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+The Project Gutenberg eBook, Master of His Fate, by J. Mclaren Cobban
+
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+
+
+
+Title: Master of His Fate
+
+Author: J. Mclaren Cobban
+
+Release Date: November 3, 2004  [eBook #13931]
+[Date last updated: January 9, 2005]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ISO-646-US (US-ASCII)
+
+
+***START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK MASTER OF HIS FATE***
+
+
+E-text prepared by Suzanne Shell, Branko Collin, and the Project Gutenberg
+Online Distributed Proofreading Team
+
+
+
+Master Of His Fate
+
+by
+
+J. MACLAREN COBBAN
+
+1890
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+Contents.
+
+
+Chapter
+
+   I. Julius Courtney
+  II. A Mysterious Case
+ III. "M. Dolaro"
+  IV. The Man of the Crowd
+   V. The Remarkable Case of Lady Mary Fane
+  VI. At The Bedside of the Doctor
+ VII. Contains a Love Interlude
+VIII. Strange Scenes in Curzon Street
+  IX. An Apparition And a Confession
+
+
+
+
+     To Z. Mennell, Esq.
+
+     My dear Mennell,
+
+     It has been my fortune to see something of the practice of the art
+     of healing under widely different conditions, and I know none who
+     better represents the most humane and most exacting of all
+     professions than yourself. The good doctor of this story--the born
+     surgeon and healer, the ever young and alert, the self-forgetful,
+     the faithful friend, gifted with "that exquisite charity which can
+     forgive all things"--is studied from you.
+
+     It is one of the greatest pleasures of my life to inscribe your
+     name on this dedicatory page, and to subscribe myself,
+
+     Your sincere friend and grateful patient,
+
+     J. Maclaren Cobban.
+
+     London, November 1889.
+
+
+
+
+Chapter I.
+
+Julius Courtney.
+
+
+The Hyacinth Club has the reputation of selecting its members from among
+the freshest and most active spirits in literature, science, and art.
+That is in a sense true, but activity in one or another of those fields
+is not a condition of membership; for, just as the listening Boswell was
+the necessary complement of the talking Johnson, so in the Hyacinth Club
+there is an indispensable contingent of passive members who find their
+liveliest satisfaction in hearing and looking on, rather than in
+speaking and doing. Something of the home principle of male and female
+is necessary for the completeness even of a club.
+
+The Hyacinth Club-house looks upon Piccadilly and the Green Park. The
+favourite place of concourse of its members is the magnificent
+smoking-room on the first floor, the bow-windows of which command a view
+up and down the fashionable thoroughfare, and over the trees and the
+undulating sward of the Park to the gates of Buckingham Palace. On a
+Monday afternoon in the beginning of May, the bow-windows were open, and
+several men sat in leather lounges (while one leaned against a
+window-sash), luxuriously smoking, and noting the warm, palpitating life
+of the world without. A storm which had been silently and doubtfully
+glooming and gathering the night before had burst and poured in the
+morning, and it was such a spring afternoon as thrills the heart with
+new life and suffuses the soul with expectation--such an afternoon as
+makes all women appear beautiful and all men handsome. The south-west
+wind blew soft and balmy, and all nature rejoiced as the bride in the
+presence of the bridegroom. The trees in the Park were full of sap, and
+their lusty buds were eagerly opening to the air and the light. The
+robin sang with a note almost as rich and sensuous as that of the
+thrush; and the shrill and restless sparrows chirped and chattered about
+the houses and among the horses' feet, and were as full of the joy of
+life as the men and women who thronged the pavements or reclined in
+their carriages in the sumptuous ease of wealth and beauty.
+
+Of the men who languidly gazed upon the gay and splendid scene from the
+windows of the Club, none seemed so interested as the man who leaned
+against the window-frame. He appeared more than interested--absorbed,
+indeed--in the world without, and he looked bright and handsome enough,
+and charged enough with buoyant health, to be the ideal bridegroom of
+Nature in her springtide.
+
+He was a dark man, tall and well built, with clear brown eyes. His black
+hair (which was not cropped short, as is the fashion) had a lustrous
+softness, and at the same time an elastic bushiness, which nothing but
+the finest-tempered health can give; and his complexion, though tanned
+by exposure, had yet much of the smoothness of youth, save where the
+razor had passed upon his beard. Thus seen, a little way off, he
+appeared a young man in his rosy twenties; on closer view and
+acquaintance, however, that superficial impression was contradicted by
+the set expression of his mouth and the calm observation and
+understanding of his eye, which spoke of ripe experience rather than of
+green hope. He bore a very good English name--Courtney; and he was
+believed to be rich. There was no member of whom the Hyacinth Club was
+prouder than of him: though he had done nothing, it was commonly
+believed he could do anything he chose. No other was listened to with
+such attention, and there was nothing on which he could not throw a
+fresh and fascinating light. He was a constant spring of surprise and
+interest. While others were striving after income and reputation, he
+calmly and modestly, without obtrusion or upbraiding, held on his own
+way, with unsurpassable curiosity, to the discovery of all which life
+might have to reveal. It was this, perhaps, as much as the charm of his
+manner and conversation, that made him so universal a favourite; for how
+could envy or malice touch a man who competed at no point with his
+fellows?
+
+His immediate neighbours, as he thus stood by the window, were a pair of
+journalists, several scientific men, and an artist.
+
+"Have you seen any of the picture-shows, Julius?" asked the painter,
+Kew.
+
+Courtney slowly abstracted his gaze from without, and turned on his
+shoulder with the lazy, languid grace of a cat.
+
+"No," said he, in a half-absent tone; "I have just come up, and I've not
+thought of looking into picture-galleries yet."
+
+"Been in the country?" asked Kew.
+
+"Yes, I've been in the country," said Courtney, still as if his
+attention was elsewhere.
+
+"It must be looking lovely," said Kew.
+
+"It is--exquisite!" said Courtney, waking up at length to a full glow of
+interest. "That's why I don't want to go and stare at pictures. In the
+spring, to see the fresh, virginal, delicious green of a bush against an
+old dry brick wall, gives a keener pleasure than the best picture that
+ever was painted."
+
+"I thought," said Kew, "you had a taste for Art; I thought you enjoyed
+it."
+
+"So I do, my dear fellow, but not now,--not at this particular present.
+When I feel the warm sun on my back and breathe the soft air, I want no
+more; they are more than Art can give--they are Nature, and, of course,
+it goes without saying that Art can never compete with Nature in
+creating human pleasure. I mean no disparagement of your work, Kew, or
+any artist's work; but I can't endure Art except in winter, when
+everything (almost) must be artificial to be endurable. A winter may
+come in one's life--I wonder if it will?--when one would rather look at
+the picture of a woman than at the woman herself. Meantime I no more
+need pictures than I need fires; I warm both hands and heart at the fire
+of life."
+
+"Ah!" said Kew, with a wistful lack of comprehension.
+
+"That's why I believe," said Courtney, with a sudden turn of reflection,
+"there is in warm countries no Art of our small domestic kind."
+
+"Just so," said Kew; while Dingley Dell, the Art critic, made a note of
+Courtney's words.
+
+"Look here!" exclaimed Dr. Embro, an old scientific man of Scottish
+extraction, who, in impatience with such transcendental talk, had taken
+up 'The St. James's Gazette.' "What do you make of this queer case at
+the Hotel-Dieu in Paris? I see it's taken from 'The Daily Telegraph;'"
+and he began to read it.
+
+"Oh," said Kew, "we all read that this morning."
+
+"Dr. Embro," said Courtney, again looking idly out of window, "is like a
+French journal: full of the news of the day before yesterday."
+
+"Have you read it yourself, Julius?" asked Embro, amid the laughter of
+his neighbours.
+
+"No," said Julius carelessly; "and if it's a hospital case I don't want
+to read it."
+
+"What!" said Embro, with heavy irony. "You say that? You, a pupil of the
+great Dubois and the greater Charbon! But here comes a greater than
+Charbon--the celebrated Dr. Lefevre himself. Come now, Lefevre, you tell
+us what you think of this Paris hospital case."
+
+"Presently, Embro," said Lefevre, who had just perceived his friend
+Courtney. "Ha, Julius!" said he, crossing to him and taking his hand;
+"you're looking uncommonly well."
+
+"Yes," said Julius, "I am well."
+
+"And where have you been all this while?" asked the doctor.
+
+"Oh," said Julius, turning his gaze again out of window, "I have been
+rambling everywhere, between Dan and Beersheba."
+
+"And all is vanity, eh?" said the doctor.
+
+"Well," said Julius, looking at him, "that depends--that very much
+depends. But can there be any question of vanity or vexation in this
+sweet, glorious sunshine?" and he stretched out his hands as if he
+burgeoned forth to welcome it.
+
+"Perhaps not," said Lefevre. "Come and sit down and let us talk."
+
+They were retiring from the window when Embro's voice again sounded at
+Lefevre's elbow--"Come now, Lefevre; what's the meaning of that Paris
+case?"
+
+"What Paris case?"
+
+Embro answered by handing him the paper. He took it, and read as
+follows:--
+
+     "About a month ago a strange case of complete mental collapse was
+     received into the Hotel-Dieu. A fresh healthy girl, of the working
+     class, about twenty years of age, and comfortably dressed,
+     presented herself at a police-station near the Odeon and asked for
+     shelter. As she did not appear to be in full possession of her
+     mental faculties, she was sent to the Hotel-Dieu, where she
+     remained in a semi-comatose condition. Her memory did not go
+     farther back than the hour of her application at the
+     police-station. She was entirely ignorant of her previous history,
+     and had even forgotten her name. The minds of the medical staff of
+     the Hotel-Dieu were very much exercised with her condition; but it
+     was not till about a week ago that they succeeded in restoring to
+     any extent her mental consciousness and her memory. She then
+     remembered the events immediately preceding her application to the
+     police. It had come on to rain, she said, and she was hurrying
+     along to escape from it, when a gentleman in a cloak came to her
+     side and politely offered to give her the shelter of his umbrella.
+     She accepted; the gentleman seemed old and ill. He asked her to
+     take his arm. She did so, and very soon she felt as if her strength
+     had gone from her; a cold shiver crept over her; she trembled and
+     tottered; but with all that she did not find her sensations
+     disagreeable exactly or alarming; so little so, indeed, that she
+     never thought of letting go the gentleman's arm. Her head buzzed,
+     and a kind of darkness came over her. Then all seemed to clear, and
+     she found herself alone near the police-station, remembering
+     nothing. Being asked to further describe the gentleman, she said he
+     was tall and dark, with a pleasant voice and wonderful eyes, that
+     made you feel you must do whatever he wished. The police have made
+     inquiries, but after such a lapse of time it is not surprising that
+     no trace of him can be found."
+
+"Well?" asked Embro, when Lefevre had raised his eyes from the paper.
+"What do you think of it?"
+
+"Curious," said Lefevre. "I can't say more, since I know nothing of it
+but this. Have you read it, Julius?"
+
+"No," said Julius; "I hate what people call news; and when I take up a
+paper, it's only to look at the Weather Forecasts." Lefevre handed him
+the paper, which he took with an unconcealed look of repulsion. "If it's
+some case of disease," said he, "it will make me ill."
+
+"Oh no," said Lefevre; "it's not painful, but it's curious;" and so
+Julius set himself to read it.
+
+"But come," said Embro, posing the question with his forefinger; "do you
+believe that story, Lefevre?"
+
+"Though it's French, and from the 'Telegraph,'" said Lefevre, "I see no
+reason to disbelieve it."
+
+"Come," said Embro, "come--you're shirking the question."
+
+"I confess," said Lefevre, "I've no desire to discuss it. You think me
+prejudiced in favour of anything of the kind; perhaps I think you
+prejudiced against it: where, then, is the good of discussion?"
+
+"Well, now," said the unabashed Embro, "I'll tell you what I think.
+Here's a story"--Julius at that instant handed back the paper to
+him--"of a healthy young woman mesmerised, hypnotised, or somnambulised,
+or whatever you like to call it, in the public street, by some man that
+casually comes up to her, and her brain so affected that her memory
+goes! I say it's inconceivable!--impossible!" And he slapped the paper
+down on the table.
+
+The others looked on with grim satisfaction at the prospect of an
+argument between the two representatives of rival schools; and it was
+noteworthy that, as they looked, they turned a referring glance on
+Courtney, as if it were a foregone conclusion that he must be the final
+arbiter. He, however, sat abstracted, with his eyes on the floor, and
+with one hand propping his chin and the other drumming on the arm of his
+chair.
+
+"I'm not a scientific man," said the journalist who was not an Art
+critic, "and I am not prejudiced either way about this story; but it
+seems to me, Embro, that you view the thing through a very ordinary
+fallacy, and make a double mistake. You confound the relatively
+inconceivable with the absolutely impossible: this story is relatively
+inconceivable to you, and therefore you say it is absolutely
+impossible."
+
+"Is there such a thing as an absolute impossibility?" murmured Julius,
+who still sat with his chin in his hand, looking as if he considered the
+"thing" from a long way off as one of a multitude of other things.
+
+"I do not believe there is," said the journalist; "but--"
+
+"Don't let us lose ourselves in metaphysics," broke in Embro. Then,
+turning to Courtney, whose direct intelligent gaze seemed to disconcert
+him, he said, "Now, Julius, you've seen, I daresay, a good many things
+we have not seen,--have you ever seen or known a case like this we're
+talking about?"
+
+"I can't say I have," said Julius.
+
+"There you are!" quoth Embro, in triumph.
+
+"But," continued Julius, "I don't therefore nail that case down as
+false."
+
+"Do you mean to say," exclaimed Embro, "that you have lived all your
+years, and studied science at the Salpetriere,--or what they call
+science there,--and studied and seen God knows what else besides, and
+you can't pronounce an opinion from all you know on a case of this
+sort?"
+
+"Oh yes," said Julius, quietly, "I can pronounce an opinion; but what's
+the use of that? I think that case is true, but I don't know that it is;
+and therefore I can't argue about it, for argument should come from
+knowledge, and I have none. I have a few opinions, and I am always ready
+to receive impressions; but, besides some schoolboy facts that are
+common property, the only thing I know--I am certain of--is, as some man
+says, '_Life's a dream worth dreaming_.'"
+
+"You're too high-falutin for me, Julius," said Embro, shaking his head.
+"But my opinion, founded on my knowledge, is that this story is a
+hallucination of the young woman's noddle!"
+
+"And how much, Embro," laughed Julius, rising to leave the circle, "is
+the argument advanced by your ticketing the case with that long word?"
+
+"To say 'hallucination,'" quoth Lefevre, "is a convenient way of giving
+inquiry the slip."
+
+"My dear Embro," said Julius,--and he spoke with an emphasis, and looked
+down on Embro with a bright vivacity of eye, which forewarned the circle
+of one of his eloquent flashes: a smile of expectant enjoyment passed
+round,--"hallucination is the dust-heap and limbo of the meanly-equipped
+man of science to-day, just as witchcraft was a few hundred years ago.
+The poor creature of science long ago, when he came upon any
+pathological or psychological manifestation he did not understand, used
+to say, '_Witchcraft_! Away with it to the limbo!' To-day he says,
+'_Hallucination_! Away with it to the dust-heap!' It is a pity," said
+he, with a laugh, "you ever took to science, Embro."
+
+"And why, may I ask?" said Embro.
+
+"Oh, you'd have been great as an orthodox theologian of the Kirk; the
+cocksureness of theology would have suited you like your own coat. You
+are not at home in science, for you have no imagination."
+
+It was characteristic of the peculiar regard in which Julius was held
+that whatever he said or did appeared natural and pleasant,--like the
+innocent actions and the simple, truthful speech of a child. Not even
+Embro was offended with these last words of his: the others laughed;
+Embro smiled, though with a certain sourness.
+
+"Pooh, Julius!" said he; "what are you talking about? Science is the
+examination of facts, and what has imagination to do with that? Reason,
+sir, is what you want!"
+
+"My dear Embro," said Julius, "there are several kinds of facts. There
+are, for instance, big facts and little facts,--clean facts and dirty
+facts. Imagination raises you and gives you a high and comprehensive
+view of them all; your mere reason keeps you down in some noisome
+corner, like the man with the muck-rake."
+
+"Hear, hear!" cried the journalist and the artist heartily.
+
+"You're wrong, Julius," said Embro,--"quite wrong. Keep your imagination
+for painting and poetry. In science it just leads you the devil's own
+dance, and fills you with delusions."
+
+Julius paused, and bent on him his peculiar look, which made a man feel
+he was being seen through and through.
+
+"I am surprised, Embro," said he, "that one can live all your years and
+not find that the illusions of life are its best part. If you leave me
+the illusions, I'll give you all the realities. But how can we stay
+babbling and quibbling here all this delicious afternoon? I must go out
+and see green things and beasts. Come with me, Lefevre, to the
+Zoological Gardens; it will do you good."
+
+"I tell you what," said Lefevre, looking at the clock as they moved
+away; "my mother and sister will call for me with the carriage in less
+than half an hour: come with us for a drive."
+
+"Oh yes," said Julius; "that's a good idea."
+
+"And I," said Lefevre, "must have a cup of tea in the meantime. Come and
+sit down, and tell me where you have been."
+
+But when they had sat down, Julius was little inclined to divagate into
+an account of his travels. His glance swept round and noted everything;
+he remarked on a soft effect of a shaft of sunshine that lit up the
+small conservatory, and burnished the green of a certain plant; he
+perceived a fine black Persian cat, the latest pet of the Club, and
+exclaimed, "What a beautiful, superb creature!" He called it, and it
+came, daintily sniffed at his leg, and leaped on his lap, where he
+stroked and fondled it. And all the while he continued to discuss
+illusion, while Lefevre poured and drank tea (tea, which Julius would
+not share: tea, he said, did not agree with him).
+
+"It bothers me," he said, "to imagine how a man like Embro gets any
+satisfaction out of life, for ever mumbling the bare dry bones of
+science. Such a life as his might as well be passed in the receiver of
+an air-pump."
+
+"Still the old Julius!" said the doctor, with a smile. "Still dreaming
+and wandering, interested in everything, but having nothing to do!"
+
+"Nothing to do, my dear fellow?" said Julius. "I've all the world to
+enjoy!" and he buried his cheek in the soft fur of the cat.
+
+"A purpose in life, however," said Lefevre, "gives an extraordinary zest
+to all enjoyment."
+
+"To live," said Julius, "is surely the purpose of life. Any smaller, any
+more obvious purpose, will spoil life, just as it spoils Art."
+
+"I believe, my boy, you are wrong in both," said Lefevre. "Art without a
+purpose goes off into all sorts of madness and extravagance, and so does
+life."
+
+"You really think so?" said Julius, his attention fixed for an instant,
+and looking as if he had set up the point and regarded it at a distance.
+"Yes; perhaps it does." But the next moment his attention seemed given
+to the cat; he fondled it, and talked to it soothingly.
+
+"I am sure of it," said Lefevre. "Just listen to me, Julius. You have
+wonderful intelligence and penetration in everything. You are fond of
+science; science needs men like you more than the dull plodders that
+usually take to it. When you were in Charbon's class you were his
+favourite and his best pupil,--don't I remember?--and if you liked you
+could be the greatest physician of the age."
+
+"It is treason to yourself to say such a thing."
+
+"Your fame would soon eclipse mine."
+
+"Fame! fame!" exclaimed Julius, for an instant showing irritation. "I
+would not give a penny-piece for fame if all the magicians of the East
+came crying it down the streets! Why should I seek fame? What good would
+it do me if I had it?"
+
+"Well, well," said Lefevre; "let fame alone: you might be as unknown as
+you like, and do a world of good in practice among the poor."
+
+Julius looked at him, and set the cat down.
+
+"My dear Lefevre," said he, "I did not think you could urge such common
+twaddle! You know well enough,--nobody knows better,--first of all, that
+there are already more men waiting to do that kind of thing than can
+find occupation: why should I go down among them and try to take their
+work? And you know, in the next place, that medical philanthropy, like
+all other philanthropy, is so overdone that the race is fast
+deteriorating; we strive with so much success to keep the sickly and the
+diseased alive, that perfect health is scarcely known. Life without
+health can be nothing but a weariness: why should it be reckoned a
+praiseworthy thing to keep it going at any price? If life became a
+burden to me, I should lay it down."
+
+"But," said Lefevre, earnestly, "your life surely is not your own to do
+with it what you like!"
+
+"In the name of truth, Lefevre," answered Julius, "if my life is not my
+own, what is? I get its elements from others, but I fashion it myself,
+just as much as the sculptor shapes his statue, or the poet turns his
+poem. You don't deny to the sculptor the right to smash his statue if it
+does not please him, nor to the poet the right to burn his
+manuscript;--why should you deny me the right to dispose of my life? I
+know--I know," said he, seeing Lefevre open his mouth and raise his hand
+for another observation, "that your opinion is the common one, but that
+is the only sanction it has; it has the sanction neither of true
+morality nor of true religion! But here is the waiter to tell you the
+carriage is come. I'm glad. Let us get out into the air and the
+sunshine."
+
+The carriage was the doctor's own; his mother, although the widow of a
+Court physician, was too poor to maintain much equipage, but she made
+what use she pleased of her son's possessions. When Lady Lefevre saw
+Julius at the carriage-door, she broke into smiles and cries of welcome.
+
+"Where have you been this long, long while, Julius?" said she. "This is
+Julius Courtney, Nora. You remember Nora, Julius, when she was a little
+girl in frocks?"
+
+"She now wears remarkable gowns," chimed in the doctor.
+
+"Which," said Julius, "I have no doubt are becoming."
+
+"My brother," said Nora, with a sunny smile, "is jealous; because, being
+a doctor, he must wear only dowdy clothes of dingy colours."
+
+"We have finished at school and college, and been presented at Court,"
+laughed Lady Lefevre.
+
+"And," broke in the brother, "we have had cards engraved with our full
+name, _Leonora_."
+
+"With all this," said Lady Lefevre, "I hope you won't be afraid of us."
+
+"I see no reason," said Julius. "For, if I may say so, I like everything
+in Nature, and it seems to me Nature has had more to do with the
+finishing you speak of than the schoolmistress or the college
+professor."
+
+"There he is already," laughed Lady Lefevre, "with his equivocal
+compliments. I shouldn't wonder if he says that, my dear, because you
+have not yet had more than a word to say for yourself."
+
+By that time Lefevre and Julius were seated, and the carriage was
+rolling along towards the Park. Julius sat immediately opposite Lady
+Lefevre, but he included both her and Nora in his talk and his bright
+glances. The doctor sat agreeably suffused with delight and wonder. No
+one, as has been seen, had a higher opinion of Courtney's rare powers,
+or had had more various evidence of them, than Lefevre, but even he had
+never known his friend so brilliant. He was instinct with life and
+eloquence. His face shone as with an inner light, and his talk was
+bright, searching, and ironical. The amazing thing, however, was that
+Julius had as stimulating and intoxicating an influence on Nora as, it
+was clear, Nora had on him. His sister had not appeared to Lefevre
+hitherto more than a beautiful, healthy, shy girl of tolerable
+intelligence; now she showed that she had brilliance and wit, and,
+moreover, that she understood Julius as one native of a strange realm
+understands another. When they entered the Park, they were the observed
+of all. And, indeed, Leonora Lefevre was a vision to excite the worship
+of those least inclined to idolatry of Nature. She was of the noblest
+type of English beauty, and she seemed as calmly unconscious of its
+excellence and rarity as one of the grand Greek women of the Parthenon.
+She had, however, a sensuous fulness and bloom, a queenly carriage of
+head and neck, a clearness of feature, and a liquid kindness of eye that
+suggested a deep potentiality of passion.
+
+They drove round the Row, and round again, and they talked and laughed
+their fill of wisdom and frivolity and folly. To be foolish wisely and
+gracefully is a rare attainment. When they had almost completed their
+third round, Julius (who had finished a marvellous story of a fairy
+princess and a cat) said, "I can see you are fond of beasts, Miss
+Lefevre. I should like to take you to the Zoological Gardens and show
+you my favourites there. May we go now, Lady Lefevre?"
+
+"By all means," said Lady Lefevre, "let us go. What do you say, John?"
+
+"Oh, wherever you like, mother," answered her son.
+
+Arrived in the Gardens, Julius took possession of his companions, and
+exerted all his arts to charm and fascinate. He led the ladies from cage
+to cage, from enclosure to enclosure, showed himself as familiar with
+the characters and habits of their wild denizens as a farmer is with
+those of his stock, and they responded to his strange calls, to his
+gentleness and fearlessness, with an alert understanding and confidence
+beautiful to see. His favourites were certain creatures of the deer
+species, which crowded to their fences to sniff his clothes, and to lick
+his hands, which he abandoned to their caresses with manifest
+satisfaction. His example encouraged the queenly Nora and her sprightly
+mother to feed the beautiful creatures with bread and buns, and to feel
+the suffusion of pleasure derived from the contact of their soft lips
+with the palm of the hand. After that they were scarcely astonished
+when, without bravado, but clearly with simple confidence and enjoyment,
+Julius put his hand within the bars of the lion's cage and scratched the
+ears of a lioness, murmuring the while in a strange tongue such fond
+sounds as only those use who are on the best terms with animals. The
+great brute rose to his touch, closing its eyes, and bearing up its head
+like a cat.
+
+Then came an incident that deeply impressed the Lefevres. Julius went to
+a cage in which, he said, there was a recent arrival--a leopard from the
+"Land of the Setting Sun," the romantic land of the Moors. The creature
+crouched sulking in the back of the cage. Julius tapped on the bars, and
+entreated her in the language of her native land, "Ya, dudu! ya,
+lellatsi!" She bounded to him with a "_wir-r-r_" of delight, leaned and
+rubbed herself against the bars, and gave herself up to be stroked and
+fondled. When he left her, she cried after him piteously, and wistfully
+watched him out of sight.
+
+"Do you know the beautiful creature?" asked Lady Lefevre.
+
+"Yes," answered Julius quietly; "I brought her over some months ago."
+
+Lefevre had explained to his mother that Julius had always been on
+friendly or fond terms with animals, but never till now had he seen the
+remarkable understanding he clearly maintained with them.
+
+"Look!" said Lady Lefevre to her son as they turned to leave the
+Gardens. "He seems to have fascinated Nora as much as the beasts."
+
+Nora stood a little aloof, regarding Julius in an ecstasy of admiration.
+When she found her mother was looking at her, her eyes sank, and as it
+were a veil of blushes fell over her. Mother and son walked on first,
+and Julius followed with Nora.
+
+"He is a most charming and extraordinary man," said the mother.
+
+"He is," said the son, "and amazingly intelligent."
+
+"He seems to know everything, and to have been everywhere,--to have been
+a kind of rolling stone. If anything should come of this, I suppose he
+can afford to marry. You ought to know about him."
+
+"I believe I know as much as any one."
+
+"He has no profession?" queried the lady.
+
+"He has no profession; but I suppose he could afford it," said Lefevre
+musingly.
+
+"You don't like the idea," said his mother.
+
+"Not much. I scarce know why. But I somehow think of him as not having
+enough sense of the responsibility of life."
+
+"I suppose his people are of the right sort?"
+
+"I suppose they are; though I don't know if he has any people," said he,
+with a laugh. "He is the kind of man who does not need parents or
+relations."
+
+"Still, hadn't you better try to find out what he may have in that
+line?"
+
+"Yes," said Lefevre; "perhaps I had."
+
+
+
+
+Chapter II.
+
+A Mysterious Case.
+
+
+The two friends returned, as they had arranged, to the Hyacinth Club for
+dinner. Courtney's coruscating brilliancy sank into almost total
+darkness when they parted from Lady and Miss Lefevre, and when they sat
+down to table he was preoccupied and silent, yet in no proper sense
+downcast or dull. Lefevre noted, while they ate, that there was clear
+speculation in his eye, that he was not vaguely dreaming, but with alert
+intelligence examining some question, or facing some contingency; and it
+was natural he should think that the question or contingency must
+concern Nora as much as Julius. Yet he made no overture of
+understanding, for he knew that Courtney seldom offered confidence or
+desired sympathy; not that he was churlish or reserved, but simply that
+he was usually sufficient unto himself, both for counsel and for
+consolation. Lefevre was therefore surprised when he was suddenly asked
+a question, which was without context in his own thought.
+
+"Have you ever found something happen or appear," said Julius, "that
+completely upsets your point of view, and tumbles down your scheme of
+life, like a stick thrust between your legs when you are running?"
+
+"I have known," said Lefevre, "a new fact arise and upset a whole
+scientific theory. That's often a good thing," he added, with a pointed
+glance; "for it compels a reconstruction of the theory on a wider and
+sounder basis."
+
+"Yes," murmured Julius; "that may be. But I should think it does not
+often happen that the new fact swallows up all the details that
+supported your theory,--as Aaron's rod, turned into a serpent, swallowed
+up the serpent-rods of the magicians of Egypt,--so that there is no
+longer any theory, but only one great, glorious fact. I do admire," he
+exclaimed, swerving suddenly, "the imagination of those old Greeks, with
+their beautiful, half-divine personifications of the Spirits of Air and
+Earth and Sea! But their imagination never conceived a goddess that
+embodied them all!"
+
+"I have often thought, Julius," said Lefevre, "that you must be some
+such embodiment yourself; for you are not quite human, you know."
+
+The doctor said that with a clear recollection of his mother's request.
+He hoped that his friend would take the cue, and tell him something of
+his family. Julius, however, said nothing but "Indeed." Lefevre then
+tried to tempt him into confession by talking about his own father and
+mother, and by relating how the French name "Lefevre" came to be
+domiciled in England; but Julius ignored the temptation, and dismissed
+the question in an eloquent flourish.
+
+"What does a man want with a family and a name? They only tie him to the
+earth, as Gulliver was tied by the people of Lilliput. We have life and
+health,--_if_ we have them,--and it is only veiled prurience to inquire
+whence we got them. A man can't help having a father and a mother, I
+suppose; but he need not be always reminding himself of the fact: no
+other creature on earth does. For myself, I wish I were like that
+extraordinary person, Melchizedek, without father and without mother,
+without descent, having neither beginning of days nor end of life."
+
+In a little while the friends parted. Lefevre said he had work to do,
+but he did not anticipate such work as he had to turn to that night.
+Though the doctor was a bachelor, he had a professional residence apart
+from his mother and sister. They lived in a small house in Curzon
+Street; he dwelt in Savile Row. Savile Row was a place of consequence
+long before Regent Street was thought of, but now they are few who know
+of its existence. Fashion ignores it. It is tenanted by small clubs,
+learned societies, and doctors. It slumbers in genteel decorum, with its
+back to the garish modern thoroughfare. It is always quiet, but by nine
+o'clock of a dark evening it is deserted. When Dr Lefevre, therefore,
+stepped out of his hired hansom, and prepared to put his latch-key in
+his own door, he was arrested by a hoarse-voiced hawker of evening news
+bursting in upon the repose of the Row with a continuous roar of
+"Special--Mystery--Paper--Railway--Special--Brighton--Paper--Victoria
+--Special!" It was with some effort, and only when the man was close
+at hand, that he interpreted the sounds into these words.
+
+"Paper, sir," said the man; and he bought it and went in. He entered his
+dining-room, and read the following paragraph;--
+
+     "A Mysterious Case.
+
+     "A report has reached us that a young man, about two or four and
+     twenty years of age, whose name is at present unknown, was found
+     yesterday (Sunday) to all appearance dead in a first-class carriage
+     of the 5 P.M. train from Brighton to Victoria. The discovery was
+     only made at Grosvenor Road Station, where tickets are taken before
+     entering Victoria. At Victoria the body was searched for purposes
+     of identification, and there was found upon him a card with the
+     following remarkable inscription:--'_I am not dead. Take me to the
+     St. James's Hospital._' To St. James's Hospital accordingly the
+     young man was conveyed. It seems probable he is in a condition of
+     trance--not for the first time--since he was provided with the
+     card, and knew the hospital with which is associated in all men's
+     minds the name of Dr Lefevre, who is so famous for his skill in the
+     treatment of nervous disorders."
+
+In matters of plain duty Dr Lefevre had got into the excellent habit of
+acting first and thinking afterwards. He at once rang the bell, and
+ordered the responsible serving-man who appeared to call a cab. The man
+went to the door and sounded his shrill whistle, grateful to the ears of
+several loitering cabbies. There was a mad race of growlers and hansoms
+for the open door. Dr Lefevre got into the first hansom that drew up,
+and drove off to the hospital. By that time he had told himself that the
+young man must be a former patient of his (though he did not remember
+any such), and that he ought to see him at once, although it is not
+ for the visiting physician of a hospital to appear, except
+between fixed hours of certain days. He made nothing of the mystery
+which the newspaper wished, after the manner of its kind, to cast about
+the case, and thought of other things, while he smoked cigarettes, till
+he reached the hospital. The house-physician was somewhat surprised by
+his appearance.
+
+"I have just read that paragraph," said Lefevre, handing him the paper.
+
+"Oh yes, sir," said the house-physician. "The man was brought in last
+night. Dr Dowling" [the resident assistant-physician] "saw him, and
+thought it a case of ordinary trance, that could easily wait till you
+came, as usual, to-morrow."
+
+"Ah, well," said Lefevre, "let me see him."
+
+Seen thus, the physician appeared a different person from the cheerful,
+modest man of the Hyacinth Club. He had now put on the responsibility of
+men's health and the enthusiasm of his profession. He seemed to swell in
+proportions and dignity, though his eye still beamed with a calm and
+kindly light.
+
+The young man led the way down the echoing flagged passage, and up the
+flight of stone stairs. As they went they encountered many silent female
+figures, clean and white, going up or down (it was the time of changing
+nurses), so that a fanciful stranger might well have thought of the
+stairway reaching from earth to heaven, on which the angels of God were
+seen ascending and descending. A stranger, too, would have noted the
+peculiar odours that hung about the stairs and passages, as if the
+ghosts of medicines escaped from the chemist's bottles were hovering in
+the air. Opening first an outer and then an inner door, Lefevre and his
+companion entered a large and lofty ward. The room was dark, save for
+the light of the fire and of a shaded lamp, by which, within a screen,
+the night-nurse sat conning her list of night-duties. The evening was
+just beginning out of doors,--shop-fronts were flaring, taverns were
+becoming noisy, and brilliantly-lit theatres and music-halls were
+settling down to business,--but here night and darkness had set in more
+than an hour before. Indeed, in these beds of languishing, which
+stretched away down either side of the ward, night was hardly to be
+distinguished from day, save for the sunlight and the occasional
+excitement of the doctor's visit; and many there were who cried to
+themselves in the morning, "Would God it were evening!" and in the
+evening, "Would God it were morning!" But there was yet this other
+difference, that disease and doctor, fear and hope, gossip and
+grumbling, newspaper and Bible and tract, were all forgotten in the
+night, for some time at least, and Nature's kind restorer, sleep, went
+softly round among the beds and soothed the weary spirits into peace.
+
+Lefevre and the house-physician passed silently up the ward between the
+rows of silent blue-quilted beds, while the nurse came silently to meet
+them with her lamp. Lefevre turned aside a moment to look at a man whose
+breathing was laboured and stertorous. The shaded light was turned upon
+him: an opiate had been given him to induce sleep; it had performed its
+function, but, as if resenting its bondage, it was impishly twitching
+the man's muscles and catching him by the throat, so that he choked and
+started. Dr Lefevre raised the man's eyelid to look at his eye: the
+upturned eye stared out upon him, but the man slept on. He put his hand
+on the man's forehead (he had a beautiful hand--the hand of a born
+surgeon and healer--fine but firm, the expression of nervous force), and
+with thumb and finger stroked first his temples and then his neck. The
+spasmodic twitching ceased, and his breath came easy and regular. The
+house-doctor and the nurse looked at each other in admiration of this
+subtle skill, while Lefevre turned away and passed on.
+
+"Where is the man?" said he.
+
+"Number Thirteen," answered the house-doctor, leading the way.
+
+The lamp was set on the locker beside the bed of Thirteen, screens were
+placed round to create a seclusion amid the living, breathing silence of
+the ward, and Lefevre proceeded to examine the unconscious patient who
+had so strangely put himself in his hands.
+
+He was young and well-favoured, and, it was evident from the firmness of
+his flesh, well-fed. Lefevre considered his features a moment, shook his
+head, and murmured, "No; I don't think I've seen him before." He turned
+to the nurse and inquired concerning the young man's clothes: they were
+evidently those of a gentleman, she said,--of one, at least, who had
+plenty of money. He turned again to the young man. He raised the left
+arm to feel the heart, but, contrary to his experience in such cases,
+the arm did not remain as he bent it, nor did the eyes open in obedience
+to the summons of the disturbed nerves. The breathing was scarcely
+perceptible, and the beating of the heart was faint.
+
+"A strange case," said Lefevre in a low voice to his young comrade--"the
+strangest I've seen. He does not look a subject for this kind of thing,
+and yet he is in the extreme stage of hypnotism. You see." And the
+doctor, by sundry tests and applications, showed the peculiar exhausted
+and contractive condition of the muscles. "It is very curious."
+
+"Perhaps," said the other, "he has been--" and he hesitated.
+
+"Been what?" asked Lefevre, turning on him his keen look.
+
+"Enjoying himself."
+
+"Having a debauch, you mean? No; I think not. There would then have
+probably been some reflex action of the nerves. This is not that kind of
+exhaustion; and it is more than mere trance or catalepsy; it seems the
+extremest suspensory condition,--and that in a young man of such
+apparent health is very remarkable. It will take a long time for him to
+recover in the ordinary way with food and sleep," he continued, rather
+to himself than to his subordinates. "He needs rousing,--a strong
+stimulant."
+
+"Shall I get some brandy, sir?" asked the nurse.
+
+"Brandy? No. That's not the stimulant he needs."
+
+He was silent for a little, moving the young man's limbs, and touching
+certain muscles which his exact anatomical knowledge taught him to lay
+his finger on with unerring accuracy. The effect was startling and
+grotesque. As a galvanic current applied to the proper nerves and
+muscles of a dead body will produce expressions and actions resembling
+those of life, so the touch of Lefevre's finger made the unconscious
+young man scowl or smile or clench his fist according to the muscles
+impressed.
+
+"The brain," said Lefevre, "seems quite sound,--perfectly passive, you
+see, but active in its passivity. You can leave us, nurse," said he;
+then, turning to the house-physician, he continued: "I am convinced this
+is such a peculiar case as I have often imagined, but have never seen.
+This nervous-muscular suspension is complicated with some exhaustive
+influence. I want your assistance, and I ask for it like this, because
+it is necessary for my purpose that you should give it freely, and
+without reserve; I am going to try the electrode."
+
+This was a simple machine contrived by Lefevre, on the model of the
+electric cylinder of Du Bois-Reymond, and worked on the theory that the
+electricity stored in the human body can be driven out by the human will
+along a prepared channel into another human body.
+
+"I understand," said the assistant promptly. He apprehended his chief's
+meaning more fully than the reader can; for he was deeply interested and
+fairly skilled in that strange annex of modern medical science which his
+chief called psycho-dynamics, and which old-fashioned practitioners
+decline to recognise.
+
+"Get me the machine and the insulating sheet," said Lefevre.
+
+While his assistant was gone on his errand, Lefevre with his right hand
+gently stroked along the main lines of nerve and muscle in the upper
+part of his patient's body; and it was strange to note how the features
+and limbs lost a certain constriction and rigidity which it was manifest
+they had had only by their disappearance. When the house-physician
+returned, the sheet (a preparation of spun-glass invented by Lefevre)
+was drawn under the patient, and the machine, with its vessels of
+chemical mixture and its conducting wires, was placed close to the bed.
+The handles attached to the wires were put into the patient's hands.
+
+"Now," said Lefevre, "this is a trying experiment. Give me your
+hand--your left; you know how to do; yes, the other hand on the machine,
+with the fingers touching the chemicals. When you feel strength--virtue,
+so to say--going out of you, don't be alarmed: let it go; use no effort
+of the will to keep it back, or we shall probably fail."
+
+"I understand," repeated the assistant.
+
+Then, holding his hand,--closely, but not so as to constrain the
+muscles,--Lefevre put his own left on the machine according to the
+direction he had given his assistant,--with his fingers, that is,
+dipping into the chemicals from plates in the bottom of which the wires
+conducted to the patient's hands. A shiver ran through the frame of both
+Lefevre and his companion, a convulsive shudder passed upon the
+unconscious body, and--a strange cry rang out upon the silence of the
+ward, and Lefevre withdrew his hands. He and the house-physician looked
+at each other pale and shaken. The nurse came running at the cry.
+Lefevre looked out beyond the screen to reassure her, and saw in the dim
+red reflection of the firelight a sight which struck him gruesomely,
+used though he was to hospital sights; all about the ward pale scared
+figures were sitting up in bed, like corpses suddenly raised from the
+dead. He bent over his patient, who presently opened his eyes and stared
+at him.
+
+"Get some brandy and milk," said Lefevre to his companion.
+
+"Who? Where am I?" murmured the patient in a faint voice.
+
+"I am Dr Lefevre, and this is St. James's Hospital."
+
+"Doctor?--hospital?--oh, I'm dreaming!" murmured the patient.
+
+"We'll talk about that when you have taken some of this," said Lefevre,
+as the house-physician reappeared with the nurse, bearing the brandy and
+milk.
+
+Lefevre presently told him how he had been found in the train, and taken
+for dead till the card--"this card," said he, taking it from the top of
+the locker--was discovered on him. The young man listened in open
+amazement, and looked at the card.
+
+"I know nothing of this!" said he. "I never saw the card before! I never
+heard your name or the hospital's till a minute ago."
+
+"Your case was strange before," said Lefevre; "this makes it stranger.
+Who journeyed with you?"
+
+"A man,--a nice, strange, oldish fellow in a fur coat." And the young
+man wished to enter upon a narrative, when the doctor interrupted him.
+
+"You're not well enough to talk much now. Tell me to-morrow all about
+it."
+
+The doctor returned home, his imagination occupied with the vision of a
+train rushing at express speed over the metals, and of a compartment in
+the train in which a young man reclined under the spell of an old man.
+The young man's face he saw clearly, but the old man's evaded him like a
+dream, and yet he felt he ought to know one who knew the peculiar repute
+of the St. James's Hospital. Next day the young man told his story,
+which was in effect as follows: He was a subaltern in a dragoon regiment
+stationed in Brighton. On Sunday afternoon he had set out for London on
+several days' leave. He had taken a seat in a smoking-carriage, and was
+preparing to make himself comfortable with a novel and a cigar, when an
+elderly gentleman, who looked like a foreigner, came in as the train was
+about to move. He particularly observed the man from the first, because,
+though it was a pleasant spring day, he looked pinched and shrunken with
+cold in his great fur overcoat, and because he had remarked him standing
+on the platform and scrutinizing the passengers hurrying into the train.
+The gentleman sat down in the seat opposite the young officer, and drew
+his fur wrap close about him. The young officer could not keep his eyes
+off him, and he noted that his features seemed worn thin and arid, as by
+passage through terrific peril,--as if he had been travelling for many
+days without sleep and without food, straining forward to a goal of
+safety, sick both in stomach and heart,--as if he had been rushing, like
+the maniac of the Gospel, through dry places, seeking rest and finding
+none. His hair, which should have been black, looked lustreless and
+bleached, and his skin seemed as if his blood had lost all colour and
+generosity, as if nothing but serum flowed in his veins. His eyes alone
+did not look bloodless; they were weary and extravasated, as from
+anxious watching. The young officer's compassion went out to the
+stranger; for he thought he must be a conspirator, fleeing probably from
+the infamous tyranny of Russian rule. But presently he spoke in such
+good English that the idea of his being a Russian faded away.
+
+"Excuse the liberty I take," said he, with a singularly winning smile;
+"but let me advise you not to smoke that cigar. I have a peculiarly
+sensitive nose for tobacco, and my nose informs me that your cigar,
+though good as cigars go, is not fit for you to smoke."
+
+The young officer was surprised that he was rather charmed than offended
+by this impertinence.
+
+"Let me offer you one of these instead," said the strange gentleman; "we
+call them--I won't trouble you with the Spanish name--but in English it
+means 'Joys of Spain.'"
+
+The officer took and thanked him for a "Joy of Spain," and found the
+flavour and aroma so excellent that, to use his own phrase, he could
+have eaten it. He asked the stranger what in particular was his
+objection to the other cigar.
+
+"This objection," said he, "which is common to all ill-prepared
+tobaccos, that it lowers the vital force. You don't feel that yet,
+because you are young and healthy, and gifted with a superabundance of
+fine vitality; but you may by smoking one bad cigar bring the time a day
+nearer when you must feel it. And even now it would take a little off
+the keen edge of the appetite for pleasure. How little," said he, "do we
+understand how to keep ourselves in condition for the complete enjoyment
+of life! You, I suppose, are about to take your pleasure in town, and
+instead of judiciously tickling and stimulating your nerves for the
+complete fulfilment of the pleasures you contemplate, you begin--you
+were beginning, I mean, with your own cigar--to dull and stupefy them.
+Don't you see how foolish that is?"
+
+The young officer admitted that it was very foolish and very true; and
+they talked on thus, the elder exercising a charm over the younger such
+as he had never known before in the society of any man. In a quarter of
+an hour the young man felt as if he had known and trusted and loved his
+neighbour all his life; he felt, he confessed, so strongly attracted
+that he could have hugged him. He told him about his family, and showed
+him the innermost secrets of his heart; and all the while he smoked the
+delicious "Joy of Spain," and felt more and more enthralled and
+fascinated by the stranger's eyes, which, as he talked, lightened and
+glowed more and more as their glance played caressingly about him. He
+was beginning to wonder at that, when with some emphatic phrase the
+stranger laid his fingers on his knee, upon which a thrill shot through
+him as if a woman had touched him. He looked in the stranger's face, and
+the wonderful eyes seemed to search to the root of his being, and to
+draw the soul out of him. He had a flying thought--"Can it be a woman,
+after all, in this strange shape?" and he knew no more ... till he woke
+in the hospital bed.
+
+That was the patient's story.
+
+"Just look over your property here," said the doctor. "Have you lost
+anything?"
+
+The young man turned over his watch and the contents of his purse, and
+answered that he had lost nothing.
+
+"Strange--strange!" said Lefevre--"very strange! And the card--of course
+the stranger must have put it in your pocket."
+
+"Which would seem to imply," said the young man, "that _he_ knows
+something of the hospital."
+
+"Well," said Lefevre, "we must see what can be done to clear the mystery
+up."
+
+"Some of those newspaper-men have been here," said the house-physician,
+when they had left the ward, "and they will be sure to call again before
+the day is out. Shall I tell them anything of this?"
+
+"Certainly," said Lefevre. "Publicity may help us to discover this
+amazing stranger."
+
+"Do you quite believe the story?" asked the house-physician.
+
+"I don't disbelieve it."
+
+"But what did the stranger do to put him in that condition, which seems
+something more than hypnotism?"
+
+"Ah," said Lefevre, "I don't yet understand it; but there are forces in
+Nature which few can comprehend, and which only one here and there can
+control and use."
+
+
+
+
+Chapter III.
+
+"M. Dolaro."
+
+
+Next day men talked, newspaper in hand, at the breakfast-table, in the
+early trains, omnibuses, and tramcars, of the singular railway outrage.
+It was clear its purpose was not robbery. What, then, did it mean?
+Some--probably most--declared it was very plain what it meant; while
+others,--the few,--after much argument, confessed themselves quite
+mystified.
+
+The police, too, were not idle. They made inquiries and took notes here
+and there. They discovered that the five o'clock train made but two
+pauses on its journey to London--at Croydon and at Clapham Junction. At
+neither of those places could a man in a fur coat be heard of as having
+descended from the train; and yet it was manifest that he did not arrive
+at Grosvenor Road, where tickets were taken. After persistent and wider
+inquiries, however, at Clapham Junction (which was the most likely point
+of departure), a cabman was found who remembered having taken up a
+fare--a gentleman in a fur coat--about the hour indicated. He
+particularly remarked the gentleman, because he looked odd and foreign
+and half tipsy (that was how he seemed to him), because he was wrapped
+up "enough for Father Christmas," and because he asked to be driven such
+a long way--to a well-known hotel near the Crystal Palace, where
+"foreign gents" were fond of staying. Being asked what in particular had
+made him think the gentleman a foreigner, cabby could not exactly say;
+he believed, however, it was his coat and his eyes. Of his face he saw
+little or nothing, it was so muffled up; yet his tongue was English
+enough.
+
+Inquiry was then pushed on to the hotel named by the cabman. A gentleman
+in a fur coat had certainly arrived there the evening before, but no one
+had seen anything of him after his arrival. He had taken dinner in his
+private sitting-room, and had then paid his bill, because, he said, he
+must be gone early in the morning. About half an hour after dinner, when
+a waiter cleared the things away, he had gone to his room, and next
+morning he had left the hotel soon after dawn. Boots, half asleep, had
+seen him walk away, bag in hand, wrapped in his greatcoat,--walk away,
+it would seem, and dissolve into the mist of the morning, for from that
+point no further trace could be got of him. No such figure as his had
+been seen on any of the roads leading from the hotel, either by the
+early milkman, or by the belated coffee-stall keeper, or night cabman.
+Being asked what name the gentleman had given at the hotel, the
+book-keeper showed her record, with the equivocal name of "M. Dolaro."
+The name might be Italian or Spanish,--or English or American for that
+matter,--and the initial "M" might be French or anything in the world.
+
+In the meantime Dr Lefevre had been pondering the details of the affair,
+and noting the aspects of his patient's condition; but the more he noted
+and pondered, the more contorted and inexplicable did the mystery
+become. His understanding boggled at its very first notes. It was almost
+unheard of that a young man of his patient's strong and healthy
+constitution and temper should be hypnotised or mesmerised at all, much
+less hypnotised to the verge of dissolution; and it was unprecedented
+that even a weak, hysterical subject should, after being unhypnotised,
+remain so long in prostrate exhaustion. Then, suppose these
+circumstances of the case were ordinary, there arose this question,
+which refused to be solved: Since it was ridiculous to suppose that the
+hypnotisation was a wanton experiment, and since it had not been for the
+sake of robbery, what had been its object?
+
+The interest of the case was emphasised and enlarged by an article in
+'The Daily Telegraph,' in which was called to mind the singular story in
+its Paris correspondence a day or two before, of the young woman in the
+Hotel-Dieu, which Lefevre had forgotten. The writer remarked on the
+points of similarity which the case in the Brighton train bore to that
+of the Paris pavement; insisted on the probable identity of the man in
+the fur coat with the man in the cloak; and appealed to Dr Lefevre to
+explain the mystery, and to the police to find the man "who has alarmed
+the civilised world by a new form of outrage."
+
+Lefevre was piqued by that article, and he went to see his patient day
+after day, in the constant hope of finding a solution of the puzzle that
+perplexed him. The direction in which he looked for light will be best
+suggested by remarking what were his peculiar theory and practice.
+Lefevre was not a materialistic physician; indeed, in the opinion of
+many of his brethren, he erred on the other side, and was too much
+inclined to mysticism. It may at least be said that he had an open mind,
+and a modest estimate of the discoveries of modern medical science. He
+had perceived while still a young man (he was now about forty) that all
+medical practice--as distinct from surgical--is inexact and empirical,
+that, like English common law, it is based merely on custom, and a
+narrow range of experience; and he had therefore argued that a wider
+experience and research, especially among decaying nations, might lead
+to the discovery of a guiding principle in pathology. That conviction
+had taken him as medical officer to Egypt and India, where, amid the
+relics of civilisations half as old as time, he found traditions of a
+great scientific practice; and thence it had brought him back to study
+such foreign medical writers as Du Bois-Reymond, Nobili, Matteucci, and
+Mueller, and to observe the method of the famous physicians of the
+Salpetriere. Like the great Charbon, he made nervous and hysterical
+disorders his specialty, in the treatment of which he was much given to
+the use of electricity. He had very pronounced "views," though he seldom
+troubled his brethren with them; for he was not of those who can hold a
+belief firmly only if it is also held by others.
+
+More than a week had passed without discovery or promise of light, when
+one afternoon he went to the hospital resolved to compass some
+explanation.
+
+He walked at once, on entering the ward, to the bedside of his puzzling
+patient, who still lay limp as a dish-clout and drowsy as a sloth. He
+tested--as he had done almost daily--his nervous and respiratory powers
+with the exact instruments adapted for the purpose, and then, still
+unenlightened, he questioned him closely about his sensations. The young
+officer answered him with tolerable intelligence.
+
+"I feel," he ended with saying, "as if all my energy had
+evaporated,--and I used to have no end,--just as a spirit evaporates if
+it is left open to the air."
+
+The saying struck Lefevre mightily. "Energy" stood then to Lefevre as an
+almost convertible term for "electricity," and his successful
+experiments with electricity had opened up to him a vast field of
+conjecture, into which, on the smallest inflaming hint, he was wont to
+make an excursion. Such a hint was the saying of the young officer now,
+and, as he walked away, he found himself, as it were, knocking at the
+door of a great discovery. But the door did not open on that summons,
+and he resolved straightway to discuss the subject with Julius Courtney,
+who, though an amateur, had about as complete a knowledge of it as
+himself, and who could bring to bear, he believed, a finer intelligence.
+
+He first sought Julius at the Hyacinth Club, where he frequently spent
+the afternoon. Failing to find him there, he inquired for him at his
+chambers in the Albany. Hearing nothing of him there, and the ardour of
+his quest having cooled a little, he stepped out across the way to his
+own home in Savile Row.
+
+There he found a note from his mother, with a touch of mystery in its
+wording. She said she wanted very much to have a serious conversation
+with him; she had been expecting for days to see him, and she begged him
+to go that evening to dinner if he could. "Julius," said she, "will be
+here, and one or two others."
+
+The mention of Julius as a visitor at his mother's house reminded him of
+his promise to that lady to find out how the young man was connected:
+engrossed as he had been with his strange case, he had almost forgotten
+the promise, and he had done nothing to fulfil it but tap ineffectually
+for admission to his friend's confidence. He therefore considered with
+some anxiety what he should do, for Lady Lefevre could on occasion be
+exacting and severe with her son. He concluded nothing could be done
+before dinner, but he went prepared to be questioned and perhaps rated.
+He was pleased to find that his mother seemed to have forgotten his
+promise as much as he had, and to see her in the best of spirits with a
+tableful of company.
+
+"Oh, you have come," said she, presenting her cheek to her son; "I
+thought that after all you might be detained by that mysterious case you
+have at the hospital. Here's Dr. Rippon--and Julius too--dying to hear
+all about it;" but she gave no hint of the serious conversation which
+she said in her note she desired.
+
+"Not I, Lady Lefevre," Julius protested. "I don't like medical
+revelations; they make me feel as if I were sitting at the confessional
+of mankind."
+
+Noting by the way that Julius and his sister seemed much taken up with
+each other, and that Julius, while as fascinating as ever, and as ready
+and apt and intelligent of speech, seemed somewhat more chastened in
+manner and less effervescent in health,--like a fire of coal that has
+spent its gas and settled into a steady glow of heat,--he turned to Dr
+Rippon, a tall, thin old gentleman of over seventy, but who yet had a
+keen tongue, and a shrewd, critical eye. He had been an intimate friend
+of the elder Lefevre, and the son greeted him with respect and
+affection.
+
+"Who is the gentleman?" said Dr Rippon, aside, when their greeting was
+over. "It does an old man's heart good to see and hear him," and the old
+doctor straightened himself. "But he'll get old too; that's the sad
+thing, from my point of view, that such beauty of person and swift
+intelligence of mind _must_ grow old and withered, and slow and dull.
+What did you say his name is, John?"
+
+"His name is Courtney--Julius Courtney," said Lefevre.
+
+"Courtney," mused the old man, stroking his eyebrow; "I once knew a man
+of that name, or, rather, who took that name. I wonder if this friend of
+yours is of the same family; he is not unlike the man I knew."
+
+"Oh," said Lefevre, immediately interested, "he may be of the same
+family, but I don't know anything of his relations. Who was the man, may
+I ask, that you knew?"
+
+"Well," said the old gentleman, settling down to a story, which Lefevre
+was sure would be full of interest and contemporary allusion, for the
+old physician had in his time seen many men and many things--"it is a
+romantic story in its way."
+
+He was on the point of beginning it when dinner was announced.
+
+"I should like to hear the story when we return to the drawing-room,"
+said Lefevre.
+
+Over dinner, Lefevre was beset with inquiries about his mysterious
+case:--Was the young man better? Had he been very ill? Was he handsome?
+What had the foreign-looking stranger done to him? and for what purpose
+had he done it? These questions were mostly ignorant and thoughtless,
+and Lefevre either parried them or answered them with great reserve.
+When the ladies retired from table, however, more particular and curious
+queries were pressed upon him as to the real character of the outrage
+upon the young man. He replied that he had not yet discovered, though he
+believed he was getting "warm."
+
+"Is it fair," said Julius, "to ask you in what direction you are looking
+for an explanation or revelation?"
+
+"Oh, quite fair," said Lefevre, welcoming the question. "To put it in a
+word, I look to _electricity_,--animal electricity. I have been for some
+time working round, and I hope gradually getting nearer, a scientific
+secret of enormous--of transcendent value. Can you conceive, Julius, of
+a universal principle in Nature being got so under control as to form a
+universal basis of cure?"
+
+"Can I conceive?" said Julius. "And is that electricity too?"
+
+"I hope to find it is."
+
+"Oh, how slow!" exclaimed Julius,--"oh, how slow you professional
+scientific men become! You begin to run on tram-lines, and you can't get
+off them! Why fix yourself to call this principle you're seeking for
+'electricity'? It will probably restrict your inquiry, and hamper you in
+several ways. I would declare to every scientific man, 'Unless you
+become as a little child or a poet, you will discover no great truth!'
+Setting aside your bias towards what you call 'electricity,' you are
+really hoping to discover something that was discovered or divined
+thousands of years ago! Some have called it 'od'--an 'imponderable
+fluid'--as you know; you and others wish to call it 'electricity.' I
+prefer to call it 'the spirit of life,'--a name simple, dignified, and
+expressive!"
+
+"It has the disadvantage of being poetic," said Dr Rippon, with grave
+irony; "and doctors don't like poetry mixed up with their science."
+
+"It _is_ poetic," admitted Julius, regarding the old doctor with
+interest, "and therefore it is intelligible. The spirit of life is
+electric and elective, and it is 'imponderable:' it can neither be
+weighed nor measured! It flows and thrills in the nerves of men and
+women, animals and plants, throughout the whole of Nature! It connects
+the whole round of the Cosmos by one glowing, teasing, agonising
+principle of being, and makes us and beasts and trees and flowers all
+kindred!"
+
+"That is all very beautiful and fresh," said Lefevre, "but--"
+
+"But," interrupted Julius, "it is not a new truth: the poet divined it
+ages ago! Buddha, thousands of years ago, perceived it, and taught that
+'all life is linked and kin;' so did the Egyptians and the Greeks, when
+they worshipped the principle of life everywhere; and so did our own
+barbaric ancestors, when the woods--the wonderful, mystic woods!--were
+their temples. Life--the spirit of life!--is always beautiful; always to
+be desired and worshipped!"
+
+"Yes," said old Dr Rippon, who had listened to this astonishing rhapsody
+with evident interest, with sympathetic and intelligent eye; "but a time
+will come even to you, when death will appear more beautiful and
+friendly and desirable than life."
+
+Courtney was silent, and looked for a second or two deadly sick. He cast
+a searching eye on Dr Rippon.
+
+"That's the one thought," said he, "that makes me sometimes feel as if I
+were already under the horror of the shade. It's not that I am afraid of
+dying--of merely ceasing to live; it is that life may cease to be
+delightful and friendly, and become an intolerable, decaying burden."
+
+He filled a glass with Burgundy, and set himself attentively to drink
+it, lingering on the bouquet and the flavour. Lefevre beheld him with
+surprise, for he had never before seen Julius take wine: he was wont to
+say that converse with good company was intoxicating enough for him.
+
+"Why, Julius," said Lefevre, "that's a new experience you are
+trying,--is it not?"
+
+Julius looked embarrassed an instant, and then replied, "I have begun it
+very recently. I did not think it wise to postpone the experience till
+it might become an absolute necessity."
+
+Old Dr Rippon watched him empty the glass with a musing eye. "'I sought
+in mine heart,'" said he, gravely quoting, "'to give myself unto wine,
+yet acquainting mine heart with wisdom.'"
+
+"True," said Julius, considering him closely. "But, for completeness'
+sake, you ought to quote also, 'Whatsoever mine eyes desired I kept not
+from them; I withheld not my heart from any joy.'"
+
+Lefevre looked from the one to the other in some darkness of perplexity.
+
+"You appear, John," said the old doctor, with a smile, "not to know one
+of the oldest and greatest of books: you will find it included in your
+Bible. Mr Courtney clearly knows it. I should not be surprised to hear
+he had adopted its philosophy of 'wisdom and madness and folly.'"
+
+"Surely you cannot say," remarked Julius, "that the writer of that book
+had what is called a 'philosophy.' He was moved by an irresistible
+impulse, of which he gives you the explanation when he uses that
+magnificent sentence about having 'the world set in his heart.'"
+
+"Yes," said the old doctor, in a subdued, backward voice, regarding
+Julius with the contemplative eyes of memory. "You will, I hope, forgive
+me when I say that you remind me very much of a gentleman who took the
+name of Courtney. I knew him years ago: was he a relation of yours, I
+wonder?"
+
+"Possibly," said Julius, seeming scarcely interested; "though the name
+of Courtney, I believe, is not very uncommon." Then, turning to Lefevre,
+he said, "I hope you don't think I wish to make light of your grand
+idea. I only mean that you must widen your view, if you would work it
+out to success."
+
+With that Lefevre became more curious to hear Dr Rippon's story. So when
+they went to the drawing-room he got the old gentleman into a secluded
+corner, and reminded him of his promise.
+
+"Yes," said the doctor, "it is a romantic story. About forty years
+ago,--yes, about forty: it was immediately after the fall of Louis
+Philippe,--I went with my friend Lord Rokeby to Madrid. He went as
+ambassador, and I as his physician. There was then at the Spanish Court
+a very handsome hidalgo, Don Hernando--I forget all his names, but his
+surname was De Sandoval. He was of the bluest blood in Spain, and a
+marquis, but poor as a church mouse. He had a great reputation for
+gallant adventures and for mysterious scientific studies. On the last
+ground I sought and cultivated his acquaintance. But he was a proud,
+reserved person, and I could never quite make out what his studies were,
+except that he read a great deal, and believed firmly in the Arabic
+philosophers and alchemists of the middle ages; and he would sometimes
+talk with the same sort of rhapsodical mysticism as this young man
+delights you with. We did not have much opportunity for developing an
+intimacy in any case; for he fell in love with the daughter of our Chief
+Secretary of Legation, a bright, lovely English girl, and that ended
+disastrously for his position in Madrid. He made his proposals to her
+father, and had them refused; chiefly, I believe, on account of his
+loose reputation. The girl, too, was the heiress of an uncle's property
+on this curious condition, it appeared,--that whoever should marry her
+should take the uncle's name of _Courtney_. Don Hernando and the young
+lady disappeared; they were married, and he took the name of Courtney,
+and was forbidden to return to Madrid. He and his wife settled in Paris,
+where I used to meet them frequently; then they travelled, I believe,
+and I lost sight of them. I returned to Paris on a visit some few years
+ago, and I asked an old friend about the Courtneys; he believed they
+were both dead, though he could give me no certain news about them."
+
+"Supposing," said Lefevre, "that this Julius were their son, do you know
+of any reason why he should be reserved about his parentage?"
+
+"No," said the old man, "no;--unless it be that Hernando was not
+episcopal in his affections; but I should think the young man is
+scarcely Puritan enough to be ashamed of that."
+
+Lefevre and the old man both looked round for Julius. They caught sight
+of him and Leonora Lefevre standing one on either side of a window, with
+their eyes fixed upon each other.
+
+"The young lady," said the old doctor, "seems much taken up with him."
+
+"Yes," said Lefevre; "and she's my sister."
+
+"Ah," said the old doctor; "I fear my remark was rather unreserved."
+
+"It is true," said Lefevre.
+
+He left Dr Rippon, to seek his mother. He found her excited and warm,
+and without a word to spare for him.
+
+"You wanted," said he, "some serious talk with me, mother?"
+
+"Oh yes," said she; "but I can't talk seriously now: I can scarcely talk
+at all. But do you see how Nora and Julius are taken up with each other?
+I never before saw such a pair of moonstruck mortals! I believe I have
+heard of the moon having a magnetic influence on people: do you think it
+has? But he is a charming man!"--glancing towards Julius--"I'm more than
+half in love with him myself. Now I must go. Come quietly one afternoon,
+and then we can talk."
+
+Her son abstained from recounting, as he had proposed to himself, what
+he had heard from Dr Rippon: he would reserve it for the quiet
+afternoon. He took his leave almost immediately, bearing with him a deep
+impression--like a strongly bitten etching wrought on his memory--of his
+last glimpse of the drawing-room: Nora and Julius set talking across a
+small table, and the tall, pale, gaunt figure of Dr Rippon approaching
+and stooping between them. It seemed a sinister reminder of the words
+the old doctor had addressed to Julius,--"_A time will come when death
+will appear more beautiful and friendly and desirable than life!_"
+
+
+
+
+Chapter IV.
+
+The Man of the Crowd.
+
+
+In a few days Dr Lefevre found a quiet afternoon, and went and told his
+mother the story of the Spanish marquis which he had got from Dr Rippon.
+She hailed the story with delight. Courtney was a fascinating figure to
+her before: it needed but that to clothe him with a complete romantic
+heroism; for, of course, she did not doubt that he was the son of the
+Spanish grandee. She wished to put it to him at once whether he was not,
+but she was dissuaded by her son from mentioning the matter yet to
+either Julius or her daughter.
+
+"If he wishes," said Lefevre, "to keep it secret for some reason, it
+would be an impertinence to speak about it. We shall, however, have a
+perfect right to ask him about himself if his attentions to Nora go on."
+
+Soon afterwards (it was really a fortnight; but in a busy life day melts
+into day with amazing rapidity), Lefevre was surprised at dinner, and
+somewhat irritated, by a letter from his mother. She wrote that they had
+seen nothing of Julius Courtney for three or four days,--which was
+singular, since for the past three or four weeks he had been a daily
+visitor; latterly he had begun to look fagged and ill, and it was
+possible he was confined to his room,--though, after all, that was
+scarcely likely, for he had not answered a note of inquiry which she had
+sent. She begged her son to call at his chambers, the more so as Nora
+was pining in Julius's absence to a degree which made her mother very
+anxious.
+
+With professional suspicion Lefevre told himself that if Julius, with
+his magnificent health, was fallen ill, it must be for some outrageous
+reason. But even if he was ill, he need not be unmannerly: he might have
+let his friends who had been in the habit of seeing him daily know what
+had come to him. Was it possible, the doctor thought, that he was
+repenting of having given Nora and her mother so much cause to take his
+assiduous attentions seriously? He resolved to see Julius at once, if he
+were at his chambers.
+
+He left his wine unfinished (to the delight of his grave and silent man
+in black), hastily took his hat from its peg in the hall, and passed out
+into the street, while his man held the door open. In two minutes he had
+passed the northern gateway of the Albany, which, as most people know,
+is just at the southern end of Savile Row. Courtney's door was speedily
+opened in response to his peremptory summons.
+
+"Is your master at home, Jenkins?" asked Lefevre of the well-dressed
+serving-man, who looked distinguished enough to be master himself.
+
+"No, doctor," answered Jenkins; "he is not."
+
+"Gone out," said Lefevre, "to the club or to dinner, I suppose?"
+
+"No, doctor," repeated Jenkins; "he is not. He went away four days ago."
+
+"Went away!" exclaimed Lefevre.
+
+"He do sometimes go away by himself, sir. He is so fond of the country,
+and he likes to be by himself. It is the only thing that do him good."
+
+"Becomes solitary, does he?" said Lefevre. "Yes; intelligent, impulsive
+persons like him, that live at high pressure, often have black moods."
+That was not quite what he meant, but it was enough for Jenkins.
+
+"Yes, sir," said Jenkins; "he do sometimes have 'em black. He don't seem
+to take no pride in himself, as he do usual--don't seem to care somehow
+if he look a gentleman or a common man."
+
+"But your master, Jenkins," said Lefevre, "can never look a common man."
+
+"No, sir," said Jenkins; "he cannot, whatever he do."
+
+"He is gone into the country, then?" asked Lefevre.
+
+"Yes, sir; I packed his small port-mantew for him four days ago."
+
+"And where is he gone? He told you, I suppose?"
+
+"No, sir; he do not usual tell me when he is like that."
+
+It did not seem possible to learn anything from Jenkins, in spite of the
+apparent intimacy of his conversation, so Lefevre left him, and returned
+to his own house. He had sat but a little while in his laboratory (where
+he had been occupying his small intervals of leisure lately in
+electrical studies and experiments) when, as chance would have it, the
+last post brought him a note from Dr Rippon. Its purport was curious.
+
+"_I think_," the letter ran, "_you were sufficiently interested in the
+story I told you some week or two ago about one Hernando Courtney, not
+to be bored by a note on the same subject. Last night I accompanied my
+daughter and son-in-law to the Lyceum Theatre. On coming out we had to
+walk down Wellington Street into the Strand to find our carriage, and in
+the surging crowd about there I am almost sure I saw the Hernando
+Courtney whom I believed to be dead_. Aut Courtney aut Diabolus. _I have
+never heard satisfactory evidence of his death, and I should very much
+like to know if he is really still alive and in London. It has occurred
+to me that, considering the intimacy of yourself and your family with
+the gentleman who was made known to me at your mother's house by the
+name of Courtney, you may have heard by now the rights of the case. If
+you have any news, I shall be glad to share it with you."_
+
+Considering this in association with the absence of Julius, Lefevre
+found his wits becoming involved in a puzzle. He could not settle to
+work, so he put on overcoat and hat, and sallied out again. He had no
+fixed purpose: he only felt the necessity of motion to resolve himself
+back into his normal calm. The air was keen from the east. May, which
+had opened with such wanton warmth and seductiveness, turned a cold
+shoulder on the world as she took herself off. It was long since he had
+indulged in an evening walk in the lamp-lit streets, so he stepped out
+eastward against the shrewd wind. Insensibly his attention forsook the
+busy and anxious present, and slipped back to the days of golden and
+romantic youth, when the crowded nocturnal streets were full of the
+mystery of life. He recalled the sensations of those days--the sharp
+doubts of self, the frequent strong desires to drink deep of all that
+life had to offer, and the painful recoils from temptation, which he
+felt would ruin, if yielded to, his hope of himself, and his ambition of
+filling a worthy place among men.
+
+Thus musing, he walked on, taking, without noting it, the most
+frequented turnings, and soon he found himself in the Strand. It was
+that middle time of evening, after the theatres and restaurants have
+sucked in their crowds, when the frequenters of the streets have some
+reserve in their vivacity, before reckless roisterers have begun to
+taste the lees of pleasure, and to shout and jostle on the pavements. He
+was walking on the side of the way next the river, when, near the
+Adelphi, he became aware of a man before him, wearing a slouch-hat and a
+greatcoat--a man who appeared to choose the densest part of the throng,
+to prefer to be rubbed against and hustled rather than not. There was
+something about the man which held Lefevre's attention and roused his
+curiosity--something in the swing of his gait and the set of his
+shoulders. The man, too, seemed urged on by a singular haste, which
+permitted him to be the slowest and easiest of passengers in the thick
+of the crowd, but carried him swiftly over the less frequented parts of
+the pavement. The doctor began to wonder if he was a pickpocket, and to
+look about for the watchful eye of a policeman. He kept close behind him
+past the door of the Strand Theatre, when the throng became slacker, and
+the man turned quickly about and returned the way he had come. Then
+Lefevre had a glimpse of his face,--the merest passing glimpse, but it
+made him pause and ask himself where he had seen it before. A dark,
+foreign-looking man, with a haggard appeal in his eye: he tried to find
+the place of such a figure in his memory, but for the time he tried in
+vain.
+
+Before the doctor recovered himself the man was well past, and
+disappearing in the throng. He hurried after, determined to overtake
+him, and to make a full and satisfying perusal of his face and figure.
+He found that difficult, however, because of the man's singular style of
+progression. To maintain an even pace for himself, moreover, Lefevre had
+to walk very much in the roadway, the dangers of which, from passing
+cabs and omnibuses, forbade his fixing his attention on the man alone.
+Yet he was more and more piqued to look him in the face; for the longer
+he followed him the more he was struck with the oddity of his conduct.
+He had already noted how he hurried over the empty spaces of pavement
+and lingered sinuously in the thronged parts; he now remarked further
+that those who came into immediate contact with him (and they were
+mostly young people who were to be met with at that season of the night)
+glanced sharply at him, as if they had experienced some suspicious
+sensation, and seemed inclined to remonstrate, till they looked in his
+face.
+
+Lefevre could not arrive at a clear front view till, by Charing Cross
+Station, the man turned on the kerb to look after a handsome youth who
+crossed before him, and passed over the road. Then the doctor saw the
+face in the light of a street-lamp, and the sight sent the blood in a
+gush from his heart. It was a dark hairless face, terribly blanched and
+emaciated, as if by years of darkness and prison, with the impress of
+age and death, but yet with a wistful light in the eyes, and a firm
+sensuousness about the mouth that betrayed a considerable interest in
+life. He turned his eyes away an instant, to bring memory and
+association to bear. When he looked again the man was moving away. At
+once recognition rushed upon him like a wave of light. The terribly
+worn, ghastly features resolved themselves into a kind of death-mask of
+Julius! The wave recoiled and smote him again. Who could the man be,
+therefore, who was so like Julius, and yet was not Julius?--who could he
+be but Julius's father,--that Hernando Courtney whom Dr Rippon believed
+he had seen the evening before?
+
+Here was a coil to unravel! Julius's father--the Spanish marquis that
+was--supposed to be dead, but yet wandering in singular fashion about
+the London streets, clearly not desiring, much less courting,
+opportunities of being recognised; Julius not caring to speak of his
+father, apparently ignoring his continued existence, and yet apparently
+knowing enough of his movements to avoid him when he came to London by
+suddenly removing "into the country" without leaving his address. What
+was the meaning of so much mystery? Crime? debt? political intrigue? or,
+what?
+
+The mysterious Hernando went on his way, by the southern sweep of
+Trafalgar Square and Cockspur Street, to the Haymarket, and Lefevre
+followed with attention and curiosity bent on him, but yet with so
+little thought of playing spy that, if Hernando had gone any other way
+or had returned along the Strand, he would probably have let him go. And
+as they went on, the doctor could not but note, as before, how the
+object of his curiosity lingered wherever there was a press of people,
+whether on the pavement or on a refuge at a crossing, and hurried on
+wherever the pavement was sparsely peopled or whenever the persons
+encountered were at all advanced in years. Indeed, the farther he
+followed the more was his attention compelled to remark that Hernando
+sharply avoided contact with the weakly, the old, and the decrepit, and
+wonder why the young people of either sex whom he brushed against should
+turn as if the touch of him waked suspicion and a something hostile.
+Thus they traversed the Haymarket, the Criterion pavement, and, flitting
+across to the Quadrant, the more popular side of Regent Street, among
+pushing groups, weary stragglers, and steady pedestrians. Lefevre had a
+mind to turn aside and go home when he was opposite Vigo Street, but he
+was drawn on by the hope of observing something that might give him a
+clue to the Courtney mystery. When Oxford Circus was reached, however,
+Hernando jumped into a cab and drove rapidly off, and Lefevre returned
+to his own fireside.
+
+He sat for some time over a cigar and a grog, walking in imagination
+round and round the mystery, which steadfastly refused to dissolve or to
+be set aside. His own honour, and perhaps the peace of his mother and
+sister, were involved in it. He was resolved to ask Julius for an
+explanation as soon as he could come to speech with him; but yet, in
+spite of that assurance which he gave himself, he returned to the
+mystery again and again, and beset and bewildered himself with
+questions: Why was Julius estranged from his father? What was the secret
+of the old man's life which had left such an awful impress on his face?
+And why was he nightly haunting the busiest pavements of London, in the
+crowd, but not of it, urged on as by some desire or agony?
+
+He went to bed, but not to sleep. In the quiet and the darkness his
+imagination ranged without constraint over the whole field of his
+questionings. He went back upon Dr Rippon's story of the Spanish
+marquis, and fixed on the mention of his occult studies. He saw him, in
+fancy, without wife or son, cut off from the position and activities in
+his native country which his proper rank would have given him, sequester
+himself from society altogether, and give himself up to the study of
+those Arabian sages and alchemists in whom he had delighted when he was
+a young man. He saw him shun the daylight, and sleep its hours away, and
+then by night abandon himself like another Cagliostro to strange
+experiments with alembic and crucible, breathing acrid and poisonous
+vapours, seeking to extort from Nature her yet undiscovered
+secrets,--the Philosophers Stone, and the Elixir of Life. He saw him
+turn for a little from his strange and deadly experiments, and venture
+forth to show his blanched and worn face among the throngs of men; but
+even there he still pursued his anxious quest of life in the midst of
+death. He saw him wander up and down, in and out, among the evening
+crowd, delighting in contact with such of his fellow-creatures as had
+health and youth, and seeking, seeking--he knew not what. From this
+phantasmagoria he dozed off into the dark plains of sleep; but even
+there the terribly blanched and emaciated face was with him, bending
+wistful worn eyes upon him and melting him to pity. And still again the
+vision of the streets would arise about the face, and the sleeper would
+be aware of the man to whom the face belonged walking quickly and
+sinuously, seeking and enjoying contact with the throng, and strangely
+causing many to resent his touch as if they had been pricked or stung,
+and yet urged onward in some further quest,--an anxious quest it
+sometimes resolved itself into for Julius, who ever evaded him.
+
+Thus his brain laboured through the dead hours of the night, viewing and
+reviewing these scenes and figures, to extract a meaning from them; but
+he was no nearer the heart of the mystery when the morning broke and he
+was waked by the shrill chatter of the sparrows. The day, however,
+brought an event which shed a lurid light upon the Courtney difficulty,
+and revealed a vital connection between facts which Lefevre had not
+guessed were related.
+
+
+
+
+Chapter V.
+
+The Remarkable Case of Lady Mary Fane.
+
+
+It was the kind of day that is called seasonable. If the sun had been
+obscured, the air would have been felt to be wintry; but the sunshine
+was full and warm, and so the world rejoiced, and declared it was a
+perfectly lovely May day,--just as a man who is charmed with the smiles
+and beauty of a woman, thinks her complete though she may have a heart
+of ice. Lefevre, as he went his hospital round that afternoon, found his
+patients revelling in the sunlight like flies. He himself was in
+excellent spirits, and he said a cheery or facetious word here and there
+as he passed, which gave infinite delight to the thin and bloodless
+atomies under his care; for a joke from so serious and awful a being as
+the doctor is to a desponding patient better than all the drugs of the
+pharmacopoeia: it is as exquisite and sustaining as a divine text of
+promise to a religious enthusiast.
+
+Dr Lefevre was thus passing round his female ward, with a train of
+attentive students at his heels, when the door was swung open and two
+attendants entered, bearing a stretcher between them, and accompanied by
+the house-physician and a policeman.
+
+"What is this?" asked Lefevre, with a touch of severity; for it was
+irregular to intrude a fresh case into a ward while the physician was
+going his round.
+
+"I thought, sir," said the house-physician, "you would like to see her
+at once: it seems to me a case similar to that of the man found in the
+Brighton train."
+
+"Where was this lady found?" asked Lefevre of the policeman. He used the
+word "lady" advisedly, for though the dress was that of a hospital nurse
+or probationer, the unconscious face was that of an educated
+gentlewoman. "Why, bless my soul!" he cried, upon more particular
+scrutiny of her features--"it seems to me I know her! Surely I do! Where
+did you say she was found?"
+
+The policeman explained that he was on his beat outside St James's Park,
+when a park-keeper called him in and showed him, in one of the shady
+walks, the lady set on a bench as if she had fainted. The keeper said he
+had taken particular notice of her, because he saw from her dress and
+her veil she was a hospital lady. When he first set eyes on her, an old
+gentleman was sitting talking to her--a strange, dark, foreign-looking
+gentleman, in a soft hat and a big Inverness cape.
+
+"Good heavens!" exclaimed the doctor. "The very man! That's the meaning
+of it. And I did not guess!"
+
+His assistant and the policeman gazed at him in surprise; but he
+recovered himself and asked, with a serious and determined knitting of
+the brows, if the policeman had seen the old gentleman. The policeman
+replied he had not; the gentleman was nowhere to be seen when he was
+called in. The keeper saw him only once; when he returned that way
+again, in about a quarter of an hour, he found the lady alone and
+apparently asleep. She had a very handsome umbrella by her side, and
+therefore he kept within eye-shot of her on this side and on that, lest
+some park-loafer should seize so good a chance of thieving. He thus
+passed her two or three times. The last time, he remarked that she had
+slipped a little to one side, and that her umbrella had fallen to the
+ground. He went to pick it up, and it struck him as he bent that she
+looked strangely quiet and pale. He spoke to her; she made no reply. He
+touched her--he even in his fear ventured to shake her--but she made no
+sign; and he ran to call the policeman. They then brought her straight
+to the hospital, because they could see she was a hospital lady of some
+sort.
+
+"It must--it must be the same!" said Lefevre.
+
+"I thought, when I first heard of it below," said the house-physician,
+"that it must be the same man as was the cause of the other case, in the
+Brighton train."
+
+"No doubt it is the same. But I was thinking of it in another--a far
+more serious sense!" Then turning to the waiting policeman, he said, "Of
+course, you must report this to your inspector?"
+
+"Yes, sir," said the policeman.
+
+"Give him my compliments, then, and say I shall see him presently."
+
+Yet, he thought, how could he speak to the official, with all that he
+suspected, all that he feared, in his heart? With his attention on the
+_qui vive_ with his experiences and speculations of the night, he was
+seized, as we have seen, by the conclusion that the "strange, dark,
+foreign-looking gentleman" of the park-keeper's story was the same whose
+steps he had followed the evening before, without guessing that the man
+was perambulating the pavement and passing among the crowd in search,
+doubtless, of a fresh victim for occult experiment or outrage! That
+conclusion once determined, shock after shock smote upon his sense. What
+if the mysterious person were really proved to be Julius's father? What
+if he had entered upon a course of experiment or outrage (he passed in
+rapid review the mysteries of the Paris pavement and the Brighton train,
+and this of the Park)--outrage yet unnamable because unknown, but which
+would amaze and confound society, and bring signal punishment upon the
+offender? And what--what if Julius knew all that, and therefore sought
+to keep his parentage hidden?
+
+"She is ready, doctor," said the Sister of the ward at his elbow, adding
+with a touch of excitement in her manner as he turned to her, "do you
+know who she is? Look at this card; we noticed the name first on her
+linen."
+
+Dr Lefevre looked at the card and read, "Lady Mary Fane, Carlton
+Gardens, S.W."
+
+"I suspected as much," said he. "Lord Rivercourt's daughter. It's a bad
+business. She has been learning at St Thomas's the duties of nurse and
+dresser, which accounts for her being in that uniform."
+
+He went to the bed on which his new patient had been laid, and very soon
+satisfied himself that her case was similar to that of the young
+officer, though graver much than it. He wrote a telegram to Lord
+Rivercourt, sent the house-physician for his electrical apparatus, and
+returned to the bedside. He looked at his patient. He had not remarked
+her hitherto more than other women of his acquaintance, though he had
+sometimes sat at her father's table; but now he was moved by a beauty
+which was enhanced by helplessness--a beauty stamped with a calm
+disregard of itself--the manifest expression of a noble and loving soul,
+which had lived above the plane of doubt and fear and gusty passion. Her
+wealth of lustrous black hair lay abroad upon her pillow, and made an
+admirable setting for her finely-modelled head and neck. As he looked at
+this excellent presentment, and thought of the intelligence and activity
+which had been wont to animate it, resentment rose in him against the
+man who, for whatever end, had subdued the noble woman to that
+condition, and a deep impatience penetrated him that he had not
+discovered--had even scarcely guessed--the purpose or the method of the
+subjugation!
+
+It was, however, not speculation but action that was needed then. The
+apparatus described in the case of the young officer was ready, and the
+house-physician was waiting to give his assistance. The stimulation of
+Will and Electricity was applied to resuscitate the patient--but with
+the smallest success: there was only a faint flutter, a passing slight
+rigidity of the muscles, and all seemed again as it had been. The
+exhausting nature of the operation or experiment forbade its immediate
+repetition. Disappointment pervaded the doctor's being, though it did
+not appear in the doctor's manner.
+
+"We'll try again in half an hour," said he to his assistant, and turned
+away to complete his round of the ward.
+
+At the end of the half-hour, Lefevre and the house-physician were again
+by Lady Mary's bedside. Again, with fine but firm touch, Lefevre stroked
+nerves and muscles to stimulate them into normal action; again he and
+his assistant put out their electrical force through the electrode; and
+again the result was nothing but a passing galvanic quiver. The doctor,
+though he maintained his professional calm, was smitten with alarm,--as
+a man is who, walking through darkness and danger to the rescue of a
+friend, finds himself stopped by an unscalable wall. While he sought
+fresh means of help, his patient might pass beyond his reach. He did not
+think she would--he hoped she would not; but her condition, so
+obstinately resistant to his restoratives, was so peculiar, that he
+could not in the least determine the issue. Imagination and speculation
+were excited, and he asked himself whether, after all, the explanation
+of his failure might not be of the simplest--a difference of sex! The
+secrets of nature, so far as he had discovered, were of such amazing
+simplicity, that it would not surprise him now to find that the
+electrical force of a man varied vitally from that of a woman. He
+explained this suspicion to his assistant.
+
+"I think," said he, "we must make another attempt, for her condition may
+become the more serious the longer it is left. We'll set the Sister and
+the nurse to try this time, and we'll turn her bed north and south, in
+the line of the earth's magnetism." But just then the lady's father, the
+old Lord Rivercourt, appeared in response to the doctor's telegram, and
+the experiment with the women had to wait. The old lord was naturally
+filled with wonder and anxiety when he saw his apparently lifeless
+daughter. He was amazed that she should have been overcome by such
+influence as, he understood, the old gentleman must wield. She had
+always, he said, enjoyed the finest health, and was as little inclined
+to hysteria as woman well could be. Lefevre told the father that this
+was something other than hystero-hypnotism, which, while it reassured
+him as to his daughter's former health, made him the more anxious
+regarding her present condition.
+
+"It is very extraordinary," said the old lord; "but whatever it is,--and
+you say it is like the young man's case that we have all read
+about,--whatever it is,"--and he laid his hand emphatically on the
+doctor's arm,--"she could not be in more capable hands than yours."
+
+That assurance, though soothing to the doctor's self-esteem, added
+gravely to his sense of responsibility.
+
+While they were yet speaking, Lefevre was further troubled by the
+announcement that a detective-inspector desired to speak with him!
+Should he tell the inspector all that he had seen the night before, and
+all that he suspected now, or should he hold his peace? His duty as a
+citizen, as a doctor, and as, in a sense, the protector of his patient,
+seemed to demand the one course, while his consideration for Julius and
+for his own family suggested the other. Surely, never was a simple,
+upright doctor involved in a more bewildering _imbroglio_!
+
+The detective-inspector entered, and opened an interview which proved
+less embarrassing than Lefevre had anticipated. The detective had
+already made up his mind about the case and his course regarding it. He
+put no curious questions; he merely inquired concerning the identity and
+the condition of the lady. When he heard who she was, and when he caught
+the import of an aside from Lord Rivercourt that it would be worth any
+one's while to discover the mysterious offender, professional zeal
+sparkled in his eye.
+
+"I think I know my man," said he; and the doctor looked the lively
+interest he felt. "I am right, I believe, Dr Lefevre, in setting this
+down to the author of that other case you had,--that from the Brighton
+train?" Lefevre thought he was right in that. "'M. Dolaro:' that was the
+name. I had charge of the case, and was baffled. I shan't miss him this
+time. I shall get on his tracks at once; he can't have left the Park in
+broad daylight, a singular man like him, without being noticed."
+
+"It rather puzzles me," said the doctor, "what crime you will charge him
+with."
+
+"It is an outrage," said Lord Rivercourt; "and if it is not criminal, it
+seems about time it were made so."
+
+"Oh, we'll class it, my lord," said the detective; "never fear."
+
+The detective departed; but Lord Rivercourt seemed not inclined to stir.
+
+"You will excuse me," said Lefevre; "but I must perform a very delicate
+operation."
+
+"To be sure," said the old lord; "and you want me to go. How stupid of
+me! I kept waiting for my daughter to wake up; but I see that, of
+course, you have to rouse her. It did not occur to me what that machine
+meant. Something magneto-electric--eh? Forgive one question, Lefevre. I
+can see you look anxious: is Mary's condition very serious?--most
+serious? I can bear to be told the complete truth."
+
+The doctor was touched by the old gentleman's emotion. He took his hand.
+"It is serious," said he--"most serious, for this reason, that I cannot
+account for her obstinate lethargy; but I think there is no immediate
+danger. If necessity arises, I shall send for you again."
+
+"To the House," said Lord Rivercourt. "I shall be sitting out a debate
+on our eternal Irish question."
+
+Lefevre was left seriously discomposed, but at once he sent for the
+house-physician, summoned the Sister and the nurse, and set about his
+third attempt to revive his patient. He got the bed turned north and
+south. He carefully explained to the two women what was demanded of
+them, and applied them to their task; but, whatever the cause, the
+failure was completer than before: there was not even a tremor of muscle
+in the unconscious lady, and the doctor was suffused with alarm and
+humiliation. Failure!--failure!--failure! Such a concatenation had never
+happened to him before!
+
+But failure only nerves the brave and capable man to a supreme effort
+for success. Still self-contained, and apparently unmoved, the doctor
+gave directions for some liquid nourishment to be artificially
+administered to his patient, said he would return after dinner, and went
+his way. The society of friends or acquaintances was distasteful to him
+then; the thought even of seeing his own familiar dining-room and his
+familiar man in black, whose silent obsequiousness he felt would be a
+reproach, was disagreeable. All his thought, all his attention, all his
+faculties were drawn tight to this acute point--he must succeed; he must
+accomplish the task he had set himself: life at that hour was worth
+living only for that purpose. But how was success to be compelled?
+
+He walked for a while about the streets, and then he went into a
+restaurant and ordered a modest dinner. He broke and crumbled his bread
+with both hands, his mind still intent on that one engrossing, acute
+point. While thus he sat he heard a voice, as in a dream, say, "The very
+doctor you read about. That's the second curious case he's got in a
+month or so.... Oh yes--very clever; he treats them, I understand, in
+the same sort of way as the famous Dr Charbon of Paris would.... I
+should say so; quite as good, if not better than Charbon. I'd rather
+have an English doctor any day than a French.... His name's in the
+paper--_Lefevre_." Then the doctor woke to the fact that he was being
+talked about. He perceived his admirers were sitting at a table a little
+behind him, and he judged from what had been said that his fresh case
+was already being made "copy" of in the evening papers. The flattering
+comparison of himself with Dr Charbon had an oddly stimulating effect
+upon him, notwithstanding that it had been uttered by he knew not
+whom,--a mere _vox et praeterea nihil_. He disclaimed to himself the
+truth of the comparison, but all the same he was encouraged to bend his
+attention with his utmost force to the solution of his difficult
+problem--what to do to rouse his patient?
+
+He sat thus, amid the bustle and buzz of the restaurant, the coming and
+going of waiters, completely abstracted, assailing his difficulty with
+questions on this side and on that,--when suddenly out of the mists that
+obscured it there rose upon his mental vision an idea, which appealed to
+him as a solution of the whole, and, more than that, as a secret that
+would revolutionise all the treatment of nervous weakness and
+derangement. How came the idea? How do ideas ever come? As inspirations,
+we say, or as revelations; and truly they come upon us with such amazing
+and inspiriting freshness, that they may well be called either the one
+or the other. But no great idea had ever yet an epiphany but from the
+ferment of more familiar small ideas,--just as the glorious Aphrodite
+was born of the ferment and pother of the waves of the sea. Lefevre's
+new idea clothed itself in the form of a comparative question--_Why
+should there not be Transfusion of Nervous Force, Ether, or Electricity,
+just as there is Transfusion of Blood?_
+
+He pushed his dinner away (he could scarcely have told what he had been
+eating and drinking), called for his bill, and returned with all speed
+to the hospital. He entered his female ward just as evening prayers were
+finished, before the lights were turned out and night began for the
+patients. He summoned his trusted assistant, the house-physician, again.
+
+"I am about to attempt," said he, "an altogether new operation: the
+patient has remained just as I left her, I suppose?"
+
+"Just the same."
+
+"Nervous Force, whether it be Electricity or not, is manifestly a fluid
+of some sort: why should it not be transfused as the other vital fluid
+is?"
+
+"Indeed, sir, when you put it so," said the house-physician, suddenly
+steeled and brightened into interest, "I should say, 'why not?' The only
+reason against it is what can be assigned against all new things--it has
+not, so far as I know, been done."
+
+"Exactly. I am going to try. I think, in case we need a current, so to
+say, to draw it along, that we shall use the apparatus too; we shall
+therefore need the women."
+
+"You mean, of course," said the young man, "you will cut a main nerve."
+
+"I shall use this nerve," said Lefevre, indicating the main nerve in the
+wrist,--upon which the young man, in his ready enthusiasm, began to bare
+his arm.
+
+"My dear fellow," said Lefevre, "do you consider what you are so
+promptly offering? Do you know that my experiment, if successful, might
+leave you a paralytic, or an imbecile, or even--a corpse?"
+
+"I'll take the risk, sir," said the young man.
+
+"I can't permit it, my boy," said Lefevre, laying his hand on his arm,
+and giving him a look of kindness. "Nobody must run this risk but me. I
+don't mean, however, to cut the nerve."
+
+"What then, sir?"
+
+"Well," said Lefevre, "this Nervous Force, or Nervous Ether, is clearly
+a very volatile, and at the same time a very searching fluid. It can
+easily pass through the skin from a nerve in one person to a nerve in
+another. There is no difficulty about that; the difficulty is to set up
+a rapid enough vibration to whirl the current through!" He said that in
+meditative fashion: he was clearly at the moment repeating the working
+out of the problem.
+
+"I see," said the young man, looking thoughtful.
+
+"Now, you are a musician, are you not?"
+
+"I play a little," said the young man, with a bewildered look.
+
+"You play the violin?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+"And, of course, you have it in your rooms. Would you be so good as
+to bring me the bow of your violin, and borrow for me anywhere a
+tuning-fork of as high a note as possible?"
+
+The young man looked at Dr Lefevre in puzzled inquiry; but the doctor
+was considering the electrical apparatus before him, and the young man
+set off on his errands. When he returned with the fiddle-bow and the
+tuning-fork, he saw Lefevre had placed the machine ready, with fresh
+chemicals in the vessels.
+
+"Do you perceive my purpose?" asked Lefevre. He placed one handle of the
+apparatus in the unconscious patient's right hand, while he himself took
+hold of her left arm with his right hand, so that the inner side of his
+wrist was in contact with the inner side of hers; and then, to complete
+the circle of connection, he took in his left hand the other handle of
+the apparatus. "You don't understand?"
+
+"I do not," answered the young man.
+
+"We want a very rapid vibration--much more rapid than usual," said the
+doctor. "I can apply no more rapid vibration at present than that which
+the note of that tuning-fork will produce. I want you to sound the
+tuning-fork with the fiddle-bow, and then apply the fork to this wire."
+
+"Oh," said the young man, "I understand!"
+
+"Now," said Lefevre, "you'd better call the Sister to set the
+electricity going."
+
+The Sister came and took her place as before described--with her hands,
+that is, on the cylinder of the electrode, her fingers dipping over into
+the vessels of chemicals. She opened her eyes and smiled at sight of the
+fiddle-bow and tuning-fork.
+
+"I am trying a new thing, Sister," said Lefevre, with a touch of
+severity. "I do not need you, I do not wish you, to exert yourself this
+time; I only wish you to keep that position, and to be calm. Maintain
+your composure, and attend.... Now!" said he, addressing the young man.
+
+The fiddle-bow was drawn across the tuning-fork, and the fork applied
+with its thrilling note to the conducting wire which Lefevre held. The
+wire hummed its vibration, and electricity tingled wildly through
+Lefevre's nerves... There was an anxious, breathless pause for some
+seconds, and fear of failure began to contract the doctor's heart.
+
+"Take your hands away, Sister," said he. Then, turning to his assistant,
+"Apply that to the other wire," said he; and dropping his own wire, he
+put his hand over the cylinder, with his fingers dipping into the vessel
+from which the other wire sprang. When the wire hummed under the
+tuning-fork and the vibration thrilled again, instantly he felt as if an
+inert obstruction had been removed. The vibratory influence whirled
+wildly through him, there was a pause of a second or two (which seemed
+to him many minutes in duration), and then suddenly a kind of rigor
+passed upon the form and features of his patient, as if each individual
+nerve and muscle were being threaded with quick wire, a sharp rush of
+breath filled her chest, and she opened her eyes and closed them again.
+
+"That will do," said Lefevre in a whisper, and, releasing his hands, he
+sank back in a chair. "It's a success," said he, turning his eyes with a
+thin smile on the house-physician, and then closing them in a deadly
+exhaustion.
+
+
+
+
+Chapter VI.
+
+At the Bedside of the Doctor.
+
+
+For the first time since he had come into the world Dr Lefevre was that
+night attended by another doctor. The resident assistant-physician took
+him home to Savile Row in a cab, assisted him to bed, and sat with him a
+while after he had administered a tonic and soporific. Then he left him
+in charge of the silent man in black, whom he reassured by saying that
+there was no danger; that his master had a magnificent constitution;
+that he was only exhausted--though exhausted very much; and that all he
+needed was rest, sleep, nourishment,--sleep above all.
+
+Lefevre slept the night through like a child, and awoke refreshed,
+though still very weak. He was bewildered with his condition for a
+moment or two, till he recalled the moving and exhausting experiences of
+the day before, and then he was suffused with a glow of
+elation,--elation which was not all satisfaction in the successful
+performance of a new experiment, nor in a good deed well done. His
+friend came to see him early, to anticipate the risk of his rising. He
+insisted that he should keep his bed, for that day at least, if not for
+a second and a third day. He reported that the patient was doing well;
+that she had asked with particularity, and had been informed with equal
+particularity, concerning the method of her recovery, upon which she was
+much bemused, and asked to see her physician.
+
+"It is a pity she was told," said Lefevre; "it is not usual to tell a
+patient such a thing, and I meant it to be kept secret, at least till it
+was better established." But for all his protest he was again suffused
+with that new sense of inward joy.
+
+Alone, and lying idle in bed, it was but natural--it was almost
+inevitable--that the doctor's thoughts should begin to run upon the
+strange events and suspicions of the past two days; and their current
+setting strongly in one channel, made him long to be resolved whether or
+no the Man of the Crowd, the author of yesterday's outrage, the "M.
+Dolaro" of whom the detective had gone in search, and who, if captured,
+would be certainly overwhelmed with contumely, if not with
+punishment,--whether or not that strange creature was Julius's father,
+or any relation at all of Julius. He was not clear how he could well put
+the matter to Julius, since he so evidently shrank from discourse upon
+it, yet he thought some kind of certainty might be arrived at from an
+interview with him. On the chance of his having returned to his
+chambers, he called for pen and paper and wrote a note, asking him to
+look in, as he would be resting all day. "Try to come," he urged; "I
+have something important to speak about."
+
+This he sent by the trusty hand of his man in black; and by mid-day
+Julius was announced. He came in confident, and bright as sunshine
+(Lefevre thought he had never seen him looking more serene); but
+suddenly the sunshine was beclouded, and Julius ceased to be himself,
+and became a restless, timorous kind of creature, like a bird put in a
+cage under the eye of his captor.
+
+"What?" he cried when he entered, with an eloquent gesture. "Lazying in
+bed on such a day as this? What does this mean?" But when he observed
+the pallor and weakness of Lefevre's appearance, he paused abruptly,
+refrained from the hand stretched out to greet him, and exclaimed in a
+tone of something like terror, "Good heavens! Are you ill?" A paleness,
+a shudder, and a dizziness passed upon him as if he sickened. "May I,"
+he said, "open the window?"
+
+"Certainly, Julius," said Lefevre, in surprise and alarm. "Do you feel
+ill?"
+
+"No--no," said Julius from the window, where he stood letting the air
+play upon his face, and speaking as if he had to put considerable
+restraint upon himself. "I--I am unfortunately, miserably constituted: I
+cannot help it. I cannot bear the sight of illness, or lowness of health
+even. It appals me; it--it horrifies me with a quite instinctive horror;
+it deadens me."
+
+Lefevre, whose abundant sympathy and vitality went out instinctively to
+succour and bless the weak and the ill, was inexpressibly shocked and
+offended by this confession of what to his sense appeared selfish
+cowardice and inhumanity. He had again and again heard it said, and he
+had with pleasure assented to the opinion, that Julius was a rare,
+finely-strung being, with such pure and glowing health that he shrank
+from contact with, or from the sight of, pain or ill-health, and even
+from their discussion; but now that the singularity of Julius's
+organization impinged upon his own experience, now that he saw Julius
+shrink from himself, he was shocked and offended. Julius, on his part,
+was pitiably moved. He kept away from the bed; he fidgeted to and fro,
+looking at this thing and that, without a sparkle of interest in his
+eye, yet all with his own peculiar grace.
+
+"You wanted to speak to me," he said. "Do you mind saying what you have
+to say and letting me go?"
+
+"I reckoned upon your staying to lunch," said Lefevre.
+
+"I can't!--I can't!... Very sorry, my dear Lefevre, but I really can't!
+Forgive what seems my rudeness. It distresses me that at such a time as
+this my sensations are so acute. But I cannot help it!--I cannot!"
+
+"You have been in the country,--have you not?" said Lefevre, beginning
+with a resolve to get at something.
+
+"I have just come back," said Julius. "My man told me you had called."
+
+"Yes. My mother wrote in a state of great anxiety about you, and asked
+me to go and look at you. She said that she and my sister had seen a
+good deal of you lately; that you began to look unwell, and then ceased
+to appear, and she was afraid you might be ill."
+
+This was put forth as an invitation to Julius to expound not only his
+own situation, but also his relations with Lady and Miss Lefevre, but
+Julius took no heed of it. He merely said, "No; I was not ill. I only
+wanted a little change to refresh me,"--and walked back to the window to
+lave himself in the air.
+
+"Well," continued Lefevre, "since I called to see you, I have had an
+adventure or two. You never look at a newspaper except for the weather,
+and so it is probable you do not know that I had brought to me yesterday
+afternoon another strange case like that of the young officer a month
+ago,--a similar case, but worse."
+
+"Worse?" exclaimed Julius, dropping into the chair by the window, and
+glancing, as a less preoccupied observer than the doctor would have
+remarked, with a wistful desire at the door.
+
+"Much worse--though, I believe, from the same hand," said Lefevre. "A
+lady this time,--titularly and really a lady,--Lady Mary Fane, the
+daughter of Lord Rivercourt."
+
+"Oh, good heavens!" exclaimed Julius, and there were manifest so keen a
+note of apprehension in his voice and so deep a shade of apprehension on
+his face, that Lefevre could not but note them and confirm himself in
+his suspicion of the intimate bond of connection between him and the
+author of the outrage. He pitied Julius's distress, and hurried through
+the rest of his revelation, careless of the result he had sought.
+
+"It may prove," said he, "a far more serious affair than the other. Lord
+Rivercourt is not the man to sit quietly under an outrage like that."
+
+Julius astonished him by demanding, "What is the outrage? Has the lady
+given an account of it? What does she accuse the man of?"
+
+"She has not spoken yet,--to me, at least," said Lefevre; "and I don't
+know what the outrage can be called, but I am sure Lord Rivercourt--and
+he is a man of immense influence--will move heaven and earth to give it
+a legal name, and to get it punishment. There is a detective on the
+man's track now."
+
+"Oh!" said Julius. "Well, it will be time enough to discuss the
+punishment when the man is caught. Now, if that is all your news," he
+added hurriedly, "I think--" He took up his hat, and was as if going
+to the door.
+
+"It is not quite all," said the doctor, and Julius went back to the
+window, with his hat in his hand.
+
+"I wonder," he broke out, "if we shall ever be simple enough and
+intelligent enough to perceive that real wickedness--the breaking of any
+of the laws of Nature, I mean (or, if you prefer to say so, the laws of
+God)--is best punished by being left to itself? Outraged nature exacts a
+severe retribution! But you were going to say--?"
+
+"The night before last," continued Lefevre, determined to be brief and
+succinct, "I was walking in the Strand, and I could not help observing a
+man who fulfilled completely the description given of the author of this
+case and my former one."
+
+"Well?"
+
+"That is not all. When I caught sight of his face I was completely
+amazed; for--I must tell you--it looked for all the world like you grown
+old, or, as I said to myself at the time, like a death-mask of you."
+
+"You--you saw that?" exclaimed Julius, leaning against the window with a
+sudden look of terror which Lefevre was ashamed to have seen: it was
+like catching a glimpse of Julius's poor naked soul. "And you
+thought--?" continued Julius.
+
+"You shall hear. Dr Rippon--you remember the old doctor?--had a sight of
+a man in the Strand the night before, who, he believes, was his old
+friend Courtney that he thought dead, and who, I believe, was the man I
+saw."
+
+Lefevre stopped. There was a pause, in which Julius put his head out of
+the window, as if he had a mind to be gone that way. Then he turned with
+a marked control upon himself.
+
+"Really, Lefevre," said he, "this is the queerest stuff I've heard for a
+long time! This is hallucination with a vengeance! I don't like to apply
+such a tomfool word to anything, but observe how all this has come
+about. An excellent old gentleman, who has been dining out or something,
+has a glimpse at night, on a crowded pavement, of a man who looks like a
+friend of his youth. Very well. The excellent old gentleman tells you of
+that, and it impresses you. _You_ walk on the same pavement the next
+evening--I won't emphasise the fact of its being after dinner, though I
+daresay it was--"
+
+"It was."
+
+"--_You_ have a glimpse of a man who looks--well, something like me;
+and you instantly conclude, 'Ah! the Courtney person--the friend of Dr
+Rippon's youth!--and, surely, some relative of my friend Julius!' Next
+day this hospital case turns up, and because the description of its
+author, given by more or less unobservant persons, fits the person you
+saw, _argal_, you jump to the conclusion that the three are one! Is your
+conclusion clear upon the evidence? Is it inevitable? Is it necessary?
+Is it not forced?"
+
+"Well," began Lefevre.
+
+"It is bad detective business," broke in Julius, "though it may be good
+friendship. You have thought there was trouble in this for me, and you
+wished to give me warning of it. But--_que diable vas-tu faire dans
+cette galere?_ You are the best friend in the world, and whenever I am
+in trouble--and who knows? who knows? 'Man is born unto trouble, as the
+sparks fly upward'--I may ask of you both your friendship and your
+skill. One thing I ask of you here: don't speak of me as you see me now,
+thus miserably moved, to any one! Now I must go. Good-bye." And before
+Lefevre could find another word, Julius had opened the door and was
+gone.
+
+"If it moves him like that," said the doctor to himself, through his
+bewilderment, "there must be something worse in it--God forgive me for
+thinking so!--than I have ever imagined."
+
+
+
+
+Chapter VII.
+
+Contains a Love Interlude.
+
+
+Next day Lefevre learned that the police had been again baffled in their
+part of the inquiry. The detective had contrived to trace his
+man--though not till the morning after the event--to the St Pancras
+Hotel, where he had dined in private, and gone to bed early, and whence
+he had departed on foot before any one was astir, to catch, it was
+surmised, the first train. But wherever he had gone, it was just as in
+the former case: from the time the hotel door had closed on his cloaked
+figure, all trace of him was lost.
+
+Nor could Lady Mary Fane add anything of moment to what Lefevre already
+knew or guessed. Her account of her adventure (which she gave him in her
+father's house, whither she had been removed on the third day) was as
+follows: She was returning home from St Thomas's Hospital, dressed
+according to her habit when she went there; she had crossed Westminster
+Bridge, and was proceeding straight into St James's Park, when she
+became aware of a man walking in the same direction as herself, and at
+the same pace. She casually noted that he looked like a distinguished
+foreigner, and that he had about him an indefinable suggestion of death
+clinging with an eager, haggard hope to life,--a suggestion which melted
+the heart of the beholder, as if it were the mute appeal of a drowning
+sailor. She was stirred to pity; and when he suddenly appeared to reel
+from weakness, she stepped out to him on an overwhelming impulse, laid a
+steadying hand on his arm, and asked what ailed him. He turned on her a
+pair of wonderful dark eyes, which were animal-like in their simple,
+direct appeal, and their moist softness. He begged her to lead him aside
+into a path by which few would pass: he disliked being stared at.
+Thinking only of him as a creature in sickness and distress, she obeyed
+without a thought for herself. She helped him to sit down upon a bench,
+and sat down by him and felt his pulse. He looked at her with an open,
+kindly eye, with a simple-seeming gratitude, which held her strangely
+(though she only perceived that clearly on looking back). He said to her
+suddenly,--
+
+"There was a deep, mystical truth in the teaching of the Church to its
+children--that they should prefer in their moments of human weakness to
+pray to the Virgin-mother; for woman is always man's best friend."
+
+She looked in his face, wondering at him, still with her finger on his
+pulse, when she felt an unconsciousness come over her, not unlike "the
+thick, sweet mystery of chloroform;" and she knew no more till she
+opened her eyes in the hospital bed. "Revived by you," she said to
+Lefevre.
+
+He inquired further, as to her sensations before unconsciousness, and
+she replied in these striking words: "I felt as if I were strung upon a
+complicated system of threads, and as if they tingled and tingled, and
+grew tighter to numbness." That answer, he saw, was kindred to the
+description given by the young officer of his condition. It was clear
+that in both cases the nerves had been seriously played upon; but for
+what purpose? What was the secret of the stranger's endeavour? What did
+he seek?--and what find? To these questions no satisfactory answer would
+come for the asking, so that in his impatience he was tempted to break
+through the severe self-restraint of science, and let unfettered fancy
+find an answer.
+
+But, most of all, he longed to see close to him the man whom the police
+sought for in and out, to judge for himself what might be the method and
+the purpose of his strange outrages. He scarcely desired his capture,
+for he thought of the possible results to Julius, and yet--Day after
+day passed, and still the man was unfound, and very soon a change came
+over Lefevre's life, which lifted it so far above the plane of his daily
+professional experience, that all speculation about the mysterious "M.
+Dolaro," and his probable relation to Julius, fell for a time into the
+dim background. The doctor had been calling daily in Carlton Terrace to
+see his patient, when, on a certain memorable day, he intimated to her
+father that she was so completely recovered that there was no need of
+his calling on her professionally again. The old lord, looking a little
+flustered, asked him if he could spare a few minutes' conversation, and
+led him into his study.
+
+"My dear Lefevre," said he, "I am at a loss how to make you any adequate
+return for what you have done for my daughter. Money can't do it; no,
+nor my friendship either, though you are so kind as to say so. But I
+have an idea, which I think it best to set before you frankly. You are a
+bachelor: it is not good to be a bachelor," he went on, laying his hand
+affectionately on the doctor's arm, and flushing--old man of the world
+though he was--flushing to the eyes. "What--what do you think of my
+daughter? I mean, not as a doctor, but as a man?"
+
+Lefevre was not in his first youth, and he had had his admirations for
+women in his time, as all healthy men must have, but yet he was made as
+deliriously dizzy as if he were a boy by his guess at what Lord
+Rivercourt meant.
+
+"Why," he stammered, "I think her the most beautiful, intelligent,
+and--and attractive woman I know."
+
+"Yes," said her father, "I believe she is pretty well in all these ways.
+But--and you see I frankly expose my whole position to you--what would
+you think of her for a wife?"
+
+"Frankly, then," said Lefevre, "I find I have admired her from the
+beginning of this, but I had no notion of letting my admiration go
+farther, because I conceived that she was quite beyond my hopes."
+
+"My dear fellow," said Lord Rivercourt, "you have relieved me and
+delighted me immensely. I know no man that I would like so well for a
+son-in-law. And after all, it is only fitting that the life you have
+saved with such risk to yourself--oh, I know all about it--should be
+devoted to making yours happy. And--and I understand from her mother
+that Mary is quite of the same opinion herself. Now, will you go and
+speak to her at once, or will you wait till another day? You will have
+to decide that," said he, with a smile, "not only as lover, but as
+doctor."
+
+Lefevre hesitated for but an instant; for what true, manly lover would
+have decided to withdraw till another day when the door to his mistress
+was held open to him?
+
+"I'll see her now," he said.
+
+Lord Rivercourt led the doctor back to his daughter, and left him with
+her. There were some moments of chilling doubt and cold uncertainty, and
+then came a rush of warm feeling at the bidding of a shy glance from
+Lady Mary. He bent over her and murmured he scarcely knew what, but he
+heard clearly and with a divine ecstasy a softly-whispered "_Yes!_"
+which thrilled in his heart for days and months afterwards, and then he
+turned to him her face, her beautiful face illumined with love, and
+kissed it: between two who had been drawn together as they had, what
+words were needed, or what could poor words convey?
+
+About an hour later he walked to Savile Row to dress and return for
+dinner. He walked, because he felt surcharged with life. He desired
+peace and goodwill among men; he pitied with all his soul the weary and
+the broken whom he met, and wondered with regret that men should get
+irremediably involved in the toils of their own misdeeds; he was profuse
+with coppers, and even small silver, to the wretched waifs of society
+who swept the crossings he had to take on his triumphant way; he would
+even have bestowed forgiveness on his greatest enemy if he had met him
+then;--for the divine joy of love was singing in his heart and raising
+him to the serene and glorious empyrean of heroes and gods. Oh matchless
+magic of the human heart, which confounds all the hypotheses of science,
+and flouts all its explanations!
+
+It was that evening when he and Lady Mary sat in sweet converse that she
+said to him these words, which he hung for ever after about his heart--
+
+"Surely, never before did a man win a wife as you have won me! You made
+me well by putting your own life into me; so what could I do but give
+you the life that was already your own!"
+
+Thus day followed day on golden wings: Lefevre in the morning occupied
+with the patients that thronged his consulting-room; in the afternoon
+dispensing healing, and, where healing was impossible, cheerfulness and
+courage, in his hospital wards; and in the evening finding inspiration
+and strength in the company of Lady Mary--for her love was to him better
+than wine. All who went to him in those days found him changed, and in a
+sense glorified. He had always been considerate and kind; but the
+weakness, the folly, and the wickedness of poor human nature, which were
+often laid bare to his searching scrutiny, had frequently plunged him
+into a welter of despondency and shame, out of which he would cry, "Alas
+for God's image! Alas for the temple of the Holy Ghost!" But in those
+days it seemed as if disease and death appeared to him mere trivial
+accidents of life, with the result that no "case," however bad, was sent
+away empty of hope.
+
+
+
+
+Chapter VIII.
+
+Strange Scenes in Curzon Street.
+
+
+It happened, however, that just when all the bays and creeks of Dr
+Lefevre's attention were occupied, as by a springtide, with the
+excellent, the divine fortune that had come to him,--when he seemed thus
+most completely divorced from anxious speculation about Julius Courtney
+and "M. Dolaro," his attention was suddenly and in unexpected fashion
+hurried again to the mystery. The doctor had not seen Julius since the
+day he had received him in his bedroom--it must be admitted he had not
+sought to see him--but he had heard now and then from his mother, in
+casual notes and postscripts, that Courtney continued to call in Curzon
+Street.
+
+On a certain evening Lady Lefevre gave a dinner and a reception,
+designed to introduce Lady Mary to the Lefevre circle. Julius was not at
+dinner (at which only members of the two families sat down), but he was
+expected to appear later. It is probable, under the circumstances, that
+Lefevre would not have remarked the absence of Julius from the
+dinner-table, had it not been for Nora. He was painfully struck with her
+appearance and demeanour. She seemed to have lost much of her beautiful
+vigour and bloom of health, like a flower that has been for some time
+cut from its stem; and she, who had been wont to be ready and gay of
+speech, was now completely silent, yet without constraint, and as if
+wrapt in a dream.
+
+"What has come over Nora?" asked Lefevre of his mother when they had
+gone to the drawing-room.
+
+"Ah," said Lady Lefevre, "you have noticed something, have you? Do you
+find her very changed, then?"
+
+"Very much changed."
+
+"It's this attachment of hers to Julius. I want to have a talk with you
+about it presently. She seems scarcely to live when he is not with her.
+She sits like that always when he is gone, and appears only to dream and
+wait,--wait with her life as if suspended till he comes back."
+
+"Has it, indeed, got so far as that?" said her son with concern. "I had
+better have a word or two with Julius about it."
+
+Just then Mr Courtney was announced, and there were introductions on
+this side and on that. He turned to be introduced to Lady Mary, and for
+the time Lefevre forgot his sister, so engrossed was he with the altered
+aspect of his friend. He looked worn and weary, like a student when the
+dawn finds him still at his books. Lady Lefevre expressed that in her
+question--
+
+"Why, Julius, have you taken to hard work? You're not looking well, and
+we have not seen you for days."
+
+A flush rose to tinge his cheek, but it sank as soon as it appeared.
+
+"I have been out of sorts," said he; "that is all. And you have not seen
+me because I have bought a yacht and have been trying it on the river."
+
+"A yacht!" exclaimed Lefevre. "I did not know you cared for the water."
+
+"_You_ know me," laughed Julius in his own manner, "and not know that I
+care for everything!" So saying, he laid his hand on Lefevre's arm. The
+act was not remarkable, but its result was, for Lefevre felt it as if it
+were a blow, and stood astonished at it.
+
+During this interchange of words Lefevre (with Lady Mary) had been
+moving with Julius, as he drew off across the room to greet Nora, and
+the doctor could not help observing how the attention of all the company
+was bent on his friend. Before his entrance all had been chatting or
+laughing easily with their neighbours; now they seemed as constrained
+and belittled as is a crowd of courtiers when a royal personage appears
+in their midst. In truth, Julius at all times had a grace, an ease, and
+a distinction of manner not unworthy of a prince; but on this occasion
+he had an added something, an indefinable attraction which strangely
+held the attention. Lefevre, therefore, was scarcely surprised (though,
+perhaps, a trifle disappointed, considering that he was a lover) to note
+that Lady Mary was regarding Julius with a silent, wide-eyed
+fascination. They convoyed Julius to Nora, and then withdrew, leaving
+them together.
+
+There were several fresh arrivals and new introductions to Lady Mary.
+These, Lefevre observed, she went through half-absently, still turning
+her eyes on Julius in the intervals with open and intense interest.
+
+"Well," said Lefevre at length, smiling in spite of a twinge of
+jealousy, "what do you think, now you have seen him, of the fascinating
+Julius?"
+
+She gave him no answering smile, but replied as if she painfully
+withdrew herself from abstraction,--"I--I don't know. He is very
+interesting and very strange. I--I can't make him out. I don't know."
+
+Then Lefevre turned his eyes on Julius, and became aware of something
+strained in the relations of his sister and his friend. He could not
+forbear to look, and as he continued looking he instinctively felt that
+a passionate scene was being silently enacted between them. They sat
+markedly apart. Nora's bosom heaved with suppressed emotion, and her
+look, when raised to Julius, plied him with appeal or reproach--Lefevre
+could not determine which. The doctor's interest almost drew him over to
+them, when Lady Lefevre appeared and said to Julius--
+
+"Do go to the piano, Julius, and wake us up."
+
+Nora put out her hand with a gesture which plainly meant, "Don't!...
+Don't leave me!"
+
+But Julius rose, and as he turned (the doctor noted) he bent an
+inscrutable look of pain on Nora. He sat down at the piano and struck a
+wild, sad chord. Instantly it became as if the people in the room were
+the instrument upon which he played,--as if the throbbing human hearts
+around him were directly connected by invisible strings with the ivory
+keys that pulsed beneath his fingers. What was the music he played no
+one knew, no one cared, no one inquired: each individual person was held
+and played upon, and was allowed no pause for reflection or criticism.
+The music carried all away as on the flood of time, showing them, on one
+hand, sunshine and beauty and joy, and all the pride of life; and on the
+other, darkness and cruelty, despair, and defiance, and death. It might
+have been, on the one hand, the music with which Orpheus tamed the
+beasts; and on the other, that which AEschylus arranged to accompany the
+last act of his tragedy of "Prometheus Bound." There was, however, no
+clear distinction between the joyous airs and the sombre: all were
+wrought and mingled into an exciting and bewildering atmosphere of
+melody, which thrilled the heart and maddened the brain. But as the
+music continued, its joyous strains died out; the instrument cried aloud
+in horror and pain, as if the vulture of Prometheus were tearing at its
+vitals; darkness seemed to descend upon the room--a darkness alive with
+the sighs and groans, the disillusions and tears, of lost souls. The men
+sat transfixed with agony and dread, the women were caught in the wild
+clutches of hysteria, and Courtney himself was as if possessed with a
+frenzy: his features were rigid, his eyes dilated, and his hair rose and
+clung in wavy locks, so that he seemed a very Gorgon's head. The only
+person apparently unmoved was old Dr Rippon, whose pale, gaunt form rose
+in the background, sinister and calm as Death!
+
+The situation was at its height, when a black cat (a pet of Miss
+Lefevre's) suddenly leaped on the top of the piano with a canary in its
+mouth, and in the presence of them all, laid its captive before Julius
+Courtney. The music ceased with a dissonant crash. With a cry Julius
+rose and laid his hand on the cat's neck: to the general amazement the
+cat lay down limp and senseless, and the little golden bird fluttered
+away. Then the sobs of the women, hitherto controlled, broke out, and
+the murmurs of the men.
+
+"O Julius! Julius! what have you done?" cried Nora, sweeping up to him
+in an ecstasy of emotion.
+
+He caught her in his arms, when with a strange cry--a strained kind of
+laugh with a hysterical catch in it--she sank fainting on his breast.
+With a sharp exclamation of pain and fear he bore her swiftly from the
+room (he was near the door) and into a little conservatory that opened
+upon the staircase, casting his eyes upon Lefevre as he went, and
+saying, "Come! come quick!" Lefevre then woke to the fact that he had
+been fixedly regarding this last strange scene, while Lady Mary clung
+trembling to his arm. He hurried out after Julius, followed by Lady Mary
+and his mother.
+
+"Take her!" cried Julius, standing away from Nora, and looking white and
+terror-stricken. "Restore her! Oh, I must not!--I dare not touch her!"
+
+With nimble accustomed fingers Lady Mary undid Nora's dress, while the
+doctor applied the remedies usual in hysterical fainting. Nora opened
+her eyes and fixed them upon Julius.
+
+"O Julius, Julius!" she cried. "Do not leave me! Come near me! Oh!... I
+think I am going to die!"
+
+"My love! my life! my soul!" said Julius, stretching out his hands to
+her, but approaching no nearer. "I cannot--I must not touch you! No, no!
+I dare not!"
+
+"O Julius!" said she. "Are you afraid of me? How can I harm you?"
+
+"Nora, my life! I am afraid of myself! You would not harm me, but I
+would harm you! Ah, I know it now only too well!"
+
+Then, as she closed her eyes again, she said, "I had better die!"
+
+"No, you must not die!" he exclaimed. "Your time is not yet! Yes, you will
+live!--live! But I must be cut off--though not for ever--from the sweetest
+and dearest, the noblest and purest of all God's creatures!"
+
+In the meantime Lefevre had been examining his sister with closer
+scrutiny. He raised her eyelid and looked at her eye; he pricked her on
+the arm and wrist; and then he turned to Julius.
+
+"Julius," said he, "what does this mean?"
+
+"It means," answered Julius, covering his face with his hands, "that I
+am of all living things the most accurst!" Then with a cry of horror and
+anguish he fled from the room and down the stairs.
+
+Lady Lefevre followed him in a flutter of fear. Presently she returned,
+and said, in answer to a look from her son, "He snatched his hat and
+coat, and was gone before I came up with him."
+
+Without a word Lefevre set himself to recover his sister, and in half an
+hour she was well enough to walk with Lady Mary's assistance to bed.
+
+The guests, meanwhile, had departed, all but two or three intimates; and
+in less than an hour Dr Lefevre was returning home in the Fane carriage.
+Lord Rivercourt and he talked of the strange events of the evening,
+while Lady Mary leaned back and half-absently listened. They were
+proceeding thus along Piccadilly, when she suddenly caught the doctor's
+arm and exclaimed--
+
+"Oh! Look! The very man I met in the Park! I am sure of it! I can never
+forget the face!"
+
+Lefevre, alert on the instant, looked to recognise Hernando Courtney,
+the Man of the Crowd: he saw only the back of a person in a loose cape
+and a slouch hat turning in at the gateway of the Albany courtyard. In
+flashes of reflection these questions arose: Who could he be but
+Hernando Courtney?--and where could he be going but to Julius's
+chambers? Julius, therefore (whose own conduct had been that night so
+extraordinary), must be familiar with his whole mysterious course, and
+consequently with the peril he was in. Before Lefevre could out of his
+perplexity snatch a resolution, Lord Rivercourt had pulled the cord to
+stop the coachman. The coachman, however, having received orders to
+drive home, was driving at a goodly pace, and it was only on a second
+summons through the cord that he slackened speed, and obeyed his
+master's direction to "draw up by the kerb."
+
+"I'll get out," said Lefevre, "and look after him. You'd better get Mary
+home; she's not very strong yet, and she has been upset to-night."
+
+He put himself thus forward for another reason besides,--on the impulse
+of his friendship for Julius, without considering whether in the event
+of an arrest and an exposure, he could do anything to shield Julius from
+shame and pain.
+
+He got out, saying his adieus, and the carriage drove on. He found
+himself well past the Albany. He hurried back, nerved by the desire to
+encounter Julius's visitor, and at the same time by the hope that he
+would not. In his heart was a turmoil of feeling, to the surface of
+which continued to rise pity for Julius. The events of the evening had
+forced him to the conclusion that Julius possessed the same singular,
+magnetic, baleful influence on men and women as his putative father
+Hernando; but Julius's burst of agony, when Nora lay overcome, had
+declared to him that till then he had scarcely been aware of the
+destructive side of his power. All resentment, therefore, all sense of
+offence and suspicion which had lately begun to arise in his mind, was
+swallowed up in pity for his afflicted friend. His chief desire, now
+that he seemed reduced to the level of suffering humanity, was to give
+him help and counsel.
+
+Thus he entered the Albany, and passed the porter. The lamps in the
+flagged passage were little better than luminous shadows in the
+darkness, and the hollow silence re-echoed the sound of his hurried
+steps. No one was to be seen or heard in front of him. He came to the
+letter which marked Julius's abode. He looked into the gloomy doorway,
+and resolved he would see and speak to Julius in any case. He passed
+into the gloom and knocked at Julius's door. After a pause the door was
+opened by Jenkins. Lefevre could not well make out the expression of the
+serving-man's face, but he was satisfied that his voice was shaken as by
+a recent shock.
+
+"I wish to see Mr Courtney," said Lefevre, in the half hope that Jenkins
+would say, "Which Mr Courtney?"
+
+"Not at home, sir," said Jenkins in his flurried voice, and prepared to
+shut the door.
+
+"Not at home, Jenkins? You don't mean that!"
+
+"Oh, it's you, Dr Lefevre, sir. Mr Courtney is not at home, but perhaps
+he will see you, sir! I hope he will; for he don't seem to me at all
+well."
+
+"But if he is engaged, Jenkins--?"
+
+"Oh, sir, you know what 'not-at-home' means," answered Jenkins. "It
+means anything or nothing. Will you step into the drawing-room, sir,
+while I inquire? Mr Courtney is in his study."
+
+"Thank you, Jenkins," said the doctor; "I'll wait where I am."
+
+Jenkins returned with deep concern on his face. "Mr Courtney's
+compliments, sir," said he, "and he is very sorry he cannot see you
+to-night. It is a pity, sir," he added, in a burst of confidence, "for
+he don't seem well. He's a-settin' there with the lamp turned down, and
+his face in his hands."
+
+"Is he alone, then?" asked the doctor.
+
+"Oh yes, sir," answered Jenkins, in manifest surprise.
+
+"Has nobody been to see him since he came in?"
+
+"No, sir, nobody," said Jenkins, in wider surprise than before.
+
+It appeared to Lefevre that his friend must be sitting alone with the
+terrible discovery he had that night made of himself. His heart,
+therefore, urged him to go in and take him by the hand, and give what
+help and comfort he could.
+
+"I think," said he to Jenkins, "I'll try and have a word with him."
+
+"Yes, sir," said Jenkins, and led the way to the study. He tapped at the
+door, and then turned the handle; but the door remained closed.
+
+"Who is there?" asked a weary voice within, which scarce sounded like
+the voice of Julius.
+
+"I--Lefevre," said the doctor, putting Jenkins aside. "May not I come
+in? I want a friendly word with you."
+
+"Forgive me, Lefevre," said the voice, "that I do not let you in. I am
+very busy at present."
+
+"You are alone," said Lefevre, "are you not?"
+
+"Alone," said Julius; "yes, all alone!" There was a melting note of
+sadness in the words which went to the doctor's heart.
+
+"My dear Julius," said he, "I think I know what's troubling you. Don't
+you think a talk with me might help you?"
+
+"You are very good, Lefevre." (That was an unusual form of speech to
+come from Julius.) "I shall come to your house in a few minutes, if you
+will allow me."
+
+"Do," answered Lefevre, for the moment completely satisfied. "Do!" And
+he turned away.
+
+But when Jenkins had closed the outer door upon him, doubts arose. Ought
+he not to have insisted on seeing whether Julius was in truth alone in
+the study? And why could they not have had their talk there as well as
+in Savile Row? These doubts, however, he thrust down with the promise to
+himself that, if Julius did not come to him within half an hour, he
+would return to him. Yet he had not gone many steps before an unworthy
+suspicion shot up and arrested him: Suppose Julius had got rid of him to
+have the opportunity of sending a mysterious companion away unseen? But
+Jenkins had said he had let no one in, and it was shameful to suspect
+both master and man of lying. Yet Lady Mary Fane had distinctly
+recognised the man who passed into the Albany courtyard: had he merely
+passed through on his unceasing pursuit of something unknown? or were
+father and son somehow aware of each other? Between this and that his
+mind became a jumble of the wildest conjectures. He imagined many
+things, but never conceived that which soon showed itself to be the
+fact.
+
+
+
+
+Chapter IX.
+
+An Apparition and a Confession.
+
+
+He let himself in with his latch-key, went into his dining-room, and sat
+down dressed as he was to wait. He listened through minute after minute
+for the expected step. The window was open (for the midsummer night was
+warm), and all the sounds of belated and revelling London floated
+vaguely in the air. Twelve o'clock boomed softly from Westminster, and
+made the heavy atmosphere drowsily vibrate with the volume of the
+strokes. The reverberation of the last had scarcely died away when a
+light, measured footfall made him sit up. It came nearer and nearer, and
+then, after a moment's hesitation, sounded on his own doorstep. With
+that there came the tap of a cane on the window. With thought and
+expectation resolutely suspended, Lefevre swung out of the room and to
+the hall-door. He opened it, and stood and gazed. The light of the
+hall-lamp fell upon a figure, the sight of which sent the blood in a
+gush to his heart, and pierced him with horror. He expected Julius, and
+he looked on the man whom he had followed on the crowded pavements some
+weeks before,--the man whom the police had long sought for
+ineffectually!
+
+"Won't you let me in, Lefevre?" said the man.
+
+The doctor stood speechless, with his eyes fixed: the face and dress of
+the person before him were those of Hernando Courtney, but the voice was
+the voice of Julius, though it sounded strange and distant, and bore an
+accent as of death. Lefevre was involved in a wild turmoil and horror of
+surmise, too appalling to be exactly stated to himself; for he shrank
+with all his energy from the conclusion to which he was being forced. He
+turned, however, upon the request for admission, and led the way into
+the dining-room, letting his visitor close the door and follow.
+
+"Lefevre," said the strange voice, "I have come to show myself to you,
+because I know you are a true-hearted friend, and because I think you
+have that exquisite charity that can forgive all things."
+
+"_Show myself!_" ... As Lefevre listened to the strange voice and looked
+at the strange person, the suspicion came upon him--What if he were but
+regarding an Illusion? He had read in some of his mystical and magical
+writers, that men gifted with certain powers could project to a distance
+eidola or phantasms of varying likeness to themselves: might not this be
+such a mocking phantasm of Julius? He drew his hand across his eyes, and
+looked again: the figure still sat there. He put out his hand to test
+its substantiality, and the voice cried in a keen pitch of terror--
+
+"Don't touch me!--for your own sake!... Why, Lefevre, do you look so
+amazed and overcome? Is not my wretched secret written in my face?"
+
+"And you are really Julius Courtney?" asked Lefevre, at length finding
+utterance, with measured emphasis, and in a voice which he hardly
+recognised as his own.
+
+"I am Julius Courtney--"
+
+He paused, for Lefevre had put his head in his hands, shaken with a
+silent paroxysm of grief. It wrung the doctor's heart, as if in the
+person that sat opposite him, all that was noblest and most gracious in
+humanity were disgraced and overthrown.
+
+"Yes," continued the voice, "I am Julius; there is no other Courtney
+that I know of, and soon there will be none at all." The doctor
+listened, but he could not endure to look again. "I am dying--I have
+been dying for a dozen years, and for a dozen years I have resisted and
+overcome death; now I surrender. I have come to my period. I shall never
+enter your house again. I have only come now to confess myself, and to
+ask a last favour of you--a last token of friendship."
+
+"I will freely do what I can for you, Julius," said the doctor, still
+without looking at him, "though I am too overcome, too bewildered, yet
+to say much to you."
+
+"Thank you. You will hear my story and understand. It contains a secret
+which I, like a blind fool, have only used for myself, but which you
+will apply for the wide benefit of mankind. The request I have to make
+of you is small, but it may seem extraordinary,--be my companion for
+twelve hours. I cannot talk to you here, enclosed and oppressed with
+streets of houses. Come with me for a few hours on the water; I have a
+fancy to see the sun rise for the last time over the sea. I have my
+yacht ready near London Bridge, and a boat waiting at the steps by
+Cleopatra's Needle; a cab will soon take us there. Will you come?"
+
+Lefevre did not look up. The voice of Julius sounded like an appeal from
+the very abode of death. Then he glanced in spite of himself in his
+face, and was moved and melted to unreserved compassion by the strained
+weariness of his expression--the open, luminous wistfulness of his eyes.
+
+"Yes; I'll go," said he. "But can't I do something for you first? Let me
+consider your case."
+
+"There's nothing now to be done for me, Lefevre," said Julius, shaking
+his head. "You will perceive that when you have heard me out."
+
+The doctor went to find his man and tell him that he was going out for
+the night to attend on an urgent case. When he returned he stood a
+moment touched with misgiving. He thought of Lady Mary--he thought of
+his mother and sister. Ought he not to leave some hint behind him of the
+strange adventure upon which he was about to embark, and which might end
+he knew not how or where? Julius was observing him, and seemed to divine
+his doubt.
+
+"You need have no hesitation," said he. "I ask you only for twelve
+hours. You can easily get back here by noon to-morrow. There is a
+south-west wind blowing, with every prospect of settled weather. I am
+quite certain about it."
+
+Fortified with that assurance, Lefevre put on a thicker overcoat and an
+old soft hat, turned out the lights in the dining-room and in the hall,
+closed the door with a slam, and stood with the new, the strange Julius
+in the street, fairly embarked upon his adventure. It was only with an
+effort that he could realise he was in the company of one who had been a
+familiar friend. They walked towards Regent Street without speaking. At
+the corner of Savile Row they came upon a policeman, and Lefevre had a
+sudden thrill of fear lest his companion should, at length, be
+recognised and arrested. Courtney himself, however, appeared in no wise
+disturbed. In Regent Street he hailed a passing four-wheeler.
+
+"Wouldn't a hansom be quicker?" said Lefevre.
+
+"It is better on your account," said Julius, "that we should sit apart."
+
+When they entered the cab, Courtney ensconced himself in the remote
+corner of the other seat from Lefevre; and thus without another word
+they drove to the Embankment. At the foot of the steps by Cleopatra's
+Needle, they found a waterman and a boat in waiting. They entered the
+boat, Lefevre going forward while Julius sat down at the tiller. The
+waterman pulled out. The tide was ebbing, and they slipped swiftly down
+the dark river, with broken reflections of lamps and lanterns on either
+bank streaming deep into the water like molten gold as they passed, and
+with tall buildings and chimney-shafts showing black against the calm
+night sky. Lefevre found it necessary at intervals to assure himself
+that he was not drifting in a dream, or that the ghastly, burning-eyed
+figure, wrapped in a dark cloak in the stern, was not a strange visitor
+from the nether world.
+
+Soon after they had shot through London Bridge they were alongside a
+yacht almost in mid-stream. It was clear that all had been prearranged
+for Julius's arrival; for as soon as they were on board, the yacht
+(loosed from her upper mooring by the waterman who had brought them down
+the river) began to stand away.
+
+"We had better go forward," said Courtney. "Are you warm enough?"
+
+The doctor answered that he was. Courtney gave an order to one of the
+men, who went below and returned with a fur-lined coat which his master
+put on. That little incident gave a curious shock to Lefevre: it made
+him think of the mysterious stranger who had sat down opposite the young
+officer in the Brighton train, and it showed him that he had not been
+completely satisfied that his friend Julius and the person he had been
+wont to think of as Hernando Courtney were one and the same.
+
+They went forward to be free of the sail and its tackling. Courtney,
+wrapped in his extra, his fur-lined coat, pointing to a low
+folding-chair for Lefevre, threw himself on a heap of cordage. He looked
+around and above him, at the rippling, flashing water and the black
+hulls of ships, and at the serene, starlit heavens stretching over all.
+
+"How wonderful!--how beautiful it all is!" he exclaimed. "All,
+all!--even the dullest and deadest-seeming things are vibrating,
+palpitating with the very madness of life! He set the world in my heart,
+and oh, how I loved!--how I loved the world!"
+
+"It is a wonderful world," said Lefevre, trying to speak cheerfully;
+"and you will take delight in it again when this abnormal fit of
+depression is over."
+
+"Never, Lefevre!--never, never!" said Courtney in strenuous tones. "I
+regret it deeply, bitterly, madly,--but yet I know that I have about
+done with it!"
+
+"Julius," said Lefevre, "I have been so amazed and bewildered, that I
+have found little to say: I can scarcely believe that you are in very
+deed the Julius I have known for years. But now let me remind you I am
+your friend--"
+
+"Thank you, Lefevre."
+
+"--And I am ready to help you to the uttermost in this crisis, which I
+but dimly understand. Tell me about yourself, and let me see what I can
+do."
+
+"You can do nothing," said Julius, sadly shaking his head. "Understand
+me; I am not going to state a case for diagnosis. Put that idea aside; I
+merely wish to confess myself to my friend."
+
+"But surely," said Lefevre, "I may be your physician as well as your
+friend. As long as you have life there is hope of life."
+
+"No, no, no, Lefevre! There is a depth of life--life on the lees--that
+is worse than death! If I could retrace my steps to the beginning of
+this, taking my knowledge with me, then--! But no, I must go my
+appointed way, and face what is beyond.... But let me tell you my story.
+
+"You have heard something of my parentage from Dr Rippon, I believe. My
+father was Spanish, and my mother was English. I think I was born
+without that sense of responsibility to a traditional or conventional
+standard which is called Conscience, and that sense of obligation to
+consider others as important as myself, which, I believe, they call
+Altruism. I do not know whether the lack of these senses had been
+manifest in my mother's family, but I am sure it had been in my
+father's. For generations it had been a law unto itself; none of its
+members had known any duty but the fulfilment of his desires; and I
+believe even that kind of outward conscience called Honour had scarcely
+existed for some of them. I had from my earliest recollection the nature
+of these ancestors: they, though dead, desired, acted, lived in
+me,--with something of a difference, due to I know not what. Let me try
+to state the fact as it appears to me looking back: I was for myself the
+one consciousness, the one person in the world, all else--trees, beasts,
+men and women, and what not--being the medium in which, and on which, I
+lived. I conceived of nothing around me but as existing to please, to
+amuse, to delight me, and if anything showed itself contrary to these
+ends, I simply avoided it. What I wished to do I did; what I wished to
+have I had;--and nothing else. I do not suppose that in these points I
+was different from most other children of wealthy parents. Where I
+differed, I believe, was in having a peculiarly sensitive, and at the
+same time admirably healthy, constitution of body, which induced a
+remarkable development of desire and gratification. I can hardly make
+you understand, I am sure I cannot make you feel--I myself cannot feel,
+I can only remember--what a bright natural creature I was when I was
+young."
+
+"Don't I remember well," said Lefevre, "what you were like when I first
+met you in Paris?"
+
+"Ah," said Julius, "the change had begun then,--the change that has
+brought me to this. I contemplate myself as I was before that with
+bitter envy and regret. I was as a being sprung fresh from the womb of
+primitive Nature. I delighted in Nature as a child delights in its
+mother, and I throve on my delight as a child thrives. I refused to go
+to school--and indeed little pressure was put upon me--to be drilled in
+the paces and hypocrisy of civilised mankind. I ran wild about the
+country; I became proficient in all bodily exercises; I fenced and
+wrestled and boxed; I leaped and swam; I rowed for days alone in a
+skiff; I associated with simple peasants, and with all kinds of animals;
+I delighted in air and water, and grass and trees: to me they were as
+much alive as beasts are. Oh, what an exquisite, abounding, unclouded
+pleasure life was! When I was hungry I ate; when I was thirsty I drank;
+when I was tired I slept; and when I woke I stretched myself like a
+giant refreshed. It was a pure joy to me in those days to close my
+fingers into a fist and see the beauty and firmness of my muscles. When
+solemn, civilised people spoke to me of duty and work, I listened like
+an idiot. I had nothing in my consciousness to help me to understand
+them. I knew no more of duty than Crusoe on his island; and as for work,
+I had no ambition,--why, then, should I work? I read, of course; but I
+read because I liked it, not because I had tasks set me. I read
+everything that came in my way; and very soon all literature and
+science--all good poetry and romance, and all genuine science--came to
+mean for me a fine, orderly expression of nature and life. And religion,
+too, I felt as the ecstasy of nature. So I fed and flourished on the
+milk of life and the bread of life.
+
+"But a time came when I longed to live deeper, and to get at the pith
+and marrow of life. I was over twenty when it was revealed to me in a
+noonday splendour and warmth of light, that the human is unspeakably the
+highest and most enthralling expression of life in all Nature. That
+discovery happened to me when I was in Morocco with my father, who died
+there--no matter how--among those whom he liked to believe were his own
+people: my mother had died long before. I had considerable wealth at my
+command, and I began to live at the height of all my faculties; I lived
+in every nerve, and at every pore.
+
+"And then I began to perceive a reverse to the bounteous beauty and the
+overflowing life of Nature,--a threatening quality, a devouring faculty
+in her by which she fed the joyous abundance of her life. I saw that all
+activity, all the pleasant palpitation and titillation in the life of
+Nature and of Man, merely means that one living thing is feeding upon or
+is feeding another. I began to perceive that all the interest of life
+centres in this alter-devouring principle. I discovered, moreover, this
+strange point,--that the joy of life is in direct proportion to the
+rapidity with which we lose or surrender life."
+
+"Yes," said Lefevre, "the giving of pleasure is always more exquisite
+and satisfactory than the getting it."
+
+"I lost life," continued Julius, without noting Lefevre's remark,--"I
+lost life,--vital force, nervous ether, electricity, whatever you choose
+to call it,--at an enormous rate, but I as quickly replenished my loss.
+I had revelled for some time in this deeper life of give and take before
+I discovered that this faculty of recuperation also was curiously and
+wonderfully active in me. Whenever I fell into a state of weakness,
+well-nigh empty of life, I withdrew myself from company, and dwelt for a
+little while with the simplest forms of Nature."
+
+"But," asked Lefevre, "how did you get into such a low condition?"
+
+"How? _I lived!_" said he with fervour. "_Yes; I lived:_ that was how! I
+had always delighted in animals, but then I began to find that when I
+caressed them they were not merely tamed, as they had been wont, but
+completely subdued; and I felt rapid and full accessions of life from
+contact with them. If I lay upon a bank of rich grass or wild flowers, I
+had to a slight extent the same revivifying sensation. The fable of
+Antaeus was fulfilled in me. The constant recurrence and vigour of this
+recuperation not only filled me with pride, but also set me thinking. I
+turned to medical science to find the secret of it. I entered myself as
+a student in Paris: it was then I met you. I read deeply, too, in the
+books of the mediaeval alchemists and sages of Spain, which my father had
+left me. It came upon me in a clear flood of evidence that Nature and
+man are one and indivisible, being animated by one identical Energy or
+Spirit of Life, however various may be the material forms; and that all
+things, all creatures, according to the activity of their life, have the
+power of communicating, of giving or taking, this invisible force of
+life. It furthermore became clear to me that, though the force resides
+in all parts of a body, floating in every corpuscle of blood, yet its
+proper channels of circulation and communication are the nerves, so that
+as soon as a nerve in any one shape of life touches a nerve in any
+other, there is an instant tendency to establish in them a common level
+of the Force of Life. If I or you touch a man or woman with a finger, or
+clasp their hand, or embrace them more completely, the tendency is at
+once set up, and the force seeks to flow, and, according to certain
+conditions, does flow, from one to another, evermore seeking to find a
+common level,--always, that is, in the direction of the greater need, or
+the greater capacity. I saw then that not only had I a greater storage
+capacity, so to say, than most men, but also, therefore, when exhaustion
+came, I had a more insistent need for replenishment, and a more violent
+shrinking at all times from any weak or unhealthy person who might even
+by chance contact make a demand on my store of life."
+
+"And is that your secret?" asked Lefevre. "I have arrived in a different
+way at something like the same discovery."
+
+"I know you have," said Julius. "But my peculiar secret is not that,
+though it is connected with it. I am growing very tired," said he,
+abruptly. "I must be quick, Lefevre," he continued in a hurried, weak
+voice of appeal; "grant me one little last favour to enable me to
+finish."
+
+"Anything I can do I will, Julius," said Lefevre, suddenly roused out of
+the half-drowsiness which the soft night induced. He was held between
+alarm and fascination by the look which Julius bent on him.
+
+"I am ashamed to ask, but you are full of life," said Julius: "I am at
+the shallowest ebb. Just for one minute help me. Of your free-will
+submit yourself to me for but a moment. Will you do me that service?"
+
+"Yes," said Lefevre, after an instant's hesitation; "certainly I will."
+
+Julius half rose from his reclining position; he turned on Lefevre his
+wonderful eyes, which in the mysterious twilight that suffused the
+midsummer night burned with a surprising brilliance. Lefevre felt
+himself seized and held in their influence.
+
+"Give me your hand," said Julius.
+
+The doctor gave his hand, his eyes being still held by those of Julius,
+and instantly, as it seemed to him, he plunged, as a man dives into the
+sea, into a gulf of unconsciousness, from which he presently emerged
+with something like a gasp and with a tremulous sensation about his
+heart. What had happened to him he did not know; but he felt slacker of
+fibre, as if virtue had gone out of him, while Julius, when he spoke,
+seemed refreshed as by a draught of wine.
+
+"How are you?" asked Julius. "For heaven's sake don't let me think that
+at the last I have troubled much the current of your life! Will you have
+something to eat and drink? There's wine and food below."
+
+"Thank you; no," said Lefevre. "I am well enough, only a little drowsy."
+
+"I am stronger," said Julius, "but it will not last; so let me finish my
+story."
+
+Then he continued. "Having explained to myself, in the way I have told
+you, the ease of my unwitting replenishment of force whenever I was
+brought low, I set myself to improve on my discovery. I saw before me a
+prospect of enjoyment of all the delights of life, deeper and more
+constant than most men ever know,--if I could only ensure to myself with
+absolute certainty a still more complete and rapid reinvigoration as
+often soever as I sank into exhaustion. I was quite sure that no energy
+of life is finer or fuller than the human at its best."
+
+"Good God!" exclaimed Lefevre, turning away with an involuntary shudder.
+
+"For heaven's sake!" cried Julius, "don't shrink from me now, or you
+will tempt me to be less frank than I have been. I wish to make full
+confession. I know, I see now, I have been cruelly, brutally selfish--as
+selfish as Nature herself!--none knows that better than I. But remember,
+in extenuation, what I have told you of my origin and my growth. And I
+had not the suspicion of a thought of injuring any one. Fool! fool!
+egregious fool that I was! I who understood most things so clearly did
+not guess that no creature, no being in the universe--god, or man, or
+beast--can indulge in arrogant, full, magnificent enjoyment without
+gathering and living in himself, squandering through himself, the lives
+of others, to their eternal loss and his own final ruin! But, as I said,
+I did not think, and it was not evident until recently, that I injured
+any one. I had for a long time been aware that I had an unusual mesmeric
+or magnetic influence--call it what you will--over others. I cultivated
+that power in eye and hand, so that I was soon able to take any person
+at unawares whom I considered fit for my purpose, and subdue him or her
+completely to myself. Then after one or two failures I hit upon a
+method, which I perfected at length into entire simplicity, by which I
+was able to tap the nervous system and draw into myself as much as ever
+I needed of the abounding force of life, without leaving any sign which
+even the most skilful doctor could detect."
+
+"Julius, you sicken me!" exclaimed Lefevre. "I am a doctor, but you
+sicken me!"
+
+"I explain myself so in detail," said Julius, "_because_ you are a
+doctor. But let me finish. I lived that life of complete wedlock with
+Nature for I dare not think how many years."
+
+"And you did not get weary of it?" asked Lefevre.
+
+"Weary of it? No! I returned to it always, after a pause of a few days
+for the reinvigoration I needed,--I returned to it with all the
+freshness of youth, with the advantage which, of course, mere youth can
+never have,--an amazingly rich experience. I revelled in the full lap of
+life. I passed through many lands, civilised and barbaric; but it was my
+especial delight to strike down to that simple, passionate, essential
+nature which lies beneath the thickest lacquer of refinements in our
+civilised societies. Oh, what a life it was!--what a life!
+
+"But a change came: it must have been growing on me for some time
+without my knowledge. I commonly removed from society when I felt
+exhaustion coming on me; but on one occasion it chanced that I stayed on
+in the pleasant company I was in (I was then in Vienna). I did not
+exactly feel ill; I felt merely weary and languid, and thought that
+presently I would go to bed. Gradually I began to observe that the looks
+of my companions were bent strangely on me, and that the expression of
+their countenances more and more developed surprise and alarm. 'What is
+the matter with you all?' I demanded; when they instantly cried, 'What
+is the matter with _you?_ Have you been poisoned?' I rose and went and
+looked in a mirror; I saw, with ghastly horror, what I was like, and I
+knew then that I was _doomed_. I fled from that company for ever. I saw
+that, when the alien life on which I flourished was gone out of me, I
+was a worn old man--that the Fire of Life which usually burned in my
+body, making me look bright and young, was now none of it my own; a few
+hot ashes only were mine, which Death sat cowering by! I could not but
+sit and gaze at the reflection of the seared ghastliness of that face,
+which was mine and yet not mine, and feel well-nigh sick unto death.
+After a while, however, I plucked up heart. I considered that it was
+impossible this change had come all at once; I must have looked like
+that--or almost like that--once or twice or oftener before, and yet life
+and reinvigoration had gone on as they had been wont. I wrapped myself
+well up, and went out. I found a fit subject. I replenished my life as
+theretofore; my youthful, fresh appearance returned, and my confidence
+with it. I refused to look again upon my own, my worn face, from that
+time until tonight.
+
+"But alarm again seized me about a year ago, when I chanced by
+calculation to note that my periods of abounding life were gradually
+getting shorter,--that I needed reinvigoration at more frequent
+intervals;--not that I did not take as much from my subjects as
+formerly--on the contrary, I seemed to take more--but that I lost more
+rapidly what I took, as if my body were becoming little better than a
+fine sieve. The last stage of all was this that you are familiar with,
+when my subjects began to be so utterly exhausted as to attract public
+notice. Yet that is not what has given me pause, and made me resolve to
+bring the whole weary, selfish business to an end. Could I not have gone
+elsewhere--anywhere, the wide world over--and lived my life? But I was
+kept, I was tethered here, to this London by a feeling I had never known
+before. Call it by the common fool's name of Love; call it what you
+will. I was fascinated by your sister Nora, even as others had been
+fascinated by me, even as I had been in my youth by the bountiful,
+gracious beauty of Nature."
+
+"I have wanted to ask you," said Lefevre, "for an explanation of your
+conduct towards Nora. Why did you--with your awful life--life which, as
+you say, was not your own, and your extraordinary secret--why did you
+remain near her, and entangle her with your fascinations? What did you
+desire?--what did you hope for?"
+
+"I scarcely know for what I hoped. But let me speak of her; for she has
+traversed and completely eclipsed my former vision of Nature. I have
+told you what my point of view was,--alone in the midst of Nature. I was
+for myself the only consciousness in the world, and all the world
+besides was merely a variety of material and impression, to be observed
+and known, to be interested in and delighted with. I was thus lonely,
+lonely as a despot, when Nora, your sister, appeared to me, and
+instantly I became aware there was another consciousness in the world as
+great as, or greater than, my own,--another person than myself, a person
+of supreme beauty and intelligence and faculty. She became to me all
+that Nature had been, and more. She expressed for me all that I had
+sought to find diffused through Nature, and at the same time she stood
+forth to me as an equal of my own kind, with as great a capacity for
+life. At first I had a vision of our living and reigning together, so to
+say, though the word may seem to you absurd; but I soon discovered that
+there was a gulf fixed between us,--the gulf of the life I had lived;
+she stood pure where I had stood a dozen years ago. So, gradually, she
+subverted my whole scheme of life; more and more, without knowing it,
+she made me see and judge myself with her eyes, till I felt altogether
+abased before her. But that which finally stripped the veil from me, and
+showed me myself as the hateful incarnation of relentlessly devouring
+Self, was my influence upon her, which culminated in the event of last
+night. Can you conceive how I was smitten and pierced with horror by the
+discovery that rose on me like a nightmare, that even on her sweet,
+pure, sumptuous life, I had unwittingly begun to prey? For that
+discovery flung wide the door of the future and showed me what I would
+become.
+
+"Beautiful, calm, divine Nora! If I could but have continued near her
+without touching her, to delight in the thought and the sight of her, as
+one delights in the wind and the sunshine! But it could not be. I could
+only appear fit company for her if I refreshed and strengthened myself
+as I had been wont; but my new disgust of myself, and pity for my
+victims, made me shudder at the thought. What then? Here I am, and the
+time has come (as that old doctor said it would) when death appears more
+beautiful and friendly and desirable than life. Forgive me,
+Lefevre--forgive me on Nora's part,--and forgive me in the name of human
+nature."
+
+Lefevre could not reply for the moment. He sat convulsed with
+heartrending sobs. He put out his hand to Julius.
+
+"No, no!" exclaimed Julius, "I must not take your hand. You know I must
+not."
+
+"Take my hand," cried Lefevre. "I know what it means. Take my life!
+Leave me but enough to recover. I give it you freely, for I wish you to
+live. You shall not die. By heaven! you shall not die. O Julius, Julius!
+why did you not tell me this long ago? Science has resource enough to
+deliver you from your mistake."
+
+"Lefevre," said Julius,--and his eyes sparkled with tears and his
+weakening voice was choked,--"your friendship moves me deeply--to the
+soul. But science can do nothing for me: science has not yet sufficient
+knowledge of the principle on which I lived. Would you have me, then,
+live on,--passing to and fro among mankind merely as a blight, taking
+the energy of life, even from whomsoever I would not? No, I must die!
+Death is best!"
+
+"I will not let you die," said Lefevre, rising to take a pace or two on
+the deck. "You shall come home with me. I shall feed your life--there
+are dozens besides myself who will be glad to assist--till you are
+healed of the devouring demon you have raised within you."
+
+"No, no, no, my dear friend!" cried Julius. "I have steadily sinned
+against the most vital law of life."
+
+"Julius," said Lefevre, standing over him, "my friendship, my love for
+you may blind me to the enormity of your sin, but I can find it in me to
+say, in the name of humanity, 'I forgive you all! Now, rise up and live
+anew! Your intelligence, your soul is too rare and admirable to be
+snuffed out like a guttering candle!'"
+
+"Lefevre," said Julius, "you are a perfect friend! But your knowledge of
+this secret force of Nature, which we have both studied, is not so great
+as mine. Let me tell you, then, that this mystical saying, which I once
+scoffed at, is the profoundest truth:--
+
+    "'Who loveth life shall lose it all;
+    Who seeketh life shall surely fall!'
+
+"There is no remedy for me but death, which (who knows?) may be the
+mother of new life!"
+
+"It would have been better for you," said Lefevre, sitting down again
+with his head in his hands, "better--if you had never seen Nora."
+
+"Nay, nay," cried Julius, sitting up, animate with a fresh impulse of
+life. "Better for her, dear, beautiful soul, but not for me! I have
+truly lived only since I saw her, and I have the joy of feeling that I
+have beheld and known Nature's sole and perfect chrysolite. But I must
+be quick, my friend; the dawn will soon be upon us. There is but one
+other thing for me to speak of--my method of taking to myself the force
+of life. It is my secret; it is perfectly adapted for professional use,
+and I wish to give it to you, because you are wise enough in mind, and
+great enough of soul, to use it for the benefit of mankind."
+
+"I will not hear you, Julius!" exclaimed Lefevre. "I am neither wise nor
+great. Your perfect secret would be too much for me. I might be tempted
+to keep it for my own use. Come home with me, and apply it well
+yourself."
+
+Julius was silent for a space, murmuring only, "I have no time for
+argument." Then his face assumed the white sickness of death, and his
+dark eyes seemed to grow larger and to burn with a concentrated fire.
+
+"Lefevre!" he panted in amazement, "do you know that you are refusing
+such a medical and spiritual secret as the world has not known for
+thousands of years? A secret that would enable you--_you_--to work cures
+more wonderful than any that are told of the greatest Eastern
+Thaumaturge?"
+
+"I have discovered a method," answered the doctor,--"an imperfect,
+clumsy method--for myself, of transmitting nervous force or ether for
+curative purposes. That, for the present, must be enough for me. I
+cannot hear your secret, Julius."
+
+"Lefevre, I beg of you," pleaded Julius, "take it from me. I have
+promised myself, as a last satisfaction, that the secret I have
+guarded--it is not altogether mine: it is an old oriental secret--that
+now I would hand it over to you for the good of mankind, that at the
+last I might say to myself, 'I have, after all, opened my hand liberally
+to my fellow-men!' For pity's sake, Lefevre, don't deny me that small
+final satisfaction!"
+
+"Julius," said Lefevre, firmly, "if your method is so perfect--as I
+believe it must be from what I have seen--I dare not lay on myself the
+responsibility of possessing its secret."
+
+"Would not my example keep you from using it selfishly?"
+
+"Does the experience of another," demanded the doctor, "however untoward
+it may be, ever keep a man from making his own? I dare not--I dare not
+trust myself to hold your perfect secret."
+
+"Then share it with others," responded Julius, promptly; "and I daresay
+it is not so perfect, but that it could be made more perfect still."
+
+"I'll have nothing to do with it, Julius; you must keep and use it
+yourself."
+
+"Then," cried Julius, throwing himself on his bed of cordage, "then
+there will be, indeed, an end of me!"
+
+There was no sound for a time, but the soft rush of the sea at the bows
+of the yacht. They had left the Thames water some distance behind, and
+were then in that part of the estuary where it is just possible in
+mid-channel to descry either coast. The glorious rose of dawn was just
+beginning to flame in the eastern sky. Lefevre looked about him, and
+strove to shake off the sensation, which would cling to him, that he was
+involved in a strange dream. There lay Julius or Hernando Courtney
+before him; or at least the figure of a man with his face hid in his
+hands. What more could be said or done?
+
+In the meantime light was swiftly rushing up the sky and waking all
+things to life. A flock of seagulls came from the depth of the night and
+wheeled about the yacht, their shrill screams strangely softened in the
+morning air. At the sound of them Julius roused himself, and raised
+himself on his elbow to watch their beautiful evolutions. As he watched,
+one and another swooped gracefully to the water, and hanging there an
+instant, rose with a fish and flew away. Julius flung himself again on
+his face.
+
+"O God!" he cried. "Is it not horrible? Even on such a beautiful day as
+this death wakes as early as life! Devouring death is ushered in by the
+dawn, hand in hand with generous life! Awful, devilish Nature! that
+makes all creatures full of beauty and delight, and then condemns them
+to live upon each other! Nature is the sphinx: she appears soft and
+gentle and more lovely than heart can bear, but if you look closer, you
+see she is a creature with claws and teeth that rend and devour! I
+thought, fool that I was! that I had found the secret to solve her
+riddle! But it was an empty hope, a vain imagination.... Yet, I have
+lived! Yes, I have lived!"
+
+He rose and stood erect, facing the dawn, with his back to Lefevre. He
+stood thus for some time, with one foot on the low bulwark of the
+vessel, till the sun leaped above the horizon and flamed with blinding
+brilliance across the sea.
+
+"Ah!" he murmured. "The superb, the glorious sun! Unwearied lord of
+Creation! Generous giver of all light and life! And yet, who knows what
+worlds he may not have drawn into his flaming self, and consumed during
+the aeons of his existence? It is ever and everywhere the same: death in
+company with life! And swift, strong death is better than slow, weak
+life!... Almost the splendour and inspiration of his rising tempt me to
+stay! Great nourisher and renewer of life's heat!"
+
+He put off his fur coat, and let it fall on the deck, and stood for a
+while as if wrapt in ecstasy. Then, before Lefevre could conceive his
+intention, his feet were together on the bulwark, and with a flash and a
+plunge he was gone!
+
+Amazement held the doctor's energies congealed, though but for an
+instant or two. Then he threw off hat and coat, and stood alert and
+resolute to dive to Julius's rescue when he rose, while those who manned
+the yacht prepared to cast a buoy and line. Not a ripple or flash of
+water passed unheeded; the flood of sunshine rose fuller and fuller over
+the world; moments grew to minutes, and minutes swelled to hopeless
+hours under the doctor's weary eyes, till it seemed to them as if the
+universe were only a swirling, greedy ocean;--but no sign appeared of
+his night's companion: his life was quenched in the depths of the
+restless waters, as a flaming meteor is quenched in night. At length
+Lefevre ordered the yacht to stand away to the shore, his heart torn
+with grief and self-upbraiding. He had called Courtney his friend, and
+yet until that last he had never won his inner confidence; and now he
+knew that his friend--he of the gentle heart, the peerless intelligence,
+and the wildly erring life--was dead in the hour of self-redemption.
+
+When he had landed, however, given to the proper authorities such
+information as was necessary, and set off by train on his return to
+town, the agitation of his grief began to assuage; and when next day,
+upon the publication in the papers of the news of Courtney's death by
+drowning, a solicitor called in Savile Row with a will which he had
+drawn up two days before, and by which all Julius Courtney's property
+was left to Dr Lefevre, to dispose of as he thought best, "for
+scientific and humane ends," the doctor admitted to his reason that a
+death that could thus calmly be prepared was not lightly to be
+questioned.
+
+"He must have known best," he said to himself, as he bowed over his
+hands--"he must have known best when to put off the poisoned garment of
+life he had woven for himself."
+
+
+
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