
a platform on the top of the pavilion—perhaps once
used as an observatory by Forman himself.
“ The gentleman who was here to-day was very much
pleased with this look-out, sir,” said the housekeeper.
“ Who would not be? I suppose Sir Philip has a
taste for astronomy.”
19


’18 A sraauoa sroay.
“I dare say, sir,” said the steward, loosing grave;
“ he likes most out-of-the-way things.”
The position of the sun now warned me that my time
pressed, and that I should have to ride fast to reach
my new patient at the hour appointed. I therefore
hastened back to my horse, and spurred on, wondering
whether, in the chain of association which so subtly
links our pursuits in manhood to our impressions in
childhood, it was the Latin inscription on the chimney-
piece that had originally biassed Sir Philip Derval’s
literary taste towards the mystic jargon of the books at
which I had contemptuously glanced.
CHAPTER XXIX.
I
I DID not see Margrave the following day, but the
next morning, a little after sunrise, he walked into my
study, according to his ordinary habit.
“ So you know something about Sir Philip Derval 1’”
said I. “What sort of a man is he i”
“ Hateful i” cried Margrave; and then checking him-
self, burst out into his merry laugh. ” Just like my
exaggerations! I am not acquainted with anything to
his prejudice. I came across his track once or twice in
.the East. Travellers are always apt to be jealous of
each other.”


A STRANGE sronr. 219
\
“ You are a strange compound of cynicism and cre-
dulity. But I should have fancied that you and Sir
Philip would have been congenial spirits, when I found,
among his favorite books, Van Helmont and Paracelsus.
Perhaps you, too, study Swedenborg, or, worse still,
Ptolemy and Lilly Y”
“Astrologers? N 0! They deal with the future] I
live for the day; only I wish the day never had a
morrow l”
“ Have you not, then, that vague desire for the some-
thing beyond; that not unhappy, but grand discontent
with the limits of the immediate Present, from which
man takes his passion for improvement and progress,
and from which some sentimental philosophers have
deduced an argument in favor of his destined immor-
tality?"
“ Eh i” said Margrave, with as vacant a stare as that
of a peasant whom one has adiressed in Hebrew.
“What farrago of words is this? I do not compre-
hend you.”
“With your natural abilities,” I asked with interest
“ do you never feel a desire for fame T”
“ Fame ? Certainly not. I cannot even understand
it!”
“Well, then, would you have no pleasure in the
thought that you had rendered a service to humanity?”
Margrave looked bewildered ; after a moment’s pause.
he took from the table a piece of bread that chanced to
no there, opened the window, and threw the crumbs


220 A STRANGE sroav.
into the lane. The sparrows gathered round the
crumbs. I
“ Now,” said Margrave, “ the sparrows come to that
dull pavement for the bread that recruits their lives in
this world; do you believe that one sparrow would be
silly enough to ﬂy to a house-top for the sake of some
beneﬁt to other sparrows, or to be chirruped about after
he was dead T I care for science as the sparrow cares
for bread; it may help me to something good for my
own life; and as for fame and humanity, I care for
them as the sparrow cares for the general interest and
posthumous approbation of sparrows l”
“ Margrave; there is one thing in you that perplexes
me more than all else—human puzzle as you are—in
your many eccentricities and self-contradictions."
“ What is that one thing in me most perplexing T”
“This; that in your enjoyment of Nature you have
all the freshness of Ichild, but when you speak of Man
and his objects in the world, you talk in the vein of
some worn-out and hoary cynic.~ At such times, were
I to close my eyes, I should say to myself, ‘ What
weary old man is thus venting his spleen against the
ambition which has failed, and the love which has for-
saken him ?’ Outwardly the very personation of youth,
and revelling like a butterﬂy in the warmth of the sun
and the tints of the herbage, why have you none of the
golden passions of the young? their bright dreams of
some impossible love—their sublime enthusiasm for
some unattainable glory? The sentiment you have


A STRANGE won! 221
just clothed in the illustration by which you place your
self on a level with the sparrows is too mean and too
gloomy to be genuine at your age. Misanthropy is
among the dismal fallacies of greybeards. N 0 man,
till man’s energies leave him, can divorce himself from
the bonds of our social kind."
" Our kind—your kind, possibly! But 1—." He
swept his hand over his brow, and resumed, in strange,
absent, and wistful accents: “ I wonder what it is that
is wanting here, and of which at moments I have a
dim reminiscence.” Again he paused, and gazing on
me, said with more appearance of friendly interest than
I had ever before remarked in his countenance, “You
are not looking well. Despite your great physical
strength, you suffer like your own sickly patients.”
“ True! I suffer at this moment, but not from bodily
pain.”
“ You have some cause of mental disquietude ?”
“ Who in this world has not?”
" I never have.”
“Because you own you have never loved; certainly,
you never seem to care for any one but yourself; and
in yourself you ﬁnd an unbroken sunny holiday—high
spirits, youth, health, beauty, wealth. Happy boy 1”
At that moment my heart was heavy within me.
Margrave resumed : -
“ Among the secrets which your knowledge places at
the command of your art, what would you give for one
which would enable you to defy and to deride a rival
19*


222 A STRANGE s'ron r.
where you place your aﬂ‘ections, which could lock to
yourself, and imperiously control, the will of the being
whom you desire to fascinate, by an inﬂuence para-
mount, transcendent?” I
“ Love has that secret,” said I, “ and love alone.”
“A power stronger than love can suspend, can
change love itself. But if love be the object or dream
of your life, love is the rosy associate of youth and
beauty. Beauty soon fades, youth soon departs.
What if in nature there were means by which beauty
and youth can be ﬁxed into blooming duration -—means
that could arrest the course, nay, repair the eﬁ'ects,
of time on the elements that make up the human
frame ?”
“ Silly boyl - Have the Rosicrucians bequeathed to
you a prescription for the elixir of life?”
“ If I had the prescription I should not ask your aid
to discover its ingredients.”
“ And is it in the hope of that notable discovery you
have studied chemistry, electricity, and magnetism?
Again I say, Silly boy i”
Margrave did not head my reply. His face was
overcast, gloomy, troubled.
“ That the vital principle is a gas,” said he, abruptly,
“ I am fully convinced. Can that gas be the one which
combines caloric with oxygen?”
“Phosoxygen? Sir Humphry Davy demonstrates
that gas not to be, as Lavoisier supposed, caloric, but
light, combined with oxygen; and he suggests, not


A STRANGE away, 22.:
r
Indeed that it is the vital principle itself, but the
pabulum of life to organic beings.” *
“ Does he ?” said Margrave, his face clearing up.
“ Possibly, possibly then, here we approach the great
secret of secrets. Look you, Allen Fenwick, I promise
to secure to you unfailing security from all the jealous
fears that now torture your heart; if you care for that
fame which to me is not worth the scent of a ﬂower,
the balm of a breeze, I will impart to you a knowledge
which, in the hands of ambition, would dwarf into com-
monplace the boasted wonders of recognized science.
I will do all this, if, in return, but for one month you
will give yourself up to my guidance in whatever experi-
ments I ask, no matter how wild they may seem to you.”
“My dear Margrave, I reject your bribes as I would
reject the moon and the stars which a child might offer
to me in exchange for a toy. But I may give the child
its toy for nothing, and I may test your experiments for
nothing some day when I have leisure.”
I did not hear Margrave’s answer, for at that moment
my servant entered with letters. Lilian’s hand! Trem-
blingly, breathlessly, I broke the seal. Such a loving,
bright, happy letter; so sweet in its gentle chiding of
my wrongful fears. It was implied rather than said
that Ashleigh Sumner had proposed and been refused.
He had now left the house. Lilian and her mother
were coming back; in a few days we should meet. In
4* See Sir Humphry Davy on Heat, Light, and the Combination!
of Light. -


224 A sraaxos s'roar.
this letter were enclosed a few lines from Mrs. Ash~
leigh. She was more explicit about my rival than Lilian
had been. If no allusion to his attentions had been
made to me before, it was from a delicate consideration
for myself. Mrs. Ashleigh said that “ the young man
had heard from L
lieved it ;” but, as Mrs. Poyntz bad so shrewdly pre-
dicted, hurried at once to the avowal of his own attach-
ment, and the offer of his own hand. On Lilian’s

of our engagement, and—disbe-
refusal his pride had been deeply mortiﬁed. He had
gone away manifestly in more anger than sorrow.
“ Lady Delaﬁeld, dear Margaret Poyntz’s aunt, had
been most kind in trying to soothe Lady Haughton’s
disappointment, which was rudely expressed —- so
rudely,” added Mrs. Ashleigh, “that it gives us an
excuse to leave sooner than had been proposed -which
I am very glad of. Lady Delaﬁeld feels much for Mr.
Sumner; has invited him to visit her at a place she has
near Worthing; she leaves to-morrow in order to receive
him; promises to reconcile him to our rejection, which,
as he was my poor Gilbert’s heir, and was very friendly
at ﬁrst, would be a great relief to my mind. Lilian is
well, and so happy at the thoughts of coming back.”
When I lifted my eyes from these letters I was as a
new man, and the earth seemed a new earth. I felt as
if I had realized Margrave’s idle dreams -—as if youth
could never fade, love could never grow cold.
“ You care for no secrets of mine at this moment,”
said Margrave, abruptly.


A s'raanea sroaY. 225
“ Secrets,” I murmured; “ none now are worth know~
ing. I am loved —-I am loved!”
“I hide my time,” said Margrave; and as my eyes
met his, I saw there a look I had never seen in those
eyes before -—sinister, wrathful, menacing. He turned
away, went out through the sash door of the study;
and as he passed towards the ﬁelds under the luxuriant
chestnut-trees, I heard his musical, barbaric chant—
the song by which the serpent-charmer charms the ser-
pent- sweet, so sweet—the very birds on the boughs
hushed their carol as if to listen.

CHAPTER XXX.
I CALLED that day on Mrs. Poyntz, and communicated
to her the purport of the glad news I had received.
She was still at work on the everlasting knitting, her
ﬁrm ﬁngers linking mesh into mesh as she listened; and
when I had done, she laid her skein deliberately down,
and said, in her favorite characteristic formula,
“ So, at last? _ that is settled l ”
She rose and paced the room as men are apt to do in
reﬂection—women rarely need such movement to aid
their thoughts—her eyes were ﬁxed on the ﬂoor, and
one hand was lightly pressed on the palm of the other
--"the gesture of a musing reasoner who is approaching
the close of a difﬁcult calculation.
P


226 A STRANGE sronr.
At length she paused, fronting me, and said, dryly,
“Accept of my congratulations—life smiles on you
now-guard that smile, and when we meet next, may
we be even ﬁrmer friends than we are now I ”
“When we meet next—that will be to-night—you
surely go to the mayor’s great ball? All the Hill d0-
scends to Low Town to-night.” _
“No; we are obliged to leave L— this afternoon
—-in less than two hours we shall be gone - a family
engagement. We may be weeks away; you will excuse
me, then, if I take leave of you so unceremoniously.
Stay, a motherly word of caution. That friend of yours,
Mr. Margravel Moderate your intimacy with him ; and
especially after you are married. There is in that
stranger, of whom so little is known, a something which
I cannot comprehend—a something that captivates,
and yet revolts. I ﬁnd him disturbing my thoughts,
perplexing my conjectures, haunting my fancies—I,
plain woman of the world i Lilian is imaginative; be-
ware of her imagination, even when sure of her heart.
Beware of Margrave. The sooner he quits L , the
better, believe me, for your peace of mind. Adieul I

must prepare for our journey.”
“ That woman," muttered I, on quitting her house,
“ seems to have some strange spite against my poor
Lilian, ever seeking to rouse my own distrust of that
exquisite nature which has just giv'en me such proof of
its truth. And yet— and yet—is that woman so wrong
here? True! Margrave with his wild notions, his


A summer: s'roar. 221
strange beauty ! -- true — true — he might dangerously
encourage that turn for the mystic and visionary which
distresses me in Lilian. Lilian should not know him.
How induce him to leave L——? Ah—those experi-
ments on which he asks my assistance! I might com.
mence them when he comes again, and then invent
some excuse to send him for completer tests to the
famous chemists of Paris or Berlin.”

CHAPTER XXXI.
IT is the night of the mayor’s ball! The guests are
assembling fast; county families twelve miles round
have been invited, as well as the principal families of
the town. All, before proceeding to the room set apart
for the dance, moved in procession through the museum
— homage to science before pleasure!
The building was brilliantly lighted, and the effect
was striking, perhaps because singular and grotesque.
There, amidst stands of ﬂowers and evergreens, lit up
with colored lamps, were grouped the dead representa-
tives of races all inferior—some deadly— to man. The
fancy of the ladies had been permitted to decorate and
arrange these types of the animal world. The tiger
glared with glass eyes from amidst artificial reeds and
herbage, as from his native jungle; the grisly white
bear peered from a mimic iceberg. There, in front,


228 A STRANGE s'roav.
stood the sage elephant, facing a hideous hippopotamus;
whilst an anaconda twined its long spire round the
stem of some tropical tree in zinc. In glass cases,
brought into full light by festooned lamps, were dread -
specimens of the reptile race—scorpion and vampire,
and cobra capella, with insects of gorgeous hues, not a
few of them with venomed stings.
But the chief boast of the collection .was in the varie_
ties of the Genus Simia—baboons and apes, chimpan-
zees, with their human visage, mockeries of man, from
the dwarf monkeys perched on boughs lopped from the
mayor’s shrubberies, to the formidable orang-outang,
leaning on his huge club.
Every one expressed to the mayor admiration—to
each other antipathy, for this unwonted and somewhat
ghastly, though instructive, addition to the revels of a
ball-room.
Margrave, of course, was there, and seemingly quite
at home, gliding from group to group of gaily-dressed
ladies, and brilliant with a childish eagerness to play
off the showman. Many of these grim fellow-creatures
he declared he had seen, played, or fought with. He
had something true or false to say about each. In his
high spirits he contrived to make the tiger move, and
imitated the hiss of the terrible anaconda. All that he
did had its grace, its charm; and the buzz of admira-
tion and the ﬂattering glances of ladies’ eyes followed
him wherever he moved.
However, there was a general feeling of relief when


A STRANGE sroav. 22$
the mayor led the way from the museum into the ball
room. In provincial parties guests arrive pretty much
within the same hour, and so few who had once paid
their respects to the apes and serpents, the hippopota-
mus and the tiger, were disposed to repeat the visit,
that long before eleven o’clock the museum was as free
from the intrusion of human life as the wilderness in
which its dead occupants had been born.
I had gone my round through the rooms, and, little
disposed to be social, had crept into the retreat of a
window-niche, pleased to think myself screened by its
draperies; not that I was melancholy, far from it—for
the letter I had received that morning from Lilian had
raised my whole being into a sovereignty of happiness
high beyond the reach of the young pleasure-hunters,
whose voices and laughter blended with that vulgar
music.
To read her letter again I had stolen to my nook-
and, now, sure that none saw me kiss it, I replaced
it in my bosom. I looked through the parted curtain;
the room was comparatively empty; but there, through
the open folding-doors, I saw the gay crowd gathered
round the dancers, and there again, at right angles, a
vista along the corridor afforded a glimpse of the great
- elephant in the deserted museum.
Presently I heard, close beside me, my host’s voice.
“ Here’s a cool corner, a pleasant sofa, you can have
ll- all to yourself; what an honor to receive you under
my roof, and on this interesting occasion l Yes, as you
20


'330 A STRANGE STORY.
aav, there are great changes in L—— since you left us.
Society has much improved. I must look about and
ﬁnd some persons to introduce to you. Clever! oh, I
know your tastes. We have a wonderful man—a new
doctor. Carries all before him—very high character,
too—good 01d family—greatly looked up to, even apart
from his profession. Dogmatic a little-a Sir Oracle—
'Lets no dog bark;’ you remember the quotation—-
Shakespeare. Where on earth is he? My dear Sir
Philip, I am sure you would enjoy his conv’ersation.”
Sir Philip! Could it be Sir Philip Derval, to whom
the mayor was giving a ﬂattering, yet scarcely propitia-
tory, description of myself? Curiosity combined with
a sense of propriety in not keeping myself an unsus-
pected listener: I emerged from the curtain, but silently,
and reached the centre of the room before the mayor
perceived me. He then came up to me eagerly, linked
his arm in mine, and leading me to a gentleman seated
on a sofa, close by the window I had quitted, said:
“ Doctor, I must present you to Sir Philip Derval,
just returned to England, and not six hours in L .
If you would like to see the museum again, Sir Philip,
the doctor, I am sure, will accompany you.”

“No, I thank you; it is painful to me at present, to
see, even under your roof, the collection which my poor
dear friend, Dr. Lloyd, was so proudly beginning to
form when I leftvthese parts.”
“Ay, Sir Philip—Dr. Lloyd was a worthy man in
his way, but sadly duped in his latter years; he took to


A sTaANen sroar. 231
mesmerism, only thinkl But our young doctor here
showed him up, I can tell you.”
Sir Philip, who had acknowledged my ﬁrst introduc-
tion to his acquaintance by the quiet courtesy with
which a well-bred man goes through a ceremony that
custom enables him to endure with equal ease and
indifference, now evinced by a slight change of manner
how little the mayor’s reference to my dispute with
Dr. Lloyd advanced me in his good opinion. He turned
away with a how more formal than his ﬁrst one, and
said calmly:
“ I regret to hear that a man so simple-minded and
so sensitive as Dr. Lloyd should have provoked an
encounter in which I can well conceive him to have
been worsted. With your leave, Mr. Mayor, I will
look into your ball-room. I may perhaps ﬁnd there
some old acquaintance."
He walked towards the dancers, and the mayor,
linking his arm in mine, followed close behind, saying
in his loud, hearty tones:
“Come along, you too, Dr.- Fenwick, my girls are
there; you have not spoken to them yet.”
Sir Philip, who was then half way across the room,
turned round abruptly, and, looking me full in the face,
said:
“Fenwick, is your name Fenwick?-Allen Fen-
wick?”
“ That is my name, Sir Philip.”
" Then permit me to shake you by the hand; you are


232 A STRANGE email.
no stranger, and no mere acquaintance to me. Mr.
Mayor, we will look into your ball-room later; do not
let us keep you now from your other guests.”
The mayor, not in the least offended by being thus
summarily dismissed, smiled, walked on, and was soon
lost amongst the crowd.
Sir Philip, still retaining my hand, reseated himself
on the sofa, and I took my place by his side. The room
was still deserted; now and then a straggler from the
ball-room looked in for a moment, and then sauntered
back to the central place of attraction.
“ I am trying to guess,” said I, “ how my name should
be known to you. Possibly you may, in some visit to
the Lakes, have known my father ? "
“No; I know none of your name but yourself—if,
indeed, as I doubt not, you are the Allen Fenwick to
whom I owe no small obligation. You were a medical
student at Edinburgh in the year —?”
“Yes.”
“ Sol At that time there was also at Edinburgh a
young man, named Richard Strahan. He lodged in a
fourth ﬂat in the Old Town.”
“ I remember him very well.”
“And you remember, also, that a ﬁre broke out at
night in the house in which be lodged; that, when it
was discovered, there seemed no hope of saving him.
The ﬂames wrapt the lower part of the house; the
staircase had given way. A boy, scarcely so old as
himself, was the only human being in the crowd who


A STRANGE sronv. 233
dared to scale the ladder, that even then scarcely
reached the windows from which the smoke rolled in
volumes; that boy penetrated into the room - found the
inmate almost insensible—rallied, supported, dragged
him to the window—got him on the ladder—saved his
life then —- and his life later, by nursing with a woman’s
tenderness, through the fever caused by terror and ex-
citement, the fellow-creature he had rescued by a man’s
daring. The name of that gallant student was Allen
Fenwick, and Richard Strahan is my nearest living
relation. Are we friends now ? ”
I answered confusedly. I had almost forgotten the
circumstances referred to. Richard Strahan had not
been one of my more intimate companions; and I had
never seen nor heard of him since leaving college. I
inquired what had become of him.
“ He is at the Scotch bar,” said Sir Philip, “and of
course without practice. I understand that be has fair
average abilities, but no application. If I am rightly
informed, he is, however, a thoroughly honorable, up-
right man, and of an affectionate and grateful disposi-
tion.”
“I can answer for all you have said in his praise
He had the qualities you name too deeply rooted in
youth to have lost them now.”
Sir Philip remained for some moments in a musing
sile’nce. And I took advantage of that silence to
examine him with more minute attention than I had
done before, much as the ﬁrst sight of him had struck
me. -


234 A s'raanen s'roav.
He was somewhat below the common height. 80
delicately formed that one might call him rather fragile
than slight. But in his carriage and air there was
remarkable dignity. His countenance was at direct
variance with his ﬁgure. For as delicacy was the attri-
bute of the last, so power was unmistakably the char-
acteristic of the ﬁrst. He looked fully the age his
steward had ascribed to him—about forty-eight; at a
superﬁcial glance, more; for his hair was prematurely
white-not grey, but white as snow. But his eyebrows
were still jet black, and his eyes, equally dark, were
serenely bright. His forehead was magniﬁcent; lofty,
and spacious, and with only one slight wrinkle between
the brows. His complexion was sunburnt, showing no
sign of weak health. The outline of his lips was that
which I have often remarked in men accustomed to
great dangers, and contracting in shch dangers the
habit of self-reliance ; ﬁrm and quiet, compressed with-
out an effort. And the power of this very noble coun-
tenance was not intimidating, not aggressive; it wu
mild—it was benignant. A man oppressed by some
formidable tyranny, and despairing to ﬁnd a protector,
would, on seeing that face, have said, “Here is one
who can protect me, and who will i ”
Sir Philip was the ﬁrst to break the silence.
“I have so many relations scattered over England,
that fortunately not one of them can venture to calcu-
late on my property if I die childless, and therefore not
one of them can feel himself injured when, a few weeks
hence, he shall read in the newspapers, that Philip


A sraanen sroar. 235
Derval is married. But for Richard Strahan, at least,
though I never saw him, I must do something before
the newspapers make that announcement. His sister
was very dear to me.”
“Your neighbors, Sir Philip, will rejoice at your
marriage, since, I presume, it may induce you to settle
amongst them at Derval Court.”
“At Derval Court! No! I shall not settle there."
Again he paused a moment or so, and then went on:
“ I 'have long lived a wandering life, and in it learned
much that the wisdom of cities cannot teach. I return
to my native land with a profound conviction that the
happiest life is the life most in common with all. I
have gone out of my way to do what I deemed good,
and to avert or mitigate what appeared to me evil. I
pause now and ask myself, whether the most virtuous
existence be not that in which virtue ﬂows spontaneously
from the springs of quiet everyday action—when a
man does good without restlessly seeking it, does good
unconsciously, simply because he is good and he lives?
Better, perhaps, for me, if I had thought so long ago!
And now I come back to England with the intention
of marrying, late in life though it be, and with such
hopes of happiness as any matter-of-fact man may form.
But my hope will not be at Derval Court. I shall reside
either in London or its immediate neighborhood, and
seek to gather round me minds by which I can correct,
if I cannot conﬁde to them, the knowledge I myself
have acquired.”


236 A s'rnaues s'roar.
“ Nay, if, as I have accidentally heard, you are fond
of scientiﬁcQursuits, I cannot wonder that, after so
long an absence from England, you should feel interest
in learning what new discoveries have been made, what
new ideas are unfolding the germs of discoveries yet to
be. But, pardon me, if in answer to your concluding
remark, I venture to say that no man can hope to cor-
rect any error in his own knowledge, unless he has the
courage to conﬁde the error to those who can correct.
La Place has said, ‘ Tout se tient dans la chatne immense
des uén'tés;’ and the mistake we make in some science
we have specially cultivated is often only to be seen by
the light of a separate science as specially cultivated by
another. Thus, in the investigation of truth, frank
exposition to congenial minds is essential to the earnest
seeker.”
“ I am pleased with what you say,” said Sir Philip,
"and I shall be still more pleased to ﬁnd in you the
very conﬁdant I require. But what was your con-
troversy with my old friend, Dr. Lloyd? Do I under-
stand our host rightly, that it related to what in Europe
has of late days obtained the name of mesmerism f”
I had conceived a strong desire to conciliatc the good
opinion of a man who had treated me with so singular
and so familiar a kindness, and it was sincerely that I
expressed my regret at the acerbity with which I had
assailed Dr. Lloyd; but of his theories and pretensions
I could not disguise my contempt. I enlarged on the
extravagant fallacies involved in a fabulous “ clair~


A srnason small. 231
voyance,” which always failed when put to plain test
by sober-minded examiners. I did not dcuy the effects
of imagination on certain nervous constitutions. “ Mes-
merism could cure nobody; credulity could cure many.
There was the well-known story of the old woman tried
as a witch; she cured agues by a charm; she owned
the impeachment, and was ready to endure gibbet
or stake for the truth of her talisman; more than a
mesmerist would for the truth of his passes! And the
charm was a scroll of gibberish sown in an old bag and
given to the woman in a freak by the judge himself
when ayoung scamp on the circuit. But the charm
cured? Certainly; just as mesmerism cures. Fools
believed in it. Faith, that moves mountains, may well
cure agues."
Thus I ran on, supporting my views with anecdote
and facts, to which Sir Philip listened with placid
gravity.
When I had come to an end, he said, “ Of mesmerism,
as practised in Europe, I know nothing, except by
report. I can well understand that medical men may
hesitate to admit it amongst the legitimate resources of
orthodox pathology; because, as I gather from what
you and others say of its practice, it must, at the best,
be far too uncertain in its application to satisfy the
requirements of science. Yet an examination of its
pretensions may enable you to perceive the truth that
lies hid in the powers ascribed to witchcraft; benevo-
lence is but a weak agency compared to malignity;


238 A STRANGE sroaY.
magnetism perverted to evil may solve half the riddles
of sorcery. On this, however, I say no more at
present. But as to that which you appear to reject as
the most preposterous and incredible pretension of the
mesmerists, and which you designate by the word
‘clairvoyance,’ it is clear to me that you have never
yourself witnessed even those very imperfect exhibitions
which you decide at once to be imposture. I say im-
perfect, because it is only a limited number of persons
whom the eye or the passes of the mesmerist can affect,
and by such means, unaided by other means, it is rarely
indeed that the magnetic sleep advances beyond the
ﬁrst vague shadowy twilight dawn of that condition to
which only in its fuller developments I would apply the
name of ‘trance.’ But still trance is as essential a con-
dition of being as sleep or as waking, having privileges
peculiar to itself. By means within the range of the
science that explores its nature and its laws, trance,
unlike the clairvoyance you describe, is producible in
every human being, however unimpressible to mere
mesmerism.”
“ Producible in every human being! Pardon me ifl
say that I will give any enchanter his own terms who
i will produce that effect upon me.”
“Will you? You consent to have the experiment
tried on yourself?”
“ Consent most readily.”
“I will remember that promise. But to return to
the subject. By the word trance I do not mean we


A s'raauon sroav 289
clusively the spiritual trance of the Alexandrian Pla-
tonists. There is one kind of trance—that to which
all human beings are susceptible—in which the soul
has no share; for of this kind of trance, and it was of
this I spoke, some of the inferior animals are sus-
ceptible; and, therefore, trance is no more a proof of
soul than is the clairvoyance of the mesmerists, or the
dream of our ordinary sleep, which last has been called
a proof of soul, though any man who has kept a dog'
must have observed that dogs dream as vividly as we
do. But in this trance there is an extraordinary cere-
bral activity—a projectile force given to the mind,
distinct from the soul—by which it sends forth its own
emanations to a distance in spite of material obstacles,
just as a ﬂower, in an altered condition of atmosphere,
sends forth the particles of its aroma. This should not
surprise you. Your thought travels over land and sea
in your waking state; thought, too, can travel in trance,
and in trance may acquire an intensiﬁed force. There
is, however, another kind of trance which is truly called
spiritual, a. trance much more rare, and in which the
soul entirely supersedes the mere action of the mind.”
“ Stay,” said I; “you speak of the soul as something
distinct from the mind. What the soul may be, I
cannot pretend to conjecture. But I cannot separate
it from the intelligence!”
“ Can you not? A blow on the brain can destroy
the intelligence ! Do you think it can destroy the soul?
‘ From Marlbro’s eyes the tears of dotage ﬂow
And Swift expires, a driveller and a show.’


240 A araanen sroar.
Towards the close of his life even Kant’s giant intellect
left him. Do you suppose that in these various arche-
types of intellectual man the soul was worn out by the
years that loosened the strings, or made tuneless the
keys, of the perishing instrument on which the mind
must rely for all notes of its music? If you cannot
distinguish‘the operations of the mind from the essence
of the soul, I know not by what rational inductions you
'arrive at the conclusion that the soul is imperishable.”
I remained silent. Sir Philip ﬁxed on me his dark
eyes quietly and searchingly, and, after a short pause,
said:
“Almost every known body in nature is susceptible
of three several states of existence—the solid, the
liquid, the aériform. 'These conditions depend on the
quantity of heat they contain. The same object at one
moment may be liquid; at the next moment solid; at
the next, aeriform. The water that ﬂows before your
gaze may stop consolidated into ice, or ascend into air
as a vapor. Thus is man susceptible of three states of
existence — the animal, the mental, the spiritual—and
according as he is brought into relation or aﬂinity with
that occult agency of the whole natural world, which
we familiarly call HEAT, and which no science has yet
explained; which no scale can weigh, and no eye
discern ; one or the other of these three states of being
prevails, or is subjected.”
I still continued silent, for I was unwilling discour-
teously to say to a stranger, so much older than myself.


A s'raanos near. 241
that he seemed to me to reverse all the maxims of the
philosophy to which be made pretence, in founding
speculations audacious and abstruse upon unanalogous
comparisons that would have been fantastic even in a
poet. And Sir Philip, after another pause, resumed
with a half smile:
“After what I have said, it will perhaps not very
much surprise you when I add that but for my belief in
the powers I ascribe to trance, we should not be known
to each other at this moment.”
“ How—pray explain l”
“Certain circumstances which I trust to relate to
you in detail hereafter, have imposed on me the duty
to discover and to bring human laws to bear upon a
creature armed with terrible powers of evil. This
monster, for, without metaphor, monster it is, not man
like ourselves, has, by arts superior to those of ordinary
fugitives, however dexterous in concealment, hitherto
for years eluded my research. Through the trance of
an Arab child, who, in her waking state, never heard
of his existence, I have learned that this being is in
I am here to encounter him.

England—is in L
I expect to do so this very night, and under this very
roof.”
“ Sir Philip 1 ”
“And if you wonder, as you well may, why I have
been talking to you with this startling unreserve, know
that the same Arab child, on whom I thus implicitly
rely, informs me that your life is mixed up with that
21 Q


248 A STRANGE sroar.
of the being I seek to unmask and disarm—to be
destroyed by his arts or his agents—or to combine in
the causes by which the destroyer himself shall be
brought to destruction.”
" My lifel—your Arab child named me, Allen
Fenwick I ”
“ My Arab child told me that the person in whom I
should thus naturally seek an ally was he who had
saved the life of the man whom I then meant for my
heir, if I died unmarried and childless. She told me
that I should not be many hours in this town, which
she described minutely, before you would be made
known to me. She described this house, with yonder
lights, and yon dancers. In her trance she saw us
sitting together, as we now sit. I accepted the invita-
tion of our host, when he suddenly accosted me on
entering the town, conﬁdent that I should meet you
here, without even asking whether a person of your
name were a resident in the place; and now you know
why I have so freely unbosomed myself of much that
might well make you, a physician, doubt the soundness
of my understanding. The same infant, whose vision
has been realized up to this moment, has warned me
also that I am here at great peril. What that peril
may be I have declined to learn, as I have ever declined
to ask from the future, what aﬂ‘ects only my own life
on this earth. That life I regard with supreme indiﬂ'er-
ence, conscious that I have only to discharge, while it
lasts, the duties for which it is bestowed on me, to the


A STRANGE sroav. 243
best of my imperfect power; and aware that minds the
strongest and souls the purest may fall into the sloth
habitual to predestinarians, if they suffer the action due
to the present hour to be awed and paralyzed by some
grim shadow on the future! It is only where, irrespec-
tively of aught that can menace myself, a light not
struck out of my own reason can guide me to disarm
cvil or minister to good, that I feel privileged to avail
myself of those mirrors on which things, near and far,
reﬂect themselves calm and distinct as the banks and
the mountain peak are reﬂected in the glass of a lake.
Here, then, under this roof, and by your side, I shall
behold him who—Lo! the moment has come—I be-
hold him now l”
As he spoke these last words, Sir Philip had risen,
and, startled by his action and voice, I involuntarily
rose too.
Resting one hand on my shoulder, he pointed with the
other towards the threshold of the ball-room. There,
the prominent ﬁgure of a gay group—the sole male
amidst a ﬂuttering circle of silks and lawn, of ﬂowery
wreaths, of female loveliness, and female frippery-—
stood the radiant image of Margrave. His eyes were
not turned towards us. He was looking down, and his
light laugh came soft, yet ringing, through the general
murmur.
I turned my astonished gaze back to Sir Philip—-
yes, unmistakably it was on Margrave that his look
was ﬁxed.


244 A STRANGE sroar.
Impossible to associate crime with the image of that
fair youth! Eccentric notions—fantastic speculations
--vivacious egotism—defective benevolence—yes. But
crime 1— No — impossible.
“Impossible,” I said, aloud. As I spoke the group
had moved on. Margrave was no longer in sight. At
the same moment some other guests came from the
ball-room, and seated themselves near us.
Sir Philip looked round, and, observing the de-
serted museum at the end of the corrider, drew me
into it.
When we were alone, he said in a voice quick and
low, but decided :
“ It is of importance that I should convince you at
once of the nature of that prodigy which is more hostile
to mankind than the wolf is to the 'sheepfold. No
words of mine could at present suﬁice to clear your
sight from the deception which cheats it. I must
enable you to judge for yourself. It must be now and
here. He will learn this night, if he has not learned
already, that I am in the town. Dim and confused
though his memories of myself may be, they are
memories still; and be well knows what cause he has
to dread me. I must put another in possession of his
secret. Another, and at once! For all his arts will be
brought to bear against me, and I cannot foretell their
issue. Go, then; enter that giddy crowd —select that
seeming young man—bring him hither. Take care
only not to mention my name; and when here, tum


A sraanes sroav. 245
the key in the door, so as to prevent interruption—ﬁve
minutes will sufﬁce.”
“Am I sure that I guess whom you mean? The ‘
young, light-hearted man, known in this place, under
the name of Margrave Y—the young man with the
radiant eyes, and the curls of a Grecian statue? ”
“ The same; him whom I pointed out; quick, bring
him hither.”
My curiosity was too much roused to disobey. Had
I conceived that Margrave, in the heat of youth, had
committed some offence which placed him in danger of
the law and in the power of Sir Philip Derval, I
possessed enough of the old borderérs’ black-mail
loyalty to have given the man whose hand I had
familiarly clasped a hint and a help to escape. But all
Sir Philip’s talk had been so out of the reach of common
sense, that I rather expected to see him confounded
by some egregious illusion than Margrave exposed to
any Well-grounded accusation. All, then, that I felt
as I walked into the ball-room and approached Mar-
grave, was that curiosity which, I think, any one of my
readers will acknowledge that, in my position, he him-
self would have felt.
Margrave was standing near the dancers, not joining
them, but talking with a young couple in the ring. I
drew him aside.
“ Come with me for a few minutes into the museum;
I wish to talk to you.”
“What about ? — an experiment ?”
21*


246 A sraauen s'roar.
“ Yes, a; experiment.”
“ Then I am at your service.”
In a minute more he had followed me into the deso-
late dead museum. I looked round, but did not see
Sir Philip.
CHAPTER XXXII.
MARGRAVE threw himself on a seat just under the
great anaconda; I closed and locked the door. When
I had done so, my eye fell on the young man’s face,
and I was surprised to see that it had lost its color;
that it showed great anxiety, great distress; that his
hands were visibly trembling.
" What is this i" he said, in feeble tones, and raising
himself half from his seat as if with great effort.
" Help me up-come away! Something in this room
is hostile to me—hostile, overpowering! What can
~ it be ?”
“Truth and my presence,” answered a stern, low
voice; and Sir Philip Derval, whose slight form the
huge bulk of the dead elephant had before obscured
from my view, came suddenly out from the shadow
into the full rays of the lamps which lit up, as if for
Man’s revel, that mocking catacomb for the playmates
of Nature which he enslaves for his service or slays for
his sport. As Sir Philip spoke and advanced, Mar-
grave sank back into his seat shrinking, collapsing,


A summer: STORY. 24'!
uerveless; terror the most abject expressed in his staring
eyes and parted lips. On the other hand, the simple
dignity of Sir Philip Derval’s bearing, and the mild
power of his countenance, were alike inconceivably
heightened. A change had come over the whole man,
the more impressive because wholly undeﬁnable.
Halting opposite Margrave, he uttered some words
in a language unknown to me, and stretched one hand
over the young man’s head. Margrave at once became
stiff and rigid as if turned to stone. Sir Philip said
to me: I
“Place one of those lamps on the ﬂoor-there, by
his feet.”
I took down one of the colored lamps from the mimic
tree round which the huge anaconda coiled its spires,
and placed it as I was told.
“ Take the seat opposite to him and watch."
I obeyed. _
Meanwhile Sir Philip had drawn from his breast-
pocket a small steel casket, and I observed, as he
opened it, that the interior was subdivided into several
compartments, each with its separate lid; from one of
these he took and sprinkled over the ﬂame of the lamp
a few grains of a powder, colorless and sparkling as
diamond dust; in a second or so a delicate perfume,
wholly unfamiliar to my sense, rose from the lamp.
“ You would test the condition of trance; test it, and
in the spirit.”
And, as he spoke, his hand rested lightly on m


248 A STRANGE STORY.
head. Hitherto, amidst a surprise not unmixed with
awe, I had preserved a certain deﬁance, a certain dis-
trust. I had been, as it were, on my guard.
But as those words were spoken, as that hand rested
on my head, as that perfume arose from the lamp, all
power of will deserted me. My ﬁrst sensation was
that of passive subjugation; but soon I was aware of
a strange intoxicating effect from the odor of the lamp,
round which there now played a dazzling vapor. The
room swam before me. Like a man oppresscd by a
nightmare, I tried to move, to cry out—feeling that to
do so would sufﬁce to burst the thrall that bound me—
in vain.
A time that seemed to me inexorably long, but which,
as I found afterwards, could only have occupied a few
seconds, elapsed in this preliminary state, which, how-
ever powerless, iwas not without a vague luxurious
sense of delight. And then suddenly came pain-
pain, that in rapid gradations passed into a rending
agony. Every bone, sinew, nerve, ﬁbre of the body,
seemed as if wrenched open, and as if some hitherto
unconjectured Presence in the vital organization were
forcing itself to light with all the pangs of travail. The
veins seemed swollen to bursting, the heart laboring to
maintain its action by ﬁerce spasms. I feel in this
description how language fails me. Enough, that the
anguish I then endured surpassed all that I have ever
experienced of physical pain. This dreadful interval
subsided as suddenly as it had commenced. I felt as


A srnason sroaY. 249
if a something undeﬁnable by any name had rushed
from me, and in that rush that a struggle was over.
I was sensible of the passive bliss which attends the
release from torture, and then there grew on me a
wonderful calm, and, in that calm, a consciousness of
some lofty intelligence immeasurably beyond that which
human memory gathers from earthly knowledge. I
saw before me the still rigid form of Margrave, and my
sight seemed with ease to penetrate through its covering
of ﬂesh, and to survey the mechanism of the whole
interior being.
“ View that tenement of clay which now seems so
fair, as it was when I last beheldit, three years ago, in
the house of Haroun of Aleppo!”
I looked, and gradually, and as shade after shade
falls on the mountain side while the clouds gather and
the sun vanishes at last, so the form and face on which
I looked changed from exuberant youth into inﬁrm old
age. The discolored, wrinkled skin, the bleared, dim
eye, the ﬂaccid muscles, the brittle, sapless bones. Nor
was the change that of age alone; the expression of
the countenance had passed into gloomy discontent,
and in every furrow a passion or a vice had sown the
seeds of grief.
And the brain now opened on my sight, with all its
labyrinth of cells. I seemed to have the clue to every
winding in the maze.
I saw therein a moral world, charred and ruined, as,
in some fable I have read, the world of the moon is


250 A srsanes sroav.
described to be ; yet withal it was a brain of magniﬁcent
formation. The powers abused to evil had been origi-
nally of rare order—imagination and scope; the energies
that dare; the faculties that discover. But the moral
part of the brain had failed to dominate the mental.
Defective veneration of what is good or great; cynical
disdain of what is right and just; in ﬁne, a great intel-
lect, ﬁrst misguided, then perverted, and now falling
with the decay of the body into ghastly but imposing
ruins. Such was the world of that brain as it had been
three years ago. And still continuing to gaze thereon,
I observed three separate emanations of light; the one
of a pale red hue, the second of a pale azure, the third
a silvery spark.
The red light, which grew paler and paler as I looked,
undulated from the brain along the arteries, the veins,
the nerves. And I murmur to myself, “ Is this the
principle of animal life if ”
The azure light equally permeated the frame, cross-
ing and uniting with the red, but in a separate and dis-
tinct ray, exactly as, in the outer world, a ray of light
crosses or unites with a ray of heat, though in itself a
separate individual agency. And again I murmured to
myself, “ Is this the principle of intellectual being,
directing or inﬂuencing that of animal life; with it, yet
not of it?"
But the silvery spark! What was that? Its centre
seemed the brain. But I could ﬁx it to no single organ.
Nay, wherever I looked through the system, it reﬂected


A STRANGE s'roav. 25]
itself as a star reﬂects itself upon water. And I ob
served that while tne red light was growing feebler and
feebler, and the azure light was confused, irregular—-
now obstructed, now hurrying, now almost lost—the
silvery spark was unaltered, undisturbed. So indepen-
dent of all which agitated and vexed the frame, that I
became strangely aware that if the heart stopped in its
action, and the red light died out, if the brain were
paralyzed, that energetic mind smitten into idiocy, and
the azure light wandering objectless as a meteor wan-
ders over the morass—still that silver spark Would shine
the same, indestructible by aught that shattered its
tabernacle. And I murmured to myself, “Can that
starry spark speak the presence of the soul? Does the
silver light shine within creatures to which no life im-
mortal has been promised by Divine Revelation?”
Involuntarin I turned my sight towards the dead
forms in the motley collection, and 10, in my trance or
.my vision, life returned to them all! To the elephant
and the serpent; to the tiger, the vulture, the beetle,
the moth; to the ﬁsh and the polypus, and to you
mockery of man in the giant ape.
I seemed to see each as it lived in its native realm
of earth, or of air, or of water; and the red light played
more or less warm, through the structure of each, and
the azure light, though duller of hue, seemed to shoot
through the red, and communicate to the creatures an
intelligence far inferior indeed to that of man, but
sut’ﬁcing to conduct the current of their will, and inﬂu-


252 A s'raanea s'roar
ence the cunning of their instincts. But in none, from
the elephant to the moth, from the bird in which brain
was the largest, to the hybrid in which life seemed to
live as in plants—in none was visible the starry silver
spark. I turned my eyes from the creatures around,
back again to the form cowering under the huge anap
conda, and in terror at the animation which the car-
casses took in the awful illusions of that marvellous
trance. For the tiger moved as if scenting blood, and
to the eyes of the serpent the dread fascination seemed
slowly returning.
Again I gazed on the starry spark in the form of the
man. And I murmured to myself, “But if this be the
soul, why is it so undisturbed and undarkened by the
sins which have left such trace and such ravage in the
world of the brain .7” And gazing yet more intent];
on the spark, I became vaguely aware that it was not
the soul, but the halo around the soul, as the star we
see in heaven is not the star itself, but its circle of rays.
And if the light itself was undisturbed and undarkened,
it was because no sins done in the body could annihi-
late its essence, nor aﬁ'ect the eternity of its duration.
The light was clear within the ruins of its lodgment,
because it might pass away, but could not be extin-
guished.
But the soul itself in the heart of the light reﬂected
back on my own soul within me its ineﬂ’able trouble,
humiliation, and sorrow; for those ghastly wrecks of
power placed at its sovereign command it was respou


A sraanoa sroav. 253
sible; and, appalled by its own sublime fate of dura-
tion, was about to carry into eternity the account of its
mission in time. Yet it seemed that while the soul_
was still there, though so forlorn and so guilty, even
the wrecks around it were majestic. And the soul,
whatever sentence it might merit, was not among the
hopelessly lost. For in its remorse and its shame, it
might still have retained what could serve for redemp-
tion. And I saw that the mind was storming the soul
in some terrible rebellious war—all of thought, of pas
sion, of desire, through which the azure light poured
its restless ﬂow, were surging up around the starry
spark, as in siege. And I could not comprehend the'
war, nor guess what it was that the mind demanded
the soul to yield. Only the distinction between the
two was made intelligible by their antagonism. And
I saw that the soul, sorely tempted, looked afar for
escape from the subjects it had ever so ill controlled,
and who sought to reduce to their vassal the power
which had lost authority as their king. I could feel its
terror in the sympathy of my own terror, the keenness
of my own supplicating pity. I knew that it was im
ploring release from the perils it confessed its want of
strength to encounter. And suddenly the starry spark
rose from the ruins and the tumult around it—rose into
space and vanished. And where my soul had recog-
nized the presence of soul, there was a void. But the
red light burned still, becoming more and more vivid;
and, as it thus repaired and recruited its lustre, the
22


254 A STRANGE s'roaY.
whole animal form which had been so decrepit, grew
restored from decay, grew into vigor and youth: and I
saw Margrave as I had seen him in the waking world,
the radiant image of animal life in the beauty of its
fairest bloom. '
And over this rich vitality and this symmetric
mechanism now reigned only, with the animal life, the
mind. The starry light ﬂed and the soul vanished,
still was left visible the mind: mind, by which- sensa-
tions'convey and cumulate ideas, and muscles obey voli-
tion: mind, as in those animals that have more than the
elementary instincts: mind, as it might be in men, were
men not immortal. As my eyes, in the Vision, followed
the azure light, undulating, as before, through the cells
of the brain, and crossing the red amidst the labyrinth
of the nerves, I perceived that the essence of that azure
light had undergone a change: it had lost that faculty
of continuous and concentred power by which man im-
proves on the works of the past, and weaves schemes
to he developed in the future of remote generations; it
had lost all sympathy in the past, because it had lost
all conception of a future beyond the grave; it had lost
conscience; it had lost remorse; the being it informed
was no longer accountable through eternity for the
employment of time. The azure light was even more
vivid in certain organs useful to the conservation of
existence, as in those organs I had observed it more
vivid among some of the inferior animals than it is in
man—secretiveness, destructiveness, and the ready


A sraanon sroar. 855
perception of things immediate to the wants of the day.
A nd the azure light was brilliant in cerebral cells, where
before it had been dark, such as those which harbor
mirthfulness and hope, for there the light was recruited
by the exuberant health of the joyous animal being.
But it was lead-like, or dim, in the great social organs
through which man subordinates his own interest to
that of his species, and utterly lost in those through
which man is reminded of his duties to the throne of
his Maker.
In that marvellous penetration with which the Vision
endowed me, I perceived that this mind—though in
energy far superior to many; though retaining, from
memories of the former existence, the relics of a culture
vide and in some things profound; though sharpened
into formidable, if desultory, force whenever it schemed
or aimed at the animal self-conservation which now
made its master impulse or instinct; and though among
the reminiscences of its state before its change were
arts which I could not comprehend, but which I felt
were dark and terrible, lending to a will never checked
by remorse, arms that no healthnt philosophy has
placed in the arsenal of disciplined genius; though the
mind in itself had an ally in a body as perfect in
strength and elasticity as man can take from the favor
of nature—still, I say, I felt that that mind wanted the
somethzng, without which men never could found cities,
frame laws, bind together, beautify, exalt the elements
of this world, by creeds that habitually subject them to


256 A STRANGE s'roav.
a reference to another. The ant, and the bee, and the
beaver congregate and construct; but they do not
improve. Man improves because the future impels
onward that which is not found in the ant, the bee and
the beaver— that which was gone from the being
before me.
I shrank appalled into myself, covered my face with
my hands, and groaned aloud: “Have I ever then
doubted that soul is distinct from mind?”
A hand here again touched my forehead, the light in
the lamp was extinguished, I became insensible, and
when I recovered I found myself back in the room in
which I had ﬁrst conversed with Sir Philip Derval, and
seated, as before, on the sofa, by his side.
CHAPTER XXXIII.
MY recollectitns of all that I have just attempted to
describe were distinct and vivid, except with respect
to time; it seemed to me as if many hours must have
elapsed since I had entered the museum with Margrave;
but the clock on the mantelpiece met my eyes as I
turned them wistfully round the room; and I was
indeed amazed to perceive that ﬁve minutes had suf-
ﬁced for all which it has taken me so long to narrate,
and which in their transit had hurried me through


A s'raanen STORY. 25?
ideas and emotions so remote from my anterior expe-
rience.
To my astonishment now succeeded shame and
indignation—shame that I, who had scoffed at the
possibility of the comparatively credible inﬂuences of
mesmeric action, should have been so helpless a puppet
under the hand of the slight fellow-man beside me, and
so morbidly impressed by phantasmagorical illusions;
indignation that, by some fumes which had special
potency over the brain, I had thus been, as it were,
conjured out of my senses; and, looking full into the
calm face at my side, I said, with a smile to which I
sought to convey disdain:
“I congratulate you, Sir Philip Derval, on having
learned in your travels in the East so expert a famili-
arity with the tricks of the jugglers.”
“ The East has a proverb,” answered Sir Philip, qui-
etly, “that the juggler may learn much from the der-
vish, but the dervish can learn nothing from the juggler.
You will pardon me, however, for the effect produced
on you for a few minutes, whatever the cause of it may
be, since it may serve to guard your whole life from
calamities to which it might otherwise have been ex-
posed. And however you may consider that which you
have just experienced to be a mere optical illusion, or
the ﬁgment of a brain super-excited by thelfumes of a
vapor, look within yourself and tell me if you do not
feel an inward and unanswerable conviction that there
is more reason to shun and to fear the creature you left
22* a


258 A s'raanoa; sToaY.
asleep under the dead jaws of the giant serpent, than
there would be in the serpent itself, could hunger again
move its coils, and venom again arm its fangs.”
I was silent, for I could not deny that that convic-
tion had come to me.
“Henceforth, when you recover from the confusion
or anger which now disturbs your impressiOns, you will
be prepared to listen to my explanations and my recital,
in a spirit far different from that with which you would
have received them before you were subjected to the
experiment, which, allow me to remind you, you invited
and deﬁed. You will now, I trust, be ﬁtted to become
my conﬁdent and my assistant—you will advise with
me how, for they sake of humanity, we should act
together against the incarnate lie, the anomalous prod-
igy which glides through the crowd in the image of
joyous beauty. For the present I quit you. have an
engagement, on worldly aﬁ‘airs, in the town this night.
I am staying at L--—-, which I shall leave for Derval
Court to-morrow evening. Come to me there the day-
after to-morrow, at any hour that may suit you the
best. Adieu!”
Here, Sir Philip Derval rose and left the room. I
made no effort to detain him. My mind was too occu-
pied in striving to recompose itself, and account for the
phenomena that had scared it, and for the strength of
the impressions it still retained.
I sought to ﬁnd natural and accountable causes for
sﬂ'ects so abnormal.


A s'raason s'roaY. 259
o
Lord Bacon suggests that the ointments with which
witches anointed themselves might have had the eﬂ‘ect
of stopping the pores and congesting the brain, and
thus impressing the sleep of the unhappy dupes of their
own imagination with dreams so vivid that, on waking,
they were ﬁrmly convinced that they had been borne
through the air to the Sabbat.
I remember also having heard a distinguished French
traveller—whose veracity was unquestionable-say,
that he had witnessed extraordinary effects produced on
the sensorium by certain fumigations used by an Afri-
can pretender to magic. A person, of however healthy
a brain, subjected to the inﬂuence of these fumigations,
was induced to believe that he saw the most frightful
apparitions.
However extraordinary such effects, they were not
incredible—not at variance with our notions of the
known laws of nature. And to the vapor or the odors
which a powder applied to a lamp had called forth, I
was, therefore, prepared to ascribe properties similar to
those which Bacon’s conjecture'ascribed to the witches’
ointment, and the French traveller to the fumigations
of the African conjuror.
But, as I came to that conclusion, I was seized with
an intense curiosity to examine for myself those agen-
cies with which Sir Philip Derval appeared so familiar;
--to test the contents in that mysterious casket of steel.
I also felt a curiosity» no less eager, but more, in spite
of myself, intermingled with fear, to learn all that Sir


260 A ensues sroar.
Philip had to communicate of the past history of Mar-
grave. I could but suppose that the young man must
indeed be a terrible criminal, for a person of years so
grave, and station so high, to intimate accusations so
vaguely dark| and to use means so extraordinary, in
order to enlist my imagination rather than my reason
against a youth in whom there appeared none of the
signs which suspicion interprets into guilt.
While thus musing, I lifted my eyes and saw Mar-
grave himself there, at the threshold of the ball-room—
there, where Sir Philip had ﬁrst pointed him out as the
criminal he had come to L——- to seek and disarm;
and now, as then, Margrave was the radiant centre of
a joyous group: not the young boy-god Iacchus, amidst
his nymphs, could, in Grecian frieze or picture, have
seemed more the type of the sportive, hilarious vitality
of sensuous nature. ' He must have passed, unobserved
by me in my preoccupation of thought, from the mu-
seum and across the room in which I sat; and now
there was as little trace in that animated countenance
of the terror it had exhibited at Sir Philip’s approach,
as of the change it had undergone in my trance or my
phantasy.
But he caught sight of me—left his young com-
panions-came gain to my side.
“ Did you not ask me to go with you into that
museum about half an hour ago, or did I dream that I
Went with you? ”
“ Yes; you went with me into that museum.”


A s'raauea sroav. 261
“ Then pray what dull theme did you select to set
me asleep there ? ”
I looked hard at him, and made no reply. Some-
what to my relief, I now heard my host’s voice:
“ Why, Fenwick, what has become of Sir Philip
Derval ? ”
“He has left; he bad business.” And, as I spoke,
again I looked hard on Margrave.
His countenance now showed a change; not surprise,
not dismay, but rather a play of the lip, a ﬂash of the
eye, that indicated complacency—even triumph.
“ Sol Sir Philip Derval! He is in L—; he has
been here to-night? Sol as I expected.”
“ Did you expect it I?” said our host. “ No one else
did. Who could have told you ? ”
“The movements of men so distinguished need never
take us by surprise. I knew he was in Paris the other
day. It is natural enough that he should come here.
I was prepared for his coming.”
Margrave here turned away towards the window,
which he threw open and looked out.
“ There is a storm in the air,” said he, as he con-
tinned to gaze into the night.
Was it possible that Margrave was so wholly uncon-
scious of what had passed in the museum, as to include
in oblivion even the remembrance of Sir Philip Derval’s
presence before he had been rendered insensible, or laid
asleep? Was it now only for the ﬁrst time that he
learned of Sir Philip’s arrival in L-—, and visit to
Q


262 A STRANGE sToaY.
that house? Was there any intimation of menace in
his words and his aspect?
I felt that the trouble of my thoughts communicated
itself to my countenance and manner; and, longing for
solitude and fresh air, I quitted the house. When I
found myself in the street, I turned rcund and saw
Margrave still standing at the open window, but he did
not appear to notice me; his eyes seemed ﬁxed ab-
stractedly on space.
-—0°0——
CHAPTER XXXIV.
I wanxnn on slowly and with the downcast brow of
a man absorbed in meditation. I had gained the broad
place in which the main streets of the town converged,
when I was overtaken by a violent storm of rain. I
sought shelter under the dark archway of that entrance
to the district of Abbey Hill, which was still called
Monk’s Gate. The shadow within the arch was so
deep that I was not aware that I had a companion till
I heard my own name, close at my side. I recognized
the voice, before I could distinguish the form, of Sir
Philip Derval.
“The storm will soon be over,” said he, quietly.
“I saw it coming on in time. I fear you neglected the
ﬁrst warning of those sable clouds, and must be already
drenched.”


A STRANGE email. 263
I made no reply, but moved involuntarily away
towards the mouth of the arch.
“I see that you cherish a grudge against mel” re-
sumed Sir Philip. “Are you, then, by nature vindic-
tive f”
Somewhat softened by the friendly tone of this
reproach, I answered, half in jest, half- in earnest:
“ You must own, Sir Philip, that I have some little
reason for the uncharitable anger your question imputes
to me. But I can forgive you on one condition.”
“ What is that ?”
“The possession, for half an hour, of that mysterious
steel casket which you carry about with you, and full
permission to analyze and test its contents.”
“ Your analysis of the contents,” returned Sir Philip,
dryly, “ would leave you as ignorant as before of the
uses to which they can be applied. But I will own to
you frankly, that it is my intention to select some conﬁ-
dant among men of science, to whom I may safely
communicate the wonderful properties which certain
essences in that casket possess. I invite your acquaint-
ance, nay, your friendship, in the hope that I may ﬁnd
such a conﬁdant in you. But the casket contains other
combinations, which, if wasted, could not be re-sup-
plied; at least by any process which the great Master
from whom I received them placed within reach of my
knowledge. In this they resemble the diamond; when
the chemist has found that the diamond aﬂ'ords no
other substance by its combustion than pure carbonic


264 A STRANGE sronr.
acid gas, and that the only chemical difference between
the costliest diamond and a lump of pure charcoal is a
proportion of hydrogen less than “(hm part of the
weight of the substance—can the chemist make you
a diamond?
“ These, then, the more potent, but also the more
perilous of the oasket’s contents, shall be explored by
no science, submitted to no test. They are the keys to
masked doors in the ramparts of Nature, which no
mortal can pass through without rousing dread sentries
never seen} upon this side her wall. The powers they
confer are secrets locked in my breast, to be lost in my
grave; as the casket which lies on my breast shall not
be transferred to the hands of another, till all the rest
of my earthly possessions pass away with my last
breath in life, and my ﬁrst in eternity.”
“Sir Philip Derval,” said I, struggling against the
appeals to fancy or to awe, made in words so strange,
uttered in a tone of earnest conviction, and heard
amidst the glare of the lightning, the bowl of the
winds, and the roll of the thunder—“Sir Philip Derval,
you aecost me in language which, but for my experience
of the powers at your 'command, I should bear with
the contempt that is due to the vaunts of a mounte-
bank, or the pity we give to the morbid beliefs of his
dupe. Asjt is, I decline the conﬁdence with which
you would favor me, subject to the conditions which it
seems you would impose. My profession abandons to
quacks all drugs which may not be analyzed—all


a STRANGE near. 265
secrets which may not be foarlessly told. I cannot
visit you at Derval Court. I cannot trust myself,
voluntarily, again in the power of a man, who has arts
of which I may not examine the nature, by which he
can impose on my imagination and steal away my
reason.”
“ Reﬂect well before you decide,” said Sir Philip
with a solemnity that was stern. “If you refuse to be
warned and to be armed by me, your reason and your
imagination will alike be subjected to inﬂuences which
I can only explain by telling you that there is truth in
those immemorial legends which depose to the existence
of magic.”
“Magic!”
“ There is magic of two kinds—the dark and evil,
appertaining to witchcraft or necromancy; the pure and
beneﬁcent, which is but philosophy applied to certain
mysteries in Nature remote from the beaten tracks of
science, but which deepened the wisdom of ancient
sages, and can yet unriddle the myths of departed
races.”
“Sir Philip,” I said, with impatient and angry inter
ruption, " if you think that a jargon of this kind be
worthy a man of your acquirements and station, it is
at least a waste of time to address it to me. I am led
to conclude that you desire to make use of me for some
purpose which I have a right to suppose honest and
blameless, because all you know of me is, that I
rendered to y0ur relation services which cannot lower
23


266 A STRANGE wear.
my character in your eyes. If your object be, as you
have intimated, to aid you in exposing and disabling a
man whose antecedents have been those of guilt, and
who threatens with danger the society which receives
him, you must give me proofs that are not reducible to
magic; and you must prepossess me against the person
you accuse, not by powders and fumes that disorder the
brain, but by substantial statements, such as justify one
man in condemning another. And, since you have
thought ﬁt to convince me that there are chemical
means at your disposal, by which the imagination can
be so affected as to accept, temporarily, illusions for
realities, so I again demand, and now still more decidedly
than before, that while you address yourself to my
reason, whether to explain your object or to vindicate
your charges against a man whom I have admitted to
my acquaintance, you will divest yourself of all means
and agencies to warp my judgment, so illicit and
fraudulent as those which you own yourself to possess.
Let the casket, with all its contents, be transferred to
my hands, and pledge me your word that,'in giving
that casket, you reserve to yourself no other means by
which chemistry can be abused to those inﬂuences over
physical organization, which ignorance or imposture
may ascribe to-magic.”
“I accept no conditions for my conﬁdence, though I
think the better of you for attempting to make them.
If I live, you will seek me yourself, and implcre my
aid Meanwhile, listen to me, and -—--”


A STRANGE sroaY. 261
“No; I prefer the rain and the thunder to the
whispers that steal to my ear in the dark from one of
whom I have reason to beware.”
So saying, I stepped forth, and at that moment the
lightning ﬂashed through the arch, and brought into
full view the face of the man beside me. Seen by that
glare, it was pale as the face of a corpse, but its expres-
sion was compassionate and serene.
I hesitated, for the expression of that hueless coun~
tenance touched me ; it was not the face which inspires
distrust or fear.
“Come,” said I, gently; “grant my demand. The
casket—”
“ It is no scruple of distrust that now makes that
demand; it is a curiosity which in itself is a fearful
tempter. Did you now possess what at this moment
you desire, how bitterly you would repentl”
“ Do you still refuse my demand ?”
“ I refuse.”
“If then you really need me, it is you who will
repent.”
I passed from the arch into the open space. The
rain had passed, the thunder was more distant. I
looked back when I had gained the opposite side of the
way, at the angle of a street which led to my own
house. As I did so, again the skies lightened, but the
ﬂash was comparatively slight and evanescent; it did
not penetrate the gloom of the arch; it did not bring
the form of Sir Philip into view; but, just under the


268 A summer. s'roaY.
base of the outer buttress to the gateway, I descried
the outline of a dark ﬁgure, cowering down, huddled
up for shelter, the outline so indistinct, and so soon lost
to sight as the ﬂash faded, that I could not distinguish
if it were man or brute. If it were some chance
passer-by, who had sought refuge from the rain, and
overheard any part of our strange talk, “ the listener,"
thought I, with a half-smile, “ must have been mightily
perplexed.”

CHAPTER XXXV.
0N reaching my own home, I found my servant
sitting up for me with the information that my attend-
ance was immediately required. The little boy whom
M'argrave‘s carelessness had so injured, and for whose
injuries he had shown so little feeling, had been weak-
ened hy the conﬁnement which the nature of the injury
required, and for the last few days had been generally
ailing. The father had come to my house a few minutes
before I reached it, in great distress of mind, saying
that his child had been seized with fever, and had
become delirious. Hearing that I was at the mayor’s
house, he had hurried thither in search of me.
I felt as if it were almost a relief to the troubled and
haunting thoughts which tormented me, to be sum-
moned to the exercise of a familiar knowledge. I
hastened to the bedside of the little sufferer, and soon


A sraanos s'roar. 269
\
forgot all else in the anxious struggle for a human life.
The struggle promised to be successful; the worst
symptoms began- to yield to remedies prompt and
energetic, if simple. I remained at the house, rather
to comfort and support the parents than because my
continued attendance was absolutely needed, till the
night was well-nigh gone; and all cause of immediate
danger having subsided, I then found myself once more
in the streets. An atmosphere palely clear in the grey
of dawn had succeeded to the thunder-clouds of the
stormy night; the street lamps, here and there, burned
wan and still. I was walking slowly and wearily, so
tired out that I was scarcely conscious of my own
thoughts, when, in a narrow lane, my feet stopped
almost mechanically before a human form stretched at
full length in the centre of the road, right in my path.
The form was dark in the shadow thrown from the
neighboring houses. “ Some poor drunkard,” thought I,
and the humanity, inseparable from my calling, not
allowing me to leave a fellow-creature thus exposed to
the risk of being run over by the ﬁrst drow‘sy wagoner
who might pass along the thoroughfare, I stooped to
reuse and to lift the form. What was my horror when
my eyes met the rigid stare of a dead man’s. I started,
looked again; it was the face of Sir Philip Dervall He
was lying on his back, the countenance upturned, a
dark stream oozing from the breast—murdered by two
ghastly wounds—murdered not long since; the blood
was still warm. Stunned and terror-stricken, I stood
23*


270 A sranuea s'roar.
bending over the body. Suddenly I was touched on
the shoulder.
“ Hollol what is this?” said a gruff voice.
“Murderl” I answered, in hollow accents, which
sounded strangely to my own ear.
“Murder! so it seems.” And the policeman who
had thus accosted me lifted the body.
“A gentleman by his dress. How did this happen?
How did you come here T” and the policeman glanced
suspiciously at me.
At this moment, however, there came up another
policeman, in whom I recognized the young man whose
sister I had attended and cured. I
“ Dr. Fenwick,” said the last, lifting his hat respect-
fully, and at the sound of my name his fellow-policeman
changed his manner, and muttered an apology.
I now collected myself suﬂiciently to state the name
and rank of the murdered man. The policemen bore
the body to their station, to which I accompanied them.
I then returned to my own house, and had scarcely
sunk on my bed when sleep came over me. But what
asleep! Never till then had I known how awfully
distinct dreams can be. The phantasmagoria of the
naturalist’s collection revived. Life again awoke in
the serpent and the tiger, the scorpion moved, and the
vulture ﬂapped its wings. And there was Margrave,
and there Sir Philip; but their position of power was
reversed. And Margrave’s- foot was on the breast of
the dead man. Still I slept on, till I was roused by the


A s'raauea sroar. 271
summons to attend on Mr. Vigors, the magistrate to
whom the police had reported the murder.
I dressed hastily and went forth. As I passed through
the street, I found that the dismal news had already
spread. I was accosted on my way to the magistrate
by a hundred eager, tremulous, inquiring tongues.
The scanty evidence I could impart was soon given.
My introduction to Sir Philip at the mayor’s house,
our accidental meeting under the arch, my discovery
of the corpse some hours afterwards on my return from
my patient, my professional belief that the deed must
have been done a very short time, perhaps but a few
minutes, before I chanced upon its victim. But, in
that case, how account for the long interval that had
elapsed between the time in which I had left Sir Philip
under the arch, and the time in which the murder must
have been committed? Sir Philip could not have been
wandering through the streets all those hours. This
doubt, however, was easily and speedily cleared up. A
Mr. Jeeves, who was one of the principal solicitors in
the town, stated that he had acted as Sir Philip’s legal
agent and adviser ever since Sir Philip came of age,
and was charged with the exclusive management of
some valuable house property which the deceased had
possessed in L—-; that when Sir Philip had arrived
in the town late in the afternoon of the previous day,
he had sent for Mr. Jeeves; informed him that he, Sir
Philip, was engaged to be married; that he wished to
have full and minute information as to the details of


272 A STRANGE STORY. .
his house property (which had greatly increased in
value since his absence from England), in connection
with the settlements his marriage would render neces-
sary; and that this information was also required by
him in respect to a codicil he desired to add to his will.
He had accordingly requested Mr. Jeeves to have all
the books and statements concerning the property ready
for his inspection that night, when he would call, after
leaving the ball which he had promised the mayor,
whom he had accidentally met on entering the town,
to attend. Sir Philip had also asked Mr. Jeeves to
detain one of his clerks in his oﬂice, in order to serve,
conjointly with Mr. Jeeves, as a witness to the codicil
he desired to add to his will. . Sir Philip had accord-
ingly come to Mr. Jeeves’s house a little before mid-
night; had gone carefully through all the statements
prepared for him, and had executed the fresh codicil to
his testament, which testament he had in their previous
interview given to Mr. Jeeves’s care sealed up. Mr.
Jeeves stated that Sir Philip, though a man of remark-
able talents and great acquirements, was extremely
eccentric, and of a very peremptory temper, and that
the importance attached to a promptitude for which
there seemed no pressing occasion, did not surprise him
in Sir Philip as it might have done in an ordinary
client. Sir Philip said, indeed, that he should devote
the next morning to the draft for his wedding settle<
ments, according to the information of his property
which he had acquired; and after a visit of very brief


A s'raanen near. 273
duration to Derval Court, should quit the neighborhood
and return to Paris, Where his intended bride then was.
and in which city it had been settled that the marriage
ceremony should take place.
Mr. Jeeves had, however, observed to him, that if he
were so soon to be married, it was better to postpone
any revision of testamentary bequests, since after mar-
riage he would have to make a new will altogether.
And Sir Philip had simply answered:
“ Life is uncertain; who can‘be sure of the morrow ?”
Sir Philip’s visit to Mr. Jeeves’s house had lasted
some hours, for the conversation between them had
branched oﬂ' from actual business to various topics.
Mr. Jeeves had not noticed the hour when Sir Philip
went; he could only say that as he attended him to the
street-door, he observed, rather to his own surprise, that
it was close upon daybreak.
Sir Philip’s body had been found not many yards
distant from the hotel at which he had put up, and to
which, therefore, he was evidently returning when he
left Mr. Jeeves: an old-fashioned hotel, which had been
the principal one at L— when Sir Philip left Eng-
land, though now outrivalled by the new and more cen-
tral establishment in which Margrave was domiciled.
The primary and natural supposition was that Sir
Philip had been murdered for the sake of plunder; and
this supposition was borne out by the fact to which his
valet deposed, viz:
That Sir Philip had about his person, on going to the


274 A STRANGE s'ronv.
mayor’s house, a purse containing notes and sovereigns;
and this purse was now missing.
The valet, who, though an Albanian, spoke English
ﬂuently, said that the purse had a gold clasp, on which
Sir Philip’s crest and initials were engraved. Sir
Philip’s watch was, however, not taken.
And now, it was not without a quick beat of the
heart that I heard the valet declare that a steel casket,
to which Sir Philip attached extraordinary value, and
always carried about him, was also missing.
-The Albanian described this casket as of ancient
Byzantine workmanship, opening with a peculiar spring,
only known to Sir Philip, in whose possession it had
been, so far as the servant knew, about three years;
when, after a visit to Aleppo, in which the servant had
not accompanied him, he had ﬁrst observed it in his
master’s hands. He was asked if this casket contained
articles to account for the value Sir Philip set on it—
such as jewels, bank-notes, letters of credit, &c. The
man replied that it might possibly do so; he had never
been alIOWed the opportunity of examining its contents;
but that he was certain the casket held medicines, for
he had seen Sir Philip take from it some small phials,
by which he had performed great cures in the East, and
especially during a pestilence which had visited Damas~
cus, just after Sir Philip had arrived at that city on
quitting Aleppo. Almost every European traveller is
supposed to be a physician ; and Sir Philip was a man
of great benevolence, and the servant ﬁrmly believed


A STRANGE STORY. 275
him also to be of great medical skill. After this state
ment, it was very naturally and generally conjectured
that Sir Philip was an amateur disciple of homosopathy,
and that the casket contained the phials or globules in
use among homoeopathists.
Whether or not Mr. Vigors enjoyed a vindictive
triumph in making me feel the Weight of his authority,
or whether his temper was ruﬁled in the excitement of
so grave a case, I cannot say, but his manner was stern
and his tone discourteous in the questions which he
addressed to me. Nor did the questions themselves
seem very pertinent to the object of investigation.
“ Pray, Dr. Fenwick,” said he, knitting his brows,
and ﬁxing his eyes on me rudely, “did Sir Philip Der-
val, iu his conversation with you, mention‘thesteel
casket which it seems he carried about with him i ”
I felt my countenance change slightly as I answered,
“ Yes.”
“ Did he tell you what it contained?”
“He said it contained secrets.”
“ Secrets of what nature? medicinal or chemical?
Secrets which a physician might be curious to learn
and covetous to possess ? ”
This question seemed to me so oﬁ'ensively signiﬁcant
that it roused my indignation, and I answered haughtily,
that “a physician of any degree of merited reputation
did not much believe in, and still less covet, those
secrets in his art which were the boast of quacks and
pretenders.”


276 A STRANGE s'ronv.
“My question need not offend you, Dr. Fenwick. I
put it in another shape: Did Sir Philip Derval so boast
of the secrets contained in his casket, that a quack or
pretender might deem such secrets of use to him ?”
“ Possibly he might, if he believed in such a boast.”
“ Humph !— he might, if he so believed. I have no
more questions to put to you, at present, Dr. Fenwick."
Little of any importance in connection with the de-
ceased, or his murder, transpired in the course of thatI
day’s examination and inquiries.
.The next day, a gentleman distantly related to the
young lady to whom Sir Philip was engaged, and who
had been for some time in correspondence with the
deceased, arrived at L-—-. He had been sent for at
the suggestion of the Albanian servant, who said that
Sir Philip had stayed a day at this gentleman’s house
in London, on his way to L—, from Dover.
The new comer, whose name was Danvers, gave a
more touching pathos to the horror which the murder
had excited. It seemed that the motives which had
swayed Sir Philip in the choice of his betrothed, were
singularly pure and noble. The young lady’s father—
an intimate college friend— had been visited by a sud-
den reverse of fortune, which had brought on a fever
that proved mortal. He had died some years ago,
leaving his only child penniless, and had bequeathed
her to the care and guardianship of Sir Philip.
The orphan received her education at a convent near
Paris; and when Sir Philip, a few weeks since, arrived


a manner. s'roaY. 271’
in that city from the East, he offered her his hand and
fortune. .
“ I know,” said Mr. Danvers, “from the conversation
I held with him when he came tome in London, that
he was induced to this oﬁ;er by the conscientious desire
to discharge the trust consigned to him by his old friend.
Sir Philip was still of an age that could not permit him
to take under his own roof a female ward of eighteen,
without injury to her good name. He could only
get over that difﬁculty by making the ward his wife.
' She will be safer and happier with the man she will
love and honor for her father’s sake,’ said the chivalrous
gentleman, ‘than she will be under any other roof I
could ﬁnd for her.”’
And now there arrived another stranger to L—-,
sent for by Mr. Jeeves, the lawyer—a stranger to
L——-, but not to me; my old Edinburgh acquaintance,
Richard Strahan.
The will in Mr. J eeves’s keeping, with its recent codi-
cil, was opened and read. The will itself bore data
about six years anterior to the testator’s tragic death;
it was very short, and, with the exception of a few leg-
acies, of which the most important was ten thousand
pounds to his ward, the whole of his property was left
to Richard Strahan, on the condition that he took the
name and arms of Derval within a year from the date
of Sir Philip’s decease. The codicil, added to the “ill
the night before his death, increased the legacy to the
young lady from ten to thirty thousand pounds, and
24


278 A s'rsauoa sroar.
bequeathed an annuity of one hundred pounds a year to
his Albanian servant. Accompanying the will, and
within the same envelope, was a sealed letter, addressed
to Richard Strahan, and dated at Paris. two weeks
before Sir Philip’s decease. .Strahan brought that let-
ter to me. It ran thus: “Richard Strahan, I advise
you to pull down the house called Derval Court, and to
build another on a better site, the plans of which, to be
modiﬁed according to your own taste and requirements,
will be found among my papers. This is a recommen-
dation, not a command. But I strictly enjoin you
entirely to demolish the more aneiept part, which was
chieﬂy occupied by myself“, and to destroy by ﬁre, with-
out perusal, all the books and manuscripts found in the
safes in my study. I have appointed you my sole
executor, as well as my heir, because I have no perso-
nal friends in whom I can conﬁde as I trust I may do
in the man I have never seen, simply because he will
bear my name and represent my lineage. There will
be found in my writing-desk, which always accompanies
me in my travels, an autobiographical work, a record
of my own life, comprising discoveries, or hints at dis-
covery, in science, through means little cultivated in
our age. You will not be surprised that before select-
ing you as my heir and executor, from a crowd of rela-
tions not more distant, I should have made inquiries in
order to justify my selection. The result of those
inquiries informs me that you have not yourself the
peculiar knowledge nor the habits of mind-that could


A s'raanea s'roav. 279
enable you to judge of matters which demand the attain-
ments and the practice of science; but that you are of
an honest, affectionate nature, and will regard as sacred
the last injunctions of a benefactor. I enjoin you, then,
to submit the aforesaid manuscript memoir to some
man on whose character for humanity and honor you
can place conﬁdential reliance, and who is accustomed
to the study of the positive sciences, more especially
chemistry, in connection with electricity and magnetism.
My desire is that he shall edit and arrange this memoir
for publication ; and that, wherever he feels a conscien-
tious doubt whether any discovery, or hint of discovery,
therein contained, would not prove more dangerous
than useful to mankind, he shall consult with any other
three men of science whose names are a guarantee for
probity and knowledge, and according to the best of
his judgment, after such consultation, suppress or pub-
lish the passage of which he has so doubted. I own
the ambition which ﬁrst directed me towards studies of
a very unusual character, and which has encouraged
me in their pursuit through many years of voluntary
em'le in lands where they could be best facilitated or
aided— the ambition of leaving behind me the renown
of a bold discoverer in those recesses of nature which
philosophy has hitherto abandoned to superstition.
But I feel, at the moment in which I trace these lines,
a fear lest, in the absorbing interest of researches which
tend to increase to a marvellous degree the power of
man over all matter, animate or inanimate, I may have


280 A s'rrmnea sronv.
blunted my own moral perceptions; and that there may
be much in the knowledge I sought and acquired from
the pure desire of investigating hidden truths, that
could beimore abused to purposes of tremendous evil
than be likely to conduce to benignant good. And of
this a mind disciplined to severe reasoning, and unin-
ﬂuenced by the enthusiasm which has probably obscured
my own judgment, should be the unprejudiced arbiter.
Much as I have coveted and still do covet that fame
which makes the memory of one man the common
inheritance of all, I would inﬁnitely rather that my
name should pass away with my breath, than that I
should transmit to my fellow-men any portion of a
knowledge which the good might for-bear to exercise
and the bad might unscrupulously pervert. I hear
about me, wherever I wander, a certain steel casket.
I received this casket, with its contents, from a man
whose memory I hold in profound veneration. Should
I live to ﬁnd a person whom, after minute and intimate
trial of his character, I should deem worthy of such
conﬁdence, it is my intention to communicate to him
the secret how to prepare and how to use such of the
powders and essences stored within that casket as I
myself have ventured to employ. Others I have never
tested, nor do I know how they could be re-supplied if
lost or wasted. But as the contents of this casket. in
the hands of any one not duly instructed as to the mode
of applying them, would either be useless, or conduce
through inadvertent and ignorant misapplication, to


A sraauoa s'ronr. 281
the most dangerous consequences; so, if I die without
having found, and in writing named, such a conﬁdent
as I have described above, I command you immediately
to empty all the powders and essences found therein
into any running stream of water, which will at once
harmlessly dissolve them. On no account must they
be cast into ﬁre!
“ This letter, Richard Strahan, will only come under
your eyes in case the plans and the hopes which I have
formed for my earthly future should be frustrated by
the death on which I do not calculate, but against the
chances of which this will and this letter provide. I
am about to revisit England, in deﬁance of a warning
that I shall be there subjected to some peril which I
refuse to have deﬁned, because I am unwilling that
any mean apprehension of personal danger should
enfeeble my nerves in the discharge of a stern and
solemn duty. If I overcome that peril, you will not
be my heir; my testament will be remodelled; this
letter will be recalled and destroyed. I shall form ties
which promise me the happiness I have never hitherto
found, though it is common to all men—the affections
of home, the caresses of children, among whom I may
ﬁnd one to whom hereafter I may bequeath, in my
knowledge, a far nobler heritage than my lands. In
that case, however, my ﬁrst care would be to assure
your own fortunes. And the sum which this codicil
assures to my betrothed would be transferred to your-
self on my wedding-day. Do you know why, never
24*


282 a smarter: sronr.
having seen you, I thus select you for preference to all
my other kindred?_why my heart, in writing thus,
warms to your image? Richard Strahan, your only
sister, many years older than yourself —you were then
a child—was the object of my ﬁrst love. We were to
have been wedded, for her parents deceived me into
the belief that she returned my affection. With a rare
and noble candor she herself informed me that her
heart was given to another, who possessed not my
worldly gifts of wealth and station. In resigning my
claims to her_hand, I succeeded in propitiating her
parents to her own choice. I obtained for her husband
the living which he held, and I settled on your sister
the dower which, at her death, passed t5 you as the
brother to whom she had shown a mother’s love, and
the interest of which has secured you a modest inde-
pendence.
“ If these lines ever reach you, recognize my title to
reverential obedience to commands which may seem to
you wild, perhaps irrational; and repay, as if a debt_
due from your own lost sister, the aﬁ'ection I have borne
to you for her sake.”
While I read this long and strange letter, Strahan sat
by my side, covering his face with his hands, and weep-
ing with honest tears for the man whose death had
made him powerful and rich.
“You will undertake the trust ordained to me in
this letter,” said be, struggling to compose himself.
“You will read and edit this memoir; you are the


A STRANGE sronr. 283
very n,an he himself would have selected. Of your
honor and humanity there can be"no doubt, and you
have studied with success the sciences which he speci-
ﬁes as requisite for the discharge of the task be com-
mands.”
At this request, though I could not be wholly unpre-
pared for it, my ﬁrst impulse was that of a vague terror.
It seemed to me as if I were becoming more and more
entangled in a mysterious and fatal web. But this
impulse soon faded in the eager yearnings of an ardent
and irresistible curiosity.
I promised to read the manuscript, and in order that
I might fully imbue my mind with the object and wish
of the deceased, I asked leave to make a copy of the
letter I had just read. To this Strahan readily assented,
and that copy I have transcribed in the preceding
pages.
I asked Strahan if he had yet found the manuscript;
he said, “No, he had not yet had the heart to inspect
the papers left by the deceased. He would now do so.
He should go in a day or two to Derval Court, and
reside there till the murderer was discovered, as-doubt-
less he soon must be through the vigilance of the
police. Not till that discovery was made should Sir
Philip’s remains, though already placed in their coﬂin,
be consigned to the family vault.”
Strahan seemed to have some superstitious notion
that the murderer might be more secure from. justice if
his victim were thrust, unavenged, into the tomb.


284 A STRANGE STORY.
CHAPTER XXXVI.
THE belief prevalent in the town ascribed the murder
of Sir Philip to the violence of some vulgar robber,
probably not an inhabitant of L Mr. Vigors did
not favor that belief. He intimated an opinion, which
seemed extravagant and groundless, that Sir Philip had
been murdered, for the sake not of the missing purse,

but of the missing casket. It was currently believed
that the solemn magistrate had consulted one of his
pretended clairvoyants, and that this impostor had gulled
him with assurances, to which he attached a credit that
perverted into egregiously absurd directions his char-
acteristic activity and zeal.
Be that as it may, the coroner’s inquest closed with-
out casting any light on so mysterious a tragedy.
What were my own conjectures I scarcely dared to
admit—I certainly could not venture to utter them.
But my suspicions centred upon Margrave. That for
some reason or other he had cause to dread Sir Philip’s
presence in L was clear, even to my reason. And

how could my reason reject all the inﬂuences which
had been brought to bear on my imagination, whether
by the scene in the museum or my conversation with
the deceased? But it was impossible to act on such
suspicions—impossible even 'to conﬁde them. Could I
have told to any man the effect produced on me in the


A s'raauon sroav. 285
museum, he would have considered me a liar or a mad-
man. And in Sir Philip’s accusations against Margrave
there was nothing tangible-nothing that could bear
repetition. Those accusations, if analyzed, vanished
into air. What did they imply ? —that Margrave was
a magician, a monstrous prodigy, a creature exceptional
to the ordinary conditions of humanity. Would the
most reckless of mortals have ventured to bring against
the worst of characters such a charge, on the authority
of a deceased witness, and to found on evidence so
fantastic the awful accusation of murder? But of all
men, certainly I—a sober, practical physician—was
the last whom the public could eXcuse for such incredible
implications-and certainly, of all men, the last against
whom any suspicion of heinous crime would be readily
entertained was that joyous youth in whose sunny
aspect life and conscience alike seemed to keep careless
holiday. But I could not overcome, nor did I attempt
to reason against, the horror akin to detestation that
had succeeded to the fascinating attraction by which
Margrave had before couciliated a. liking, founded rather
on admiration than esteem.
In order to avoid his visits -I kept away from the
study in which I had habitually spent my mornings,
and to which he had been accustomed to so ready an
access. And if he called at the front door, 1 directed
mv servant to tell him that I was either from home or
engaged. He did attempt for the ﬁrslfew days to visit
me as before, but when my intention to shun him


286 A srnanoa s'ronv.
became thus manifest, desisted, naturally enough, as
any other man so pointedly repelled would have done.
I abstained from all those houses in which I was
likely to meet him; and went my professional round
of visits in a close carriage, so that I might not be
accosted by him in his walks.
One morning, a very few days after Strahan had
shown me Sir Philip Derval’s letter, I received a note
from my old college acquaintance, stating that he was
going to Derval Court that afternoon; that he should
take with him the memoir which he had found, and
begging me to visit him at his new home the next day,
and commence my inspection of the manuscript. I
consented eagerly.
That morning, on going my round, my carriage
passed by another drawn up to the pavement, and I
recognized the ﬁgure of Margrave standing beside the
vehicle, and talking to some one seated within it. I
looked back, as my own carriage whirled rapidly by,
and saw with uneasiness and alarm that it was Richard
Strahan to whom Margrave was thus familiarly ad
dressing himself. How had the two made acquaint-
ance? Was it not an outrage on Sir Philip Derval’s
memory, that the heir he had selected should be thus
apparently intimate with the man whom he had so
sternly denounced? I became still more impatient to
read the memoir—in all probability it would give such
explanations with respect to Margrave’s antecedents,
as, if not suﬂieing to criminate him of legal oﬂ'ences.


a s'rnanen near. 281
would at least effectually terminate any acquaintance
between Sir Philip’s successor and himself.
All my thoughts were, however, diverted to channels
of far deeper interest even than those in which my
mind had of late been so tnmultuously whirled along,
when, on returning home, I found a note-from )lrs.
Ashleigh. I She and Lilian had just come back '0’. -
L , sooner than she had led me to anticipate.
Lilian had not seemed quite well the last day or two,

and had been anxious to return.
CHAPTER XXXVII.
LET me recall it—softly—softlyl Let me recall
that evening spent with herl—that evening, the last
before darkness rose between us like a solid wall.
It was evening, at the close of summer. The sun
had set, the twilight was lingering still. We were in
the old monastic garden -garden so quiet, so cool, so
fragrant. She was seated on a bench under the one
great cedar-tree that rose sombre in the midst of the
grassy lawn with its little paradise of ﬂowers. I had
thrown myself on the sward at her feet; her hand so
conﬁdingly lay in the clasp of mine. I see her still-
how young, how fair, how innocent!
Strange, strange! So inexpressibly English; so
thoroughly the creature of our sober, homely life! The


288 a s'raasen sroaY.
pretty, delicate white robe that I touch so timorously,
and the ribbon-knots of blue that so well become the
soft color of the fair check, the wavy silk of the brown
hair! 'She is murmuring low her answer to my tremb-
ling question.
“As well as when last we parted? Do you love me
' as well still?”
“There is no ‘still’ written here,” said she, softly
pressing her hand to her heart. “ Yesterday is as to-
morrow in the Forever.” .
“Ah, Lilian! if I could reply to you in words as akin
to poetry as your own.”
“ Fiel you who affect not to care for poetry l ”
“ That was before you went away —before I missed
you from my eyes, from my life —-before I was quite
conscious how precious you were to me, more precious
than common words can tell! Yes, there is one period
in love when all men are poets, however the penury
of their language may belie the luxuriance of their
fancies. What would become of me if you ceased to
love me .7 ” _
“Or of me, if you could cease to love? ”
“And somehow it seems to me this evening as if my
heart drew nearer to you —nearer, as if for shelter.”
“ It is sympathy,” said she, with tremulous eager-
ness; “ that sort of mysterious sympathy which I have
often heard you deny or deride; for I, too, feel drawn
nearer to you, as if there were a storm at hand. I was
oppressed by an indescribable terror in returning home,


A STRANGE near. 289
and the moment I saw you there came a sense of pro-
tection.”
Her head sank on my shoulder; we were silent some
moments; then we both rose by the same involuntary
impulse, and round her slight form I twined my strong
arm of man. And now we are winding slow under the
lilacs and acacias that belt the lawn. Lilian has not
yet heard of the murder, which forms the one topic of
the town, for all tales of violence and blood aﬁ'ected her
as they aﬂ'ect a fearful child. Mrs. Ashleigh, therefore,
had judiciously concealed from her the letters and the
journals by which the dismal news had been carried to
herself. I'need scarcely say that the grim subject was
not broached by me. In fact, my owh mind escaped
from the events which had of late so perplexed and
toi'mented it; the tranquillity of the scene, the bliss of
Lilian’s presence, had begun to chase away even that
melancholy foreboding which had overshadowed me in
the ﬁrst moments of our reunion. So we came gradu-
ally to converse of the future —- of the day, not far dis-
tant, when we two should be as one. We planned our
bridal excursion. We would visit the scenes endeared
to her by song, to me by childhood—the bank and
waves of my native Windermere—our one brief holiday
before life returned to labor, and hearts now so dis-
quieted by hope and joy settled down to the calm
serenity of home.
As we thus talked, the moon, hourly rounded to her
full, rose amidst skies without a cloud. We paused to
25 . T


290 A s'raarren sroaY. 4
gaze on her solemn, haunting beauty, as where are the
lovers who have not paused to gaze? We were then
on the terrace-walk, which commanded a view of the
town below. Before us was a parapet wall, low on the
garden side, but inaccessible on the outer side, forming
part of a straggling, irregular street that made one of
the boundaries dividing Abbey Hill from Low Town.
ri‘he lamps of the thoroughfares, in many a line and
row beneath us, stretched far away, obscured here and
there by intervening roofs and tall church-towers. The
hum of the city came to our ears, low and mellowed
into a lulling sound. It was not displeasing to be
reminded that there was a world without, as close and
closer we drew each to each-worlds to one another!
Suddenly there carolled forth the song of a human
voice—a wild, irregular, half-savage melody—foreign,
nncomprehended words—air and words not new to me.
I recognized the voice and chant of Margrave. I started,
and uttered an angry exclamation.
“Hush ! ” whispered Lilian, and I felt her frame
shiver within my encircling arm. “Hush! listen! Yes;
I have heard that voice before—last night.”
“Last night! you were not here; you Were more
than a hundred miles away.”
“I heard it in a dream! 'Hush, hush ! ”
The song rose louder; impossible to describe its
effect, in the midst of the tranquil night, chiming over
the serried roof-tops, and under the solitary moon. It
was not like the artful song of man, for it was defective


a sraauos sroar. 291
in the methodical harmony of tune; it was not like the
song of the wild bird, for it had no monotony in its
sweetness; it was wandering and various as the sounds
from an Eolian harp. But it affected the senses to a
powerful degree, as in remote lands and in vast soli-
tudes I have since found the note of the mocking-bird,
suddenly heard, affect the listener half with delight,
half with awe, as if some demon-creature of the desert
were mimicking man for its own merriment. The chant
now had changed into an air of defying glee, of menacing
exultation; it might have been the triumphant war-
song of some antique barbarian race. The note was
sinister; a shadow passed through me, and Lilian had
closed her eyes, and was sighing heavily; then with a
rapid change, sweet as the coo with which an Arab
mother lulls her babe to sleep, the melody died away.
“ There, there, look,” murmured Lilian, moving from me,
“ the same I saw last night in sleep ; the same I saw in
the space above, on the evening I ﬁrst knew you I ”
Her eyes were ﬁxed-her hand raised; my look
followed hers, and rested on the face and form of Mar-
grave. The moon shone full upon him, so full as if
concentrating all its light upon his image. The place
on which he stood (a balcony to the upper story of a
house about ﬁfty yards distant) was considerably above
the level of the terrace from which we gazed on him.
His arms were folded on his breast, and he appeared to
be looking straight towards us. Even at that distance
the lustrous youth of his countenance appeared to me


292 A STRANGE s'roar.
terribly distinct, and the light of his wondrous eye
seemed to rest upon us in one lengthened, steady ray
through the limpid moonshine. Involuntarin I seized
Lilian’s hand, and drew her away almost by force, for
she was unwilling to move, and as I led her back, she
turned her head to look round; I too turned in jealous
rage! I breathed more freely. Margrave had dis-
appeared!
“How came he there? It is not his hotel. Whose
house is it?” I said, aloud, though speaking to myself.
Lilian remained silent; her eyes ﬁxed upon the
ground as if in deep reverie. I took her hand; it did
not return my pressure. I felt cut to the heart when
she drew coldly from me that hand, till then so frankly
cordial. I stopped short: “Lilian, what is this? you
are chilled towards me. Can the mere sound of that
man’s voice, the mere glimpse of that man’s face,
have ” I paused; I did not dare to complete my

question.
Lilian lifted her eyes to mine, and I saw at once in
those eyes a change. Their look was cold; not haughty,
bgt abstracted. “ I do not understand you,” she said,
in a weary, listless accent. “It is growing late; I
must go in.”
So we walked on moodily, no longer arm in arm, nor
hand in hand. Then it occurred to me that, the next
day Lilian would be in that narrow world of society;
that there she could scarcely fail to hear of Margrave.
to meet, to know him. Jealousy seized me with all its


A summer: near. 293
imaginary terrors, and amidst that jealousy, a nobler,
purer apprehension for herself. Had I been Lilian’s
brother instead of her betrothed, I should not have
trembled less to foresee the shadow of Margrave’s
mysterious inﬂuence passing over a mind so predis-
posed to the charm which Mystery itself has for those
whose thoughts fuse their outlines in fancies; whose
world melts away into Dreamland. Therefore I spoke.
“ Lilian, at the risk of offending you—alas! I have
never done so before this night-I must address to
you a prayer, which I implore you not to regard as the
dictate of a suspicion unworthy you and myself. The
person whom you have just heard and seen is, at
present, much courted in the circles of this town. I
entreat you not to permit any one to introduce him to
you. I entreat you not to know him. I cannot tell
you all my reasons for this petition; enough that I
pledge you my honor that those reasons are grave.
Trust then in my truth, as I trust in yours. Be assured
that I stretch not the rights which your heart has
bestowed upon mine in the promise I ask, as I shall be
freed from all fear by a promise which I know will be
sacred when once it is given.”
“What promise ?” asked Lilian, absently, as if she
had not heard my words.
“What promise? Why, to refuse all acquaintance
with that man; his name is Margrave. Promise me,
dearest, promise me.”
"Why is your voice so changed ?" said Lilian. “ Its
25*


294 A s'raasoa sroar.
tone jars on my ear,” she added, with a peevishness so
unlike her, that it startled me more than it offended;
and, without a word further, she quickened her pace,
and entered the house.
For the rest of the evening we were both taciturn
and distant towards each other. In vain Mrs. Ash-
leigh kindly sought to break down our mutual reserve.
I felt that I had the right to be resentful, and I clung
to that right the more because Lilian made no attempt
at reconciliation. This, too, was wholly unlike herself,
for her temper was ordinarily sweet—sweet to the
extreme of meekness ; saddened if the slightest misun-
derstanding between us had ever vexed me, and yearn-
ing to ask forgiveness if a look or a word had pained
me. I was in hopes that, before I went away, peace
between us would be restored. But long ere her usual
hour for retiring to rest, she rose abruptly, and, com-
plaining of fatigue‘ and headache, wished me good-
night, and avoided the hand I sorrowfully held out to
her as I opened the door.
“You must have been very unkind to poor Lilian,”
said Mrs. Ashleigh, between jest and earnest, “for I
never saw her so cross to you before And the ﬁrst
day of her return, too l”
“ The fault is not mine,” said I, somewhat sullenly;
“ I did but ask Lilian, and that as a humble prayer, not
to make the acquaintance of a stranger in this town‘
against whom I have reasons for distrust and aversion.
I know not why that prayer should displease her.”


A STRANGE s'ronv. 295
“ Nor I. Who is the stranger?”
“A person who calls himself Margrave. Let me at
least entreat you to avoid him 1”
“Oh, I have no desire to make acquaintance with
strangers. But, now Lilian is gone, do tell me all
about this dreadful murder? The servants are full of
it, and I cannot keep it long concealed from Lilian. I
was in hopes that you would have broken it to her.”
I rose impatiently; I could not bear to talk thus of
an event the tragedy of which was assoeiated in my
mind with circumstances so mysterious. I became
agitated and even angry when Mrs. Ashleigh persisted
in rambling woman-like inquiries—“ Who was sus-
pected of the deed? Who did I think had committed
it? What sort of a man was Sir Philip? What was
that strange story about a casket?” Breaking from
such interrogations, to which I could give but abrupt
and evasive answers, I seized my hat, and took my
departure.
CHAPTER XXXVIII
uzrna mom sum: names 10 mum ASHLEIGH. _
“ I HAVE promised to go to Derval Court to-day, and
shall not return till to-morrow. I cannot bear the
thought that so many hours should pass away with one
ﬁeling less kind than usual resting like a cloud upon


296 A sraanen sroar.
you and me. Lilian, if I offended you, forgive me!
Send me one line to say sol-one line which I can
place next to my heart and cover with grateful kisses
till we meet again ! ”
REPLY.
“I scarcely know what you mean, nor do I quite
understand my own state of mind at this moment. It
cannot be that I love you less—and yet—but I will not
write more now. I feel glad that we shall not meet
for the next day or so, and then I hope to be quite
recovered. I am not well at this moment. Do not ask
me to forgive you—but, if it is I who am in fault, for-
give me, oh forgive me, Allen.”
And with this unsatisfactory note-not worn next to
my heart, not covered with kisses, but thrust crumpled
into my desk like a creditor’s unwelcome bill, I ﬂung
myself on my horse and rode to Derval Court. I am
naturally proud ; my pride came now to my aid. I felt
bitterly indignant against Lilian, so indignant that I
resolved on my return to say to her, “ If in those words,
‘And yet,’ you implied a doubt whether you loved me
less, I cancel your vows, I give you back your freedom.”
And I could have passed from her threshold with a ﬁrm
foot, though with the certainty that I should never
smile again.
Does her note seem to you who may read these
pages to justify such resentment? Perhaps not. But


A sraarvoa sroar. 29’!
there is an atmosphere in the letters of the one we
love, which we alone—we who love—can feel, and in
the atmosphere of that letter I felt the chill of the
coming winter.
_ I reached the park lodge of Derval Court-late in the
day. I had occasion to visit some patients whose
houses lay scattered many miles apart, and for that
reason, as well as from the desire for some quick
bodily exercise which is so natural an effect of irritable
perturbation of mind, I had made the journey on horse-
back instead of using a carriage, that I could not have
got through the lanes and ﬁeld-paths by which alone
the work set to myself could be accomplished in time.
Just as I entered the park, an uneasy thought seized
hold of me with the strength which is ascribed to pre-
sentiments. I had passed through my study (which
has been so elaborately described) to my stables, as I
generally did when I wanted my saddle-horse, and, in
so doing, had, doubtless, left open the gate to the iron
palisade, and probably the window of the study itself.
I had been in this careless habit for several years,
without ever once having cause for self-reproach. As
I before said, there was nothing in my study to tempt a
thief; the study shut out from the body of the house,
and the servant sure at nightfall both to close the win-
dow and lock the gate; yet now, for the ﬁrst time, I
felt an impulse, urgent, keen, and disquieting, to ride
back to the town and see those precautions taken. I
could not guess why, but something whispered to me


298 A STRANGE swear.
that my neglect had exposed me to some great danger.
I even checked my horse and looked at my watch; too
late!-already just on the stroke of Strahan’s dinner-
hour as ﬁxed in his note; my horse, too, was fatigued
and spent; besides, what folly! what bearded man can
believe in the warnings of a “presentiment?”
pushed on, and soon halted before the old-fashioned
ﬂight of stairs that led up to the hall. Here I was
accosted by the old steward; he had just descended
the stairs, and, as I dismounted, he thrust his arm into
mine unceremoniously, and drew me a little aside.
“Doctor, I was right; it was his ghost that I saw
by the iron door of the mausoleum. I saw it again at
the same place last night, but I had no ﬁt then. Jus-
tice on his murderer! Blood for blood!”
“Ay!” said I sternly; for if I suspected Margrave
before, I felt convinced now that the inexpiable deed
was his. Wherefore convinced? Simply because I
now hated him more, and hate is so easily convinced!
“Lilian! Lilian!” I murmured to myself that name:
the ﬂame of my hate was fed by my jealousy. “Ay ! ”
said I, sternly, “ murder will out.”
“ What are the police about?” said the. old man,
querulously; “days pass on days, and no nearer the
truth. But what does the new owner care? He has
the rents and acres; what does he care for the dead?
I Will never serve another master. I have just told
Mr. Strahan so. How do I know whether he did not
do the deed? Who else had an interest in it? "


A sraasea sroar 299
“Hush, hush!” I cried; “you do not know how
Wildly you are talking.”
The old man stared at me, shook his head, released
my arm, and strode away.
A laboring man came out of the garden, and having
unbuckled the saddle-bags, which contained the few
things required for so short a visit, I consigned my
horse to his care, and ascended the perron. The old
housekeeper met me in the hall, conducted me up the
great staircase, showed me into a bedroom prepared for
me, and told me that Mr. Strahan was already waiting
dinner for me. I should ﬁnd him in the study. I
hastened to join him. He began apologizing, very un-
necessarily, for the state of his establishment. He had,
as yet, engaged no new servants. The housekeeper,
with the help of a housemaid, did all the work.
Richard Strahan at college had been as little distin-
guishable from other young men as a youth neither
rich nor poor, neither clever nor stupid, neither hand-
some nor ugly, neither audacious sinner nor formal
saint, possibly could he. \
Yet, to those who understood him well, he was not
without some of those moral qualities by which a youth
of mediocre intellect often matures into a superior man.
He was, as Sir Philip had been rightly informed,
thoroughly honest and upright. But with a strong
sense of duty, there was also a certain latent hardness.
He was not indulgent. He had outward frankness
with acquaintances, but was easily roused to suspicion


800 A STRANGE sroar.
He had much of the thi'iftiness and self-denial of the
North countryman, and I have no doubt that he had
lived with calm content and systematic economy on an
income which made him, as a bachelor, independent of
his nominal profession, but would not have sufﬁced, in
itself, for the ﬁtting maintenance of a wife and family.
He was, therefore, still single.
It seemed to me, even during the few minutes in
which we conversed before dinner was announced, that
his character showed a new phase with his new for-
tunes. He talked in a grandiose style of the duties of
station and the woes of wealth. He seemed to be very
much afraid of spending, and still more appalled at the
idea of being cheated. His temper, too, was rufﬂed;
the steward had given him notice to quit. Mr. Jeeves,
who had spent the morning with him, had said the
steward would be a great loss, and a steward, at once
sharp and honest, was not to be easily found.
What triﬂes can embitter the possession of great
goods! Strahan had taken a fancy to the old house;
it was conformable to his notions, both of comfort and
pomp, and Sir Philip had expressed a desire that the
old house should be pulled down. Strahan had in-
spected the plans for the new mansion to which Sir
Philip had referred, and the plans did not please him;
on the contrary, they terriﬁed.
“Jeeves says that I could not build such a house
under seventy or eighty thousand pounds, and then it
will require twice the establishment which will suﬁice


A s'raauen s'roaY. 301
for this. I shall be ruined,” cried the man who had
just come into possession of at least ten thousand a
year.
“ Sir Philip did not enjoin you to pull down the old
house; he only advised you to do so. Perhaps he
thought the site less healthy than that which he pro-
poses for a new building, or was aware of some other
drawback to the house, which you may discover later.
Wait a little, and see before deciding."
“ But, at all events, I suppose I must pull down this
curious old room-the nicest 'part of the whole house i "
Strahan, as he spoke, looked wistfully round at the
quaint oak chimney-piece; the carved ceiling; the well-
built, solid walls, with the large mullion casement,
opening so pleasantly on the sequestered gardens. He
had ensconced himself in Sir Philip’s study, the chamber
in which the once famous mystic, Forman, had found a
refuge.
“ So cozy a room for a single man i” sighed Strahan.
“Near the stables and dog-kennels, tool But I sup-
pose I must pull it down. I am' not bound to do so
~legally; it is no condition of the will. But in honor
and gratitude I ought not to disobey poor Sir Philip’s
positive injunction.”
“Of that,” said I, gravely, “there cannot be a
doubt.” _
Here our conversation Was interrupted by Mrs
Gates, who informed us that dinner was served in the
library. Wine of great age was brought from the long-
26


802 A s'raauos sroar.
neglected cellars; Strahan ﬁlled and reﬁlled his glass,
and, warmed into hilarity, began to talk of bringing old
college friends around him in the winter season, and
making the roof-tree ring with laughter and song once
more.
Time were away, and night had long set in, when
Strahan at last rose from the table, his speech thick
and his tongue unsteady. We returned to the study,
and I reminded my host of the special object of my visit
to him, viz., the inspection of Sir Philip’s manuscript.
“It is tough reading,” said Strahan; “ better put it
oﬂ’ till to-morrow. You will stay here two or three
days.”
“ No; I must return to L— to-morrow. I cannot
absent myself from my patients. And it is the more
desirable that no time should be lost before examining
the contents of the manuscript, because probably they
may give some clue to the detection of the murderer.”
“Why do you think that?” cried Strahan, startled
from the drowsiness that was creeping over him.
“ Because the manuscript may show that Sir Philip
had some enemy— and who but an enemy could have i
had a motive for such a crime? Come, bring forth the
book. You of all men are bound to be alert in every
research that may guide the retribution of justice to
the assassin of your benefactor.”
“ Yes, yes. I will oﬁ'er a reward of ﬁve thousand
pounds for the discovery. Allen, that wretched old
steward had the insolence to tell me that I was the


a sraasoa sroav. 303
only man in the world who could have an interest in
the death of his master: and he looked at me as if he
thought that I had committed the crime. You are
right; it becomes me, of all men, to be alert. The
assassin must be found. He must hang.”
While thus speaking, Strahan had risen, unlocked a
desk which stood on one of the safes, and drawn forth
a thick volume, the contents of which were protected
by a clasp and lock. Strahan proceeded to open this
lock by one of a bunch of keys, which he said had been
found on Sir Philip’s person.
“There, Allen, this is the memoir. I need not tell
you what store I place on it; not, between you and me,
that I expect it will warrant poor Sir Philip’s high
opinion of his own scientiﬁc discoveries. That part of
his letter seems to me very queer, and very ﬂighty.
But he evidently set his heart on the publication of
his work, in part, if not in whole. And, naturally, I
must desire to comply with a wish so distinctly intima-
ted by one to whom I owe so much. I beg you, there-
fore, not to be too fastidious. Some valuable hints in
medicine, I have reason to believe, the manuscript will
contain, and these may help you in your profession,
Allen.” -
“ You have reason to believe! Why l’”
“ Oh, a charming young fellow, who, with most of
the other gentry resident at L , called on me at my
hotel, told me that he had travelled in the East, and
had there heard much of Sir Philip’s knowledge of


304 A STRANGE STORY.
chemistry, and the cures it had enabled him to perform."
“ You speak of Mr. Margrave. He called on you?”
“Yes.”
“ You did not, I trust, mention to him the existence
of Sir Philip’s manuscript.”
“Indeed I did; and I said you had promised to
enamine it. He seemed delighted at that, and spoke
most highly of your peculiar ﬁtness for the task."
“Give me the manuscript,” said I, abruptly, “and,
after I have looked at it to-night, I may have some-
thing to say to you to-morrow in reference to Mr.
Margrave.”
“ There is the book,” said Strahan; “I have just
glanced at it, and ﬁnd much of it written in Latin; and
I am ashamed to say that I have so neglected the little
Latin I learned in our college days, that I could not
construe what I looked at.”
I sat dOWn and placed the book before me; Strahan
fell into a doze, from which he was wakened by the
housekeeper, who brought in the tewthings.
“Well,” said Strahan, languidly, “Do you ﬁnd much
in the book that explains the many puzzling riddles in
poor Sir Philip’s eccentric life and pursuits? ”
“ Yes,” said I. “ Do not interrupt me.”
Strahan again began to d02e, and the housekeeper
asked if we should want anything more that night, and
if I thought I could ﬁnd my way to my bedroom.
I dismissed her impatiently, and continued to read.
Strahan woke up againas the clock struck eleven,


A sraanoa s'roav. 305
and ﬁnding me still absorbed in the manuscript, and
disinclined to converse, lighted his candle, and telling
me to replace the manuscript in the desk when I had
done with it, and be sure to lock the desk and take
charge of the key, which he took 05' the bunch and
gave me, went upstairs, yawning.
I was alone in the wizard Forman’s chamber, and
bending over a stranger record than had ever excited
my infant wonder, or, in later years, provoked my scep-
tic smile.
CHAPTER XXXIX.
THE Manuscript was written in a small and peculiar
hand-writing, which, though evidently by the same
person whose letter to Strahan I had read, was,
whether from haste or some imperfection in the ink,
much more hard to decipher. Those parts of the
Memoir which related to experiments, or alleged secrets
in Nature, that the writer intimated a desire to submit
exclusively to scholars or men of science, were in
Latin - and Latin which, though grammatically correct,
was frequently obscure. But all that detained the eye
and attention on the page necessarily served to impress
the contents more deeply on remembrance.
The narrative commenced with the writer’s sketch
of his childhood. Both his parents had died before
26* u


306 A sraauoa sroaY.
he attained his seventh year. The orphan had been
sent by his guardians to a private school, and his holi-
days had been passed at Derval Court. Here his ear-
liest reminiscences were those of the quaint old room,
in which I now sat, and of his childish wonder at the
inscription on the chimney-piece—who and what was
the Simon Forman who had there found a refuge from
persecution? Of what nature were the studies he had
cultivated, and the discoveries he boasted to have made ?
When he was about sixteen, Philip Derval had
begun to read the many mystic books which the library
contained; but without other result on his mind than
the sentiment of disappointment and disgust. The
impressions produced on the credulous imagination of
childhood vanished. He went to the university; was
sent abroad to travel; and on his return took that place
in the circles of London which is so readily conceded
to a young idler of birth and fortune. He passed
quickly over that period of his life, as one of extrava-
gance and dissipation, from which he was ﬁrst drawn
by the attachment for his cousin to which his letter to
Strahan referred. Disappointed in the hopes which
that aﬁ'ection had conceived, and his fortune impaired,
partly by some years of reckless profusion, and partly
by the pecuniary sacriﬁces at which he had effected
his cousin’s marriage with another, he retired to Derval
Court, to live there in solitude and seclusion. On
searching for some old title-deeds required for a mort-
gage, he chanced upon a collection of manuscripts, much


A s'rnaner. near. 307
discolored, and in part eaten away by moth or damp.
These, on examination, proved to be the writings of
Forman. Some of them were astrological observations
and predictions; some were upon the nature of the
Cabbala; some upon the invocation of spirits and the
magic of the dark ages. All had a certain interest, for
they were interspersed with personal remarks, anec-
dotes of eminent actors in a very stirring time, and were
composed as Colloquies, in imitation of Erasmus; the
second person in the dialogue being Sir Miles Derval,
the patron and pupil; the ﬁrst person being Forman,
the philosopher and expounder.
But along with these shadowy lucubrations were
treatises of a more uncommon and a more startling
character; discussions on various occult laws of nature,
and detailed accounts of analytical experiments. These
opened a new, and what seemed to Sir Philip a prac- V
tical, ﬁeld of inquiry—a true border-land between
natural science and imaginative speculation. Sir Philip-
had cultivated philosophical science at the university;
he resumed the study, and tested himself the truth of
various experiments suggested by Forman. Some, to
his surprise, proved successful-some wholly failed.
These lucubrations ﬁrst tempted the writer of the
memoir towards the studies in which the remainder
of his life had been consumed. But he spoke of the
lucubrations themselves as valuable only where sug-
gestive of some truths which Forman had accidentally
approached, without being aware of their true nature


£8 A STRANGE wear.
and importance. They were debased by absurd puer-
ilities, and vitiated by the vain and presumptuous
ignorance which characterized the astrology of the
middle ages. For these reasons the writer intimated
his intention (if he lived to return to England) to
destroy Forman’s manuscripts, together with sundry
other books, and a few commentaries of his own upon
studies which had for a while misled him—all now
deposited in the safes of the room in which I sat.
After some years passed in the retirement of Derval
Court, Sir Philip was seized with the desire to travel,
and the taste he had imbibed for occult studies led him
towards those Eastern lands in which they took their
origin, and still retain their professors.
Several pages of the manuscript were now occupied
with minute statements of the writer‘s earlier disap-
pointment in the objects of his singular research. The
so-called magicians, accessible to the curiosity of
European travellers, were either but ingenious jugglers,
or produced effects that perplexed him by practices
they had mechanically learned, but of the rationale of
which they were as ignorant as himself. It was not
till he had resided some considerable time in the East,
and acquired a familiar knowledge of its current lan-
guages and the social habits of its various populations,
that he became acquainted with men in whom he
recognized earnest cultivators of the lore which tradition
ascribes to the colleges and priesthoods of the ancient
world; men generally living remote from others, and


A STRA NGE STORY. 809
seldom to be bribed by money to exhibit their marvels
or divulge their secrets. In his intercourse with these
sages, Sir Philip arrived at the conviction that there
does exist an art of magic, distinct from the guile of
the conjuror, and applying to certain latent powers and
afﬁnities in nature a philosophy akin to that which we
receive in our acknowledged schools, inasmuch as it is
equally based upon experiment, and produces from
deﬁnite causes deﬁnite results. In support of this
startling proposition, Sir Philip now devoted more than
half his volume to the detail of various experiments,
to the process and result of which he pledged his guar-
antee as the actual operator. As most of these alleged
experiments appeared to me wholly incredible, and as
all of them were unfamiliar to my practical experience,
and could only be veriﬁed or falsiﬁed by tests that
would require no inconsiderable amount of time and
care, I passed with little heed over the pages in which
they were set forth. I was impatient to arrive at that
part of the manuscript which might throw light on the
mystery in which my interest was the keenest. What
were the links which connected the existence of Mar-
grave with the history of Sir Philip Derval? Thus
hurrying on, page after page, I suddenly, towards the
end of the volume, came upon a name that arrested all
my intention—Haroun of Aleppo. He who has read
the words addressed to me in my trance may well con-
ceive the thrill that shot through my heart when I
came upon that name, and will readily understand how


310 A STRANGE STORY.
much more vividly my memory retains that part of the
manuscript to which I now proceed, than all which had
gone before.
“It Was,” wrote Sir Philip, “in an obscure suburb
of Aleppo that I at length met with the wonderful
man from whom I have acquired a knowledge immea-
surably more profound and occult than that which may
be tested in the experiments to which I-have devoted
so large a share of this memoir. Haroun of Aleppo
had, indeed, mastered every secret in nature which the
nobler or theurgic magic seeks to fathom.
“ He had discovered the great Principle of Animal
Life, which had hitherto battled the subtlest anatomist;
provided only that the great organs were not irreparably
destroyed, there was no disease that he could not cure;
no decrepitude to which he could not restore vigor;
yet his science was based on the same theory as that
espoused by the best professional practitioners of medi-
cine,—viz., that the true art of healing is to .assist
nature to throw off the disease—to summon, as it were,
the whole system to eject the enemy that has fastened
on a part. And thus his processes, though occasionally
varying in the means employed, all combined in this -
viz., the reinvigorating-and recruiting of the principle
of life.” '
No one knew the birth or origin of Haroun; no one
knew his age. In outward appearance he was in the
strength and prime of mature manhood. But, accord-
ing to testimonies in which the writer of the memoir


A srsauon near. 311
expressed a belief that, I need scarcely say, appeared
to me egregiously credulous, Haroun’s existence under
the same name, and known by the same repute, could
be traced back to more than a hundred years. He told
Sir Philip that he had thrice renewed his own life, and
had resolved to do so no more—he had grown weary
of living on. With all his gifts, Haroun owned him-
self to be consumed by a profound melancholy. He
complained that there was nothing new to him under
the sun; he said that, while he had at his command
unlimited wealth, Wealth had ceased to bestow enjoy.
ment; and he preferred living as simply as a peasant;
he had tired out all the aﬁ'ections and all the passions
of the human heart; he was in the universe as in a
solitude. In a word, Haroun would often repeat with
mournful solemnity: “ The soul is not meant to inhabit
this earth, and in ﬂeshy tabernacle, for more than the
period usually assigned to mortals; and when by art in
repairing the walls of the body, we so retain it, the
soul repines, becomes inert or dejected.” “He only,”
said Haroun, “would feel continued joy in continued
existence who could preserve in perfection the sensual
part of man, with such mind or reason as may be inde-
pendent of the spiritual essence; but whom soul itself
has quittcdl Man, in short, as the grandest of the
animals, but without the sublime discontent of earth,
which is the peculiar attribute of soul.”
One evening Sir Philip was surprised to ﬁnd at
Haroun’s house another European. He paused in his


812 a STRANGE s'roaY.
narrative to describe this man. He said that for three
or four years previously he had heard frequent mention,
amongst the cultivators of magic, of an orientalized
Englishman engaged in researches similar to his own,
and to whom was ascribed a terrible knowledge in
those branches of the art which, even in the East, are
condemned as instrumental to evil. Sir Philip here
distinguished at length, as he had so brieﬂy distin-
guished in his conversation with me, between the two
kinds of magic-that which he alleged to be as pure
from sin as any other species of experimental know-
ledge, and that by which the agencies of witchcraft are
invoked for the purposes of guilt.
The Englishman, to whom the culture of this latter
and darker kind of magic was ascribed, Sir Philip
Derval had never hitherto come across. He now met
him at the house of Haroun; decrepit, emaciated,
bowed down with inﬁrmities, and racked with pain.
Though little more than sixty, his aspect was that of
extreme old age, but still on his face there were seen
the ruins of a once singular beauty; and still in his
mind there was a force that contrasted the decay of the
body. Sir Philip had never met with an intellect more
powerful and more corrupt. The son of a notorious
usurer, heir to immense wealth, and endowed with the
talents which justify ambition, he had entered upon
life burdened with the odium of his father’s name. A
duel, to which he had been provoked by an ungencrous
taunt on his origin, but in which a temperament ﬁercely


A s'rnanos STORY. 813
vindictive had led him to violate the usages prescribed
by the social laws that regulate such encounters, had
subjected him to a trial in which he escaped conviction,
either by a ﬂaw in the technicalities of legal procedure,
or by the compassion of the jury ;* but the moral pre-
* The reader will here observe a discrepancy between Mrs.
Poyntz’s account and Sir Philip Derval’s narrative. According
to the former, Louis Grayle was tried in his absence from
England, and sentenced to three years’ imprisonment, which his
ﬂight enabled him to evade. According to the latter, Louis
Grayle stood his trial, and obtained an acquittal. Sir Philip's
account must, at least, be nearer the truth then the lady’s,
because Louis Grayle could not, according to English law, have
been tried on a capital charge without being present in court.
Mrs. Poyntz tells her story as I. woman generally does tell a
story—sure to make a mistake where’she touches on a question
of law; and—unconsciously perhaps to herself— the Woman
of the World warps the facts in her narrative so as to save the
personal dignity of the hero, who has captivated her interest,
not from the moral odium of a great crime, but the debasing
position of a prisoner at the bar. Allen Fenwick, no doubt,
purposely omits to notice the discrepancy between these two
statements, or to animadvert on the mistake which, in the eyes
of a lawyer, would discredit Mrs. Poyntz’s. It is consistent with
some of the objects for which Allen Fenwick makes public his
Strange Story, to invite the reader to draw his own inferences
from the contradictions by which, even in the most commonplace
matters (and how much more in any tale of wonder!), a fact
stated by one person is made to differ from the same fact stated
by another. The rapidity with which a truth becomes trans-
formed into'fable, when it is once sent on its travels from lip to
lip, is illustrated by an amusement at this moment in fashion.
The amusement is this: In a party of eight or ten persons, let
one whisper to another an account. of some supposed transaction,
or a piece of invented gossip relating to absent persons, dead or
alive; let the person, who thus ﬁrst hears the story, proceed to
whisper it, as exactly as he can remember what he has just
27


314 A STRANGE sroar.
snmptions against him were suﬁiciently strong to set
an indelible brand on his honor, and an insurmountable
barrier to the hopes which his early ambition had con-
ceived. After this trial he had quitted his country to
return to it no more. Thenceforth much of his life had
been passed out of sight or conjecture of civilized men
in remote regions and amongst barbarous tribes. At
intervals, however, he had reappeared in European
capitals; shunned by and shunning his equals, sur-
rounded by parasites, amongst whom were always to
be found men of considerable learning, whom avarice
or poverty subjected to the inﬂuences of his wealth.
For the last nine or ten years he had settled in Persia,
purchased extensive lands, maintained the retinue, and
heard, to the next; the next does the same to his neighbor, and
so on, till the tale has run the round of the party. Each nar-
rator, as soon as he has whispered his version of the tale, writes
down what he has whispered. And though, in this game, no one
has had any interest to misrepresent, but, on the contrary, each
for his own credit’s sake strives to repeat what he has heard as
faithfully as he can, it will be almost invariably found that the
story told by the ﬁrst person has received the most material
alterations before it has reached the eighth or the tenth. Some-
times, the most important feature of the whole narrative is alto-
gether omitted; sometimes, a feature altogether new and pre-
posterously absurd has been added. At the close of the experi-
ment one is tempted to exclaim: “ How, after this, can any of
those portions of history, which the chronicler took from hearsay,
be believed 3" But, above all, does not every anecdote of scandal
which has passed, not through ten lips, but perhaps through ten
thousand, before it has reached us, become quite as perplexing
to him who would get at the truth, as the marvels he recounts
are to the bewildered reason of Fenwick the Sceptioi


A sraanen sronY. 315
exercised more than the power, of an Oriental prince.
Such was the man who, prematurely worn out; and
assured by physicians that he had not six weeks of life,
had come to Aleppo with the gaudy escort of an
Eastern satrap, had caused himself to be borne in his
litter to the mud hut of Haroun the Sage, and now
called on the magician, in whose art was his last hope,
to reprieve him from the—grave.
He turned round to Sir Philip, when the latter
entered the room, and exclaimed in English, “I am
here because you are. Your intimacy with this man
was known to me. I took your character as the guar-
antee of his own. Tell me that I am no credulous
dupe. Tell him that I, Louis Grayle, am no needy
petitioner. Tell me of his wisdom; assure him of my
wealth.”
Sir Philip looked inquiringly at Haroun, who remained
seated on his carpet in profound silence.
“ What is it you ask of Haroun ?”
“ To live on—to live on. For every year of life he
can give me, I will load these ﬂoors with gold.”
“ Gold will not tempt Haroun.”
“ What will i”
“Ask him yourself; you speak his language.”
“ I have asked him; he vouchsafes me no answer.”
Haroun here suddenly roused himself as from a
reverie. He drew from under his robe a small phial,
from which he let fall a single drop into a cup of water,
and said, “Drink this. Send to me tomorrow for such


816 A s'raarws s'roar.
medicaments as I may prescribe. Return hither your-
self in three days; not before 1 ”
When Grayle was gone, Sir Philip, moved to pity,
asked Haroun if, indeed, it were within the compass of
his art to preserve life in a frame that appeared so
thoroughly. exhausted. Haroun answered, J‘A fever
may so waste the lamp of life that one ruder gust of
air could extinguish the ﬂame, yet the sick man recovers.
This sick man’s existence has been one long fever; this
sick man can recover.”
“ You will aid him to do so ?”
“ Three days hence I will tell you.”
On the third day Grayle revisited Haroun, and, at
Haroun’s request, Sir Philip came also. Grayle de-
clared that he had already derived unspeakable relief
from the remedies -administered; he was lavish in
expressions of gratitude; pressed large gifts on Haroun,
and seemed pained when they were refused. This
time Haroun conversed freely, drawing forth Grayle’s
own irregular, perverted, stormy, but powerful intellect.
I can best convey the general nature of Grayle’s
. share in the dialogue between himself, Haroun, and
Derval—recorded in the narrative in words which I
cannot trust my memory to repeat in detail—by stat-
ing the effect it produced on my own mind. It seemed,
while I read. as if there passed before me some convul-
sion of Nature— a storm, an earthquake. Outcries of
rage, of scorn, of despair; a despot’s vehemence of will;
a rebel‘s scoﬂ' at authority. Yet, ever and anon, some


A smarter STORY. 31'!
swell of lofty thought, some burst of passionate genius,
abrupt variations from the vaunt of superb deﬁance to
the wail of intense remorse.
The whole had in it, I know not what, of uncouth
but colossal—like the chant, in the old lyrical tragedy
of one of those mythical giants, who, proud of descent
from Night and Chaos, had held sway over the ele-
ments, while still crude and conﬂicting, to be crushed
under the rocks, upheaved in their struggle, as Order
and Harmony subjected a brightening Creation to the
milder inﬂuences throned in Olympus. But it was
not till the later passages of the dialogue in which my
interest was now absorbed, that the language ascribed
to this sinister personage lost a gloomy pathos not the
less impressive for the awe with which it was mingled.
For, till then, it seemed to me as if in that tempestuous
nature there were still broken glimpses of starry light;
that a character originally lofty, if irregular and ﬁerce,
had been embittered by early and continuous war with
the social world, and had, in that war, become maimed .
and distorted; that, under happier circumstances, its
ﬁery strength might have been disciplined to good;
that even now, where remorse was so evidently poig-
nant, evil could not be irredeemably conﬁrmed.
At length all the dreary compassion previously in-
spired vanished in one unqualiﬁed abhorrence.
The subjects discussed changed from those which,
relating to the common world of men, were within the
scope of my reason. Haroun led his wild guest to
27*


318 A srnANor: sroav.
boast of his own proﬁciency in magic, and, despite my
incredulity, I could not overcome the shudder with
which ﬁctions, however extravagant, that deal with
that dark Unknown abandoned to the chimeras of poets,
will, at night and in solitude, send through the veins
of men the least accessible to imaginary terrors.
Grayle spoke of the power he had exercised through
the agency of evil spirits—a power to fascinate and to
destroy. He spoke of the aid revealed to him, now too
late, which such direful allies could afford, not only to
a private revenge, but to a kingly ambition. Had he
acquired the knowledge he declared himself to possess,
before the feebleness of the decaying body made it
valueless, how he could have triumphed over that
world, which had expelled his youth from its palel He
spoke of means by which his inﬂuence could work unde-
tected on the minds of others, control agencies that
could never betray, and baﬁie the justice that could
never discover. He spoke vaguely of a power by which
a spectral reﬂection of the material body could be cast,
like a shadow, to a distance; glide through the walls
of a prison, elude the sentinels of a camp-a power
that he asserted to be—when enforced by eoncentred
will, and acting on the mind, where, in each individual
temptation found mind the weakest—almost infallible
in its eﬁ‘eet to seduce or to appal. And he closed these
and similar boasts of demoniacal arts, which I remem-
ber tob obscurely to repeat, with a tumultuous impre-
cation on their nothingness to avail against the gripe


A s'razmoa sroar. 319
of death. All this lore he would communicate to He-
roun, in return for what? A boon shared by the
meanest peasant—life, common life; to breathe yet a
while the air, feel yet a while the sun.
Then Haroun replied. He said, with a quiet dis.
dain, that the dark art to which Grayle made such
boastful pretence, was the meanest of all abuses of
knowledge, rightly abandoned, in all ages, to the vilest
natures. And then, suddenly changing his tone, he
spoke, so far as I can remember the words assigned to
him in the manuscript, to this effect:
“Fallen and unhappy wretch, and you ask me for
prolonged life'l-a prolonged curse to the world and to
yourself. Shall I employ spells to lengthen the term
of the Pestilence, or profane the secrets of Nature to
restore vigor and youth to the failing energies of
Crime?”
Grayle, as if stunned by the rebuke, fell on his knees
with despairing entreaties that strangely contrasted his
previous arrogance. “And it was,” he said, “because'
his life had been evil that he dreaded death. If life
could be renewed he would repent, he would change;
he retracted his vannts, he would forsake the arts he
had boasted, he would re-enter the world as its bene-
factor.”
“So ever the wicked man lies to himself when 'ap-
palled by the shadow of death,” answered Haroun.
“But know, by the remorse which preys on thy soul,
that it is not thy soul that addresses this prayer to me.


520 a srsanen s'roar.
Couldst thou hear, through the storms of the Mind, the
Soul’s melancholy whisper, it would dissuade thee from
a wish to live on. While I speak, I behold it, that
soon! Sad for the stains on its essence, awed by the
account it must render, but dreading, as the 'direst
calamity, a renewal of years below—darker stains and
yet heavier accounts? Whatever the sentence it may
now undergo, it has a hope for mercy in the remorse
which the mind vainly struggles to quell. But darker
its doom if longer retained to earth, yoked to the mind
that corrupts it, and enslaved to the senses which thou
bidst me restore to their tyrannous forces.”
And Grayle bowed his head and covered his face
with his hands in silence and in trembling.
Then Sir Philip, seized with compassion, pleaded for
him. “At least, could not the soul have longer time
on earth for repentance?” And while Sir Philip was
so pleading, Grayle fell prostrate in a swoon like that
of death. When he recovered, his head was leaning
on Haroun’s knee, and his opening eyes ﬁxed on the
glittering phial which Haroun held, and from which his
lips had been moistened.
“Wondrousl” he murmured; “how I feel life ﬂow-
ing back to me. And that, then, is the elixir! it is no
fable!”
His hands stretched greedily, as to seize the phial,
and he cried imploringly, “More, more!” Haroun
replaced the vessel in the folds of his robe, and an
ewered:


A s'raauoa sroar. 321
“I will not renew thy youth, but I will release thee
from bodily suﬁ'ering: I will leave the mind and the
soul free from the pangs of 'the ﬂesh, to reconcile, if yet
possible, their long war. My skill may afford thee
months yet for repentance; seek, in that interval, to
atone for the evil of sixty years; apply thy wealth
where it may most compensate for injury done, most
relieve the indigent, and most aid the virtuous. Listen
to thy remorse. Hu’mble thyself in prayer.”
Grayle departed, sighing heavily and muttering to
himself.
The next day Haroun summoned Sir Philip Derval,
and said to him:
“Depart to Damascus. In that city the Pestilence
has appeared. Go thither thou, to heal and to save.
In this casket are stored the surest antidotes to the
poison of the plague. Of that essence, undiluted and
pure, which tempts to the undue prolongation of soul
in the prison of ﬂesh, this casket contains not a drop.
I curse not my friend with so mournful a boon. Thou
hast learned enough of my art to know by what simples
the health of the temperate is easily restored to its
balance, and their path to the grave smoothed from
pain. Not more should Man covet from Nature for the
solace and weal of the body. Nobler gifts far than
aught for the body this casket contains. Herein are
the essences which quicken the life of those duplicate
senses that lie dormant and coiled in their chrysalis
web, awaiting the wings of a future development-the
V


322 A srsasos srosv.
senses by which we can see, though not with the eye,
and hear, but not by the ear. Herein are the links
between Man’s mind and Nature’s; herein are secrets
more precious even than these—those extracts of light
which enable the Soul to distinguish itself from the
Mind, and discriminate the spiritual life, not more from
life carnal than life intellectual. Where thou seest
some noble intellect, studious of Nature, intent upon
Truth, yet ignoring the fact that- all animal life has a
mind, and Man alone on the earth ever asked, and has
asked, from the hour his step trod the Earth and his
eye sought the Heaven, ‘Have I not a soul;- can it
perish i ’—there, such aids to the soul, in the innermost
vision vouchsafed to the mind, thou mayest lawfully
use. But the treasures contained in this casket are like
all which a mortal can win from the mines he explores;
- good or ill in their uses as they pass to the hands of
the good or the evil. Thou wilt never conﬁde them
but to those who will not abuse; and even then, thou
art an adept too versed in the mysteries of Nature not
to discriminate betWeen the powers that may serve the
good to good ends, and the powers that may tempt the
good - where less wise than experience has made thee
and me—to the ends that are evil; and not even to thy
friend, the most virtuous—if less proof against passion,
than thou and I have become—wilt thou conﬁde such
contents of the casket as may work on the fancy, to
deafen the conscience, and imperil the soul. ”
Sir Philip took the casket, and with it directions for


A STRANGE sromx 32?.
use, which he did not detail. He then spoke to Haroun
about Louis Grayle, who had inspired him with a
mingled sentiment of admiration and abhorrence; of,
pity and terror. And Haroun answered thus, repeating
the words ascribed to him, so far as I can trust, in
regard to them—as to all else in this marvellous nar-
rative—t0 a memory habitually tenacious even in
ordinary matters, and strained to the utmost extent of
its power, by the strangeness of the ideas presented to
it, and the intensity of my personal interest in whatever
admitted a ray into that cloud which, gathering fast
over my reason, now threatened storm to my aﬂ'ections:
“ When the mortal deliberately allies himself to the
spirits of evil, he surrenders the citadel of his being to
the guard of its enemies; and those who look from
without can only dimly guess what passes within the
precincts abandoned to Powers whose very nature we
shrink to contemplate, lest our mere gaze should invite
them. This man, whom thou pitiest, is not yet ever-
lastingly consigned to the ﬁends, because his soul still
struggles against them. His life has been one long
war betWeen his intellect which is mighty and his
spirit which is feeble. The intellect, armed and winged
by the passions, has besieged and oppressed the soul;
but the soul has never ceased to repine and to repent.
And at moments it has gained its inherent ascendency,
persuaded revenge to drop the prey it had seized,
turned‘ the mind astray from hatred and wrath into
unwonted paths of charity and love. In the long desert


324 A s'raauen aroma.
of guilt there have been green spots and fountains of
good. The ﬁends have occupied the intellect which
invoked them, but they have never yet thoroughly
mastered the soul which their presence appals. In the
struggle that now passes within that breast, amidst the
ﬂickers of waning mortality, only Allah, whose eye
never slumbers, can aid.”
Haroun then continued, in words yet more strange
and yet more deeply graved in my memory:
“ There have been men (thou mayst have known
such) who, after an illness in which life itself seemed
suspended, have arisen, as out of a sleep, with charac-
ters wholly changed. Before, perhaps gentle and good
and truthful, they now become bitter, malignant and
false. To the persons and the things they had before
loved, they evince repugnance and loathing. Some-
times this change is so marked and irrational, that
their kindred ascribe it to madness. Not the madness
which affects them in the ordinary business of life, but
that which turns into harshness and discord the moral
harmony that results from natures whole and complete.
But there are dervishes who hold that in that illness,
which had for its time the likeness of death, the soul
itelf has passed away, and an evil genius has ﬁXed
itself into the body and the brain, thus left void of their
former tenant, and animates them in the unaccountable
change from the past to the present existence. Such
mysteries have formed no part of my study, and I tell
you the conjecture received in the East without hazard-


a srnauoa sroav. 325
ing a comment whether of incredulity or belief. But if.
in this war between the mind which the ﬁends have
seized, and the soul which implores refuge of Allah ; if,
while the mind of you traveller now covets life length-
ened on earth for the enjoyments it had perverted its
faculties to seek and to ﬁnd in sin, and covets so eagerly
that it would shrink from no crime, and revolt from no
ﬁend, that could promise the gift—the soul shudder-
ingly implores to be saved from new guilt, and would
rather abide by the judgment of Allah on the sins that
have darkened it, than pass forever irredeemably away
to the demons: if this be so, what if the soul’s petition
be heard-what if it rise from the ruins around it—
what if the ruins be left to the witchcraft that seeks to
rebuild them? There, if demons might enter, that
which they sought as their prize has escaped them;
that which they ﬁnd would mock them by its own
incompleteness even in evil. In vain might animal life
the most perfect be given to the machine of the ﬂesh,
in vain might the mind, freed from the check of the soul,
be leftto roam at will through a brain stored with
memories of knowledge and skilled in the command of
its faculties; in vain, in addition to all that body and
brain bestow on the normal condition of man, might
unhallowed reminiscences gather all the arts and the
charms of the sorcery by which the ﬁends tempted the
soul, before it ﬂed, through the passions of ﬂesh and
the cravings of mind; the Thing, thus devoid of a soul,
would be an instrument of evil, doubtless, but an
28


326 A s'raauos s'roar.
instrument that of itself could not design, invent, and
complete. The demons themselves could have no per-
manent hold on the perishable materials. They might
enter it for some gloomy end which Allah permits
in his inscrutable Wisdom; but they could leave it no
trace when they pass from it, because there is no
conscience where soul is wanting. The human animal
without soul, but otherwise made felicitously perfect in
its mere vital organization, might ravage and destroy,
as the tiger and the serpent may destroy and ravage,
and, the moment after, would sport in the sunlight
harmless and rejoicing, because, like the serpent and
the tiger, it is incapable of remorse.”
“Why startle my wonder,” said Derval, “with so
fantastic an image ?”
“ Because, possibly the image may come into palpable
form! I know, while I speak to thee, that this miserable
man is calling to his aid the evil sorcery over which he
boasts his control. To gain the end he desires, he must
pass through a crime. Sorcery whispers to him how to
pass through it, secure from the detection of man. The
soul resists, but in resisting, is weak against the tyranny
of the mind to which it has submitted so long. Ques~
tion me no more. But if I vanish from thine eyes, if
thou hear that the death which, to my sorrow and in
my foolishness I have failed to recognize as the merci-
ful minister of Heaven, has removed me at last from the
earth, believe that the Pale Visitant was welcome, and
that I humbly accept as blessed release the lot of our
common humanity.”


A sraason sronr. 327
Sir Philip went to Damascus. There he found the
pestilence raging—there he devoted himself to the
cure of the aﬂiicted; in no single instance, so at least
he declared, did the antidotes stored in the casket fail
in their effect. The pestilence had passed, his medica-
ments were exhausted, when the news reached him
that Haroun was no more. The Sage had been found,
one morning, lifeless in his solitary home, and, accord-
ing to popular rumor, marks on his throat betrayed the
murderous hand of the strangler. Simultaneously,
Louis Grayle had disappeared from the city, and was
supposed to have shared the fate of Haroun, and been
secretly buried by the assassins who had deprived him
of life._ Sir Philip hastened to Aleppo. There, he
ascertained that on the night in which Haroun died,
Grayle did not disappear alone; with him were also
missing two of his numerous suite; the one, an Arab
woman, named Ayesha, who had for some years been
his constant companion, his pupil and associate in the
mystic practices to which his intellect had been debased,
and who was said to have acquired a singular inﬂuence
over him, partly by her beauty, and partly by the ten-
derness with which she had nursed him through his long
decline; the other, an Indian, specially assigned to her
service, of whom all the wild retainers of Grayle spoke
with detestation and terror. _ He was believed by them
to belong to that murderous sect of fanatics whose
existence as a community has only recently been made
known to Europe, and who strangle their unsuspecting


328 A s'raanos STORY.
victim in the ﬁrm belief that they thereby propitiate the
favor of the goddess they serve. The current opinion
at Aleppo was, that if those two persons had conspired
to murder Haroun, perhaps for the sake of the treasures
he was said to possess, it was still more certain that
they had made away with their own English lord, ‘
whether for the sake of the jewels he were about him,
or for the sake of treasures less doubtful than those im-
puted to Haroun- and of which the hiding-place would
to them be much better known. “I did not share that '
opinion,” wrote the narrator; “for I assured myself that
Ayesha sincerely loved her awful master; and that love
need excite no wonder, for Louis Grayle was one whom,
if a woman, and especially a woman of the East, had
once loved, before old age and inﬁrmity fell on him, she
would love and cherish still more devotedly when it
became her task to protect the being who, in his day of
power and command, had exalted his slave into the rank
of his pupil and companion. And the Indian whom
Grayle had assigned to her service, was allowed to have
that brute kind of ﬁdelity which, though it recoils from
no crime for a master, refuses all crime against him.
“ I came to the conclusion that Haroun had been
murdered by order of Louis Grayle—for the sake of
the elixir of life—murdered by Juma the Strangler;
and that Grayle himself had been aided in his ﬂight
from Aleppo, and tended, through the effects of the life-
giving drug thus murderously obtained, by the womanly
love of the Arab woman, Ayesha. These convictions


A sraanen sroar. 829
(since I could not—without being ridiculed as the
wildest of dupes—even hint at the vital elixir) I failed
to impress on the Eastern ofﬁcials, or even on a coun-
tryman of my own whom I chanced to ﬁnd at Aleppo.
They only arrived at what seemed the common-sense
verdict—viz.: that Haroun might have been strangled,
or might have died in a ﬁt (the body, little examined,
was buried long before I came to Aleppo); and that
Louis Grayle was murdered by his own treacherous
dependents. But all trace of the fugitives was lost.
“And now,” wrote Sir Philip, “I will state by what
means I discovered that Louis Grayle still lived—
changed from age into youth ; a new form, a new being;
realizing, I verily believe, the image which Haroun’s
Words had raised up, in what then seemed to me the
metaphysics of phantasy; criminal, without conscious-
ness of crime; the dreadest of the mere animal race;
an incarnation of the blind powers of Nature — beauti-
ful and joyous, wanton, and terrible, and destroying!
Such as ancient myths have personiﬁed in the idols of
Oriental creeds; such as Nature, of herself, might form
man in her moments of favor, if man were wholly the
animal, and spirit were no longer the essential distinc-
tion between himself and the races to which by superior
formation and subtler perceptions he would still be
the king.
“ But this being is yet more dire and portentous than
the mere animal man, for in him are not only the frag-
mentary memories of a pristine intelligence which no


830 A srasuen sronv.
mind, unaided by the presence of soul, could have ori-
ginally compassed, but amidst that intelligence are the
secrets of the magic which is learned through the agen-
cies of spirits the most hostile to our race. And who
shall say whether the ﬁends do not enter at their will
this VOid and deserted temple whence the soul has
departed, and use as their tools, passive and uncon-
seious, all the faculties which, skilful in sorcery, still
place a mind at the control of their malice?
“ It was in the interest excited in me by the strange
and terrible fate that befell an Armenian family with
which I was slightly acquainted, that I ﬁrst traced, in
the creature I am now about to describe, and whose
course I devote myself to watch, and trust to bring to
a close—the murderer of Haroun for the sake of the
elixir of youth
“ In this Armenian family there were three daugh~
ters; one of them —”
I had just read thus far when a dim shadow fell over
the page, and a cold air seemed to breathe on me. Cold
- so cold, that my blood halted in my veins as if sud-
denly frozen! Involuntarin I started, and looked up,
sure that some ghastly presence was in the room. And
then, on the opposite side of the wall, I beheld an un-
substantial likeness of a human form. Shadow I call
it, but the word is not strictly correct, for it was lumi-
nous, though with a pale shine. In some exhibition in
London there is shown a curious instance of optical
illusion; at the end of a corridor you see, apparently in


A STRANGE near. 831
strung light, a. human skull. You are convinced it is
there as you approach; it is, however, only a reﬂec-
tion from a skull at a distance. The image before me
was less vivid, less seemingly prominent than is the
illusion I speak of. I was not deceived. I felt it was
a spectrum, a phantasm, but I felt no less surely that it
was a reﬂection from an animate form—the form and
the face of Margrave; it was there, distinct, unmistak-
able. Conceiving that he himself must be behind me,
I sought to rise, to turn round, to examine. I could not
move: limb and muscle were over-mastered by some
incomprehensible spell. Gradually my senses forsook
me, I became unconscious as well as motionless. _ When
I recovered, I heard the clock strike three. I must
have been nearly two hours insensible; the candles
before me were burning low; my eyes rested on the
table; the dead man’s manuscript was gone!

CHAPTER XL.
THE dead man’s manuscript was gone. But how?
A phantom might delude my eye, a'human will, though
exerted at a distance, might, if the tales of mesmerism
be true, deprive me of movement and of consciousness;
but neither phantom nor mesmeric will could surely
remove from the table before me the material substance
of the book that had vanished !' IVas I to seek expla-


838 a STRANGE sroar.
nation in the arts of sorcery ascribed to Louis Graylo
in the narrative ?— I would not pursue that conjecture.
Against it my reason rose up half alarmed, half disdain-
ful. Some one must have entered the room—some
one have removed the manuscript. I looked round.
The windows were closed, the curtains partly drawn
over the shutters, as they were before my conscious
ness had left me—all seemed undisturbed. Snatching
up one of the candles, fast dying out, I went into the
adjoining library, the desolate state-rooms, into the
entrance-hall, and examined the outer door. Barred
and locked! The robber had left no vestige of his
stealthy presence.
I resolved to go at once to Strahan’s room and tell
him of the loss sustained. A deposit had been conﬁded
to me, and I felt as if there were a slur on my honor
every moment in which I kept its abstraction concealed
from him to whom I was responsible for the trust. I
hastily ascended the great staircase, grim with faded
portraits, and found myself in a long corridor opening
on my own bed-room; no doubt also on Strahan’s.
Which was his? I knew not. I opened rapidly door
after door, peered into empty chambers, went blunder-
ing on, when, to the right, down a narrow passage, I
recognized the signs of my host’s whereabouts—signs
familiarly commonplace and vulgar, signs by which
the inmate of any chamber in lodging-house or inn
makes himself known-a chair before a doorway,
clothes negligently thrown on it, beside it a pair of


A s'raanez s'roaY. 333
shoes. And so ludicrous did such testimony of com-
mon every-day life, of the habits which Strahan would
necessarily have contracted in his desultory, unluxurious
bachelor’s existence - so ludicrous, I say, did these
homely details seem to me, so grotesquely at variance
with the wonders of which I had been reading, with
the wonders yet more incredible of which I myself had
been witness and victim, that, as I turned down the
passage, I heard my own unconscious, half-hysterical
laugh ; and, startled by the sound of that laugh as if it
came from some one else, I paused, my hand on the
door, and asked myself: “ Do I dream? Am I awake?
And if awake, what am I to say to the commonplace mor—
tal I am about to reuse? Speak to him of a phantom!
Speak to him of some weird spell over this strong frame 1
Speak to him of a mystic trance in which has been
stolen what he conﬁded to me, without my knowledge!
What will he say? What should I have said a few
days ago to any man who told such a tale to me i” I did
not wait to resolve these questions. I entered the room.
There was Strahan sound asleep on his bed. I shook
him roughly. He started up, rubbed his eyes-“You,
Allen —you f What the deuce? — what’s the matter?”
“ Strahan, I have been robbed l -— robbed of the manu-
script you lent me. I could not rest till I had told you.”
“ Robbed, robbed! Are you serious 7”
By this time Strahan had thrown 011' the bed-clothes,
and sat upright, staring at me.
And then those questions which my mind had sug~


334 a sraanos sroaY.
gested while I was standing at his door' repeated the.m-
selves with double force. Tell this man, this unimagi-
native, hard-headed, raw-boned, sandy-haired North-
countryman—tell this man a story which the most
credulous school-girl would have rejected as a fable!
Impossible.
“I fell asleep,” said I, coloring and stammering,
for the slightest deviation from truth was painful to
me, “and—and—when I woke— the manuscript was
gone. Some one must have entered, and committed
the theft —”
“Some one entered the house at this hour of the
night, and then only stolen a manuscript which could
be of no value to him? Absurd! If thieves have
come in, it must be for other objects—for plate, for
money. I will dress; we will see i”
Strahan hurried on his clothes, muttering to himself,
and avoiding my eye. He was embarrassed. He did
not like to say to an old friend what was on his mind,
but I saw at once that he suspected I had resolved to
deprive him of the manuscript, and had invented a wild
tale in order to conceal my own dishonesty.
Nevertheless he proceeded to search the house. I
followed him in silence, oppressed with my own thoughts,
and longing for solitude in my own chamber. We found
no one, no trace of any one, nothing to excite suspicion.
There were but two female servants sleeping in the
house—the old housekeeper, and a country girl who
assisted her. It was not possible to suspect either of
a


A s'rnanea sroar. 335
these persons, but in the course of our search we opened
the door of their rooms. We saw that they were both
in bed, both seemingly asleep; it seemed idle to wake
and question them. When the formality of our futile
investigation was concluded, Strahan stopped at the
door of my bedroom, and for the ﬁrst time ﬁxing his
eyes on me steadily, said:
“Allen Fenwick, I would have given half the fortune
I have come into rather than this had happened. The
manuscript, as you know, was bequeathed to me as a
sacred trust by a benefactor whose slightest wish it is
my duty to obserye religiously. If it contained aught
valuable to a man of your knowledge and profession—
why, you were free to use its contents. Let me hope,
Allen, that the book will reappear to-morrow.”
He said no more, drew himself away from the hand
I involuntarily extended, and walked quickly back
towards his own room.
Alone once more, I sank on a seat, buried my face in
my hands, and strove in vain to collect into some deﬁ-
nite shape my own tumultuous and disordered thoughts.
Could I attach serious credit to the marvellous narra-
tive I had read? Were there, indeed, such powers
given to man? such inﬂuences latent in the calm routine
of Nature? I could not believe it; I must have some
morbid affection of the brain; I must be under an hallu-
cination. Hallucination? The phantom, yes—the
trance, yes. Bht still, how came the book gone ? That,
at least, was not hallucination


836 A STRANGE BTOBY.
I left my room the next morning with a vague hope
that I should ﬁnd the manuscript somewhere in the
study; that, in my own trance, I might have secreted
it, as sleep-walkers are said to secrete things, without
remembrance of their acts in their waking state.
I searched minutely in every conceivable place.
Strahan found me still employed in that hopeless task.
He had breakfasted in his own room, and it was past
eleven o’clock when he joined me. His manner was
new hard, cold, and distant, and his suspicion so bluntly
shown, that my distress gave way to resentment.
“ Is it possible,” I cried indignantly, “that you who
have known me so well can suspect me of an act so
base, and so gratuitously base ? Purloin, conceal a book
conﬁded to me, with full power to copy from it what
ever I might desire, use its contents in any way that
might seem to me serviceable to science, or useful to me
in my own calling!”
“I have not accused you,” answered Strahan, sul-
lenly. “ But what are we to say to Mr. Jeeves, to all
others who know that this manuscript existed? Will
they believe what you tell me ?”
“ Mr. Jeeves,” I said, “ cannot suspect a fellow towns-
man, whose character is as high as mine, of untruth
and theft. And to whom else have you communicated
the facts connected with a memoir and a request of so
extraordinary a nature f”
“ To young Margrave; I told you so i”
“ True, true. We need go no further to ﬁnd the thief


A sraanos STORY. 83'!
Margrave has been in the house more than once. He
knows the position of the rooms. You have named
the robber!”
“ Tutl what on earth could a gay young fellow like
Margrave want with a work of such dry and recon- -
dite nature as I presume my poor kinsman’s memoir
must be f” '
I was about to answer, when the door was abruptly
opened, and the servant girl entered, followed by two
men, in whom I recognized the superintendent of the
L police and the same subordinate who had found
me by Sir Philip’s corpse.

The superintendent came up to me with a grave face,
and whispered in my ear. I did not at ﬁrst comprehend
him. “Come with you,” I said, “and to Mr. Vigors,
the magistrate? I thought my deposition was closed.”
The superintendent shook his head. “I have the
authority here, Dr. Fenwiek.”
“Well, I will come of course. Has anything new
transpired f” _
The superintendent turned'to the servant girl, who
was standing with gaping mouth and staring eyes.
“ Show us Dr. Fenwick’s room. You had better put up,
sir, whatever things you have brought here. I will go
upstairs with you,” he whispered again. “Come, Dr.
Fenwick, I am in the discharge of my duty.”
Something in the man’s manner was so sinister and
menacing that I felt at once, that some new and strange
calamity had befallen me. I turned towards Strahan
29 w


338 A STRANGE s'ronv.
He was at the threshold, speaking in a low voice to the
subordinate policeman, and there was an expression of
amazement and horror in his countenance. As I came
towards him he darted away without a word.
I went up the stairs, entered my bedroom, the super-
intendent close behind me. As I took up mechanically
the few things I had brought with me, the police-oﬂicer
drew them from me with an abruptness that appeared
insolent, and deliberately searched the pockets of the
coat which I had worn the evening before, then opened
the drawers of the room, and even pried into the bed.
“What do you mean f” I asked, haiightily.
“ Excuse me, sir. Duty. You are --”
“Well, I am what?”
“My prisoner; here is the warrant."
“Warrant! on what charge?”
“ The murder of Sir Philip Derval.”
“ I - I 1 Murder 1” I could say no more.
I must hurry over this awful passage in my marvel-
lous record. It is torture to dwell on the details, and
indeed I have so sought to chase them from my recol-
lection, that they only come back to me in hideous
fragments, like the incoherent remains of a horrible
dream.
All that I need state is as follows: Early on the very
morning on which I had been arrested, a man, a stran-
ger in the town, had privately sought Mr. Vigors, and
deposed that on the night of the murder, he had been
taking refuge from a sudden storm under shelter of the


A STRANGE sroar. 339
eaves and buttresses of a wall adjoining an old archway;
that he had heard men talking within the archway;
had heard one say to the other, “ You still hear me a
grudge.” The other had replied, “ I can forgive you on
one condition.” That he then lost much of the conver-
sation that ensued, which was in a lower voice; but he
gathered enough to know that the condition demanded
by the one was the possession of a casket which the
other carried about with him. That there seemed an
altercation on this matter between the two men, which,
to judge by the tones of voice, was angry on the part
of the man demanding the casket; that, ﬁnally, this man
said in a loud key, “ Do you still refuse ?” and on
receiving the answer which the witness did not over-
hear, exclaimed threateningly, “ It is you who will
repent;” and then stepped forth from the arch into the
street. The rain had then ceased, but by a broad ﬂash
of lightning the witness saw distinctly the ﬁgure of the
person thus quitting the shelter of the arch ; a man of
tall stature, powerful frame, erect carriage. A little
time afterwards, witness saw a slighter and older man
come forth from the arch, whom he could only examine
by the ﬂickering ray of the gas-lamp near the wall, the
lightning having ceased, but whom be fully believed to
be the person he afterwards discovered to be Sir Philip
Derval.
He said that he himself had only arrived at the town
a few hours before; a stranger to L , and indeed to
England; having come from the United States of


840 a sraanoa sroar.
America, where he had passed his life from childhood.
He had journeyed on foot to L—-, in the hope of
ﬁnding there some distant relatives. He had put up at
a small inn, after which he had strolled through the
town, when the storm had driven him to seek shelter.
He had then failed to ﬁnd his way back to the inn, and
after wandering about in vain, and seeing no one at
that late hour of night of whom he could ask the way'
he had crept under a portico and slept for two or three
hours., Waking towards the dawn, he had then got up
and again sought to ﬁnd his way to the inn, when he
saw, in a narrow street before him, two men, one of
whom he recognized as the taller of the two, to whose
conversation he had listened under the arch, the other
he did not recognize at the moment. The taller man
seemed angry and agitated, and he heard him say,
“The casket; I will have it.” There then seemed to
be a struggle between these two persons, when the
taller one struck down the shorter, knelt on his breast,
and he caught distinctly the gleam of some steel instru-
ment. That he was so frightened that he could not
stir from the place, and that though he cried out, he
believed his voice was not heard. He then saw the
taller man rise, the other resting on the pavement
motionless; and a minute or so afterwards beheld police
men coming to the place, on which he, the Witness,
walked away. He did not know that a murder had
been committed; it might be only an assault; it was no
business of his, he was a stranger. He thought it best


a sraason s'roav. 341
not to interfere, the police having cognizance of the
aﬁ'air. He found out his inn; for the next few days he
was absent from L———, in search of his relations, who
had left the town, many years ago, to ﬁx their residence
in one of the neighboring villages.
He was, however, disappointed, none of these rela-
tions now survived. He had now returned to L—,
heard of the murder, was in doubt what to do, might
got himself into trouble if, a mere stranger, he gave an
unsupported testimony. But, on the day before the
evidence was volunteered, as he was lounging in the
streets, he had seen a gentleman pass by on horseback,
in whom he immediately recognized the man who, in
his belief, was the murderer of Sir Philip Derval. He
inquired of a bystander the name of the gentleman, the
answer was “Dr._ Fenwick.” That, the rest of the
day, he felt much disturbed in his mind, not liking to
volunteer such a charge against a man of apparent
respectability and station. But that his conscience
would not let him sleep that night, and he had resolved
at morning to go to the magistrate and make a clean
breast of it.
The story was in itself so improbable that any other
magistrate but Mr. Vigors would perhaps have dis-
missed it in contempt. But Mr. Vigors, already so
bitterly prejudiced against me, and not sorry, perhaps,
to subject me to'the humiliation of so horrible a charge,
immediately issued his warrant to search my house. I
was absent at Derval Court; the house was searched
29*


842 A s'raauen sronv.
\
In the bureau in my favorite study, which was left
unlocked, the steel casket was discovered, and a large
case-knife, on the blade of which the stains of blood
were still perceptible. On this discovery I was appre-
hended, and on these evidences, and on the deposition
of this vagrant stranger, I was, not indeed committed
to take my trial for murder, but placed in conﬁnement;
all bail for my appearance refused, and the examination
adjourned to give time for further evidence and inqui~
ries. I had requested the professional aid of Mr.
Jeeves. To my surprise and dismay Mr. Jeeves begged
me to excuse him. He said he was pro-engaged by Mr.
Strahan to detect and prosecute the murderer of Sir P.
Derval, and could not assist one accused of the murder.
I gathered from the little he said that Strahan had
already been to him that morning and told him of the
missing manuscript—that Strahan had ceased to be
my friend. I engaged another solicitor, a young man
of ability, and who professed personal esteem for me.
Mr. Stanton (such was the lawyer’s name) believed in
my innocence; but he warned me that appearances
were grave, he implored me to be perfectly frank with
him. “ Had I held conversation with Sir Philip under
the archway as reported by the witness? Had I used
such or similar words? Had the deceased said, “ I had
a grudge against him ?” Had I demanded the casket?
Had I threatened Sir Philip that he would repent?
And of what? His refusal?
“ What was the reason of the grudge? What was


a sraasos STORY. 34‘)
the nature of this casket, that I should so desire its
possession ? ”
There, I became terribly embarrassed. What could
I say to a keen, sensible, worldly man of law? Tell
him of the powder and the fumes, of the scene in the
museum, of Sir Philip’s tale, of the implied identity of
the youthful Margrave with the aged Grayle, of the
elixir of life, and of magic arts? I—I tell such a
romance! I the noted adversary of all pretended
mysticism. 1—1 a sceptical practitioner of medicine!
Had that manuscript of Sir Philip’s been available-
a substantial record of marvellous events by a man of
repute for intellect and learning—I might, perhaps,
have ventured to startle the solicitor of L—— with my
revelations. But the sole proof that all which the
solicitor urged me to conﬁde was not a monstrous ﬁction
or an insane delusion had disappeared; and its disap-
pearance was a part of the terrible mystery that envel-
oped the whole. I answered, therefore, as composedly
as I could, that “ I could have no serious grudge against
Sir Philip, whom I had never seen before that evening;
that the words, which applied to my supposed grudge
were lightly said by Sir Philip, in reference to a physio-
logical dispute on matters connected with mesmerical
phenomena; that the deceased had declared his casket,
which he had shown me at the mayor’s house, contained
drugs of great potency in medicine; that I had asked
permission to test these drugs myself; and that when
I said he would repent of his refusal, I merely meant


344 A STRANGE sroar.
that he would repent of his reliance on drugs not was
ranted by the experiments of professional science.
My replies seemed to satisfy the lawyer so far, but
“how could I account for the casket and the knife being
found in my room? ” .
“ In no way but this: the window of my study is a
door-window opening on the lane, from which any one
might enter the room. I was in the habit, not only of
going out myself that way, but of admitting through
that door any more familiar private acquaintance.”
“ Whom, for instance? ”
I hesitated a moment, and then said, with a signiﬁ-
cance I could not forbear, “ Mr. Margravel He would
know the locale perfectly; he would know that the
door was rarely bolted from within during the day-
time; he could enter‘at all hours; he could place, or
instruct any one to deposit the knife and casket in my
bureau, which he knew I never kept locked; it con-
tained no secrets, no private correspondence—chieﬂy
surgical implements, or such things as I might want
for professional experiments.”
“Mr. Margravei But you cannot suspect him—a
lively, charming young man, against whose character
not a whisper was ever heard—of connivance with
such a charge against you; a connivance that would
implicate him in the murder itself, for if you are \
accused wrongfully, he who accuses you is either the
criminal or the criminal’s accomplice; his'instigator or
his tool.”


a sraauea sronv. 34':
“ Mr. Stanton,” I said ﬁrmly, after a moment’s pause,
“I do suspect Mr. Margrave of a hand in this crime.
Sir Philip, on seeing him at the mayor’s house, ex-
pressed a strong abhorrence of him, more than hinted
at crimes he had committed; appointed me to come to
Derval Court the day after that on which the murder
was committed. Sir Philip had known something of
this Margrave in the East—Margrave might dread ex-
posure, revelations—of what I know not; but, strange
as it may seem to you, it is my conviction that this
young man, apparently so gay and so thoughtless, is
the real criminal, and in some way, which I cannot
conjecture, has employed this lying vagabond in the
fabrication of a charge against myself. Reﬂect: of Mr.
Margrave’s antecedents we know nothing; of them
nothing was known even by the young gentleman who
ﬁrst introduced him to the society of this town. If
you would serve and save me, it is to that quarter that
you will direct your vigilant and unrelaxing researches.”
I had scarcely so said when I repented my candor,
for I observed in the face of Mr. Stanton a sudden
revulsion of feeling, an utter incredulity of the accusa
tion I had thus hazarded, and for the ﬁrst time a doubt
of my own innocence. The fascination exercised by
Margrave was universal; nor was it to be wondered
at; for, besides the charm of his joyous presence, he
seemed so singularly free from even the errors common
enough with the young. So gay and been a companion, '
yet a shunner of wine; so dazzling in aspect, so more


346 A STRANGE s'roar
than beautiful, so courted, so idolized by women, yet
no tale of seduction, of proﬂigacy, attached to his name!
As to his antecedents, he had so frankly owned himself
a natural son, a nobody, a traveller, an idler; his ex-
penses, though lavish, were so unostentatious, so regu-
larly defrayed. He was so wholly the reverse of the
character assigned to criminals, that it seemed as absurd
to bring a charge of homicide against a butterﬂy or a
goldﬁnch as against this seemingly innocent and delight-
ful favorite of humanity and nature.
However, Mr. Stanton said little or nothing, and
shortly afterwards left me, with a dry expression of
hope that my innocence would be cleared in spite of
evidence that, he was bound to say, was of the most
serious character.
I was exhausted. I fell into a profound sleep early
that night; it might be a little after twelve when I
woke, and woke as fully, as completely, as much
restored to life and consciousness, as it was then my
habit to be at the break of day. And, so waking, I
saw, on the wall opposite my bed, the same luminous
phantom I had seen in the Wizard’s study at Derval
Court. I have read in Scandinavian legends of an
apparition called the Scin-Lrsca, or shining corpse. It
is supposed, in the northern superstition, sometimes to
haunt sepulchres, sometimes to foretell doom. It is the
spectre of a human body seen in a phosphoric light, and
so exactly did this phantom correspond to the descrip-
tion of such an apparition in Scandinavian fable that I


A STRANGE STORY. 34']
know not how to give it a better name than that of
Scin-Lteca — the shining corpse.
There it was before me, corpse-like, yet not dead;
there, as in the haunted study of the wizard Formanl
- —-the form and the face of Margrave. Constitutionally,
my nerves are strong, and my temper hardy, and now
I was resolved to battle against any impression which
my senses might receive from my own deluding fancies.
Things that witnessed for the ﬁrst time daunt us,
witnessed for the second time lose their terror. I rose
from my bed with a bold aspect, I_ approached the
phantom with a ﬁrm step; but when within two paces
of it, and my hand outstretched to touch it, my arm
became ﬁxed in air, my feet locked to the ground. I
did not experience fear; I felt that my heart beat regu-
larly, but an invincible something opposed itself to me.
I stood as if turned to stone, and then from the lips of
this phantom there came a voice, but a voice which
seemed borne from a. great distance—very low, mufﬂed,
and yet distinct; I could not even be sure that my ear
heard it, or whether the sound was not conveyed to me
by an inner sense.
“I, and I alone, can save and deliver you,” said the
voice. “I will do so; and the conditions I ask, in
return, are simpleand easy.”
“Fiend or spectre, or mere delusion of my own
brain,” cried I, “there can be no compactbetween thee
and me. I despise thy malice, I reject thy services; I
accept no conditions to escape from the one or to obtain
the other ”


a sraason sroar. 349
“My good sir, why these unjust prepossessions
against a true friend? It was as your friend that, as
soon as the charge against you amazed and shocked the
town of L-—-, Mr. Margrave called on Mrs. Ashleigh
—presented to her by Miss Brabazon—and was so
cheering and hopeful that —”
“ Enough l ” I exclaimed—“enough!”
I paced the room in a state of excitement and rage,
which the lawyer in vain endeavored to calm, until at
length I halted abruptly; “Well—and you saw Miss
Ashleigh? What message does she send to me— her
betrothed ?"
Mr. Stanton looked confused. “ Message! Consider,
sir — Miss Ashleigh’s situation _ the delicacy -— and —
and—”
“I understand! no message, no word, from a young
lady so respectable to a man accused of murder.”
Mr. Stanton was silent for some moments; and then
said quietly, “ Let as change this subject; let us think
of what more immediately presses. I see you have
been making notes; may I look at them?”
I composed myself and sat down. “ This accuser!
Have inquiries really been made as to himself, and
his statement of his own proceedings? He comes, he
says, from America—in what ship? At what port did
he land? Is there any evidence to corroborate his story
of the relations he tried to discover—of the inn at
which he ﬁrst put up, and to which he could not ﬁnd
his way?”
30


850 A s'raanen s'roar.
“Your suggestions are sensible, Dr. Fenwick. I
have forestalled them. It is true that the man lodged
at a small inn -the Rising Sun—true that he made
inquiries about some relations of the name of Walls,
who formerly resided at L—, and afterwards removed
to a village ten miles distant—two brothers—trades-
men of small means but respectable character. He at
ﬁrst refused to say at what sea-port he landed, in what
ship he sailed. I suspect that he has now told a false-
hood as to these matters. I have sent my clerk to
Southampton—for it is there he said that he was put
on shore; we shall see—the man himself is detained
in close custody. I hear that his manner is strange
and excitable; but that he preserves silence as much as
possible. It is generally believed that he is a bad char-
acter, perhaps a returned convict, and that this is the
true reason why he so long delayed giving evidence,
and has been since so reluctant to account for himself.
But even if his testimony should be impugned, should
break down, still we should have to account for the fact
that the casket and the case-knife were found in your
bureau. For, granting that a person could, in your
absence, have entered your study and placed the
articles in your bureau, it is clear that such a person
must have beep well acquainted with your house, and
this stranger to L-_—- could not have possessed that
knowledge.”
“Of course not-Mr. Margrave did possess it!”
“ Mr. Margrave again l—oh, sir.”


A summon STORY. 35]
I arose and moved away, with an impatiei l gesture.
I could not trust myself to speak. That nigh I did not
sleep; I watched impatiently, gazing on th opposite
wall, for the gleam of the Scin-Laeca. But the night
passed away, and the spectre did not appear
CHAPTER XLI.
THE lawyer came the next day, and with something
like a smile on his countenance. He brougl. t me a few
lines in pencil from Mrs Ashleigh; they were kindly
expressed, bade me be of good cheer; “she nevei for a
moment believed in my guilt; Lilian bore up wonder-
fully under so terrible a trial; it was an unspeakable
comfort to both to receive the visits of a friend so
attached to me, and so conﬁdent of a triumphant refu-
tation of the hideous calumny under which I now sufl
fered, as Mr. Mai-grave l "
The lawyer had seen Margrave again—seen him
in that house. Margrave seemed-almost domiciled
there!
I remained sullen and taciturn during this visit. 1
longed again for the night. Night came. I heard the
distant clock strike twelve, when again the icy wind
passed through my hair, and against the wall stood the
Luminous shadow.


652 A s'rnauun sroaY.
“ Have you considered ?” whispered the voice, still. al
from afar. “ I repeat it—I alone can save you.”
“ Is it among the conditions which you ask, in return,
that-I shall resign to you the woman I love ?”
H No."
“Is it one of the conditions that I should commit
some crime— a crime perhaps heinous as that of which
I am accused ?” l
H No)? \
“With such reservations, I accept the conditions you
may name, provided I, in my turn, may demand one
condition from yourself.”
“ Name it."
“ I ask you to quit this town. I ask you, meanwhile,
to cease your visits to the house that holds the woman
betrothed to me.”
“I will cease these visits. And before many days
are over, I will quit this town.”
“Now, then, say what you ask from me. I am pre-
pared to concede it. And not from fear for myself, but
because I fear for the pure and innocent being who is
under the spell of your deadly fascination. This is
your pOWer over me. You command me through my
love for another. Spea .”
“My conditions are simple. You will pledge your-
self to desist from all charges of insinuation against
myself, of what nature soever. You will not, when you
meet me in the ﬂesh, refer to what you have known of
my likeness in the Shadow. You will be invited to the


A era/men sroar. 353
house at which I may be also a guest; you will come;
you will meet and converse with me as guest speaks
with guest in the house of a host.”
“Is that all f”
“It is all.”
“ Then I pledge you my faith; keep your own.”
“ Fear not; sleep secure in the certainty that you will
soon be released from these walls.”
The Shadow waned and faded. Darkness settled
back, and a sleep, profound and calm, fell over me.
The next day Mr. Stanton again visited me. He had
received that morning a note from Mr. Margrave, stating
that he had left L to pursue, in person, an invea
tigation which he had already commenced through
another, affecting the man who had given evidence
against me, and that, if his hope should prove well
founded, be trusted to establish my innocence, and con-
vict the real murderer of Sir Philip Derval. In the
research he thus volunteered, he had asked for, and
obtained, the assistance of the policeman Waby, who,
grateful to me for saving the life of his sister, had
expressed a strong desire to be employed in my
service.

Meanwhile, my most cruel assailant was my old col-
lege friend, Richard Strahan. For Jeeves had spread
abroad Strahan’s charge of purloining the memoir which
had been intrusted to me; and that accusation had done
me great injury in public opinion, because it seemed to
give probability to the only motive which ingenuity
30* x


854 A srssnas sroav.
could ascribe to the foul deed imputed to me. That
motive had been ﬁrst suggested by Mr. Vigors. Cases
are on record of men whose life had been previously
blameless, who have committed a crime, which seemed
to belie their nature, in the monomania of some intense
desire. In Spain, a scholar reputed of austere morals,
murdered and robbed a traveller for money in order to
purchase books; books written, too, by Fathers of his
Church! He was intent on solving some problem of
theological casuistry. In France, an antiquary esteemed
not more for his learning, than for amiable and gentle
qualities, murdered his most intimate friend for the pos-
session of a medal, without which his own collection
was incomplete. These, and similar anecdotes, tending
to prove how fatally any vehement desire, morbidly
cherished, may suspend the normal operations of reason
and conscience, were whispered about by Dr. Lloyd’s
vindictive partisan, and the inference drawn from them
and applied to the assumption against myself, was the
more credulously received, because of that over-reﬁning
speculation on motive and act which the shallow accept,
in their eagerness to show how readily they understand
the profound.
I was known to be fond of scientiﬁc, especially of
chemical, experiments; to be eager in testing the truth
of any novel invention. Strahan catching hold of the
magistrate’s fantastic hypothesis, went about repeating
anecdotes of the absorbing passion for analysis and
discovery which had characterized me in youth as a


a sraanos near. 355
medical student, and to which, indeed, I owed the pre-
cocious reputation I had obtained.
Sir Philip Derval, according not only to report, but
to the direct testimony of his servant, had acquired in
the course of his travels many secrets in natural science,
especially as connected with the healing art-his ser-
vant had deposed to the remarkable cures he had eﬁ'ected
by the medicinals stored in the stolen casket-doubt-
less Sir Philip, in boasting of these medicinals in the
course of our conversation, had excited my curiosity,
inﬂamed my imagination, and thus, when I afterwards
suddenly met him in a lone spot, a passionate impulse
had acted on a brain heated into madness by curiosity
and covetous desire.
All these suppositions, reduced into system, were
corroborated by Strahan’s charge that I had made away
with the manuscript supposed to contain the explana-
tions of the medical agencies employed by Sir Philip,
and had sought to shelter my theft by a tale so impro-
bable, that a man of my reputed talent could not have
hazarded it if in his sound senses. I saw the web, that
had thus been spread around me by hostile prepos-
sessions and ignorant gossip; how could the arts of
Margrave scatter that web to the winds? I know not,
but I felt conﬁdence in his promise and his power.
Still, so great had been my alarm for Lilian, that the
hope of clearing my own innocence was almost lost in
my joy that Margrave, at least, was no longer in her
presence, and that I had received his pledge to quit the
town in which she lived


856 A sraanen s'ronv.
Thus, hours rolled on hours, till, I think, on the third 1
day from that night in which I had last beheld the mys-
terious Shadow, my door was hastily thrown open, a
confused crowd presented itself at the threshold— the
governor of the prison, the police superintendent, Mr.
Stanton, and other familiar faces shut out from me since
my imprisonment. I knew at the ﬁrst glance that I
was no longer an outlaw beyond the pale of human
friendship. And proudly, sternly, as I had supported
myself hitherto in solitude and suspense, when I felt
warm hands grasping mine, heard joyous voices prof-
fering' congratulations, saw in the eyes of all that my
innocence had been cleared, the revulsion of emotion
was too strong for me -the room reeled on my sight—
I fainted. I pass, as quickly as I can, over the expla-
nations that crowded on me when I recovered, and that
were publicly given in evidence in Court next morning.
I had owed all to Margrave. It seems that he had
construed to my favor the very supposition which had
been bruited abroad to my prejudice. “ For,” said he,
“ it is conjectured that Fenwick committed the crime of
which he is accused in the impulse of a disordered rea-
son. That conjecture is based upon the probability that
a madman alone could have committed a crime without
adequate motive. But it seems quite clear that the
accused is not mad; and I- see cause to suspect that the
accuser is.” Grounding this assumption on the current
reports of the witness’s manner and bearing since he
had been placed under oﬂicial surveillance, Margrave


A sraanon sroax. 351
had commissioned the policeman, Waby, to make inqui~
ries in the village to which the accuser had asserted he
had gone in quest of his relations, and Waby had there
found persons who remembered to have heard that the
two brothers named Walls lived less by the gains of
the petty shop which they kept than by the proceeds
of some property consigned to them as the nearest of
kin to a lunatic who had once been tried for his life.
Margrave had then examined the advertisements in the
daily newspapers. One of them, warning the public
against a dangerous maniac, who had effected his escape
from an asylum in the west of England, caught his
attention. To that asylum he had repaired.
There he learned that the patient advertised was one
whose propensity was homicide, consigned for life to the
asylum on account of a murder, for which he had been
tried. The description of this person exactly tallied
with that of the pretended American. The medical
superintendent of the asylum hearing all particulars
from Margrave, expressed a strong persuasion that the
witness was his missing patient, and had himself com-
mitted the crime of which he had accused another. If
so, the superintendent undertook to coax from him the
full confession of all the circumstances. Like many
other madmen, and not least those whose propensity is
to crime, the fugitive maniac was exceedingly cunning,
treacherous, secret, and habituated to trick and strata-
gem. More subtle than even the astute in possession
of all their faculties, whether to achieve his purpose or


858 A s'raauon s'ronr.
to conceal it, and fabricate appearances against another
But while, in ordinary conversation, he seemed rational
enough to those who were not accustomed to study him,
he had one hallucination which, when humored, led him
always, not only to betray himself, but to glory in any
crime proposed or committed. He was under the belief
that he had made a bargain with Satan, who, in return
for implicit obedience, would bear him harmless through
all the consequences of such submission, and ﬁnally
raise him to great power and authority. It is no unfre-
quent illusion-of homicidal maniacs to suppose they are
under the inﬂuence of the Evil One, or possessed by a
Demon. Murderers have assigned as the only reason
they themselves could give for the crime, that “the
Devil got into them,” and urged the deed. But the
insane have, perhaps, no attribute more in common
than that of superweening self-esteem. The maniac
who has been removed from a garret sticks straws in
his hair and calls them a crown. So much does inordi-
nate arrogance characterize mental aberration, that, in
the course of my own practice, I have detected, in that
inﬁrmity, the certain symptom of insanity, long before
.he brain had made its disease manifest even to the
most familiar kindred.
Morbid self-esteem accordingly pervaded the dreadful
illusion by which the man I now speak of was possessed.
He was proud to be the protected agent of the Fallen
Angel. And if that self-esteem were artfully appealed
to, he would exult superbly in the evil he held himself


a sraanea s'roar. 35!)
ordered to perform, as if a special prerogative, an ofﬁcial
rank and privilege; then, he would be led on to boast
gleefully of thoughts which the most cynical of crimi-
nals, in whom intelligence was not ruined, would shrink
from owning. Then, he Would reveal himself in all his
deformity with as complacent and frank a self-glorying
as some vain good man displays in parading his amiable
sentiments and his beneﬁcent deeds.
“If,” said the superintendent, “ this be the patient
who has escaped from me, and if his propensity to
homicide has been, in some way, directed towards the
person who has been murdered, I shall not be with him
a quarter of an hour before he will inform me how it
happened, and detail the arts be employed in shifting
his crime upon another—all will be told as minutely
as a child tells the tale of some school-boy exploit, in
which he counts on your sympathy, and feels sure of
your applause.”
Margrave brought this gentleman back to L—--,
took him to the mayor, who was one of my warmest
supporters; the mayor had suﬂicient inﬂuence to dictate
and arrange the. rest. The superintendent was intro-
duced to the room in which the pretended American
was lodged. At his own desire a select number of
witnesses were admitted with him-Margrave excused
himself; he said candidly that he was too intimate a
friend of mine to be an impartial listener to aught that
concerned me so nearly.
The superintendent proved right in his suspicions,


360 A sraauos s'roar.
and veriﬁed his promises. My false accuser was his
missing patient; the man recognized Dr. * * * with no
apparent terror, rather with an air of condescension,
andin a very few minutes was led to tell his own tale,
with a gloating complacency both at the agency by
which he deemed himself exalted, and at the dexterous
cunning with which he had acquitted himself of the
task, that increased the horror of his narrative.
He spoke of the mode of his escape, which was ex
tremely ingenious, but of which the details, long in
themselves, did not interest me, and I understood them
too imperfectly to repeat. He had encountered a sea-
faring traveller on the road, whom he had knocked down
with a stone, and robbed of his glazed hat and pea-jacket,
as well as of a small sum in coin, which last enabled him
to pay his fare in a railway that conveyed him eighty
miles away from the asylum. Some triﬂing remnant
of this money still in his pocket, he then travelled on
foot along the high road till he came to a town about
twenty miles distant from L——-; there he had stayed
a day or two, and there he said “that the Devil had
told him to buy a case-knife, which he did.” “He
knew by that order that the Devil meant him to do
something great.” “His Master,” as he called the
ﬁend, then directed him the read he should take. He
,put up, as he had correctly stated he-

came to L
fore, at a small inn, wandered at night about the town
was surprised by the sudden storm, took shelter under
the convent arch, overheard somewhat more of my


A STRANGE sroav. 361
conversation with Sir Philip than he had previously
deposed—heard enough to excite his curiosity as to the
casket: “ While he listened his Master told him that
he must get possession of that casket.” Sir Philip had
quitted the archway almost immediately after I had
done so, and he would then have attacked him if he
had not caught sight of a policeman going his rounds.
He had followed Sir Philip to a house (Mr. Jeeves’s).
“ His Master told him to wait and watch.” He did so.
When Sir Philip came forth, towards the dawn, he
followed him, saw him enter a narrow street, came up
to him, seized him by the arm, demanded all he had
about him. Sir Philip tried to shake him 05— struck
at him. What follows, I spare the reader. The deed
was done. He robbed the dead man, both of the casket
and of the purse that he found in the pockets; had
scarcely done so when he heard footsteps. He had just
time to get behind the portico of a detached house at
angles with the street, when I came up. He witnessed,
from his hiding—place, the brief conference between my-
self and the policemen, and when they moved on, bear-
ing the body, stole unobserved away. He was going
back towards the inn, when it occurred to him that it
would be safer if the casket and purse were not about
his person ; that he asked his master to direct him how
to dispose of them; that his Master guided him to an
open yard (a stone-mason’s) at a very little distance
from the inn; that in this yard there stood an old
wych-elm tree, from the gnarled roots of which the
81


362 A sraanen sronY.
earth was worn away, leaving chinks and hollows, in
one of which he placed the casket and purse, taking
from the latter only two sovereigns and some silver,
and then heaping loose mould over the hiding place.
That he then repaired to his inn, and left it late in the
morning, on the pretence of seeking for his relations—
persons, indeed, who really had been related to him,
but of whose death years ago he was aware. He re-
turned to L_- a few days afterwards, and, in the dead
of the night, went to take up the casket and the money.
He found the purse with its contents undisturbed; but
the lid of the casket was unclosed. From the hasty
glance he had taken of it before burying it, it had
seemed to him ﬁrmly locked—he was alarmed, lest
some one had been to the spot. But his Master
whispered to him never to mind, told him that he
might now take the casket, and would be guided what
to do with it; that he did so, and, opening the lid,
found the casket empty; that he took the rest of the
money out of the purse, but that he did not take the
purse itself, for it had a crest and initials on it, which
might lead to the discovery of what had been done;
that he therefore left it in the hollow amongst the roots,
heaping the mould over it as before; that, in the course
of the day, he heard the people at the inn talk of the
murder, and that his own ﬁrst impulse was to get out
of the town immediately, but that his Master made
him too wise for that, and bade him stay; that pass-
ing through the streets, he saw me come out of the


A sraauon sronr. 863
sash-window door, go to the stable yard on the other
side of the house, mount on horseback and ride away;
that he observed the sash-door was left partially open ;
that he walked by it and saw the room empty; there
was only a dead wall opposite; the place was solitary,
unobserved; that his Master directed him to lift up the
sash gently, enter the room, and deposit the knife and
the casket in a large walnut-tree bureau which stood
unlocked near the window. All that followed—his
visit to Mr. Vigors, his accusation against myself_ his
whole tale-was, he said, dictated by his Master, who
was highly pleased with him, and promised to bring
him safely through. And here he turned round with a
hideous smile, as if for approbation of his notable
cleverness and respect for his high employ.
Mr. J eevss had the curiosity to request the keeper to
inquire how, in what form, or in what manner, the
Fiend appeared to the narrator, or conVeyed his infer-
nal dictates. The man at ﬁrst refused to say; but it
was gradually drawn from him that the Demon had no
certain and invariable form; sometimes it appeared to
him in the form of a rat; sometimes even of a leaf; or
a fragment of wood, or a rusty nail; but, that his Mas
ter’s voice always' came to him distinctly, whatever
shape he appeared in; only, he said, with an air of great
importance, his Master, this time, had graciously conde-
scended, ever since he left the asylum, to communicate
with him in a much more pleasing and imposing aspect
than he had ever done before-in the form of a beauti-


364 A s'raanon s'roav.
ful youth, or, rather, like a bright rose-colored shadow,
in which the features of a young man were visible, and
that he had heard the'voice more distinctly than usual,
though in a milder tone, and seeming to come to him
from a great distance.
After these revelations the man became suddenly
disturbed. He shook from limb to limb, he seemed
convulsed with terror; he cried out that he had betrayed
the secret of his Master, who had warned him not to
describe his appearance and mode of communication,
or he would surrender his servant to the tormentors.
Then the maniac’s terror gave way to fury; his more
direful propensity made itself declared; he sprang into
the midst of his frightened listeners, seized Mr. Vigors
by the throat, and would have strangled him but for
the prompt rush of the superintendent and his satellites.
Foaming at the mouth, and horribly raving, he was
then manacled, a strait-waistcoat thrust upon him, and
the group so left him in charge of his captors. Inqui-
ries were immediately directed towards such circum-
stantial evidence as might corroborate the details he
so minutely set forth. The purse recognized as Sir
Philip’s, by the valet of the deceased, was found buried
under the wych-elm. A policeman despatched, express,
to the town in which the maniac declared the knife to
have been purchased, brought back word that a outlet
in the place remembered perfectly to have sold such a
knife to a sea-faring man, and identiﬁed the instrument
when it was shown to him. From the chink of a door


A STRANGE sroar. 865
ajar, in the wall opposite my sash-window, a maid-ser
vant, watching for her sweetheart (a young journeyman
carpenter, who habitually passed that way on going
home to dine), had, though unobserved by the mur-
derer, seen him come out of my window at a time that
corresponded with the dates of his own story, though
she had thought nothing of it at the moment. He
might be a patient, or have called on business; she did
not know that I was from home. The only point of
importance not cleared up was that which related to
the opening of the casket—the disappearance of ' the
contents; the lock had been unquestionably forced. No
one, however, could suppose that some third person
had discovered the hiding-place and forced open the
casket to abstract its contents and then rebury it. The
only probable supposition was, that the man himself
had forced it open, and, deeming the contents of no
value, had thrown them away before he had hidden the
casket and purse, and, in the chaos of his reason, had
forgotten that he had so done. Who could expect that
every link in a 'madman’s tale would be found integral
and perfect? In short, little importance was attached
to this solitary doubt. Crowds accompanied me to my
door, when I was set free, in open court, stainlessl—
it was a triumphant procession. The popularity I had
previously enjoyed, superseded for a moment by so
horrible a charge, came back to me ten-fold, as with the
reaction of generous repentance for a momentary doubt.
One man shared the public favor—the young man
81'


866 A s'raancn s'roar.
whose acuteness had delivered me from the peril,
and cleared the truth from so awful a mystery; but
Margrave had escaped from congratulation and com-
pliment; he had gone on a visit to Strahan, at Derval
Court.
Alone, at last, in the welcome sanctuary of my own
home, what were my thoughts? Prominent amongst
them all was that assertion of the madman, which had
made me shudder when repeated to me: he had been
guided to the murder and to all the subsequent pro-
ceedings by the luminous shadow of the beautiful
youth—the Scin-Laeca to which I had pledged myself.
If Sir Philip Derval could be believed, Margrave was
possessed of powers, derived from fragmentary recollec-
tions of a knowledge acquired in a former state of
being; which would render his remorseless intelligence
inﬁnitely dire, and frustrate the endeavors of a reason,
unassisted by similar powers, to thwart his designs or
bring the law against his-crimes. Had he then the
arts that could thus-inﬂuence the minds of others to
serve his fell purposes, and achieve securely his own
evil ends through agencies that could not be traced
home to himself? _
But for what conceivable purpose had I been sub-
jected as a victim to inﬂuences as much beyond my
control as the Fate or Demoniac Necessity of a, Greek
Myth? In the legends of the classic world some
august sufferer is oppressed by powers more than
mortal, but, with an ethical if gloomy vindication of his,


A summer: areas. 86'.‘
ehastisement, he pays the penalty of crime committed
by his ancestors or himself, or he has braved, by arro-
gating equality with the gods, the mysterious calamity
which the gods alone can inﬂict. But I, no descendant
of Penelope, no (Edipus boastful of a wisdom which
could interpret the enigmas of the Sphynx, while igno-
rant even of his own birth—what had I done to be
singled out from the herd of men for trials and visita-
tionsfrom the Shadowland of ghosts and sorcerers? It
would be ludicrously absurd to suppose that Dr. Lloyd’s
dying imprecation could have had a prophetic effect
upon my destiny—to believe that the pretences of mes-
merisers were specially favored by Providence, and that
to question their assumptions was an offence of profana-
tion to be punished by exposure to preternatural
agencies. There was not even that congruity between
cause and effect which fable seeks in excuse for its
inventions. Of all men living, I, unimaginative disciple
of austere science, should be the last to become the
sport of that witchcraft which even imagination reluct-
antly allows to the machinery of poets, and science
casts aside into the mouldy lumber-room of obsolete
superstition.
Rousing my mind from enigmas impossible to solve-
it was with intense and yet most melancholy satisfao
tion that I turned to the image of Lilian, rejoicing,
though with a thrill of awe, that the promise so mys-
teriously conveyed to my senses had, here too, been
already fulﬁlled-Margrave had left the town; Lilian


868 a s'raanoa s'roav.
was no longer subjected to his evil fascination. But an
instinct told me that that fascination had already pro-
duced an effect adverse to all hope of happiness for me.
Lilian’s love for myself was gone. Impossible other-
wise that she—in whose nature I had always admired
that generous devotion which is more or less inseparable
from the romance of youth—should have never con-
veyed to me one word of consolation in the hour of my
agony and trial: that she who, till the last evening we
had met, had ever been so docile, in the sweetness of a
nature femininer submissive to my slightest wish,
should have disregarded my solemn injunction, and
admitted Margrave to acquaintance, nay, to familiar
intimacy; at the very time, too, when to disobey my
injunctions was to embitter my ordeal, and add her own
contempt to the degradation imposed upon my honor!
No, her heart must be wholly gone from me; her very
nature wholly warped. An union between us had
become impossible. My love for her remained unsbat-
tered—the more tender, perhaps, for a sentiment of
compassion. But my pride was shocked, my heart was
wounded. My love was not mean and servile. Enough
for me to think that she would be at least saved from
Margrave. Her life associated with Mel-contempla-
.ion, horrible and ghastlyl-from that fate she was
saved. Later, she would recover the eﬁ'ect of an in-
ﬂuence happily brief. She might form some new
attachment—some new tie. But love once withdrawn
is never to be restored-and her love was withdrawn


A s'rasnca sroar. 369
from me. I had but to release her, with my own lips,
from our engagement—she would welcome that release.
Mournful but ﬁrm in these thoughts and these resolu-
tions, I sought Mrs. Ashleigh’s house.
CHAPTER XLII.
IT was twilight when I entered, unannounced (as
had been my wont in our familiar intercourse), the
quiet sitting-room in which I expected to ﬁnd mother
and child. But Lilian was there alone, seated by the
open window, her hands crossed and drooping on her
knee, her eyes ﬁxed upon the darkening summer skies,
in which the evening star had just stolen forth, bright
and steadfast, near the pale sickle of a half-moon that
was dimly visible, but gave as yet no light.
Let any lover imagine the reception he would expect
to meet from his betrothed, coming into her presence
after he had passed triumphant through a terrible peril
to life and fame—conceive what ice froze my blood,
what anguish weighed down my heart, when Lilian,
turning towards me, rose not, spoke not-gazed at me
heedlessly as if at some indiﬂ'erent stranger—and—
and—— But no matter. I cannot hear to recall it even
now, at the distance of years! I sat down beside her,
and took her hand, without pressing it; it rested lan-
s
I


3'70 A summer. sroav.
guidly, passively in mine-one moment;—-I dropped
it then, with a bitter sigh.
“Lilian,” I said, quietly, “you love me no longer.
Is it not so ? ”
She raised her eyes to mine, looked at me wistfully,
and pressed her hand on her forehead, then said, in a
strange voice, “ Did I ever love you? What do you
mean ? ”
“Lilian, Lilian, rouse yourself; are you not, while
you speak, under some spell, some inﬂuence which you
cannot describe nor account for ?”
She paused a moment before she answered, calmly,
“ Nol Again I ask what do you mean f”
“What do I mean? Do you forget that we are
betrothed Y Do you forget how often, and how recently,
our vows of affection and constancy have been ex-
changed ? ”
“ No, I do not forget; but I must have deceived you
and myself -——”
“It is true, then, that you love me no more ?”
“ I suppose so.”
“ But, oh, Lilian, is it that your heart is only closed
to me ? or is it—oh, answer truthfully-is it given to
another? — to him -to him - against whom I warned
you, whom I implored you not to receive? Tell me, at
least, that your love is not gone to Margrave -—”
“ To him-love to him. Oh no—no -—”
“What, then, is your feeling towards him f”
Lilian’s face grew visibly paler—even in that dim


a STRANGE sroar. 371
light. “I know not,” she said, almost in a whisper;
" but it is partly awe - partly ”
“What 1”
“Abhorrencel” she said, almost ﬁercely, and rose to
her feet, with a wild, defying start.
“If that be so,” I said gently, “ you would not grieve
were you never again to see him —”

“But I shall see him again,” she murmured in a tone
of weary sadness, and sunk back once more into her
chair.
“I think not,” said I, “ and I hope not. And now
hear me and heed me, Lilian. It is enough for me, no
matter what your feelings towards another, to learn
from yourself that the affection you once professed for
me is gone. I release you from your troth. If folks
ask why we two henceforth separate the lives we had
agreed to join, you may say, if you please, that you
could not give your hand to a man who had known the
' taint of a felon’s prison, even on a false charge. If that
seems to you an ungenerous reason, we will leave it to
your mother to ﬁnd a better. Farewell! For your own
sake I can yet feel happiness—happiness to hear that
you did not love the man against whom I warn you
still more solemnly than beforel Will you not give me
your hand in parting—and have I not spoken your
Own wish ?”
She turned away her face, and resigned her hand to
me in silence Silently I held it in mine, and my emo-
tions nearly stiﬂed me. One symptom of raga-t, of


372 a swimmer: STORY.
reluctance, on her part, and I should have fallen at her
feet, and cried, “ Do not let us break a tie which our
vows should have made indissoluble; heed not my oﬁ‘ers
—wrung from a tortured heart! You cannot have
ceased to love me!” But no such symptom of relent-
ing showed itself in her, and with a groan I left the
room.

CHAPTER XLIII.
I was just outside the garden-door, when I felt an
arm thrown round me, my cheek kissed nd wetted
with tears. Could it be Lilian? Alas, no! It was
her mother’s voice, that, between laughing and crying,
exclaimed hysterically: “ This is joy, to see you
again, and on these thresholds. I have just come from
your house; I went there on purpose to congratulate
you, and to talk to you about Lilian. But you have
seen her? ”
“Yes; I have but this moment left her. Come this
way.” I drew Mrs. Ashleigh back into the garden,
along the winding walk, which the shrubs concealed
from view of the house. We sat down on a rustic seat
where I had often sat with Lilian, midway between the
house and the Monks’ Well. I told the mother what
had passed between me and her daughter; I made no
complaint of Lilian’s coldness and change; I did not
hint at its cause. “ Girls of her age will change,” said


A STRANGE s'roaY. 373
I, “and all that now remains is for us two to agree on
such a tale to our curious neighbors, as may rest the
whole blame on me. Man’s Name is of robust ﬁbre;
it could not push its way to a place in the world, if it
could not bear, without sinking, the load idle tongues
may lay on it. Not so Woman’s Name—what is but
gossip against Man, is scandal against Woman.”
“ Do not be rash, my dear Allen,” said Mrs. Ashleigh,
in great distress : “ I feel for you, I understand you; in
your case I might act as you do. I cannot blame you.
Lilian is changed— changed unaccountably. Yet sure
I am that the change is only on the surface, that her
heart is really yours, as entirely and as faithfully as
ever it was; and that later, when she recovers from the
strange, dreamy kind of torpor which appears to have
come over all her faculties and all her affections, she
would awake with a despair which you cannot conjec-
ture, to the knowledge that you had renounced her.”
“ I have not renounced her,” said I, impatiently; “ I
did but restore her freedom of choice. But pass by this
now, and explain to me more fully the change in your
daughter, which I gather from your words is not con-
ﬁned to me.”
“I wished to speak of it before you saw her, and for
that reason came to your house. It was on the morn-
ing in which we left her aunt’s to return hither that I
ﬁrst noticed something peculiar in her look and manner.
She seemed absorbed and absent, so much so that I
asked her several.times to tell me what made her so
ea


874 A sraaues s'roar.
grave, but I could only get from her that she had had a
confused dream that she could not recall distinctly
enough to relate, but that she was sure it boded eviL
During the journey she became gradually more herself,
and began to look forward with delight to the idea of
seeing you again. Well, you came that evening. What
passed between you and her you know best. You com-
plained that she slighted your request to shun all
acquaintance with Mr. Margrave. I was surprised
that, whether your wish were reasonable or not, she
could have hesitated to comply with it. I spoke to her
about it after you had gone, and she wept bitterly at
thinking she had displeased you.”
“She wept! You amaze me. Yet the next day
what a note she returned to mine 1 ”
“ The next day the change in her became very visible
to me. She told me, in an excited manner, that she
was convinced she ought not to marry you. Then
came, the following day, the news of your committal.
I heard of it, but dared not break it to her. I went to
our friend the mayor, to consult with him what to say,
what to do; and to learn more distinctly than I had
done from terriﬁed, incoherent servants, the rights of so
dreadful a story. When I returned, I found, to my
amazement, a young stranger in the drawing-room; it
was Mr. Margrave—Miss Brabazon had brought him
at his request. Lilian was in the room, too, and my
astonishment was increased, when she said to me with
a singular smile, vague but tranquil: ‘I know all about


A. s'raanoa smear. 375
Allen Fenwick; Mr. Margrave has told me all. He is
a friend of Allen’s. He says there is no cause for fear.’
Mr. Margrave then apologized to me for his intrusion
in a caressing, kindly manner, as if one of the family.
' He said he was so intimate with you that he felt that
he could best break to Miss Ashleigh an information
she might receive elsewhere, for that he was the only
man in the town who treated the charge with ridicule.
You know the wonderful charm of this young man’s
manner. I cannot explain to you how it was, but in a
few moments I was as much at home with him as if he
had been your brother. To be brief, having once come,
he came constantly. He had moved, two days before
you went to Derval Court, from his hotel to apartments
in Mr. —’s house, just opposite. We could see him
on his balcony from our terrace; he would smile to us
and come across. I did wrong in slighting your injunc-
tion, and suffering Lilian to do so. I could not help
it. he was such a comfort to me—to her, too—in
her tribulation. He alone had no doleful words,
were no long face; he alone was invariably cheerful.
‘Everything,’ he said, ‘would come right in a day
or two.’ ”
“And Lilian could not but admire this young man,
he is so beautiful.”
“Beautiful? Well, perhaps. But if you have a
iealous feeling, you'were never more mistaken. Lilian,
I am convinced, does more than dislike him; he has
inspired, her with repugnant-c, with terror. And much


R76 A sraauea s'roar.
as I own I like him, in his wild, joyous, careless, harm-
less way, do not think I ﬂatter you if I say that Mr.
Margrave is not the man to make any girl untrue to
you—untrue to a lover with inﬁnitely less advantages
than you may pretend to. He would be an universal
favorite, I grant; but there is something in him, or a
something wanting in him, which makes liking and ad-
miration stop short of love. I know not why; perhaps,
because, with all his good humor, he is so absorbed in
himself, so intensely egotistical—so light; were be
less clever, I should say so frivolous. He could not
make love, he could not say in the serious tone of a man ~
in earnest, lI love you.’ He owned as much to me,
and owned, too, that he knew not even what love was.
As to myself— Mr. Margrave appears rich ; no whisper
against his character or his honor ever reached me.
Yet were you out of the question, and were there no
stain on his birth, nay, were he as high in rank and
wealth as he is favored by Nature in personal advan-
tages, I confess I could never consent to trust him with
my daughter’s fate. A voice at my heart would cry,
‘Nol’ It may be an unreasonable prejudice, but I
could not bear to see him touch Lilian’s hand!
“ Did she never, then—never suffer him even to take
her hand? ”
“ Never. Do not think so meanly of her‘ as to sup-
pose that she could be caught by a fair face, a graceful
manner. Reﬂect: just before, she had refused, for your
sake, Ashleigh Sumner, whom Lady Haughlan said,


a srnarma s'roaY. . 371
' no girl in her senses could refuse ;’ and this change in
Lilian really began before we returned to L

; before
she had even seen Mr. Margrave. I am convinced it is
something in the reach of your skill as physician— it is
on the nerves, the system. I will give you a proof of
what I say, only do not betray me to her. It was
during your imprisonment, the night before your re-
lease, that I was awakened by her coming to my bed-
side. She was sobbing as if her heart would break.
‘0 mother, motherl’ she cried, pity me, help me-—'I
am so wretched.’ ‘ What is the matter, darling?’ ‘I
' have been so cruel to Allen, and I know I shall be so
again. I cannot help it. Do not question me; only if
we are separated, if he cast me off, or I reject him, tell
him some day—perhaps when I am in my grave—not
to believe appearances; and that I, in my heart of
hearts, never ceased to love himl’”
“She said that! You are not deceiving me ? ”
“ Oh no! how can you think so 7”
“ There is hope still,” I murmured; and I bowed my
head upon my hands, hot tears forcing their way through
the clasped ﬁngers.
“ One word more,” said I ; “ you tell me that Lilian
has a repugnance to this Margrave, and yet that she
found comfort in his visits—a comfort that could not be
wholly ascribed to cheering words he might say about
myself, since it is all but certain that I was not, at that
time, uppermost in her mind. Can you explain this
apparent contradiction f”
32 *


878 _ A STRANGE STORY.
“I cannot otherwise than by a conjecture which you
would ridicule.”
“ I can ridicule nothing now. What ,is your
conjecture? ”
“ I know how much you disbelieve in the stories one
hears of animal magnetism and electro—biology, other~
wise ”

“ You think that Margrave exercises some power of
that kind over Lilian? Has he spoken of such a
_power ? ”
“ Not exactly; but he said that he was sure Lilian
possessed a faculty that he called by some hard name,
not clairvoyance, but a faculty which he said, when I
asked him to explain, was akin to prevision—to second
sight. Then he talked of the Priestesses who had
administered the ancient oracles. Lilian, he said,
reminded him of them, with her deep eyes and mys
terious smile.”
“ And Lilian heard him? What said she ? ”
“ Nothing; she seemed in fear while she listened.”
“ He did not offer to try any of those arts practised
by professional mesmerists and other charlatans ? ”
“ I thought he was about to do so, but I forestalled
him; saying I never would consent to any experiment
of that kind, either on myself or my daughter.”
“ And he replied —-—? ”
“ With his gay laugh, ‘that I was very foolish; that
a person possessed of such a faculty as be attributed to
Lilian, would, if the faculty were developed, be an in-


380 a s'rnANea sronr. _
grateful tendernes's; her plain sense had divined what
all my boasted knowledge had failed to detect in my
earlier intimacy with Margrave- viz. that in him there
was a something present, or a something wanting,
which forbade love and excited fear. Young, beautiful,
wealthy, seemingly blameless in life as he was, she
would not have given her daughter’s hand to him!
CHAPTER XLIV.
THE next day my house was ﬁlled with visitors. I
had no notion that I had so many friends. Mr. Vigors
wrote me a generous and handsome letter, owning his
prejudices against mepn account of his sympathy with
poor Dr. Lloyd, and begging my pardon for what he
now felt to have been harshness, if not distorted justice.
But what most moved me, was the entrance of Stra-
han, who rushed up to me with the heartiness of old
college days. “ Oh, my dear Allen, can you ever for-
give me; that I should have disbelieved your word-
should have suspected you of abstracting my poor
cousin’s memoir?”
“ Is it found, then?”
“Oh, yes; you must thank Margrave. He, clever
fellow, you know, came to me on a visit yesterday.
He put me at once on the right scent. Only guess;
but you never can! It was that wretched old house-


A sraauon STORY. 38]
keeper who purloiued the manuscript. You remember
she came into the room while you were looking at the
memoir. She heard us talk about it; her curiosity was
roused; she longed to know the history of her old mas-
ter, under his own hand; she could not sleep; she heard
me go up to bed; she thought you might leave the
book on the table when you, too, went to rest. She
stole down stairs, peeped through the keyhole of the
library, saw you asleep, the book lying before you,
entered, took away the book softly, meant to glance at
its contents and to return it. You were sleeping so
soundly she thought you would not wake for an hour ;_
she carried it into the library, leaving the door open,
and there began to pore over it; she stumbled ﬁrst on
one of the passages in Latin; she hoped to ﬁnd some
part in plain English, turned over the leaves, putting
her candle close to them, for the old woman’s eyes were
dim, when she heard you make some sound in your
sleep. Alarmed, she looked round; you were moving
uneasily in your seat, and muttering to yourself. From
watching you she was soon diverted by the consequence
of her own confounded curiosity and folly. In moving,
she had unconsciously brought the poor manuscript
close to the candle; the leaves caught the ﬂame; her
own cap and hand burning ﬁrst made her aware of the
mischief done. She threw down the book; her sleeve
was in ﬂames; she had ﬁrst to tear of the sleeve, which
was, luckily for her, not sewn to her dress. By the
time she recovered presence of mind to attend to the


382 A sraarzos s'roar.
book, half its leaves were reduced to tinder. She did
not dare then to replace what was left of the manuscript
on your table; returned, with it, to her room, hid it,
and resolved to keep her own secret. I should never
have guessed it; I had never even spoken to her of the
occurrence; but when I talked over the disappearance
of the book to Margrave last night, and expressed my
disbelief of your story, he said in his merry way: ‘ But
do you think that Fenwick is the only person curious
about your cousin’s odd ways and strange history?
Why, every servant in the household would have been
equally curious. You have examined your servants
of course?’ ‘No, I never thought of it.’ ‘Examine
them now, then. Examine especially that old house-
keeper. I observe a great change in her manner since
I came here, weeks ago, to look over the house. She
has something on her mind—I see it in her eyes.’
Then it occurred to me, too, that the woman’s manner
had altered, and that she seemed always in a tremble
and a ﬁdget. I went at once to her room, and charged
her with stealing the book. She fell on her knees, and
told the whole story as I have told it to you, and as I
shall take care to tell it to all to whom I have so fool-
ishly blabbed my yet more foolish suspicions cf your
self. But can you forgive me, old friend ?”
“ Heartily, heartily! And the book is burned P”
"See," and be red 2. mutilated manuscript
Straw _ - ull- port -» med“ reduced, indeed, to tinder-
Was 1.1-. conc‘ Lung part that related to Haroun—to


A STRANGE s'roar. 383
Grayle; no vestige of that part was left; the earlier por-
tions were scorched and mutilated, though in some
places still decipherable; but as my eye hastily ran
over those places, I saw only mangled sentences of the
experimental problems which the writer had so mi'
nutely elaborated.
“ Will you keep the manuscript as it is, and as long
as you like?” said Strahan.
“No, no; I will have nothing more to do with it.
Consult some other man of science. And so this is the
old woman’s whole story? No accomplice—none?
No one else shared her curiosity and her task P”
“No. Oddly enough, though, she made much the
same excuse for her pitiful folly that the madman made
for his terrible crime; she said, ‘the Devil put it into
her head.’ Of course he did, as he puts everything
wrong into one’s head. That does not mend the
' matter.”
“Howl did she, too, say she saw a Shadow and
heard a voice? ”
“No; not such a liar as that, and not mad enough
for such a lie. But she said that when she was in bed,
thinking over the book, something irresistible urged her
to get up and go down into the study; swore she felt
‘ something lead her by the hand; s‘wore, too, that when
she ﬁrst discovered the manuscript was not in English,
something whispered in her ear to turn over the leaves
and approach them to the candle. But I had no patience


A STRANGE STORY. 385
demoniac sorcery, guided the hand of the murderer
against the life of the person who alone could imperil
his own? had he, by the same dark spells, urged the
woman to the act that had destroyed the only record of
the monsti'ous being—the only evidence that I was
not the sport of an illusion in the horror with which he
inspired me?
But if the latter supposition could be admissible, did
he use his agents only to betray them afterwards to
exposure, and that, without any possible clue to his own
detection as the instigator? Then, there came over me
confused recollections of tales of medizeval witchcraft,
which I had read in boyhood. Were there not on judi-
cial record, attestation and evidence, solemn and circum-
stantial, of powers analogous to those now exercised by
Margrave? Of sorcerers instigating to sin through
inﬂuences ascribed to Demons—making their appari-
tions glide through guarded walls, their voices heard
from afar in the solitude of dungeons or monastic cells?
subjugating victims to their will, by means which no
vigilance could have\detected, if the victims themselves
had not confessed the witchcraft that had ensnared—
courting a sure and infamous death in that confession --
preferring such death to a life so haunted? Were stories
so gravely set forth in the pomp of judicial evidence,
and in the history of times comparatively recent, indeed,
to be massed—pell-mcll together, as a moles indigesta
of senseless superstition—all the witnesses to be
83 I


386 A s'raasea sroar.
deemed liars? all the victims and tools of tho sorcerers,
lunatics? all the examiners or judges, with their solemn
gradations - lay and clerical— from commissions of
Inquiry to Courts of Appeal— to be despised for credu-
lity, loathed for cruelty; or, amidst records so'numerons,
so imposingly attested—were there the fragments of a
terrible truth ? And had our ancestors been so unwise
in those laws we now deem so savage, by which the
world was rid of scourges more awful and more potent
than the felon with his candid dagger? Fell instiga-
tors of the evil in men’s secret hearts—shaping into
action the vague, half-formed desire, and guiding with
agencies, impalpable, unseen, their spell-bound instru-
ments of calamity and death.
Such Were the gloomy questions that I—by repute,
the sternest advocate of common sense against fantas-
tic errors—by profession, the searcher into ﬂesh and
blood, and tissue, and nerve, and sinew, for the causes
of all that disease the mechanism of the universal
human frame;— I, self-boasting physician, sceptic, phi-
losopher, materialist- revolved, not amidst gloomy
pines, under grim winter skies, but as I paced slow
through laughing meadows, and by the banks of merry
streams, in the ripeness of the golden August; the hum
of insects in the fragrant grass, the ﬂutter of birds amid
the delicate green of boughs chequered by playful sun-
beams and gentle shadows, and ever in sight of the
resorts of busy work-d ay man. Walls, roof-tops, church~


A s'raauoa sroar. 387
spires rising high. There, white and modern, the hand-
writing of our race, in this practical nineteenth century,
on its square, plain masonry and Doric shafts, the Town-
Hall, central in the animated market-place. And I—
I—prying into long-neglected corners and dust-holes
of memory for what my reason had ﬂung there as worth-
less rubbish; reviving the jargon of French law, in the
procés verbal, against a Gille de Retz, or an Urbain.
Grandier, and sifting the equity of sentences on witch-
craft!
Bursting the links of this ghastly soliloquy with a
laugh at my own folly, I struck into a narrow path that
led back towards the city, by a quiet and rural suburb:
the path wound on through a wide and solitary church-
yard at the base of the Abbey-hill. Many of the for-
mer dwellers on that eminence now slept in the lowly
burial-ground at its foot. And the place, mournfnlly
decorated with the tombs which still mark distinctions
of rank amidst the levelling democracy of the grave,
was kept trim with the care which comes half from piety,
and half from pride.
I seated myself on a bench, placed between the
clipped yew-trees that bordered the path from the
entrance to the church-porch; deeming vaguely that
my own perplexing thoughts might imbibe a quiet from
the quiet of the place.
“And oh,” I murmured to myself, “ oh that I had one
bosom friend to whom I might freely conﬁde all these


388 A STRANGE s'roav.
torturing riddles which I cannot solve—one who could
read my heart; light up its darkness; exercise its spec-
tres; one in whose wisdom I could welcome a guide
thrOugh the Nature which now suddenly changes her
aspect, opening out from the walls with which I had
fenced and enclosed her as mine own formal garden ——
all her pathways, therein, trimmed to my footstep; all
.her blooms grouped and harmonized to my own taste
in color; all her groves, all her caverns, but the sooth-
ing retreats of a Muse or a Science; opening out-
opening out, desert on desert, into clueless and measure-
less spacei Gone is the Garden? Were its conﬁnes
too narrow for Nature ? Be it sol The Desert replaces
the garden, but where ends the Desert? Reﬁt from my
senses are the laws which gave order and place to their
old, questionless realm. I stand lost and appalled
amidst Chaos. Did my mind misconstrue the laws it
deemed ﬁxed and immutable? Be it sol But still
Nature cannot be lawless; Creation is not a Chaos.
If my senses deceive me in some things, they are still
unerring in others; if thus, in some things, fallacious,
still, in other things, truthful. Are there within me
senses ﬁner than those I have cultured, or without me
vistas of knowledge which instincts, apart from my
senses, divine? So long as I deal with the Finite
alon/e, my senses sufﬁce me; but when the Inﬁnite is ob-
trnded upon me, there are my senses faithless deserters?
If so, is there aught else in my royal resources of Man


A sraanaa s'roaY. 385
—whose ambition it is, from the ﬁrst dawn of his glory
as thinker, to invade, and to subjugate N ature—is
there aught else to supply the place of those traitors, the
senses, who report to my Reason, their judge and their
sovereign, as truths, seen and heard, tales which my
Reason forfeits her sceptre if she does not disdain as
lies? Oh, for a friendl Oh, for a guide I ”
And as I so murmured, my eye fell upon the form of
a kneeling child-- at the farther end of the burial-
ground, beside a grave with its new headstone gleam-
ing white amidst the older moss-grown tombs, a female
child, her head bowed, her hands clasped. I could see
but the outline of her small form in its sable dress — an
infant beside the dead.
My eye and my thoughts were turned from that silent
ﬁgure, too absorbed in my own restless tumult of doubt
and dread, for sympathy with the grief or the consola-
tion of a kneeling child. And yet I should have
remembered that tombl Again I' murmured with a
ﬁerce impatience, “Oh, for a friendl Oh, for a guide!”
I heard steps on the walk under the yews. And an
old man came in sight, slightly bent, with long, grey hair,
but still with enough of vigor for years to come, in
his tread, ﬁrm, though slow -in the unshrunken mus-
cle of his limbs and the steady light of his clear, blue
eye. I started. Was it possible? That countenance,
marked, indeed, with the lines of laborious thought, but
sweet in the mildness of humanity, and serene in the
88"


890 A s’rnumn no“.
peace of conscience! I could not be mistaken. Julms
Faber was before me. The profound pathologist, to
whom my own proud self-esteem acknowledged inferi-
ority, without humiliation; the generous benefactor to
whom I owed my own smoothed entrance into the
arduous road of fame and fortune. I had longed for a
friend, a guide; what I sought stood suddenly at my
side
END 0! VOLUME FIRST.


A STRANGE STORY
VOL. II.


A STRANGE STORY.

CHAPTER XLV.
EXPLANATION, on Faber’s part, was short and simple.
The nephew whom he designed as the heir to his
wealth, had largely outstripped the liberal allowance
made to him— had incurred heavy debts; and in order
to extricate himself from the debts, had plunged into
ruinous speculations. Faber had come back to Eng-
land to save his heir from prison or outlawry, at the
expense of more than three-fourths of the destined
inheritance. To add to all, the young man had married
a young lady without fortune; the uncle only heard of
the marriage on arriving in England. The spendthrift
was hiding from his creditors in the house of his father-
in-law, in one of the western counties. Faber there
sought him; and, on becoming acquainted with his
wife, grew reconciled to the marriage, and formed hopes
of his nephew’s future redemption. He spoke, indeed,
(7)


8 A era/men s'roav.
'of the young wife with great aﬁ'ection. She was good
and sensible; willing and anxious to encounter any
privation by which her husband might retrieve the
effects of his folly. “ So,” said Faber, “ on consultation
with this excellent creature —for my poor nephew is so
broken down by repentance, that others must think for
him to exalt repentance into reform—my plans were
determined. I shall remove my prodigal from all scenes
of temptation. He has youth, strength, plenty of
energy, hitherto misdirected. I shall take him from
the Old World into the New. I have decided on Aus-
tralia. The fortune still left to me, small here, will be
ample capital there. It is not enough to maintain us
separately, so we must all live together. Besides, I feel
that, though I have neither the strength nor the expe-
rience which could best serve a young settler on a
strange soil, still, under my eye, my poor boy will be at
once more prudent and more persevering. We sail
next week.”
Faber spoke so cheerfully that I knew not how to
express compassion; yet, at his age, after a career of
such prolonged and distinguished labor, to resign the
ease and comforts of the civilized state for the hard-
ships and rudeness of an infant colony, seemed to me a
dreary prospect; and, as delicately, as tenderly' as I
could to one whom I loved and honored as a father, I
placed at his disposal the fortune which, in great part,
I owed to him —-pressing him at least to take from it
enough to secure to himself, in his own country, a home


A STRANGE s'roar. 9
suited to his years and worthy of his station. He
rejected all my offers, however earnestly urged on him,
with his usual modest and gentle dignity; and assuring
me that he looked forward with great interest to a
residence in lands new to his experience, and afford-
ing ample scope for the hardy enjoyments which had
always allured his tastes, he hastened to change the
subject.
“And who, think you, is the admirable helpmate my
scapegrace has had the saving good luck to ﬁnd? A
daughter of the worthy man who undertook the care of
poor Dr. Lloyd’s orphans — the orphans who owed so
much to your generous exertions to secure a provision
for them—and that child, now just risen from her
father’s grave, is my pet companion, my darling ewe-
lamb -- Dr. Lloyd’s daughter Amy.”
Here the child joined us, quickening her pace as she
recognized the old man, and nestling to his side as she
glanced wistfully towards myself. A winning, candid,
lovable child’s face, somewhat melancholy, somewhat
more thoughtful than is common to the face of child-
hood, hut calm, intelligent, and ineﬂ'ably mild. Pre-
sently she stole from the old man, and put her hand
in mine:
“ Are you not the kind gentleman who came to see
Him that night when he passed away from us, and
who, they all say at home, was so good to my brothers
and me? Yes, I recollect you now.” And she put
her pure face to mine, wooing me to kiss it.


10 A STRANGE swear.
I kind! I good! I—l? Alas! she little knew,
little guessed, the wrathful imprecation her father had
bequeathed to me that fatal night!
‘ I did not dare to kiss Dr. Lloyd’s orphan daughter,
but my tears fell over her hand. She took them as
signs of pity, and, in her infant thankfulness, silently
kissed me.
“ Oh, my friend!” I murmured to Faber, “I have
much that I yearn to say to you—alone—alone —come
to my house with me, be at least my guest as long as
you stay in this town.”
“ Willingly,” said Faber, looking at me more intently
than he had done before, and with the true eye of the
practised Healer, at once soft and penetrating.
He rose, took my arm, and whispered a word in the
ear of the little girl, she went on before us, turning her
head,'as she gained the gate, for another look at her
father’s grave. As we walked to my house, Julius
Faber spoke to me much of this child. Her brothers
were all at school; she was greatly attached to his
nephew’s wife; she had become yet more attached to
Faber himself, though on so short an acquaintance; it
had been settled that she was to accompany the emi-
grants to Australia.
“There,” said he, “the sum that some muniﬁcent,
but unknown, friend of her father has settled on her,
will provide her no mean dower for a colonist’s wife,
when the time comes for her to bring a blessing to
some other hearth than ours.” He went on to say that


a s'raauon s'ronr. H
, in order

she had wished to accompany him to L
to visit her father’s grave before crossing the wide seas;
“ and she has taken such fond care of me all the way,
that you might fancy I were the child of the two. 'I
came back to this town, partly to dispose of a few poor
houses in it which still belong to me, principally to bid
you farewell before quitting the Old World, no doubt
forever. So, on arriving to-day, I left Amy by herself
in the churchyard while I went to your house, but you
were from home. And now I must congratulate you
on the reputation you have so rapidly acquired, which
has even surpassed my predictions.”
“ You are aware,” said I falteringly, “ of the extra-
ordinary charge from which that part of my reputation
dearest to all men has just emerged 7”
He had but seen. a short account in a weekly journal,
written after my release. He asked details, which I
postponed.
Reaching my home, I hastened to provide for the
comfort of my two unexpected guests; stro’a to rally
myself—to be cheerful. Not till night, when Julius
Faber and I were alone together, did I touch on what
was weighing at my heart. Then drawing to his side,
I told him all;—all of which the substance is herein
written, from the death-scene in Dr. Lloyd’s chamber
to the hour in which I had seen Dr. Lloyd’s child at her
father’s grave. Some of the incidents and conversations
which had most impressed me, I had already committed
to writing, in the fear that, otherwise, my fancy might


19 a sraasoa s'roav.
forge for its own thraldom the links of reminiscence
which my memory might let fall from its chain. Faber
listened with a silence only interrupted by short perti-
nent questions; and when I had done, he remained
thoughtful for some moments; then the great physician
replied thus :
“ I take for granted your conviction of the reality of
all you tell me, even of the Luminous Shadow, of the
bodiless Voice ; but, before admitting the reality itself,
we must abide by the old maxim, not to accept as cause
to effect those agencies which belong to the Marvellous,
when causes less improbable for the effect can be ration-
ally conjectured. In this case are there not such causes?
Certainly there are -—- ”
“ There are ?”
“ Listen; you are one of those nien who attempt to
stiﬂe their own imagination. But in all completed
intellect, imagination exists, and will force its way;
deny it healthful vents, and it may stray into morbid
channels. The death-room of Dr. Lloyd deeply im-
pressed your heart, far more than your pride would
own. This is clear, from the pains you took to ex-
onerate your conscience, in your generosity to the
orphans. As the heart was moved, so was the imagi-
nation stirred; and, unaware to yourself, prepared for
much that subsequently appealed to it. Your sudden
love, conceived in the very grounds of the house so
associated with recollections in themselves strange and
romantic; the peculiar temperament and nature of the


a smarter. sroaY. 13
girl to whom your love was attracted; her own vision-
ary beliefs, and the keen anxiety which infused into
your love a deeper poetry of sentiment—all insensiny
tended to induce the imagination to dwell on the
Wonderful ; and, in overstriving to reconcile each rarer
phenomenon to the most positive laws of Nature, your
very intellect could discover no solution but the
Preternatural.
“ You visit a man who tells you he has seen Sir
Philip Derval’s ghost; on that very evening, you hear
a strange story, in which Sir Philip’s name is mixed up
with a tale of murder, implicating two mysterious pre-
tenders to magic—Louis Grayle, and the Sage of
Aleppo. The tale so interests your fancy that even
the glaring impossibility of a not unimportant part of
it escapes your ndtice—viz. the account of a criminal
trial in which the circumstantial evidence was more
easily attainable than in all the rest of the narrative,
but which could not legally have taken place as told.
Thus it is whenever the mind begins, unconsciously, to
admit the shadow of 8. Supernatural; the Obvious is
lost to the eye that plunges its gaze into the Obscure.
Almost immediately afterwards you become acquainted
with a young stranger, whose traits of characterv interest
1nd perplex, attract yet revolt you. All this time you
are engaged in a physiological work which severely
tasks the brain, and in which you examine the intricate
question of soul distinct from mind.
“And, here, I can conceive a cause deep-hid amongst
H. -— 2


14 A STRANGE sroar.
what metaphysicians would call latent associations, for
a train of thought which disposed you to accept the
fantastic impressions afterwards made on you by the
scene in the museum and the visionary talk of Sir
Philip Derval. Doubtless, when, at college, you ﬁrst
studied metaphysical speculation, you would have
glanced over Beattie’s Essay on Truth as one of the
works written in opposition to your favorite, David
Hume.”
“Yes, I read the book, but I have long since for-
gotten its arguments.”
“ Well, in that essay, Beattie" cites the extraordinary
instance of Simon Browne, a learned and pious clergy-
man, who seriously disbelieved the existence of his own
soul; and imagined that, by interposition of Divine
power, his soul was annulled, and” nothing left but
a principal of animal life, which he held in common
with the brutes! When, years ago, a thoughtful im-
aginative student, you came on that story, probably
enough you would have paused, revolved in your own
mind and fancy what kind of a creature a man might
be, if, retaining human life and merely human under-
standing, he was deprived of the powers and properties
which reasoners have ascribed to the existence of soul.
Something in this young man, unconsciously to your-
self, revives that forgotten train of meditative ideas.
His dread of death as the ﬁnal cessation of being, his
* Beattie‘s Essay on Truth, part i. ch. ii. 8. The story of Simon
Browne is to be found in “The Adventurer."


A s'raanua arm“. [5
brute-like want )f sympathy with his kind, his her
pacity to comprehend the motives which carry man
on to scheme and to build for a future that extends
beyond his grave, all start up before you at the very
moment your reason is overtasked, your imagination
fevered, inv seeking the solution of problems which, to
a philosophy based upon your system, must always
remain insoluble. The young man’s conversation not
only thus excites your fancies, it disturbs your aﬂ‘ec-
tions. He speaks not only of drugs that renew youth,
but of charms that secure love. You tremble for your
Lilian while you hear him I And the brain thus tasked,
the imagination thus inﬂamed, the heart thus agitated,
you are presented to Sir Philip Derval, whose ghost
your patient had supposed he saw weeks ago.
“ This person, a seeker after an occult philosophy,
which had possibly acquainted him with some secrets
in nature beyond the pale of our conventional experi-
ence, though, when analyzed, they might prove to be
quite reconcilable with sober science, startles you with
an undeﬁned, mysterious charge against the young man
who had previously seemed to you diﬂ‘erent from ordi-
nary mortals. in a room stored with the dead things
of the brute. soulless world. your brain becomes intoxi-
cated with the fumes of some vapor which produces
effects not uncommon in the superstitious practices of
the East; your brain, thus excited, brings distinctly
before you the vague impressions it had before received.
Margrave becomes identiﬁed with the Louis Graylo
2A


16 A sraanoa S'I‘Oltl".
of whom you had previously heard an obscure and
legendary tale, and all the anomalies in his character
are explained by his being that which you had con-
tended, in your physiological work, it was quite possible
for man to be—viz. mind and body without soul! You
were startled by the monster which man would be were
your own theory possible; and in order to reconcile the
contradictions in this very monster, you account for
_ knowledge and for powers that mind without soul could
not have attained, by ascribing to this prodigy broken
memories of a former existence, demon attributes from
former proﬁciency in evil .magic. My friend, there is
nothing here which your own study of morbid idiosyn-
crasies should not sufﬁce to solve.”
“So then,” said I, “you would reduce all that has
affected my senses as realities into the deceit of illu-
sions? But,” I added, in a whisper, terriﬁed by my
own question, “ do not physiologists agree in this, viz.:
that though illusory phantasms may haunt the sane as
well as the insane, the sane know that they are only
illusions, and the insane do not 7 ”
“ Such a distinction,” answered Faber, “is far too
arbitrary and rigid for more than a very general and
qualiﬁed acceptance. Miiller, indeed, who is, perhaps,
the highest authority on such a subject, says, with
prudent reserve, ‘When a person who is not insane
sees spectres and believes them to be real, his intellect
must be imperfectly exercised.’* He would, indeed, be
* Miller’s Physiology of the Senses, p. 894.


A STRANGE STORY. 1'!
a bold physician who maintained that every man who
believed he had really seen a ghost was of unsound
mind. In Dr. Abercrombie’s interesting account of
spectral illusions, he tells us of a servant-girl _who
believed she saw, at the foot of her bed, the apparition
of Curran, in a sailor’s jacket and an immense pair of
whiskers)I No doubt the spectre was an illusion, and
Dr. Abercrombie very ingeniously suggests the associa-
tion of ideas by which the apparition was conjured up
with the grotesque adjuncts of the jacket and the
whiskers; but the servant-girl, in believing the reality
, of the apparition, was certainly not insane. When I
read in the American public journals'l' of ‘spirit mani-
festations,’ in which large numbers of persons of at
least the average degree of education, declare that they
have actually witnessed various phantasms, much more
extraordinary than all which you have conﬁded to me,
and arrive, at once, at the conclusion that they are
thus put into direct communication with departed souls,
I must assume that they are under an illusion, but I
should be utterly unwarranted in supposing that, be-
cause they credited that illusion, they were insane. I
should o'nly say with Milller, that in their reasoning on
the phenomena presented to them, ‘their intellect was
* Abercronibie on the Intellectual Powers, p. 281 (16th
edition).
f At the date of Faber's conversation with Allen Fenwick, the
(so-called) spirit manifestiOns had not spread from America over
Europe. But if they had, Faber's views would, no doubt, he"
remained the same.
2 i


18 a era/mes STORY.
lmperfectly exercised.’ And an impression made on the
senses, being in itself sufﬁciently rare to excite our
wonder, may be strengthened till it takes the form of a
positive fact, by various coincidences which are accepted
as corroborative testimony, yet which are, nevertheless,
nothing more than coincidences found in every-day
matters of business, but only emphatically noticed
when we can exclaim, ‘How astonishingl’ In your
case such coincidences have been, indeed, very signal,
and might well aggravate the perplexities into which
your reason Was thrown. Sir Philip Derval’s murder,
the missing casket, the exciting nature of the manu-
script, in which a superstitious interest is already
enlisted by your expectation to ﬁnd in it the key to the
narrator’s boasted powers, and his reasons for the
astounding denunciation of the man whom you suspect
to be his'murderer; in all this there is much to conﬁrm,
nay, to cause, an illusion, and for that very reason,
when examined by strict laws of evidence, in all this
there is but additional proof that the illusion was-
only illusion. Your aﬁ'ections contribute to strengthen
your fancy in its war on your reason. The girl you so
passionately love develops, to your disquietude and
terror, the visionary temperament which, at her age, is
ever liable to fantastic caprices. She hears Margrave’s
song, which, you say, has a wildness of charm that
aﬁ'ects and thrills even you. Who does not know the
power of music? and of all music, there is none so
potential as that of the human voice. Thus, in some


A s'raauon wear. [9
languages, charm and song are identical expression;
and even when a critic, in our own sober newspapers,
extols a Malibran or a Grisi, you may be sure that he
will call her ‘enchantress;’ Well, this lady, your be-
trothed, in whom the nervous system is extremely
impressionable, hears a voice which, even to your ear,
is strangely melodious, and sees a form and face which,
even to your eye, are endowed with a singular character
of beauty. Her fancy is impressed by what she thus
hears and sees ; and impressed the more because, by a
coincidence not very uncommon, a face like that which
she beholds has before been presented to her in a dream
or a reverie. In the nobleness of genuine, conﬁding,
reverential love, rather than impute to your beloved a
levity of sentiment that would seem to you a treason,
you accept the chimera of ‘magical fascination.’ In
this frame of mind you sit down to read the memoir of
a mystical enthusiast. Do you begin now to account
for the Luminous Shadow? A dream! And a dream
no less because your eyes were open and you believed
yourself awake. The diseased imagination resembles
those mirrors which, being themselves distorted, repre-
sent distorted pictures as correct.
“And even this memoir of Sir Philip Derval’s-
can you be quite sure that you actually read the part
which relates to Haroun and Louis Grayle? You say
that, while perusing the manuscript, you saw the Lumi-
nous Shadow and became insensible. The old woman
says you were fast asleep. May you not really have


20 .. s'raanea sroa 1.
fallen into a slumber, and in that slumber have dreamed
the parts of the tale that relate to Grayle? dreamed
that you beheld the Shadow? Do you remember what
is said so well by Dr. Abercrombie, to authorize the
explanation I suggest to you: ‘ A person under the
inﬂuence of some strong mental impression, falls asleep
for a few seconds, perhaps without being sensible of it:
some scene or person appears in a dream, and he starts
up under the conviction that it was a spectral appear-
ance.’"*
“But,” said I, “the apparition was seen by me
again, and when, certainly, I was not sleeping.”
* Abercrombie on the Intellectual Powers, p. 278 (15th edi-
tion). This author, not more to be admired for his intelligence
than his candor, and who is entitled to praise for a higher degree
of original thought than that to which he modestly pretends,
relates a curious anecdote illustrating “the analogy between
dreaming and spectral illusion, which he received from the gen-
tleman to which it occured—an eminent medical friend:"--
“ Having sat up late one evening, under considerable anxiety for
one of his children, who was ill, he fell asleep in his chair, and
had a frightful dream, in which the prominent ﬁgure was an
immense baboon. He awoke with the fright, got up instantly,
and walked to a. table which was in the middle of the room. He
was then quite awake, and quite conscious of the articles around
him: but close by the wall in the end of the apartment he lis-
tinctly saw the baboon making the same grimaces which he had
seen in his dream: and this spectre continued visible for about
half a minute." Now, a man who saw only a baboon would be
quite ready to admit that it was but an optical illusion; but if,
instead of a baboon, he had seen an intimate friend, and that
friend, by some coincidence of time, had died about that date, he
would be a very strong-minded man if he admitted for the mys-
tery of seeing his friend. the same natural solution which he
would readin admit for seeing a baboon.


A STRANGE s'ronr. \ 21
“ True; and who should know better than a physician
so well read as yourself that a spectral illusion once
beheld is always apt to return again in the same form!
Thus, Goethe was long haunted by one image; the
phantom of a ﬂower unfolding itself, and developing
new ﬂowers.* Thus, one of our most distinguished
philosophers tells us of a lady known to himself, who
would see her husband, hear him move and speak, when
he was not even in the house-l" But instances of the
facility with which phantasms, once admitted, repeat
themselves to the senses, are numberless. Many are
recorded by Hibbert and Abercrombie, and every phy-
sician in extensive practice can add largely, from his
own experience, to the list. Intense self-concentration
is, in itself, a mighty magician. The magicians of the
East inculcate the necessity of fast, solitude and medi-
tation, for the due development of their imaginary
powers. And I have no doubt with effect; because
fast, solitude and meditation—in other words, thought
or fancy intensely concentred, will both raise apparitions
and produce the invoker’s belief in them. Spinello,
striving to conceive the image of Lucifer for his picture
of the Fallen Angels, was at last actually haunted by
the Shadow of the Fiend. Newton himself has been
subjected to a phantom, though to him, Son of Light,
the spectre presented was that of the sun I You remem-
* See Miiller’s observations on this phenomenon, Physiology 01
the Senses, Balcy’s translation, p. 1395.
1- Sir David Brewster’s Letters on Natural Magic, p. 89


22 a s'raaucs s'roar.
ber the account that Newton gives to Locke of this
visionary appearance. He says that ‘though he had
looked at the sun with his right eye only, and not with
the left, yet his fancy began to make an impression
upon his left eye as well as his right, for if he shut his
right and looked upon the clouds, or a book, or any
bright object with his left eye, he could see the sun
almost as plain as with the right, if he did but intend
his fancy a little while on it:’ nay, ‘for some months
after, as often as he began to meditate on the phenom-
ena, the spectrum of the sun began to return, even
though he lay in bed at mid-night, with his curtains
drawnl’ Seeing, then, how any vivid impression once
made will recur, what wonder that you should behold
in your prison the Shining Shadow that had ﬁrst star-
tled you in a Wizard’s chamber when poring over the
records of a murdered visionary? The more minutely
you analyze your own hallucinations—pardon me the
word—the more they assume the characteristics of a
dream; contradictory, illogical, even in the marvels they
represent. Can any two persons be more totally unlike
each other, not merely as to form and years, but as to
all the elements of character, than the Grayle of whom
you read, or believe you read, and the Margrave in
whom you evidently think that Grayle is existent still?
The one represented, you say, as gloomy, saturnine,
with vshement passions, but with an original grandeur
of thought and will, consumed by an internal remorse;
the other you paint to me as a joyous and wayward


a s’rasuon s'roar. 23
darling of Nature, acute yet frivolous, free from even
the ordinary passions of youth, taking delight in inno-
cent amusements, incapable of continuous study, with-
out a single pang of repentance for the crimes you so
fancifully impute to him. And now, when your sus-
picions, so romantically conceived, are dispelled by
positive facts, now, when it is clear that Margrave
neither murdered Sir Philip Derval nor abstracted the
memoir, you still, unconsciously to yourself, draw on
your imagination in order to excuse the suspicion your
pride of intellect declines to banish, and suppose that
this youthful sorcerer tempted the madman to the mur-
der, the woman to the theft —-”
“ But you forget the madman said ‘that he was led
on by the Luminous Shadow of a beautiful youth,’ that
the woman said also that she was impelled by some
mysterious agency.”
“I do not forget those coincidences; but how your
learning would dismiss them as nugatory were your
imagination not disposed to exaggerate theml When
you read the authentic histories of any popular illusion,
such as the spurious inspirations of the J ansenist Con-
vulsionaries, the apparitions that invaded convents, as
deposed in the trial of Urbain Grandier, the confessions
of witches and wizards in places the most remote from
each other, or, at this day, the tales of ‘spirit-mani-
festation’ recorded in half the towns and villages of
America—do not all the superstitious impressions of a
particular time have a common family likeness? What


24 A 's'raauea s'roav.
one sees another sees, though there has been no com-
munication between the two. I cannot tell you why
these phantasms thus partake of the nature of an atmo
spheric epidemic; the fact remains incontestable. And,
strange as may be the coincidence between your im-
pression of a mystic agency and those of some other
brains not cognizant of the chimeras of your own, still,
is it not simpler philosophy to say, ‘They are coinci
dences of the same nature which made witches in the
same epoch all tell much the same story of the broom-
sticks they rode and the sabbats at which they danced
to the ﬁend’s piping,’ and there leave the matter, as in
science we must leave many of the most elementary
and familiar phenomena inexplicable as to their causes
--is not this, I say, more philosophical than to insist
upon an explanation which accepts the supernatural
rather than leave the extraordinary unaccounted
for i”
“As you speak,” said I, resting my downcast face
upon my hand, “ I should speak to my patient who had
conﬁded to me the tale I have told to you.”
“And yet the explanation does not wholly satisfy
you? Very likely: to some phenomena there is, as
yet, no explanation. Perhaps Newton himself does
not explain quite to his own satisfaction why he was
haunted at midnight by the spectrum of a sun ; though
I have no doubt that some later philosopher, whose
ingenuity has been stimulated by Newton’s account,
has, by this time, suggested a rational solution of the


a sraasoa sronr. 25
enigma.* To return to your own case. I have oﬁ'ered
such interpretations of the mysteries that confound
you, as appear to me authorized by physiological sci-
ence. Should you adduce other facts which physio-
* Newton’s explanation is as follows: “This story I tell you
to let you understand, that in the observation related by Mr.
Boyle, the man's fancy probably concurred with the impression
made by. the sun’s light to produce that phantasm of the sun
which he constantly saw in bright objects, and so your question
about the cause of this phantasm involves another about the power
of the fancy, which [must confess is too hard a knot for me to antic.
To place this effect in a constant motion is hard, because the sun
ought then to appear perpetually. It seems rather to consist in
a disposition of the sensorium to move the imagination strongly,
and to be easily moved both by the imagination and by the light
as often as bright objects are looked upon.” —Leiterfrom Sir I.
Newton to Locke, Lord King’: Life of Locke, vol. i., pp. 405-8.
Dr. Roget (Animal and Vegetable Physiology considered with
reference to Natural Theology, Bridgewater Treatise, pp. 524,
525) thus refers to this phenomenon, which he states “all of us
may experience z”—
“ When the impressions are very vivid ” Roget is speak-
ing of visual impressions), “another phenomenon often takes
place, namely, their subsequent recurrence after a certain inlerval,
during which they are not fell, and quite independently of any renewed
application of the cause which had originally excited them." (I mark
by italics the words which more precisely coincide with Julius
Faber’s explanations.) “ If, for example, we look steadfastly at
the sun for a second or two, and then immediately close our
eyes, the image or spectrum of the sun remains for a long time
present to the mind as if the light were still acting on the retina.
It then gradually fades and disappears; but if we continue to
keep the eyes shut, the same impression will, after a ccrlain time,
recur and again vanish: and this phenomenon will be repeated at
intervals, the sensation becoming fainter at each renewal. It
then gradually fades and disappears; but if we continue to keep
the eyes shut, the same impression will after a time recur, and
II. — 3 ‘


26 A STRANGE STORY.
logical science wants the data to resolve into phe-
nomena, always natural, however rare, still hold fast to
that simple saying of Goethe’s, ‘Mysteries are not
necessarily miracles.’ And, if all which physiological
then vanish, and this phenomena will be repeated at intervals,
the sensation becoming fainter at each renewal. It is probable
that these re-appcarances of the image, after the light which
produced the original impression has been withdrawn, 'are occa-
sioned by spontaneous aﬁ'ections of the retina itself which are
conveyed to the sensorium. In other cases, where the impres-
sions are less strong, the physical changes producing these
changes are perhaps conﬁned to the sensorium.”
It may be said that there is this diﬂ‘erence between the spec-
trum of the sun and such a phantom as that which perplexed
Allen Fenwick—viz., that the sun has been actually beheld
before its visionary appearance can be reproduced. and that
Allen Fenwick only imagines he has seen the apparition which
repeats itself to his fancy. “ But there are grounds for the sus-
picion” (says Dr. Hibbert, Philosophy of Apparitions, p. 250),
“ that when ideas of vision are uiviﬁed to the height of sensation, a
corresponding nﬂ'ection of the optic nerve accompanies the illusion."
Milller (Physiology of the Senses, p. 1392, Baley‘s translation)
states the same opinion still more strongly, and Sir David Brews-
ter, quoted by Dr. Hibbert (p. 251), says: " In examining these
mental impressions, I have found that they follow the motions
of the eyeball exactly like the spectral impressions of luminous
objects. and that they resemble them also in their apparent
immobility when the eye is displaced by an external force. If
this result (which I state with much difﬁdence, from having
only my own experience in its favor) shall be found generally
true by others, it will follow that the objects of mental contempla-
tion may be seen as distinctly as external objects, and will occupy the
same local position in the axis of vision, as if they had been formed by
the agency-of light.” Hence the impression of an image once con
veyed to the senses. no matter how, whether by actual or illu-
sory vision, is liable to renewal, “independently of any renewed
application of the cause which had originally excited it,” and


A s'rnanor. s'rosr. 27
science comprehends in its experience wholly fails us, I
may then hazard certain conjectures which, by acknow-
ledging ignorance, is compelled to recognize the Mar-
vellous (for, as where knowledge enters the Marvellous
recedes, so where knowledge falters the Marvellous
advances), yet still, even in those conjectures, I will
distinguish the Marvellous from the Supernatural.
But, for the present, I advise you to accept the guess
that may best quiet the fevered imagination which any
bolder guess would only more excite.”
“You are right,” said I, rising proudly to the full
height of my stature, my head erect and my heart defy-
ing. “And so let this subject be renewed no more
between us. I will brood over it no more myself. I
regain the unclouded realm of my human intelligence;
and, in that intelligence, I mock the sorcerer and dis-
dain the spectre.”

CHAPTER XLVI.
JULrus FABEB and Amy Lloyd stayed In my house
three days, and in their presence I felt a healthful sense
of security and peace. Amy wished to visit her father’s
house, and I asked Faber, in taking her there, to seize
the image can be seen in that renewal, " as distinctly as external
objects," for indeed “the revival of the fantastic ﬁgure really
does aﬂ'ect those points of the retina which had been previously
Impressed.”


28 a s'raanea sroar.
the occasion to see Lilian, that he might communicate
to me his impression of a case so peculiar. I prepared
Mrs. Ashleigh for this visit by a previous note. When
the old man. and the child came back, both brought me
comfort. Amy was charmed with Lilian, who had
received her with the sweetness natural to her real
character, and I loved to hear Lilian’s praise from those
innocent lips.
Faber’s report was still more calculated to console me:
“I have seen, I have conversed with her long and
familiarly. You were quite right, there is no tendency
to consumption in that exquisite, if delicate, organiza-
tion; nor do I see cause for the fear to which your
statement had preinclined me. That head is too nobly
formed for any constitutional cerebral inﬁrmity. In its
organization, ideality, wonder, veneration are large, it is
true, but they are balanced by other organs, now per-
haps almost dormant, but which will come into play as
life passes from romance into duty. Something at this
moment evidently oppresses her mind. In conversing
with her, I observe abstraction—listlessness; but I am
so convinced of her truthfulness, that if she has once -
told you she returned your affection, and pledged to you
her faith, I should, in your place, rest perfectly satisﬁed
that whatever he the cloud that now rests on her ima-
gination, and for the time obscures the idea of yourself,
it will pass away.”
Faber was a believer in the main divisions of phre-
nology, though he did not accept all the dogn- as of Gall


A s'raanea arm“. 29
and Spurzheim; while, to my mind, the refutation of
phrenology in its fundamental propositions had been
triumphantly established by the lucid arguments of Sir
W. Hamilton. * But when Faber rested on phrenolog-
ical observations assurances in honor of Lilian, I for-
get Sir W. Hamilton, and believed in phrenology. As
iron girders and pillars expand and contract with the
mere variations of temperature, so will the strongest
conviction on which the human intellect rests its judg-
ment, varywith the changes of the human heart; and
the building is only safe where these variations are
foreseen and allowed for by a wisdom intent on self-
knowledge. 1' i
There was much in the affection that had sprung up
between Julius Faber and Amy Lloyd which touched
my heart and softened allits emotions. This man,
unblessed, like myself, by conjugal and parental ties,
turned for solace to the love of a child, as I, in the pride
of manhood, had turned to the love of woman. 'But his
love was without fear, without jealousy, without trou-
ble. My sunshine came to me, in a ﬁtful ray, through
*The.summary of this distinguished lecturer’s objections to
phrenology is to be found in the Appendix to vol. i. of Lectures
on Metaphysics, p. 404, et. seq. Edition 1859.
1- The change of length in iron girders caused by variation of
temperature, has not unfrcquently brought down the whole
ediﬁce into which they were admitted. Good engineers and
architects allow for such changes produced by temperature. In
the tubular bridge across the Menai Straits, a self-acting record
of the daily amount of its contraction and expansion is ingeni-
ously contrived.
8*


80 A sraanes s'roar.
clouds that had gathered over my noon; his sunshine
covered all his landscape, hallowed, and hallowing, by
the calm of declining day.
And Amy was no common child. She had no exube-
rant imagination; she was haunted by no whispers from
Afar; she was a creature ﬁtted to the earth _to accept
its duties and to gladdcn its cares. Her tender obser-
vation, ﬁne and tranquil, was alive to the all important
household triﬂes by which, at the earliest age, man’s
allotted soother asserts her privileges to tend and to
comfort. It was pleasant to see her moving so noise-
lessly through the rooms I had devoted to her venerable
protector, knowing all his simple wants, and providing
for them as if by the mechanism of a heart exquisitely
moulded to the loving uses of life. Sometimes when I
saw her setting his chair by the window (knowing, as I
did, how much he habitually loved to be near the light)
and smoothing his papers (in which he was apt to be
unmetlmdical), placing the mark in his book when he
ceased to read, divining, almost without his glance, some
wish passing through his mind, and then seating her-
self at his feet, often with her work - which was
always destined for him or for one of her absent brothers
-now and then, with the one small book that she car-
ried with her, a selection of Bible stories compiled for
children ;— sometimes when I saw her thus, how I
wished that Lilian, too, could have seen her, and have
compared her own ideal phantasies with those young
developments of the natural, heavenly Woman.


a smarter. s'roaY. 81
But was there nothing in that sight from which I,
proud of my arid reason even in its perplexities, might
have taken lessons for myself?
On the second evening of Faber’s visit I brought to
him the draft of deeds for the sale of his property. He
had never been a man of business out of his profession;
he was impatient to sell his property, and disposed to
accept an offer at half its value. I insisted on taking
on myself the task of negotiator; perhaps, too, in this
oﬂice I was egotistically anxious to prove to the great
physician that that which he believed to be my “ hallu-
cination ” had in no way obscured my common sense in
i the daily affairs of life. So I concluded, and in a few
hours, terms for-his property that were not only just, but
were inﬁnitely more advantageous than had appeared
to himself to be possible. But, as I approached him
with the papers, he put his ﬁnger to his lips. Amy was
standing by him with her little book in her hand, and
his own Bible lay open on the table. He was reading
to her from the Sacred Volume itself, and impressing on
her the force and beauty of one of the Parables, the
adaptation of which had perplexed her; when he had
done, she kissed him, bade him good-night, and went
away to rest. Then said Faber thoughtfully, and as if
to himself more than me:
“What a lovely bridge between old age and child-
hood is religionl How intuitively the world begins
with prayer and Worship on entering life, and how
intuitively on quitting life the old man turns back to
2B


32 A s'raanoa sroar.
prayer‘and worship, putting himself again side by side
with the infant l”
‘ I made no answer, but, after a pause, spoke of ﬁnes
and freeholds, title-deeds and money; and when the
business on hand was concluded, asked my learned
guest if, before he departed, he would deign to look
over the pages of my ambitious Physiological Work.
There were parts of it on which I much desired his opin-
ion, touching on subjects in which his special studies
made him an authority as high as our land possessed.
He made me bring him the manuscript, and devoted _
much of that night and the next day to its perusal.
When he gave it me back, which was not till the
morning of his departure, be commenced with eulogies
on the scope of its design, and the manner of its execu-
tion, which ﬂattered my vanity so much that I could
not help exclaiming, “Then, at least, there is no trace
of ‘ hallucination’ here i ” _
“ Alas, my poor Allen! here, perhaps, hallucination,
or self-deception, is more apparent than in all the
strange tales you conﬁded to me. For here is the
hallucination of the man seated on the shores of
Nature, and who would say to its measureless sea, ‘So
far shalt thou g0 and no farther ; ’—here is the halluci-
nation of the creature, who, not content with exploring
the laws of the Creator, ends with submitting to his
interpretation of some three or four laws, in the midst
of a code of which all the rest are in language unknown
to him, the powers and free-will of the Lawgiver


A sraaues sroav. 33
Himself; here is the hallucination by which Nature is
left Godless—because Man is left soulless. What
would matter all our speculations on a Deity who
would cease to exist for us when we are in the grave?
Why mete out, like Archytas, the earth and the sea,
and number the sands on the shore that divides them,
if the end of this wisdom be a handful of dust sprinkled
over a skull!
‘Nec quidquam tibi prodest
Aerias tentasse demos, animoque rotundum
Percurrisse polum morituro.’
Your book is a proof of the soul that you fail to discover
Without a soul, no man would work for a Future that
begins for his fame when the breath is gone from his
body. Do you remember how you saw that little child
praying at the grave of her father? Shall I tell you
that in her simple orisons she prayed for the benefactor
-—who had cared for the orphan; who had reared over
dust that tomb which, in a Christian burying-ground, is
a mute but perceptible memorial of Christian hopes;
that the child prayed, haughty man, for you? And
you sat by, knowing naught of this; sat by, amongst
_ the graves, troubled and tortured with ghastly doubts
—-vain of a reason that was sceptical of eternity, and
yet shaken like a reed by a moment’s marvel. Shall I
tell the child to pray for you no more f—that you dis-
believe in a soul? If you do so, what is the efﬁcacy of
prayer? Speak—shall I tell her this? Shall the infant
pray for you never more ? ”
o


84 A sraason areas.
I was silent— I was thrilled.
“ Has it never occurred to you, who, in denying all
innate perceptions as well as ideas, have passed on to
deductions from which poor Locke, humble Christian
that he was, would have shrunk in dismay; has it
never occurred to you as a wonderful fact, that the
easiest thing in the world to teach a child is that which
seems to metaphysical schoolmen the abstrusest of all
problems? Read all those philosophers wrangling about
a First Cause, deciding on what are miracles, and then
again deciding that such miracles cannot be; and when
one has answered another, and left in the crucible of
wisdom a caput mortuum of ignorance, then turn your
eyes, and look at the infant praying to the invisible
God at his mother’s knees. This idea, so miraculously
abstract, of a Power that the infant has never seen, that
cannot be symbolled forth and explained to him by the
most erudite sage—a Power, nevertheless, that watches
over him, that hears him, that sees him, that will carry
him across the grave, that will enable him to live on
forever;-this double mystery of a Divinity and of a
Soul the infant learns with the most facile readiness, at
the ﬁrst glimpse of his reasoning faculty. Before you
can teach him a rule in addition, before you can venture
to drill him into his horn-book, he leaps, with one intui-
tive spring of all his ideas, to the comprehension of the
truths which are only incomprehensible to blundering
sages! And you, as you stand before me, dare not
say, ‘Let the child pray for me no more!’ But will


A name: sroar. 35
the Creator accept the child’s prayer for the man who
refuses prayer for himself? Take my advice—pray!
And in this counsel I do not overstcp my province._ I
speak not as a preacher, but as a physician. For health
is a word that comprehends our whole organization, and
a just equilibrium of all faculties and functions is the
condition of health. As in your Lilian, the equilibrium
is deranged by the over-indulgence of a spiritual mysti-
cism which withdraws from the nutriment of duty the
essential pabulum of sober sense, so in you, the resolute
negation of disciplined spiritual communion between
Thought and Divinity robs imagination of its noblest
and safest vent. Thus, from opposite extremes, you
and your Lilian meet in the same regiori of mist and
cloud, losing sight of each other and of the true ends of
life, as her eyes only gaze on the stars and yours only
bend to the earth. Were I advising her, I should say:
‘ Your Creator has placed the scene of your trial below,
and not in the stars.’ Advising you, I say: ‘But in
the trial below, man should recognize education for
heaven.’ In a word, I would draw somewhat more
downward her fancy, raise somewhat more upward
your reason. Take my advice then — Pray! Your
mental system needs the support of prayer in order to
preserve its balance. In the embarrassment and con-
fusion of your senses, clearness of perception will come
with habitual and tranquil conﬁdence in Him who alike
rules the universe and reads the heart. I only say
here what has been said much better before by a


36 a sunken s'roar.
reasoner in whom all students of Nature recognize a
guide. I see on your table the very volume of Bacon
which contains the passage I commend to your reﬂec-
tion. Here it is. Listen : ‘ Take an example of a dog,
and mark what a generosity and courage he will put on
when he ﬁnds himself maintained by a man who, to
him, is instead of a God, or mel'ior natura, which
courage is manifestly 'such as that creature without
that conﬁdence of a better nature than his own, could
never attain. So man, when he resteth and assureth
himself upon Divine protection and favor, gathereth a
force and faith which human nature could not obtain.’ *
You are silent, but your gesture tells me your doubt—
a doubt which your heart, so femininely tender, will
not speak aloud lest you should rob the old man of a
hope with which your strength of manhood dispenses—
you doubt the eﬁicacy of prayer! Pause and reﬂect,
bold but candid inquirer into the laws of that guide you
call Nature. If there were no eﬁicacy in prayer—if
prayer were as mere an illusion of superstitious phan-
tasy as aught against which your reason now struggles
- do you think that Nature herself would have made it
amongst the most common and facile of all her dictates?
Do you believe that if there really did not exist that tie
between Man and his Maker—that link between life here
* Bacon’s Essay on Atheism. The quotation is made with
admirable felicity and force by Dr. Whewell, page 378 of Bridge-
water Treatise on Astronomy and General Physics considered
with reference to Natural Theology.


A srnases STORY. 37
and life hereafter which is found in what we call Soul,
alone—that wherever you look through the universe,
you would behold a. child at prayer? Nature inculcates
nothing that is superﬂuous. Nature does not impel the
leviathan or the lien, the eagle or the moth, to pray;
she impels only man. Why? Because man only has
soul, and Soul seeks to commune with the Everlasting,
as a fountain struggles up to its source. Burn your
book. It would found you a reputation for learning and
intellect and courage, I allow; but learning and intel-
lect and courage wasted against a truth—like spray
against a rockl A truth valuable to the world, the
world will never part with. You will not injure the
truth, but you will mislead and may destroy many, -
whose best security is in the truth which you so
eruditely insinuate to be a fable. Soul and Hereafter
are the heritage of all men; the humblest journeyman
in these streets, the pettiest trader behind those
counters, has in those beliefs his prerogatives of
royalty. You would dethrone and embrute the lords
of the earth by your theories. For my part, having
given the greater part -of my life to the study and
analysis of facts, I would rather be the author of the
tritest homily, or the baldest poem, that inculcated that
imperishable essence of the soul to which I have neither
scalpel nor probe, than be the founder of the subtlest
school, or the framer 0f the loftiest verse, that robbed
my fellow-men of their faith in a spirit that eludes the
dissecting-knife—in a teing that escapes the grave-
II.-4


88 A sraaacn s'ronr.
digger. Burn your book—Accept This Boon instead:
Read and Pray.”
He placed his Bible in my hand, embraced me, and,
an hour afterwards, the old man and the child left my
hearth solitary once more.
1

CHAPTER XLVII.
THAT night, as I sat in my study, very thoughtful
and very mournful, I revolved all that Julius Faber had
said; and the impression his words had produced became
gradually weaker and weaker, as my reason, naturally
combative, rose up with all the replies which my phi-
losophy suggested. No; if my imagination had really
seduced and betrayed me into monstrous credulities, it
was clear that the best remedy to such morbid tendencies
towards the Superstitious was in the severe exercise of
the faculties most opposed to Superstition-in the
culture of pure reasoning—in the science of absolute
fact. Accordingly, I placed before me the very book
which Julius Faber had advised me to burn; I forced
all my powers of mind to go again over the passages
which contained the doctrines that his admonition had
censured; and before daybreak, I had stated the sub-
stance of his argument, and the logical reply to it, in an
elaborate addition to my chapter on “ Sentimental Phi-
losophers.”(While thus rejecting the purport of his


A sraauus srosr. 89
[hating counsels, I embodied in another portion of my
work his views on my own “illusions,” and as here my
common sense was in concord with his, I disposed of
all my own previous doubts in an addition to my
favorite chapter “On the Cheats of the Imagination.”
And when the pen dropped from my hand, and the day-
star gleamed through the window, my heart escaped
from the labor of my mind, and ﬂew back to the image
of Lilian. The pride of the philosopher died out of
me, the sorrow of the man reigned supreme, and I
shrank from the coming of the sun, despondent.

CHAPTER XLVIII.
No'r till the law had completed its proceedings, and
satisﬁed the public mind as to the murder of Sir Philip
Derval, were the remains of the deceased consigned to
the family mausoleum. The funeral was, as may be
supposed, strictly private, and when it was over, the
excitement, caused by an event so tragical and singular,
subsided. New tepics engaged the public talk, and—-
in my presence, at least—the delicate consideration due
to one whose name had been so painfully mixed up in
the dismal story, forbore a topic which I could not be
expected to hear without distressful emotion. Mrs.
Ashleigh I saw frequently at my own house; she
honestly confessed that Lilian had not shown that grief


40 A s'raauen sronY.
at the cancelling of our engagement which would alone
justify Mrs. Ashleigh in asking me again to see her
daughter, and retract my conclusions against our union
She said that Lilian was quiet, not uncheerful, never
spoke of me or Margrave, but seemed absent and pre-
occupied as-before, taking pleasure in nothing that had
been wont to please her; not in music, nor books, nor
that tranquil pastime which women call work, and in
which they ﬁnd excuse to meditate, in idleness, their
own fancies. She rarely stirred out—even in the
garden; when she did, her eyes seemed to avoid the
house in which Margrave had lodged, and her steps the
old favorite haunt by the Monks’ Well. She would
remain silent for long hours together, but the silence
did not appear melancholy. For the rest, her health
was more than usually good. Still, Mrs. Ashleigh per-
sisted in her belief that, sooner or later, Lilian would
retulln to her former self—her former sentiments for me;
and she entreated me not, as yet, to let the world know
that our engagement was broken off. “ For if,” said
she, with good sense, “if it should prove not to be
broken off, only suspended, and afterwards hap'pily
renewed, there will be two stories to tell when no story
be needed. Besides, I should dread the effect on Lilian,
if oﬂ‘ensive gossips babbled to her on a matter that
would excite so much curiosity as the rupture of an
union in which our neighbors have taken so general an
interest.”
I had no reason to refuse acquiescence in Mrs. Ash-


A STRANGE s'roar. 41
leigh’s request, but I did not share in her hopes; I felt
that the fair prospects of my life were blasted; I could
never love another-never wed another; I resigned
myself to a solitary hearth, rejoiced, at least, that Mar-
grave had not revisited Mrs. Ashleigh’s—had not,
indeed, reappeared in the town. He was still staying
with Strahan, who told me that his guest had ensconced
himself in Forman’s old study, and amused himself with
reading—though not for long at a time—the curious
old books and manuscripts found in the library, or
climbing trees like a schoolboy, and familiarizing him-
self with the deer and the cattle, which would group
round him quite tame, and feed from his hand. Was
this the description of a criminal? But if Sir Philip’s
assertion were really true; if the criminal were man
without soul; if without soul, man would have no con-
scienCe, never be troubled by repentance, and the vague
dread of a future world—why, then, should not the
criminal be gay despite his crimes, as the white bear
gambols as friskly after his meal on human ﬂesh?
These questions would haunt me, despite my determi-
nation to accept as the right solution of all marvels the
construction put on my narrative by Julius Faber.
Days passed; I saw and heard nothing of Margrave.
I began half to hope that, in the desultory and rapid
changes of mood and mind which characterized his
restless nature, he had forgotten my existence
One morning I went out early on my rounds, when
I met Strahan unexpectedly.
4i-


42 A STRANGE swear.
“I was in search of you,” he said, “for more than
one person has told me that you are looking ill and
jaded. So you are! And the town now is hot and
unhealthy. You must come to Derval Court for a week
or so. You can ride into toWn every day to see your
patients. Don’t refuse. Margrave, who is still with
me, sends all kind messages, and bade me say that he
entreats you to come to the house at which he also is a
guest!”
I started. What had the Scin-Lzeca required of me,
and obtained to that condition my promise? “If you
are asked to the house at which I also am a guest, you
will come; you will meet and converse with me as
guest speaks to guest in the house of a host!” Was
this one of the coincidences which my reason was bound
to accept as coincidences, and nothing more? Tut, tutl
Was I returning again to my “hallucinations?” Grant-
ing that Faber and common sense were in the right,
what was this Margrave? A man to whose friendship,
sentences, and energy I was under the deepest obliga-
tions—to whom I was indebted for active services that
had saved my life from a serious danger, acquitted my
honor of a horrible suspicion. “I thank you,” I said to
Strahan, “ I will come; not, indeed, for a Week, but, at
all events, for a day or two.”
“ That’s right; I will call for you in the carriage at
six o’clock. You will have done your day’s work by
then?”
“ Yes; I will so arrange."


a surnames s'ronr. 48
On our way to Derval Court that evening, Strahan
talked much about Margrave, of whom, nevertheless,
he seemed to be growing weary.
“ His high spirits are too much for one,” said he;
“ and then so restless-so incapable of sustained quiet
conversation. And, clever though he is, he can’t help
me in the least about the new house I shall build. He
has no notion of construction. I don’t think he could
build a barn.”
“ I thought you did not like to demolish the old house.
and would content yourself with pulling down the more
ancient part of it?”
“ True. At ﬁrst it seemed a pity to destroy so hand-
some a mansion; but you see, since poor Philip’s
manuscript, on which he set such store, has been too
mutilated, I fear, to allow me to effect his wish with
regard to it, I think I ought, at least, scrupulously to
obey his other whims. And, besides, I don’t know,
there are odd noises about the old house. I don’t
believe in haunted houses, still there is something
dreary in strange sounds at the dead of night, even if
made by rats, or winds through decaying rafters. You,
I remember at college, had a taste for architecture, and
can draw plans. I wish to follow out Sir Philip’s
design, but on a smaller scale, and with more attention
to comfort.”
Thus he continued to run on, satisﬁed to ﬁnd me a
silent and attentive listener. We arrived at the mansion
an hour before sunset, the westering light shining full


44 a srnanen STORY.
against the many windows cased in moulderlng pilas-
ters, and making the general dilapidation of the old
place yet more mournfully evident.
It was but a few minutes to the dinner-hour. I went
up at once to the room appropriated to me—not the
one I had before occupied. Strahan had already got
together a new establishment. I was glad to ﬁnd in
the servant who attended me an old acquaintance. He
had been in my own employ when I ﬁrst settled at
L , and left me to get married. He and his wife
were both in Strahan’s service. He spoke warmly of
his new master and his contentment with his situation,

while he unpacked my carpet-bag and assisted me to
change my dress. But the chief object of his talk and
his praise was Mr. Margrave.
“ Such albright young gentleman, like the ﬁrst ﬁne
day in May!” _
When I entered the drawing-room, Margrave and
Strahan were both there. The former was blithe and
genial, as usual, in his welcome. At dinner, and during
the whole evening till we retired severally to our'own
rooms, he was the principal talker; recounting incidents
of travel, always very loosely strung together, jesting,
good-humoredly enough, at Strahan’s sudden hobby for
building, then putting questions to me about mutual
acquaintances, but never waiting for an answer; and
every now and then, as if at random, startling us with
some brilliant aphorism, or some suggestion drawn frcm
abstract science or unfamiliar erudition. The whole


a swimmer STORY. 46
eﬁ'ect was sparkling, but I could well understand that,
if long continued, it would become oppressive. The
soul has need of pauses of repose—intervals of escape,
not only from the ﬂesh, but even from the mind. A
man of the loftiest intellect will experience times when l
mere intellect not only fatigues him, but amidst its most
original conceptions, amidst its proudest triumphs, has
a something trite and commonplace compared with one
of those vague intimations of a spiritual destiny which
are not within the ordinary domain of reason; and,
gazing abstractedly into space, will leave suspended
some problem of severest thought, or uncompleted some
golden palace of imperial poetry, to indulge in hazy
reveries, that do not diﬂ'er from those of an innocent
quiet child! The soul has a long road to travel—from
time through eternity. It demands its halting hours of
contemplation. Contemplation is serene. But with
such wants of an immortal, immaterial spirit, Margrave
had no fellowship, no sympathy; and for myself, I need
scarcely add that the lines I have just traced I should
not have written at the date at which my narrative has
now arrived.


46 A srnanea sroar.
CHAPTER XLIX.
I HAD no case that necessitated my return to L———
the following day. The earlier hours of the forenoon I
devoted to Strahan and his building plans. Margrave
ﬂitted in and out of the room, ﬁtfully as an April sun-
beam, sometimes ﬂinging himself on a sofa, and reading
for a few minutes one of the volumes of the ancient
mystics, in which Sir Philip’s library was so rich. I
remember it was a volume of Proclus. He read that
crabbed and diﬂicult Greek with a ﬂuency that surprised
me. “I picked up the ancient Greek,” said be, “years
ago, in learning the modern.” But the book soon tired
him ; then he would come and disturb us, archly enjoy-
ing Strahau’s peevishness of interruption; then he
would throw open the window and leap down, chanting
one of his wild, savage airs; and in another moment he
was half hid under the. drooping boughs of a broad lime-
tree, amidst the antlers of deer that gathered fondly
round him. In the afternoon my host was called away
to attend some visitors of importance, and I found
myself on the sward before the house, right in view of
the mausoleum and alone with Margrave.
I turned my eyes from that dumb House of Death
wherein rested the corpse of the last lord of the soil,
so strangely murdered, with a strong dCSlI'GItO speak
out to Margrave the doubts respecting himself that


A s'rsanos s'roar. 47
tortured me. But—setting aside the promise to the
contrary, which I had given, or dreamed I had given, to
the Luminous Shadow - to fulﬁl this desire would have
been impossible—impossible to any one gazing on that
radiant, youthful face! I think I see him now'as I saw
him then: a white doe, that even my presence could
not scare away from him, clung loyingly to his side,
looking up at him with her soft eyes. He stood there
like the incarnate principle of mythological sensuous
life. I have before applied to him that illustration; let
the repetition be pardoned. Impossible, I repeat it, to
say to that creature, face to face, “ Art thou the master
of demoniac arts, and the instigator of secret murder I”
As if from redundant happiness within himself, he was
humming, or rather cooing, a strain of music, so sweet,
so wildly sweet, and so unlike the music one hears from
tutored lips in crowded rooms! I passed my hand
over my forehead in bewilderment and awe.
“ Are there,” I said, unconsciously- “ are there,
indeed, such prodigies in nature 1'”
“ Nature !” he cried, catching up the word; “talk to
me of nature! Talk of her, the wondrous, blissful
mother! Mother I may well call her. I am her
spoiled. child, her darling But oh, to die, ever to
die, ever to lose sight of nature!_to rot, senseless,

whether under these turfs or within those dead walls -”
I could not resist the answer.
" Like yon murdered man! murdered, and by whom T”
“ By whom 1' I thought that was clearly proved.”
2c


48 A STRANGE s'rom'.
“The hand was proved; what inﬂuence moved the
hand ?”
“Tush! the poor wretch spoke of a Demon. Who
can tell? Nature herself is a grand destroyer. See
that pretty bird, in its beak a writhing worm! All
Nature’s children live to take life; none, indeed, so
lavishly as man. What hecatombs slaughtered, not to
satisfy the irresistible sting of hunger, but for the wan-
ton ostentation of a feast, which he may scarcely taste,
or for the mere sport that he ﬁnds in destroying. We
speak with dread of the beasts of prey: what beast of
prey is so dire a ravager as man ?-—so cruel and so
treacherous? Look at you ﬂock of sheep, bred and
fattened for the shambles; and this hind that I caress,
—if I were the park-keeper, and her time for my bullet
had come, would you think her life was the safer
because, in my own idle whim, I had tamed her to
trust to the hand raised to slay her ?”
“ It is true,” said I — “ a grim truth. Nature, on the
surface so loving and so gentle, is full of terror in her
deeps when our thought descends into their abyss!”
Strahan now joined us with a party of country
visitors.
“Margrave is the man to show you the beauties of
this park,” said he. “Margrave knows every bosk and
dingle, twisted (ild thorn-tree, or opening glade, in its
intricate, undulating ground.” _
Margrave seemed delighted at this proposition; and
as he led us through the park, though the way was


A STRANGE STORY. 49
long, though the sun was ﬁerce, no one seemed fatigued.
For the pleasure he felt in pointing out detached beau-
ties which escaped an ordinary eye was contagious.
He did not talk as talks the poet or the painter: but at
some lovely effect of light amongst the tremulous
leaves, some sudden glimpse of a sportive rivulet below,
he would halt, point it out to us in silence, and with a
kind of childlike ecstasy in his own bright face, that
seemed to reﬂect the life and the bliss of the blithe
summer-day itself.
Thus seen, all my doubts in his dark, secret nature
faded away- all my horror, all my hate; it was impos-
sible to resist the charm that breathed round him, not
to feel a tender, aﬂ‘ectionate yearning towards him as
to some fair, happy child. Well might be call himself
the Darling of Nature. Was he not the mysterious
likeness of that awful Mother, beautiful as Apollo in
one aspect, direful as Typhon in another?

CHAPTER L.
“WHAT a strange-looking cane you have, sir i” said a
little girl, who was one of the party, and who had en-
twined her arm round Margrave’s. “ Let me look at it."
“Yes,” said Strahan: “ that cane, or rather walking-
staﬁ', is worth looking at. Margrave bought it in Egypt,
and declares that it is very ancient.”
II. -5 n


50 A srasnoa s'roav.
This staff seemed constructed from a reed: looked at,
it seemed light, in the hand it felt heavy; it was of a
pale, faded yellow, wrought with black rings at equal
distances, and graven with half-obliterated characters
that seemed hieroglyphic. I remembered to have seen
Margrave with it before, but I had never noticed it with
any attention until now, when it was passed from hand
to hand. At the head of the cane there was a large,
unpolished stone of a dark blue.
“ Is this a pebble or a jewel f" asked one of the party.
“I cannot tell you its name or nature,” said Mar-
grave, “but it is said to cure the bite of serpents,* and
has other supposed virtues— a talisman, in short.
*The following description of a stone at Corfu, celebrated as
an antidote to the venom of the serpent’s bite, was given to me
by an eminent scholar and legal functionary in that island :—
“DESCRIPTION or THE BLUE Srona.-—This stone is of an oval
shape, one and two-tenths inches long, seven-tenths inches broad,
three-tenths inches thick, and, having been broken formerly, is
now set in gold. ‘
“When a person is bitten by a poisonous snake, the bite must
be opened by a cut of a laneet or razor longways, and the stone
applied within twenty-four hours. The stone then attaches itself
ﬁrmly to the wound, and when it has done its oﬂice falls oﬂ‘; the
euro is then complete. The stone must then be thrown into milk,
whereupon it vomits the poison it has absorbed, which remains
green on the top of the milk, and the stone is then again ﬁt
for use.
“This stone has been from time immemorial in the family of
Ventura, of Corfu, a house of Italian origin, and is notorious,
so that peasants immediately apply for its aid. Its virtue has
not been impaired by the fracture. Its nature or composition is
unknown. '
"In a case where two were stung at the same time by ser-


a smarter: sroav. 51
He here placed the staff in my hands, and bade me
look at it with care. Then he changed the conversa-
tion and renewed the way, leaving the staﬂ' with me,
till, suddenly, I forced it back on him. I could not
have explained why, but its touch, as it warmed in my
clasp, seemed to send through my whole frame a singu
lar thrill, and a sensation as if I no longer felt my own,
weight—as if I walked on air.
Our rambles came to a close; the visitors went away;
I re-entered the house through the sash-window of
Forman’s study; Margrave threw his hat and staff on a
the table, and amused himself with examining minutely
the tracery on the mantel-piece. Strahan and myself
.left him thus occupied, and, going into the adjoining
library, resumed our task of examining the plans for the
new house. I continued to draw outlines and sketches
pents, the stone was applied to one, who recovered; but the
other, for whom it could not be used, died.
“It never failed but once, and then it was applied after the
twenty-four hours.
“Its color is so dark as not to be distinguished from black.
, “P. M. COLQUHOUI.
“Corfu, 7th Nov., 1860.”
Sir Emerson Tennent, in his popular and excellent work on
Ceylon, gives an account of “snake stones “ apparently similar
to the one at Corfu, except that they are “intensely black and
highly polished,” and which are applied, in much the same man-
ner, to the wounds inﬂicted by the cobra-capella.
Query—Might it not be worth while to ascertain the chemical
properties of these stones, and, if they be eﬂicacious in the
extraction of venom conveyed by a bite, might they not he as
successful if applied to the bite of a mad dog as to that of a
oubra-capella?


52 A s'raasor: s'roav.
of various alterations, tending to simplify: and contract
Sir Philip’s general design. Margrave soon joined us,
and, this time, took his seat patiently beside our table,
watching me use ruler and compass with unwonted
attention.
“ I wish I could draw,” he said, “ but I can do noth-
ing useful.”
“ Rich men like you,” said Strahan, peevishly, “ can
engage others, and are better employed in rewarding
good artists than in making bad drawings themselves.”
“Yes, I can employ others; and—Fenwick, when
you have ﬁnished with Strahan, I will ask permission
to employ you, though without reward; the task I
would impose will not take you a minute.”
He then threw himself back in his chair, and seemed
to fall into a doze.
The dressing-bell rang; Strahan put away the plans
--indeed, they were now pretty well ﬁnished and de-
cided on. '
Margrave woke up as our host left the room, and
drawing me towards another table in the room, placed
before me one of his favorite mystic books, and, point-
ing to an old woodcut, said: ‘
“I will ask you to copy this for me; it pretends to
be a fac-simile of Solomon’s famous seal. I have a
whimsical desire to have a copy of it. You observe two
triangles interlaced and inserted in a circle? _the pen-
tacle, in short. Yes, just so. You need not add the
astrological characters; they are the senseless, super-


A sraanon STORY. 53
ﬂuous accessories of the dreamer who wrote the book.
But the pentacle itself has an intelligible meaning; it
belongs to the only universal language, the language of
symbol, in which all races that think—around, and
above, and below us—can establish communion of
thought. If in the external universe any one construct-
ive principle can be detected, it is the geometrical ; and
in every part of the World in which magic pretends to
a written character, I ﬁnd that its hieroglyphics are
geometrical ﬁgures. Is it not laughable that the most
positive of all the sciences should thus lend its angles
and circles to the use of— what shall I call it?— the -
ignorance T-ay, that is the word—the ignorance of
dealers in magic?”
He took up the paper, on which I had hastily
described the triangles and the circle, and left the room
chanting the serpent-charmer’s song.
CHAPTER LI.
WHEN we separated for the night, which we did at
eleven o’clock, Margrave said:
“Good-night and good-bye. I must leave you to-
morrow, Strahan, and before your usual hour for rising.
I took the liberty of requesting one of your men to
order me a chaise from L Pardon my seeming
abruptness, but 1 always avoid long leave-takings, and

5* .


54 A s'raANes s'roar. —
I had ﬁxed the date of my departure almost as soon as
I accepted your invitation.”
“I have no right to complain. The place must be
dull, indeed, to a gay young fellow like you. It is dull
even to me. I am meditating ﬂight already. Are you
going back to L——- i”
“Not even for such things as I leftat my lodgings.
When I settle somewhere and can give an address, I
shall direct them to be sent to me. There are, I hear,
beautiful patches of scenery towards the north, only
known to pedestrian tourists. I am a good walker;
' and you know, Fenwick, that I am also a child of
Nature. Adieu to you both; and many thanks to you,
Strahan, for your hospitality.”
He left the room.
“I am not sorry he is going,” said Strahan, after a
pause, and with a quick breath as if of relief. “Do
you not feel that he exhausts ohe? An excess of oxy-
gen, as you would say in a lecture.”
I was alone in my own chamber; I felt indisposed
for bed and for sleep; the curious conversation I had
held with Margrave weighed on me. In that conver-
sation, we had. indirectly touched upon the prodigies
which I had not brought myself to speak of with frank
courage, and certainly nothing in Margrave’s manner
had betrayed consciousness of my suspicions; on the
contrary, the open frankness with which he evinced his
predilection for mystic speculation, or uttered his more
unamiable sentiments, rather tended to disarm than


a sraanea STORY. 55
encourage belief in gloomy secrets or sinister powers.
And as he was about to quit the neighborhood, he
would not again see Lilian, not even enter the town of
L Was I to ascribe this relief from his presence
to the promise of the Shadow, or was I not rather right

in battling ﬁrmly against any grotesque illusion, and
accepting his departure as a simple proof that my jeal-
ous fears had been amongst my other chimeras, and
that, as he had really only visited Lilian out of friend
ship to me, in my peril, so he might, with his character-
istic acuteness, have guessed my jealousy, and ceased
his visits from a kindly motive delicately concealed? _
And might not the same motive now have dictated the
words which were intended to assure me that L
contained no attractions to tempt him to return to it?
Thus, gradually soothed and cheered by the course to
which my reﬂections led me, I continued to muse for
hours. At length, looking at my watch, I was sur-
prised to ﬁnd it was the second hour after midnight. I

was just about to rise from my chair to undress, and
secure some hours of sleep, when the well-remembered
cold wind passed through the room, stirring the roots
of my hair; and before me stood, against the wall, the
Luminous Shadow.
“ Rise and follow me,” said the voice, sounding much
nearer than it had ever done before.
And at those words I rose mechanically, and like a
sleep-walker.
“ Take up the light.”


66 A s'raanon STORY.
I took it.
The Scin-Latca glided along the wall towards the
threshold, and motioned me to open the door. I did
so. The Shadow ﬂitted on through the corridor. I
followed, with hushed footsteps, down a small stair into
Forman’s study. In all my subsequent proceedings,
about to be narrated, the Shadow guided me, some-
times by voice, sometimes by sign. I obeyed the
guidance not only unresistingly, but without a desire
to resist. I was unconscious either of curiosity or of
awe—only of a calm and passive indiﬁ'erence, neither
pleasurable nor painful. In this obedience, from which
all will seemed extracted, I took into my hands the
staff which I had examined the day before, and which
lay on the table, just where Margrave had cast it on
re-entering the house. I unclosed the shutter to the
easement, lifted the sash, and, with the light in my left
hand, the staﬁ' in my right, stepped forth into the gar-
den. The night was still; the ﬂame of the candle
scarcely trembled in the air; the Shadow moved on
before me towards the old pavilion described in an ear-
lier part of this narrative, and of which the mouldering
doors stood wide open. I followed the Shadow into
the pavilion, up the crazy stair to the room above, with
its four great, blank, unglazed windows, or rather
arcades, north, south, east, and west. I halted on the
middle of the ﬂoor;'right before my eyes, through the
vista made by breathless boughs, stood out from the
moonlit air the dreary mausoleum. Then, at the com-


A sraanes s'roar. 5‘!
mand conveyed to me, I placed the candle on a wooden
settle, touched a spring in the handle of the staff, a lid
ﬂew back, and I drew from the hollow, ﬁrst a lump of
some dark bituminous substance, next a smaller slender
wand of polished steel, of which the point was tippeu‘
with a translucent material, which appeared to me like
crystal. Bending down, still obedient to the direction
conveyed to me, I described on the ﬂoor with the lump
of bitumen (if I may so call it) the ﬁgure of the pen-
tacle with the interlaced triangles, in a circle nine feet
in diameter, just as I had drawn it for Margrave the
evening before. The material used made the ﬁgure
perceptible, in a dark color of mingled black and red.
I applied the ﬂame of the candle to the circle, and
immediately it became lambent with a low, steady
splendor that rose about an inch from the ﬂoor, and
gradually from this light there emanated a soft grey
transparent mist and a faint but exquisite odor. I
stood in the midst of the circle, and within the circle
also, close to my side, stood the Scin-Laaca; no longer
reﬂected on the Wall, but apart from it, erect, rounded
into more integral and distinct form, yet impalpable,
and from it there breathed an icy air. Then lifting the
wand, the broader end of which rested in_the palm of
my hand, the two foreﬁngers closing lightly over it in a
-ine parallel with the point, I directed it towards the
wide aperture before me, fronting the mausoleum. I
repeated aloud, some words whispered to me in a lan-
guage I know not: those words I would not trace on


58 A STRANGE s'ronr.
this paper, could I remember them. As they came to
a close, I heard a bowl from the watch-dog in the yard
—a dismal, lugubrious howl. Other dogs in the dis
tant village caught up the sound, and bayed in a dirge-
like chorus; and the howling went on louder and
louder. Again strange words were whispered to me,
and I repeated them in mechanical submission; and
when they, too, were ended, I felt the ground tremble
beneath me, and as my eyes looked straight forward
down the vista, that, stretching from the casement, was
bounded by the solitary mausoleum, vague, formless
shadows seemed to pass across the moonlight— below,
along the award—above, in the air; and then sud-
denly a terror, not before conceived, came upon me.
And a third time words were whispered; but, though
I knew no more of their meaning than I did of those
that had preceded them, I felt a repugnance to utter
them aloud. Mutely I turned towards the Scin-Laaca,
and the expression of its face was menacing and
terrible; my will became yet more compelled to the
control imposed upon it, and my lips commenced the
formula again whispered into my ear, when I heard
distinctly a voice of warning and of anguish, that
murmured “ Hold 1”, I knew the voice; it was Lilian’s.
I paused—I turned towards the quarter from which
the voice had come, and in the space afar I saw the
features, the form of Lilian. Her arms were stretched
towards me in supplication, her countenance was deadly
pale and anxious with unutterable distress. The whole


A s'rrmuoa s'roaY. 59
image seemed in unison with the voice; —the look, the
attitude, the gesture of one who sees another in deadly
peril, and cries, “ Beware i”
This apparition vanished in a moment; but that
moment sufﬁced to free my mind from the constraint
which had before enslaved it. I dashed the wand to
the ground, sprang from the circle, rushed from the
place. How I got into my own room I can remember
not—I know not; I have a vague reminiscence of some
intervening wanderings, of giant trees, of shroud-like
moonlight, of the Shining Shadow and its angry aspect,
of the blind walls and the iron door of the House of the
Dead, of spectral images—a confused and dreary phan-
tasmagoria. But all I can recall with distinctness is
the sight of my own hueless face in the mirror in my
own still room, by the light of the white moon through
the window; and sinking down, I said to myself, “ This,
at least, is an hallucination or a dream I”

‘ CHAPTER LII.
A HEAVY sleep came over me at daybreak, but I did
not undress or go to bed. The sun was high in the
heavens, when, on waking, I saw the servant who had
attended me bustling about the room. ‘
“I beg your pardon, sir, I am afraid I disturbed you;
but I have been three times to see if you were not


60 v a sraanos s'roav.
coming down, and I found you so soundly asleep I did
not like to wake you. Mr. Strahan has ﬁnished break-
fast, and gone out riding; Mr. Margrave has left—left
before six o’clock.”
“Ah, he said he was going early.”
“ Yes, sir; and he seemed so cross when he went.
I could never have supposed so pleasant a gentleman
could put himself into such a passion i”
“What was the matter ?”
" Why, his walking-stick could not be found; it was
not in the hall. He said he had left it in the study;
we could not ﬁnd it there. At last he found it himself
in the old summer-house, and said—I beg pardon, he
said-‘ he was sure you had taken it there: that some
one, at all events, had been meddling with it.’ How-
ever, I am very glad it was found, since he seems to
set such store on it.” A
“ Did Mr. Margrave go himself into the summer-house
to look for it f”
“ Yes, sir; no one else would have thought of such
a place: no one likes to go there, even in the day-
time.”
“ Why ?”
“ Why, sir, they say it is haunted since poor Sir
Philip’s death; and, indeed, there are strange noises in
every part of the house. I am afraid you had a bad
night, sir,” continued the servant, with evident curiosity
glancing towards the bed, which I had not pressed, and
towards the evening-dress, which, while he spoke, I was


A STRANGE s'roaY 61
rapidly changing for that which I habitually wore in the
morning. “ I hope you did not feel yourself ill ?”
“No! but it seems I fell asleep in my chair.”
“Did you hear, sir, how the dogs howled about
two o’clock in the morning? They woke me. Very
frightful l” '
“The moon was at her full. Dogs will bay at the
moon.”
I felt relieved to think that I should not ﬁnd Strahan
in the breakfast-room, and hastening through the cere-
mony of a meal which I scarcely touched, I went out
into the park unobserved, and creeping round the copses
and into the neglected gardens, made my way to the
pavilion. I mounted the stairs— I looked on the ﬂoor
of the upper room; yes, there still was the black ﬁgure
of the pentacle—the circle. 80, then, it was not a
dream! Till then I had doubted. Or, might it not still
be so far a dream, that I had walked in my sleep, and
with an imagination preoccupied by my conversations
with Margrave— by the hieroglyphics on the staff I had
handled—by the very ﬁgure associated with super-
stitious practices which I had copied from some weird
book at his request—by all the strange impressions
previously stamped on my mind ;—might I not, in
truth, have carried thither in sleep the staff, described
the circle, and all the rest been but visionary delusion ?
Surely—surely, so common sense and so Julius Faber
would interpret the riddles that perplexed me! Be that
as it may, my ﬁrst thought was to eﬁace the marks on
II. -- 6


62 A sraanoa worn.
the ﬂoor. I found this easier than I had ventured to
hope. I rubbed the circle and the pentacle away from
the boards with the sole of my foot, leaving but an
undistinguishable smudge behind. I know not why,
but I felt the more nervously anxious to remove all such
evidences of my nocturnal visit to that room, because
Margrave had so openly gone thither to seek for the
staff, and had so rudely named me to the servant as
having meddled with it. Might be not awake some
suspicion against me? Suspicion, what of f I knew
not, but I feared! ,
The healthful air of day gradually nerved my spirits
and relieved my thoughts. But the place had become
hateful to me. I resolved not to wait for Strahan’s
return, but to walk back to L—-, and leave a message
for my host. It was sufﬁcient excuse that I could not
longer absent myself from my patients; accordingly, I
gave directions to have the few things which I had
brought with me sent to my house by any servant who
might be going to L—, and was soon pleased to ﬁnd
myself outside the park-gates and on the high-road
I had not gone a mile before I met Strahan on horse-
back. He received my apologies for not waiting his
return to bid him farewell, without observation, and,
dismounting, led his horse and walked beside me on
my road. I saw that there was something on his
mind; at last he said, looking down :
“Did you hear the dogs howl last night?”
“ Yes! the full moon l”


a swimsuit s'roar. 63
“ You were awake, then, at the time. Did you hear
any other sound? Did you see anything?”
“ What should I hear or see ?”
Strahan was silent for some moments; then he said,
with great seriousness:
“I could not sleep when I went to bed last night; I
felt feverish and restless. Somehow or other, Mar-
grave got into my head, mixed up in some strange way
with Sir Philip Derval. I heard the dogs how], and,
at the same time, or rather a few minutes later, I felt
the whole house tremble, as a frail corner-house in
London seems to tremble at night when a carriage is
driven past it. The howling .had then ceased, and
ceased as suddenly as it had begun. I felt a vague
superstitious alarm; I got up, and went to my window,
which was unclosed (it is my habit to sleep with my
windows open)—the moon was very bright—and I
saw, I declare I saw, along the green alley that leads
from the old part of the house to the mausoleum

No, I will not say what I saw or believed I saw-you
would ridicule me, and justly. But, whatever it might
be, on the earth Without or in the fancy within my
brain, I was so terriﬁed, that I rushed back to my bed,
and buried my face in my pillow. I would have come
to you; but I did not dare to stir. I have been riding
hard all the morning in order to recover my nerves.
But I dread sleeping again under that roof, and now
that you and Margrave leave me, I shall go this very
day to London. I hope all that I have told you is
21)


64 A s'raanea sroar.
no bad sign of any coming disease; blood to the
head, eh f”
“No; but imagination overstrained can produce
wondrous eﬂ'ects. You do right to change the scene.
Go to London at once, amuse yourself, and —"
“Not return, till the old house is razed to the
ground. That is my resolve. You approve? That’s
well. All success to you, Fenwick. I will center back
and get my portmanteau ready and the carriage out, in
time for the ﬁve o’clock train.”
So then he, too, had seen—what? I did not dart
and I did not desire to ask him. But he, at least, was
not walking in his sleep! Did we both dream, or
neither?
CHAPTER LIII.
Tunas is an instance of the absorbing tyranny of
every-day life which must have struck all such of my
readers as have ever experienced one of those portents
which are so at variance with every-day life, that the
ordinary epithet bestowed on them is “ supernatural.”
And be my readers few or many, there will be no
small proportion of them to whom, once, at least in the
course of their existence, a something strange and eirie
has occurred—a something which perplexed and baf-
ﬂed rational conjecture, and struck on those chords


A s'raanoa sroar. 65
which vibrate to superstition. It may have been only
a dream unaccountably veriﬁed—an undeﬁnable pre-
sentiment or forewarning; but up from such slighter
and vaguer tokens of the realm of marvel—up to the
portents of ghostly apparitions or haunted chambers, I
believe that the greater number of persons arrived at
middle age, however instructed the class, however
civilized the land, .however skeptical the period, to
which they belong, have either in themselves expe-
rienced, or heard recorded by intimate associates whose
veracity they accept as indisputable in all ordinary
transactions of life—phenomena which are not to be
solved by the wit that mocks them, nor, perhaps,
always and entirely, to the contentment “of the reason
or the philosophy that explains them away. Such
phenomena, I say, are inﬁnitely more numerous than
would appear from the instances currently quoted and
dismissed with a jest; for few of those who have wit-
nessed them are disposed to own it, and they who only
hear of them through others, however trustworthy,
would not impugn their character for common sense by
professing a belief to which common sense is a merci ‘
less persecutor. But he who reads my assertion in the
quiet of his own room will, perhaps, pause, ransack his
memory, and ﬁnd there, in some dark corner, which he
excludes from “the babbling and remorseless day,” a
pale recollection that proves the assertion not untrue.
And it is, I say, an instance of the absorbing tyranny
of every-day life, that whenever some such startling
6* I


A s'raasos areas. 67
our aﬂ‘ections, or blast our fortunes, overshadowing our
whole future with a sense of loss; but where a trouble
or calamity has been an accident, an episode in our
wonted life, where it affects ourselves alone, where it is
attended with a sense of shame and humiliation, where
the pain of recalling it seems idle, and if indulged
would almost madden us-a-gonies of that kind we do
not brood over as we do over the death or falsehood of
beloved friends, or the train of events by which we are
reduced from wealth to penury. No one, for instance,
who has escaped from a shipwreck, from the brink of a
precipice, from the jaws of a tiger, spends his days and
nights in reviving his terrors past, re-imagining dangers
not to occur again, or if they do occur, from which the
experience undergone can suggest no additional safe-
guards. The current of our life, indeed, like that of the
rivers, is most rapid in the midmost channel, where all
streams are alike comparatively slow in the depth and
along the shores in which each life, as each river, has a
character peculiar to itself. And hence, those who
would sail with the tide of the world, as those who sail
with the tide of a river, hasten to take the middle of
the stream, as those who sail against the tide are found
clinging to the shore. I returned to my habitual duties
and avocations with renewed energy; I did not suffer
my thoughts to dwell on the dreary wonders that had
haunted me, from the evening I ﬁrst met Sir Philip
Derval to the morning on which I had quitted the
house of his heir: whether realities or hallucinations


68 A sraanea sroaY.
no guess of mine could unravel such marvels, and no
prudence of mine guard me against their repetition.
But I had no fear that they would be repeated, any
more than the man who had gone through shipwreck,
or the hair-breadth escape from a fall down a glacier,
fears again to be found in a similar peril. Margrave
had departed, whither I knew not, and, with his depar-
ture, ceased all sense of his inﬂuence. A certain calm
within me, a tranquillizing feeling of relief, seemed to
me like a pledge of permanent delivery.
But that which did accompany and haunt me, through
all my occupations and pursuits, was the melancholy
remembrance of the love I had lost in Lilian. I heard
from Mrs. Ashleigh, who still frequently visited me, that
her daughter seemed much in the same quiet state of
mind- perfectly reconciled to our separation— seldom
mentioning my name—if mentioning it, with indiffer-
ence; the only thing remarkable in her state was her
aversion to all society, and a kind of lethargy that would
come over her, often in the daytime. She would sud-
denly fall into sleep and so remain for hours, but a sleep
that seemed very serene and tranquil, and from which
she awoke of herself. She kept much within her own
room, and always retired to it when visitors were an-
nounced.
Mrs. Ashleigh began reluctantly to relinquish the per-
suasion she had so long and so obstinately maintained,
that this state of feeling towards myself — and, indeed,
this general change in Lilian --was but temporary and


a s'raanen s'rosv. 69
abnormal; she began to allow that it was best to drop;
all thoughts of a renewed engagement—a future union.
I proposed to see Lilian in her presence and in my pro-
fessional capacity; perhaps some physical cause, espe-
cially for this lethargy, might be detected and removed.
Mrs. Ashleigh owned to me that the idea had occurred
to herself; she had sounded Lilian upon it; but her
daughter had so resolutely opposed it—had said with
so quiet a ﬁrmness “that all being over between us, a
visit from me would be unwelcome and painful ;” that
Mrs. Ashleigh felt that an interview thus deprecated,
would only conﬁrm estrangement. One day, in calling,
she asked my advice whether it would not be better to
try the effect of change of air and scene, and, in some
other place, some other medical opinion might be taken I
I approved of this suggestion with unspeakable sadness.
“And,” said Mrs. Ashleigh, shedding tears, “if that
experiment prove unsuccessful, I will write and let you
know; and we must then consider what to say to the
world as a reason why the marriage is broken oﬁ'. I
can render this more easy by staying away. I will not
return to L— till the matter has ceased to be the topic
of talk, and at a distance any excuse be less ques-
tioned, and seem more natural. But still-still—let
us hope still.”
“ Have you one ground for hope f"
“ Perhaps so; but you will think it very frail and
tallaeious.”
“Name it, and let me judge.”


70 A STRANGE s'roar.
“ One night—in which you were on a visit to Derval
Court ”
“Ay, that night.” -
“ Lilian woke me by a loud cry (she sleeps in the
next room to me, and the door was left open); I has-
tened to her bedside in alarm; she was asleep, but
appeared extremely agitated and convulsed. She kept
calling on your name, in a tone of passionate fondness,
but as if in great terror. She cried, ‘Do not go, Allen?
-—do not gol— you know not what you brave ! -— what
you do P Then she rose in her bed, clasping her hands.
Her face was set and rigid; I tried to awake her, but
could not. After a little time, she breathed a deep sigh,
and murmured, ‘Allen, Allen! dear love! did you not
hearf—did you not see me? What could thus baﬂie
matter and traverse space but love and soul? Can you
still doubt me, Allen?—doubt that I love you now,
shall love you evermore ? -— yonder, yonder, as here
below? She then sank back on her pillow, weeping,
and then I woke her.”’
“And what did she say on waking ?"
“ She did not remember what she had dreamed,
except that she had passed through some great terror;
but added, with a vague smile, ‘It is all over, and I feel
happy now.’ Then she turned round and fell asleep
again, but quietly as a child, the tears dried, the smile
resting.”

“ Go, my dear friend, go; take Lilian from this place
as soon as you can ; divert her mind with fresh scenes


A era/mes s'roav. 'II
I hopel—I do hope! 'Lct me know where you ﬁx
yourself. I will seize a holiday—I need one; I will
arrange as to my patients—I will come to the same
place; she need not know of it—but I must be by to
watch, to hear your news of her. Heaven bless you
for what you have said! I hope l-I do hope!”

CHAPTER LIV.
Seam days after, I received a few lines from Mrs.
Ashleigh. Her arrangements for departure were made.
They were to start the next morning. She had ﬁxed
on going into the north of Devonshire, and staying
some weeks either at Ilfracombe or Lynton, whichever
place Lilian preferred. She would write as soon as
they were settled.
I was up at my usual, early hour the next morning
I resolved to go out towards Mrs. Ashleigh’s house,
and watch, unnoticed, where I might, perhaps, catch a
glimpse of Lilian as the carriage that would convey he
to the railway passed my hiding-place.
I was looking impatiently at. the clock; it was yet
two hours before the train by which Mrs. Ashleigh pro-
posed to leave. A loud ring at my belll I opened the
door. Mrs. Ashleigh rushed in, falling on my breast.
“ Lilian! Lilian l”
“ Heavens I What has happened f”


72 A STRANGE sroar.
“ She has left—she is gone—gone away! Oh,
Allen! howf—whither? Advise me. What is to be
done T”
' “ Come in—compose yourself - tell me all—clearly,
quickly. Lilian gone 7—- gone away? Impossible!
She must be hid somewhere in the house — the garden ;
she, perhaps, did not like the journey. She may have
crept to some young friend’s house. But I talk when
you should talk: tell me all.”
Little enough to tell ! Lilian had seemed unusually
cheerful the night before, and pleased at the thought of
the excursion. Mother and daughter retired to rest
early : Mrs. Ashleigh saw Lilian sleeping quietly before
she herself went to bed. She woke betimes in the
morning, dressed herself, went into the next room to
call Lilian—Lilian was not there. No suspicion of
ﬂight occurred to her. Perhaps her daughter might be
up already, and gone downstairs, remembering some-
thing she might wish to pack and take with her on the
journey. Mrs. Ashleigh was conﬁrmed in this idea
when she noticed that her own room door was left open.
She went downstairs, met a maidservant in the hall,
who told her, with alarm and surprise, that both the
street and garden doors were found unclosed. No one-
had seen Lilian. Mrs. Ashleigh now became seriously
uneasy. On remounting to her daughter’s room, she
missed Lilian’s bonnet and mantle. The house and
garden were both searched in vain. There could be no
doubt that Lilian had gone-must have stolen noise-


A s'raauez near. '13
lessly at night through her mother‘s room, and let her-
self out of the house and through the garden.
“Do you think she could have received any letter,
any message, any visitor unknown to you i”
“I cannot think it. Why do you ask? Oh, Allen,
you do not believe there is any accomplice in this dis-
appearance! No, you do not believe it. But my child's
honorl What will the world think i”
N ot for the world cared I at that moment. I could
think only of Lilian, and without one suspicion that
imputed blame to her.
“ Be quiet, be silent; perhaps she has gone on some
visit, and will return. Meanwhile, leave inquiry to me.”
CHAPTER LV.
I'r seemed incredible that Lilian could wander far
without being observed. I soon ascertained that she
had not gone away by the railway —by any public con-
veyance—had hired no carriage; she must therefore
be still in the town, or have left it on foot. The greater
part of the day was consumed in unsuccessful inquiries,
and faint hopes that she would return; meanwhile, the
news of her disappearance had spread; how could such
news fail to do so?
An acquaintance of mine met me under the archwa_v
II. — 7


74 A STRANGE stern.
of Monks’ Gate. He wrung my hand, and looked at
me with great compassion. I
“ I fear,” said he, “that we were all deceived in that
young Margrave. He seemed so well conducted, in
spite of his lively manners. But ”
“ But what ?”
“Mrs. Ashleigh was, perhaps, imprudent to admit him
into her house so familiarly. He was certainly very
handsome. Young ladies will be romantic.”
“How dare you, sirl” I cried, choked with rage
“And without any coloring to so calumnious a sugges
tionl Margrave has not been in the town for many
days. No one knows even where he is.”
“Oh yes, it is known where he is. He wrote to
order the effects which he had left here to be sent to
Penrith.”
“When i”
“The letter arrived the day before yesterday. I hap-
pened to be calling at the house where he last lodged,
when at L——, the house opposite Mrs. Ashleigh’s
garden. ' No doubt the servants in both houses gossip
with each other.“ Miss Ashleigh could scarcely fail to
hear of Mr. Margrave’s address from her maid; and
since servants will exchange gossip, they may also con-
vey letters. Pardon me, you know I am your friend.”
“ Not from the moment you breathe a word against
my betrothed wife,” said I, ﬁercely.
I wrenched myself from the clasp of the man’s hand,
but his words still rang in my ears. I mounted my


A STRANGE s'roar. 75
horse; I rode into the adjoining suburbs, the neighbor-
ing villages; there, however, I learned nothing till, just
at nightfall, in a hamlet about ten miles from L

, a
laborer declared he had seen a young lady dressed as I
described, who passed by him in a path through the
ﬁelds a little before noon; that he was surprised to see
one so young, so well dressed, and a stranger to the
neighborhood (for he knew by sight the ladies of the
few families scattered round), walking alone; that, as
he stepped out of the path to make way for her, he
looked hard into her face, and she did not heed him—
seemed to gaze right before her, into space. If her
expression had been less quiet and gentle, he should
have thought, he could scarcely say why, that she was
not quite right in her mind-there was a strange,
unconscious stare in her eye, as if she were walking in
her sleep. Her pace was very steady-neither quick
nor slow. He had watched her till she passed out of
sight, amidst a wood through which the path wound
its way to a village at some distance.
I followed up this clue. I arrived at the village to
which my informant directed me, but night had set in.
Most of the houses were closed, so I could glean no
further information from the cottages or at the inn.
But the police superintendent of the district lived in
the village, and to him I gave instructions which I had
not given, and, indeed, would have been disinclined to
give, to the police at L——. He was intelligent and
kindly: he promised to communicate at once with the


76 a STRANGE s'roar.
diﬁ'erent police-stations for miles round, and with all
delicacy and privacy. It was not probable that Lilian
could have wandered in one day much farther than the
place at which I then was; it was scarcely to be con-
ceived that she could bafﬂe my pursuit and the practised
skill of the police. I rested but a few hours, at a small
public-house, and was on horseback again at dawn. A
little after sunrise I again heard of the wanderer. At
a lonely cottage, by a brick-kiln, in the midst of a wide
common, she had stopped the previous evening, and
asked for a draught of milk. The woman who gave it
to her inquired if she had lost her way? She said
“No;” and, only tarrying a few minutes, had gone
across the common; and the woman supposed she was
a visitor at a gentleman’s house which was at the farther
end of the waste, for the path she took led to no town,
no village. It occurred to me, then, that Lilian avoided
all high-roads, all places, even the humblest, where men
congregated together. But where could she have passed
the night? Not to fatigue the reader 'with the fruitless
result of frequent inquiries, I will but say that at the
end of the second day I had succeeded in ascertaining
that I was still on her track; and though I had ridden
to and fro nearly double the distance-coming back
again to places I had left behind—it was at the dis-
tance of forty miles from L that I last heard of her
that second day. She had been seen sitting alone by a
little brook only an hour before. I was led to the very
spot by a woodman—it was at the hour of twilight

I


A STRANGE near. 7?
when he beheld her—she was leaning her face on her
hand, and seemed weary. He spoke to her; she did
not answer, but rose, and resumed her way along the
banks of the streamlet. That night I put up at no inn;
I followed the course of the brook for miles, then struck
into every path that I could conceive her to have taken
-—in vain. Thus I consumed the night on foot, tying
my horse to a tree, for he was tired out, and returning
to him at sunrise. At noon, the third day, I again
heard of her, and in a remote, savage part of the
country. The features of the landscape were changed;
there was little foliage and little culture, but the ground
was broken into mounds and hollows, and covered with
patches of heath and stunted brushwood. She had
been seen by a shepherd, and he made the same obser-
vation as the ﬁrst who had guided me on her track-
she looked to him " like some one walking in her sleep.”
An hour or two later, in a dell, amongst the furze-
bushes, I chanced on a knot of ribbon. I recognized
the color Lilian habitually wore; I felt certain that the
ribbon was hers. Calculating the utmost speed I could
ascribe to her, she could not be far off, yet still I failed
to discover. The scene now was as solitary as a desert;
I met no one on my way. At length, a little after
sunset, I found myself in view of the sea. A small
town nestled below the cliffs, on which I was guiding
my weary horse. I entered the town, and while my
horse was baiting went in search of the resident police~
man. The information I had directed to be sent round
7.


18 A s'raanoa near.
the country had reached him; he had acted on it_ but
without result. I was surprised to hear him address
me by name, and looking at him more narrowly, I recog-
nized him for the policeman Waby. This young man
had always expressed so grateful a sense of my attend-
ance on his sister, and had, indeed, so ‘notably evinced
his gratitude in prosecuting with Margrave the inquiries
which terminated in the discovery of Sir Philip Derval’s
murderer, that I conﬁded to him the name of the
wanderer, of which he had not been previously informed;
but which it would be, indeed, impossible to conceal
from him should the search in which his aid was asked
prove successful—as he knew Miss Ashleigh by sight.
His face immediately became thoughtful. He paused a
minute or two, and then said:
“I think I have it, but I do not like to say; I may
pain you, sir.”
“Not by conﬁdence; you pain me by concealment.”
The man hesitated still; I encouraged him, and then
he spoke out frankly.
“ Sir, did you never think it strange that Mr. Mar~
grave should move from his handsome rooms in the
hotel to a somewhat uncomfortable lodging, from the
window of which he could look down. on Mrs. Ash-
leigh’s garden? I have seen him at night in the bal-
cony of that window, and when I noticed him going so
frequently into Mrs. Ashleigh’s house during your unjust
detention, I own, sir, I felt for you ”
“Nonsense! Mr. Margrave went to Mrs. Ashleigh’s


80 A STRANGE s'roar.
kind, in the house of a man known as a desperate
smuggler, suspected to be worse ?—order a yacht to
meet him here; is not all this strange ? But would it
be strange if- he were waiting for a young lady? And
if a young lady has ﬂed at night from her home, and
has come secretly along by-paths, which must have been
very fully explained to her beforehand, and is now near
that young gentleman’s lodging, if not actually in it—
if this be so, why, the affair is not so very strange after
all. And now do you forgive me, sir?”
“ Where is this house? Lead me to it.”
“ You can hardly get to it except on foot; rough walk-
ing, sir, and about seven miles off by the shortest cut."
“ Come, and at once ; come quickly. We must be there
before — before -—-”
“Before the young lady can get to the place. Well,
from what you say of the spot in which she was last
seen, I think, on reﬂection, we mgy easily do that. I
am at your service, sir. But I should warn you that
the owners of the house, man and wife, are both of vil-
lanous character_ would do anything for money. Mr.
Margrave, no doubt, has money enough ; and if the
young lady chooses to go away with Mr. Margrave, you
know I have no power to help it.”
“Leave all that to me; all I ask of you is to show
me the house.” .
We were seen out of the town; the night had closed
in; it was very dark, in spite of a few stars; the path
was rugged and precipitous, sometimes skirting the very


a STRANGE STORY. 81
brink of perilous cliffs; sometimes delving down to the
sea-shore—there stopped by rock or wave — and pain-
fully rewinding up the ascent.
“ It is an ugly path, sir, but it saves four miles; and
anyhow the road is a bad one.”
We came, at last, to a few wretched ﬁshermen’s huts.
The moon had now risen, and revealed the squalor of
poverty-stricken, ruinous hovels; a couple of boats
moored to the shore; a moaning, fretful sea; and at a
distance, a vessel, wi.th lights on board, lying perfectly
still at anchor in a sheltered curve of the bold, rude
shore. The policeman pointed to the vessel.
“ The yacht, sir; the wind will be in her favor if she
sails to night.”
We quickened our pace as Well' as the nature of the
path would permit, left the huts behind us, and, about a
mile farther on, came to a. solitary house, larger than,
from the policeman’s description of Margrave’s lodg-
ment, I should have presupposed: a house that in the
wilder parts of Scotland might be almost a laird’s; but
even in the moonlight it 100ked very dilapidated and
desolate. Most of the windows were closed, some
with panes broken, stuffed with wisps of straw; there
were the remains of a wall round the house; it was
broken in some parts—only its foundation left. On
approaching the house, I observed two doors—one on
the side fronting the see, one on the other side facing
a patch of broken ground that might once have been a
garden, and lay waste within the enclosure of the ruined
l‘


82 A sraanoa s'roav.
wall, encumbered with various litter- heaps of rubbish,
a ruined shed, the carcass of a worn-out boat. This
latter door stood wide open—the other _was closed.
The house was still and dark, as if either deserted, or
all within it retired to rest.
“I think that open door leads at once to the rooms
Mr. Margrave hires; he can go in and out without dis-
turbing the other inmates. They used to keep, on the
side which they inhabit, a beer-house, but the magis-
trates shut it up; still it is a reso'rt for bad characters.
Now, sir, what shall we do ?"
“Watch separately. You wait within the enclosure
of the wall, hid by those heaps of rubbish, near the
door; none can enter but what you will observe them.
If you see her, you will accost and stop her, and call
aloud for me; I shall be in hearing. I will go back to
the high part of the ground yonder-it seems to me
that she must pass that way; and I would desire, if
possible, to save her from the humiliation, the-the
shame of coming within the precincts of that man’s
abode. I feel I may trust you now and hereafter. It
is a great thing for the happiness and honor of this poor
young lady and her mother, that I may be able to
declare that I did not take her from that man, from any
man— from that house, from any house. You com-
prehend me, and will obey? I speak to you as a con-
ﬁdant—a friend.”
“I thank you with my whole heart, sir, for so doing.
You saved my sister’s life, and the least I can do is to


A s'raanon STORY. 83
keep secret all that would pain your life if blabbed
abroad. I know what mischief folks’ tongues can make
I will wait by the door, never fear, and will rather lose
my place than not strain all the legal power I possess
to keep the young lady back from sorrow.”
This dialogue was interchanged in close, hurried
whisper behind the broken wall, and out of all hearing.
Waby now crept through a wide gap into the enclosure,
and nestled himself silently amidst the wmcks of the
broken boat, not six feet from the open door, and close
to the wall of the house itself. I went back some
thirty yards up the road, to the rising ground which I
had pointed out to him. According to the best calcula-
tion I could make—considering the pace at which I
had cleared the precipitous pathway, and reckoning
from the place and time at which Lilian had been last
seen—she could not possibly have yet entered that house.
I might presume it would be more than half an hour
before she could arrive; I was in hopes that, during the
interval, Margrave might show himself, perhaps at the
door, or from the windows, or I might even by some
light from the latter be guided to the room in which to
ﬁnd him. If, after waiting a reasonable time, Lilian
should fail to appear, I had formed my plan of action;
but it was important for the success of that plan that
I should not lose myself in the strange house, nor bring
its owners to Margrave’s aid—that I should surprise
him alone and unawares. Half an hour, three-quarters,
\ whole hour thus passed—no sign of my poor wan-


84 ‘ A STRANGE sroay.
derer; but signs there were of the enemy, from whom
I resolved, at whatever risk, to free and to save her.
A window on the ground-ﬂoor to the left of the door,
which had long ﬁxed my attention because I had seen
light through the chinks of the shutters, slowly un-
closed, the shutters fell back, the easement opened, and
I beheld M argrave distinctly; he held something in his
hand that gleamed in the moonlight, directed not
towards thomound on which I stood, nor towards the
path I had taken, but towards an open space beyond
the ruined wall, to the right. Bid by a cluster of
stunted shrubs, I watched him with a heart that beat
with rage, not with terror. He seemed so intent in his
own gaze, as to be unheeding or unconscious of all else.
I stole from my post, and, still under cover, sometimes
of the broken wall, sometimes of the shaggy ridges
that skirted the path, crept on, on till I reached the
side of the house itself; then, there, secure from his
eyes, should he turn them, I stepped over the ruined
wall, scarcely two feet high in that place, on—on
towards the door. I passed the spot on which the
policeman had shrouded himself; he was seated, his
back against the ribs of the broken boat. I put my
hand to his mouth that he might not cry out in sur-
prise, and whispered in his ear; he stirred not. I shook
him by the arm; still be stirred not. A ray of the
moon fell on his face. I saw that he was in a profound
slumber. Persuaded that it was no natural sleep, and
that he had become useless to me, [ passed him by. I


a STRANGE sroav. 85
was at the threshold of the open door; the light from
the window close by falling on the ground; I was in
the passage; a glimmer came through the chinks of a
door to the left; I turned the handle noiselessly; and,
the next moment, Margrave was locked in my grasp.-
“ Call out,” I hissed in his ear, “ and I strangle you
before any one can come to your help I ”
He did not call out; his eye, ﬁxed on mine as he
writhed round, saw, perhaps, his peril if he did. His
countenance betrayed fear, but as I tightened my grasp
that expression gave way to one of wrath and ﬁerce-
ness; and as, in turn, I felt the grip of his hand, I
knew that the struggle between us would be that of
two strong men, each equally bent on the mastery of
the other. A
I was, as I have said before, endowed with an un-
usual degree of physical power, disciplined in early
youth by athletic exercise and contest. In height and
in muscle I had greatly the advantage over my an-
tagonist, but such was the nervous vigor, the elastic
energy of his incomparable frame, in which sinews
seemed springs of steel, that had our encounter been
one in which my strength was less heightened by rage,
I believe that I could no more have coped with him
than the bison can cope with the boa; but I was ani-
mated by that passion which trebles for a time all our
forces—which makes even the weak man a match for
the strong. I felt that if I were worsted, disabled,
stricken down, Lilian might be lost in losing her sole
Il.—8 '


86 -A summer: s'roav.
protector; and on the other hand, Margrave had been
taken at the disadvantage of that surprise which will
half unnerve the ﬁercest of the wild beasts; while, as
we grappled, reeling and rocking to and fro in our
struggle, I soon observed that his atteption was dis-
tracted-that his eye was turned towards an object
which he had dropped involuntarily when I ﬁrst seized
him. He sought to drag me towards that object, and
when near it stooped to seize it. It was a bright, slender,
short wand of steel. I remembered when and where I
had seen it, whether in my waking state or in vision;
and as his hand stole down to take it from the ﬂoor, I
set on the wand my strong foot. I cannot tell by what
rapid process of thought and association I came to the
belief that the possession of a little piece of blunted
steel would decide the conﬂict in favor of the possessor,
but the struggle now was concentrated on the attain-
ment of that seemingly idle weapon. I was becoming
breathless and exhausted, while Margrave seemed every
moment to gather up new force, when, collecting all my
strength for one ﬁnal eﬁ‘ort, I lifted him suddenly high
in the air, and hurled him to the farthest end of the
cramped arena to which our contest was conﬁned. He
fell, and with a force by which most men would have
been stunned; but he recovered himself with a quick
rebound, and, as he stood facing me, there was some-
thing grand as well as terrible in his aspect. His eyes
literally ﬂamed, as those of a tiger; his rich hair, ﬂung
back from his knitted forehead, seemed to erect itself as


88 A STRANGE STORY.
He moved his head as in sign of deprecating sub-
mission.
“ You hear and understand me ? Speak l ”
His lips faintly muttered, “Yes.”
“ I command you to answer truly the questions I
shall address to you.”
“I must while yet sensible of the power that has
passed to your hand.”
“ Is it by some occult magnetic property in this wand
that you have exercised so demoniac an inﬂuence over
a creature so pure as Lilian Ashleigh f”
“ By that wand and by other arts which you could
not comprehend.” ‘
“ And for what infamous object?—her seduction, her
dishonor ? ”
“ Nol I sought in her the aid of a gift which would
cease, did she cease to be pure. At ﬁrst I but cast my
inﬂuence upon her that through her I might inﬂuence
yourself. I needed your help to discover a secret.
Circumstances steeled your mind against me. I could
no longer hope that you would voluntarily lend yourself
to my will. Meanwhile, I had found in her the light
of a loftier knowledge than that of your science; through
that knowledge, duly heeded and cultivated, I hoped to
divine what I cannot of myself discover. Therefore I
deepened over her mind the spells I command—there-
fore I have drawn her hither as the loadstone draws the
steel, and therefore I would have borne her with me to
the shores to which I was about this night to sail. I


a warmer: sroaY. 89
had cast the inmates of the house and all around it, into
slumber, in order that none might witness her departure;
had I not done so, I should have summoned others to
my aid, in spite of your threat.”
“And would Lilian Ashleigh have passively accom-
panied you, to her own irretrievable disgrace ? ”
“ She could not have helped it; she would have been
unconscious of her acts; she was, and is, in a trance;
nor, had she gone with me, would she have waked from
that state while she lived-that would not have been
long.”
“ Wretchl and for what object of unhallowed curiosity
do you exert an inﬂuence which withers away the life
of its victim?”
“ Not curiosity, but the instinct of self-preservation.
I count on no life beyond the grave. I would defy the
grave, and live on.” '
“ And was it to learn, through some ghastly agencies,
the secret of renewing existence, that you lured me by
the shadow of your own image on the night when we
met last?”
The voice of Margmve here became very faint as he
answered me, and his countenance began to exhibit the
signs of an exhaustion almost mortal.
“ Be quick,” he murmured, “or I die. The ﬂuid
which emanates from that wand, in the hand of one
who envenoms the ﬂuid with his own hatred and rage,
will prove fatal to my life. Lower the wand from my
forehead; low — low ; — lower still l ”
a!


90 A STRANGE s'roav.
“What was the nature of that rite in which you con-
strained me to share?”
“I cannot say. You are killing me. Enough that
you were saved from a great danger by the apparition
of the protecting image vouchsafed to your eye; other-
wise you would-you would—Oh, release mel Away!
away I”
The foam gathered to his lips; his limbs became
fearfully convulsed. -
“ One question more: where is Lilian at this moment?
Answer that question, and I depart.”
He raised his head, made a visible effort to rally his
strength, and gasped out— k
“ Yonder. Pass through the open space up the cliﬂ',
beside a thorn-tree—you will ﬁnd her there, where she
halted when the wand dropped from my hand. But—
but— beware! Hal you will serve me yet, and
through herl They said so that night, though you
heard them not. THEY said it!” Here his face became
death-like; he pressed his hand on his heart, and
shriekod out, “Away-away l or you are my murderer!”
I retreated to the other end of the room, turning the
wand from him, and when I gained the door, looked
back; his convulsions had ceased, but he seemed locked
in a profound swoon. I left the room—the house-
paused by Waby; he was still sleeping. “Awake!” I
said, and touched him with the wand. He started up
at once, rubbed his eyes, began stammeriug out excuses.
I checked them, and bade him follow me. I took the


A s'rnanoa s'roaY. 91
way up the open ground towards which Margrave had
pointed the wand, and there, motionless, beside a
gnarled, fantastic thorn-tree, stood Lilian. Her arms
were folded across her breast; her face, seen by the
moonlight, looked up so innocent and so infantine, that
I needed no other evidence to tell me how unconscious
she was of the peril to which her steps had been drawn.
I took her gently by the hand. “Come with me," I
said in a whisper, and she obeyed me silently, and with
a placid smile.
Rough though the way, she seemed unconscious of
fatigue. I placed her arm in mine, but she did not lean
on it. We got back to the town. I obtained there an
old chaise and a pair of horses. At morning Lilian was
under her mother’s roof. About the noon of that day
fever seized her; she became rapidly worse, and, to all
appearance, in imminent danger. Delirium set in; I
watched beside her night and day, supported by an
inward conviction of her recovery, but tortured by the
sight of her sufferings. On the third day a change for
the better became visible; her sleep was calm, her
breathing regular.
Shortly afterwards she woke out of danger. Her
eyes fell at once on me, with all their old ineﬁ'able
tender sWeetness. ‘
“ Oh, Allen, beloved, have I not been very ill? But
I am almost well now. Do not weep; I shall live for
you—for your sake.” And she bent forward, drawing
my hand from my streaming eyes, and kissing me with
a child’s guileless kiss on my burning forehead.


92 A sraanoa s'roar.
CHAPTER LVI.
LILIAN recovered, but the strange thing was this:
all memory of the weeks that had elapsed since her
return from visiting her aunt was completely obliterated;
she seemed in profound ignorance of the charge on
which I had been conﬁned—perfectly ignorant even of
the existence of Margrave. She had, indeed, a very
vague reminiscence of her conversation with me in the
garden-the ﬁrst conversation which had ever been
embittered by a disagreement—but that disagreement
itself she did not recollect. Her belief was that she had
been ill and light-headed since that evening. From
that evening to the hour of her waking, conscious and
revived, all was a blank. Her love for me was restored,
as if the thread had never been broken. Some such
instances of oblivion after bodily illness or mental shock
are familiar enough to the practice of all medical men ;*
4" Such instances of suspense of memory are recorded in most
physiological and in some metaphysical works. Dr. Abercrombie
notices some, more or less similar to that related in the text:—
“A young lady who was present at a catastrophe in Scotland,
in which many people lost their lives by the fall of the gallery
of a church, escaped without any injury, but with the complete
loss of the recollection of any of the ircumstances; and this
extended not only to the accident, but to everything that had
occurred to her for a certain time before going to church. A
lady whom I attended some years ago in a protracted illness, in
which her memory became much impaired, lost the recollection
of a period of about ten or twelve years, but spoke with perfect
consistency of things as they stood before that time." Dr. Aber-


A s'raanes sroav. 93
and I was therefore enabled to appease the anxiety and
wonder of Mrs. Ashleigh, by quoting various examples
of loss, or suspension, of memory. We agreed that it
would be necessary to break to Lilian, though very
cautiously, the story of Sir Philip Derval’s murder, and
the charge to which I had been subjected. She could
not fail to hear of those events from others. How shall
I express her womanly terror, her loving, sympathizing
pity, on hearing the tale, which I softened as well as I
could ?
“And to think that I knew nothing of thisl” she
cried, clasping my hand; “ to think that you were in
peril, and that I was not by your side 1”
Her mother spoke of Margrave as a visitor— an
agreeable, lively stranger; Lilian could not even recol-
lect his name, but she seemed shocked to think that any
visitor had been admitted while I was in circumstances
so awful! Need I say that our engagement was
renewed? Renewed! To her knowledge and to her
heart it had never been interrupted for a moment. But
oh! the malignity of a wrong worldl Ohl that strange
lust of mangling reputations, which seizes on hearts the
least wantonly cruel 1 Let two idle tongues utter a tale
against some third person, who never oﬁ'ended the bab-
crombie adds: “ As far as I have been able to trace it, the prin-
ciple in such cases seems to be, that when the memory is impaired
to a certain degree, the loss of it extends backward to some
event or some period by which a particularly deep impression
had been made upon the mind.”-—Abercrombie 0n the Intellectual
Powers, pages 118, 119 (15th edition).


94 A summon s'ronr.
blers, and how the tale spreads, like ﬁre, lighted none
know how, in'the herbage of an American prairie?
IVho shall put it out?
What right have we to pry into the secrets of other
men’s hearths? True or false, the tale that is gab-
bled to us, what concern of ours can it be? I speak
not of cases to which the law has been summoned,
which law has sifted, on which law has pronounced.
But how, when the law is silent, can we assume its
verdicts? How be all judges, where there has been no
witness-box, no cross-examination, no jury ? Yet, every
day we put on our ermine, and make ourselves judges
-judges sure to condemn, and on what evidence?
That which no court of law will receive. Somebody
has said something to somebody, which somebody re-
peats to everybody!
The gossip of L
Liliau’s fair name. No ladies had called or sent to con-

had set in full'current against
gratulate Mrs. Ashleigh on her return, or to inquire
after Lilian herself during her struggle between life and
death.
How I missed the Queen of the Hill at this critical
moment! How I longed for aid to crush the slander,
with which I knew not how to grapple—aid in her
knowledge of the world, and her ascendancy over its
judgments! I had heard from her once since her
absence, brieﬂy but kindly expressing her amazement at
the ineﬁ'able stupidity which could for a moment have
subjected me to a suspicion of Sir Philip Derval’a


A s'rsauos sronr. 90
strange murder, and congratulating rne heartily on my
complete vindication from so monstrous a charge. To
this letter no address was given. I supposed the omis-
sion to be accidental, but on calling at her house to
inquire her direction, I found that her servants did not
know it.
What, then, was my joy when, just at this juncture,
I received a note from Mrs. Poyntz, stating that she
had returned the night before, and would be glad to
see me.
I hastened to her house. “Ah,” thought I, as I
sprang lightly up the ascent to the Hill, how the tattlers
will be silenced by a word from her imperial lipsl”
And only just as I approached her door did it strike me
how difﬁcult—nay, how impossible to explain to her—-
the hard, positive woman, her who had, less ostensibly
but more ruthlessly than myself, destroyed Dr. Lloyd
for his belief in the comparatively rational pretensions
of clairvoyance—all the mystical excuses for Lilian’s
ﬂight from her home? How speak to her—or, indeed,
to any one—about an occult fascination and a magic
wand? No matter; surely it would be enough to say
that, at the time, Lilian had been light-headed, under
the inﬂuence of the fever which had afterwards nearly
proved fatal. The early friend of Anne Ashleigh would
not be a severe critic on any tale that might right the
good name of Anne Ashleigb’s daughter. So assured,
with a light heart and cheerful face, I followed the ser- .
vant into the great lady’s pleasant but decorous pres-
ence-chamber. 2p


96 a arr-anon srosr. ,
CHAPTER LVII.
Mas. Pornrz was on her favorite seat by the window,
and, for a wonder, not knitting—that classic task seemed
done ; but she was smoothing and folding the completed
work with her white, comely hand, and smiling over
it, as if in complacent approval, when I entered the
room. At the ﬁreside sat the he-colonel, inspecting a
newly-invented barometer; at another window, in the
farthest recess of the room, stood Miss Jane Poyntz,
with a young gentleman whom ‘I had never before seen,
but who turned his eyes full upon me with a haughty
look as the servant announced my name. He was tall,
well-proportioned, decidedly handsome, but with that
expression of cold and concentrated self-esteem in his
very attitude, as well as his countenance, which makes a
man of merit unpopular, a man without merit ridiculous.
The he-colonel, always punctiliously civil, rose from
his seat, shook hands with me cordially, and said,
“ Coldish weather to-day; but we shall have rain to-
morrow. Rainy seasons come in cycles. We are about
to commence a cycle of them with heavy showers.”
He sighed, and returned to his barometer.
Miss Jane bowed to me graciously enough, but was
evidently a little confused, a circumstance which might
well attract my notice, for I had never before seen that
high-bred young lady deviate a hair’s breadth from the


a s-raanen sroar. 97
even tenor of a manner admirable for a cheerful and
courteous ease, which, one felt convinced, would be
unaltered to those around her, if an earthquake swal-
lowed one up an inch before her feet.
The young gentleman continued to eye me loftily.
as the heir-apparent to some celestial planet might
eye an inferior creature from a half-formed nebula
suddenly dropped upon his sublime and perfected star.
Mrs. Poyntz extended to me two ﬁngers, and said,
frigidly, “ Delighted to see you again! How kind to
attend so soon to my note l” Motioning me to a seat
beside her, she here turned to her husband, and said,
“ Poyntz, since a cycle of rain begins to-morrow, better
secure your ride te-day. Take these young people with
you. I want to talk with Dr. Fenwick.”
The colonel carefully put away his barometer, and
saying to his daughter “ Come l” went forth. Jane fol~
lowed her father; the young gentleman followed Jane.
The reception I met chilled and disappointed me. I
felt that Mrs. Poyntz was changed, and in her change
the whole house seemed changed. The very chairs
looked civilly unfriendly, as if preparing to turn their
backs on me. However, I was not in the false posi-
tion of an intruder; I had been summoned; it was for
Mrs. Poyntz to speak ﬁrst, and I waited quietly for her
to do so.
She ﬁnished the careful folding of her work, and
then laid it at rest in the drawer of the table at which
she sat. Having so done, she turned to me and said-
II.—9 e


98 A summer: s'roav.
“ By the way, I ought to have introduced to you
my young guest, Mr. Ashleigh Sumner. You would
like him. He has talents -not showy, but solid. He
will succeed in public life.”
“' So that young man is Mr. Ashleigh Sumner? I
do not wonder that Miss Ashleigh rejected him."
1 aid this, for I was nettled, as well as surprised,
at the coolness with which a lady who had professed
a friendship for me, mentioned that fortunate young
gentleman, with so complete an oblivion of all the
antecedents that had once made his name painful to
my ear.
In turn, my answer seemed to nettle Mrs. Poyntz:
“I am not sure that she did reject; perhaps she
rather misunderstood him; gallant compliments are
not always proposals of marriage. However that be,
his spirits were not much damped by Miss Ashleigh’s
disdain, nor his heart deeply smitten by her charms;
for he is now very happy, very much attached to
another young lady, to whom he proposed, three days
ago, at Lady Delaﬁeld’s, and not to make a mystery
of what all our little world will know before to-morrow,
that young lady is my daughter Jane.”
“Were I acquainted with Mr. Sumner, I should offer
to him my sincere congratulations.”
Mrs. Poyntz resumed, without heeding a reply more
complimentary to Miss Jane than to the object of her
choice:
“I told you that I meant Jane to marry a rich


A STRANGE STORY. 99
country gentleman, and Ashleigh Sumner is the very
country gentleman I had then in my thought. He is
clever and more ambitious than I could have heped;
he will be a minister some day, in right of his talents,
and a peer, if he wishes it, in right of his lands. So
that matter is settled.”
There was a pause, during which my mind passed
rapidly through links of reminiscence and reasoning,
which led me to a mingled sentiment of admiration
for Mrs. Poyntz as a diplomatist and of distrust for
Mrs. Poyntz as a friend. It was now clear why Mrs.
Poyntz, before so little disposed to approve my love,
had urged me at once to offer my hand to Lilian, in
order that she might depart alﬂauced and engaged to
the house in which she would meet Mr. Ashleigh Sum-
ner. Hence, Mrs. Poyntz’s anxiety to obtain all the
information I could afford her of the sayings and doings
at Lady Haughton’s; hence, the publicity she had so
suddenly given to my engagement; hence, when Mr.
Sumner had gone away a rejected suitor, her own de-
parture from L——; she had seized the very moment
when a vain and proud man, piqued by the mortiﬁca-
tion received from, one lady, falls the easier prey to the
arts which allure his suit to another. All was so far
clear to me. And I—was my self-conceit less egregious
and less readily duped than that of you gilded popin-
jay’sl How skilfully this woman had knitted me into
her work with the noiseless turn of her white hands!
and yet, forsooth, I must vaunt the superior sicope of


100 A STRANGE sroaY.
my intellect, and plumb all the fountains of N ature-I,
who could not fathom the little pool of this female
schemer’s mind!
But that was no time for resentment to her or
rebuke to myself. She was now the woman who
could best protect and save from slander my innocent,
beloved Lilian. But how approach that perplexing
subject?
Mrs. Poyntz approached it, and with her usual deci-
sion of purpose, which bore so deceitful a likeness to
candor of mind.
“But it was not to talk of my affairs that I asked you
to call, Allen Fenwick." As she uttered my name.
her voice softened, and her manner took that maternal.
caressing tenderness which had sometimes amused and
sometimes misled me. “No, I do not forget that you
asked me to be your friend, and I take, without scruple.
the license of friendship. What are these stories that
I have heard already about Lilian Ashleigh, to whom
you were once engaged ?” '
" To whom I am still engaged.”
“ Is it possible? Oh, then, of course the stories I
have heard are all false. Very likely; no ﬁction in
scandal ever surprises me. Poor dear Lilian, then-
never ran away from her mother’s house ?”
I smothered the angry pain which this mode of ques-
tioning caused me; I knew how important it was to
Lilian to secure to her the countenance and support of
this absolute autocract; I spoke of Lilian’s long previous


A STRANGE won. 101
distemper of mind; I accounted for it as any intelli-
gent physician, unacquainted with all that I could not
reveal, would account. Heaven forgive me for the
venial falsehood, but I spoke of the terrible charge
against myself as enough to unhinge, for a time, the
intellect of a girl so acutely sensitive as Lilian; I
sought to create that impression as to the origin of all
that might otherwise seem strange; and in this state
of cerebral excitement she had wandered from home
—-but alone. I had tracked every step of her way; I
had found and restored her to her home. A critical
delirium had followed, from which she now rose, cured
in health, nnsuspicious that there could be a whisper
against her name. And then, with all the eloquence
I could command, and in words as adapted as I could
framé them to soften the heart of a woman, herself a.
mother, I implored Mrs. Poyntz’s aid to silence all the
cruelties of calumny, and extend her shield over the
child of her own early friend.
When I came to an end, I had taken, with caressing ,
force, Mrs. Poyntz’s reluctant hands in mine. There
were tears in my voice, tears in my eyes. And the
sound of her voice in reply gave me hope, for it was
unusually gentle. She was evidently moved. The
hope was soon quelled.
“Allen Fenwick,” she said, “you have a noble heart;
[grieve to see how it abuses your reason. I cannot
aid Lilian Ashleigh in the way you ask. Do not start
back so indignantly. Listen to me as patiently as I '
9i


102 a smarter: s'roar.
have listened to you. That when you brought back
the unfortunate young woman to her poor mother, her
mind was disordered, and became yet more dangerously -
so, I can well believe; that she is now recovered and
thinks with shame, or refuses to think at all, of her
imprudent ﬂight, I can believe also; but I do not
believe, the World cannot believe, that she did not,
knowingly and purposely, quit her mother’s roof, and
in quest of that young stranger so incautiously, so
unfeelingly admitted to her mother’s house during the
very time you were detained on the most awful of
human accusations. Every one in the town knows
that Mr. Margrave visited daily at Mrs. Ashleigh’s
during that painful period; every one in the town
knows in what strange out-of-the-way place this young
man had niched himself; and that a yacht was bought,
and lying in wait there. What for? It is said that
the chaise in which you brought Miss Ashleigh back to
her home was hired in a village within an easy reach
of Mr. Margrave’s lodging—of Mr. Margrave’s yacht.
I rejoice that you saved the poor girl from ruin; but
her good name is tarnished, and if Anne Ashleigh,
whom I sincerely pity, asks me my advice, I can but
give her this: ‘Leave L , take your daughter
abroad; and if she is not to marry Mr. Margrave,
marry her as quietly and as quickly as possible to some
foreigner.’ ”

“Madam! madaml this, then, is your friendship to
her-to me! Oh, shame on you to insult thus an adi-


A s'raasua near. 105
my most intimate companion. But that silly child 1 --
absnrdl Nevertheless, the freshness and enthusiasm
of your love touched me; you asked my aid, and I
gave it-perhaps I did believe that when you saw
more of Lilian Ashleigh you would be cured of a fancy
conceived by the eye—I should have known better
what dupes the wisest men can be to the witcheries, of
a fair face and eighteen! When I found your illusion
obstinate, I wrenched myself away from a vain regret,
turned to my own schemes and my own ambition, and
smiled bitterly to think that, in pressing you to pro-
pose so hastily to Lilian, I made your blind passion an
agent in my own plans. Enough of this. I speak thus
openly and boldly to you now, because now I have not
a sentiment that can'interfere with the dispassionate
soundness of my counsels. I repeat-I you cannot now
marry Lilian Ashleigh; I cannot take my daughter to
visit her; I cannot destroy the social laws that I
myself have set in my petty kingdom.”
“ Be it as you will. I have pleaded for her while
she is still Lilian Ashleigh. I plead for no one to
whom I have once given my name. Before the woman
whom I have taken from the altar, I can place, as a
shield sufﬁcient, my strong breast of man. Who has so
deep an interest in Lilian’s purity as I have? Who is
so ﬁtted to know the exact truth of every whisper
against her? Yet when I, whom you admit to have
some reputation for shrewd intelligence —— I, who
tracked her way—I, who restored her to her home—


106 A STRANGE STORY.
when I, Allen Fenwick, am so assured of her inviolabla
innocence in thought as in deed, that I trust my honor
to her keeping—surely, surely, I confute the scandal
which you yourself do not believe, though you refuse
to reject and to annul it ?”
“ Do not deceive yourself, Allen Fenwick,” said she,
still standing beside me, her countenance now hard and
stern. “ Look, where I stand, I am the WORLD! The
World, not as satirists depreciate or as optimists extol
its immutable properties, its all-persuasive authority.
I am the Worldl And my voice is the World’s voice
when it thus warns you. Should you make this mar-
riage, your dignity of character and position would be
gonel—if you look only to ‘lucre and professional suc-
cess, possibly they may not ultimately suﬂ'er. You
have skill, which men need; their need may still draw
patients to your door, and pour guineas into your purse.
But you have the pride, as well as the birth, of a gen-
tleman, and the wounds to that pride will be hourly
chafed and never healed. Your strong breast of man
has no shelter to the frail name of Woman. The World,
in its health, will look down on your wife, though its
sick may look up to you. This is not all. The World,
in its gentlest mood of indulgence, will say, compas-
sionately, ‘Poor man! how weak, and how deceived!
What an unfortunate marriagel’ But the World is not
often indulgent—it looks most to the motives most
seen on the surface. And the World will more fre-
quently say, ‘No, much too clever a man to be duped!


A s'raasen sroar. 107
Miss Ashleigh had money. A good match to the man
who liked gold better than honor.’ ”
I sprang to my feet, with difﬁculty suppressing my
rage; and, remembering it was a woman who spoke to
me, “Farewell, madam,” said I, through my grinded
teeth. “Were you, indeed, the Personation of The
World, whose mean notions you mouth so calmly, I
could not disdain you more.” I turned to the door,
and leﬁ her still standing erect and menacing, the hard
sneer on her resolute lip, the red glitter in her remorse-
less eye.

CHAPTER LVIII.
I! ever my heart vowed itself to Lilian, the vow was
now the most trustful and the most sacred. I had re-
linquished our engagement before, but then her aﬂ’ection
seemed, no matter from what cause, so estranged from
me, that though I might be miserable to lose her, I
deemed that she would be unhappy in our union.
Then, too, she was the gem and darling of the little
world in which she lived; no whisper assailed her.
Now, I knew that she leved me; I knew that her
cstrangemcnt had been involuntary; I knew that ap-
pcarances wronged her, and that they never could be
explained. I was in the true position of man to woman;
I was the shield, the bulwark, the fearless, couﬁding
protector! Resign her now because the world babbled,


108 A s'raanen s-roar
because my career might be impeded, because my good
name might be impeached—resign her, and, in that
resignation, conﬁrm all that was said against her!
Could I do so, I should be the most craven of gentle-
men, the meanest of men!
I went to Mrs. Ashleigh, and entreated her to hasten
my union with her daughter, and ﬁx the marriage-day.
I found the poor lady dejected and distressed. She
was now sutﬁciently relieved from the absorbing anxiety
for Lilian to be aware of the change on the face of that
World which the woman I had just quitted personiﬁed
and concentred; she had learned the cause from the
bloodless lips of Miss Brabazon.
“ My child ——my poor child ! ” murmured the mother.
“ And she so guileless_so sensitive! Could she know
what is said, it would kill her. She would never marry
you, Allen-she would never bring shame to you i”
“ She never need learn the barbarous calumny. Give
her to me, and at once ; patients, fortune, fame, are not
found only at L—. Give her to me at once. But
let me name a. condition; I have a patrimonial inde-
pendence—I have amassed large savings-I have my
profession and my repute. I cannot touch her fortune
-—I cannot—never can! Take it while you live; when
you die, leaveit to accumulate for her children, if children
she have; not to me; not to her—unless I am dead or
ruined!”
“ Oh, Allen, what a heart ! - what a heartl No, not
heart, Allen—that bird in its cage has a heart; soul-
what a soul 1”


A s'raauea STORY. 109
CHAPTER LIX.
How innocent was Lilian’s virgin blush when I knelt
to her, and prayed that she would forestall the date that
had been ﬁxed for our union, and be my bride before the
breath of the autumn had withered the pomp of the
woodland and silenced the song of the birds! Mean- '
while, I was so fearfully anxious that she should risk no
danger of hearing, even of surmising, the cruel slander
against her—should meet no cold contemptuous looks
— above all, should be safe from the barbed talk of Mrs.
Poyntz—that I insisted on the necessity of immediate
change of air and scene. I proposed that we should all
three depart, the next day, for the banks of my own
beloved and native Windermere. By that pure moun-
tain air, Lilian’s health would be soon re-established; in
the church hallowed to me by the graves of my fathers
our vows could be plighted. No calumny had ever cast
a shadow over those graves. I felt as if my bride would
be safer in the neighborhood of my mother’s tomb.
I carried my point; it was so arranged. Mrs.
Ashleigh, hOWever, was reluctant to leave before she
had seen her dear friend, Margaret Poyntz. I had not
the courage to tell her what she might expect to hear
from that dear friend, but, as delicately as I could, I
informed her that I had already seen the Queen of the
Hill, and contradicted the gossip that had reached her;
IL — 10


110 A sraanes worm.
but that as yet, like other absolute sovereigns, the
Queen of the Hill thought it politic to go with the pop-
ular stream, reserving all check on its direction till the
rush of its torrent might slacken; and that it would be
inﬁnitely wiser in Mrs. Ashleigh to postpone conversa-

tion with Mrs. Poyntz until Lilian’s return to L as
my wife. Slander by that time would have wearied
itself out, and Mrs. Poyntz (assuming her friendship to
‘ Mrs. Ashleigh to be sincere) would then be enabled to
say with authority to her subjects, “ Dr._ ‘Fenwick alone
knows the facts of the story, and his marriage with Miss
Ashleigh refutes all the gossip to her prejudice.”
I made that evening arrangements with a young and
rising practitioner to secure attendance on my patients
during my absence. I passed the greater part of the
night in drawing up memoranda to guide my proxy in
each case, however humble the sufferer. This task
ﬁnished, I chanced, in searching for a small microscope,
the wonders of which I thought might interest and
amuse Lilian, to open a drawer in which I kept the
manuscript of my cherished Physiological Work, and,
in so doing, my eye fell upon the wand which I had
taken from Margrave. I had thrown it into that drawer
on my return home, after restoring Lilian to her
mother's house, and, in the anxiety which had subse-
quently preyed upon my mind, had almost forgotten the
strange possession I had as strangely acquired. There
it- now lay, the instrument of agencies over the
mechanism of nature which no doctrine admitted by


A STRANGE s'rome'.P 111
my philosophy could acbept, side by side with the
presumptuous work which had analyzed the springs
by which nature is moved, and decided the principles
by which reason metes out, from the inch of its
knowledge, the plan of the Inﬁnite Unknown.
I took up the wand and examined it curiously. It-
was evidently the work of an age far remote from our
own, scored over with half-obliterated characters in
some Eastern tongue, perhaps no longer extant. I
found that it was hollow within. A more accurate
observation showed, in the centre of this hollow, an
exceedingly ﬁne thread~likc wire, the unattached end
of which would slightly touch the palm when the wand
was taken into the hand. Was it possible that there
might be a natural and even a simple cause for the
effects which this instrument produced? ‘Could it serve
to collect, from that great focus of animal heat and ner-
vous energy which is placed in the palm of the hand,
some such latent ﬂuid as that which Reiehenbach calls
the “odic,” and which, according to him, “rushes
through and pervades universal Nature?” Alter all,
why not? For how many centuries lay unknown all
the virtues of the loadstone and the amber? It is but
as yesterday that the forces of vapor have become to
men genii more powerful than those conjured up by
Aladdin; that light, at a touch, springs forth from
invisible air; that thought ﬁnds a messenger swifte!
than the wings of the fabled Afrite. As, thus musing,
my hand closed over the wand, I felt a wild thrill
20


112 A s'rannoa s'roav.
through my frame. I recoiled; I was alarmed lest
(according to the plain common-sense theory of Julius
Faber) I might be preparing my imagination to form
and to credit its own illusions. Hastily I laid down
the wand. But then it occurred to me, that whatever
its properties, it had so served the purpose of the dread
Fascinator from whom it had been taken, that he might
probably seek to repossess himself of it; he might con-
trive to enter my house in my absence; more prudent
to guard in my own watchful keeping the incomprehen-
sible instrument of incomprehensible arts. I resolved,
therefore, to take the wand with me, and placed it in
my travelling-trunk, with such effects as I selected for
use in the excursion that was to commence with the
morrow. ‘I now lay down to rest, but I could not sleep.
The recollections of the painful interview with Mrs.
Poyntz became vivid and haunting. It was clear that
the sentiment she had conceived for me was that of no
simple friendship-something more or something less-
but certainly something else; and this conviction
brought before me that proud, hard face, disturbed by a
pang wrestled against but not subdued, and that clear
metallic voice, troubled by the quiver of an emotion
which, perhaps, she had never analyzed to herself. I
did not need her own assurance to know that this
sentiment was not to be confounded with a love which
she would have despised as a weakness and repelled as
a crime; it was an inclination of the intellect, not a
passion of the heart. But still it admitted a jealousy


A s'raaaos s'roar. 118
little less keen than that which has love for its cause—
so true it is that jealousy is never absent where self-love
is always present. Certainly, it was no susceptibility
of sober friendship which had made the stern arbitress
of a coterie ascribe to her interest in me her pitiless
judgment of Lilian. Strangely enough, with the image
of this archetype of conventional usages and the trite
social life, came that of the mysterious Margrave, sur-
rounded by all the attributes with which superstition
clothes the being of the shadowy border-land that lies
beyond the chart of our visual world itself. By what
link were creatures so dissimilar riveted together in the
metaphysical chain of association? Both had entered
into the record of my life when my life admitted its
own ﬁrst romance of love. Through the aid of this
cynical schemer I had been made known to Lilian. At
her house I had heard the dark story of that Louis
Grayle, with whom, in mocking spite of my reason,
conjectures, which that very reason must depose itself
before it could resolve into distempered fancies, identiﬁed
the enigmatical Margrave. And now both she, the
representative of the formal world most opposed to
visionary creeds, and he, who gathered round him all
the terrors which haunt the realm of fable, stood united
against me—foes with whom the intellect I had so
haughtily cultured knew not how to cope. What-
ever assault I might expect from either, I was
unable to assail again. Alike, then, in this, are the
Slander and the Phantom; that which appals us
10* a


[14 a s'raauos sronv.
most in their power over us is our impotence
against them.
But up rose the sun, chasing the shadows from the
earth, and brightening insensibly the thoughts of man.
After all, Margrave had been balﬂed and defeated,
whatever the arts he had practised and the secrets he
possessed. It was, at least, doubtful whether his evil
machinations would be renewed. He had seemed so
incapable of long-sustained ﬁxity of purpose, that it was
probable he was already in pursuit of some new agent
or victim ; and as to this commonplace and conventional
spectre, the so-called World, if it is everywhere to him
whom it awes, it is nowhere to him who despises it.
What was the good or bad word of a Mrs. Poyntz to
me ? Ay, but to Lilian? There, indeed, I trembled;
but still, even in trembling, it was sweet to think that
my home would be her shelter—my choice her vindica-
tion. Ahl b'ow nnutterably tender and reverential
Love becomes when it assumes the duties of the guar-
dian, and hallows its own heart into a sanctuary of
refuge for the beloved!


a s'rsasos s'roav. 115
CHAPTER LX.
Tm: beautiful lake! We two are on its grassy mar-
gin—twilight melting into night; the stars stealing
forth, one after one. What a wonderful change is
made within us when we come from our callings
amongst men, chafed, weary, wounded; gnawed by our
cares, perplexed by the doubts of our very wisdom,
stung by the adder that dwells in cities -- Slander; nay,
even if renowned, fatigued with the burden of the very
names that we have won! What a change is made
within us when suddenly we ﬁnd ourselves transported
into the calm solitudes of Nature ;— into scenes famil-
iar to our happy, dreaming childhood; back, back from
the dusty thoroughfare of our toil-worn manhood to
the golden fountain of our youth! Blessed is the
change, even when we have no companion beside us to
whom the heart can whisper its sense of relief and joy.
But if the one, in whom all our future is garnered up,
be with us there, instead of that weary World which
has so magically vanished away from the eye and the
thought, then does the change make one of those rare
epochs of life in which the charm is the stillness. In
the pause from all by which our own turbulent struggles
for happiness trouble existence, we feel with a rapt
amazement, how calm a thing it is to be happy. And
so as the night, in deepening, brightened, Lilian and I


116 A s'raases sroav.
wandered by the starry lake. Conscious of no evil in
ourselves, how secure we felt from evil! A few days
more — a few days more, and we two should be as one! .
And that thought we uttered in many forms of words,
brooding over it in the long intervals of enamored
silence.
And when we turned back to the quiet inn at which
we had taken up our abode, and her mother, with her
soft face, advanced to meet us, I said to Lilian:
“Would that in these scenes we could ﬁx our home
for life, away and afar from the dull town we have left
behind us, with the fret of its wearying cares and the
jar of its idle bubble 1 " '
“And why not, Allen? Why not? But no, you
would not be happy.”
“ Not be happy, and with you? Sceptic, by what
reasonings do you arrive at that ungracious conclusion?”
“ The heart loves repose and the soul contemplation,
but the mind needs action. Is it not so ?”
“ Where learned you that aphorism, out of place on
such rosy lips f"
“I learned it in studying you," murmured Lilian
tenderly.
Here Mrs. Ashleigh joined us. For the ﬁrst time I
slept under the same roof as Lilian. And I forgot
that the universe contained an enigma to solve or an
enemy to fear.


a manual: sroar. 11'!
CHAPTER LXI.
'l‘vnm days —the happiest my life had ever known
-thus glided on. Apart from the charm which love
bestows on the beloved, there was that in Lilian’s con-
versation which made her a delightful companion.
Whether it was that, in this pause from the toils of my
career, my mind could more pliantly supple itself to her
graceful imagination, or that her imagination was less
vague and dreamy amidst those rural scenes, which
realized in their loveliness and grandeur its long-con-
ceived ideals, than it had been in the petty garden-
ground neighbored by .the stir and hubbub of the busy
town --in much that I had once slighted or contemned
as the vagaries of undisciplined fancy, I now recog-
nized the sparkle and play of an intuitive genius, light-
ing up many a depth obscure to instructed thought.
It is with some characters as with the subtler and more
ethereal order of poets. To appreciate them we must
suspend the course of artiﬁcial life. In the city we
call them dreamers, on the mountain-top we ﬁnd them
interpreters.
In Lilian, the sympathy with Nature was not, as in
Murgrave, from the joyous sense of Nature’s lavish
vitality ; it was reﬁned into exquisite perception of the
diviner spirit by which that vitality is informed. Thus,
like the artist, from outward forms of beauty she drew


118 a STRANGE s'roar.
O
forth the covert types, lending to things the most
familiar, exquisite meanings unconceived before. For
it is truly said by a wise critic of old, that “ the attri-
bute of art is to suggest inﬁnitely more than it ex-
presses-,” and such suggestions, passing from the
artist’s innermost thought into the mind that receives
them, open on and on into the Inﬁnite of Ideas, as a
moonlit wave struck by a passing oar impels wave upon
wave along one track of light.
So the days glided by, and brought the eve of our
bridal morn. It had been settled that, after the cere-
mony (which was to be performed by license in the
village church, at no great distance, which adjoined my
paternal home, now passed away to strangers), we
should make a short excursion into Scotland, leaving
Mrs. Ashleigh to await our return at the little inn.
I had retired to my own room to answer some letters
from anxious patients, and having ﬁnished these, I looked
into my trunk for a Guide-Book to the North, which I
had brought with me. My hand came upon Mar-
grave’s wand, and, remembering that strange thrill
which had passed through me when I last handled it,
I drew it forth, resolved to examine calmly if I could
detect the cause of the sensation. It was not now the
time of night in which the imagination is most liable to
credulous impressions, nor was, I now in the anxious
and jaded state of mind in which such impressions may
be the more readily conceived. The sun was slowly
setting over the delicious landscape; the air cool and


a srnauer: sroar. 119
serene; my thoughts collected—heart and conscience
alike at peace. I took, then, the wand, and adjusted it
to the palm of the hand as I had done before. I felt
the slight touch of the delicate wire within, and agair
the thrilll I did not this time recoil; I continued to
grasp the wand, and sought deliberately to analyze my
own sensations in the contact. There came over me an
increased consciousness of vital power; a certain exhil-
aration, elasticity, vigor, such as a strong cordial may
produce on a fainting man. All the forces of my frame
seemed refreshed, redoubled; and as such eﬁ'ects on the
physical system are ordinarily accompanied by corres-
pondent eﬂ'ects on the mind, so I was sensible of a
proud elation of spirits—a kind of defying, superb self-
glorying. All fear seemed blotted out from my thought,
as a weakness impossible to the grandeur and might
which belong to Intellectual Man; I felt as if it were a
royal delight to scorn Earth and its opinions, brave
Hades and its spectres. Rapidly this new-born arro-
gance enlarged itself into desires vague but daring. My
mind reverting to the wild phenomena associated with
its memories of Margrave, I said, half aloud, “ If a
creature so beneath myself in constancy of will and
completion of thought can wrest from Nature favors so
marvellous, what could not be won from her by me, her
patient, persevering seeker? What if there be spirits
around and about, invisible to the common eye, but
whom we can submit to our control; and what if this
red be charged with some occult ﬂuid, that runs


120 a STRANGE s'ronr.
through all creation, and can be so disciplined as to
establish communication wherever life and thought can
reach to beings that live and think. So would the
mystics of old explain what perplexes me. Am I sure
that the mystics of old duped themselves or their
pupils? This, then, this slight wand, light as a reed in
my grasp, this, then, was the instrument by which
Margrave sent his irresistible will through air and
space, and by which I smote himself, in the midst of
his tiger-like wrath, into the helplessness of a sick
man’s swoonl Can the instrument at this distance
still control him; if new meditating evil, disarm and
disable his purpose ?” Involuntarily, as I revolved
these ideas, I stretched forth the wand, with a concen-
tred energy of desire that its inﬂuence should reach
Margrave and command him. And since I knew not
his whereabout, yet was vaguely aware that, according
to any conceivable theory by which the wand could be
supposed to carry its imagined virtues to deﬁnite goals
in distant space, it should be pointed in the direction of
the object it was intended to eﬂ'ect, so I slowly moved
the wand as if describing a circle, and thus, in some
point of the circle—east, west, north, or south—the
direction could not fail to be true. Before I had per-
formed half the circle, the wand of itself stopped,
resisting palpably the movement of my hand to impel
it onward. Had it, then, found the point to which my
will was guiding it, obeying my will by some magnetic
sympathy never yet comprehended by any recognized


n s'raanos sroar. 18
science? I know not; but I had not held it thus ﬁxed
for many seconds, before a cold air, well remembered,
passed by me, stirring the roots of my hair; and,
reﬂected against the opposite wall, stood the hateful
Scin-Lsca. The Shadow was dimmer in its light than
when before beheld, and the outline of the features was
less distinct—still it was the unmistakable lemur, or
image, of Margrave.
And a voice was conveyed to my senses, saying, as
from a great distance, and in weary yet angry accents:
“ You have summoned me? Wherefore?”
I overcame the startled shudder with which, at ﬁrst, I
beheld the Shadow and heard the Vision.
“ I summoned you not," said I; “ I sought but to im-
pose upon you my will, that you should persecute, with
your ghastly inﬂuence, me and mine no more. And
now, by whatever authority this wand bestows on me,
I so adjure and command you l”
I thought there was a sneer of disdain on the lip
through which‘the answer seemed to come:
“ Vain and ignorant; it is but a shadow you com
mand. My body you have cast into a sleep, and it
knows not that the shadow is here ; nor, when it wakes,
will the brain be aware of one reminiscence of the
words that you utter or the words that you hear.”
“What, then, is this shadow that stimulates the bodyr ?
Is it that which in popular language is called the soul ?”
"‘ It is not; soul is no shadow.”
“ What then 1'”
II. -— 11


[22 A STRANGE s'roar.
“Ask not me. Use the wand to invoke Intelligence
higher than mine.”
“And how i” .
“I will tell you not. Of yourself you may learn, if
you guide the wand by your own pride of will and
desire; but in the hands of him who has_learned not
the art, the wand has its dangers. Again, I say you
have summoned mel Wherefore Y”
“ Lying shade, I summoned thee not.”
“ So wouldst thou say to the demons, did they come
in their terrible wrath, when the bungler, who knows
not the springs that he moves, calls them up unawares,
and can neither control nor dispel. Less revengeful
than they, I leave thee unharmed, and depart.”
“ Stay. If, as thou sayest, no command I address to
thee—to thee, who art only the image or shadow—
can have effect on the body and mind of the being
whose likeness thou art, still thou canst tell me what
passes now in his brain. Does it now harbor schemes
against me through the woman I love? Answer
truly.”
“ I reply for the sleeper, of whom I am more than a
likeness, though only the shadow. His thought speaks
thus: “ I know, Allen Fenwick, that in thee is the
agent I need for achieving the end that I seek. Through
the woman thou lovest I hope to subject thee. A grief
tnat will harrow thy heart is at hand; when that grief
shall befall, thou wilt welcome my coming. In me alone
thy hope will be placed—through me alone wilt thou


A s'raanoa s'roaY. 123
seek a path out of thy sorrow. I shall ask my condi-
tions; they will make thee my tool and my slave l”
The shadow waned—it was gone. I did not seek to
detain it, nor, had I sought, could I have known by
what process. But a new idea now possessed me.
This Shadow, then, that had once so appalled and con-
trolled me, was, by its own confession, nothing more
than a shadowl It had spoken of higher Intelligences;
from them I might learn what the Shadow could not
reveal. As I still held the wand ﬁrmer and ﬁrmer in
my grasp, my thoughts grew haughticr and bolder.
Could the wand, then, bring those loftier beings thus
darkly referred to before me? \Vith that thought,
intense and engrossing, I guided the wand towards the
space, opening boundless and blue from the casement
that let in the skies. The wand no longer resisted my
hand.
In a few moments I felt the ﬂoors of the room vibrate;
the air was darkened; a vaporous, hazy cloud seemed
to rise from the ground without the easement; an awe,
inﬁnitely more deep and solemn than that which the
Scin-Laeca had caused in its earliest apparition, curdled
through my Veins, and stilled the very best, of my heart.
At that moment _I heard, without, the voice of Lilian,
singing a simple, sacred song which I had learned at
my mother’s knees, and taught to her the day before;
singing low, and as with a warning angel’s voice. By
an irresistible impulse I dashed the wand to the ground,
and bowed my head as I had bowed it when my infant


124 A sraases sroav.
mind comprehended, without an eﬂ'ort, mysteries more
solemn than those which perplexed me now. Slowly I
raised my eyes, and looked round; the vaporous, hazy
cloud had passed away, or melted into the ambient rose-
tints amid which the sun had sunk.
Then, by one of those common reactions from a period
of over-strained excitement, there succeeded to that sen-
timent of arrogance and daring with which these wild,
half-conscious invocations had been fostered and sus-
tained, a profound humility, a warning fear.
“What!” said I, inly, “have all those sound resolu-
tions, which my reason founded on the wise talk of
Julius Faber, melted away in the wreck of haggard,
dissolving fancies! Is this my boasted intellect, my
vaunted science! I——-I, Allen Fenwick, not only the
credulous believer, but the blundering practitioner, of
an evil magic! Grant what may be possible, however
uncomprehended—grant that in this accursed instru-
ment of antique superstition there be some real powers
--chemical, magnetic, no matter what—by which the
imagination can be aroused, inﬂamed, deluded, so that
it shapes the things I have seen, speaks in the tones I
have heard— grant this, shall I keep ever ready, at the
caprice of will, a constant tempter, to steal away my
reason and fool my senses? Or if, on the other hand, I
force my sense to admit what all sober men must reject
-—if I unschool myself to believe that in what I have
just experienced there is no mental illusion, that sor-
cery is a fact, and a demon world has gates which open


A STRANGE sroav. [25
to a key that a mortal can forge-who but a saint
would not shrink from the practice of powers by which
each passing thought of ill might ﬁnd in a ﬁend its
abettor? In either case—in anylcase -— while, I keep
this direful relic of obsolete arts, I am haunted-
cheated out of my senses-unﬁtted for the uses of life.
If, as my ear or my fancy informs me, grief— human
grief—is about to befall me, shall I, in the sting of im-
patient sorrow, have recourse to an aid which, the same
voice declares, will reduce me to a tool and a slave ?--
tool and slave to a being I dread as a foe! Out on
these nightmares! and away with the thing that be-
witches the brain to conceive them !"
I rose; I took up the wand, holding it so that its
hollow should not rest on the palm of the hand. I
stole from the house by the back way, in order to avoid
Lilian, whose voice I still heard, singing low, on the
lawn in front. I came to a creek, to the bank of which
a boat was moored, undid its chain, rowed on to a deep
part of the lake, and dropped the wand into its waves.
It sank at once; scarcely a ripple furrowed the surface,
not a bubble arose from the deep. And, as the boat
glided on, the star mirrored itself on the spot where the
placid waters had closed over the tempter to evil.
Light at heart I sprang again on the shore, and has
tening to Lilian, where she stood on the silvered,
shining sward, clasped her to my breast.
“ Spirit of my life i" I murmured, ‘no enchantments
for me but thine! Thine are the spells by whir \
11 *


126 A s'raauen s'roar.
creation is beautiﬁed, and, in that beauty, hallowui.
What though we can see not into the measureless future
from the verge of the moment—what though sorrow
may smite us while we are dreaming of bliss, let the
future not rob me of thee, and a balm will be found for
each wound! Love me ever as now, oh my Lilian;
troth to troth, side by side, till the grave l”
“And beyond the grave,” answered Lilian, softly.
CHAPTER LXII.
OUR. vows are exchanged at the altar—the rite
which made Lilian my wife is performed-we are
returned from the church, amongst the hills, in which
my fathers had worshipped; the joy-bells that had
peeled for my birth, had rung for my marriage. Lilian
has gone to her room to prepare for our bridal excur-
sion; while the carriage we have hired is waiting at
the door. I am detaining her mother on the lawn, seek-
ing to cheer and compose her spirits, painfully affected
by that sense of change in the relations of child and
parent which makes itself suddenly felt by the parent’s
heart on the day that secures to the child another heart
on which to lean. ‘
But Mrs. Ashleigh’s was one of those gentle, woman-
ly natures which, if easily aﬂlicted, are easily consoled.
And, already smiling through her tears, she was about


A. STRANGE sronr. [2.
to quit me and join her daughter, when one of the inn-
eervants came to me with some letters, which had just
been delivered by the postman. As I took them from
the servant, Mrs. Ashleigh asked if there were any for
her? She expected one from her housekeeper at L———,
who had been taken ill in her absence, and about whom
the kind mistress felt anxious. The servant replied
that there was no letter for her, but one directed to Miss
Ashleigh, which thad just sent up to the young lady.
Mrs. Ashleigh did not doubt that her housekeeper had
Written to Lilian, whom she had known from the cradle,
and to whom she was tenderly attached, instead of to
her mistress; and, saying something to me to that
eﬂ'ect, quickened her steps towards the house.
I was glancing over my own letters, chieﬂy from
patients, with a rapid eye, when a cry of agony, a cry
as if of one suddenly stricken to the heart, pierced my
car—a cry from within the house. “Heavens! was
not that Lilian’s voice?” The same doubt struck Mrs.
Ashleigh, who had already gained the door. She rushed
on, disappearing within the threshold, and calling to me
to follow. I bounded forward —passed her on the
stairs—was in Lilian’s room before her.
My bride was on the ﬂoor, prostrate, insensible; so
still, so colorless! that my ﬁrst dreadful thought was
that life had gone. In her hand was a letter, crushed,
as with a convulsive, sudden grasp.
It was long before the color came back to her check,
before the breath was perceptible on her lip. She wokeI
2n


128 a ensues 31-03:.
but not to health, not to sense. Hours were passed in
violent convulsions, in which I momently feared her
death. To these succeeded stupor, lethargy, not benig-
nant sleep. That night, my bridal night, Ipassed as in
some chamber to which I had been summoned to save
youth from the grave. At length ——at length, life was
rescued, was assure_dl Life came-back, but the mind
was gone. She knew me not, nor her mother. She
spoke little and faintly; in the words she uttered there
was no reason.
I pass hurriedly on; my experience here was in fault,
my skill ineffectual. Day followed day, and no ray
came back to the darkened brain. We bore her, by
gentle stages, to London. I was sanguine of good
result from skill more consummate than mine, and
more specially devoted to diseases of the mind. I
summoned the ﬁrst advisers. In vain l -- in vainl

CHAPTER LXIII.
AND the cause of this direful shock? Not this time
could it be traced to some evil spell, some phantasmal
inﬂuence. The cause was clear, and might have pro-
duced eﬂ‘ects as sinister on nerves of stronger ﬁbre if
accompanied by a heart as delicately sensitive, an honor
as exquisitely pure.
The letter found in her hand was without name; it


A summon sroar. 129
was dated from L , and bore the postmark of that
town. It conveyed to Lilian, in the biting words which

female malice can make so sharp, the tale we had sought
sedulously to guard from her ear—her ﬂight, the con-
struction that scandal put upon it. It affected for my
blind infatuation a contemptuous pity; it asked her to
pause before she brought on the name I oﬁ'ered to her
an indelible disgrace. ,If she so decided, she was
warned not to return to L
the sentence that would exclude her from the society

, or to prepare there for
of her own sex. I cannot repeat more, I cannot minute
down all that the letter expressed or implied, to wither
the orange-blossoms in a bride’s wreath. The heart
that took in the vendm cast its poison on the brain, and
the mind ﬂed before the presence of a thought so deadly
to all the ideas which its innocence had heretofore
conceived.
I knew not whom to suspect of the malignity of this
mean and miserable outrage, nor did I much care to
know. The handwriting, though evidently disguised,
was that of a woman, and, therefore, had I discovered
the author, my manhood would have forbidden me the
idle solace of revenge. Mrs. Poyntz, however resolute
and pitiless her hostility when once aroused, was not
without a certain largeness of nature irreconcilable with
the most dastardly of all the weapons that envy or
hatred can supply to the vile. She had too lofty a self-
esteem and too decorous a regard for the moral senti-
ment of the world that she typiﬁed, to do, or connive
l


130 A s'raanoa sroar.
at, an act which degrades the gentlewomun. Putting
her aside, what other female enemy had Lilian pro-
voked? No matterl What other woman at L——
was worth the condescension of a conjecture?
After listening to all that the ablest of my professional
brethren in the metropolis could suggest to guide me,
and trying in vain their remedies, I brought back my
charge to L—-—. Retaining my former residence for
the visits of patients, I engaged, for the privacy of my
home, a house two miles from the town, secluded in its
own grounds, and guarded by high walls.
Lilian’s mother removed to my mournful dwelling-
place. Abbots’ House, in the centre of that tattling
coterie, had become distasteful to Her, and to me it was
associated with thoughts of anguish and of terror. I
could not, without a shudder, have entered its grounds
--could not, without a stab at the heart, have seen
again the old fairy-land round the Monks’ Well, nor
the dark cedar-tree under which Lilian’s hand had been
placed in mine; and a superstitious remembrance, ban-
ished while Lilian’s angel face had brightened the fatal
precincts, now revived in full force. The dying man’s
curse — had it not been fulﬁlledl
A new occupant for the old house was found within
a week after Mrs. Ashleigh had written from London to
a house-agent at L--, intiniating her desire to dispose
of the lease. Shortly before we had gone to Winder-
mere, Miss Brabazon had become enriched by a liberal
life-annuity bequeathed to her by her uncle, Sir Phelim


a swimmer: arm“. )3]
Her means thus enabled her to move, from the com-
naratively humble lodging she had hitherto occupied,
to Abbots’ House; but just as she had there commenced
a series of ostentatious entertainments, implying an
ambitious desire to dispute with Mrs. Poyntz the
sovereignty of the Hill, she was attacked by some
severe malady which appeared complicated with spinal
disease, and after my return to L— I sometimes met
her on the spacious platform of the Hill, drawn along
slowly in a Bath chair, her livid face peering forth from
piles of Indian shawls and Siberian furs, and the gaunt
ﬁgure of Dr. Jones stalking by her side, taciturn and
gloomy as some sincere mourner who conducts to the
grave the patron on whose life he himself had conveni-
ently lived. It was in the dismal month of February
that I returned to L-—-, and I took possession of my
blighted nuptial home on the anniversary of the very
day in which I had passed through the dead, dumb
world from the naturalist’s gloomy death-room.

CHAPTER LXIV.‘
LILIAN’S wondrous gentleness of nature did not desert
her in the suspension of her reason. She was habitually
calm—very silent; when she spoke it was rarely 0n
earthly things— on things familiar to her past—things
one could comprehend. Her thought seemed to hava


132 A STRANGE s'roar.
quitted the earth, seeking refuge in some imaginary
heaven She spoke of wandering with her father as if
he were living still; she did not seem to understand
the meaning we attach to the word Death. She would
sit for hours murmuring to herself; when one sought
to catch the words. they seemed in converse with in-
visible spirits. We found it cruel to disturb her at such
times, for if left unmolested, her face was serene—more
serenely beautiful than-I had seen it even in our happiest
hours; but when we called her back to the wrecks of
her real life, her eye became troubled, restless, anxious,
and she would sigh — oh, so heavily! At times, if we
did not seem to observe her, she would quietly resume
her once favorite accomplishments—drawing, music.
And in these her young excellence was still apparent,
only the drawings were strange and fantastic; they
had a resemblance to those with which the painter
Blake, himself a visionary, illustrated the Poems of the
“ Night Thoughts” and “The Grave.” Faces of ex-
quisite loveliness, forms of aérial grace, coming forth
from the bells of ﬂowers, or ﬂoating upwards amidst the
spray of fountains, their outlines melting away in foun-
tain or in ﬂower. So with her music; her mother could
not recognize the airs she played, for a while so sweetly
and with so ineﬁ‘able a pathos, that one could scarcely
hear her without weeping; and then would come, as if
involuntarily, an abrupt discord, and, starting, she would
cease and look around, disquieted, aghast.
And still she did not recognize Mrs. Ashleigh or


a smarter: sronr. 133
myself as her mother, her husband; but she had by
degrees learned to distinguish us both from others. To
her mother she gave no name, seemed pleased to see
her, but not sensibly to miss her when away; me she
called her brother; if longer absent than usual, me she
missed. When, after the toils of the day, I came to
join her, even if she spoke not, her sweet face bright-
ened. When she sang, she beckoned me to come near
to her, and looked at me ﬁxedly, with eyes ever tender,
often tearful; when she drew, she would pause and
glance over her shoulder to see that I was watching
her, and point to the drawings with a smile of strange
signiﬁcance, as if they conveyed, in some covert alle-
gory, messages meant for me; so, at least, I interpreted
her smile, and taught myself to say, “ Yes, Lilian, I
understand!”
And more than once, when I had so answered, she
rose and kissed my forehead. I thought my heart
would have broken when I felt that spirit-like, melan-
choly kiss.
And yet how marvelloust the human mind teaches
itself to extract consolations from its sorrows. The
least wretched of my hours were those that I passed in
that saddened room, seeking how to establish fragments
of intercourse, invent signs, by which each might inter-
pret each, between the intellect I had so laboriously'
cultured, so arrogant-ly vaunted, and the fancies wan-
dering through the dark, deprived of their guide in
reason. It was something even of joy to feel myself
II.—12


A sraANes STORY. 135
have been so unprepared for reproach. The explana-
tion I had previously given, discredited then, was now
accepted without a question. Lilian's present state
accounted for all that ill nature had before miscon-
strued. Her good name was restored to its maiden
whiteness by the fate that had severed the ties of the
bride. The formal dwellers on the Hill vied with the
franker, warmer-hearted household of Low Town in
the nameless attentions by which sympathy and respect
are rather delicately indicated than noisily proclaimed.
Could Lilian have then recovered and been sensible of
its repentnnt homage, how reverently that petty world
would have thronged around her! And, ah! could
fortune and man’s esteem havetoned for the blight of
hopes that had been planted and cherished on ground
beyond their reach, ambition and pride might have
been well contented with the largeness of the exchange
that courted their acceptance. Patients on patients
crowded on me. Sympathy with my sorrow seemed to
create and endear a more trustful belief in my skill.
But the profession I had once so enthusiastically loved
became to me wearisome, insipid, distasteful; the kind-
ness heaped on me gave no comfort, it but brought
before me more vividly the conviction that it came too
late to avail me: it could not restore to me the mind,
the love, the life of my life, which lay dark and shat-
tered in the brain of my guileless Lilian. Secretly I
felt a sullen resentment. I knew that to the crowd the
resentment was unjust. The world itself is but an


136 A srasuos s'roar.
appearance; who can blame it if appearance guide its
laws? But to those who had been detached from the
crowd by the professions of friendship—those who,
when the slander was yet new, and might have been
awed into silence had they stood by my side, -- to the
pressure of their hands, now, I had no response.
Against Mrs. Poyntz, above all others, I bore a
remembrance of unrelaxcd, nnmitigable indignation.
Her schemes for her daughter’s marriage had tri-
umphed; Jane was Mrs. Ashleigh Sumner. Her mind
was, perhaps, softened now that the object which had
sharpened its worldly faculties was accomplished; but
in vain, on ﬁrst hearing of my afﬂiction, had this she-
Machiavel owned a humane remorse, and, with all her
keen comprehension of each facility that circumstances
gave to her will, availed herself of the general compas-
sion to strengthen the popular reaction in favor of
Lilian’s assaulted honor—in vain had she written to
me with a gentleness of sympathy foreign to her
habitual characteristics~in vain besought me to call
on her—in vain waylaid and accosted me with a
humility that almost implored forgiveness; I vouch-
safed no reproach, but I could imply no pardon. I put
between her and my great sorrow the impenetrable
wall of my freezing silence.
One word of here at the time that I had so patheti-
cally besought her aid, and the parrot-ﬂock that repeated
her very whisper in noisy shrillness, Would have been
as loud tn defend as it had been to defame; that vile


[38 A srnsues s'rosv.
eﬂicacy of his advice. The letter I now received from
him had been begun, and continued at some length,
before my communication reached him. And this earlier
portion contained animated and cheerful descriptions of
his Australian life and home, which contrasted with the
sorrowful tone of the supplement written in reply to
the tidings with which I had wrung his friendly and
tender heart. In this, the latter part of his letter, he
suggested that if time had wrought no material change
for the. better, it might be advisable to try the effect of
foreign travel. Scenes entirely new might stimulate
observation, and the observation of things external
'withdraw the sense from that brooding over images
delusively formed within, which characterized the kind
of mental alienation I had described. “ Let any intellect
create for itself a visionary world, and all reasonings
built on it are fallacious; the visionary world vanishes
in proportion as we can arouse a predominant interest
in the actual.”
This grand authority, who owed half his consummate
skill as a practitioner to the scope of his knowledge as
a philosopher, then proceeded to give me a hope which
I had not dared, of myself, to form. He said, “Idis
tinguish the case you so minutely detail from that
insanity which is reason lost; here it seems rather to
be reason held in suspense. Where there is hereditary
predisposition, where there is organic change of structure
in the brain—nay, where there is that kind of insanity
which takes the epithet of moral, whereby the whole


a stunner away. 189
character becomes so transformed that the prime element
of sound understanding, conscience itself, is‘either erased
or warped into the sanction of what, in a healthful state,
it would most disapprove, it is only charlatans who-
promise effectual cure. But here I assume that there
is no hereditary taint; here I am convinced, from my
own observation, that the nobility of the organs, all
fresh as yet in the vigor of youth, would rather submit
to death than the permanent overthrow of the equi-
librium in reason; here, where you tell me the character
preserves all its moral attributes of gentleness and
purity, and but over-indulges its own early habit of
estranged contemplation; here, without deceiving you
in false kindness, I give you the guarantee of my expe-
rience when I bid you ‘hopel’ I am persuaded that,
sooner or later, the mind, thus for a time affected, will
right itself; because here, in the cause of the maladv
we do but deal with the nervous system. And that,
once righted, and the mind once disciplined in those
practical duties which conjugal life necessitates, the
malady itself will never return; never be transmitted
to} the children on whom your wife’s restoration to
health may permit you to count hereafter. If the course
of travel I recommend and the prescriptions I enjoin
with that course fail you, let me know; and though I
would fain close my days in this land, I will come to
you. I love you as my son. I will tend your wife as
my daughter." "
Foreign travel! The idea smiled on me. Julius


A srnauea STORY. 141
He described the house thus to be sold-in case I might
know of a purchaser. It had been built at a cost
unusual in those early times, and by one who clung to
English tastes amidst Australian wilds, so that in this
purchase a settler would escape the hardships he had
then ordinarily to encounter; it was, in short, a home
to which a man, more luxurious than I, might hear a
bride with wants less simple than those which now
suﬁiced for my darling Lilian.
This communication dwelt on my mind through the
avocations of the day on which I received it, and in
the evening I read all, except the supplement, aloud to
Mrs. Ashleigh in her daughter’s presence. I desired
to see if Faber’s descriptions of the country and its
life, which in themselves were extremely spirited and
striking, would arouse Lilian’s interest. At ﬁrst she
did not seem to heed me while I read, but when I came
to Faber’s loving account of little Amy, Lilian turned
her eyes towards me, and evidently listened with
attention. He wrote how the Child had already become
the most useful person in the simple household. How
watchful the quickness of the heart had made the
service of the eye; all their associations of comfort had
grown round her active, noiseless movements; it was
she who had contrived to monopolize the management,
or supervision of all that added to Home the nameless,
interior charm. Under her eyes the rude furniture of
the log-house grew inviting with English neatness; she '
took charge of the dairy; she had made the garden


142 A STRANGE s'roar.
gay with ﬂowers selected from the wild, and suggested
the trellised walk, already covered with hardy vine.
She was their conﬁdant in every plan of improvement,
their comforter in every anxious doubt, their nurse in
every passing ailment, her very smile a refreshment in
the weariness of daily toil. “ How all that is best in
womanhood,” wrote the old man, with the enthusiasm
which no time had reft from his hearty, healthful
genius- “ how all that is best in womanhood is here
opening fast into ﬁower from the bud of the infant’s
soul! The atmosphere seems to suit it—the child-
woman in the child-world I”
I heard Lilian sigh; I looked towards her furtively;
tears stood in her softened eyes; her lip was quiyering.
Presently, she began to rub her right hand over the
left—over the wedding-ring—at ﬁrst, slowly; then
with quicker movement.
“It is not here,” she said, impatiently; “it is not
herel”
“What is not here i” asked Mrs. Ashleigh, hanging
over her.
Lilian lent back her head on her mother’s bosom,
and ansWered faintly:
“ The stainl some one said there was a stain on this
hand. I do not see it—do you 7”
“There is no stain, never was,” said I; “ the hand
is white as your own innocence, or the lily from'which
you take your name.”
“ Hnshl you do not know my name. I will whisper


A s'raanos sroav. 143
it. Softl—my name is Nightshade! Do you want
to know where the lily is now, brother? I will tell
you. There, in that letter—you call her Amy—she \ ,
is the lily—take her to your breast —— hide her. Hist!
what are those bells .7 Marriage-bells. Do not let her
hear them. For there is a cruel wind that whispers
the bells, and the bells ring out what it whispers, louder
and louder,
‘Stain on lily,
Shame on lily,
Wither lily.‘
If she been what the wind whispers to the bells, she
will creep away into the dark, and then she, too, will
turn to Nightshade.”
" Lilian, look up, awake! You have been in along,
long dream: it is passing away. Lilian, my beloved,
my blessed Lilian l”
Never till then had I heard from her even so vague
an allusion to the fatal calumny, and its dreadful eﬂ'ect,
and while her words now pierced my heart, it best,
amongst its pangs, with a thrilling hope.
But, alas! the idea that had gleamed upon her had
vanished already. She murmured something about
Circles of Fire, and a Veiled Woman in black gar-
ments; became restless, agitated, and unconscious of
our presence, and ﬁnally sank into a heavy sleep.
That night (my room was next to hers with the
intervening door open) I heard her cry out. I hastened
to her side. She was still asleep, but there was an
21


144 A s'raauoa s'roar.
anxious, laboring expression on her young face, and yet
not an expression wholly of pain—for her lips were
parted with a smile —— that glad yet troubled smile with
which one who has been revolving some subject of per-
plexity or fear, greets a sudden thought that seems to
solve the riddle, or prompt the escape from danger; and
as I softly took her hand she returned my gentle pres-
sure, and inclining towards me, said, still in sleep:
“ Let us go.”
“Whither?” I answered, under my breath, so as not
to awake her; “is it to see the child of whom I read,
and the land that is blooming out of the earth’s child-
hood 1'”
“Out of the dark into the light; where the leaves
do not change; where the night is our day, and the
winter our summer. Let us go—let us gol”
“ We will go. Dream on undisturbed, my bride.
Oh, that the dream could tell you that my love has not
changed in our sorrow, holier and deeper than on the
day in which our vows were exchanged! In you still
all my hopes fold their wings; where you are, there
still I myself have my dreamland l”
The sweet face grew bright as I spoke; all trouble
left the smile; softly she drew her hand from my clasp,
and rested it for a moment on my bended head, as if in
blessing.
I rose; stole back to my own room, closing the door.
lest the sob I could not stiﬂe should mar her sleep.


A sraasos sroar. 145
CHAPTER LXVI.
I unrowsn my new prospects to Mrs. Ashleigh.
She was more easily reconciled to them than I could
have supposed, judging by her habits, which were
naturally indolent, and averse to all that disturbed their
even tenor. But the great griefgvhich had befallen
her bad roused up that strength of devotion which liés
dormant in all hearts that are capable of loving an-
other more than self. With her full consent I wrote to
Faber, communicating my intentions, instructing him
to purchase the property he had so commended, and
inclosing my banker’s order for the amount, ‘on an
Australian ﬁrm. I now announced my intention to
retire from my profession ; made prompt arrangements
with a successor to my practice; disposed of my two
houses at L

; ﬁxed the day of my departure.
Vanity was dead within me, or I might have been
gratiﬁed by the sensation which the news of my design
created. My faults became at once forgotten: such
good qualities as I might possess were exaggerated.
The public regret vented and consoled itself in a costly
testimonial, to which even the poorest of my patients
insisted on the privilege to contribute, graced with an
inscription ﬂattering enough to have served for the
epitaph on some great man’s tomb. No one who has
served an art and striven for a name, is a stoic to the
II.-— 18 u


I46 4 STRANGE s'roar.
esteem of others, and sweet indeed would such honors
have been to me had not publicity itself seemed a wrong
to the sanctity of that afﬂiction which set Lilian apart
from the movement and the glories of the World.
The two persons most active in “ getting up” this
testimonial were, nominally, Colonel Poyntz—in truth,
his wife—and my old disparager, Mr. Vigorsl It is
long since my narrative has referred to Mr. Vigors. It
is due to him now to state that, in his capacity of
magistrate, and in his own way, he had been both
active and delicate in the inquiries set on foot for Lilian
during the unhappy time in which she had wandered,
spellbound, from her home. He, alone, of all the more
inﬂuential magnates of the town, had upheld her inno-
cence against the gossip that aspersed it; and during
the last trying year of my residence at L—-, be had
sought me, with frank and manly confessions of his
regret for his former prejudice against me, and assur-
ances of the respect in which he had held me ever since
my marriage-marriage but in rite—with Lilian. He
had then, strong in his ruling passion, besought me to
consult his clairvoyants as to her case. I declined this
invitation, so as not to affront him—declined it, not as
I should once have done, but with no word nor look of
incredulous disdain. The fact was, that I had con-
ceived a solemn terror of all practices and theories out
of the beaten track of sense and science. Perhaps in my
refusal I did wrong. I know not. I was afraid of my
own imagination. He continued not less friendly in


A srnaues sroar. 14'!
spite of my refusal. And, such are the vicissitudes in
human feeling, I parted from him whom I had regarded
as my most bigoted foe with a warmer sentiment of
kindness than for any of those on whom I had counted
on friendship. He had not deserted Lilian. It was
not so with Mrs. Poyntz. I would have paid tenfold
the value of the testimonial to have erased, from the list
of those who subscribed to it, her husband’s name.
The day before I quitted L , and some weeks
after I had, in fact, renounced my practice, I received

an urgent entreaty from Miss Brabazon to call on her.
She wrote in lines so blurred that I could with difﬁculty
decipher them, that she was very ill, given over by Dr
Jones, who had been attending her. She implored my
opinion.
CHAPTER LXVII.
Ox reaching the house, a formal man-servant, with
indiﬁ'erent face, transferred me to the guidance of a
hired nurse, who led me up the stairs, and, before I
was well aware of it, into the room in which Dr. Lloyd
had died. Widely d'LITerent, indeed, the aspect of the
walls, the character of the furniture. The dingy paper-
hangings were replaced by airy muslins, showing a
rose-colored ground through their fanciful open-work;
luxurious fauteuils, gilded wardrobes, full-length mirrors.


A s'raauon s'roar. 149
“Do you think I am really dying, Dr. Fenwick?"
said a feeble voice. “I fear Dr. Jones has misunder-
stood my case. I wish I had called you in at the ﬁrst
-but-but I could not—I could not! Will you feel
my pulse? Don’t you think you could do me good?”
I had no need to feel the pulse in that skeleton wrist;
the aspect of the face suﬁiced to tell me that death was
drawing near.
Mechanically, however, I went through the hackneyed
formulae of professional questions. This vain ceremony
done; as gently and delicately as I could, I implied the
expediency of concluding, if not yet settled, those affairs
which relate to this world.
“ This duty,” I said, “ in relieving the mind from care
for others to whom we owe the forethought of affection,
often relieves the body also of many a gnawing pain, and
sometimes, to the surprise of the most experienced
physician, prolongs life itself.”
“Ah,” said the old maid, peevishly, “ I understand!
But it is not my will that troubles me. I should not
be left to a nurse from a hospital if my relations did not
know that my annuity dies with me; and I forestalled
it in furnishing this house, Dr. Fenwick, and all these
pretty things will be sold to pay those horrid trades-
men !-very hard! so hard l—just as I had got things
about me in the way I always said I would have them
if I could ever aﬂ'ord it! I always said I would have
my bed-room hung with muslin, like dear Lady L.’s ;--
and the drawing-room in geranium-coloured silk—so
18*


150 A STRANGE sroar.
pretty. You have not seen it: you would not know
the house, Dr. Fenwick. And just when all is ﬁnished,
to be taken away and thrust into the grave. It is so
cruel!" ' And she began to weep. Her emotion
brought on a violent paroxysm, which, when she re-
covered from it, had produced one of those startling
changes of mind that are sometimes witnessed before
death: changes whereby the whole character of a life
seems to undergo solemn transformation. The hard
will become gentle, the proud meek, the frivolous earn-
est. That awful moment when the things of earth
pass away like dissolving scenes, leaving death visible
on the background by the glare that shoots up in the
last ﬂicker of life’s lamp.
And when she lifted her haggard face from my
shoulder, and heard my pitying, soothing voice, it was
not the grief of a triﬂer at the loss of fondled toys that
spoke in the fallen lines of her lip, in the woe of her
pleading eyes. '
“ So this is death,” she said. “ I feel it hurrying on.
I must speak. I promised Mr. C. that I would. Forgive
me, can you-can you? That letter—that letter to
Lilian Ashleigh, I wrote itl Oh, do not look at me so
terribly; I never thought it could do such evill And
am I not punished enough? I truly believed when I
wrote that Miss Ashleigh was deceiving you, and once
I was silly enough to fancy that you might have liked
me. But I had another motive; I had' been so poor all
my life—I had become rich unexpectedly; I set my


A STRANGE s'roav. 151
heart on this house—I had always fancied it—and I
thought if I could prevent Miss Ashleigh’s marrying
you, and scare her and her mother from coming back to
L , I could get the house. And I did get it. What
for?-to die. I had not been here a week before I got

the hurt that is killing me—a fall down the stairs—
comiug out of this very “room; the stairs had been
polished. If I had stayed in my old lodging, it would
not have happened. Oh, say you forgive me! Say,
say it, even if you do not feel you can! Say it! ” And
the miserable woman grasped me by the arm as Dr.
Lloyd had grasped me.
I shaded my averted face with my hands; my heart
heaved with the agony of my suppresed passion. A
wrong, however deep, only to myself, I could have
pardoned without effort; such a wrong to Lilian,—nol
I could not say, “ I forgive.”
The dying wretch was perhaps more appalled by my
silence than she would have been by my reproach.
Her voice grew shrill in her despair.
“You will not pardon mel I shall die with} your
curse on my head. Mercy! mercy! That good man,
Mr. (3., assured me you would be merciful. Have you
never wronged another? Has the Evil One never
tempted you ? ”
Then I spoke in broken accents: “Me! Oh, had
it been I whom you defamed—hut a young creature
so harmless, so unoﬁ'ending, and for so miserable a
motive l "


152 A STRANGE BTOBY.
“ But I tell you, I swear to you, I never dreamed I
could cause such sorrow; and that young man, that
Margrave, put it into my head I ”
“Margravel He had left L—— long before that
letter was written.”
“But he came back for a day just before I wrote; it
was the very day I met him in the lane yonder. He
asked after you—after Miss Ashleigh; and when he
spoke he laughed, and I said that Miss Ashleigh had been
ill, and had gone away; and he laughed again. And
I thought he knew more than he would tell me, so I
asked him if he supposed Mrs. Ashleigh would come
back, and said how much I should like to take this
house if she did not; and again he laughed, and said,
‘ Birds never stay in the nest after the young ones are
hurt,’ and went away singing. When' I got home, his
laugh and his song haunted me. I thought I saw him
still in my room, prompting me to write, and I sat
down and wrote. Oh, pardon, pardon me! I have
been a foolish, poor creature, but never meant to do
such harm. The Evil One tempted me! There he is,
near me now! I see him yonder! there, at the door-
way. He comes to claim me! As you hope for mercy
yourself, free me from him! Forgive me I”
I made an eﬁ‘ort over myself. In naming Margrave
as her tempter, the woman had suggested an excuse,
echoed from that innermost cell of my mind, which I
recoiled from gazing into, for there I should behold his
image. Inexpiable though the injury she had wrought


a sraanos near. 153
against me, and mine, still the woman was human—-
fellow-creature—like myself ;_-but as? ,
I took the pale hand that still pressed my arm, and
said, with ﬁrm voice:
" Be comforted. In the name of Lilian, my wife, I
forgive you for her and for me as freely and as fully as
we are enjoined by Him, against whose precepts the
best of us daily sin, to forgive—we children of wrath
—-to forgive one anotherl ”
“Heaven bless you l—oh, bless you 1” she mur-
mured, sinking back upon her pillow.
“Ah!” thought I, “what if the pardon I grant for a
wrong far greater than I inﬂicted on him whose impre-
cation smote me in this chamber, should indeed be
received as atonement, and this blessing on the lips of
the dying annul the dark curse that the dead body has
left on my path through the Valley of the Shadow l ”
I left my patient sleeping quietly—the sleep that
precedes the last. As I went down the stairs into the
hall, I saw Mrs. Poyntz standing at the threshold,
speaking to the man-servant and the nurse.
I would have passed her with a formal how but she
stopped me.
' “I came to inquire after poor Miss Brabazon," said
she. “ You can tell me more than the servants can; is
there no hope?”
“ Let the nurse go up and watch beside her. She
may pass away in the sleep into which she had fallen.”
" Allen Fenwick, I must speak with you—nay, but


154 A s'raanes swoav.
for a few minutes. I hear that you leave L—-- to-
morrow. It is scarcely among the chances of life that
we should meet again.” While thus saying, she drew
me along the lawn down the path that led towards
her own home. “I wish,” said she earnestly, “that
you could part with a kindlier feeling towards me; but
I can scarcely expect it. Could I put myself in your
place, and be moved by your feelings, I know that I
should be implacable ; but I --— ”
“But you, madam, are The Worldl and the World
governs itself, and dictates to others, by laws which
seem harsh to those who ask from its favor the services
which the World cannot tender, for the World admits
favorites but ignores friends. You did but act to me as
the World ever acts to those who mistake its favor for
its friendship."
“It is true,” said Mrs. Poyntz, with blunt candor;
and we continued to walk on silently. At length, she
said, abruptly, “But do you not rashly deprive your-
self of your only consolation in sorrow? When the
heart suﬂ‘ers, does your skill admit any remedy like
occupation to the mind? Yet you abandon that occu-
pation to which your mind is most accustomed; you
desert your career; you turn aside, in the midst of the
race, from the fame which awaits at the goal; you go
back from civilization itself, and dream that all your
intellectual cravings can ﬁnd content in the life of a
herdsman, amidst the monotony of a wild! No, you
will repent, for you are untrue to your mindl”


a srsANos STORY. 15!)
“I am sick of the word ‘mindl”’ said I, bitterly.
And therewith I relapsed into musing.
- The enigmas which had foiled my intelligence in the
uuravelled Sibyl Book of Nature were mysteries strange
to every man’s normal practice of thought, even if redu-
cible to the fraudulent impressions of outward sense ,
for illusions in a brain otherwise healthy, suggest prob-
lems in our human organization which the colleges
that record them rather guess at than solve. But the
blow which had shattered my life had been dealt by
the hand of a fool. Here, there were no mystic en-
chantments. Motives the most common-place and
paltry, suggested to a brain as trivial and shallow as
ever made the frivolity of woman a theme for the satire
of poets,’had sufﬁced, in devastating the ﬁeld of my
affections, to blast the uses for which I had cultured
my mind; and had my intellect been as great as heaven
ever gave to man, it would have been as vain a shield
as mine against the shaft that had lodged in my heart.
While I had, indeed, been preparing my reason and my
fortitude to meet such perils, weird and marvellous, as
those by which tales round the winter ﬁre-side scare
the credulous child — a contrivance so vulgar and back-
neyed that not a day passes but what some hearth is
vexed by an anonymous libel—had wrought a calam-
ity more dread than aught which my dark guess into
the Shadow-Land unpicrced by Philosophy, could trace
to the prompting of malignant witchcraft. So, ever
this truth runs through all legends of ghost and demon


156 A s'rnnuen s'ronr.
_through the uniform records of what wonder accredits
and science rejects as the supernatural-lo! the dread
machinery whose wheels roll through Hades! What
need such awful engines for such mean results? The
ﬁrst blockhead we meet in our walk to our grocer’s can
lell us more than the ghost tells us; the poorest envy
We ever aroused hurts us more than the demon. How
true an interpreter is Genius to Hell as to Earth! The
Fiend comes to Faust, the tired seeker of knowledge;
Heaven and Hell stake their cause in the Mortal’s
temptation. And what does the Fiend to astonish the
'Mortal? Turn wine into ﬁre, turn love into crime.
We need no Mephistocles to accomplish these marvels
every day!
Thus silently thinking, I walked by the side of the
world-wise woman ; land when she next spoke, I looked
up, and saw that we were at the Monk’s Well, where I
had ﬁrst seen Lilian gazing into heaven.
Mrs. Poyntz had, as we walked, placed her hand on
my arm, and, turning abruptly from the path into the
glade, I found myself standing by her side in the scene
where a new sense of being had ﬁrst disclosed to my
sight the hues with which Love, the passionate beauti-
ﬁer, turns into purple and gold the grey of the common
air. Thus, when romance has ended in sorrow, and
the Beautiful fades from the landscape, the trite and
positive forms of life banished for a time, reappear, and
deepen our mournful remembrance of the glories they
replace. And the Woman of the World, ﬁnding how


A sraauos s'roaY. 157
little I was induced to respond to her when she had
talked of myself, began to speak, in her habitual, clear,
ringing accents, of her own social schemes and devices:
“I shall miss you when you are gone, Allen Fen-
wick, for though, during the last year or so, all actual
intercourse between us has ceased, yet my interest in
you gave some occupation to my thoughts when I sat
alone—having lost my main object of ambition in set-
tling my daughter, and having no longer any one in
the house with whom I could talk of the future, or for
whom I could form a project. It is so wearisome to
count the changes which pass within us, that we take
interest in the changes that pass without. Poyntz still
‘has his weather-glass; I have no longer my Jane.”
“1 cannot linger with you on this spot,” said I,
impatiently turning back into the path; she followed,
treading over fallen leaves. And unheeding my inter-
ruption, she thus continued her hard talk:
“But I am not sick of my mind as you seem to be
of yours; [am only somewhat tired of the little cage
in which, since it has been alone, it ruﬂles its plumes
against the ﬂimsy wires that conﬁne it from wider
space. I shall take up my home for a time with the
new-married couple: they want me. Ashleigh Sumner
has come into Parliament. He means to attend regu-
larly and work hard, but he does not like Jane to go
into the world by hersolf, and he wishes her to go into
the world, because he wants a wife to display his wealth
for the improvement of his position. In Ashleigh
II.—l4


I58 A sraauoa sroar.
Sumner’s house, I shall have ample scope for my ener-
gies, such as they are. I have a curiosity to see the
few that perch on the wheels of the State, and say ‘It
is we who move the wheels!’ It will amuse me to
learn if I can maintain in a capital the authority I have
won in a country town; if not, I can but return to my
small principality. Wherever I live I must sway, not
serve. If I succeed— as I ought, for in Jane’s beauty
and Ashleigh’s fortune I have materials for the woof of
ambition, wanting which here, I fall asleep over my
knitting—if I succeed, there will be enough to occupy
the rest of my life. Ashleigh Sumner must be a power;
the power will he represented and enjoyed by my child,
and created and maintained by me! Allen Fenwick,
do as I do. Be world with the world, and it will only
be in moments of spleen and chagrin that you will sigh
to think that the heart may be void when the mind is
full. Confess you envy me while you listen.”
“Not so; all that to you seems so great, appears to
me so small! Nature alone is always grand, in her
terrors as well as her charms. The World for you,
Nature for me. Farewell l”
“Nature,” said Mrs. Poyntz compassionately. “ Poor
Allen Fenwickl Nature indeed-intellectual suicide!
Nay, shake hands, then, if for the last time."
So we shook hands and parted, where the wicket-
gate and the stone stairs separated my blighted fairy-
land from the common thoroughfare.


A s'raaues sroav. 159
CHAPTER LXVIII.
THAT night I was employed in collecting books and ‘
manuscripts which I proposed to take with me, inclu-
ding my long-suspended physiological work, and such
standard authorities as I might want to consult or refer
to in the portions yet incompleted, my servant entered
to inform me, in answer to the inquiries I had sent him
to make, that Miss Brabazon had peacefully breathed
her last an hour before. Well! my pardon had per-
haps soothed her last moments; but how unavailing
her death-bed repentance to undo the wrong she had
donel
I turned from that thought, and, glancing at the work
into which I had thrown all my learning, methodized
into system with all my art, I recalled the pity which
Mrs. Poyntz had expressed for my meditated waste of
mind. The tone of superiority which this incarnation
of common sense, accompanied by uncommon will, as-
sumed over all that was too deep or too high for her
comprehension,lhad sometimes amused me; thinking
over it now, it piqued. I said to myself, “After all, I
shall bear with me such solace as intellectual occupa-
tion can aﬂ'ord. I shall have leisure to complete this
labor, and a record that I have lived and thought may
outlast all the honors which Worldly ambition may
bestow upon an Ashleigh Sumner!” And, as I so
murmured, my hand, mechanically, selecting the books
2K


l60 A s'rnauen STORY.
I needed, fell on the Bible that Julius Faber had given
to me. I
It opened at the Second Book of Esdras, which our
Church places amongst the Apoerypha, and is generally
considered by scholars to have been written in the ﬁrst
or second century of the Christian era.* But in which,
the questions raised by man in the remotest ages, to
which we can trace back his desire “to comprehend the
ways of the Most High,” are invested with a grandeur
of thought and sublimity of word to which I know of
no parallel in writers we call profane.
My eye fell on this passage in the lofty argument
between the Angel, whose name was Uriel, and the
Prophet, perplexed by his own cravings for know-
ledge :
“ He (the Angel) answered me, and said, I went into
a forest into a plain, and the trees took counsel,
“And said, Come, let us go and make war against
the sea, that it may depart away before us, and that we
may make us more woods.
“ The ﬂoods of the see also in like manner took coun-
sel, and said, Come, let us go up and subdue the woods
of the plain, and there also we may make us another
country.
“The thought of the wood was in vain, for the ﬁr;
came and consumed it.
*Such is the supposition of Jahn. Dr. Lee, however, is of.
Opinion that the author was contemporary, and, indeed, identi-
eel, with the author of the Book of Enoch.


A s'raauca sroav. 161
“ The thought of the ﬂoods of the sea came likewise
to nought, for the sand stood up and stopped them.
“If thou wcrt judge now betwixt these two, whom
wouldst thou begin to justify? or whom wouldst thou
condemn ?
“I answered and said, Verin it is a foolish thought
that they both have devised; for the ground is given
unto the wood, and the sea also hath his place to bear
his ﬂoods.
“ Then answered be me, and said, Thou hast given a
right judgment; but why judgest thou not thyself also?
“ For like as the ground is given unto the wood, and
the sea to his ﬂoods: even so they that dwell upon the
earth may understand nothing but that which is upon
the earth: and He that dwelleth above the heavens
may only understand the things that are above the
height of the heavens.”
I paused at those words, and closing the Sacred
Volume fell into deep, unquiet thought.
CHAPTER LXIX.
I HAD hoped that the voyage would produce some
beneﬁcial eﬂ'ect upon Lilian ; but no effect, good or bad,
was perceptible, except, perhaps, a deeper silence, a
gentler calm. She loved to sit on the deck when the
nights were fair, and the stars mirrored in the deep.
14* L


162 A STRANGE sroar.
And once, thus, as I stood beside her, bending over the
rail of the vessel, and gazing on the long wake of light
which the moon made amidst the darkness of an ocean
to which no shore could be seen, I said to myself,
“ Where is my track of light through the measureless
future? Would that I could believe as I did when a
child! Woe is me, that all the reasonings I take from
my knowledge should lead me away from the comfort
which the peasant who mourns ﬁnds in faith! Why
should riddles so dark have been thrust upon me ?--
me, no fond child of fancy; me, sober pupil of schools
the severest. Yet what marvel-the strangest my
senses have witnessed or feigned in the fraud they have
palmed on me -is greater than that by which a simple
affection, that all men profess to have known, has
changed the courses of life prearranged by my hopes
and conﬁrmed by my judgment? How calmly before
I knew love I have anatomized its mechanism, as the
tyre who dissects the-webwork of tissues and nerves
in the dead! L0! it lives, lives in me; and, in living,
escapes from my scalpel and mocks all my knowledge.
Can love be reduced to the realm of the senses? No;
what nun is more barred by her grate from the realm
of the senses than my bride by her solemn amiction?
Is love, then, the union of kindred, harmonious minds?
No, my beloved one sits by my side, and I guess not
her thoughts, and my mind is to her a sealed fountain.
Yet I love her more— oh ineﬁ'ably more! for the doom
which destroys the two causes philosophy assigns to


A STRANGI s'roar. 168
love—in the form, in the mind! How can I now, in
my vain physiology, say what is love-what is not?
Is it love which must tell me that man has a soul, and
that in soul will be found the solution of problems,
never to be solved in body or mind alone ?”
My self-questionings halted here as Lilian’s hand
touched my shoulder. She had risen from her seat, and
had come to me.
“Are not the stars very far from earth f” she said.
“Very far."
“Are they seen for the ﬁrst time to-night ?”
“ They were seen, I presume, as we see them, by the
fathers of all human races!” .
“ Yet close below us they shine reﬂected in the
waters; and yet, see, wave ﬂows on wave before we
can count it i”
“ Lilian, by what sympathy do you read and answer
my thought?”
Her reply was incoherent and meaningless. If a
gleam of intelligence had mysteriously lighted my heart
to her view, it was gone. But drawing her nearer
towards me, my eye long followed wistfully the path
of light, dividing the darkness on either hand, till it
closed in the sloping horizon.


MA A sraanes smear.
CHAPTER'LXX.
THE voyage is over. At the seaport at which we
landed I found a letter from Faber. My instructions
had reached him in time to effect the purchase on which
his descriptions had ﬁxed my desire. The stock, the
implements of husbandry, the furniture of the house,
were included in the purchase. All was prepared for
my arrival, and I hastened from the then miserable
village, which may some day rise into one of the
mightiest capitals of the world, to my lodge in the
wilderness.
It was the burst of the Australian spring, which
commences in our autumn month of October. The air
was loaded with the perfume of the acacias. Amidst
the glades of the open forest land, or climbing the
craggy banks of winding silvery creeks,* creepers and
ﬂowers of dazzling hue contrasted the olive-green of the
surrounding foliage. The exhilarating eﬂ‘ect of the
climate in that season heightens the charm of the
strange scenery. In the brilliancy of the sky, in the
lightness of the atmosphere, the sense of life is won~
drously quickened. With the very breath the Adventurer
draws in from the racy air, he feels as if inhaling hope.
We have reached our home—we are settled in it; the
* Creek is the name given by Australian colonists to precarious
watercourses and tributary streams.


A sraasos sroar 165
early unfamiliar impressions are worn away. We have
learned to dispense with much that we at ﬁrst missed,
and are reconciled to much that at ﬁrst disappointed or
displeased.
The house is built but of logs-_the late proprietor
had commenced, upon a rising ground, a mile distant,
a more imposing ediﬁce of stone; but it is not half
ﬁnished.
This log-house is commodious, and much has been
done, within and without, to conceal or adorn its prim-
itive rudeness. It is of irregular, picturesque form,
with verandahs round three sides of it, to which the
grape-vine has been trained, with glossy leaves that
clamber up to the gable roof. There is a large garden
in front, in which many English fruit-trees have been
set, and grow fast amongst the plants of the tropics
and the orange-trees of Southern Europe. Beyond,
stretch undulous pastures, studded not only with sheep,
but with herds of cattle, which my speculative prede-
cessor had bred from parents of famous stock, and
imported from England at mighty cost; but as yet the
herds had been of little proﬁt, and they range their
luxuriant expanse of pasture with as little heed. To
the left, soar up, in long range, the many-colored hills;
to the right meanders a creek, belted by feathery trees,
and on its opposite bank a forest opens, through fre-
quent breaks, into park-like glades and alleys. The
territory, of which I so suddenly ﬁnd myself the lord,
is vast, even for a colonial capitalist.


166 A STRANGE sroar.
It had been originally purchased as “ a special sur-
vey,” comprising twenty thousand acres, with the
privilege of pasture over forty thousand more. In v.ery
little of this land, though it includes some of the most
fertile districts in the known world, has cultivation
been even commenced. At the time I entered into
possession even sheep were barely proﬁtable; labor was
scarce and costly. Regarded as a speculation, I could
not wonder that my predecessor ﬂed in fear from his
domain. Had I invested the bulk of my capital in this
lordly purchase, I should have deemed myself a ruined
man; but a villa near London, with a hundred acres,
would have cost me as much to buy, and thrice as much
to keep up. I could afford the investment I had made.
I found a Scotch bailiff already on the estate, and I was
contented to escape from rural occupations, to which I
brought no experience, by making it worth his while to
serve me with zeal. Two domestics of my own, and
two who had been for many years with Mrs. Ashleigh,
had accompanied us: they remained faithful and seemed
contented. So the clockwork of our mere household
arrangements went on much the same as in our native
home. Lilian was not subjected to the ordinary priva-
tions and discomforts that await the wife even of the
wealthy emigrant. Alas! would she have heeded them
if she had been?
The change of scene wrought a decided change for
the better in her health and spirits, but not such as
implied a dawn of reviving reason. But her counte-


A sraaxos s'roav. 167
nance was now more rarely overcast. Its usual aspect
was glad with a soft, mysterious smile. She would
murmur snatches of songs, that were partly borrowed
from English poets, and partly glided away into what
seemed spontaneous additions of her own—wanting
intelligible meaning, but never melody or rhyme.
Strange, that memory and imitation—the two earliest
parents of all inventive knowledge—should still be so
active, and judgment-the after faculty, that combines
the rest into purposes and method—be annulled!
Julius Faber I see continually, though his residence
is a few miles distant. He is sanguine as to Lilian’s
ultimate recovery; and, to my amazement and to my
envy, he has contrived, by some art which I cannot
attain, to establish between her and himself intelligible
communion. She comprehends his questions, when
mine, though the simplest, seem to her in unknown
language; and he construes into sense her words, that
to me are meaningless riddles.
“I was right,” he said to me one day, leaving her
seated in the garden beside her quiet, patient mother,
and joining me where I lay-listless yet fretful—under
the shadeless gum-trees, gazing not on the ﬂocks and
ﬁelds that I could call my own, but on the far mountain
range, from which the arch of the horizon seemed to
spring ;—“ I was right,” said the great physician; “this
is reason suspended, not reason lost. Your wife will

recover; but ”
“ But what ? ”


168 a STRANGE s'roar.
“ Give me your arm as I walk homeward, and I Will
tell you the conclusion to which I have come.”
I rose, the old man leant on me, and we went down
the valley, along the craggy ridges of the winding
creek. The woodland on the opposite bank was vocal
with the chirp, and creek, and chatter of Australian
birds-all mirthful, all songless, save that sweetness
of warblers, which some early irreverent emigrant de-
graded to the name of magpie, but whose note is
sweeter than the nightingale’s, and trills through the
lucent air with a distinct ecstatic melody of joy that
dominates all the discords;-—so ravishing the sense,
that, while it sings, the ear scarcely heeds the scream
of the parrots.
CHAPTER LXXI.
“ You may remember,” said Julius Faber, “ Sir
Humphry Davy’s eloquent description of the effect pro-
duced on him by the inhalation of nitrous oxide. He
states that he began to lose the perception of external
things: trains of vivid visible images rapidly passed
through his mind, and were connected with words in
such a manner as to produce perceptions perfectly novel.
‘ I existed,’ he says, ‘ in a world of newly-connected and
newly-modiﬁed ideas.’ When he recovered, be ex-
claimed: ‘Nothing exists but thoughts; the universe
is composed of impressions, ideas, pleasures, and pains l”


a s’rasuos near. 169
“Now observe, that thus. a cultivator of positive
science, endowed with one of the healthiest of human
brains, is, by the inhalation of a gas, abstracted from
all external life --enters into a new world, which con-
sists of images he himself creates, and animates so
vividly—that, on waking, he resolves the universe
itself into thoughts.”
“Well,” said I, “ but what inference do you draw
from that voluntary experiment, applicable to the malady
of which you bid me hope to cure?” .
“ Simply this; that the effect produced on a healthful
brain by the nitrous oxide may be produced also by
moral causes operating on the blood, or on the nerves.
There is a degree of mental excitement in which ideas
are more vivid than sensations, and then the world of
external things gives way to the world within the
brain.* But this, though a suspension of that reason
which comprehends accuracy of judgment, is no more
a permanent aberration of reason than were Sir Hum-
Davy’s visionary ecstasies under the inﬂuence of the
gas. The difference between the two states of suspen-
sion is that of time, and it is but an aﬂ'air of time with
our beloved patient. Yet prepare yoursele I fear that
the mind will not recover without some critical malady
of the body!”
“ Critical! but not dangerous ? — say not dangerous.
" See, on the theory elaborated from this principle, Dr. Hib<
bert’s interesting and valuable work on the Philosophy of
lpparitions.
II. — 15


170 A sraanes sroav.
I can endure the pause of her reason; I could not en-
dure the void in the universe if her life were to fade
from the earth.”
“ Poor friend! would not you yourself rather lose life
than reason ? ”
“ I—yesl But we men are taught to set cheap value
on our own lives; we do not estimate at the same rate
the lives of those we love. Did we do so, Humanity
would lose its virtues.”
“ What, then! Love teaches that there is something
of nobler value than mere mind? yet surely it cannot
be the mere body? What is it, if not that continuance
of being which your philosophy declines to acknowledge
—viz., sOUL? If you fear so painfully that your Lilian
should die, is it not that you fear to lose her forever ? ”
“ Oh, cease, cease!” I cried, impatiently. “I cannot
now argue on metaphysics. What is it that you antici-
pate of harm to her life? Her health has been stronger
ever since her affliction. She never seems to know
ailment now. Do you not perceive that her check has
a more hardy bloom, her frame a more rounded sym-
metry, than when you saw her in England ?”
“ Unquestionably. Her physical forces have been
silently recruiting themselves in the dreams which half
lull, half amuse her imagination. IMAGINATION! that
faculty, the most glorious which is bestowed on the
human mind, because it is the faculty which enables
thought to create, is of all others the most exhausting
to life when unduly stimulated, and consciously reason-


A sraasos STORY. 17!
ing on its own creations. I think it probable that, had
this sorrow not befallen you, you would have known a
sorrow yet graver—you would have long survived your
Lilian. As it is now, when she recovers, her whole
organization, physical and mental, will have undergone
a beneﬁcent change. But, I repeat my prediction—
some severe malady of the body will precede the restora-
tion of the mind; and it is my hope that the present
suspense or aberration of the more wearing powers of
the mind may ﬁt the body to endure and surmount the
physical crisis. I remember a case, within my own
professional experience, in many respects similar to this,
but in other respects it was less hopeful. I was con-
sulted by a young student of a very delicate physical
frame, of great mental energies, and consumed by an
intense ambition. He was reading for university hon-
ors. He would not listen to me when I entreated him
to rest his mind. I thought that he was certain to
obtain the distinction for which he toiled, and equally
certain to die a few months after obtaining it. He
falsiﬁed both my prognostics. He so overworked him-
self that, on the day of examination, his nerves were
agitated, his memory failed him; he passed, not with-
out a certain credit, but fell far short of the rank
amongst his fellow-competitors to which he aspired.
Here, then. the irritated mind acted on the disappointed
heart, and raised a new train of emotions. He was
ﬁrst visited by spectral illusions; then he sank into a
state in which the external world seemed quite blotted


172 A srnanes STORY.
out. He heeded nothing that was said to him; seemed
to see nothing that was placed before his eyes; in a
word, sensations became dormant, ideas preconceived
usurped their place, and those ideas gave him pleasure.
He believed that 'his genius was recognized, and lived
amongst its supposed creations enjoying an imaginary
fame. So it went on for two years; during which sus-
pense of his reason, his frail form became robust and
vigorous. At the end of that time he was seized with
a fever, which would have swept him in three days to
the grave had it occurred when I was ﬁrst called in to
attend him. He conquered the fever, and, in recoVer-
ing, acquired the full possession of the intellectual
faculties so long suspended. When I last saw him,
many years afterwards, he was in perfect health, and
the object of his young ambition was realized; the body
had supported the mind—he had achieved distinction.
Now what had so, for a time, laid this strong intellect
into visionary sleep? the most agonizing of human emo-
tions in a noble spirit—shame! What has so stricken
down your Lilian? You have told me the story:
shamel—the shame of a nature pre-eminently pure.
But observe that, in his case as in hers, the shock in-
ﬂicted does not produce a succession of painful illusions;
on the contrary, in both, the illusions are generally
pleasing. Had the illusions been painful, the body
would have suffered—the patient died. Why did a
painful shock produce pleasing illusions? because. no
matter how a shock on the nerves may originate, if it


A STRANGE sroar. 173
affects the reason, it does but make more vivid, than
impressions from actual external objects, the ideas pre-
viously most cherished. Such ideas in the young
student were ideas of earthly fame; such ideas in the
young maiden are ideas of angel comforters and hea-
venly Edens. You miss her mind on the earth, and,
while we speak, it is in paradise.”
“Much that you say, my friend, is authorized by the
speculations of great writers, with whom I am not
unfamiliar; but in none of those writers, nor in your
encouraging words, do I ﬁnd a solution for much that
has no precedents in my experience—much, indeed,
that has analogies in my reading, but analogies which I
have hitherto despised as old wives’ fables. I have
bared to your searching eye the weird mysteries of my
life. How do you account for facts which you cannot
resolve into illusions? for the inﬂuence which that
strange being, Margrave, exercised over Lilian’s mind
or fancy, so that for a time her love for me was as dor-
mant as is her reason now; so that he could draw her
-her whose nature you admit to be singularly pure
and modest-from her mother’s home. The magic
wand! the trance into which that wand threw Mar-
grave himself; the apparition which it conjured up in
my own quiet chamber, when my mind was without a
care, and my health without a ﬂaw. How account for
all this-as‘yon endeavored, and perhaps successfully,
to account for all my impressions of the Vision in the
lluseum, of the luminous, haunting shadow in its earlier
15 *


"a A STRANGE STORY.
apparitions, when my fancy was heated, my heart tor-
mented, and, it might be, even the physical forces of
this strong frame disordered ?”
“Allen,” said the old pathologist, "here we approach
a ground which few physicians have dared to examine.
Honor to those who, like our bold contemporary, Elliot-
son, have braved scoff and sacriﬁced dress in seeking to
extract what is practical in uses, what can be tested by
experiment, from those exceptional phenomena on which
magic sought to found a philosophy, and to which phi-
losophy tracks the origin of magic.”
“What! Do I understand you? Is it you, Julius
Faber, who attach faith to the wonders attributed to
animal magnetism and electrobiology, or subscribe to
the doctrines which their practitioners teach I?"
_“I have not examined into those doctrines, nor seen
with my own eyes the wonders recorded, upon evidence
too respectable, nevertheless, to permit me peremptorin
to deny what I have not witnessed.* But wherever I
’4‘ What Faber here says is expressed with more authority by
one of the most accomplished metaphysicians of our time (Sir W.
Hamilton) : —
“Somnnmbulism is a phenomenon still more astonishing (than
dreaming). In this singular state a person performs a regular
series of rational actions, and those frequently of the most difﬁ-
cult and delicate nature; and what is still more marvellous, with
a talent to which he could make no pretension when awake.
(Cr. Aneillon. Essais Philos. ii. 161.) His memory and reminis-
cence supply him with recollections of words and things which,
perhaps, never were at his disposal in the ordinary state— he
speaks more ﬂuently a more reﬁned language. And if we are to
credit what the evidence on which it rests hardly allows us to


A s'raauos sroar. 1'“!
look through the History of Mankind n all ages and
all races, I ﬁnd a concurrence in certain beliefs which
disbelieve, he has not only perception of things through other
channels than the common organs of sense. but the =phere of his
cognition is ampliﬁed to an extent far beyond the limits to which
sensible perception is conﬁned. This subject is one of the most
perplexing in the whole compass of philosophy; for, on the one
hand, the phenomena are so remarkable that they cannot be
believed, and yet, on the other, they are of so unambiguous and
palpable a character, and the witnesses to their reality are so
numerous, so intelligent, and so high above every suspicion of
deceit, that it is equally impossible to deny credit to what is
attested by such ample and unexceptionable evidence." -—Sir W.
Hamilton’s Lectures on Metaphysics and Logic, vol. ii. p. 274.
This perplexity, in which the distinguished philosopher leaves
the judgment so equally balanced that it ﬁnds it impossible to
believe, and yet impossible to disbelieve, forms the right state of
mind in which a candid thinker should come to the examination
of those more extraordinary phenomena which he has not him-
self yet witnessed, but the fair inquiry into which may be
tendered to him by persons above the imputation of quackery
and fraud. Miiller, who is not the least determined, as he is
certainly one of the most distinguished disbelievers of mesmeric
phenomena, does not appear to have witnessed, or at least to have
carefully examined, them, or he would, perhaps, have seen that
even the more extraordinary of those phenomena conﬁrm, rather
than contradict, his own general theories, and may he explained
by the sympathies one sense has with another— “the laws of
reﬂexion through the medium of the brain." (Physiology of
Senses, p. 1311.) And again by the maxim, “that the mental
principle, or cause of the mental phenomena, cannot be conﬁned
to the brain, but that it exists in a latent state in every part of
the organism." (lb. p. 13-55.) ,The “nerve power," contended
for by Mr. Bain, also, may suggest a rational solution of much
that has seemed incredible to those physiologists who have not
condescended to sift the genuine phenomena of mesmerism from
the imp nature to which, in all ages, the phenomena exhibited by
what may be called the ecstatic temperament, have been applied.
2i.


A manual: near. 17’!
phrase I comprehend all constitutional mystics) is pecu-
liarly sensitive to electric atmospheric inﬂuences. This
is a fact which most medical observers will have re
marked in the range of their practice. Accordingly, I
was prepared to ﬁnd Mr. Hare Townshend, in his in.
tcrcsting work,"I state that he himself was of ‘the
electric temperament,’ sparks ﬂying from his hair when
combed in the dark, dtc. That accomplished writer,
whose veracity no one would impugn, afﬁrms that
‘ between this electrical endowment and whatever mes-
meric properties he might possess, there is a remarkable
relationship and parallelism. Whatever state of the
atmosphere tends to accumulate and insulate electricity
in the body, promotes equally,’ says Mr. Townshend,
‘the power and facility with which I inﬂuence others
mesmerically.’ What Mr. Townshend thus observes in
himself, American physicians and professors of chemistry
depose to have observed in those modern magicians the
mediums of (so—called) ‘spirit manifestation.’ They
state that all such mediums are of the electric tempera-
ment, thus everywheris found allied with the ecstatic,
and their power varies in proportion as the state of the
atmosphere serves to depress or augment the electricity
stored in themselves. Here, then, in the midst of
vagrant phenomena, either too hastily dismissed as
altogether the tricks of fraudful imposture, or too credu-
lously accepted as supernatural portents—here, at least,
in one generalized fact, we may, perhaps, ﬁnd a starting-
“ Facts in Mesmerism.
' I


1'18 a STRANGI STORY.
point, from which inductive experiment may arrive soon
or late at a rational theory. But, however the power
of which we are speaking (a power accorded to special
physical temperament) may or may not be accounted
for by some patient student of nature, I am persuaded
that it is in that power we are to seek for whatever is
not wholly imposture, in the attributes assigned to
magic or witchcraft. It is well said, by a writer who
has gone into the depth of these subjects with the
research of a scholar and the science of a pathologist,
‘that if magic had exclusively reposed on credulity and
falsehood, its reign would never have endured so long.
But that its art took its origin in singular phenomena,
proper to certain affections of the nerves, or manifested
in the conditions of sleep. These phenomena, the
principle of which was at ﬁrst unknown, served to root
faith in magic, and often abused even enlightened minds.
The enchanters and magicians arrived, by divers prac-
tices, at the faculty of provoking in other brains a deter-
mined order of dreams, of engendering hallucinations
of all kinds, of inducing ﬁts of hypnotism, trance, mania,
during which the persons so aﬂ'ected imagined that they
saw, heard, touched supernatural beings, conversed with
them, proved their inﬂuences, assisted at prodigies of
which magic proclaimed itself to possess the secret.
The public, the enchanters, and the enchanted were
equally dupes.’* Accepting this explanation, unintel-
* La Magic et l’Astrologie dans l’Antiquité et an Mayan-Age.
Par L. F. Alfred Maury, Membre de 1' Institut. P. 225.


A s'raasoa s'roar. 181
tion, of problems that, once demonstrated, may lead to
discoveries of inﬁnite value—hints, I- say, in two wri-
ters of widely opposite genius—Van Helmont and
Bacon. Van Helmont, of all the mediaaval mystics, is,
in spite of his many extravagant whims, the one whose
intellect is the most suggestive to the disciplined rea-
soners of our day. He supposed that the faculty which
he calls Phantasy, and which we familiarly call Imagi-
nation, is invested with the power of creating for itself
ideas independent of the senses, each idea clothed in a
form fabricated by the imagination, and becoming an
operative entity. This notion is so far favored by mod-
ern physiologists, that Lincke reports a case where the
eye itself was extirpated; yet the extirpation was fol-
lowed by thc appearance of luminous ﬁgures before the
orbit. And again, a woman, stone-blind, complained
of ‘luminous images, with pale colors, before her eyes.’
Abercrombie mentions the case ‘of a lady quite blind,
her eyes being also disorganized and sunk, who never
walked out without seeing a little old woman in a red
cloak, who seemed to walk before her.’* Your favor-
ite authority, the illustrious Muller, who was himself in
the habit of 'seeing different images in the ﬁeld of
vision when he lay quietly down to sleep asserts that
these images are not merely presented to the fancy, but
that even the images of dreams are really seen,’ and
that ‘ any one may satisfy himself of this by accustom-
" She had no illusions when within doors. —Abercrombie on
the intellectual powers, p. 277 (15th Edition.)
IL—ld


182 A STRANGE sroar.
ing himself regularly to open his eyes when waking
after a dream—the images seen in the dream are then
sometimes visible, and can be observed to disappear
gradually.’ He conﬁrms this statement, not only by the
result of his own experience, but by the observations
made by Spinoza, and the yet higher authority of Aris-
totle, who accounts for spectral appearance as the inter-
nal action of the sense of vision.* And this opinion is
favored by Sir David Brewster, whose experience leads
him to suggest ‘that the objects of mental contemplation
may be seen as distinctly as external-objects, and will oc-
cupy the same local position in the axis of vision as if they
had been formed by the agency of light.’ Be this as it
may, one fact remains, that images can be seen even by
the blind as distinctly and vividly as you and I now
see the stream below our feet and the opossums at play
upon yonder boughs. Let us come next to some remark-
able suggestions of Lord Bacon. In his Natural His-
tory, treating of the force of the imagination, and the
help it receives ‘by one man working by another,’ he
cites an instance he had witnessed of a kind of juggler,
who could tell a person what card he thought of. He
mentioned this ‘ to a pretended learned man, curious in
such things,’ and this sage said to him, ‘ It is not the
4' Miiller, Physiology of the Senses. Baley’s translation, pp.
1068-1395, and elsewhere. Mr. Bain. in his thoughtful and sug-
gestive work on the Senses and intellect, makes very powerful
use of these statements in support of his proposition, which
Faber advances in other words, vim, “ the return of the nervous
currents exactly on their old track in revived sensations."


a sraanon email. 183
knowledge of the man’s thought, for that is proper to
God, but the enforcing of a thought upon him, and
minding his imagination by a stronger, so that he could
think of no other card.’ You see this sage anticipated
our modern electro-biologists! And the learned man
then shrewdly asked Lord Bacon, ‘ Did the juggler tell
the card to the man himself who had thought of it, or
bid another tell it ?’ ‘ He bade another tell it,’ answered
Lord Bacon. ‘I thought so,’ returned bis learned
acquaintance, ‘for the juggler himself could not have
put on so strong an' imagination; but by telling the
card to the other, who believed the juggler was some
strange man who could do strange things, that other
man caught a strong imagination.’* The whole story
is worth reading, because Lord Bacon evidently thinks
it conveys a guess worth examining. And Lord Bacon,
were he now living, would be the man to solve the
mysteries that branch out of mesnlerism or (so—called)
spiritual manifestation, for he would not pretend to
despise their phenomena for fear of hurting his reputa-
‘ Perhaps it is for the reason suggested in the text. viz" that
the magician requires the interposition of a third imagination
between his own and that of the consulting believer, and that
any learned adept in (so‘called) magic will invariably refuse to
exhibit without the presence of a third person. Hence the au-
thor of Dogma et Rituel de la Haute Magie, printed at Paris,
1852-53—0. book less remarkable for its learning than for the
earnest belief of a scholar of our own day in the reality of the
art of which he records the history— insists much on the neces-
sity of rigidly observing Le Ternaire, in the number of persons
who assist in an enuhanter’s experiments.


184 A sraauos s-roav.
tion for good sense. Bacon then goes on to state that
there are three ways to fortify the imagination : ‘ First,
authority derived from belief in the art and in the
man who exercises it; secondly, means to quicken and
corroborate the imagination; thirdly, means to repeat
and refresh it.’ For the second and the third he refc rs
to the practices of magic, and proceeds afterwards to
state on what things imagination has most force: ‘ upon
things that have the lightest and easiest motions, and,
therefore, above all, upon the spirits of men, and, in them,
on such affections as move lightest—in love, in fear,
in irresolution. ‘And,’ adds Bacon, earnestly, in a very
different spirit from that which dictates to the sages of
our time the philosophy of rejecting without trial that
which belongs to the marvellous, ‘and whatsoever is of
this kind, should be thoroughly inquired into.’ And
this great founder or renovator of the sober inductive
system of investigation, even so far leaves it a matter of
speculative inquiry, whether imagination may not be so
powerful that it can actually operate upon a plant, that
he says:_‘This likewise should be made upon plants,
and that diligently, as if you should tell a man that
such a tree would die this year, and will him, at these
and these times, to go unto it and see how it thriveth.’
I presume that no philosopher has followed such recom-
mendations: had some great philosopher done so, pos-
sibly we should by this time know all the secrets of
what is popularly called witchcraft.”
And as Faber here paused there came a strange laugh


.\ sraxxos sronv. 185
from the fantastic she-oak-tree overhanging the stream
— a wild, impish laugh.
“ Pooh! it is but the great king-ﬁsher, the laughing
bird of the Australian bush,” said Julius Faber, amused
at my start of superstitious alarm.
We walked on for some minutes in musing silence,
and the rude log-hut in which my wise Companion had
his home came in view -_ the ﬂocks grazing on undulous
pastures, the kine drinking at a watercourse fringed by
the slender gum-trees, and a few ﬁelds, laboriously won
from the luxuriant grass-land, rippling with the wave
of corn.
I halted and said, “ Rest here for a few moments, till
I gather up the conclusions to which your speculative
reasoning seems to invite me.”
We sat down on a rocky crag, half mantled by luxu-
riant creepers with vermillion buds.
“ From the guesses,” said I, “which you have drawn
from the erudition of others and your own ingenious and
reﬂective inductions, I collect this solution of the mys-
teries, by which the experience I gain from my senses
confounds all the dogmas approved by my judgment.
To the rational conjectures by which, when we ﬁrst con-
versed on the marvels that perplexed me, you ascribed
to my imagination, predisposed by mental excitement,
physical fatigue or derangement, and a concurrence of
singular events tending to strengthen such predisposi-
tion, the phantasmal impressions produced on my senses;
to these conjectures you now add a new one, more
16 "


186 A STRANGE STORY.
startling and less admitted by sober physiologists. You
conceive it possible that persons endoWed with a rare
and peculiar temperament can so operate on the imagi-
nation, and, through the imagination, on the senses of
of others, as to exceed even the powers ascribed to the
practitioners of mesmerism and electro-biology, and give
a certain foundation of truth to the old tales of magic
and witchcraft. You imply that Margrave may be a
person thus gifted, and hence the inﬂuence he unques-
tionably exercised over Lilian, and over, perhaps, less
innocent agents, charmed or impelled by his will. And
not discarding, as I own I should have been originally
induced to do, the queries or suggestions adventured by
Bacon in his discursive speculations on nature, to wit,
‘that there be many things, some of them inanimate,
that operate upon the spirits of men by secret sympathy
and antipathy,’ and to which Bacon gave the quaint
name of ‘imaginants;’ so even that wand, of which I
have described to you the magic-like effects, may have
had'properties communicated to it by which it performs
the work of the magician, as mesmerists pretend that
some substance mesmerized by them can act on the
patient as sensibly as if it were the mesmerizer himself.
Do I state your suppositions correctly ?"
“Yes; always remembering that they are only sup-
positions, and volunteered with the utmost diﬁidcnce.
But since, thus seated in the early wilderness, we per-
mit ourselves the indulgence of childlike guess, may
it not be possible, apart from the doubtful question


A s'raazma s'ronr. 189
order to extract from it agencies that might appear
supernatural. Possibly, then, the rods or wands of the
East, of which Scripture makes mention, were framed
upon some principles of which we in our day are very
naturally ignorant, since we do not ransack science for
the same secrets. And thus, in the selection or prepa-
ration of the material employed, mainly consisted what-
ever may be referable to natural philosophical causes, in
the antique science of Rhabdomancy, or divination and
enchantment by wands. The staﬁ' or wand of which
you tell me, was, you say, made of iron or steel and
tipped with crystal. Possibly iron and crystal do really
contain some properties not hitherto scientiﬁcally an-
alyzed, and only, indeed, potential over exceptional
temperaments, which may account for the fact that iron
and crystal have been favorites with all professed mys~
tics, ancient and modern. The Delphic Pythoness had
her iron tripod, Mesmer his iron bed; and many per-
sons, indisputably honest, cannot gaze long upon a ball
of crystal but what they begin to see visions. I sus-
pect that a philosophical cause for such seemingly pre-
ternatural effects of crystal and iron will be found in
connection with the extreme impressionability to changes
in temperature which is the characteristi: both of crys-
tal and iron. But if these materials do ccntain certain
powers over exceptional constitutions, we do not arrive
at a supernatural, but at a natural phenomenon.”
“ Still," said I, “ even granting that your explanatory
hypothesis hit or approach the truth—still what a


190 A s'raanon s'ronr.
terrible ppwer you would assign to men’s will OYer
men’s reason and deeds l”
“Man’s will,” answered Faber, “has over men’s
deeds and reason, habitual and daily power inﬁnitely
greater, and, when uncounterbalanced, inﬁnitely more
dangerous than that which superstition exaggerates in
magic. Man’s will moves a war that decimates a race,
and leaves behind it calamities little less dire than
slaughter. Man’s will frames, but it also corrupts, laws;
exalts, but also demoralizes, opinion; sets the World
mad with fanaticism, as often as it curbs the heart’s
ﬁerce instincts by the wisdom of brother-like mercy.
You revolt at the exceptional, limited sway over some
two or three individuals which the arts of a sorcerer (if
sorcerer there be) can eﬂ'ect; and yet, at the very
moment in which you were perplexed and appalled by
such sway, or by your reluctant belief in it, your will
was devising an engine to unsettle the reason and
wither the hopes of millions!”
“My will! What engine?”
“A book conceived by your intellect, adorned by
your learning, and directed by your will, to steal from
the minds of other men their persuasion of the soul’s
everlasting Hereafter.”
I bOWed my head, and felt myself grow pale.
“And if we accept Bacon’s theory of ‘secret sym-
pathy,’ or the plainer-physiologica! maxim that there
must be in the imagination, morbidly impressed by the
will of another, some trains of idea in aﬁinity with such


a STRANGE near. 191
Inﬂuence and preinclined to receive it, no magician
could warp you to evil, except through thoughts that
themselves went astray. Grant that the Margrave who
still haunts your mind did really, by some occult,
sinister magnetism, guide the madman to murder—did
inﬂuence the servantrwoman’s vulgar desire to pry into
the secrets of her ill-fated master—or the old maid’s
covetous wish and envious malignity—what could this
awful magician do more than any commonplace guilty
adviser, to a mind predisposed to accept the advice ?”
“ You forget one example which-destroys your argu-
ment—the spell which this mysterious fascinator could
cast upon a creature so pure from all guilt as Lilian!”
“ Will you forgive me if I answer frankly i"
“ Speak.” v
“Your Lilian is spotless and pure as you deem her,
and the fascination, therefore, attempts no lure through
a sinful desire; it blends with its attraction no senti-
ment of affection untrue to yourself. Nay, it is justice
to your Lilian, and may be a melancholy comfort to
you, to state my conviction, based on the answers my
questions have drawn from her, that you were never
more cherished by her love than when that love seemed
in forsake you. Her imagination impressed her with
the illusion that through your love for her you were
threatened with a great peril. What seemed the levity
of her desertion was the devotion of self-sacriﬁce. And,
in her strange, dream-led wanderings, do not think that
she was conscious of the fascination you impute to this
2M


192 A sraauen sroaY.
mysterious Margrave; in her belief it was your own
guardian angel that guided her steps, and her pil-
grimage was ordained to disarm the fee that menaced
you, and dissolve the/ spell that divided her life from
yours! But had she not, long before this, wilfully
prepared herself to be so deceived? Had not her
fancies been deliberately encouraged to dwell remote
from the duties we are placed on the earth to perform?
The loftiest faculties in our nature are those that
demand the ﬁnest poise, not ‘to fall from their height
and crush all the wzﬂls that they crown. With exqui-
site beauty of illustration, Hume says of the dreamers
of ‘bright fancies,’ ‘that they may be compared to those
angels whom the Scriptures represent as covering their
eyes with their wings.’ Had you been, like my nephew,
a wrestler for bread with the wilderness, what helpmate
would your Lilian have been to you? How often
would you have cried out in justiﬁable anger, ‘1, son of
Adam, am on earth, not in paradise! Oh, that my Eve
were at home on my hearth, and not in the skies with
the seraphsl’ No Margrave, I venture to say, could
have suspended the healthful aﬁections, or charmed
into danger, the wide-awake soul of my Amy. When
she rocks in its cradle the babe the young parents
intrust to her heed—when she calls the kine to the
milking, the chicks to their corn—when she but ﬂits
through my room to renew the ﬂowers on the stand. or
range in neat order the books that I read- -no spell on
her fancy could lead her a step from the range of he!


A s'raaucs sroar. 198
provident cares! At day she is contented to be on the
commonplace earth; at evening she and I knock toge-
ther at the no door of heaven, which opes to thanks-
giving and prayer; and thanksgiving and prayer send
us back, calm and hopeful, to the task that each morrow
renews.”
I looked up as the old man paused, and in the limpid
clearness of the Australian atmosphere, I saw the child
he thus praised standing by the garden-gate, looking
towards us, and, though still distant, she seemed near.
I felt wroth with her. My heart so cherished my harm-
less, defenceless Lilian, that I was jealous of the praise
taken from her to be bestowed on another.
“Each of us,” said I coldly, “has his or her own
nature, and the uses harmonious to that nature’s
idiosyncrasy. The world, I grant, would get on very
ill if women were not, more or less, actively useful and
quietly good, like your Amy. But the world would
lose standards that exalt and reﬁne, if no woman were
permitted to gain, through the indulgence of fancy,
thoughts exquisite as those which my Lilian conceived,
while thought, alas! ﬂowed out of fancy. I do not
wound you by citing your Amy as a type of the
mediocre. I do not claim for Lilian the rank we accord
to the type of genius. But both are alike to such types
in this: viz., that the uses of mediocrity are for every-
day life, and the uses of genius, amidst a thousand
mistakes which mediocrity never commits, are to sug-
gest and perpetuate ideas which raise the standard of
II. —- 17 I


194 A STRANGE swear.
the mediocre to a nobler level. There would be fewer
Amys in life if there were no Lilianl as there would
be far fewer good men of sense if there were no crring
dreamer of genius!” _
“ You say well, Allen Fenwick. And who should
be so indulgent to the vagaries of the imagination as
the philosophers who taught your youth to doubt
everything in the Maker’s plan of creation which could
not be mathematically proved? ‘The human mind,’
said Luther, ‘is like a drunkard on horseback; prop it
on one side, and it falls on the cther.’_ So the man
who is much too enlightened to believe in a peasant’s
religion, is always sure to set up some inane super-
stition of his own. Open biographical volumes wher-
ever you please, and the man who has no faith in
religion, is a man who has faith in a nightmare. See
that type of the elegant skeptics—Lord Herbert of
Cherbury. He is writing a book against Revelation;
he asks a sign from heaven to tell him if his book is
approved by his Maker, and the man who cannot
believe in the miracles performed by his Saviour,
gravely tells us of a miracle vouchsafed to himself.
Take the hardest and strongest intellect which the
hardest and strongest race of mankind ever schooled
and accomplished. See the greatest of great men, the
great Julius Caesar! Publicly he asserts in the Senate
that the immortality of the soul is a. vain chimera. He
professes the creed which Roman voluptuaries deduced
from Epicurus, and denies all Divine interference in the


s sraauen sronv. .190
affairs of the earth. A great authority for the Material-
ists—they have none greater! They can show on
their side no intellect equal to Caesar’s! and yet this
magniﬁcent free-thinker rejecting a soul and a Deity,
habitually entered his chariot in muttering a charm;
crawled on his knees up the steps of a temple to pro-
pitiate the abstraction called ‘Nemesis ;’ and did not
cross the Rubicon till he had committed the omens.
What does all this prove f—a very simple truth. Man
has some instincts with the brutes; for instance, hun-
ger and sexual love. Man has one instinct peculiar to
himself, found universally (or with alleged exceptions
in savage states so rare that they do not aﬂ'ect the
general law*) - an instinct of an invisible power with-
out this earth, and of a life beyond the grave, which
that power vouchsafes to his spirit. But the best of us
cannot violate an instinct with impunity. Resist hun-
l‘ It seems extremely doubtful whether the very few instances
in which it has been asserted that a savage race has been found
without recognition of a Deity and a future state would bare
searching examination. It is set forth, for example, in most of
the popular works on Australia, that the Australian savages
have no notion of a Deity or Hereafter, that they only worship a
devil, or evil spirit. This assumption, though made more per-
emptorily, and by a greater number of writers than any similar
one regarding other savages, is altogether erroneous, and has
no other foundation than the ignorance of the writers. The Aus-
tralian savages recognise a Deity, but He is too august for a
name in their own language; in English they call Him The Great
Master—an expression synonymous with “The Great Lord.”
They believe in a hereafter of eternal joy, and place it amongst
the stars.—- See Strzelecki’s Physical Description of New South
Wales.


196 a sraanoa s'roar.
ger as lcng as you can, and, rather than die of starva-
tion, your instinct will make you a cannibal; resist love
when youth and nature impel to it, and what patholo-
gist does not track one broad path into madness or
crime? So with the noblest instinct of all. Reject the
internal conviction by which the grandest thinkers have
sanctioned the hope of the humblest Christian, and you
are servile at once to some faith inconceivably more
'hard to believe. The imagination will not be withheld
from its yearnings for vistas beyond the walls of the
ﬂesh and the span of the present hour. Philosophy
itself, in rejecting the healthful creeds by which man
ﬁnds his safeguards in sober prayer, and his guide
through the wilderness of visionary doubt, invents
systems compared to which the mysteries of theology
are simple. Suppose any man of strong, plain under-
standing had never heard of a Deity like Him whom we
Christians adore, then ask this man which he can the
better comprehend in his mind, and accept as a natural
faith—via, the simple Christianity of his shepherd, or
the Pantheism of Spinoza? Place before an accom-
plished critic (who comes with a perfectly unprejudiced
mind to either inquiry), ﬁrst the arguments of David
Hume against the Gospel miracles, and then the meta-
physical crotchets uf David Hume himself. This subtle
philosopher, not content, with Berkeley, to get rid of
matter — not content, with Condillae, to get rid of spirit
or mind ——proceeds to a miracle greater than any his
Maker has yet vouehsafed to reveal. He, being then


a srnauos cross. 19’!
alive and in the act of writing, gets rid of himself alto-
gether. Nay, he confesses he cannot reason With any
one who is stupid enough to think he has a self. His
words are: ‘What we call a mind is nothing but a heap
or collection of diﬁ'erent perceptions or objects united
together by certain relations and supposed, though
falsely, to be endowed with perfect simplicity and iden-
tity. If any one, upon serious and candid reﬂection,
thinks he has a diﬂ'erent notion of himself, I must con-
fess I can reason with him no longer?’ Certainly I
would rather believe all the ghost stories upon record,
than believe that I am not even a ghost, distinct and
apart from the perceptions conveyed to me, no matter
how —just as I am distinct and apart from the furni-
ture in my room, no matter whether I found it there
or whether I bought it. If some old cosmogonist asked
you to believe that the primitive cause of the solar
system was not to be traced to a Divine Intelligence,
but to a nebulosity, originally so diﬁ'used that its exist-
ence can with difﬁculty be conceived, and that the
origin of the present system of organized beings equally
dispensed with the agency of a creative mind, and could
be referred to molecules formed in the water by the
power of attraction, till by modiﬁcations of cellular tissue
in the gradual lapse of ages, one monad became an oys-
ter and another a Man -—-would you not say this cosmog-
ony could scarcely have misled the human understand-
ing even in the earliest dawn of speculative inquiry?
Yet such are the hypotheses to which the desire to
17*


198 a sraauos sroar.
philosophizo away that simple proposition of a Divine
First Cause, which every child can comprehend, led
two of the greatest geniuses and profoundest reasoners
of modern times — La Place and La Marck.* Certainly,
the more you examine those arch phantasmagorists, the
philosophers who would leave nothing in the universe
but their own delusions, the more your intellectual
pride may be humbled. The wildest phenomena which
have startled you, are not more extravagant than the
grave explanations which intellectual presumption
adventures on the elements of our own organism and
the relations between the world of matter and the world
of ideas.”
Here our conversation stopped, for Amy had now
joined us, and, looking up to reply, I saw the child’s
innocent face between me and the furrowed face of the
old man.
CHAPTER LXXII.
I TURNED back alone. The sun was reddening the
summits of the distant mountain-range, but dark clouds,
that portende'd rain, were gathering behind my way
and deepening the shadows in many a. chasm and hollow
-which volcanic ﬁres had wrought on the surface of up
lauds undulating like diluvian billows ﬁxed into stone
* See the observations on La Place and La Merck in the Intro-
duction to Kirby’s Bridgewater Treatise.


A sraaues sroav. 199
in the midst of their stormy swell. I wandered on and
away from the beaten track, absorbed in thought.
Could I acknowledge in Julius Faber’s conjectures any
basis for logical ratiocination? or were they not the
ingenious fancies of that imperial Philosophy of Senti-
ment by which the aged, in the decline of severer
faculties, sometimes assimilate their theories to the
hazy romance of youth? I can well conceive that the
story I tell will be regarded by most as a wild and
fantastic fable; that by some it may be considered a
vehicle for guesses at various riddles of Nature, without
or within us, which are free to the license of romance,
though forbidden to the caution of science. But, I—I
——know unmistakably my own identity, my own posi-
tive place in a substantial universe. And beyond that
knowledge, what do I know? Yet had Faber no
ground for his startling parallels between the chimeras
of superstition and the alternatives to faith volunteered
by the metaphysical speculations of knowledge? On
the theorems of Condillac, I, in common with number-
less contemporaneous students (for, in my youth, Con,
dillac held sway in the schools, as new, driven forth
from the schools, his opinions ﬂoat loose through the
talk and the scribble of men of the world, who perhaps
never opened his page)-on the theorems of Condillac
I had built up a system of thought designed to immure
the swathed form of material philosophy from all rays
and all sounds of the world not material, as the Walls
of some blind mausoleum shut out, from the mummy


200 A s'raanon sroar.
Within the whisper of winds, and the gleaming of
stars.
And did not these very theorems, when carried out
to their strict and completing results ‘ by the close
reasoning of Hume, resolve my own living identity, the
one conscious indivisible ME, into a bundle of memories
derived from the senses which had bubbled and duped
my experience, and reduce into a phantom, as spectral
As that of the Luminous Shadow, the whole solid frame
of creation?
While pondering these questions, the storm whose
forewarnings I had neglected to heed, burst forth with
suddenness peculiar to the Australian climes. The
rains descended like the rushing of ﬂoods. In the beds
of watercourses, which, at noon, seemed dried up and
exhausted, the torrents began to swell and to rave; the
gray crags around them were animated into living
waterfalls. I looked round, and the landscape was as
changed as a scene that replaces a scene on the player’s -
stage. I was aware that I had wandered far from my
home, and I knew not what direction I should take to
regain it. Close at hand, and raised above the torrents
that now rushed in many a gully and tributary creek,
around and before me, the mouth of a deep cave, over-
grown with bushes and creeping ﬂowers tossed wildly
to and fro between the rain from above and the spray
of cascades below, offered a shelter from the storm. I
entered; scaring innumerable ﬂocks of bats striking
against me, blinded by the glare of the lightning that


A s'raanoa sroav. 201
followed me into the cavern, and hastening to re-settle
themselves on the pendants of stalactites, or the jagged
buttresses of primaeval wall.
From time to time the lightning darted into the gloom
and lingered amongst its shadows; 'and I saw, by the
dash, that the ﬂoors on which I stood were strewn
with strange bones, some amongst them the fossilized
relics of races destroyed by the Deluge. The rain con-
tinued for more than two hours with unabated violence;
then it Ceased almost as suddenly as it had come on.
And the lustrous moon 'of Australia burst from the
clouds, shining, bright as an English dawn, into the
bellows of the cave. And then simultaneously arose
all the choral songs of the wilderness—creatures whose
voices are heard at night—the loud hirr of the locusts,
the musical boom of the bullfrog, the cuckoo note of the
morepork, and, mournful amidst all those merrier sounds,
the boot of the owl, through the wizard she-oaks and the
pale green of the gum-trees.
I stepped forth into the open air and gazed, ﬁrst
instinctively on the heavens, next with more heedful
eye, upon the earth. The nature of the soil bore the
evidence of volcanic ﬁres long since extinguished. J ust
before my feet, the rays fell full upon a bright yellow
streak in the block of quartz half embedded in the soit
moist soil. In the midst of all the solemn thoughts and
the intense sorrows Jvhich weighed upon heart and
mind, that yellow gleam startled the mind into a direc-
tion remote from philosophy. quickened the heart to a


202 A sraanon sroaY.
beat that chimed with no household affections. In-
voluntarily I stooped; impulsively I struck the block
with the hatchet, or tomahawk, I carried habitually
about me, for the purpose of marking the trees that I
wished to clear from the waste of my broad domain
The quartz was shattered by the stroke, and left dis
buried its glittering treasure. My ﬁrst glance had not
deceived me. I, vain seeker after knowledge, had, at
least, discovered gold. I took up the bright metal—
goldl I paused; I looked round; the land that just
before had seemed to me so worthless, took the value
of Ophir. Its features had before been as unknown to
me as the Mountains of the Moon, and now my memory
became wonderfully quickened. I recalled the rough
map of my possessions, the ﬁrst careless ride round
their boundaries. Yes, the land on which I stood-for
miles, to the spur of those farther mountains— the land
was mine, and, beneath its surface there was gold! I
closed my eyes; for some moments, visions of bound-
less wealth, and of the royal power which suchpwealth
could command, swept athwart my brain. But my
heart rapidly settled back to its real treasure. " What
matters,” I sighed, “all this dross? Could Ophir itself
buy back to my Lilian’s smile one ray of the light which
gave ‘glory to the grass and splendor to the ﬂower?"’
So muttering, I ﬂung the gold into the torrent that
raged below, and went on through the moonlight,
sorrowing silently-only thankful for the discovery
that had quickened my reminiscence of the land-


A STRANGE STORY. _ 203
marks by which to steer my way through the
wilderness.
The night was half gone, for even when I had gained
the familiar track through the pastures, the swell of the
many winding creeks that now intersected the way
obliged me often to retrace my steps; to ﬁnd, some-
times, the bridge of a felled tree which had been provi-
dently left unremoved over the now foaming torrent,
and, more than once, to swim across the current, in
which swimmers less strong or less practised would
have been dashed down the falls, where loose logs and
torn trees went clattering and whirled: for I was in
danger of life. A band of the savage natives were
stealthin creeping on my track—the natives in those
parts were not then so much awed by the white man
as now. A boomerang* had whirred by me, burying
itself amongst the herbage close before my feet. I had
turned, sought to ﬁnd and to face these dastardly foes;
they contrived to elude me. But when I moved on,
my ear, sharpened by danger, heard them moving, too,
in my rear. Once only three hideous forms suddenly
faced me, springing up from a thicket, all tangled with
noneysuckles and creepers of blue and vermilion. I
walked steadily up to them; they halted a moment or
so in suspense, but perhaps they were scared by my
stature or awed by my aspect; and the Unfamiliar,
though Human, had terror for them, as the Unfamiliar,
although but a Shadow, had had terror for me. They
* A missile weapon peculiar to the Australian savages.


204 A STRANGE sroav.
vanished, and as quickly as though they had crept into
the earth. I
At length the air brought me the soft perfume of my
well-known acacias, and my house stood before me,
amidst English ﬂowers and English fruit-trees, under
the eﬂ'ulgent Australian moon. Just as I was opening
the little gate which gave access from the pasture-land
into the garden, a ﬁgure in white rose up from under
light, feathery boughs, and a hand was laid on my arm.
I started; but my surprise was changed into fear when
I saw the pale face and sweet eyes of Lilian.
“Heavens! you here! you! at this hour! Lilian,
what is this I”
“ Hush 1” she whispered, clinging to me; “ hushl do
not tell: no one knows. I missed you when the storm
came on; I have missed you ever since. Others went
in search of you and came back. I could not sleep, but
the rest are sleeping, so I stole down to watch for you.
Brother, brother, if any harm chanced to you, even the
angels could not comfort me ; all would be dark, dark!
But you are safe, safe, safe 1” And she clung to me
yet closer.
“Ahl Lilian, Lilian, your vision in the hour I ﬁrst
beheld you was indeed prophetic— ‘Each has need of
the other.’ Do you remember ?”
“ Softly, softly,” she said,_ “let me think 1” She
stood quietly by my side, looking up into the sky, wiih
all its numberless stars, and its solitary moon now sink-
ing slow behind the verge of the forest. “It comes


A s'raasos sronr. 205
back to me,” she murmured softly—“the Long ago—
the sweet Long ago 1”
- I held my breath to listen.
“There—there 1” she resumed, pointing to the
heavens; “ do you see ? You are there, and my father,
and — and — Oh I that terrible face - those serpent
eyes—the dead man’s skulll Save me—save me!”
She bowed her head upon my bosom, and I led her
gently back towards the house. As we gained the
door which she had left open, the starlight shining
across the shadowy gloom within, she lifted her face
from my breast, and cast a hurried, fearful look round
the shining garden, then into the dim recess beyond the
threshold. 0
“ It is there —therel—-the Shadow that lured me
on, whispering that if I followed it I should join my
beloved. False, dreadful Shadow! it will fade soon-
fade into the grinning, horrible skull. Brother, brother,
where is my Allen? Is he dead-.dead—or is it I
who am dead to him Y”
I could but clasp her again to my breast, and seek to
mantle her shivering form with my dripping garments,
all the while my eyes- following the direction which
hers had taken —dwelt on the walls of the nook within
the threshold, half lost in darkness, half white in star-
light. -And there I, too, beheld the haunting Luminous
Shadow, the spectral eﬂigies of the mysterious being,
whose very existence in the ﬂesh was a riddle unsolved
by my reason. Distinctly I saw the Shadow, but its
11. — 18


206 A STRANGE sroav.
' light was far paler, its outline far more vague, than
when I had beheld it before. I took courage, as I felt
Lilian’s heart beating against my own. I advanced, I-
crossedthe threshold - the Shadow was gone.
“There is no Shadow here—no phantom to daunt
thee, my life’s life,” said I, bending over Lilian.
“It has touched me in passing; I feel it—cold, cold,
cold!” she answered, faintly.
I bore her to her room, placed her on her bed, struck
a light, watched over her. At dawn there was a change
in her face, and from that time health gradually left her;
strength slowly, slowly, yet to me perceptibly, ebbed
from her life away.

CHAPTER LXXIIl.
Mourns upon months have rolled on since the night
in which Lilian had watched for my coming amidst the
chilling airs under the haunting moon. I have said
that from the date of that night her health began
gradually to fail, but in her mind there was evidently
at work some slow revolution. Her visionary abstrac-
tions were less frequent; when they occurred, less
prolonged. There was no longer in her soft face that
celestial serenity which spoke her content in her dreams,
but often a look of anxiety and trouble. She was even
more silent than before; but when she did speak, there
were now evident some struggling gleams of memory.


A s'rnaxoa s'roav. 209
of those over whom they have forced a control? I
know not. But if they have, it is not supernatural; it
it is but one of those operations in Nature so rare and
exceptional, and of which testimony and evidence are
so imperfect and so liable to superstitious illusions, that
they have not yet been traced—as, if truthful, no doubt
they can be, by the patient genius of science—to one
of those secondary causes by which the Creator ordains
that Nature shall act on Man.”
By degrees I became dissatisﬁed with my conversa-
tions with Faber. I yearned for explanations; all
guesses but bewildered me more. In his family, with
one exception, I found no congenial association. His
nephew seemed to me an ordinary specimen of a very
trite human nature—a young man of limited ideas, fair
moral tendencies, going mechanically right where not
tempted to wrong. The same desire of gain which had
urged him to gamble and speculate when thrown in
societies rife with such example, led him, now in the
Bush, to healthful, industrious, persevering labor. Spes
fovet agricolas, says the poet; the same Hope which
entices the ﬁsh to the hook, impels the plough of the
husbandman. The young farmer’s young wife was
somewhat superior to him; she had more reﬁnement of
taste, more culture of mind, but living in his life, she
was inevitably levelled to his ends and pursuits. And,
next to the babe in the cradle, no object seemed to her
so important as that of guarding the sheep from the
scab and the dingoes. I was amazed to see how quietly a
18 * o


210 A STRANGE STORY.
man whose mind was so stored by life and books as that
of Julius Faber—a man who had loved the clash of con-
ﬂicting intellects, and acquired the rewards of fame—
could accommodate himself to the cabined range of his
kinsfolks’ half-civilized existence, take interest in their
trivial talk, ﬁnd varying excitement in the monotonous
household of a peasant-like farmer. I could not help
saying as much to him once. “ My friend,” replied the
old man, “believe me that the happiest art of intellect,
however lofty, is that which enables it to be cheerfully
at home with the Real l” .
The only one of the family in which Faber was
domesticated in whom I found an interest, to whose
talk I could listen without fatigue, was the child Amy.
Simple though she was in language, patient of labor as
the most laborious, I recognized in her a quiet noble-
ness of sentiment, which exalted above the common-
place the acts of her commonplace life. She had no
precocious intellect, no enthusiastic fancies, but she had
an exquisite activity of heart. It was her heart that
animated her sense of duty, and made duty a sweetness
and a joy. She felt to he core the kindness of those
around her; exaggerated, with) the warmth of her
gratitude, the claims which that kindness imposed.
Even for the blessing of life, which she shared with all
creation, she felt as if singled out by the undeserved
favor of the Creator, and thus was ﬁlled with religion
because she was ﬁlled with love.
My interest in this child wasincreased and deepened


A srsascz s'roav. 211
by my saddened and not wholly unremorseful remem-
brance of the night on which her sobs had pierced my
ear—the night from which I secretly dated the mys-
terious agencies that had wrenched from their proper
ﬁeld and career both my mind and my life. But a
gentler interest endeared her to my thoughts in the
pleasure that Lilian felt in her visits, in the affectionate
intercourse that sprung up between the afﬂicted sufferer
and the harmless infant. Often when we failed to com-
prehend some meaning which Lilian evidently wished
to convey to us—we, her mother and her husband—
she was understood with as much ease by Amy, the
unlettered child, as by Faber, the grey-haired thinker.
“ How is it—how is it?” I asked impatiently and
jealously, of Faber: “Love is said to interpret where
wisdom fails, and you, yourself, talk of the marvels
which sympathy may eﬁ'ect between lover and beloved;
yet when, for days together, I cannot succeed in unrav-
elling Lilian’s wish or her thought—and her own
mother is equally in fault—you or Amy, closeted alone
with her for ﬁve minutes, comprehend and are com-
prehended.”
“Allen,” answered Faber, “Amy and I believe ln
spirit, and she, in whom mind is dormant but spirit
awake, feels in such belief a sympathy which she has not,
in that respect, with yourself nor even with her mother.
You seek only through your mind to conjecture hers.
Her mother has sense clear enough where habitual
experience can guide it, but that sense is confused. and


212 A STRANGE s'roaY.
forsakes her when forced from the regular pathway in
which it has been accustomed to tread. Amy and I,
through soul guess at soul, and though mostly con-
tented with earth, we can both rise at times into heaven.
We pray.” I
“Alas!” said I, half mournfully, half angrily: “ when
you thus speak of Mind as distinct from Soul, it was
only in that Vision which you bid me regard as the
illusion of a fancy stimulated by chemical vapors, pro-
ducing on the brain an effect similar to that of opium or
the inhalation of the oxide gas, that I have ever seen
the silver spark of the Sou-l, distinct from the light of
the Mind. And holding, as I do, that all intellectual
ideas are derived from the experiences of the body,
whether I accept the theory of Locke, or that of Condil-
lac, or that into which their propositions reach their
ﬁnal development in the wonderful subtlety of Hume, I
cannot detect the immaterial spirit in the material sub-
stance—much less follow its escape from the organic
matter in which the principle of thought ceases with
the principle of life. When the metaphysician, contend-
ing for the immortality of the thinking faculty, analyzes
Mind, his analysis comprehends the mind of the brute,
nay, of the insect, as Well as that of man. Take Reid’s
deﬁnition of Mind, as the most comprehensive which I
can at the moment remember: ‘By the mind of a man
we understand that in him which thinks, remembers,
reasons, and wills.’ But this deﬁnition only distin-
guishes the mind of man from that of the brute by


a srsascz areas. 213
superiority in the same attributes, and not by attributes
denied to the brute. An animal, even an insect, thinks,
remembers, reasons, and wills.* Few naturalists will
now support the doctrine that all the mental operations
of brute or insect are to be exclusively referred to
instincts; and, even if they do, the word instinct is a
very vague word --loose and large enough to cover an
abyss which our knowledge has not sounded. And,
indeed, in proportion as an animal, like the dog, becomes
cultivated by intercourse, his instincts grow weaker,
and his ideas, formed by experience (viz., his mind),
more developed, often to the conquest of the instincts
themselves. Hence, with his usual candor, Dr. Aber-
crombie-in contending ‘that everything mental ceases
to exist after death, when we know that everything cor-
4' “Are intelligence and instinct, thus differing in their rela-
tive proportion in man as compared with all other animals, yet
the same in kind and manner of operation in both? To this
question we must give at once an aﬁirmative answer. The
expression of Cuvier, regarding the faculty of reasoning in lower
animals, ‘Leur intelligence execute des operations du meme
genre,’ is true in its full sense. We can in no manner deﬁne
reason-so as to exclude acts which are at every moment present
to our observation, and which we ﬁnd in many instances to con-
travene the natural instincts of the species. The demeanor and
acts of the dog in reference to his master, or the various uses to
which he is put by man, are as strictly logical as those we wit-
ness in the ordinary transactions of life.”—(Sir Henry llolland,
chapters on Mental Physiology, p. 220.) The whole of the
chapter on Instincts and Habits in this work should be read in
connection with the passage just quoted. The work itself, at
once cautious and suggestive, is not one of the least obligations
which philosophy and religion alike owe to the lucubrations of
English medical men.


A s'rnasos near. 215
very subject; in which certainly More has the best of
it when Descartes insists on reducing what he calls the
soul (Prime) of brutes, into the same kind of machines
as man constructs from inorganized matter. The learn-
ing, indeed, lavished on the insoluble question involved
in the psychology of the inferior animals, is a proof at
least of the all-inquisitive, redundant spirit of man.*
We have almost a literature in itself devoted to en-
deavors to interpret the language of brutes.1' Dupont
de Nemours has discovered that dogs talk in vowels,
using only two consonants, a, z, when they are angry.
He asserts that cats employ the same vowels as dogs;
but their language is more aﬂiuent in consonants,
including M, N, B, R, v, F. How many laborious eﬂ‘orts
have been made to deﬁne and to construe the song of
the nightingale! One version of that song by Beck-
stein, the naturalist, published in 1840, I remember to
have seen. And I heard a lady, gifted with a singu-
larly charming voice, chant the mysterious vowels with
so exquisite a pathos, that one could not refuse to
believe her when she declared that she fully compre-
hended the bird’s meaning, and gave to the nightin-
*M. Tissot, the distinguished Professor of Philosophy at
Dijon, in his recent work, La Vie dans l’Homme, p. 255, gives a
long and illustrious list of philosophers who assign a rational
soul (ﬁme) to the inferior animals, though he truly adds, “ that
they have not always the courage of their opinion."
1- Some idea of the extent of research and imagination bestowed
on this subject may be gleaned from the sprightly work of Pier-
quin de Gemblous, Idiomologle ies Animaux, published at Paris,
l844-


216 A BTBA sen STORY.
gale’s warble the tender interpretation of her own
woman’s heart.
“ But leaving all such discussions to their proper
place amongst the Curiosities of Literature, I come in
earnest to the question you have so earnestly raised;
and to me the distinction between man and the lower
animals in reference to a spiritual nature designed for a
future existence, and the mental operations whose uses
are bounded to an existence on earth, seems ineﬂ‘ace-
ably clear. Whether ideas or even perceptions be
innate or all formed by experience is a speculation for
metaphysicians, which, so far as it aﬂ'ects the question
of an immaterial principle, I am quite willing to lay
aside. I can well understand that a materialist may
admit innate ideas in Man, as he must admit them in
the instinct of brutes, tracing them to hereditary predis-
positions. On the other hand, we know that the most
devout believers in our spiritual nature have insisted,
with Locke, in denying any idea, even of the Deity, to
be innate.
" But here comes my argument. I care not how ideas
are formed—the material point is, how are the capacities
-'o receive ideas formed! The ideas may all come from
experience, but the capacity to receive the ideas must
be inherent. I take the word capacity as a good, plain
English word, rather than the more technical word,
‘receptivity,’ employed by Kant. And by capacity I
mean the passive power * to receive ideas, whether in
“ Faculty is active power: capacity is passive poer."-Sir W.
Hamilton, Lectures on Metaphysics and Logic, vol. i. p. 178.


A STRANGE STORY. all
man or in any living thing by which ideas are received.
A man and an elephant is each formed with capacities
to receive ideas suited to the several places in the uni-
verse held by each.
“ The more I look through nature, the more I \ﬁnd
that on all varieties of organized life is carefully be-
stowed the capacity to receive the impressions, be they
called perceptions or ideas, which are adapted to the
uses each creature is intended to derive from them. I
ﬁnd, then, that Man alone is endowed with the capacity
to receive the ideas of a God, of Soul, of Worship, of a
Hereafter. I see no trace of such a capacity in the
inferior races; nor, howcver their intelligence may be
reﬁned by culture,,is such capacity ever apparent in
them.
“ But wherever capacities to receive impressions are
suﬂicieutly general in any given species of creature to
be called universal to that species, and yet not given
to another species, then, from all analogy throughout
Nature, those capacities are surely designed by Provi-
dence for the distinct use and conservation of the species
to which they are given. ‘
“ It is no answer to me to say that the inherent
capacities thus bestowed on Man do not sufﬁce in them-
selves to make him form right notions of a Deity or a
Hereafter; because it is plainly the design of Provi-
dence that Man must learn to correct and improve all
his notions by his own study and observation. He must
build a but before he can build a Parthenon; he must
ll.—l9 


218 a crimson s'roar.
believe with the savage or the heathen before he can
believe with the philosopher or Christian. In a word,
in all his capacities Man has only given to him, not the
immediate knowledge of the Perfect, but the means to
strive towards the Perfect. And thus one of the most
accomplished of modern reasoners, to whose lectures
you must have listened with delight in your college
days, says well: ‘Accordingly, the sciences always
studied with keenest interest are those in a state of
progress and uncertainty; absolute certainty and abso-
lute completion would be the paralysis of any study,
and the last worst calamity that could befall Man, as
he is at present constituted, would be that full and
ﬁnal possession of speculative truth which he now vainly
anticipates as the consummation of his intellectual hap-
piness."l
“Well, then, in all those capacities’for the reception
of impressions from external Nature which are given
to Man, and not to the brutes, I see the evidence of
Man’s Soul. I can understand why the inferior animal
has no capacity to receive the idea of a Deity and of
\Vorship-simply because the inferior animal, even if
graciously admitted to a- future life, may not therein
preserve the sense of its identity. I can understand
even why that sympathy with each other which we
men possess, and which constitutes the great virtue we
emphatically call Humanity, is not possessed by the
lesser animals (or, at least, in a very rare and ex
* Sir W. Hamilton’s Lectures, vol. i. p. 10.


a srnaaos near. 219
ceptional degree) even where they live in communities,
like beavers, or bees, or ants; because men are destined
to meet, to know, and to love each other in the life to
come, and the bond between the brutes ceases here.
“ Now the more, then, we examine the inherent
capacities bestowed distinctly and solely on Man, the
more they seem to distinguish him from the other races
by their comprehension of objects beyond his life upon
this earth. ‘Man alone,’ says Miiller, ‘can conceive
abstract notions;’ and it is in abstract notions—such
as time, space, matter, spirit, light, form, quantity,
essence~that man grounds, not only all philosophy,
all science, but all that practically improves one gene-
ration for the beneﬁt of the next. And why? Because
all these abstract notions unconsciously lead the mind
away from the material into the immaterial—from the
present into the future. But if man ceases to exist
when he disappears in the grave, you must be compelled
to afﬁrm that he is the only creature in existence whom
Nature or Providence has condescended to deceive and
cheat by capacities for which there are no available
objects. How nobly and how truly has Chalmers said:
_ 'Wbat inference shall we draw from this remarkable
law in Nature, that there is nothing waste and nothing
meaningless in the feelings and faculties wherewith
living creatures are endowed? For each desire there
is a counterpart object; for each faculty there is room
and opportunity for exercise, either in the present or
the coming futurity. Now, but for the doetrine of im-


220 A srnanea no“.
mortality, Man would be an exception to this law—he
would stand forth‘ as an anomaly in Nature, with aspi~
rations in his heart for which the universe had no anti-
type to oﬁ'er, with capacities of understanding and
thought that never were to be followed by objects of
corresponding greatness through the whole history of
his being!
a: a a: a a:
“ ‘With the inferior animals there is a certain square-
‘ness of adjustment, if we may so term it, between each
desire and its correspondent gratiﬁcation. The one is
evenly met by the other, and there is a fullness and
deﬁniteness of enjoyment up to the capacity of enjoy-
ment. Not so with Man who, both from the vastness
of his propensities and the vastness of his powers, feels
himself chained and beset in a ﬁeld too narrow for him.
He alone labors under the discomfort of an incongruity
between his circumstances and his powers; and unless
there be new circumstances awaiting him in a more
advanced state of being, he, the noblest of Nature’s
products here, would turn out to be the greatest of her
failures.’ *
“ This, then, I take to be the proof of Soul in Man,
not that he has afmind—because, as you justly say,
* Chalmer’s, Bridgewater Treatise, vol. ii. pp. 28, 80. Perhaps
I should observe, that here and elsewhere in the dialogues between
Faber and Fenwick, it has generally been thought better to sub-
stitute the words of the author quoted for the mere outline or
purport of the quotation which memory aﬂ‘orded to the inter-
looutor.


A s'raauea STORY. 221
Inferior animals have that, though in a lesser degree—
but because he has the capacities to comprehend, as
soon as he is capable of any abstract ideas whatsoever,
the very truths not needed for self-conservation on
I earth, and therefore not given to yonder 0x and opossum
-—-viz., the nature of Deity—Soul—Hereafter. And
in the recognition of these truths, the Human society,
that excels the society of beavers, bees, and ants, by
perpetual and progressive improvement on the notions
inherited from its progenitors, rests its basis. Thus, in
fact, this world is beneﬁted for men by their belief in
the next, while the society of brutes remains age after
age the same. Neither the bee nor the beaver has, in
all probability, improved since the Deluge.
“But, inseparable from the conviction of these truths
is the impulse of prayer and worship. It does not touch
my argument when a philosopher of the school of Bo-
lingbroke or Lucretius says, ‘that the origin of prayer
is in Man’s ignorance of the phenomena of Nature ;’
that it is fear or ignorance which, ‘when rocked the
mountains or when groaned the ground, taught the
weak to bend, the proud to pray,’-—my answer is, the
brutes are much more forcibly impressed by natural
phenomena than Man is; the bird and the beast know.
before you and I do when the mountain will rock and
the ground groan, and their instinct leads them to shel-
ter; but it does not lead them to prayer. If my theory
be right that Soul is to be sought not in the question
whether mental ideas be innate or formed by experi-
19'


224 A s'rnases s'ronr.
sitics of its Divine wisdom, and substitute for a benig-
nant Deity a relentless Fate. But here I should exceed
my province. I am no theologian. Enough for me
that in all my aﬁlictions, all my 'perplexities, an impulse,
that I obey as an instinct, moves me at once to prayer.
Do I ﬁnd by experience that the prayer is heard, that
the afﬂiction is removed, the doubt is solved? That,
indeed would be presumptuous to say. But it is not
presumptuous to think that by the efﬁcacy of prayer
my heart becomes more fortiﬁed against the sorrow,
and my reason more serene amidst the doubt.”
I listened, and 'ceased to argue. I felt as if in that
solitude, and in the pause of my wonted mental occupa-
tion, my intellect was growing languid, and its old
weapons rusting in disuse. My pride took alarm. I
had so from my boyhood cherished the idea of fame,
and so gloriﬁed the search after knowledge, that I re-
coiled in dismay from the thought that I had relin~
quished knowledge, and out myself off from fame. I
resolved to resume my once favorite philosophical pur-
suits, re-examine and complete the Work to which I
had once committed my hopes of renown; and, simulta-
neously, a restless desire seized me to communicate,
though but at brief intervals, with other minds than
those immediately within my reach -minds fresh from
the old world, and reviving the memories of its vivid
civilization. Emigrants frequently passed my doors,
but I had hitherto shrunk from tendering the hospital-
ities so universally accorded in the colony. I could not


A STRANGE STORY. 225
endure to expose to such rough strangers my Lilian’s
mournful aﬂiiction, and that thought was not less intol-
erable to Mrs. Ashleigh. I now hastily constructed a
log-building a few hundred yards from the house, and
near the main track taken by travellers through the
spacious pastures. I transported to this building my
books and scientiﬁc instruments. In an upper story I
placed my telescope and lenses, my crucibles and retorts.
I renewed my chemical experiments—I sought to
invigorate my mind by other branches of science which
I had hitherto less cultured-meditated new theories
on Light and Color—collected specimens in Natural
History—subjected animalcules to my microscope-
geological fossils to my hammer. With all these quick-
ened occupations of thought, I strove to distract myself
from sorrow, and strengthen my reason against the illu-
sions of my phantasy. The Luminous Shadow was
not seen again on my wall, and the thought of Mar-
grave himself was banished.
In this building I passed many hours of each day;
more and more earnestly plunging my thoughts into the
depths of abstract study, as Lilian’s unaccountable dis-
like to my presence became more and more decided
When I thus ceased to think that my life cheered and
comforted hers, my heart’s occupation was gone. I had
annexed to the apartment reserved for myself in this
log-hut a couple of spare rooms, in which I could
accommodate passing strangers. I learned to look for-
ward to their coming with interest, and to see them
P
I


226 A s'raasos s'roar.
depart with regret; yet, for the most part, they Were
of the ordinary class of colonial adventurers: bankrupt
tradesmen, unlucky farmers, forlorn mechanics, hordes
of unskilled laborers, now and then a brieﬂess barrister,
or a sporting collegian who had- lost his all on the
Derby. One day, however, a young man of education
and manners that unmistakably proclaimed the cultured
gentleman of Europe, stopped at my door. He was a
cadet of a noble Prussian family, which for some politi-
cal reasons had settled itself in Paris; there he had
become intimate with young French nobles, and, living
the life of a young French noble, had soon scandalized
his German parents, forestalled his slender inheritance,
and been compelled to ﬂy his father’s frown and his
tailor’s bills. All this he told me with a lively frank-
ness which proved how much the wit of a German can
be quickened in the atmosphere of Paris. An old
college friend, of birth inferior to his own, had been as
unfortunate in seeking to make money as this young
prodigal had been an adept in spending it. The friend,
a few years previously, had accompanied other Germans
in a migration to Australia, and was already thriving;
the spendthrift noble was on his way to join the bank-
rupt trader, at a German settlement ﬁfty miles distant
from my house. This young man was unlike any
German I ever met. He had all the exquisite levity by
which the well-bred Frenchman gives to the doctrines
of the Cynic the grace of the Epicurean. He owned
himself to be good for nothing with an elegance of can.


A STRANGE srosv. 227
dor which not only disarmed censure, but seemed to
challenge admiration; and, withal, the happy spend-
thrift was so inebriate with hope -sure that he should
be rich before he was thirty. How and wherefore rich?
—he could have no more explained than I can square
the circle. When the grand serious German naturo
does Frenchify itself, it can become so extravagantly
French!
I listened, almost enviously, to this light-hearted
proﬂigate’s babble, as we sat by my rude ﬁreside—I,
sombre man of science and sorrow, be, smiling child of
idlesse and pleasure, so much one of Nature’s courtier-
like nobles, that there, as he smoked his villanous pipe,
in his dust-soiled shabby garments, and with his ruﬂianly
revolver stuck into his belt, I would defy the daintiest
Aristarch who ever presided as critic over the holiday
world not to have said, “ There smiles the genius be-
yond my laws, the burn darling of the Graces, who in
every circumstance, in every age, like Aristippus, would
have socially charmed— would have been welcome to
the orgies of a Caesar or a Clodius, to the boudoirs of a
Montespan or a Ponipadour— have lounged through the
Mulberry Gardens with a Rochester and a Buckingham,
or smiled from the death-cart, with a Richelieu and a
Lauzun, a gentleman’s disdain of a mob l ”
I was so thinking as we sat, his light talk frothing up
from his careless lips, when suddenly from the spray
and the sparkle of that light talk was ﬂung forth the
name of Margrave.


228 A sraazvoa- s'roav. .
“ Margrave l” I eXclaimed. “ Pardon me. What
of him?”
“ What of lel I asked if, by chance, you knew the
only lEnglishman I ever had the meanness to envy?”
“ Perhaps you speak of one person, and I thought of
another.”
“Pardieu, my dear host, there can scarcely be two
Margravesl The one of whom I speak ﬂashed 'like a
meteor upon Paris, bought from a prince of the Bourse
a palace that might have lodged a prince of the blood-
royal, eclipsed our Jew bankers in splendor, our jetmesse
dorée in good looks and hair-brain adventures, and,
strangest of all, ﬁlled his salons with philosophers and
charlatans, chemists and spirit-rappers; insulting the
gravest dons of the schools by bringing them face to
face with the most impudent quacks, the most ridiculous
dreamers—and yet, withal, himself so racy and charm-
ing, so bon prince, so bon enfant 1 For six months he
was the rage at Paris; perhaps he might have continued
to be the rage there for six years, but all at once the
meteor vanished as suddenly as it had ﬂashed. Is this
the Margrave whom you know?”
“I should not have thought the Margrave whom I
knew could have reconciled his tastes to the life of
cities.”
“ Nor could this man; cities were too tame for him.
He has gone to some far-remote wilds in the East-.-
some say in-search of the Philosopher’s Stone; for he
actually maintained in his house a Sicilian adventurer.


A star/mon STORY. 229
who, when at work on that famous discovery, was
stiﬂed by the fumes of his [own crucible. After that
misfortune Margrave took Paris in disgust, and we lost
him.”
“So this is the only Englishman whom you envy!
Envy him? Why ? ”
“ Because he is the only Englishman I ever met who
contrived to 'be rich and yet free from the spleen; I
envied him because one had only to look at his face and
see how thoroughly he enjoyed the life of which your
countrymen seem to be so heartily tired! But now
that I have satisﬁed your curiosity, pray satisfy mine.
Who and what is this Englishman?”
“ Who and what was be supposed at Paris to be i ”
“ Conjectures were numberless. One of your country-
men suggested that which was most generally favored.
This gentleman, whose name I forget, but who was one
of those old roués who fancy themselves young because
they live with the young, no sooner set eyes upon Mar-
grave, than he exclaimed, ‘Louis Grayle come to life
again, as I saw him forty-four years ago! But no—
still younger, still handsomer—it must be his son I ’"
“ Louis Grayle who was said to be murdered at
Aleppo ? ”
“ The same. That strange old man was enormously
rich; but it seems that he hated his lawful heirs, and
left behind him a fortune so far below that which he
was known to possess, that he must certainly have dis~
posed of it secretly before his death. Why so dispose
1I.—20


230 A STRANGE arm“.
of it, if not to enrich some natural son, whom, for
private reasons, he might not have wished to acknowl-
edge, or point out to the world by the signal bequest of
his will? All that Margrave ever said of himself and
the source of his wealth conﬁrmed this belief. He
frankly proclaimed himself a natural son, enriched _by a
father whose name he knew not nor cared to know.”
“It is true. And Margrave quitted Paris for the
East. When Y”
“ I can tell you the date within a day or two, for his
ﬂight preceded mine by a week; and, happily, all Paris
was so busy in talking of it, that I slipped away with-
out notice.”
And the Prussian then named a date which it thrilled
me to hear, for it was in that very month, and about
that very day, that the Luminous Shadow had stood
within my threshold.
The young Count now struck off into other subjects
of talk: nothing more was said of Margrave. An hour
or two afterwards he went on his way, and I remained
long gazing musingly on the embers of the ﬁre dying
low on my hearth.


A s'raasos near. 231
CHAPTER LXXIV.
MY Work, my Philosophical Work—the ambitious
hope of my intellectual life—how eagerly I returned
to it againl Far away from my household grief, far
away from my haggard perplexities—neither a Lilian
nor a Margrave there!
As I went over what I had before written, each link
in its chain of reasoning seemed so serried, that to alter
one were to derange all: and the whole reasoning was
so opposed to the possibility of the wonders I myself
had experienced, so hostile to the subtle hypotheses of
a Faber, or the childlike belief of an Amy, that I must
have destroyed the entire work if I had admitted such
contradictions to its designl
But the Work was I myselfl—I, in my solid, sober,
healthful mind, before the brain had been perplexed by
a phantom. Were phantoms to be allowed as testi-
monies against science ? No; in returning to my Book,
I returned to my former Mel -
How strange is that contradiction between our being
as man and our being as Author! Take any writer
enamored of a system —— a- thousand things may happen
to him every day which might shake his faith in that
system; and while he moves about as mere man, his .
faith is shaken. But when he settles himself back into
the phase of his being as author, the more not of taking


232 A summer. s'roaY.
pen in hand and smoothing the paper before him, restores
his speculations to their ancient mechanical train. The
system, the beloved system, re-asserts its tyrannic
sway, and be either ignores, or moulds into fresh proofs
of his theory as author, all which, an hour before, had
given his theory the lie in his living perceptions as
man.
I adhered to my system;_I continued my work.
Here, in the barbarous desert, was a link between me
and the Cities of Europe. All else might break down
under me. The love I had dreamed of was blotted out
from the world and might never be restored; my heart
might be lonely, my life be an exile’s. My reason
might, at last, give way before the spectres which awed
my senses, or the sorrows which stormed my heart.
But here, at least, was a monument of my rational
thoughtful Me -of my individualized identity in multi-
form creation. And my mind, in the noon of its force,
would shed its light on the earth when my form was
resolved to its elements. Alas! in this very yearning
for the Hereafter, though but the Hereafter of a Name,
could I see only the craving of Mind, and hear not the
whisper of Soul!
The evocation of a colonist, usually so active, had
little interest for me. This vast territorial lordship, in
which, could I have endeared its possession by the
.hopes that animate a Founder, I should have felt all
the zest and the pride of ownership, was but the run
of a commonto the passing emigrant, who would leave


A STRANGE away. 233
no son to inherit the tardy products of his labor. I
was not goaded to industry by 'the stimulus of need.
I could only be ruined if I risked all my capital in the
attempt to improve. I lived, therefore, amongst my
fertile pastures, as careless of culture as the English
occupant of the Highland moor, which he rents for the
range of its solitudes.
I knew, indeed, that if ever I became avaricious, I
might swell my modest afﬂuence into absolute wealth.
I had revisited the spot in which I had discovered the
nugget of gold, and had found the precious metal in
rich abundance just under the ﬁrst coverings of the
alluvial soil. I concealed my discovery from all. I
knew that, did I proclaim it, the charm of my bush~
life would be gone. My ﬁelds would be infested by all
the wild adventurers who gather to gold as the vultures
of prey round a carcase; my servants would desert me,
my very ﬂocks would be shepherdlessl
Months again rolled on months. I had just ap-
proached the close of my beloved Work, when it was
again suspended, and by an a-nguish‘keener than all
which I had previously known.
Lilian became alarmingly ill. Her state of health,
long gradually declining, had hitherto admitted che-
quered intervals of improvement, and exhibited no
symptoms of actual danger. But now she was seized
with a kind of chronic fever, attended with absolute
privatiou of sleep, an aversion to even the lightest
nourishment, and an acute nervous susceptibility to all
20*


234 A STRANGE sroar.
the outward impressions of which she had long seemed
so unconscious; morbidly alive to the faintest sound,
shrinking from the light as from a torture. Her
previous impatience at my entrance into her room
became aggravated into vehement emotions, convulsive
paroxysms of distress; so that Faber banished me from
her chamber, and, with a heart bleeding at every ﬁbre,
I submitted to the cruel sentence. >
Faber had taken up his abode in my house and
brought Amy with him; one or the other never left
Lilian, night or day. The great physician spoke doubt-
fully of the case, but not despairingly.
“ Remember,” he said, “ that in spite of the want of
sleep, the abstinence from food, the form has not wasted
as it would do were this fever inevitably mortal. It is
upon that phenomenon I build a hope that I have not
been mistaken in the opinion 1 hazarded from the ﬁrst.
We are now in the midst of the critical struggle
between life and reason; if she preserve the one, my
conviction is that she will regain the other. That
seeming antipathy to yourself is a good omen. You
are inseparably associated with her intellectual world;
in proportion as she revives to it, must become vivid
and powerful the reminiscences of the shock that
annulled, for a time, that world to her. So I welcome,
rather than fear, the over-susceptibility of the awaken-
ing senses to external sights and sounds. A few days
will decide if I am right. In this climate the progress
of acute maladies is swift, but the recovery from them


A s'raanoa sworn. 235
is yet more startlingly rapid. Wait—endure—be
prepared to submit to the will of Heaven; but do not
despond of its mercy."
I rushed away from the consoler-away into the
thick of the forests, the heart of the solitude. All
around me, there, was joyous with life; the locust sang
amidst the herbage; the cranes gambolled on the banks
of the creek; the squirrel-like opossnms frolicked on
the feathery boughs. “And what,” said I to myself-
“ what if that which seems so fabulous in the distant
being whose existence has bewitched my own, be sub-
stantially true? What if to some potent medicament
Margrave owes his vitality, his radiant youth? Oh!
that I had not so disdainfully turned away from his
hinted solicitations—to whatf—to nothing guiltier
than lawful experiment. Had I been less devoted a
bigot to this vain schooleraft, which we call the Medical
Art, and which, alone in this age of science, has made
no perceptible progress since the days of its earliest
teachers—had I said, in the true humility of genuine
knowledge, ‘these alchemists were men of genius and
thought; we owe to them nearly all the grand hints of
our chemical science—is it likely that they would have
been wholly drivellers and idiots in the one faith they
clung to the most?’——had I said that, I might now
haVe no fear of losing my Lilian. Why, after all.
should there not be in Nature one primary essence, one
master substance, in which is stored the speciﬁc nutri-
ment of life ? ”


236 A s'rnansn s'roar.
Thus lncoherently muttering to the woods what my
pride of reason would not have suffered me gravely to
say to my fellow-men, I fatigued my tormented spirits
into a gloomy calm, and mechanically retraced my steps
at the decline of day. I seated myself at the door of
my solitary log-hut, leaning my cheek upon my hand,
and musing. Wearily I looked up, roused by a discord
of clattering hoofs and lumbering wheels on the hollow-
sonnding grass-track. A crazy, groaning vehicle, drawn
by four horses, emerged from the copse of gum-trees—
fast, fast along the road, which no such pompous vehicle
had traversed since that which had borne me—luxu-
rious satrap for an early colonist-to my lodge in the
wilderness. What emigrant rich enough to squander
in hire of such an equipage more than its cost in Eng-
land, could thus be entering on my waste domain ?
An ominious thrill shot through me.
The driver—perhaps some broken-down son of luxury
in the Old World, ﬁt for nothing in the New World but
to ply, for hire, the task that might have led to his ruin
when plied in sport—stopped at the door of my but,
and called out, “Friend, is not this the great Fenwick
Section, and is not yonder long pile of building the
Master’s house?”
Before I could answer I heard a faint voice, within
the vehicle, speaking to the driver; the last nodded,
descended from his seat, opened the carriage-door, and
offered his arm to a man, who, waving aside the prof<
fered aid, descended slowly and feebly; paused a mo-


A sraaxon sroav. 237
ment as if for breath, and then, leaning on his staff,
walked from the road, across the sward rank with
luxuriant herbage, through the little gate in the new-
set fragrant wattle-fence, wearily, languidly, halting
often, till he stood facing me, leaning both wan and
emaciated hands upon his staff, and his meagre form
shrinking deep within the folds of a cloak lined thick
with costly sables. His face was sharp, his complexion
of a livid yellow, his eyes shone out from their hollow
orbits, unnaturally enlarged and fatally bright. Thus,
in ghastly contrast _to his former splendor of youth and
opulence of life, Margrave stood before me. _ ’
“I come to you," said Margrave, in accents hoarse
and broken, from the shores of the East. Give me
shelter and rest. I have that to say which will more
than repay you.”
'Whatever, till that moment, my hate and my fear of
this unexpected visitant, hate would have been inhu-
manity, fear a meanness—Tchceived for a creature so
awfully stricken down.
Silently, involuntarily, I led him into the house.
,There he rested a few minutes, with closed eyes and
painful-gasps for breath. Meanwhile, the driver brought
from the carriage a travelling-bag and a small wooden
chest or coﬂ'er, strongly banded with iron clamps.
Margrave, looking up as the man drew near, exclaimed
ﬁercely, “Who told you to touch that chest? How
dare you? Take it from that man, Fenwickl Place it
here—here by my side l ”


238 a s‘rnnson s'ronv.
I took the chest from the driver, whose rising anger,
at being so imperiously rated in the land of democratic
equality, was appeased by the gold which Margrave
lavishly ﬂung to him.
“Take care of the poor gentleman, squire,” he whis-
pered to me, in the spontaneous impulse of gratitude-
“I fear he will not trouble you long. He must be
monstrous rich. Arrived in a vessel hired all to himself,
and a train of outlandish attendants, whom he has left
behind in the town yonder! May I bait my horses in
your stables? They have come a long way.”
I pointed to the neighboring sthbles, and the man
nodded his thanks, remounted his box, and drove off.
I returned to Ma-rgrave. A faint smile came to his
lips as I placed the chest beside him.
“Ay, ay,” he muttered. “ Safe! safe! I shall soon
be well again—very soon! And now I can sleep in
peace l”
I led him into an inner room, in which there was a
bed. He threw himself on it with a loud sigh of relief.
Soon, half-raising himself on his elbow, he exclaimed,
“The chest—bring it hither! I need it always beside
me! There, there! Now for a few hours of- sleep;
and then, if I can take food, or some such restoring
cordial as your skill may suggest, I shall be strong
enough to talk. We will talkl—we .Will talk l "'
His eyes closed heavily as- his voice fell into a drowsy
mutter; a moment more and he was asleep.
I watched beside him, in mingled wonder and cons


A s-raaue: sronr. 839
passion. Looking into that face, so altered yet still so
young, I could not sternly question what had been the
evil of that mystic life, which seemed now oozing away
through the last sands in the hour-glass. I placed my
hand softly on his pulse; it scarcely beat. I put my
ear to his breast, and involuntarily sighed, as I distin-
guished in its ﬂuttering heave that dull, dumb sound,
in which the heart seems knelling itself to the greedy I
gravel
Was this, indeed, the potent magician whom I had
so fearedl—this the guide to the Rosicrucian’s secret
of life’s renewal, in whom, but an hour or two ago, my
fancies gelled my credulous trust!
But suddenly, even while thus chiding, my wild super-
stitions, a fear, that to most will seem scarcely less super-
stitious, shot across me. Could Lilian be affected by
the near neighborhood of one to whose magnetic inﬂu-
ence she had once been so strangely subjected? I left
Margrave still sleeping, closed and locked the door of
the but, went back to my dwelling, and met Amy at
the threshold. Her smile was so cheering that I felt
at once relieved.
“Hush!” said the child, putting her ﬁnger to her
lips, “she is so quiet! I was coming in search of you,
with a message from her.”
“ From Lilian to med-what! to me!”
“Hush! About an hour ago, she beckoned me to
draw near to her, and then said, very softly: ‘Tell
Allen, that light is coming back to me, and it all settles
2P


240 a srasues sroav.
on him—on him. Tell him that I pray to be spared
to walk by his side on earth, hand-in-hand to that
heaven which is no dream, Amy. Tell him that;-no
dreaml’”
While the child spoke my tears gushed, and the
strong hands in which I veiled my face quivered like the
_ leaf of the aspen. And when I could command my
voice, I said, plaintively:
“May I not, then see herl—only for a moment, and
answer her message, though but by a look ?”
“ N o, no i"
“No! where is Faber?”
“ Gone into the forest, in search of some herbs, but
he gave me this note for you.”
I wiped the blinding tears from my eyes, and read
these lines:
_ “I have, though with hesitation, permitted Amy to
tell you the cheering words, by which our beloved
patient conﬁrms my belief that reason is coming back
to her—slowly, laboringly, but if she survive, for per-
manent restoration. On no account, attempt to pre-
cipitate or disturb the work of Nature. As dangerous
as a sudden glare of light to eyes long blind and newly
regaining vision in the friendly and soothing dark,
would be the agitation that your presence at this crisis
would cause. Conﬁde in me.”
I remained brooding over these lines and over Lilian’s
message, long and silently, while Amy’s soothing whis-
pers stole into my ear, soft as the murmurs of arill


A s'raases s'roaY. 24]
heard in the gloom of forests. Rousing myself it
length, my thoughts returned to Margrave. Doubtless
he would soon awake. I bade Amy bring me such
slight nutriment as I thought best suited to his enfeebled
state, telling her it was for a sick traveller, resting him-
self in my hut When Amy returned, I took from her
the little basket, with which she was charged, and hav-
ing, meanwhile, made a careful selection from the con-
.tents of my medicine-chest, went back to the but. I
had not long resumed my place beside Margrave’s pil-
low before he awoke.
“What o’clock is it '3” he asked in an anxious voice.
“ About seven.”
“ Not later? That is well; my time is precious."
“ Compose yourself, and eat.”
I placed the food before him, and he partook of it,
though sparingly, as if with eﬂ'ort. He then dozed for
a short time, again woke up, and impatiently demanded
the cordial, which I had prepared in the meanwhile.
Its effects was-greater and more immediate than I could
have anticipated, proving, perhaps, how much of youth
there was still left in his system, however undermined
and ravaged by disease. Color came back to his
cheek, his voice grew pcrccptibly stronger. And as 1
lighted the lamp on the table near us —for it was grow-
ing dark — he gathered himself up and spoke thus:
“You remember that I once pressed on you certain
experiments. My object then was to discover the ma-
terials from which is extracted the speciﬁc that enab.es
II.—2l Q


242 A STRANGE STORY.
the organs of life to expel disease and regain vigor. In
that hope, I sought your intimacy. An intimacy you
gave, but withdrew.”
“ Dare you complain ? Who and what was the being
from whose intimacy I shrunk appalled?”
“Ask what questions you please,” cried MargraveI
impatiently, “later—if I have strength left to answer
them. But do not interrupt me, while I husband my
force to say what alone is important to me and to you.
Disappointed in the hopes I had placed in you, I
resolved to repair to Paris—that great furnace of all
bold ideas. I questioned learned formalists ; I listened
to audacious empirics. The ﬁrst, with all their boasted
knowledge, were too timid to concede my premises;
the second, with all their speculative daring, too knavish
to let me trust to their conclusions. I found but one
man, a Sicilian, who comprehended the secrets that are
called occult, and had the courage to meet Nature and
all her agencies face to face. He believed, and sin-
cerely, that he was approaching the grand result, at the
very moment when he perished from want of the com-
mon precautions which a tyro in chemistry would have
taken. At his death the gaudy city became hateful;
all its pretended pleasures only served to exhaust life
the faster. The true joys of youth are those of the
wild bird and wild brute, in the healthful enjoyment of
Nature. In cities, youth is but old age with a varnish.
[ ﬂed to the East; I passed through the tents of the
Arabs; I was guided —no matter by whom or by


A STRANGE STORY. 243
what—t0 the house of a Dervish, who had for his
teacher the most erudite master of secrets occult, whom
I knew years ago at Aleppo-why that exclamation l”
“ Proceed. What I have to say will come—later.”
“From this Dervish I half forced and half pur-
chased the secret I sought to obtain. I now know from
what peculiar substance the so-called elixir of life is
extracted; I know also the steps of the process through
which that task is accomplished. You smile incredu-
lously. What is your doubt? State it while I rest for
a moment._ My breath labors; give me more of the
cordial.”
“ Need I tell you my doubt? You have, you say, at
your command the elixir of life, of which Cagliostro did
not leave his disciples the recipe; and you stretch out
your hand for a vulgar cordial which any village chem-
ist could give you !”
“ I can explain this apparent contradiction. The pro_
cess by which the elixir is extracted from the material
which hoards its essence, is one that requires a hardi-
hood of courage which few possess. This Dervish, who
had passed through that process once, was deaf to all
prayer and unmoved by all bribes, to attempt it again.
He was poor; for the secret by which metals may be
transmuted is not, as the old alchemists seem to imply,
identical with that by which the elixir of life is ex-
tracted. He had only been enabled to discover, in the
niggard strata of the lands within range of his travel, a
few scanty morsels of the glorious substance. From


A STRANGE sroar. 245
lizard; to sport through the blooms of the earth,
Nature’s playmate and darling; to face, in the forest
and desert, the pard and the lion—Nature’s bravest
and ﬁercest—her ﬁrstborn, the heir of her realm, with
the rest of her children for slaves I”
As these words burst from his lips, there was a wild
grandeur in the aspect of this enigmatical being which
I had never beheld in the former time of his aﬁluent,
dazzling youth. And, indeed, in his language, and in
the thought it clothed, there was an earnestness, a con-
centration,-a directness, a purpose, which had seemed
wanting to his desultory talk in the earlier days. I
expected that reaction of languor and exhaustion would
follow his vehement outbreak of passion; but, after a
short pause, he went on with steady accents. His will
was sustaining his strength. He.was determined to
force his convictions on me, and the vitality, once so
rich, rallied all its lingering forces to the aid of his
intense desire.
“ I tell you, then,” he resumed, with deliberate calm~
ness, “ that, years ago, I tested in my own person that
essence which is the sovereign medicament. In me, as

you saw me at L , you beheld the proof of its vir-
tues Feeble and ill as I am now, my state was incal-
culably more hopeless when formerly restored by the
elixir. He from whom I then took the sublime restora-
tive, died without revealing the secret of its compo-
sition. What I obtained was only just sufﬁcient to
recruit the lamp of my life, then dying down - and no
21 *


246 A STRANGE s'ronr.
drop was left for renewing the light which wastes its
own rays in the air that it gilds. Though the Der-
vish would not sell me his treasure, he permitted me
to see it. The appearance and odor of this essence are
strangely peculiar- unmistakable by one who has once
beheld and partaken of it. In short, I recognized in the
hands of the Dervish the bright life-renewer, as I had
borne it away from the corpse of the Sage of Aleppo.”
“Hold! Are you then, in truth, the murderer of
Haroun, and is your true name Louis Grayle l”
“ I am no murderer, and Louis Grayle did not leave
me his name. I again adjure you to postpone for this
night, at least, the questions you wish to address to me.
" Seeing that this obstinate pauper possessed that
for which the pale owners of millions, at the ﬁrst touch
of palsy or gout, would consent to be paupers, of course
I coveted the possession of the essence even more than
the knowledge of the substance from which it is ex-
tracted. I had no coward fear of the experiment, which
this timid driveller had not the nerve to renew. But
still the experiment might fail. I must traverse land
and sea to ﬁnd the ﬁt place for it. While, in the rage
of the Dervish, the unfailing result of the experiment
was at hand. The Dervish suspected my design—he
dreaded my power. He ﬂed on the very night in which
I had meant to seize what he refused to sell me. After
all, I should have done him no great wrong; for I
should have left him wealth enough to transport him-
self to any soil in which the material for the elixir may


A STRANGE s'roaY. 247
be most abundant; and the desire of life would have
given his shrinking nerves the courage to replenish its
ravished store. I had Arabs in my pay, who obeyed
me as hounds their master. I chased the fugitive. I
came on his track, reached a house in a miserable vil-
lage, in which, I was told, he had entered but an hour
before. The day was declining—the light in the room
imperfect. I saw in a corner what seemed to me the
form of the Dervish —stooped to seize it, and my hand
closed on an asp. The artful Dervish had s9 piled his
rags that they took the shape of the form they had
clothed, and he had left, as a substitute for the giver of
life, the venomous reptile of death. ,
“The strength of my system enabled me to survive
the eﬂ'ect of the poison; but during the torpor that
numbed me, my Arabs, alarmed, gave no chase to my
quarry. At last, though enfeebled and languid, I was
again on my horse—again the pursuit—again the
track ! I learned -—- but this time by a knowledge surer
than man’s— that the Dervish had taken his refuge in
a hamlet that had sprung up over the site of a city once
famed through Assyria. The same voice that informed
me of his whereabouts warned me not to pursue. I
rejected the warning. In my eager impatience I sprang
(n to the chase; in my fearless resolve I felt sure of
the prey. I arrived at the hamlet wearied out, for my
forces were no longer the same since the bite of the asp.
The Dervish eluded me still; he had left the ﬂoors. on
which I sank exhausted, but a few minutes before my


248 A STRANGE s'roar.
horse stopped at the door. The carpet, on which he
had rested, still lay on the ground. I dismissed the
youngest and keenest of my troop in search of the fugi-
tive. Sure that this time he would not escape, my eyes
closed in sleep.
“How long I slept I know not—a long dream of
solitude, fever, and anguish. Was it the curse of the
Dervisb’s carpet? Was it a taint in the walls of the
house, or of the air, which broods sickly and rank over
places where cities lie buried? I know not; but the
Pest of the East had seized me in slumber. When my
senses recovered I found myself alone, plundered of my
arms, despoiled of such gold as I had carried about me.
All had deserted and left me, as the living leave the
dead whom the Plague has claimed for its own. As
soon as I could stand I crawled from the threshold.
The moment my voice was heard, my face seen, the
whole squalid populace rose as on a wild beast-—a
mad dog. I was driven from the place with impreca-
tions and stones, as a miscreant whom the Plague had
overtaken while plotting the death of a holy man.
Bruised and bleeding, but still defying, I turned in
wrath on that dastardly rabble; they slunk away from
my path. I knew the land for miles around. I had
been in that land years, long years, ago. I came at last
to the road which the caravans take on their way to
Damascus. There I was found, speechless and seem-
ingly lifeless, by some European traVellers. Conveyed
to Damascus, I languished for weeks between life and


250 A s'rnases s'roar.
aspect, the manner, the man!” So it was with the
incomprehensible being before me. Though his youth
was faded, though his beauty was dimmed, though my
fancies'clothed him with memories of abhorrent dread,
though my reason opposed his audacious beliefs and
assumptions, still he charmed and spell-bound me—
still he was the mystical fascinator-still, if the legends
of magic had truth for their basis, he was the born
magician; as genius, in what calling soever, is born
with the gift to enchant and subdue us.
Constraining myself to answer calmly, I said: “You
have told me your story; you have deﬁned the object
of the experiment in which you ask me to aid. You do
right to bid me postpone my replies or my questions.
Seek to recruit by sleep the strength you have so sorely
tasked. To-morrow ”
“ To-morrow, ere night, you will decide whether the
man, whom out of all earth I have selected to aid me,
shall be the foe to condemn me to perishl I tell you

plainly I need your aid, and your prompt aid. Three
days from this, and all aid will be too latel”
I had already gained the door of the room, when he
called to me to come back.
“ You do not live in this but, but with your family
yonder. Do not tell them that I am here; let no one
but yourself see me as I now am. Lock the door of
the but when you quit it. I should not close my eyes
if I were not secure from intruders.”
“ There is but one in my house, or in these parts,


a sunrise s'roaY. 2i)!
whom I would except from the interdict you_impose
You are aware of your own imminent danger; the life,
which you believe the discovery of a Dervish will in~
deﬁnitely prolong, seems to my eye of physician to
hang on a thread. I have already formed my own con-
jecture as to the nature of the disease that enfeebles
you. But I would fain compare that conjecture with
the weightier opinion of one whose experience and skill
are superior to mine. Permit me, then, when I return
to you to-morrow, to bring with me the great_ physician
to whom I refer. His name will not, perhaps, be
unknown to you: I speak of Julius Faber.”
“A physician of the schools! I can guess well
enough how learnedly he would prate, and how little
he could do. But I will not object to his visit, if it
satisﬁes you that, since I should die under the hands
of the doctors, I may be permitted to indulge my own
whim in placing my hopes in a Dervish. Yet stay.
You have, doubtless, spoken of me to this Julius Faber,
your fellow-physician and friend? Promise me, if you
bring him here, that you will not name me-that you
will not repeat to him the tale I have told you, or the
hope which has led me to these shores. What I have
told to you, no matter whether, at this moment, you
consider me the dupe of ,a chimera, is still under the
seal of the conﬁdence which a patient reposes in the
physician he himself selects for his conﬁdant. I select
you, and not Julius Faber! ”
“ Be it as you will,” said I, after a moment’s reﬂection.


252 A s'rassos s'rosr.
“ The moment you make yourself my patient, I am
bound to consider what is best for you. And you may
more respect, and proﬁt by, an opinion based upon your
purely physical condition than by one in which you
might suppose the advice was directed rather to the
disease of the mind than to that of the body."
“ How amazed and indignant your brother-physician
will be if he ever see me a second time i How learnedly
he will prove that, according to all correct principles of
science and nature, I ought to be dead 1"
He uttered this jest with a faint, dreary echo of his
old merry, melodious laugh, then turned his face to the
wall; and so I left him to repose. "
CHAPTER LXXV.
I rowan Mrs. Ashleigh waiting for me in our usual
sitting-room. She was in tears. She had begun to
despond of Lilian’s recovery, and she infected me with
her own alarm. However, I disguised my participation
in her fears, soothed and sustained her as I best could,
and persuaded her to retire rest. I saw Faber for a
few. minutes before I sought my own chamber. He
assured me that there was no perceptible change for
the worse in Lilian’s physical state since he had last
seen me, and that her mind, even within the last few


A STRANGE near. 253
hours, had become decidedly more clear. He thought
that, within the next twenty-four hours, the reason
would make a strong and successful elTort for complete
recovery; but he declined to hazard more than a hope
that the effort would not exhaust the enfeebled powers
of the frame. He himself was so in need of a few hours
of rest that I ceased to harass him with questions which
he could not answer, and fears which he could not
appease. Before leaving him for the night, I told him
brieﬂy that there was a traveller in my hut smitten by
a disease which seemed to me so grave that I would ask
his opinion of the case, if he could accompany me to
the but the next morning.
My own thoughts that night were not such as would
suffer me to sleep.
Before Margrave’s melancholy state much of my
former fear and abhorrence faded away. This being,
so exceptional that fancy might well invest him with
preternatural attributes, was now reduced by human
suffering to human sympathy and comprehension; yet
his utter want of conscience was still as apparent as in
his day of joyous animal spirits. With what hideous
candor he had related his perﬁdy and ingratitude to the
man to whom, in his belief, he owed an inestimable
obligation, and with what insensibility to the signal
retributim which in most natures would have awakened
remorse]
And by what dark hints and confessions did he seem
to conﬁrm the incredible memoir of Sir Philip Derval!
1L—22


254 A STRANGE sroar.
He owned that he had borne from the corpse of Haroun
the medicament to which be ascribed his recovery from
a state yet more hopeless than that under which' he
now laboredl He had alluded, rapidly, obscurely, to
some knowledge at his command “ surer than man’s!"
And now, even now, the mere wreck of his former exist-
ence—by what strange charm did he still control and
confuse my reason? And how was it that I felt myself
murmuring, again and again, “But what, after all, if
his hope be no chimera, and if Nature do hide a secret
by which I could save the life of my beloved Lilian?”
And again and again, as that thought would force
itself on me, I' rose and crept to‘ Lilian’s threshold,
listening to catch the faintest sound of her breathing.
All still, all dark! In that sufferer recognized science
detects no mortal disease, yet dares not bid me rely on
its amplest resources of skill to turn aside from her
slumber the stealthy advance of death; while in you
log-hut, one whose malady recognized science could not
doubt to be mortal has composed himself to sleep, con-
ﬁdent of life! Recognized science! recognized igno-
rance! The science of to-day is the igndrance of to-
morrow! Every year some bold guess lights up a truth
to which, but the year before, the schoolmen of science
were as blinded as moles.
“What, then," my lips kept repeating-“what if
Nature do hide a secret by which the life of my life can
be saved! What do we know of the secrets of Nature?
What said Newton himself of his knowledge? 'I am


A s'rasnoa STORY. 255
like a child picking up pebbles and shells on the sand,
while the great ocean of Truth lies all undiscovered
around mel’ And did Newton himself, in the ripest
growth of his matchless intellect, hold the creed of the
alchemists in scorn? Had he not given to one object
of their research, in the transmutation of metals, his
days and his nights? Is there proof that he ever con-
vinced himself that the research was the dream, which
we, who are not Newtons, call it?* And that other
great sage, inferior only to Newton—the calculating
doubt-weigher, Descartes-had he not believed in the
yet nobler hope of the alchemists—believed in some
* “ Besides the three great subjects of Newton’s labors -— the
ﬂuxional calculus, physicial astronomy, and optics— a very large
portion of his time, while resident in his college, was devoted to
researches of which scarcely a trace remains. Alchemy, which
had fascinated so many eager and ambitious minds, seems to
have tempted Newton with an overwhelming force. What theories
he formed, what experiments he tried, in that laboratory where,
it is said, the ﬁre was scarcely extinguished for weeks together,
will never be known. It is certain that no success attended his
labors; and Newton was not a man—like Kepler—to detail to
the world all the hopes and disappointments, all the crude and
mystical fancies, which mixed themselves up with his career of
philosophy. . . . . Many years later we ﬁnd Newton
in correspondence with Locke with reference to a mysterious
red earth by which Boyle, who was then recently (lend, had
asserted that he could effect the grand desideratum of multiplying
gold. By this time, however, Newton‘s faith had become some-
what shukcn by the unsatisfactory communications which he had
himself received from Boyle on the subject of the golden recipe,
though he did not abandon the idea of giving the experiment a
further trial as soon as the weather should become suitable for
furnace experiments.”--Quarterly Review, No. 220, pp. 126-6,
2o


256 A STRANGE s'roar.
occult nostrum or process by which human life could
attain to the age of the Patriarchs ?” *
* Southey, in his Doctor, vol. vi. p. 2, reports the conversation
of Sir Kenelm Digby with Descartes, in which the great geo-
metrician said: “That as for rendering man'immortal, it was
what he could not venture to promise, but that he was very sure
he could prolong his life to the standard of the patriarchs.” And
Southey adds, “That St. Evremond, to whom Digby repeated
this, says that this opinion of Descartes Was well known both to
his friends in Holland and in France." By the stress Southey
lays on this hearsay evidence, it is clear that he was not
acquainted with the works and biography of Descartes, or he
would have gone to the fountain-head for authority on Descartes's
opinions—viz., Descartes himself. It is to be wished that. Southey
had done so, for no one more than he would have appreciated
the exquisitely candid and lovable nature of the illustrious French-
man, and the sincerity with which he cherished in his heart what-
ever doctrine he conceived in his understanding. Descartes,
whose knowledge of anatomy was considerable, had that passion
for the art of medicine which is almost inseparable from the
pursuit of natural philosophy. At the age of twenty~four he had
sought (in Germany) to obtain initiation into the brotherhood of
the Bosicrucians, but unluckily could not discover any member
of the society to introduce him. “He desired," says Cousin,
“to assure the health of man, diminish his ills, extend his ex-
istence. He was terriﬁed by the rapid and almost momentary
passage of man upon earth. He believed it was not, perhaps,
impossible to prolong its duration.” There is a hidden recess
of grandeur in this idea, and the means proposed by Descartes
for the execution of his project were not less grand. In his
Discourse on Method, Descartes says, “If it is possible to ﬁnd
some means to render generally men more wise and more able
than they have been till now, it is, I believe, in medicine that
those means must be sought. * * * I am sure that there is
~ no one, even in the medical profession, who will not avow that
all which one knows of the medical art is almost nothing in com-
parison to that which remains to learn, and that one could be
exempted from an inﬁnity ot’ maladies, both of body and mind


A s'rasnoa sroar. 25'!
In thoughts like these the night wore away, the
moonbeams that streamed through my window lighting
up the spacious solitudes beyond—mead and creek,
forest-land, mountain-top-and the silence without
broken by the wild cry of the night-hawk and the
sibilant, melancholy dirge of the shining chrysococyx; *
and even, perhaps, from the decrepitude of old age, if one had
sufﬁcient lore of their causes and of all the remedies which
nature provides for them. Therefore, having design to Employ all
my life in the research of a science IO necessary, and having discovered
a path which appears to me such that one ought irt/‘allt'bly, in following,
to ﬁnd it, if one is not hindered prematurely by the brevity of
life or by the defects of experience, Iconsider that there is no
better remedy against those two hindrances than to communicate
faithfully to the public the little I have found," 5.0. (Discours
de la Methode, vol. i. (Euvres do Descartes, Cousin’s Edition.)
.And again, in nis Correspondence (vol. ix. p. 3-11), he says:
“ The conservation of health has been always the principal object
of my studies, and I have no doubt that there is a means of
acquiring much knowledge touching medicine which, up to this
time, is ignored.” He then refers to his meditated Treatise on
Animals as only an entrance upon that knowledge. But what-
ever secrets Descartes may have thought to discover, they are
not made known to the public according to his promise. And in
a letter to M. Chanut, written 1646 (four years before he died),
he says ingenuonsly: “I will tell you in conﬁdence that the
notion, such as it is, which I have endeavored to acquire in
physical philosophy, had greatly assisted me to establish certain
foundations for moral philosophy; and that [am more easily
satisﬁed upon this point than I am on many others touching
medicine, to which I have, nevertheless, devoted much more
time. So that” (adds the grand thinker with a pathetic noble-
ness) — “so that, instead of ﬁnding the means to preserve life, Ilum
found another good, more easy and more sure, which t‘l—not to fear
death." ,
*Cbrysococyx l'lCldllS—VIZ., the bird popularly called the
shining or bronzed cuckoo. " Its note is an exceedingly melan-
22" a


A STRANGE s'roav. 259
bid each interview now. If, in a few hours, she become
either decidedly stronger or decidedly more enfeeblcd,
you shall be summoned to her side. Even if you are
condemned to a loss for which the sole consolation must
be placed in the life hereafter, you shall have, at least,
the last mortal commune of soul with soul. Courage—
couragel You are maul Bear as man what you have
so often bid other men submit to endure.”
I had ﬂung myself on the ground—writhing worm
that had no home but on earth 1 Man, indeedl Mani
All, at that moment, I took from manhood was its acute
sensibility to love and to anguishl
But after all such paroxysms of mortal pain, there
comes a strange lull. Thought itself halts, like the still
hush of water between descending torrents. I rose in
a calm, which Faber might well mistake for fortitude.
“Well,” I said, quietly, “fulﬁl your promise. If
Lilian is to pass away from me, I shall see her, at least,
again; no wall, you tell me, between our minds; mind
to mind once more— once more i”
“ Allen,” said Faber, mournfully and softly. “ why do
you shun to repeat my words— soul to soul f”
“Ay, ay-I understand. Those words mean that
you have resigned all hope that Lilian’s life will linger
here, when her mind comes back in full consciousness;
I know well that last lghtning ﬂash and the darkness
that swallows it up l”
“You exaggerate my fears. I have not resigned the
hope that Lilian will survive the struggle through


260 A s'raanen srosr.
which she is passing, but it will be cruel to deceive you
--my hope is Weaker than it was.”
“Ay, ay. Again I understand! Your science is in
fault—it desponds. Its last trust is in the wonderful
resources of Nature - the vitality stored in the young!”
“You have said : Those resources of Nature are
wondrous. The vitality of youth is a fountain spring-
ing up from the deeps out of sight, when, a moment
before, we had measured the drops oozing out from the
sands, and thought that the well was exhausted.”
“ Come with me -— come. I told you of another suf-
ferer yonder. I want your opinion of his case. But
can you be spared a few minutes from Lilian’s side f” ‘
“Yes ; I left her asleep. What is the case that per-
plexes your eye of physician, which is usually keener
than mine, despite all the length of my practice f”
“ The suﬁ'erer is young— his organization rare in its
vigor. He has gone through and survived assaults
upon life that are commonly fatal. His system has been
poisoned by the fangs of a venomous asp, and shattered
by the blast of the plague. These alone, I believe, "
would not sufﬁce to destroy him. But he is one who
has a strong dread of death. And while the heart was
thus languid and feeble, it has been gnawed by emotions
of hope or of fear. I suspect that he is dying, not from
the bite of the reptile, not from the taint of the pesti-
lence, but from the hope and the fear that have over-
tasked the heart’s functions. Judge for yourself.”
We were now at the door of the but. I unlocked it;


A STRANGE s'roar. 261
We entered. Margrave had quitted his bed, and was
' pacing the room slowly. His step was less feeble, his
countenance less haggard than on the previous evening.
IIe submitted himself to Faber’s questioning with a
quiet indiﬁ'ercncc, and evidently cared nothing for any
opinion which the great physician might found on his
replies.
When Faber had learned all he could, he said, with
a grave smile: “I see that my advice will have little
weight with you; such as it is, at least reﬂect on it.
The conclusions to which your host arrived in his view
of your case, and which he conﬁded to me, are, in my
humble judgment, correct. I have no doubt that the
great organ of the heart is involved in the cause of your
sufferings; but the heart is a noble and much-enduring
organ. I have known men in whom it has been more
severely and unequivocally affected with disease than
it is in you, live on for many years, and ultimately die
of some other disorder. But then life was held, as
yours must be held, upon one condition—repose. I
enjoin you to abstain from all violent action—to shun
all excitements that cause moral disturbance. You are
young; would you live on, you must live as the old.
More than this—it is my-duty to warn you that your
tenure on earth is very precarious; you may attain to
many years; you may he suddenly called hence to-
morrow. The best mode to regard this uncertainty
with the calm in which is your only chance of long life,
is so to arrange all your wordly affairs, and so to dis-


A srsa nos s-roav. 268
malady baﬂies the doctor‘s skill, imagines or dreams of
a remedy? Call it a whim if you please, learned sir;
do you not listen to the whim, and, in despair of your
own prescriptions, comply with those of the patient?”
Faber changed countenance, and even started. Mar-
grave watched him and laughed.
“'You grant that there are such cases, in which the
patient gives the law to the physician. Now, apply
your experience to my case. Suppose some strange
fancy had seized upon my imagination—“that is the
doctor’s cant word for all phenomena which we call
exceptional—some strange fancy that I had thought of
a cure for this disease for which you have no drugs;
and suppose this fancy of mine to be so strong, so vivid,
that to deny me its gratiﬁcation would produce the very
emotion from which you warn me as fatal—storm the
heart, that you would soothe to repose, by'the passions
of rage and despair—would you, as my trusted physi-
cian, concede or deny me my whim?”
“Can you ask? I should grant it at once, if I had
no reason to know that the thing that you fancied was
harmful.”
“ Good man, and wise doctor! I have no other ques
tion to ask. I thank you.”
Faber looked hard on the young, wan face, over
which played a smile of triumph and irony; then
turned away with an expression of doubt and trouble
on his own noble countenance. I followed him silently
into the open air.


864 A STRANGE s'ronv.
“ Who and what is this visitor of yours? ” he asked,
abruptly.
“ Who and what! I cannot tell you.”
Faber remained some moments musing, and mutter-
ing slowly to himself, “ Tut l but a chance coincidence
-a haphazard allusion to a fact which he could not
have known l” ‘
“Faber,” said I, abruptly, “ can it be that Lilian is
the patient in whose self-suggested remedies you con-
ﬁde more than in the various learning at command of
your practised skill ? "
“ I cannot deny it,” replied Faber reluctantly “ In
the intervals of that suspense from waking sense, which
in her is not sleep, nor yet altogether catalepsy, she has,
for the last few days, stated accurately the precise
moment in which the trance—if I may so call it—
would pass away, and prescribed for herself the reme-
dies that should be then administered. In every in-
stance, the remedies so self-prescribed, though certainly
not those which would have occurred to my mind, have
proved efﬁcacious. Her rapid progress to reason I
ascribe to the treatment she herself ordained in her
trance, without remembrance of her own suggestions
when she awoke. I had meant to defer communicating
these phenomena in the idiosyncrasy of her case until
our minds could more calmly inquire into the process
by which ideas—not apparently derived, as your meta-
physical school would derive all ideas, from precon-
ceived experiences—will thus sometimes act like an


A srasuon s'roar. 265
instinct on the human suﬁ'erer for self-preservation, as
the bird is directed to the herb or the berry which heals
or assuages its ailments. We know how the mesmer-
ists would account for this phenomenon of hygienic
introvision and clairvoyance But here, there is no
mesmerizer, unless the patient can be supposed to mes-
merize herself. Long, however, before mesmerism Was
heard of, medical history attests examples in which
patients who baﬂled the skill of the ablest physicians
have ﬁxed their fancies on some remedy that physicians
would call inoperative for good or for harm, and have
recovered by the remedies thus singularly self-suggested.
And Hippocrates himself, if I construe his meaning
rightly, recognizes the powers for self-cure which the
condition of trance will sometimes bestow on the
sufferer, ‘where’ (says the father of our art) ‘ the sight
being closed to the external, the soul more truthfully
perceives the aﬁ'ections of the body.’ In short—I own
it—in this instance, the skill of the physician has been
a compliant obedience to the instinct called forth in the
patient. And the hopes I have hitherto permitted my-
self to give you, were founded on my experience that
her own hopes, conceived in trance, had never been
fallacious or exaggerated. The simples that I gathered
for her yesterday she had described; they are not in our
herbal. But as they are sometimes used by the natives,
[ had the curiosity to analyze their chemical properties
shortly after I came to the colony, and they seemed to me
as innocent as lime-blossoms. They are rare in this part
Il.--23


866 A s'rasuon s'roar.
of Australia, but she told me where I should ﬁnd them
-- a remote spot, which she has certainly never visited.
Last night, when you saw me disturbed, dejected, it
was because, for the ﬁrst time, the docility with which
she had hitherto, in her waking state, obeyed her own
injunctions in the state of trance, forsook me. She
could not be induced to taste the decoction I had made
from the herbs; and if you found me this morning with
weaker hopes than before, this is the real cause—viz.,
that when I visited her at sunrise, she was not in sleep
but in trance, and in that trance she told me-that she
had nothing more to suggest or reveal; that on the
complete restoration of her senses, which was at hand,
the abnormal faculties vouchsai'ed to trance would be
withdrawn. ‘As for my life,’ she said quietly, as if
unconscious of our temporary joy or woe in the term of
its tenure here —‘as for my life, your aid is now idle;
my own vision obscure; on my life a dark and cold
shadow is resting. I cannot forsee if it will pass away.
When I strive to look around, I see but my Allen ’"

“ And so,” said I, mastering my emotions, “in bid-
ding me hope, you did not rely on your own resources
of science, but on the whisper of nature in the brain of
your patient ?”
“It is so.”
We both remained silent some moments, and then,
as he disappeared within my house, I murmured:
“ And when she strives to look beyond the shadow
she sees only me! Is there some prophet-hint of Nature


a s'raason s'roav. 26'!
firm also, directing me not to scorn the secret which a _
wanderer, so suddenly dropt on my solitude, assures me
that Nature will sometimes reveal to her seeker? And
oh! that dark wanderer—has Nature a marvel more
weird than himself?”

CHAPTER Lxva.
I s'r'narnn through the forest till noon, in debate with
myself, and strove to shape my wild doubts into pur-
pose, before I could nerve and compose myself again to
face Margrave alone. ' i
I re-entered the hut. To_my surprise, Margrave was
not in the room in which I had left him, nor in that
which adjoined it. I ascended the stairs to the kind of
loft in which I had been accustomed to pursue my
studies, but in which I had not set foot since my alarm
for‘Lilian had suspended my labors. There I saw Mar-
grave quietly seated before the manuscript of my Ambi.
tions Work, which lay open on the rude table just as I
had left it, in the midst of its concluding summary.
"1 have taken the license of former days, you see,"
said Margrave, smiling, “and have hit by chance on a
passage I can understand without effort. But why such
a waste of argument to prove a fact so simple? In
man, as in brute, life once lost is lost forever; and that
is why life is so precious to man.”
I took the book from his hand, and ﬂung it aside in


268 a s'raanaa s'roav.
_ wrath. His approval revolted me more with my own
theories than all the argumentative rebukes of Faber.
“And now,” I said, sternly, “the time has come for
the explanation you promised. Before I can aid you in
any experiment that may serve to prolong your life, I
must know how far that life has been a baleful and
destroying inﬂuence ?”
“ I have some faint recollection of having saved your
life from an imminent danger, and if gratitude were the
attribute of man, as it is of the dog, I should claim
your aid to serve mine as a right. Ask me what you
will. You must have seen enough of me to know that
I do not aﬂ‘ect either the virtues or vices of others. I
regard both .with so supreme an indiﬁ'erence, that I
believe I am vicious or virtuous unawares. I know
not if I can explain what seems to have perplexed you,
but if I cannot explain I have no intention to lie. Speak
—I listen! We‘have time enough now before us.”
SO saying, he reclined back in the chair, stretching
out his limbs wearily. All round this spoilt darling of
Material Nature the aids and appliances of Intellectual
Science! Books, and telescopes, and crucibles, with
the light of day coming through a small circular apor-
ture in the boarded casement, as I had constructed the
opening for my experimental observation of the pris-
mal rays.
While I write, his image is as visible before my
remembrance as if before the actual eye-beautiful
even in its decay, awful even in its weakness, myste-


A STRANGE s'roar. 269
rlons as in Nature herself amidst all the mechanism by
which our fancied knowledge attempts to measure her
laws and analyze her light.
But at that moment no such subtle reﬂections de-
layed my inquisitive, eager mind from its immediate
purpose - who and what was this creature boasting of
a secret through which I might rescue from death the
life of her who was my all upon earth.
I gathered rapidly and succinctly together all that I
knew and all that I guessed of Margrave’s existence
and arts. I commenced from my Vision in that mimic
Golgotha of creatures inferior to man, close by the
scenes of man’s most trivial and meaningless pastime.
I went on— Derval’s murder; the missing contents of
the casket; the apparition seen by the maniac assassin
guiding him to the horrid deed; the luminous, haunting
Shadow; the positive charge in the murdered man’s
memoir concerning Margrave with Louis Grayle, and
accusing him of the murder of Haroun; the night in
the moonlit pavilion at Derval Court; the baneful
inﬂuence on Lilian ; the struggle between me and him-
self in the house by the sea-shore;—The strange All
that is told in this Strange Story.
But warming as I spoke, and in a kind of ﬁerce joy to
be enabled thus to free my own heart of the doubts that
had burdened it, now that I was fairly face to face with
the being by whom my reason had been so perplexed
and my life so tortured, I was restrained by none of
the fears lest my own fancy deceived me, with which in
28‘


A sranuon sroar. 271
“In much that you tell me I recognize myself; in
much I am as lost in amazement as you in wild doubt
or ﬁerce wrath. Of the effect that you say Philip Der-
val produced on me I have no recollection. Of him-
self I have only thi-that he was my foe, that he
came to England intent on schemes to shorten my life
or destroy its enjoyments. All my faculties tend to
self-preservation; there, they converge as rays in a
focus; in that focus they illume and—they burn. I
willed to destroy my intended destroyer. Did my will
enforce itself on the agent to which it was guided?
Likely enough. Be it so. Would you blame me for
slaying the tiger or serpent—not by the naked hand,
but by weapons that arm it? But what could tiger and
serpent do more against me than the man who would
rob me of life? He had his arts for assault—I had
mine for self-defence. He was to me as. the tiger that
creeps through the jungle, or the serpent uncoiling his
folds for the spring. Death to those whose life is de-
struction to mine, be they serpent, or tiger, or man! Der-
val perished. Yes! the spot in which the maniac had
buried the casket was revealed to me— no matter how;
the contents of the casket passed into my hands. I cov-
eted that possession because I believed that Derval had
learned from Haroun of Aleppo the secret by which the
elixir of life is prepared, and I supposed that some stores
of the essence would be found in his casket. I was
deceived—not a drop! What I there found I knew
not how to use or apply, nor did I care to learn. What
2a


A s'raasos s‘roav. 273
advanced one step into knowledge except through that
imaginative faculty which is strongest in the wisdom of
ignorance, and weakest in the ignorance of the wise.
Ponder this, and those marvels that perplex you will
cease to be marvellous. I pass on to the riddle that
puzzles you most. By Philip Derval’s account I am, in
truth, Louis Grayle restored to youth by the elixir, and
while yet inﬁrm, decrepit, murdered Haroun—a man
of a frame as athletic as yours! By accepting this
notion you seem to yourself alone to unravel the mys-
teries you ascribe to my life and my powers. Oh, wise
philosopher! oh, profound logicianl you accept that
notion, yet hold my belief in the Dervish’s tale a chi-
mera! I am Grayle made young by the elixir, and yet
the elixir itself is a fable l”
He paused and laughed, but the laugh was no longer
even an echo of its former merriment or playfulness —-
a sinister and terrible laugh, mocking, threatening,
malignant.
Again he swept his hand over his brows and re-
sumed:
“ Is it not easier to so accomplished a sage as you to
believe that the idlers of Paris have guessed the true.
solution of that problem—my place on this earth?
May I not be the love-son of Louis Grayle? And
when Haroun refused the elixir to him, or he found that
his frame was too far exhausted for even the elixir to
repair organic lesions of structure in the worn frame of
old age, may he not have indulged the common illusion
I


A summer. near. 275
Graylel all my earlier memories go back to Louis
Graylel All my arts and powers, all 'that I have
learned of the languages spoken in Europe, of the sci- ‘
ences taught in her schools, I owe to Louis Grayle.
But am I one and the same with him? No—I am
but a pale reﬂection of his giant intellect. I have not
even a reﬂection of his childlike agonies of sorrow.
Louis Graylel He stands apart from me, as a rock
from the tree that grows out its chasms. Yes, the
gossip was right; I must be his son.”
He leant his face on both hands, rocking himself to
and fro. At length, with a sigh, he resumed:
“I remember, too, a long and oppressive illness,
attended with racking pains—a dismal journey in a
wearisome litter—the light hand of the woman Ayesha,
so sad and so stately, smoothing my pillow or fanning
my brows. I remember the evening on which my
nurse drew the folds of the litter aside, and said, ‘ See
Aleppo! and the star of thy birth shining over its
walls?’
“ I remember a face incxpressibly solemn and mourn-
ful. I remember the chill that the calm of its ominous
eye sent through my veins—the face of Haroun, the
Sage of Aleppo. I remember the vessel of crystal he
bore in his hand, and the blessed relief from my pain
that a drop from the essence which ﬂashed through the
crystal bestowed l And then — and then — I remember
no more till the night on which Ayeshs. came to my
couch and said, ‘Rise.’


276 A STRANGE sronr.
“And I rose, leaning on her, supported by her. We
went through dim, narrow streets, faintly lit by wan
stars, disturbing the prowl of the dogs, that slunk from
the look of that woman. We came to a solitary house,
small and low, and my nurse said, ‘ Wait.’
“ She opened the door and went in; I seated myself
on the threshold. And after a time she came out from
the house, and led me, still leaning on her, into a
chamber.
“A man lay, as in sleep, on her carpet, and beside
him stood another man, whom I recognised as Ayesha’s
special attendant— an Indian. ‘ Haroun is dead,’ said
Ayesha. ‘Search for that which will give thee new
life. ' Thou hast seen, and wilt know it, not I.’
“And I put my hand on the breast of Haroun—for
the dead man was he— and drew from it the vessel of
crystal.
“ Having done so, the frown on his marble brow
appalled me. I staggered back, and swooned away.
“I came to my senses, recovered and rejoicing,
miles afar from the city, the dawn red on its distant
walls. Ayesha had tended me; the elixir had already
restored me.
“My ﬁrst thought, when full consciousness came
back to me, rested on Louis Grayle, for he, also, had
been at Aleppo. I was but one of his numerous train.
He, too, was enfeebled and suﬂ'ering; he had sought
the known skill of Haroun for himself as for me; and
this woman loved and had tended him as she had loved


A STRANGE STORY. 271
and tended me. And my nurse told me that he was
dead, and forbade me henceforth to breathe his name.
“We travelled on—she and I, and the Indian, her
servant-qmy strength still renewed by the wondrous
elixir. No longer supported by her, what gazelle ever
roved through its pasture with a bound more elastic
than mine?
“ We came to a town, and my nurse placed before me
a mirror. I did not recognize myself. In this town
we rested, obscure, till the letter there reached me by
which I learned that I was the oﬂ'spring of love, and
enriched by the care of a father recently dead. Is it
not clear that Louis Grayle was this father l”
“ If so, was the woman, Ayesha, your mother T”
“ The letter said that ‘my mother had died in my
infancy.’ Nevertheless, the care with which Ayesha
had tended me induced a suspicion that made me ask
her the very question you put. She wept when I asked
her, and said, ‘ No, only my nurse. And now I needed
a nurse no more.’ The day after I received the letter
which announced an inheritance that allowed me to vie
with the nobles of Europe, this woman left me, and
went back to her tribe.”
“ Have you never seen her since?”
Margrave hesitated a moment, and then answered,
though with seeming reluctance, “ Yes, at Damascus.
Not many days after Iwas borne to that city by the
strangers, who found me half»dead on their road, I woke
one morning to ﬁnd her by my side. And she said, ‘In
II.-24


2'18 A STRANGE s'ronv.
joy and in health you did not needme. I are needed
now.’ ” -
“Did you then, deprive yourself of one so devoted P
You have not made this long voyage-fromlEgypt to
Australia— alone; you, to whom wealth made no
excuse for privation ?”
“The woman came with me; and some chosen attend-
ants. I engaged to ourselves the vessel we sailed in."
“ Where have you left your companions?”
“By this hour,” answered Margrave, “they are in
reach of my summons; and when you and I haVe
achieved the discovery-_in the results of which we
shall share—I will exact no more from your aid. I
trust all that rests for my cure to my nurse and her
swarthy attendants. You will aid me now, as a. matter
of course; the physician whose counsel you needed to
guide your own skill enjoins you to obey my whim —
if whim you still call it; you will obey it, for on that
whim rests your own- sole hope of happiness—you,
who can love— I love nothing but life. Has my frank
narrative solved all the doubts that stood between you
and me, in the great meeting-ground of an interest in
common T”
“ Solved all the doubts! Your wild story but makes
some the darker, leaving others untouched; the occult
powers of which you boast, and some of which I have
witnessed-your very insight into my own household
sorrows, into the interest I have, with yourself, in the
truth of a faith so repugnant to reason ——”


A STRANGE near. 279
“Pardon me,” interrupted Margrave, with that slight
curve of the lip which is half smile and half sneer, “if,
in my-account of myself, I omitted what I cannot
explain, and you cannot conceive; let me ﬁrst ask how
many of the commonest actions of the commonest men
are purely involuntary and wholly inexplicable? When,
for instance, you open your lips and utter a sentence,
you have not the faintest idea beforehand what word
will follow another; when you move a muscle, can you
tell me the thought that prompts to the movement?
And, wholly unable thus to account for your own
simple sympathies between impulse and act, do you
believe that there exists a man upon earth who can read
all the riddles in the heart and brain of another? Is it
not true that not one drop of water, one atom of matter,
ever really touches another? Between each and each
there is always a space, however inﬁnitesimally small.
How, then, could the world go on, if every man asked
another to make his whole history and being as lucid
as daylight before he would buy and sell with him?
All interchange and alliance rest but on this—an
interest in common. You and I have established that
interest; all else, all you ask more is superﬂuous.
Could I answer each doubt you would raise, still,
whether the answer should please or revolt you, your
reason would come back to the same starting-point, viz.,
In one deﬁnite proposal have we two an interest in
common i’”
And again Margrave laughed, not in mirth, but in


280 A sraauos s'roaY.
mockery. The laugh and the words that preceded it
were not the laugh and the words of the young. Could
it be possible that Louis Grayle had indeed revived to
false youth in the person of Margrave, such might have
been his laugh and such his words. The whole mind
of Margrave seemed to have undergone change since I
last saw him; more rich in idea, more crafty even in
candor, more powerful, more concentred. As we see
in our ordinary experience, that some inﬁrmity, threat-
ening dissolution, brings forth more vividly the reminis-
cences of early years, when impressions were vigorously
stamped, so I might have thought, that as Margrave
neared the tomb, the memories he had retained from
his former existence, in a being more amply endowed,
more formidably potent, struggled back to the brain;
and the mind that had lived in Louis Grayle moved the
lips of the dying Margrave.
“ For the powers and the arts that it equally puzzles
your reason to assign or to deny me,” resumed my
terrible guest, “I will say brieﬂy but this: they come
from faculties stored within myself, and doubtless con-
duce to my self-preservation—faculties more or less,
perhaps (so Van Helmont asserts), given to all men,
though dormant in most;—-vivid and active in me
because in me self-preservation has been and yet is the
strong master-passion, 0r instinct; and because I have
been taught how to use and direct such faculties by
disciplined teachers—some by Louis Grayle, the en-
chanter; some by my nurse, the singer of charmed


A STRANGE sroar. 281
songs. But in much that I will to have done, I know
no more than yourself how the agency acts. Enough
for me to will what I wish, and sink calmly into slumber,
sure that the will would work somehow its way. But
when I have willed to know what, when known, should
shape my own courses, I could see, without aid from
your pitiful telescopes, all objects howsoever far. What
wonder in that? Have you no learned puzzle-brained
metaphysicians, who tell you that space is but an idea,
all this palpable universe an idea in the mind, and no
more! Why am I an enigma as dark as the Sibyls,
and your metaphysicians as plain as a hornbook?”
Again the sardonic laugh. “ Enough; let what I have
said obscure or enlighten your guesses, we come back
to the same link of union, which binds man to man,
bids states arise from the desert, and foemen embrace
as brothers. I need you and you need me; without
your aid my life is doomed; without my secret the
breath will have gone from the lips of your Lilian
before the sun of to-morrow is red on you hill-tops.”
“ Fiend or juggler,” I cried in rage, “you shall not
so enslave and enthral me by this mystic farrago and
jargon. Make your fantastic experiment on yolirself if
you will; trust to your arts and your pOWers. My
Lilian’s life shall not hang on your ﬁat. I trust it—to-J’
“ To what—to man’s skill? Hear what the sage of
the college shall tell you, before I ask you again for
your aid. Do you trust to God’s saving mercy l’ Ah!
of course you believe in a God? Who, except a phi‘
24* '


282 a sraauoa STORY.
losopher, can reason a Maker away? But that the
Maker will alter His courses to hear you ; that, whether
or not you trust in Him, or in your doctor, it will
change by a hairbreadth the thing that must be--do
you believe this, Allen Fenwiek Y ”
And there eat this reader of heartsl a boy in his
aspect, mocking meand the greybeards of schools.
I could listen no more; I turned to the door and ﬂed
down the stairs, and heard, as I tied, a low chant;
feeble and faint, it was still the old barbaric chant, by
which the serpent is drawn from its hole by, the
charmer. ,,
CHAPTER LXXVII.
To those of my readers who may seek with Julius
Faber to explore, through intelligible cau'ses, solutions
of the marvels Ilnarrate, Margrave’s confession may
serve to explain away much that my own superstitious
beliefs had obscured. 'To them Margrave is evidently
the soil of Louis Grayle. The elixir of life is reduced
to some simple restorative, owing much of its effect to
the faith of a credulous patient; youth is so soon
restored to its joy in the sun, with or without an elixir.
To them Margrave’s arts of enchantment are reduced
to those idiosyncrasies of temperament on which the
disciples of Mesmer build up their theories ;' exagge-


A sraauoa near. 9388
rated, in much, by my own superstitions; aided, in
part, by such natural, purely physical magic as, explored
by the ancient priestcrafts, is despised by the modern
philosophies, and not only remains occult because
Science delights no more in the slides of the lantern
which fascinated her childhood with simulated phan-
toms. To them Margrave is, perhaps, an enthusiast,
not less an imposter. “L’Homme se pique,” .eays
Charron. Man cogs the dice for himself ere he rattles
the box for his dupes. Was there ever successful im-
postor who did not commence by a fraud on his own
understanding? Cradled in OrientTable-land, what
though Margrave believes in its legends; in a wand,
an elixir; in sorcerers, or Afrites? That belief in itself
makes him keen to detect, and skilful to proﬁt by, the
latent but kindredcredulities of others. In all illustra-
tions of Duper and Duped through the records of super-
stition—from the guile‘ of a Cromwell, a Mahomet,
down to the cheats of a gipsy—professional visionaries
are amongst the astutest observers. The knowledge
that Margrave had gained of my abode, of my aﬂliction,
or of the innermost thoughts in my mind, it surely
demanded no preternatural aids to acquire. An Old
Bailey attorney could have got at_the one, and any
quick student of human. hearts have readily mastered
the other. In ﬁne, Margrave, thus rationally criticised,
is no other prodigy (save in degree and concurrence of
attributes simple, though not very common) than may
be found in each alley that harbors a fortune-teller who


884 A s'raasos: s'roar.
has just faith enough in the stars or the cards to bubble
himself while he swindles his victims; earnest, indeed,
in the self-conviction that he is really a seer, but reading
the looks of his listeners, divining the thoughts that
induce them to listen, and acquiring by practice a start-
ling ability to judge what the listeners will deem it
most seer-like to read in the cards or divine from the
stars.
I leave this interpretation nnassailed. It is that
which is the most probable, it is clearly that which, in
a case not my own, I should have accepted; and yet I
revolved and dismissed it. The moment we deal with
things beyond our comprehension, and in which our
ow_n senses are appealed to and bafﬂed, we revolt hen
the Probable, as it seems to the senses of those who
have not experienced what we have. And the same
principle of Wonder that led our philosophy up from
inert ignorance into restless knowledge, now winding
back into Shadow-land, reverses its rule by the way,
and, at last, leaves as lost in the maze, our knowledge
inert, and our ignorance restless.
And putting aside all other reasons for hesitating to
believe that Margrave was the son of Louis Grayle—
reasons which his own narrative might suggest-was
it not strange that Sir Philip Derval, who had instituted
inquiries so minute, and reported them in his memoir
with so faithful a care, should not have discovered that
a youth, attended by the same woman who had attended
Grayle, had disappeared from the town on the same


A STRANGE mon. 285
night as Grayle himself disappeared? But Derval had
related truthfully, according to Margrave’s account, the
ﬂight of Ayesha and her Indian servant, yet not alluded
to the ﬂight, not even to the existence of the boy, who
must have been of no mean importance in the suite of
Louis Grayle, if he were, indeed, the son whom Grayle
had made his constant companion, and constituted his
principal heir.
Not many minutes did I give myself up to the cloud
of reﬂections through which no sunbeam of light forced
its way. One thought overmastered all; Margrave had
threatened death to my Lilian, and warned me of what
I should learn from the lips of Faber, “ the sage of the
college.” I stood, shuddering, at the door of my home;
I did not dare to enter.
“ Allen,” said a voice, in which my ear detected an
unwonted tremulous faltering, “ be ﬁrm—be calm. I
keep my promise. The hour is come in which you may
again see the Lilian of old—mind to mind, soul to
soul.”
Faber’s hand took mine, and led me into the house.
“You do, then, fear that this interview will be too
much for her strength T” said I, whispering-1y.
“ I cannot say; but she demands the interview, and
I dare not refuse it"


286 a s'raanor: sroar.
CHAPTER LXX‘VIII.
I L!" Faber on the stairs, and paused at the door
of Lilian’s- room. The door opened suddenly, noise-
lessly, and her mother came out with one hand before
her face, and the other locked in Amy’s, who was lead-
ing her as a child leads the blind. Mrs. Ashleigh looked
up, as I touched her, with a vacant, dreary-stare. She
was not weeping, as was her womanly wont in every
pettier grief, but Amy was. No word was exchanged
between us. I entered, and closed the door; my eyes
turned mechanically to the corner in which was placed
the small virgin bed, with its curtains white as a shroud.
Lilian was not there. I looked around, and saw her
half reclined on a couch near the‘window. She was
dressed, and with care. Was not that'her bridal robe?
' “ Allen -'--’Allen,” she murmured. “ "Again, again my
Allen—again, again your Lilian l” And, striving in
vain to rise, she stretched out her arms in the yearning
of reunited love. And as I knelt beside her, those
arms closed round me for the ﬁrst time in the frank,
chaste, holy tenderness of a wife’s embrace.
“Ah l” she said, in her low voice (her voice, like
Cordelia’s, was ever low), " all has come back to me --
all that I owe to your protecting, noble, trustful, guar-
dian love i”
“ Hushl bash! the gratitude rests with me — it is so


A srassos sroaY. 28?
sweet to love, to trust, to guard! my own, my beautiful
—still my beautiful! Sull'ering has not dimmed the
light of those dear eyes to me! Put your lips to my
ear. Whisper but these words: ‘I love you, and for '
your sake I wish to live !’ ” '
” For your sake, I pray—with my whole weak,
human heart—I pray to live! Listen. Some day
hereafter, if I am spared, under the purple blossoms of
yonder waving trees I shall tell you all, as I see it now;
all that darkened or shone on me in my long dream,
and before the dream closed around me, like a night in
which cloud and star chase each other! Some day
hereafter, some quiet, sunlit, happy, happy day. But
now, all I would say is this: Before that dreadful mom-
ing —” Here she paused, shuddered, and passion-
ately burst forth—“Allen, Allen! you did not believe
that slanderous letter! God bless you! God bless
you! Great-hearted, high-soaled-God bless you, my
darlingl my husband! And He will! Pray to Him
humbly as I do, and He will bless you.” She stooped
and kissed away my tears—then she resumed, feebly,
meekly, sorrowfully:
“Before that morning I was not worthy of such a
heart, such a love as yours. No, no; hear me. Not
that a thought of love for another ever crossed me!
Never, while conscious and reasoning, was I untrue to
you --even in fancy? But I was a child-wayward
as the child who pines for what earth cannot give, and
covets the moon for a toy. Heaven had been so kind
9s
d


888 A sraasos swear.
to my lot on earth, and yet with my lot on earth I was
secretly discontented. When I felt that you loved me,
and my heart told me that I loved again, I said to my-
self, ‘ Now the void that my soul ﬁnds on earth will be
ﬁlled.’ I longed for your coming, and yet when you
went I murmured, ‘But is this the ideal of which I
had dreamed?’ I asked for an impossible sympathy.
Sympathy with what? Nay, smile on me, dearest l -
sympathy with what? I could not have said. Ah!
Allen, then, then, I was not worthy of you; Infant that
I was, I asked you to understand me ; now I know that
I am a woman, and my task is to study you] Do I
make myself clear? Do you forgive me? I was not
untrue to you; I was untrue to my own duties in life.
I believed, in my vain conceit, that a mortal’s dim
vision of heaven raised me above the earth; I did not
perceive the truth that earth is a part of the same
universe as heaven! Now, perhaps, in the awful
aﬁiiction that darkened my reason, my soul has been
made more clear. As if to chastise but to teach me,
my soul has been permitted to indulge its own pre-
sumptuous desire; it has wandered forth from the
tramels of mortal duties and destinies; it comes back,
alarmed by the dangers of its own rash and presumpv
tuons escape from the tasks which it should desire
upon earth to perform. Allen, Allen, I am less un-
worthy of you now! Perhaps in my darkness one
rapid glimpse of the true world of spirit has been
Vouchsafed to me. If so, how unlike to the visions my -


290 A sraauea s'roar.
“She will die—she will diel Her eyes have the
same heavenly look as my Gilbert’s on the day on which
his closed forever. 'Her very words are his last words
—‘Forgive me all my faults to you.’ She will die—
she will die! ”
Hours thus passed away. At length Faber entered
the room; he spoke ﬁrst to Mrs. Ashleigh—meaning-
less soothings, familiar to the lips of all who pass from
the chamber of the dying to the presence of mourners,
and know that it is a falsehood to say “hope,” and a
mockery as yet to say, “endure.”
But he led her away to her own room docile as a
wearied child led to sleep, stayed with her some time,
and then returned to me, pressing me to his bosom
father-like.
“No hope—no hope!" said I, recoiling from his
embrace. “ You are silent. Speak! speak! Let me
know the worst.”
“I have a hope, yet I scarcely dare bid you share it;
for it grows rather out of my heart as man, than my
experience as physician. I cannot think that her soul,
would be now so reconciled to earth, so fondly, so
earnestly cling to this mortal life, if it were about to
be summoned away. You know how commonly even
tho sufferers who have dreaded death the most become
calmly resigned to its coming, when death visibly
reveals itself out from the shadows in which its shape
has been guessed and not seen. As it is a bad sign for
life when the patient has lost all will to live on, so there


A STRANGE sroar. 29'
is hope while the patient, yet young and with no per-
ceptible breach in the great centres of life (however
violently their forts may be stormed), has still intense
faith in recovery, perhaps drawn (who can say i) from
the whispers conveyed from above to the soul. ,
“I cannot bring myself to think that all the uses for
which a reason, always so lovely even in its errors, has
been restored, are yet fulﬁlled. It seems to me as if
your union, as yet so imperfect, has still for its end that
holy life on earth by which two mortal beings strengthen
each other for a sphere of existence to which this is the
spiritual ladder. Through yourself I have hope yet for
her. Gifted with powers that rank you high in the
manifold orders of man; thoughtful, laborious, and
brave; with a heart that makes intellect vibrate to
every ﬁne touch of humanity; in error itself, conscien-
tious; in delusion, still eager for truth; in anger, for-
giving; in wrong, seeking how to repair; and, best of
all, strong in a love which the mean would have
shrunk to defend from the fangs of the slanderer—a
love, raising passion itself out of the realm of the senses
made sublime by the sorrows that tried its devotion :—
with all these noble proofs in yourself, of a being not
meant to end here, your life has stopped short in its
uses, your mind itself has been drifted, a bark without
rudder or pilot, over seas without shore, under skies
without stars. And wherefore? Because the Mind
you so haughtily vaunted has refused its companion
and teacher in Soul.


l 292 A STRANGE s'roat.
“ And therefore, through you, I hope that she will be
spared yet to live on;-—she, in whom soul has been
led dimly astray, by unheeding the checks and the deﬁ-
nite goals which the mind is ordained to prescribe to
its wanderings while here; the mind taking thoughts
from the actual and visible world, and the soul but
vague glimpses and hints from the instinct of its ulti-
mate heritage. Each of you two seems to me as yet in-
complete, and your destinies yet uncompleted. Through
the bonds of the heart, through the trials of time, ye
have both to consummate your marriage. I do not-
believe me—I do not say this in the fanciful wisdom
of allegory and type, save that, wherever deeply exam-
ined, allegory and type run through all the most com-
monplace phases of outward and material life. I hope,
then, that she may yet be spared to you; hope it, not
from my skill as a physician, but my inward belief as a
Christian. To perfect your own being and end, ‘ Ye
will need one another 1’ ”
I started—the very words that Lilian had heard in
her vision l
“ But,” resumed Faber, “ how can I presume to trace
the numberless links of eﬁ'cct up to the First Cause, for
off—obi far off— out of the scope of my reason. I
leave that to philosophers, who would laugh my meek
hope to. s’corn. Possibly, probably, where I, whose
calling has been but to save ﬂesh from the worm, deem
that the life of your Lilian is needed yet, to develop
and train your own convictions of soul, Heaven in its


A s'raasos s'roav. 293
wisdom may see that her death would instruct you far
more than her life. I have said: Be prepared for
either; wisdom through joy, or wisdom through grief.
Enough that, looking only through the mechanism by
which this moral world is impelled and improved, you
know that cruelty is impossible to wisdom. Even a
man, or man’s law, is never-wise but when merciful.
But mercy has general conditions; and that which is
mercy to the myriads may seem hard to the one, and
that which seems hard to the one in the pang of a
moment may be mercy when viewed by the eyes that
looks on through eternity.”
And from all this discourse—of which I now, at
calm distance of time, recall every word-my human,
loving heart bore away for the moment but this sen-
tence, " Ye will need one another ;” so that I cried out,
“Life, life, life! Is there no hope for her life Y Have
you no hope as physician? I am physician, too; I will
see her. I will judge. I will not be banished from
my post.”
“ Judge, then, as physician, and let the responsibility
rest with you. At this moment, all convulsion, all
struggle has ceased—the frame is at rest. Look on
her, and perhaps only the physician’s eye could distin-
guish her state from death. It is not sleep, it is not
trance, it is not the dooming coma from which there is
no awaking. Shall I call it by the name received in
our schools? Is it the catalepsy in which life is sus~
pended, but consciousness acute? She is motionless,
25*


294 a scanner: sroax.
rigid; it is but with a strain of my own sense that I
know that the breath still breathes, and the heart still
beats. But I am convinced that though she can neither
speak, nor stir, nor give sign, she is fully, sensitively
conscious of all that passes around her. She is like
those who have seen the very coﬂin carried into their
chamber, and been unable to cry out, ‘ Do not bury me
alive 1’ Judge then for yourseif, with this intense con-
sciousness and this impotence to evince it, what might
be the eﬂ‘ect of your presence—ﬁrst an agony of
despair, and then the complete extinction of life i”
“I have known but one such case—a mother whose
heart was wrapped up in a suﬂ'ering infant. She had
lain for two days and two nights, still, as if in her
shroud. All, save myself, said, ’Life is gone.’ I said,
‘ Life still is there.’ They, brought in the infant, to try
what effect its presence would produce; then her lips
moved, and the hands crossed upon her bosom trembled.”
“ And the result 7” exclaimed Faber, eagerly. “If
the result of your experience sanction your presence,
come; the sight of the babe rekindled life Y"
“N0; extinguished its last sparkl I will not enter
Lilian’s room. I will go away—away from the house
itself. That acute consciousness! I know it well!
She may even hear me move in the room below, hear
me speak at this moment. Go back to her, go back!
But if hers be the state which I have known in another,
which may be yet more familiar to persons of far ampler
experience than mine. there is no immediate danger of


a s'rsauos STORY. 295
death. The state will last through to-day, through
to-night, perhaps for days to come. I§ it so 1'”
“I believe that for at least twelve hours there will be
no change in her state. I believe also that if she
recover from it, calm and refreshed, as from a sleep, the
danger of death will have passed away.”
“And for twelve hours my presence would be hurtful.”
“ Rather say fatal, if my diagnosis be right.”
I wrung my friend’s hand, and we parted.
Oh I to lose her nowl now that her love and her rea-
son had both returned, each more vivid than before!
Futile, indeed, might be Margrave’s boasted secret; but
at least in that secret was hope. In recognized science
I saw only despair.
And, at that thought, all dread of this mysterious
visitor vanished-all anxiety to question more of his
attributes or his history. His life itself became to me
dear and precious. What if it should fail me in the
steps of the process, whatever that was, by which the
life of my Lilian might be saved!
The shades of evening were now closing in. I re
membered that I had left Margrave without even food
for many hours. I stole round to the back of the house,
ﬁlled a basket with aliments more generous than those
of the former day; extracted fresh drugs from my stores,
and, thus laden, hurried back to the but. I found Mar-
grave in the room below, seated on his mysterious coﬂ‘er,
leaning his face on his hand. When I entered, he
looked up and said:


996 a sraanoa s'roar.
“You have neglected me. My strength is waning
Give me more of the cordial, for we have work before
us to-night, and I need support.”
He took for granted my assent to his wild experi-
ment; and he was right.
I administered the cordial. I placed food before him,
and this time he did not eat with repugnance. I poured
out wine, and he drank it sparingly, but with ready com-
pliance, saying, “ In perfect health, I looked upon wine
as poison; now it is like a fortaste of the glorious
elixir.”
Aﬁer he had thus recruited himself, he seemed to
acquire an energy that startlingly contrasted his languor
the day before; the effort of breathing was scarcely
perceptible; the color came back to his cheeks; his
bended frame rose elastic and erect.
“ If I understood you rightly,” said I, “the experi-
ment you ask me to aid can be accomplished in a single
night T”
“ In a single night—this night.”
“ Command me. Why not begin at once? What
apparatus or chemical agencies do you need f”
“Ah l” said Margrave. “ Formerly, how I was mis-
led! Formerly, how my conjectures blunderedl I
thought, when I asked you to give a month to the
experiment I wish to make, that I should need the sub-
tlest skill of the chemist. I then believed, with Van
Helmont, that the principle of life is a gas, and that the
secret was but in the mode by which the gas might be


a s'raanos STORY. 291
rightly administered. But now, all that I need is con-
tained in this coffer, save one very simple material—
fuel sufﬁcient for a steady ﬁre for six hours. I see
even that is at hand, piled up in your outhouse. And
now for the substance itself —to that you must guide
me.”
‘Explain.”
“Near this very spot is there not gold—in mines
yet undiscovered ? — and gold of the purest metal f”
“ There is. What then? Do you, with the alche-
mists, blend in one discovery —gold and life ?”
“ N 0. But it is only where the chemistry of earth
or of man produces gold, that the substance from which
the great pabulum of life is extracted by ferment can
be found. Possibly, in the attempts at that transmu-
tation of metals, which I think your own great chemist,
Sir Humphry Davy, allowed might be possible, but held
not to be worth the cost of the process—possibly, in
these attempts, some scanty grains of this substance
were found by the alchemists, in the crucible, with
grains of the metal as niggardly yielded by pitiful mim-
icry of Nature’s stupendous laboratory; and from such
grains enough of the essence might, perhaps, have been
drawn forth, to add a few years of existence to some
feeble greybeard-granting, what rests on no proofs,
that some of the alchemists reached an age rarely given
to man. But it is not in the miserly crucible, it is in
the matrix of Nature herself, that we must seek in pro-
liﬁc abundance Nature’s grand principle— life. As the


298 A sraanon sroav.
loadstone is rife with the magnetic virtue, as amber
contains the electric, so in this substance, to which we
yet want a name, is found the bright, life-giving ﬂuid.
In the old gold-mines of Asia and Europe the sub-
stance exists, but can rarely be met with. The soil for
its nutriment may there be wellnigh exhausted. It is
here, where Nature herself is all vital with youth, that
the nutriment of youth must be sought. Near this
spot is gold— guide me to it.”
“You cannot come with me. The place which I
know as auriferous is some miles distant—the way
rugged. You cannot walk to it. It is true I have
horses, but —”
“Do you think I have come this distance, and not
foreseen and forestalled all that I want for my object?
Trouble yourself not with conjectures how I can arrive
at the place. I have provided the means to arrive at
and leave it. My litter and its bearers are in reach of
my call. Give me your arm to the rising ground, ﬁfty
yards from your door.”
I obeyed mechanically, stiﬂing all surprise. I had
made my resolve, and admitted no thought that could
shake it. I
When we reached the summit of the grassy hillock,
which sloped from the road that led to the seaport,
Margrave, after pausing to recover breath, lifted up his
voice in a key, not loud, but shrill, and slow, and pro_
longed, half cry and half chant, like the night-hawk’s.
Through that air—so limpid and still, bringing near far


800 A sraanon STORY.
in my solemn completeness of man? Perhaps, in great
capitals, young men of pleasure will answer, “It in
youth; and we think what he says l” Young friends,
I do not believe you.

CHAPTER LXXX.
ALONG the grass-track I saw now, under the moon,
just risen, a strange procession—never seen before in
Australian pastures. It moved on, noiselessly but
quickly. We descended the hillock, and met it on the
way; a sable litter, borne by four men, in unfamiliar
Eastern garments; two other swarthy servitors, more
bravely dressed, with yataghans and silver-hilted pis-
tols in their belts, preceding this sombre equipage.
Perhaps Margrave divined the disdainful thought that
passed through my mind, vaguely and half-consciously;
for he said, with the hollow, bitter laugh that had
replaced the lively peal of his once melodious mirth:
“A little leisure and a little gold, and your raw colo-
nist, too, will have the tastes of a pacha.”
I I made no answer. I had ceased to care who and
what was my tempter. To me his whole being was
resolved into one problem: Had he a secret by which
Death could be turned from Lilian?
But now, as the litter halted, from the long, dark
shadow which it cast upon the turf, the ﬁgure of a


A STRANGE sroav. 301
woman emerged and stood before us. rl'be outlines of
her shape were lost in the loose folds of a black mantle,
and the features of her face were hidden by a black
veil, except only the dark-bright, solemn eyes. Her
stature was lofty, her bearing majestic, whether in
movement or repose.
Margrave accosted her in some language unknown
to me. She replied in what seemed to my ear the same
tongue. The tones of her voice were sweet, but in-
expressibly mournful. The words that they uttered
appeared intended to warn, or deprecate, or dissuade;
for they called to Margrave’s brow a lowering frown,
and drew from his lips a burst of unmistakable anger.
The woman rejoined, in the same meiancholy music of
voice. And Margrave then, leaning his arm upon her
shoulder, as he had leant it on mine, drew her away
from the group into a neighboring copse of the ﬂowering
eucalypti—mystic trees, never changing the hues of
their pale-green leaves, ever shifting the tints of their
ash-grey, shedding, bark. For some moments I gazed
on the two human forms, dimly seen by the glinting
moonlight through the gaps in the foliage. Then, turn-
ing away my eyes, I saw, standing close at my side, a
man whom I had not noticed before. His footstep, as
it stole to me, had fallen on the award without sound.
His dress, though. Oriental, diﬁ'ered from that of his
companions, both in shape and color; ﬁtting close to the
breast, leaving the arms bare to the elbow, and of an
uniform ghastly white, as are the cerements of the
Il.—-26


302 A s'raanos s'roar.
grave. His visage was even darker than those of the
Syrians or Arabs behind him, and his features were
those of a bird of prey—the beak of the eagle, but the
eye of the vulture. His checks were hollow—the
arms, crossed on his breast, were long and ﬂeshless.
Yet in that skeleton form there was a something which
conveyed the idea of a serpent’s suppleness and strength;
and as the hungry, watchful eyes met my own startled
gaze, I recoiled impulsively, with that inward warning
of danger which is conveyed to man, as to inferior
animals, in the very aspect of the creatures that sting
or devour. At my movement the man inclined his head
in the submissive Eastern salutation, and spoke in his
foreign tongue. softly, humbly, fawningly, to judge by
his tone and his gesture.
1 moved yet farther away from him with loathing,
and now the human thought ﬂashed upon me: was I,
in truth, exposed to no danger in trusting myself to the
mercy of the weird and remorseless master of those
hirelings from the East—seven men in number, two
at least of them formidably armed, and docile as blood-
hounds to the hunter, who has only to show them their
prey? But fear of man like myself is not my weak-
ness; where fear found its way to my heart, it was
through the doubts or the fancies in which man like
myself disappeared in the attributes, dark and unknown,
which we give to a ﬁend or a spectre. And, perhaps,
If I could have paused to analyze my own sensations,
the very presence of this escort—creatures of ﬂesh


A s'raanoa near. 308
and blood—lessened the dread of my incomprehensible
tempter. Rather, a hundred times, front and defy those
seven Eastern slaves—I, haughty son of the Anglo
Saxon, who conquers all races because he fears no odds
-than have seen again on the walls of my threshold
the luminous, bodiless Shadow! Besides, Lilian-
Liliaul for one chance of saving her life, however wild
and chimerical that chance might be, I would have
shrunk not a foot from the march of an army.
Thus reassured and thus resolved, I advanced, with
a smile of disdain, to meet Margrave and his veiled com-
panion, as they now came from the moonlit copse.
“Well,” I said to him, with an irony that uncon-
sciously mimicked his own, “have you taken advice
with your nurse? I assume that the dark form by your
side is that of Ayeshal ”
The woman looked at me from her sable veil, with
her steadfast, solemn eyes, and said, in English, though
with a foreign accent: “ The nurse born in Asia is but
wise through her love; the pale son of Europe is wise
through his art. The nurse says, ‘Forbearl’ Do you
say, ‘Adventure?’ ”
“ Peace l ” exclaimed Margrave, stamping his foot on
the 'ground. “I take no counsel from either; it is for _
me to resolve, for you to obey, and for him to aid.
Night is come, and we waste it; move on.”
The woman made no reply, nor did I. He took my
arm and walked back to the hut. The barbaric escort
followed. When we reached the door of the building,
21‘


304 A s'rasrmn STORY.
Margrave said a few words to the woman and to the
litter-bearers. They entered the but with us. Mar-
grave pointed out to the woman his coﬂ'er—to the men
the fuel stowed in the out-house. Both were borne
away and placed within the litter. Meanwhile, I took
from the table, on which it was carelessly thrown, the
light hatchet that I habitually carried with me in my
rambles.
“Do you think that you need that idle weapon i’”
said Margrave. “ Do you fear the good faith of my‘
swarthy attendants ?”
“ Nay, take the hatchet yourself; its use is to sever
the gold from the quartz in which we may ﬁnd it im-
bedded, or to clear, as this shovel, which will also be
needed, from the slight soil above it, the ore that the
mine in the mountain ﬂings forth, as the sea casts its
waifs on the sands.”
“Give me your hand, fellow-laborer!” said Mar-
grave, joyfully. “Ah, there is no faltering terror in
this pulse! I was not mistaken in the Man. What
rests, but the Place and the Hour! I shall live—I
shall live!” '


a s'raanea sroar. 305
CHAPTER LXXXI.
Maaoaavn now entered the litter, and the Veiled
Woman drew the black curtains round him. I walked
on, as the guide, some yards in advance. The air was
still, heavy, and parched with the breath of the Aus-
tralasian sirocco.
We passed through the meadow-lands, studded with
slumbering ﬂocks; we followed the branch of the creek,
which was linked to its source in the mountains by
many a trickling waterfall; we threaded the gloom of
stunted, misshapen trees, gnarled with the stringy bark
which makes one of the signs of the strata that nourish
gold; and at length the moon, now in all her pomp of
light, mid-heaven amongst her subject stars, gleamed
through the ﬁssures of the cave, on whose ﬂoor lay the
relics of antediluvian races, and rested in one ﬂood of
silvery splendor upon the hollows of the extinct volcano,
with tufts of dank herbage, and wide spaces of paler
award, covering the gold below—Gold, the dumb
symbol of organized Matter’s great mystery, storing in
itself, according as Mind, the informer of Matter, can
distinguish its uses, evil and good, bane and blessing.
Hitherto the Veiled Woman had remained in the
rear, with the white-robed skeleton-like image that had
crept to my side unawares with its noiseless step.
Thus, in each winding turn of the diﬁicult path at which
26* u


a s'rasnes near. 801
which now, in the drought and the hush of the skies,
was but a dead pile of stones.
The litter now ascended the height; its bearers
halted; a lean hand tore the curtains aside, and Mar-
grave descended, leaning, 'this time, not on the Black
veiled Woman, but on the White-robed Skeleton.
There, as he stood, the moon shone full on his wasted
form; on his face, resolute, cheerful, and proud, despite
its hollowed outlines and sicklied hues. He raised his
head, spoke in the language unknown to me, and the
armed men and the litter-bearers grouped round him,
bending low,_ their eyes ﬁxed on the ground. The
Veiled Woman rose slowly and came to his side, motion-
ing away, with a mute sign, the ghastly form on which
he leant, and passing round him silently, instead, her
own sustaining arm. Margrave spoke again a few
sentences, of which I could not even guess the mean-
ing. When he had concluded, the armed men and the
litter-bearers came nearer to his feet, knelt down, and
kissed his hand. They then rose, and took from the
bier-like vehicle the coder and the fuel. This done,
they lifted again the litter, and again, preceded by the
armed men, the procession descended down the sloping
hillside, down into the valley below.
Margrave now whispered, for some moments, into
the ear of the hideous creature who had made way for
the Veiled Woman.
submissively, and strode noiselesst away through the
The grim skeleton bowed his head
long grasses; the slender stems, trampled under his


A s'raaues sronv. 309
“ Let us ﬁrst fin-~ the gold, and instead of describing
the life-amber, so let me call it, I will point it out to
your own eyes. As to the process, your share in it is
so simple, that you will ask me why I seek aid from a
chemist. The life-amber, when found, has but to be
subjected to heat and fermentation for six hours; it will
be placed, in a small cauldron which that coﬁ'er con—
tains, over the ﬁre which that fuel will feed. To give
effect to the process, certain alkalies and other ingre-
dients are required. But these are prepared, and mine
is the task to commingle them. From your science as
chemist I need and ask nought. In you I have sought
only the aid of a man." .
“If that be so, why, indeed, seek .me at all? Why
not conﬁde in those swarthy attendants, who doubtless
are slaves to your orders?”
“Conﬁde in slavesl when the ﬁrst task enjoined to
them would be to discover, and refrain from purloining,
gold. Seven such unscrupulous knaves, or even one
such, and I, thus defenceless and feeblel Such is not
the work that wise masters conﬁde to ﬁerce slaves.
But that is the least of the reasons which exclude them
from my choice, and ﬁx my choice of assistant on you.
Do you forget what I told you of the danger which the
Dervish declared no bribe I could offer could tempt him
a second time to brave ?”
“I remember now; those words had passed away
from my mind.” ‘
“ And because they had passed away from your mind,


a sraasos s'roaY. 311
men plies the clockwork, that measures his hours, and
stops when its chain reaches the end of its coil, strives
to pass over those boundaries at which philosophy says,
‘ Knowledge ends,’ then he is like all other travellers in
regions unknown; he must propitiate or brave the
tribes that are hostile—must depend for his life on the
tribes that are friendly. Though your science discredits
the alchemist’s dogmas, your learning informs you that
all alchemists were not ignorant impostors; yet those
whose discoveries prove them to have been the nearest
allies to your practical knowledge, ever hint in their
mystical works at the reality of that realm which is
open to magic-ever hint that some means less familiar
than furnace and bellows are essential to him who
explores the elixir of life. He who once quaﬁ's that
elixir obtains in his very veins the bright ﬂuid by which
he transmits the force of his will to agencies dormant
in nature, to giants unseen in the space. And here, as
he passes the boundary which divides his allotted and
normal mortality from the regions and races that magic
alone can explore, so here he breaks down the safe-
guard between himself and the tribes that are hostile.
Is it not ever thus between man and man? Let a race
the most gentle, and timid, and civilized dwell on one
side a river or mountain, and another have home in the
region beyond, each, if it pass not the intervening
barrier, may with each live in peace. But if ambitious
adventurers scale the mountain, or cross the river, with
design to subdue and enslave the populati'ins they


A STRANGE s'rosv. - 813
neglected no caution, we failed from no oversight. But
out from the cauldron dread faces arose, and the spectrcs
or demons dismayed and bafﬂed us.’ Such, then, is the
danger which seems so appalling to a son of the East,
as it seemed to a seer in the dark age of Europe. But
we can deride all its threats, you and I. For myself, I
own frankly I take all the safety that the charms and
resources of magic bestow. You, for your safety, have
the cultured and disciplined reason which reduces all
phantasies to nervous impressions; and I rely on the
courage of one who has questioned, unquailing, the
Luminous Shadow, and wrested from the hand of the
magician himself the wand which concentred the won.
ders of will l”
To this strange and long discourse I listened without
interruption, and now quietly answered:
" I do not merit the trust you affect in my courage;
but I am now on my guard against the cheats of the
fancy, and the fumes of a vapor can scarcely bewilder
the brain in the open air of this mountain-land. I
believe in no races like those which you tell me lie
vicwless in space, as do gases. I believe not in magic;
I ask not its aids, and I dread not its terrors. For the
rest, I am conﬁdent of one mournful courage-the
courage that comes from despair. I submit to your
guidance whatever it be, as a sufferer whom colleges
doom to the grave submits to the quack who says,
‘Take my speciﬁc and live!’ My life is nought in
itself; my life lives in another. You and I are both
II. — 27


a s'raanos s'roav. 315
Would pause not to heed it; and did I describe it, and
chemistry deign to subject it to analysis, could chemistry
alone detach or discover its boasted virtues?
Its particles, indeed, are very minute, not seeming
readily to crystallize with each other; each in itself of
uniform shape and size, spherical as the egg which
contains the germ of life, and small as the egg from
which the life of an insect may quicken.
But Margrave’s keen eye caught sight of the atoms
upcast by the light of the moon. He exclaimed to me,
“ Found! I shall live!" And then, as he gathered up
the grains with tremulous hands, he called out to the
Veiled Woman, hitherto still seated motionless on the
crag. At his word she rose and went to the place hard
by, where the fuel was piled, busying herself there. I
had no leisure to heed her. I continued my search in
the soft and yielding soil that time and the decay of
vegetable life had accumulated over the Pre-Adamite
strata on which the arch of the cave rested its mighty
keystone. '
When we had collected of these particles about thrice
as much as a man might hold in his hand, we seemed
to have exhausted their bed. We continued still to
ﬁnd gold, but no more of the delicate substance, to
which, in our sight, gold was as dross.
“Enough,” then said Margrave reluctantly desisting.
“ What we ,have gained already will suﬁice for a life
thrice as long as legend attributes to Haroun. I shall
live—I shall live through the centuries.”


318 a STRANGE s'roar.
the woman, before inactive and unheeding, slowly
advanced, knelt by the pile, and lighted it. The dry
wood crackled and the ﬂame burst forth,‘ licking the
rims of the cauldron with tongues of ﬁre.
Margrave ﬂung into the cauldron the particles we
had collected, poured over them ﬁrst a liquid,‘ colorless
as water, from the largest of the vessels drawn from his
coﬂ'er, and then, more sparingly, drops from small crystal
phials, like the phials I had seen in the hand of Philip
Derval.
Having surmounted my ﬁrst impulse of awe, I
watched these proceedings, curious yet disdainful, as
one who watches the mummeries of an enchanter on
the stage.
“If,” thought I, these are but artful devices to
inebriate and fool my own imagination, my imagination
is on its guard, and reason shall not, this time, sleep at
her post I ” ,
“ And now,” said Margrave, “I consign to you the
easy task by which you are to merit your share of the
elixir. It is my task to feed and replenish the cauldron;
it is Ayesha’s to heed the ﬁre, which must not for a
moment relax in its measured and steady heat. Your
task is the lightest of all; it is but to renew from this
vessel the ﬂuid that burns in the lamps, and on the
ring. Observe the contents of the vessel must be
thriftily husbanded; there is enough, but no more than
enough, to sustain the light in the lamps, on the lines
traced round the cauldron, and on the farther ring, for


a s'raauos STORY. 32!
heaving like the swell of the sea, and as if in the air‘
itself there was a perceptible tremor.
I placed, my hand on Margrave’s shoulder and
whispered, “ To me earth and air seem to vibrate. Dc
they seem to vibrate to you i ”
“ I know not, I care not,” he answered impetuously.
“The essence is bursting the shell that conﬁned it.
Here are my air and my earth! Trouble me not.
Look to the circle—feed the lamps if they fail.”
I passed by the Veiled Woman as I walked towards
a place in the ring in-which the ﬂame was waning dim.
And I whispered to her the same question which I had
whispered to Margrave. She looked slowly around and
ansWered, “ So is it before the Invisible make them-
selves visiblel Did I not bid him forbear? ” Her
head again drooped on her breast, and her watch was
again ﬁxed on tho ﬁre.
I advanced to the circle and stooped to replenish the
light where it waned. As I did so, on my arm, which
stretched somewhat beyond the line of the ring, I felt
a shock like that of electricity. The arm fell to my
side numbed and nerveless, and from my hand dropped,
but within the ring, the vessel that contained the ﬂuid.
Recovering my surprise or my stun, hastily with the
other hand I caught up the vessel, but some of the
scanty liquid was already spilled on the sward; and I
saw-with a thrill of dismay, that contrasted indeed the
tranquil indiﬂ'crence with which 1 had ﬁrst undertaken
my chzirge, how small a supply was now left.
V


322 A sraauoa swear.
I went back to Margrave, and told him of the shock,
and of its consequence in the waste of the liquid.
“Beware,” said he, “ that not a motion_of the arm,
not an inch of the foot, pass the verge of the ring; and
if the ﬂuid be thus unhappily stinted, reserve all that is
left for the protecting circle and the twelve outer lamps!
See how the Grand Work advances! how the hues in
the cauldron are glowing blood-red through the ﬁlm on
the surface!”
And new four hours of the six were gone; my arm
had gradually recovered its strength. Neither the ring
nor the lamps had again required replenishing; per-
haps their light was exhausted less quickly, as it was
no longer to be exposed to the rays of the intense Aus~
tralian moon. Clouds had gathered over the sky, and
though the moon gleamed at times in the gaps that
they left in blue air, her beam was more hazy and
dulled. The locusts no longer were heard in the grass,
nor the how! of the dogs in the forest. Out of the cir-
cle, the stillness was profound.
And aboutithis time I saw distinctly in the distance
a vast Eye! It drew nearer and nearer, seeming to
move from the ground at the height of some lofty giant.
Its gaze riveted mine; my blood curdled in the blaze
from its angry ball; and now as it advanced larger and
larger, other eyes, as if of giants in its train, grew out
from the space in its rear; numbers on numbers,‘like
the spear-heads of some Eastern army, seen afar by
pale warders of battlements doomed to the dust. My


a s'raanos sroar. 323
voice long refused an utterance to my awe; at length
it burst forth shrill and loud:
“Look-look! Those terrible Eyes! Legions on
legions. And hark! that tramp of numberless feet,
they are not seen, but the hollows of earth echo the
sound of their march l”
Margrave more than ever intent on the cauldron, in
which, from time to time, he kept dropping powders or
essences drawn forth from his coﬂ'er, looked up, defy-
ingly, ﬁercely:
“Ye come,” he said in a low mutter, his once mighty
voice sounding hollow and laboring, but fearless and ﬁrm
—“ ye come - not to conquer, vain rebels l --ye whose
dark chief I struck down at my feet in the tomb where
my spell had raised up the ghost of your ﬁrst human
master, the Ghaldee! Earth and air have their armies
still faithful to me, and still I remember the war-song
that summons them up to confront you! Ayesha—
Ayesha! recall the wild troth that we pledged amongst
roses; recall the dread bond by which we united
our sway over hosts that yet own thee as queen,
though my sceptre is broken, my diadeni reft from my
brows!” .
The Veiled Woman rose at this adjuration. ~ Her veil
now was withdrawn, and the blaze of the ﬁre between
Margrave and herself ﬂushed, as with the rosy bloom
of youth, the grand beauty of her softened face. It
was seen, detached as it were, from her dark-mantled
form; seen through the mist of the vapors which rose


824 A STRANGE s'ronv.
from the cauldron, framing it round like the clouds that
are yieldingly pierced by the light of the evening star.
Through the haze of the vapor came her voice, more
musical, more plaintive than I had heard it before, but
far softer, more tender; still in her foreign tongue ; the
words unknown to me, and yet their sense, perhaps,
made intelligible by the love, which has one common
language and one common look to all who have loved
-the love unmistakably heard in the loving tone,
unmistakably seen in the loving face.
A moment or so more, and she had come round from
the opposite side of the ﬁre-pile, and bending over Mar-
grave’s upturned brow, kissed it quietly, solemnly; and
then her countenance grew ﬁerce, her crest rose erect;
it was the lioness protecting her young. She stretched
forth her arm from the black mantle, athwart the pale
front that new again bent over the cauldron; stretched
it towards the haunted and hollow-sounding space
beyond, in the gesture of one whose right hand has the
sway of the sceptre. And then her voice stole on the
air in the music of a chant, not loud yet far-reaching;
so thrilling, so sweet, and yet so solemn, that I could
at once comprehend how legend united of old the spell
of enchantment with the power of song. All that I
recalled of the effects which, in the former time, Mar-
grave’s strange chants had produced on the ear that
they ravished and the thoughts they confused, was but
as the wild bird’s imitative carol, compared to the depth,
and the art, and ‘he soul of the singer, whose voice


326 A s'raanes s'roaY.
sixth lamp, not a drop in the vessel that fed them was
left. In avague dismay, I how looked round the half
of the wide circle in rear of the two bended ﬁgures
intent on the cauldron. All along that disc the light
was already broken, here and there ﬂickering up, here
and there dying down; the six lamps in that half of the
circle still twinkled, but faintly, as stars shrinking fast
from the dawn of day. But it was not the fading shine
in that half of the magical ring which daunted my eye
and quickened with terror the pulse of my heart; the
Bush-land beyond was on ﬁre. From the background
of the forest rose' the ﬂames and the smoke—the
smoke, there, still half smothering the ﬂame. But
along the width of the grasses and herbage, between
the verge of the forest and the bed of the water-creek
just below the raised platform from which I beheld the
dread conﬂagration, the ﬁre was advancing; wave upon
wave, clear and red against the columns of rock behind :
as the rush of a ﬂood through the mists of some Alp
crowned with lightnings.
Roused from my stun at the ﬁrst sight of a danger
not foreseen by the mind I had steeled against far rarer
portents of nature, I cared no more for the lamps and
the circle. Hurrying back to Ayesha, I exclaimed:
“The phantoms have gone from the spaces in front;
but what incantation or spell can arrest the red march
of the foe, speeding on in the rear! While we gazed
on the cauldron of life, behind us, unheeded, behold the
Destroyer l ”


828 a STRANGE sroaY.
death than my life. She thinks that in life I should
scorn and forsake her, that in death I should die in her
arms! Sorceress, avauntl Art thou useless and
powerless now when I need thee most? Go! Let
the world be one funeral pyrel What to me is the
world? My world is my life! Thou knowest that my
last hope is here—that all the strength left me this
night will die down, like the lamps in the circle, unless
the elixir restore it. Bold friend, spurn that sorceress
away. Hours yet ere those ﬂames can assail usl A
few minutes more, and life to your Lilian and me! ”
Thus having said, Margrave turned from us, and cast
into the cauldron the last essence yet left in his emptied
coﬂer. -
Ayesha silently drew her black veil over her face;
and turned with the being she loved, from the terror
he scorned, to share in the hope that be cherished.
Thus left alone, with my reason disenthralled, disen-
chanted, I surveyed more calmly the extent of the actual
peril with which we were threatened, and the peril
seemed less, so surveyed.
It is true, all the Bush-land behind, almost up to the
bed of the creek, was on ﬁre; but the grasses, through
which the ﬂame spread so rapidly, ceased at the oppo-
site marge of the creek. Watery pools were still, at
intervals, left in the bed of the creek, shining tremulous,
like waves of ﬁre, in the glare reﬂected from the burn-
ing land; and even, where the water failed, the stony
course of the exhausted rivulet was a barrier against


A sraasos sroar. 329
the march of the conﬂagration. Thus, unless the wind,
now still, should rise, and waft some sparks to the
parched combustible herbage immediately around us,
we were saved from the ﬁre, and our work might yet
be achieved.
I whispered to Ayesha the conclusion to which I
came.
“ Thinkest thou,” she answered, withoht raising her
mournful head, “that the Agencies of Nature are the
movements of chance? The Spirits I invoked to his
aid are leagued with the hosts that assail. A mightier
than I am has doomed himl”
Scarcely had she uttered these words before Mar-
grave exclaimed, “ Behold how the Rose of the alche-
mist’s dream enlarges its blooms from the folds of its
petals! I shall live, I shall live I ”
I looked, and the liquid which glowed in the caul-
dron had now taken a splendor that mocked all com-
parisons borrowed from the lustre of gems. In its
prevalent color it had, indeed, the dazzle and ﬂash of
the ruby; but, out from the mass of the molten red,
broke coruscations of all prismal hues, shooting, shift-
ing, in a play that made the wavelets themselves seem
living things, sensible of their joy. No longer was there
scum or ﬁlm upon the surface; only ever and anon a
light rosy vapor ﬂoating up, and quick lost in the bag-
gard, heavy, sulphurous air, hot with the conﬂagration
rushing towards us from behind. And these corusca
tions formed, on the surface of the molten ruby, literally
28*


A s'raauoa s'roar. 331
turf which had been traced by the triangles of light
long since extinguished, and towards the verge of the
circle. As I advanced, overhead rushed a dark cloud
of wings—birds dislodged from the forest on ﬁre, and
screaming, in dissonant terror, as they ﬂew towards the
farthermost mountains; close by my feet hissed and
glided the snakes, driven forth from their blazing
coverts, and glancing through the ring, unscared by its
waning lamps; all undulating by me, brightreyed and
hissing—all made innocuous by fear: even the terrible
Death-adder, which I trampled on as I halted at the
verge of the circle, did not turn to bite, but crept harm-
less away. I halted at the gap between the two dead
lamps, and bowed my head to look again into the
crystal vessel.’ Were there, indeed, no lingering drops
yet left, if but to recruit the lamps for some priceless
minutes more? As I thus stood, right into the gap
between the two dead lamps, strode a gigantic Foot.
All the rest of the form was unseen; only, as volume
after volume of smoke poured on from the burning land
behind, it seemed as if one great column of vapor, eddy-
ing round, settled itself aloft from the circle, and that
out from that column strode the giant Foot. And, as
strode the Foot, so with it came, like the sound of its
tread, a roll of muttered thunder.
I rec-oiled, with a cry that rang loud through the
lurid air. ‘
" Couragel” said the voice of Ayesha.~ “ Trembling
soul, yield not an inch to the demon l"


332 A s'raasua away.
At the charm, the wonderful charm, in the tone of
the Veiled Woman’s voice, my will seemed to take a
force more sublime than its own. I folded my arms on
my breast, and stood as if rooted to the spot, confront-
ing the column of smoke and the stride of the giant
Foot. And the Foot halted, mute.
Again, in the momentary- hush of that suspense, I
heard a voice —it was Margrave’s
“The last hour expires—the work is accomplished!
Comel come l—aid me to take the cauldron from the
ﬁre; and, quickl—or a drop may be wasted in vapor
_the Elixir of Life from the cauldron 1”
At that cry I receded, and the Foot advanced.
And at that moment, suddenly, unawares, from
behind, I was stricken down. Over me, as I lay, swept
a whirlwind of trampling hoofs and glancing horns.
The herds, in their ﬂight from the burning pastures,
had rushed over the bed of the watercourse—scaled
the slopes of the banks. Snorting and bellowing, they
plunged their blind way to the mountains. One cry
alone, more wild than their own savage blare, pierced
the reek through which the Brute Hurricane swept.
At that cry of wrath and despair I struggled to rise,
again dashed to earth by the hoofs and the horns. But
was it the dream-like deceit of my reeling senses, or did
I see that giant Foot stride past through the close-
serried ranks of the maddening herds? Did I hear,
distinct through all the huge uproar of animal terror,
the roll of low thunder which followed the stride of
that Foot?


834 A s‘raauoa s'roar.
bending. I saw, as I moved with bruised limbs to the
place, close by the lips of the dying magician, the ﬂash
of the ruby-like essence spilt on the award, and, meteor-
like, sparkling up from the torn tufts of herbage.
I now reached Margrave’s side. Bending over him
as the Veiled Woman bent, and as I sought gently to
raise him, be turned his face, ﬁercely faltering out,
“ Touch me not, rob me not! You share with mel
Never—never] These glorious drops are all mine!
Die all else! I will live—I will live!" Writhing
himself from my pitying arms, he plunged his face
amidst the beautiful, playful ﬂame of the essence, as if
to lap the elixir with lips scorched away from its in-
tolerable burning. Suddenly, with a low shriek, he fell
back, his face upturned to mine, and on that face un-
mistakably reigned Death 1
Then Ayesha tenderly, silently, drew the young head
to her lap, and it vanished from my sight behind her
black veil.
I knelt beside her, murmuring some trite words of
comfort; but she heeded me not, rocking nerself to and
fro as the mother who cradles a child to sleep. Soon,
the fast-ﬂickering sparkles of the lost elixir died out on
the grass; and with their last sportive diamond-like
tremble of light, up, in all the suddenness of Australian
day, rose the sun, lifting himself royally above the
mountain-tops, and fronting the meaner blaze of the
forest as a young king fronts his rebels. And as there,
where the bush-ﬁres had ravaged, all was a desert, so


A STRANGE s'roar. 835
there, where their fury had not spread, all was a garden
Afar, at the foot of the mountains, the fugitive herds
were grazing; the cranes, ﬂocking back to the pools,
renewed the strange grace of their gamhols; and the
great kingﬁsher, whose laugh, half in mirth, half in
mockery, leads the choir that welcome the morn-
which in Europe is night—alighted hold on the roof
of the cavern, whose ﬂoors were still white with the
bones of races, extinct before—so helpless through
instincts, so royal through Soul -rose MANl
But there, on the ground where the dazzling elixir
had wasted its virtues—there the herbage already had
a freshness of verdure which, amid the duller sward
round it, was like an oasis of green in a desert. And,
there, wild ﬂowers, whose chill hues the eye would
have scarcely distinguished the day before, now glit-
tered forth in blooms of unfamiliar beauty. Towards
that spot were attracted myriads of happy insects,
whose hum of intense joy was musically loud. But
the form of the life-seeking sorcerer lay rigid and stark;
—blind to the bloom of the wild ﬂowers, deaf to the
glee of the insects—one hand still resting heavily on
the rim of the emptied cauldron, and the face still hid
behind the Black Veil. What! the wondrous elixir,
sought with such hope and well-nigh achieved through
such dread, ﬂeeting back to the earth from which its
material was drawn, to give bloom, indeed-but to
herbs; joy indeed—but to insects! ’
And now in the ﬂash of the sun, slowly wound up
2v


836 A s'raauen swear.
the slopes that led to the circle, the same barbaric pro-
cession which had sunk into the valley under the ray
of the moon. The armed men came ﬁrst, stalwart and
tall, their vests brave with crimson and gold lace—
their weapons gaily gleaming with holiday silver.
‘ After them, the Black Litter. As they came to the
place, Ayesha, not raising her head, spoke to them in
her own Eastern tongue. A wail was her answer.
The armed men bounded forward, and the bearers left
the litter.
All gathered round the dead form with the face con-
cealed under the black veil—all knelt, and all wept.
Far in the distance, at the foot of the blue mountains,
a crowd of the savage natives had risen up as if from
the earth ; they stood motionless, leaning on their clubs
and spears, and looking towards the spot on which we
were -, strangely thus brought into the landscape, as if
they too, the wild dwellers on the verge which
Humanity guards from the Brute, were'among the
mourners for the mysterious Child of mysterious
Nature! And still, in the herbage, bummed the small
insects, and still, from the cavern, laughed the great
kingﬁsher. I said to Ayesha, "Farewell! your love
mourns the dead, mine calls me to the living. You
are now with your'own people, they may console you-
say if I can assist.”
“ There is no consolation for mel What mourner
can be consoled if the dead die forever? Nothing for
him is left but the grave; that grave shall be in the


A STRANGE STORY. 33'!
land where the song of Ayesha ﬁrst lulled him to sleep.
Thou assist Mia—thou, the wise man of Europe! From
me ask assistance. What road wilt thou take to thy
home?”
“There is but one road known to me through the
maze of the solitude—that which we took to this
upland.”
“ On that road Death lurks, and awaits thee! Blind
dupe, couldst thou think that if the grand secret of life
had been won, he whose head rests on my lap would
have yielded thee one petty drop of the essence which
had ﬁlched from his store of life but a moment? Me,
who so loved and so cherished him—me he would have
doomed to the pitiless cord of my servant, the Strangler,
if my death could have lengthened a hairbreadth the
span of his being. But what matters to me his crime
or his madness? I loved him—I loved him I ”
She bowed her veiled head lower and lower; perhaps
under the veil, her lips kissed the lips of the dead.
Then she said whisperingly:
“Juma, the Strangler, whose word never failed to
his master, whose prey never slipped from his snare,
waits thy step on the road to thy home! But thy
death cannot now proﬁt the dead, the beloved. And
thou hast had pity for him who took but thine aid
to design thy destruction. His life is lost, thine is
saved!”
She spoke' no more in the tongue that I could inter-
pret. She spoke, in the language unknown. a few
II. — 29 I


A era/mes s'roaY. 839
and the home which I sped to, came, far in advance of
my guards, into the thicket in which the bushmen had
started up in my path on the night that Lilian had
watched for my coming. The earth at my feet was
rife with creeping plants and many-colored ﬂowers, the
sky overhead was half-hid by motionless pines. Sud-
denly, whether crawling out from the herbage or drop-
ping down from the trees, by my side stood the white-
robed and skeleton form—Ayesha’s attendant, the
Strangler.
I sprang from him in shuddering, then halted and
faced him. The hideous creature crept towards me,
cringing and fawning, making signs of humble goodwill
and servile obeisance. Again I recoiled—wrathfully,
loathingly; turned my face homeward, and ﬂed on. I
thought I had baﬂled his chase, when, just at the mouth
of the thicket, he dropped from a bough in my path
close behind me. Before I could turn, some dark muf-
ﬂing substance fell betWeen my sight and the sun, and
I felt a ﬁerce strain at my throat. But the words of
Ayesha had warned me; with one rapid hand I seized
the noose before it could tighten too closely, with the
other I tore the bandage away from my eyes, and,
wheeling round on the dastardly foe, struck him down
with one spurn of my foot. His hand, as he fell,
relaxed its hold on the noose; Ifreed my threat from
the knot, and sprang from the copse into the broad sunlit
plain. I saw no more of the armed men or the Strangler.
Panting and breathless, I paused at last before the


\ A s'raauea near. 341
thing more dear than an animal’s life for itself! What
remained—what remained for man’s bopef—man’s
mind and man’s heart thus exhausting their all with no
other result than despair? What remained but the
mystery of mysteries, so clear to the sunrise of child-
hood, the sunset of age, only dimmed by the clouds
which collect round the noon of our manhood? Where
yet was Hope found? In the soul; in its every-day
impulse to supplicate comfort and light, from the Giver
of soul, wherever the heart is afﬂicted, the mind is
obscured.
Then the words of Ayesha rushed over me; “ What
mourner can be consoled, if the dead die forever?”
Through every pulse of my frame throbbed that dread
question. All Nature around seemed to murmur it.
And suddenly, as if by a ﬂash from Heaven, the grand
truth in Faber’s grand reasoning shone on me, and
lighted up all, within and without. Man alone, of all
earthly creatures, asks, “Can the Dead die forever l”
and the instinct that urges the question is God’s answer
to man! No instinct_ is given in vain.
And, born with the instinct of soul is the instinct
that leads the soul from the seen to the unseen, from
time to eternity, from the torrent that foams towards
the Ocean of Death, to the source of its stream, far
aloft from the ocean.
“Know thyself,” said the Pythian of old. “ That
precept descended from Heaven.” Know thyself! is
that maxim wise? If so, know thy soul. But never
29*


A s'raauea sroar. 348
terrible Demons, but of the wild’s savage children
whom I had seen, halting, curious and mute, in the
light of the morning. The tremor of the ground (if
not, as heretofore, explicable by the illusory impression
of my own treacherous sense) might be but the natural
effect of elements struggling yet under a soil unmistak-
ably charred by volcanoes. The luminous atoms dis-
solved in the cauldron might as little be fraught with a
vital elixir as are the splendors of N aphtha or phosphor.
As it was, the weird rite had no magic result. The
magician was not rent limb from limb by the ﬁends.
By causes as natural as ever extinguished life’s spark
in the frail lamp of clay, he had died out of sight-
under the black vail.
What mattered henceforth to Faith, in its far grander
questions and answers, whether Reason, in Faber, or
Fancy, in me, supplied the more probable guess at a
hieroglyph which, if construed aright, was but a word
of small mark in the mystical language of Nature? If
all the arts of enchantment recorded by Fable were
attested by facts which Sages were forced to acknow-
ledge, Sages would sooner or later ﬁnd some cause for
such portents-not supernatural. But what Sage,
without cause supernatural, both without and within
him, can guess at the wonders he views in the growth
of a blade of grass, or the tints on an insect’s wing?
Whatever art Man can achieve in his progress through
time, Man’s reason, in time, can suﬁce to explain. But
the wonders of God? These belong to the Inﬁnite;


344 A s'rsanen STORY.
and these, 0 Immortal! will but develop new wonder
on wonder, though thy sight be a spirit’s, and thy
leisure to track and to solve, an eternity.
As'I raised my face from my clasped hands, my
eyes fell full upon a form standing in the open door-
way. There, where on the night in which Lilian’s long
struggle for reason and life had begun, the Luminous
Shadow had been beheld in the doubtful light of a
dying moon and a yet hazy dawn; there, on the thresh-
old, gathering round her bright locks the auriole of the
glorious sun, stood Amy, the blessed child! And as I
gazed, drawing nearer and nearer to the silenced house,
and that Image of Peace on its threshold, I felt that
Hope met me at the door-Hope in the child’s stead-
fast eyes— Hope in the child’s welcoming smile!
“I was at watch for you,” whispered Amy. “All
is well.”
“ She lives still—she lives! Thank God—thank
God!”
.“ She lives-she will recover!” said another voice,
as my head sunk on Faber’s shoulder. “ For some
hours in the night her sleep was disturbed—convulsed.
I feared, then, the worst. Suddenly, just before the
dawn, she called out aloud, still in sleep—
.“‘ The cold and dark shadow has passed away from
me, and from Allen—passed away from us both forever!’
“And from that moment the fever leﬁ her; the
breathing became soft, the pulse steady, and the color
stole gradually back to her cheek. The crisis is past


a s'raauos sToaY. 345
Nature’s benign Disposer has permitted Nature to
restore your life’s gentle partner, heart to heart, mind
to mind ”
“ And soul to soul,” I cried, in my solemn joy.
“Above as below, soul to soul l” Then, at a sign from
Faber, the child took me by the hand and led me up
the stairs into Lilian’s room.

Again those dear arms closed round me in wife-like
and holy love, and those true lips kissed away my
tears;—even as now, at the distance of years from
that happy morn, while I write the last words of this
Strange Story, the same faithful arms close around me,
the same tender lips kiss away my tears.
THE END OF A STRANGE STORY


‘1


TH] /
HAUNTED AND THE HAUNTERS;
OR.
THE HOUSE AND THE BRAIN. ‘
(“7)


[Tnls tale ﬁrst appeared in Blackwood’: Magazine, August, 1859.
A portion of it as then published is now suppressed, because
encroaching too much on the main plot of the “ Strange Story."
As it stands, however, it may be considered the preliminary out-
line of that more elaborate attempt to construct an interest akin
to that which our forefathers felt in tales of witchcraft and ghost-
land, out of ideas and beliefs which have crept into fashion in
the society of our own day. There has, perhaps, been no age in
which certain phenomena, that in all ages have been produced by,
or upon, certain physical temperaments, have excited so general
a notice—more, perhaps, among the educated classes than the
uneducated. Nor do I believe that there is any age in which
those phenomena have engendered throughout a wider circle a
more credulous superstition. But, on the other hand, there has
certainly been no age in which persons of critical and inquisitive
intellect—seeking to divest what is genuine in these apparent
vagaries of Nature from the chants of venal impostors and the
exaggeration of puzzled witnesses—have more soberly endeavored
to render such exceptional tbaumaturgia of philosophical use, in
enlarging our conjectural knowledge of the complex laws of being
—sometimes through physiological, sometimes through meta-
physical, research. Without discredit, however, to the many able
and distinguished speculators on so vague a subject, it must be
observed that their explanations as yet have been rather ingenious
than satisfactory. Indeed, the ﬁrst requisites for conclusive theory
are at present wanting. The facts are not sufﬁciently generalized,
and the evidences for them have not been sufﬁciently tested.
It is just when elements of the marvellous are thus struggling
between superstition and philosophy, that they fall by right to
the domain of Art—the art of post or tale-teller. They furnish
the constructor of imaginative ﬁction with materials for mys-
terious terror of a character not exhausted by his predecessors,
and not foreign to the notions that ﬂoat on the surface of his own
time; while they allow him to wander freely over that range of
conjecture which is favorable to his purposes, precisely because
science itself has not yet disenchanted that debatable realm of
its haunted shadows and goblin lights.)
( 348)


350 THE HAUNTED AND THE HAUNTERS; on,
ask you to accept on my aﬂirmation what you would
hold to be incredible without the evidence of your own
senses. Let me only say this, it was not so much what
we saw or heard (in which you might fairly suppose
that we were the dupes of our own excited fancy, or
the victims of imposture in others) that drove us away,
as it was an undeﬁnable terror which seized both of us
Whenever we passed by the door of a certain unfur-
nished room, in which we neither saw nor heard any-
thing. And the strangest marvel of all was, that for
once in my life I agreed with my wife, silly woman
though she be—and allowed, after the third night, that
it was impossible to stay a fourth in that house. Accord-
ingly, on the fourth morning, I summoned the woman
who kept the house and attended on us, and told her
that the rooms did not quite suit us, and we could not
stay out our week. She said, dryly, ‘I know why; you
have stayed longer than any other lodger. Few ever
stayed a seoond night; none before you a third. But I
take it they have been very kind to you.’
“ ‘ They—who ?’ I asked, affecting a smile.
“'Why, they who haunt the house, whoever they
are. I don’t mind them; I remember them many years
ago, when I lived in this house, not as a servant; but
I know they will be the death of me some day. I don’t
care—I’m old, and must die soon anyhow; and then I
shall be with them, and in this house still.’ The woman
spoke with so dreary a sadness, that really it was a sort
of awe that prevented my conversing with her further.


852 mm HAUNTED AND 'rnn HAUNTED-S; on,
“What is he ?—in any business l”
“N0, sir—nothing particular; a single gentleman. "
I gave the pot-boy the gratuity earned by his liberal
information, and proceeded to Mr. J , in G
Street, which was close by the street that boasted the
haunted house. I was lucky enough to ﬁnd Mr. J-—-


at home-an elderly man, with intelligent countenance
and prepossessiug manners.
I communicated my name and my business frankly.
I said I heard the house was considered to be haunted
-that I had a strong desire to examine a house with
so equivocal a reputation—that I should be greatly
obliged if he would allow me to hire it, though only for
a night. I was willing to pay for that privilege what-
ever he might be inclined to ask. “ Sir,” said Mr.
J—, with great courtesy, “the house is at your
service, for as short or as long a time as you please.
Rent is out of the question—the obligation will be on
my side should you be able to discover the cause of the
strange phenomena which at present deprive it of all
value. I cannot let it, for I cannot even get a servant
to keep it in order or answer the door. Unluckin the
house is haunted, if I may use that expression, not
only by night, but by day; though at night the disturb-
ances are of a more unpleasant and sometimes of a more
alarming character. The poor old woman who died in
it three weeks ago was a pauper whom I took out of a
workhouse, for in her childhood she had been known to
some of my family, and had once been in such good


rm; HOUSE AND run BRAIN. 353
circumstances that she had rented that house of my
uncle. She was a woman of superior education and
strong mind, and was the only person I could ever
induce to remain in the house. Indeed, since her
death, which was sudden, and the coroner’s inquest,
which gave it a notoriety in the neighborhood, I have
so despaired of ﬁnding any person to take charge of the
house, much more a tenant, that I would willingly let
it rent-free for a year to any one who would pay its
rates and taxes.”
“ How long is it since the house acquired this sinister
character ? "
“ That I can scarcely tell you, but very many years
since. The old woman I spoke of said it was haunted
when she rented it between thirty and forty years ago.
The fact is, that my life has been spent in the East
Indies, and in the civil service of the Company. I re-
turned to England last year, on inheriting the fortune
of an uncle, among whose possessions was the house in
question. I found it shut up and uninhabited. I was
told that it was haunted, that no one would inhabit it.
I smiled at what seemed to me so idle a story. I spent
some money in repairing it— added to its oldfashioned
furniture a few modern articles—advertised it, and
obtained a lodger for a year. He was a colonel retired
on half-pay. He came in with his family, a son and a
daughter, and four or ﬁve servants; they all leﬁ: the
house the next day; and, although each of them de-
clared that he had seen something different from that
30* x


B54 was HAUNTED AND ran nausrnas; 0a,
which had scared the others, a something still was
equally terrible to all. I really could not in conscience
sue, nor even blame, the colonel for breach of agreement.
Then I put in the old woman I have spoken of, and she
was empowered to let the house in apartments. I never
had one ledger who stayed more than three days. I do
not tell you their stories—to no two lodgers have there
been exactly the same phenomena repeated. It is
better that you should judge for yourself, than enter
the house with an imagination inﬂuenced by previous
narratives; only be prepared to see and to hear some-
thing or other, and take whatever precautions you
yourself please.”
“ Have you never had a curiosity yourself to pass a
night in that house? ”
“Yes. I passed not a night, but three hours in
broad daylight alone in that house. My curiosity is
not satisﬁed, but it is quenched. I have no desire to
renew the experiment. You cannot complain, you see,
sir, that I am not sufﬁciently candid ; and unless your
interest be eXceedingly eager and your nerves unusually
strong, I honestly add, that I advise you not to pass a
night in that house.”
“ My interest is exceedingly keen,” said I, “ and
though only a coward will boast of his nerves in situw
tions wholly unfamiliar to him, yet my nerves have
been seasoned in such variety of danger that I have the
right to rely on them-even in a haunted house.”
Mr. J—— said very little more; he took the keys of


run nousn AND THE naam. 855
the house out of his bureau, gave them to me, and,
thanking him cordially for his frankness, and his urbane
concession to my wish, I carried off my prize.
Impatient for the experiment, as soon as I reached
home, I summoned my conﬁdential servant—a young
man of gay spirits, fearless temper, and as free from
superstitious prejudice as any one I could think of.
“F ,” said I, “you remember in Germany how

disappointed we Were at not ﬁnding a ghost in that old
castle, which was said to be haunted by a headless
apparition? Well, I have heard of a house in London
which, I have reason to hope, is decidedly haunted. I
mean to sleep there to-night. From what I hear, there
is no doubt that something will allow itself to be seen
or to be heard—something, perhaps, excessively horri-
ble. Do you think, if I take you with me, I may rely
on your presence of mind, whatever may happen Y ”
“Oh, sirl pray trust me,” answered F
with delight.
“ Very well; then here are the keys of the house—

, grinning
this is the address. Go now—select for me any bed-
room you please; and since the house has not been
inhabited for weeks, make up a good ﬁre — air the bed
well—see, of course, that there are candles as well as
fuel. Take with you my revolver and my dagger— so
much for my weapons—arm yourself equally well; and
if we are not a match for a dozen ghosts, we shall be
but a sorry couple of Englishmen."
I was engaged for the rest of the day on business so


356 mm HAUNTED AND run HAUNTIBB on,
urgent that I had not leisure to'think much on the
nocturnal adventure to which I had plighted my honor.
I dined alone, and very late, and while dining, read, as
is my habit. I selected one of the volumes of Macau-
lay’s Essays. I thought to myself that I would take
the book with me; there was so much of healthfulness
in the style, and practical life in the subjects, that it
would serve as an antidote against the inﬂuences of
superstitious fancy.
Accordingly, about half-past nine, I put the book into
my pocket, and strolled leisurely towards the haunted
house. I took with me a favorite dog—an exceed-
ingly sharp, bold, and vigilant bull-terrier— a dog
fond of prowling about strange ghostly corners and
passages at night in search of rats—a dog of dogs for
a ghost.
It was a summer night, but chilly, the sky somewhat
gloomy and overcast. Still there was a moon-faint
and sickly, but still a moon—and if the clouds permitted,
after midnight it would be brighter.
I reached the house, knocked, and my servant opened
with a cheerful smile.
“ All right, sir, and very comfortable.”
“ Oh I” said I, rather disappointed; “have you not
seen or heard anything remarkable T”
“Well, sir, I must own I have heard something -
queer.”
“What?-what I”
“ The sound of feet pattering behind me; and once


'rnn HOUSE AND Tan Imam. 357
or twice small noises like whispers close at my ear-
nothing more.”
“You are not at all frightened?”
“I! not a bit of it, sir;” and the man’s bold look
reassured me on one point—viz., that, happen what
might, he would not desert me.
We were in the hall, the street door closed, and my
attention was now drawn to my dog. He had at ﬁrst
run in eagerly enough, but had sneaked back to the
door, and was scratching and whining to get out. After
patting him on the head, and encouraging him gently,
the dog seemed to reconcile himself to the situation,
and followed me and F—— through the house, but
keeping close at my heels instead of hurrying inquisi-
tively in advance, which was his usual and normal
habit in all strange places. We ﬁrst visited the sub-
terranean apartments, the kitchen and other oﬂices, and
especially the cellars, in which last there were two or
three bottles of wine still left in a bin, covered with
cobwebs, and, evidently, by their appearance, undis-
turbed for many years. _ It was clear that the ghosts
Were not winebibbers. For the rest we discovered
nothing of interest. There was a gloomy, little back-
yard, with very high walls. The stones of this yard
were very damp; and what with the damp, and what
with the dust and smoke-grime on the pavement, our
feet left a slight impression where we passed. And
now appeared the ﬁrst strange phenomenon witnessed
3y myself in this strange abode. I saw, just before me,


362 rm: HAUNTED AND 'rrm naunrsns; on,
door now very slowly and quietly opened as of its own
accord. We precipitated ourselves into the landing-
place. We both saw a large, pale light—as large as
the human ﬁgure, but shapeless ahd unsubstantial—
move before us, and ascend the stairs that led from the
landing into the attics. I followed the light, and my
servant followed me. It entered, to the right of the
landing, a small garret, of which the door stood open.
I entered in the same instant. The light then collapsed
into a. small globule, exceedingly brilliant and vivid;
rested a moment on a bed in the corner, quivered and
vanished. We approached the bed and examined it - a
half-tester, such as is commonly found in attics devoted
to servants. 0n the drawers that stood near it we per-
ceived an old, faded silk kerchief, with the needle still
left in a rent half repaired. The kerchief was covered
with dust; probably it had belonged to the old woman
who had last died in that house, and this might have
been her sleeping-room. I had sufﬁcient curiosity to
open the drawers; there were a few odds and ends of
female dress, and two letters tied round with a narrow
ribbon of faded yellow. I took the liberty to possess
myself of the letters. We found nothing else in the
room worth noticing—nor did the light reappear; but
we distinctly heard, as we turned to go, a pattering
footfall on the ﬂoor —-just before us. We went through
the other attics (in all four), the footfall still preceding
us. Nothing to be seen—nothing but the footfall
heard. I had the letters in my hand; just as I was


ﬁn: uouss AND run mum. 368
descending the stairs I distinctly felt my wrist seized,
and a faint, soft eﬁ'ort made to draw the letters from
my clasp. I only held them the more tightly, and the
effort ceased.
We regained the bedchamber appropriated to myself,
and I then remarked that my dog had not followed us
when we had left it. He was thrusting himself close
to the ﬁre, and trembling. I was impatient to examine
the letters; and while I read them, my servant opened
a little box in which he had deposited the Weapons I
had ordered him to bring; took them out, placed them
on a table close at my bed-head, and then occupied him-
self in soothing the dog, who, however, seemed to heed
him very little.
The letters were short—they were dated; the dates
exactly thirty-ﬁve years ago. They were evidently
from a lover to his mistress, or a husband to some
young wife. Not only the terms of expression, but a dis-
tinct reference to a former voyage, indicated the writer
to have been a seafarer. The spelling and hand-writing
were those of a man imperfectly educated, but still
the language itself was forcible. In the expressions of
endearment there was a kind of rough, wild love; but
here and there were dark unintelligible hints at some
secret not of love -some secret that seemed of crime.
“We ought to love each other,” was one of the sen-
tences I remember, “ for how every one else would exe.
crate us if all was known.” Again: “Don’t let any
one he in the same room with you at night—you talk


864 mu HAUNTED AND THE HAUNTERS; on,
in your sleep.” And again: “What’s done can’t be
undone; and I tell you there’s nothing against us
unless the dead could come to life.” Here there was
underlined in a better handwriting (a female’s), “They
do I ” At the end of the letter latest in date the same
female hand had written these words: “ Lost at sea
the 4th of June, the same day as -_-”
I put down the letters, and began to muse over their
contents.
Fearing, however, that the train of thoughts into
which I fell might unsteady my nerves, I fully deter-
mined to keep my mind in a ﬁt state to cope with what-
ever of marvellous the advancing night might bring
forth. I roused myself—laid the letters on the table-
stirred up the ﬁre, which was still bright and cheering
-and opened my volume of Macaulay. I read quietly
enough until about half-past eleven. I then threw my-
self dressed upon the bed, and told my servant he might
retire to his own room, but must keep himself awake.
I bade him leave open the door between the two rooms.
Thus alone, I kept two candles burning on the table by
my bed-head. I placed my watch beside the weapons,
and calmly resumed my Macaulay. Opposite to me the
ﬁre burned clear; and on the hearthrug, seemingly
asleep, lay the dog. In about twenty minutes I felt an
exceedingly cold air pass by my cheek, like a sudden
draught. I fancied the door to my right, communical',
ing with the landing-place, must have got open; but no
--it was closed. I then turned my glance to my left


366 ms HAUNTED an) 'rm: mum-ans; on,
heard it again clap to. Ilwas left alone in the haunted
house. _
It was but for a moment that I remained undecided
whether or not to follow my servant; pride and curiosity
alike forbade so dastardly a ﬂight. I re-entered my
room, closing the door after me, and proceeded cautiously
into the interior chamber. I encountered nothing to
justify my servant’s terror. I again carefully examined
the walls, to see if there were any concealed door. I
could ﬁnd no trace of one—not even a seam in the dull-
brown paper with which the room was hung. How,
then, had the THING, whatever it was, which had so
scared him, obtained ingress except through my own
chamber?
I returned to my room, shut and locked the door that
opened upon the interior one, and stood on the hearth,
expectant and prepared. I now perceived that the dog
had slnnk into an angle of the wall, and was pressing
himself close against it, as if literally striving to force
his way into it. I approached the animal and spoke to
it; the poor brute was evidently beside itself with terror. ‘
It showed all its teeth, the slaver dropping from its
jaws, and would certainly have bitten me if I had
touched it. It did not seem to recognize me. Who-
ever has seen at the Zoological Gardens a. rabbit fasci-
nated by a serpent, cowering in a corner, may form
some idea of the anguish which the dog exhibited
Finding all efforts to soothe the animal in vain, and
fearing that his bite might be as venomous in that state


ms nous: as!) Tun BRAIN. 371
fear; unless I fear, I cannot be harmed; my reason
rejects this thing; it is an illusion—I do not fear."
With a violent eﬁ'ort I succeeded at last in stretching
out my hand towards the weapon on the table; as I did
so, on the arm and shoulder I received a strange shock,
and my arm fell to my side powerless. And now, to
add to my horror, the light began slowly to wane from
the candles—they were not, as it were, extinguished.
but their ﬂame seemed very gradually withdrawn; it
was the same with the ﬁre—the light was extracted
from the fuel; in a few minutes the room was in utter
darkness. The dread that came over me, to be thus in
the dark with that dark Thing, whose power was so
intensely felt, brought a reaction of nerve. In fact,
terror had reached that climax, that either my senses
must have deserted me, or I must have burst through
the spell. I did burst through it. I found voice,
though the voice was a shriek. I remember that I
broke forth with words like these -—-“ I do not fear, my
soul dees not fear,” and at the same time I found the
strength to rise. Still in that profound gloom I rushed
to one of the windows—tore aside the curtain—ﬂung
open the shutters; my ﬁrst thought was— LIGHT.
And when I saw the moon high, clear, and calm, I felt
a joy that almost compensated for the previous terror.
There, was the moon, there, was also the light from
the gas-lamps in the deserted, slumberous street. I
turned to look back into the room; the moon penetrated
its shadow very palely and partially—but still there


was noose AND THE BRAIN. 373
white. It began sleeking its long, yellow hair, which
fell over its shoulders ; its eyes were not turned “towards
me, but to the door; it seemed listening, watching,
waiting. The shadow of the shade in the background
grew darker; and again I thought I beheld the eyes
gleaming out from the summit of the shadow—eyes
ﬁxed upon that shape.
As if from the door, though it did not open, there
grew out another shape, equally distinct, equally
ghastly—a man’s shape—a young man’s. It was in
the dress of the last century, or rather in a likeness df
such dress (for both the male shape and the female,
though deﬁned, were evidently unsubstantial, impalw
pable—simulacra—phantasms); and there was some-
thing incongruous, grotesque, yet fearful in the contrast
between the elaborate ﬁnery, the courtly precision of
that old-fashioned garb, with its rallies, and lace, and
buckles, and the corpse-like aspect and ghost-like still-
ness of the ﬂitting wearer. Just as the male shape
approached the female, the dark Shadow started from
the wall, all three for a moment wrapped in darkness.
When the pale light returned, the two phantoms were
as if in the grasp of the Shadow that towered between
them; and there was a blood-stain on the breast of the
female; and the phantom male was leaning on its phan-
tom sword, and blood seemed trickling fast from the
rufﬂes, from the lace; and the darkness of the interme
diate Shadow swallowed them up-they were gone.
And again the bubbles of light shot, and sailed, and
[l.-—32


382 THE HAUNTED awn was HAUNTEBB; on,
they are wondrously inferior to what Bacon, Shake-
speare, and Plato said and wrote when on earth Nor,
what is more noticeable, do they ever contain an idea
that was not on the earth before. Wonderful, therefore,
as such phenomena may be (granting them .to be truth-
ful), I see much that philosophy may question, nothing
that it is incumbent on philosophy to deny—viz.,
nothing supernatural. They are but ideas conveyed
somehow or other (we have not yet discovered the
means) from one mortal brain to another. Whether,
in so doing, tables walk of their own accord, or ﬁend-
like shapes appear in a magic circle, or bodyless hands
rise and remove material objects, or a Thing of Dark-
ness, such as presented itself to me, freeze our blood—
still I am persuaded that these are but agencies con-
veyed, as by electric wires, to my own brain from the
brain of another. In some constitutions there is a
natural chemistry, and those constitutions may produce
chemie wonders—in others a natural ﬂuid, call it elec-
tricity, and these may produce electric wonders. But
the wonders differ from Normal Science in this—they
are alike objectless, purposeless, puerile, frivolous.
They lead on to no grand results; and therefore the
world does not heed, and true sages have not culti-
vated them. But sure I am, that of all I saw or heard,
a man, human as myself, was the remote originator;
and I believe unconsciously to himself as to the exact
effects produced, for this reason: no two persons, you
say, have ever told you that they experienced exactly


386 was HAUNTED AND THE HAUNTEBB; on,
the exceeding stubbornness and perversity of the child,
who was declared to be half-witted. Be that as it may,
at the orphan’s death the aunt inherited her brother’s
fortune. Before the ﬁrst wedded year was out, the
American had quitted England abruptly, and never
returned to it. He obtained a cruising vessel, which
was lost in the Atlantic two years afterwards. The
widow was left in afﬂuence; but reverses of various
kinds had befallen her; a bank broke—an investment
failed-she went into a small business and became
insolvent—then she entered into service, sinking lower
and lower, from housekeeper down to maid-of-all-work—
never long retaining a place, though nothing decided
against her character was ever alleged. She was con-
sidered sober, honest, and peculiarly quiet in her ways;
still nothing prospered with her. And so she had
dropped into the workhouse, from which Mr. J —- had
taken her, to be placed in charge of the very house
which she had rented as mistress in the ﬁrst year of her
wedded life.
Mr. J#—-— added that he had passed an hour alone
in the unfurnished room which I had urged him to
destroy, and that his impressions of dread while there
were so great, though he had neither heard nor seen
anything, that he was eager to have the walls bared
and the ﬂoors removed as I had suggested. H1 had
engaged persons for the work, and would commence
any day I would name.
The day was accordingly ﬁxed. I repaired to the
haunted Muse-we went into the blind. dreary room.


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