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+The Project Gutenberg EBook A Strange Story, by E. B. Lytton, Volume 5.
+#124 in our series by Edward Bulwer-Lytton
+
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+*****These EBooks Were Prepared By Thousands of Volunteers*****
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+
+Title: A Strange Story, Volume 5.
+
+Author: Edward Bulwer-Lytton
+
+Release Date: March 2005  [EBook #7696]
+[Yes, we are more than one year ahead of schedule]
+[This file was first posted on April 22, 2003]
+
+Edition: 10
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+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ASCII
+
+
+
+
+*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK STRANGE STORY, LYTTON, V5 ***
+
+
+This eBook was produced by Andrew Heath
+and David Widger
+
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XLI.
+
+The lawyer came the next day, and with something like a smile on his lips.
+He brought me a few lines in pencil from Mrs. Ashleigh; they were kindly
+expressed, bade me be of good cheer; "she never for a moment believed in
+my guilt; Lilian bore up wonderfully under so terrible a trial; it was an
+unspeakable comfort to both to receive the visits of a friend so attached
+to me, and so confident of a triumphant refutation of the hideous calumny
+under which I now suffered as Mr. Margrave!"
+
+The lawyer had seen Margrave again,--seen him in that house.  Margrave
+seemed almost domiciled there!
+
+I remained sullen and taciturn during this visit.  I longed again for the
+night.  Night came.  I heard the distant clock strike twelve, when again
+the icy wind passed through my hair, and against the wall stood the
+luminous Shadow.
+
+"Have you considered?" whispered the voice, still as from afar.  "I repeat
+it,--I alone can save you."
+
+"Is it among the conditions which you ask, in return, that I shall resign
+to you the woman I love?"
+
+"No."
+
+"Is it one of the conditions that I should commit some crime,--a crime
+perhaps heinous as that of which I am accused?"
+
+"No."
+
+"With such reservations, I accept the conditions you may name, provided I,
+in my turn, may demand one condition from yourself."
+
+"Name it."
+
+"I ask you to quit this town.  I ask you, meanwhile, to cease your visits
+to the house that holds the woman betrothed to me."
+
+"I will cease those visits.  And before many days are over, I will quit
+this town."
+
+"Now, then, say what you ask from me.  I am prepared to concede it.  And
+not from fear for myself, but because I fear for the pure and innocent
+being who is under the spell of your deadly fascination.  This is your
+power over me.  You command me through my love for another.  Speak."
+
+"My conditions are simple.  You will pledge yourself to desist from all
+charges of insinuation against myself, of what nature soever.  You will
+not, when you meet me in the flesh, refer to what you have known of my
+likeness in the Shadow.  You will be invited to the house at which I may
+be also a guest; you will come; you will meet and converse with me as
+guest speaks with guest in the house of a host."
+
+"Is that all?"
+
+"It is all."
+
+"Then I pledge you my faith; keep your own."
+
+"Fear not; sleep secure in the certainty that you will soon be released
+from these walls."
+
+The Shadow waned and faded.  Darkness settled back, and a sleep, profound
+and calm, fell over me.
+
+The next day Mr. Stanton again visited me.  He had received that morning a
+note from Mr. Margrave, stating that he had left L---- to pursue, in
+person, an investigation which he had already commenced through another,
+affecting the man who had given evidence against me, and that, if his
+hope should prove well founded, he trusted to establish my innocence, and
+convict the real murderer of Sir Philip Derval.  In the research he thus
+volunteered, he had asked for, and obtained, the assistance of the
+policeman Waby, who, grateful to me for saving the life of his sister, had
+expressed a strong desire to be employed in my service.
+
+Meanwhile, my most cruel assailant was my old college friend, Richard
+Strahan.  For Jeeves had spread abroad Strahan's charge of purloining the
+memoir which had been entrusted to me; and that accusation had done me
+great injury in public opinion, because it seemed to give probability to
+the only motive which ingenuity could ascribe to the foul deed imputed to
+me.  That motive had been first suggested by Mr. Vigors.  Cases are on
+record of men whose life had been previously blameless, who have committed
+a crime which seemed to belie their nature, in the monomania of some
+intense desire.  In Spain, a scholar reputed of austere morals murdered
+and robbed a traveller for money in order to purchase books,--books
+written, too, by Fathers of his Church!  He was intent on solving some
+problem of theological casuistry.  In France, an antiquary, esteemed not
+more for his learning than for amiable and gentle qualities, murdered his
+most intimate friend for the possession of a medal, without which his own
+collection was incomplete.  These, and similar anecdotes, tending to prove
+how fatally any vehement desire, morbidly cherished, may suspend the
+normal operations of reason and conscience, were whispered about by Dr.
+Lloyd's vindictive partisan; and the inference drawn from them and applied
+to the assumptions against myself was the more credulously received,
+because of that over-refining speculation on motive and act which the
+shallow accept, in their eagerness to show how readily they understand the
+profound.
+
+I was known to be fond of scientific, especially of chemical experiments;
+to be eager in testing the truth of any novel invention.  Strahan,
+catching hold of the magistrate's fantastic hypothesis, went about
+repeating anecdotes of the absorbing passion for analysis and discovery
+which had characterized me in youth as a medical student, and to which,
+indeed, I owed the precocious reputation I had obtained.
+
+Sir Philip Derval, according not only to report, but to the direct
+testimony of his servant, had acquired in the course of his travels many
+secrets in natural science, especially as connected with the healing
+art,--his servant had deposed to the remarkable cures he had effected by
+the medicinals stored in the stolen casket.  Doubtless Sir Philip, in
+boasting of these medicinals in the course of our conversation, had
+excited my curiosity, inflamed my imagination; and thus when I afterwards
+suddenly met him in a lone spot, a passionate impulse had acted on a brain
+heated into madness by curiosity and covetous desire.
+
+All these suppositions, reduced into system, were corroborated by
+Strahan's charge that I had made away with the manuscript supposed to
+contain the explanations of the medical agencies employed by Sir Philip,
+and had sought to shelter my theft by a tale so improbable, that a man of
+my reputed talent could not have hazarded it if in his sound senses.  I
+saw the web that had thus been spread around me by hostile prepossessions
+and ignorant gossip: how could the arts of Margrave scatter that web to
+the winds?  I knew not, but I felt confidence in his promise and his
+power.  Still, so great had been my alarm for Lilian, that the hope of
+clearing my own innocence was almost lost in my joy that Margrave, at
+least, was no longer in her presence, and that I had received his pledge
+to quit the town in which she lived.
+
+Thus, hours rolled on hours, till, I think, on the third day from that
+night in which I had last beheld the mysterious Shadow, my door was
+hastily thrown open, a confused crowd presented itself at the
+threshold,--the governor of the prison, the police superintendent, Mr.
+Stanton, and other familiar faces shut out from me since my imprisonment.
+I knew at the first glance that I was no longer an outlaw beyond the pale
+of human friendship.  And proudly, sternly, as I had supported myself
+hitherto in solitude and suspense, when I felt warm hands clasping mine,
+heard joyous voices proffering congratulations, saw in the eyes of all
+that my innocence had been cleared, the revulsion of emotion was too
+strong for me,--the room reeled on my sight, I fainted.  I pass, as
+quickly as I can, over the explanations that crowded on me when I
+recovered, and that were publicly given in evidence in court next morning.
+I had owed all to Margrave.  It seems that he had construed to my favour
+the very supposition which had been bruited abroad to my prejudice.
+"For," said he, "it is conjectured that Fenwick committed the crime of
+which he is accused in the impulse of a disordered reason.  That
+conjecture is based upon the probability that a madman alone could have
+committed a crime without adequate motive.  But it seems quite clear that
+the accused is not mad; and I see cause to suspect that the accuser is."
+Grounding this assumption on the current reports of the witness's manner
+and bearing since he had been placed under official surveillance, Margrave
+had commissioned the policeman Waby to make inquiries in the village to
+which the accuser asserted he had gone in quest of his relations, and Waby
+had there found persons who remembered to have heard that the two brothers
+named Walls lived less by the gains of the petty shop which they kept than
+by the proceeds of some property consigned to them as the nearest of kin
+to a lunatic who had once been tried for his life.  Margrave had then
+examined the advertisements in the daily newspapers.  One of them, warning
+the public against a dangerous maniac, who had effected his escape from an
+asylum in the west of England, caught his attention.  To that asylum he
+had repaired.
+
+There he learned that the patient advertised was one whose propensity was
+homicide, consigned for life to the asylum on account of a murder, for
+which he had been tried.  The description of this person exactly tallied
+with that of the pretended American.  The medical superintendent of the
+asylum, hearing all particulars from Margrave, expressed a strong
+persuasion that the witness was his missing patient, and had himself
+committed the crime of which he had accused another.  If so, the
+superintendent undertook to coax from him the full confession of all the
+circumstances.  Like many other madmen, and not least those whose
+propensity is to crime, the fugitive maniac was exceedingly cunning,
+treacherous, secret, and habituated to trick and stratagem,--more subtle
+than even the astute in possession of all their faculties, whether to
+achieve his purpose or to conceal it, and fabricate appearances against
+another.  But while, in ordinary conversation, he seemed rational enough
+to those who were not accustomed to study him, he had one hallucination
+which, when humoured, led him always, not only to betray himself, but to
+glory in any crime proposed or committed.  He was under the belief that he
+had made a bargain with Satan, who, in return for implicit obedience,
+would bear him harmless through all the consequences of such submission,
+and finally raise him to great power and authority.  It is no unfrequent
+illusion of homicidal maniacs to suppose they are under the influence of
+the Evil One, or possessed by a Demon.  Murderers have assigned as the
+only reason they themselves could give for their crime, that "the Devil
+got into them," and urged the deed.  But the insane have, perhaps, no
+attribute more in common than that of superweening self-esteem.  The
+maniac who has been removed from a garret sticks straws in his hair and
+calls them a crown.  So much does inordinate arrogance characterize mental
+aberration, that, in the course of my own practice, I have detected, in
+that infirmity, the certain symptom of insanity, long before the brain had
+made its disease manifest even to the most familiar kindred.
+
+Morbid self-esteem accordingly pervaded the dreadful illusion by which the
+man I now speak of was possessed.  He was proud to be the protected agent
+of the Fallen Angel.  And if that self-esteem were artfully appealed to,
+he would exult superbly in the evil he held himself ordered to perform, as
+if a special prerogative, an official rank and privilege; then, he would
+be led on to boast gleefully of thoughts which the most cynical of
+criminals in whom intelligence was not ruined would shrink from owning;
+then, he would reveal himself in all his deformity with as complacent and
+frank a self-glorying as some vain good man displays in parading his
+amiable sentiments and his beneficent deeds.
+
+"If," said the superintendent, "this be the patient who has escaped from
+me, and if his propensity to homicide has been, in some way, directed
+towards the person who has been murdered, I shall not be with him a
+quarter of an hour before he will inform me how it happened, and detail
+the arts he employed in shifting his crime upon another; all will be told
+as minutely as a child tells the tale of some school-boy exploit, in
+which he counts on your sympathy, and feels sure of your applause."
+
+Margrave brought this gentleman back to L----, took him to the mayor, who
+was one of my warmest supporters: the mayor had sufficient influence to
+dictate and arrange the rest.  The superintendent was introduced to the
+room in which the pretended American was lodged.  At his own desire a
+select number of witnesses were admitted with him.  Margrave excused
+himself; he said candidly that he was too intimate a friend of mine to be
+an impartial listener to aught that concerned me so nearly.
+
+The superintendent proved right in his suspicions, and verified his
+promises.  My false accuser was his missing patient; the man recognized
+Dr. ---- with no apparent terror, rather with an air of condescension, and
+in a very few minutes was led to tell his own tale, with a gloating
+complacency both at the agency by which he deemed himself exalted, and at
+the dexterous cunning with which he had acquitted himself of the task,
+that increased the horror of his narrative.
+
+He spoke of the mode of his escape, which was extremely ingenious, but of
+which the details, long in themselves, did not interest me, and I
+understood them too imperfectly to repeat.  He had encountered a
+sea-faring traveller on the road, whom he had knocked down with a stone,
+and robbed of his glazed hat and pea-jacket, as well as of a small sum in
+coin, which last enabled him to pay his fare in a railway that conveyed
+him eighty miles away from the asylum.  Some trifling remnant of this
+money still in his pocket, he then travelled on foot along the high-road
+till he came to a town about twenty miles distant from L----; there he had
+stayed a day or two, and there he said "that the Devil had told him to buy
+a case-knife, which he did."  "He knew by that order that the Devil meant
+him to do something great."  "His Master," as he called the fiend, then
+directed him the road he should take.  He came to L----, put up, as he had
+correctly stated before, at a small inn, wandered at night about the town,
+was surprised by the sudden storm, took shelter under the convent arch,
+overheard somewhat more of my conversation with Sir Philip than he had
+previously deposed,--heard enough to excite his curiosity as to the
+casket: "While he listened his Master told him he must get possession of
+that casket."  Sir Philip had quitted the archway almost immediately after
+I had done so, and he would then have attacked him if he had not caught
+sight of a policeman going his rounds.  He had followed Sir Philip to a
+house (Mr. Jeeves's).  "His Master told him to wait and watch."  He did
+so.  When Sir Philip came forth, towards the dawn, he followed him, saw
+him enter a narrow street, came up to him, seized him by the arm, demanded
+all he had about him.  Sir Philip tried to shake him off,--struck at him.
+What follows I spare the reader.  The deed was done.  He robbed the dead
+man both of the casket and the purse that he found in the pockets; had
+scarcely done so when he heard footsteps.  He had just time to get behind
+the portico of a detached house at angles with the street when I came up.
+He witnessed, from his hiding-place, the brief conference between myself
+and the policemen, and when they moved on, bearing the body, stole
+unobserved away.  He was going back towards the inn, when it occurred to
+him that it would be safer if the casket and purse were not about his
+person; that he asked his Master to direct him how to dispose of them:
+that his Master guided him to an open yard (a stone-mason's) at a very
+little distance from the inn; that in this yard there stood an old
+wych-elm tree, from the gnarled roots of which the earth was worn away,
+leaving chinks and hollows, in one of which he placed the casket and
+purse, taking from the latter only two sovereigns and some silver, and
+then heaping loose mould over the hiding-place.  That he then repaired to
+his inn, and left it late in the morning, on the pretence of seeking for
+his relations,--persons, indeed, who really had been related to him, but
+of whose death years ago he was aware.  He returned to L---- a few days
+afterwards, and in the dead of the night went to take up the casket and
+the money.  He found the purse with its contents undisturbed; but the lid
+of the casket was unclosed.  From the hasty glance he had taken of it
+before burying it, it had seemed to him firmly locked,--he was alarmed
+lest some one had been to the spot.  But his Master whispered to him not
+to mind, told him that he might now take the casket, and would be guided
+what to do with it; that he did so, and, opening the lid, found the casket
+empty-; that he took the rest of the money out of the purse, but that he
+did not take the purse itself, for it had a crest and initials on it,
+which might lead to the discovery of what had been done; that he therefore
+left it in the hollow amongst the roots, heaping the mould over it as
+before; that in the course of the day he heard the people at the inn talk
+of the murder, and that his own first impulse was to get out of the town
+immediately, but that his Master "made him too wise for that," and bade
+him stay; that passing through the streets, he saw me come out of the
+sash-window door, go to a stable-yard on the other side of the house,
+mount on horseback and ride away; that he observed the sash-door was left
+partially open; that he walked by it and saw the room empty; there was
+only a dead wall opposite; the place was solitary, unobserved; that his
+Master directed him to lift up the sash gently, enter the room, and
+deposit the knife and the casket in a large walnut-tree bureau which
+stood unlocked near the window.  All that followed--his visit to Mr.
+Vigors, his accusation against myself, his whole tale--was, he said,
+dictated by his Master, who was highly pleased with him, and promised to
+bring him safely through.  And here he turned round with a hideous smile,
+as if for approbation of his notable cleverness and respect for his high
+employ.
+
+Mr. Jeeves had the curiosity to request the keeper to inquire how, in what
+form, or in what manner, the Fiend appeared to the narrator, or conveyed
+his infernal dictates.  The man at first refused to say; but it was
+gradually drawn from him that the Demon had no certain and invariable
+form: sometimes it appeared to him in the form of a rat; sometimes even
+of a leaf, or a fragment of wood, or a rusty nail; but that his Master's
+voice always came to him distinctly, whatever shape he appeared in; only,
+he said, with an air of great importance, his Master, this time, had
+graciously condescended, ever since he left the asylum, to communicate
+with him in a much more pleasing and imposing aspect than he had ever done
+before,--in the form of a beautiful youth, or, rather, like a bright
+rose-coloured shadow, in which the features of a young man were visible,
+and that he had heard the voice more distinctly than usual, though in a
+milder tone, and seeming to come to him from a great distance.
+
+After these revelations the man became suddenly disturbed.  He shook from
+limb to limb, he seemed convulsed with terror; he cried out that he had
+betrayed the secret of his Master, who had warned him not to describe his
+appearance and mode of communication, or he would surrender his servant to
+the tormentors.  Then the maniac's terror gave way to fury; his more
+direful propensity made itself declared; he sprang into the midst of his
+frightened listeners, seized Mr. Vigors by the throat, and would have
+strangled him but for the prompt rush of the superintendent and his
+satellites.  Foaming at the mouth, and horribly raving, he was then
+manacled, a strait-waistcoat thrust upon him, and the group so left him
+in charge of his captors.  Inquiries were immediately directed towards
+such circumstantial evidence as might corroborate the details he had so
+minutely set forth.  The purse, recognized as Sir Philip's, by the valet
+of the deceased, was found buried under the wych-elm.  A policeman
+despatched, express, to the town in which the maniac declared the knife to
+have been purchased, brought back word that a cutler in the place
+remembered perfectly to have sold such a knife to a seafaring man, and
+identified the instrument when it was shown to him.  From the chink of a
+door ajar, in the wall opposite my sash-window, a maid-servant, watching
+for her sweetheart (a journeyman carpenter, who habitually passed that way
+on going home to dine), had, though unobserved by the murderer, seen him
+come out of my window at a time that corresponded with the dates of his
+own story, though she had thought nothing of it at the moment.  He might
+be a patient, or have called on business; she did not know that I was from
+home.  The only point of importance not cleared up was that which related
+to the opening of the casket,--the disappearance of the contents; the lock
+had been unquestionably forced.  No one, however, could suppose that some
+third person had discovered the hiding-place and forced open the casket to
+abstract its contents and then rebury it.  The only probable supposition
+was that the man himself had forced it open, and, deeming the contents of
+no value, had thrown them away before he had hidden the casket and purse,
+and, in the chaos of his reason, had forgotten that he had so done.  Who
+could expect that every link in a madman's tale would be found integral
+and perfect?  In short, little importance was attached to this solitary
+doubt.  Crowds accompanied me to my door, when I was set free, in open
+court, stainless; it was a triumphal procession.  The popularity I had
+previously enjoyed, superseded for a moment by so horrible a charge, came
+back to me tenfold as with the reaction of generous repentance for a
+momentary doubt.  One man shared the public favour,--the young man whose
+acuteness had delivered me from the peril, and cleared the truth from so
+awful a mystery; but Margrave had escaped from congratulation and
+compliment; he had gone on a visit to Strahan, at Derval Court.
+
+Alone, at last, in the welcome sanctuary of my own home, what were my
+thoughts?  Prominent amongst them all was that assertion of the madman,
+which had made me shudder when repeated to me: he had been guided to the
+murder and to all the subsequent proceedings by the luminous shadow of the
+beautiful youth,--the Scin-Laeca to which I had pledged myself.  If Sir
+Philip Derval could be believed, Margrave was possessed of powers, derived
+from fragmentary recollections of a knowledge acquired in a former state
+of being, which would render his remorseless intelligence infinitely dire
+and frustrate the endeavours of a reason, unassisted by similar powers, to
+thwart his designs or bring the law against his crimes.  Had he then the
+arts that could thus influence the minds of others to serve his fell
+purposes, and achieve securely his own evil ends through agencies that
+could not be traced home to himself?
+
+But for what conceivable purpose had I been subjected as a victim to
+influences as much beyond my control as the Fate or Demoniac Necessity of
+a Greek Myth?  In the legends of the classic world some august sufferer
+is oppressed by powers more than mortal, but with an ethical if gloomy
+vindication of his chastisement,--he pays the penalty of crime committed
+by his ancestors or himself, or he has braved, by arrogating equality with
+the gods, the mysterious calamity which the gods alone can inflict.  But
+I, no descendant of Pelops, no OEdipus boastful of a wisdom which could
+interpret the enigmas of the Sphynx, while ignorant even of his own
+birth--what had I done to be singled out from the herd of men for trials
+and visitations from the Shadowland of ghosts and sorcerers?  It would be
+ludicrously absurd to suppose that Dr. Lloyd's dying imprecation could
+have had a prophetic effect upon my destiny; to believe that the pretences
+of mesmerizers were specially favoured by Providence, and that to question
+their assumptions was an offence of profanation to be punished by exposure
+to preternatural agencies.  There was not even that congruity between
+cause and effect which fable seeks in excuse for its inventions.  Of all
+men living, I, unimaginative disciple of austere science, should be the
+last to become the sport of that witchcraft which even imagination
+reluctantly allows to the machinery of poets, and science casts aside into
+the mouldy lumber-room of obsolete superstition.
+
+Rousing my mind from enigmas impossible to solve, it was with intense
+and yet most melancholy satisfaction that I turned to the image of Lilian,
+rejoicing, though with a thrill of awe, that the promise so mysteriously
+conveyed to my senses had, hereto, been already fulfilled,--Margrave had
+left the town; Lilian was no longer subjected to his evil fascination.
+But an instinct told me that that fascination had already produced an
+effect adverse to all hope of happiness for me.  Lilian's love for myself
+was gone.  Impossible otherwise that she--in whose nature I had always
+admired that generous devotion which is more or less inseparable from the
+romance of youth--should have never conveyed to me one word of consolation
+in the hour of my agony and trial; that she, who, till the last evening we
+had met, had ever been so docile, in the sweetness of a nature femininely
+subinissive to my slightest wish, should have disregarded my solemn
+injunction, and admitted Margrave to acquaintance, nay, to familiar
+intimacy,--at the very time, too, when to disobey my injunctions was to
+embitter my ordeal, and add her own contempt to the degradation imposed
+upon my honour!  No, her heart must be wholly gone from me; her very
+nature wholly warped.  A union between us had become impossible.  My love
+for her remained unshattered; the more tender, perhaps, for a sentiment of
+compassion.  But my pride was shocked, my heart was wounded.  My love was
+not mean and servile.  Enough for me to think that she would be at least
+saved from Margrave.  Her life associated with his!--contemplation
+horrible and ghastly!--from that fate she was saved.  Later, she would
+recover the effect of an influence happily so brief.  She might form some
+new attachment, some new tie; but love once withdrawn is never to be
+restored--and her love was withdrawn from me.  I had but to release her,
+with my own lips, from our engagement,--she would welcome that release.
+Mournful but firm in these thoughts and these resolutions, I sought Mrs.
+Ashleigh's house.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XLII.
+
+It was twilight when I entered, unannounced (as had been my wont in our
+familiar intercourse), the quiet sitting-room in which I expected to find
+mother and child.  But Lilian was there alone, seated by the open window,
+her hands crossed and drooping on her knee, her eye fixed upon the
+darkening summer skies, in which the evening star had just stolen forth,
+bright and steadfast, near the pale sickle of a half-moon that was dimly
+visible, but gave as yet no light.
+
+Let any lover imagine the reception he would expect to meet from his
+betrothed coming into her presence after he had passed triumphant through
+a terrible peril to life and fame--and conceive what ice froze my blood,
+what anguish weighed down my heart, when Lilian, turning towards me, rose
+not, spoke not, gazed at me heedlessly as if at some indifferent
+stranger--and--and--But no matter.  I cannot bear to recall it even now,
+at the distance of years!  I sat down beside her, and took her hand,
+without pressing it; it rested languidly, passively in mine, one moment; I
+dropped it then, with a bitter sigh.
+
+"Lilian," I said quietly, "you love me no longer.  Is it not so?"
+
+She raised her eyes to mine, looked at me wistfully, and pressed her hand
+on her forehead; then said, in a strange voice, "Did I ever love you?
+What do you mean?"
+
+"Lilian, Lilian, rouse yourself; are you not, while you speak, under some
+spell, some influence which you cannot describe nor account for?"
+
+She paused a moment before she answered, calmly, "No!  Again I ask what do
+you mean?"
+
+"What do I mean?  Do you forget that we are betrothed?  Do you forget how
+often, and how recently, our vows of affection and constancy have been
+exchanged?"
+
+"No, I do not forget; but I must have deceived you and myself--"
+
+"It is true, then, that you love me no more?"
+
+"I suppose so."
+
+"But, oh, Lilian, is it that your heart is only closed to me; or is
+it--oh, answer truthfully--is it given to another,--to him--to
+him--against whom I warned you, whom I implored you not to receive?  Tell
+me, at least, that your love is not gone to Margrave--"
+
+"To him! love to him!  Oh, no--no--"
+
+"What, then, is your feeling towards him?"
+
+Lilian's face grew visibly paler, even in that dim light.  "I know not,"
+she said, almost in a whisper; "but it is partly awe--partly--"
+
+"What?"
+
+"Abhorrence!" she said almost fiercely, and rose to her feet, with a wild
+defying start.
+
+"If that be so," I said gently, "you would not grieve were you never again
+to see him--"
+
+"But I shall see him again," she murmured in a tone of weary sadness, and
+sank back once more into her chair.
+
+"I think not," said I, "and I hope not.  And now hear me and heed me,
+Lilian.  It is enough for me, no matter what your feelings towards
+another, to learn from yourself that the affection you once professed for
+me is gone.  I release you from your troth.  If folks ask why we two
+henceforth separate the lives we had agreed to join, you may say, if you
+please, that you could not give your hand to a man who had known the taint
+of a felon's prison, even on a false charge.  If that seems to you an
+ungenerous reason, we will leave it to your mother to find a better.
+Farewell!  For your own sake I can yet feel happiness,--happiness to hear
+that you do not love the man against whom I warn you still more solemnly
+than before!  Will you not give me your hand in parting--and have I not
+spoken your own wish?"
+
+She turned away her face, and resigned her hand to me in silence.
+Silently I held it in mine, and my emotions nearly stifled me.  One
+symptom of regret, of reluctance, on her part, and I should have fallen at
+her feet, and cried, "Do not let us break a tie which our vows should have
+made indisoluble; heed not my offers, wrung from a tortured heart!  You
+cannot have ceased to love me!"  But no such symptom of relenting showed
+itself in her, and with a groan I left the room.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XLIII.
+
+I was just outside the garden door, when I felt an arm thrown round me, my
+cheek kissed and wetted with tears.  Could it be Lilian?  Alas, no!  It
+was her mother's voice, that, between laughing and crying, exclaimed
+hysterically: "This is joy, to see you again, and on these thresholds.  I
+have just come from your house; I went there on purpose to congratulate
+you, and to talk to you about Lilian.  But you have seen her?"
+
+"Yes; I have but this moment left her.  Come this way."  I drew Mrs.
+Ashleigh back into the garden, along the old winding walk, which the
+shrubs concealed from view of the house.  We sat down on a rustic seat
+where I had often sat with Lilian, midway between the house and the Monks'
+Well.  I told the mother what had passed between me and her daughter; I
+made no complaint of Lilian's coldness and change; I did not hint at its
+cause.  "Girls of her age will change," said I, "and all that now remains
+is for us two to agree on such a tale to our curious neighbours as may
+rest the whole blame on me.  Man's name is of robust fibre; it could not
+push its way to a place in the world, if it could not bear, without
+sinking, the load idle tongues may lay on it.  Not so Woman's Name: what
+is but gossip against Man, is scandal against Woman."
+
+"Do not be rash, my dear Allen," said Mrs. Ashleigh, in great distress.
+"I feel for you, I understand you; in your case I might act as you do.  I
+cannot blame you.  Lilian is changed,--changed unaccountably.  Yet sure I
+am that the change is only on the surface, that her heart is really yours,
+as entirely and as faithfully as ever it was; and that later, when she
+recovers from the strange, dreamy kind of torpor which appears to have
+come over all her faculties and all her affections, she would awake with a
+despair which you cannot conjecture to the knowledge that you had
+renounced her."
+
+"I have not renounced her," said I, impatiently; "I did but restore her
+freedom of choice.  But pass by this now, and explain to me more fully
+the change in your daughter, which I gather from your words is not
+confined to me."
+
+"I wished to speak of it before you saw her, and for that reason came to
+your house.  It was on the morning in which we left her aunt's to return
+hither that I first noticed some thing peculiar in her look and manner.
+She seemed absorbed and absent, so much so that I asked her several times
+to tell me what made her so grave; but I could only get from her that she
+had had a confused dream which she could not recall distinctly enough to
+relate, but that she was sure it boded evil.  During the journey she
+became gradually more herself, and began to look forward with delight to
+the idea of seeing you again.  Well, you came that evening.  What passed
+between you and her you know best.  You complained that she slighted your
+request to shun all acquaintance with Mr. Margrave.  I was surprised that,
+whether your wish were reasonable or not, she could have hesitated to
+comply with it.  I spoke to her about it after you had gone, and she wept
+bitterly at thinking she had displeased you."
+
+"She wept!  You amaze me.  Yet the next day what a note she returned to
+mine!"
+
+"The next day the change in her became very visible to me.  She told me,
+in an excited manner, that she was convinced she ought not to marry you.
+Then came, the following day, the news of your committal.  I heard of it,
+but dared not break it to her.  I went to our friend the mayor, to consult
+with him what to say, what to do; and to learn more distinctly than I had
+done from terrified, incoherent servants, the rights of so dreadful a
+story.  When I returned, I found, to my amazement, a young stranger in the
+drawing-room; it was Mr. Margrave,--Miss Brabazon had brought him at his
+request.  Lilian was in the room, too, and my astonishment was increased,
+when she said to me with a singular smile, vague but tranquil: 'I know all
+about Allen Fenwick; Mr. Margrave has told me all.  He is a friend of
+Allen's.  He says there is no cause for fear.'  Mr. Margrave then
+apologized to me for his intrusion in a caressing, kindly manner, as if
+one of the family.  He said he was so intimate with you that he felt that
+he could best break to Miss Ashleigh information she might receive
+elsewhere, for that he was the only man in the town who treated the charge
+with ridicule.  You know the wonderful charm of this young man's manner.
+I cannot explain to you how it was, but in a few moments I was as much at
+home with him as if he had been your brother.  To be brief, having once
+come, he came constantly.  He had moved, two days before you went to
+Derval Court, from his hotel to apartments in Mr. ----'s house, just
+opposite.  We could see him on his balcony from our terrace; he would
+smile to us and come across.  I did wrong in slighting your injunction,
+and suffering Lilian to do so.  I could not help it, he was such a
+comfort to me,--to her, too--in her tribulation.  He alone had no doleful
+words, wore no long face; he alone was invariably cheerful.  'Everything,'
+he said, 'would come right in a day or two.'"
+
+"And Lilian could not but admire this young man, he is so beautiful."
+
+"Beautiful?  Well, perhaps.  But if you have a jealous feeling, you were
+never more mistaken.  Lilian, I am convinced, does more than dislike him;
+he has inspired her with repugnance, with terror.  And much as I own I
+like him, in his wild, joyous, careless, harmless way, do not think I
+flatter you if I say that Mr. Margrave is not the man to make any girl
+untrue to you,--untrue to a lover with infinitely less advantages than you
+may pretend to.  He would be a universal favourite, I grant; but there is
+something in him, or a something wanting in him, which makes liking and
+admiration stop short of love.  I know not why; perhaps, because, with all
+his good humour, he is so absorbed in himself, so intensely egotistical,
+so light; were he less clever, I should say so frivolous.  He could not
+make love, he could not say in the serious tone of a man in earnest, 'I
+love you.' He owned as much to me, and owned, too, that he knew not even
+what love was.  As to myself, Mr. Margrave appears rich; no whisper
+against his character or his honour ever reached me.  Yet were you out of
+the question, and were there no stain on his birth, nay, were he as high
+in rank and wealth as he is favoured by Nature in personal advantages, I
+confess I could never consent to trust him with my daughter's fate.  A
+voice at my heart would cry, 'No!' It may be an unreasonable prejudice,
+but I could not bear to see him touch Lilian's hand!"
+
+"Did she never, then--never suffer him even to take her hand?"
+
+"Never.  Do not think so meanly of her as to suppose that she could be
+caught by a fair face, a graceful manner.  Reflect: just before she had
+refused, for your sake, Ashleigh Sumner, whom Lady Haughton said 'no girl
+in her senses could refuse;' and this change in Lilian really began before
+we returned to L----,--before she had even seen Mr. Margrave.  I am
+convinced it is something in the reach of your skill as physician,--it is
+on the nerves, the system.  I will give you a proof of what I say, only
+do not betray me to her.  It was during your imprisonment, the night
+before your release, that I was awakened by her coming to my bedside.  She
+was sobbing as if her heart would break.  'O mother, mother!' she cried,
+'pity me, help me!  I am so wretched.'  'What is the matter, darling?'  'I
+have been so cruel to Allen, and I know I shall be so again.  I cannot
+help it.  Do not question me; only if we are separated, if he cast me off,
+or I reject him, tell him some day perhaps when I am in my grave--not to
+believe appearances; and that I, in my heart of hearts, never ceased to
+love him!'"
+
+"She said that!  You are not deceiving me?"
+
+"Oh, no! how can you think so?"
+
+"There is hope still," I murmured; and I bowed my head upon my hands, hot
+tears forcing their way through the clasped fingers.
+
+"One word more," said I; "you tell me that Lilian has a repugnance to this
+Margrave, and yet that she found comfort in his visits,--a comfort that
+could not be wholly ascribed to cheering words he might say about myself,
+since it is all but certain that I was not, at that time, uppermost in her
+mind.  Can you explain this apparent contradiction?"
+
+"I cannot, otherwise than by a conjecture which you would ridicule."
+
+"I can ridicule nothing now.  What is your conjecture?"
+
+"I know how much you disbelieve in the stories one hears of animal
+magnetism and electro-biology, otherwise--"
+
+"You think that Margrave exercises some power of that kind over Lilian?
+Has he spoken of such a power?"
+
+"Not exactly; but he said that he was sure Lilian possessed a faculty that
+he called by some hard name, not clairvoyance, but a faculty, which he
+said, when I asked him to explain, was akin to prevision,--to second
+sight.  Then he talked of the Priestesses who had administered the ancient
+oracles.  Lilian, he said, reminded him of them, with her deep eyes and
+mysterious smile."
+
+"And Lilian heard him?  What said she?"
+
+"Nothing; she seemed in fear while she listened."
+
+"He did not offer to try any of those arts practised by professional
+mesmerists and other charlatans?"
+
+"I thought he was about to do so, but I forestalled him, saying I never
+would consent to any experiment of that kind, either on myself or my
+daughter."
+
+"And he replied--"
+
+"With his gay laugh, 'that I was very foolish; that a person possessed of
+such a faculty as he attributed to Lilian would, if the faculty were
+developed, be an invaluable adviser.' He would have said more, but I
+begged him to desist.  Still I fancy at times--do not be angry--that he
+does somehow or other bewitch her, unconsciously to herself; for she
+always knows when he is coming.  Indeed, I am not sure that he does not
+bewitch myself, for I by no means justify my conduct in admitting him to
+an intimacy so familiar, and in spite of your wish; I have reproached
+myself, resolved to shut my door on him, or to show by my manner that his
+visits were unwelcome; yet when Lilian has said, in the drowsy lethargic
+tone which has come into her voice (her voice naturally earnest and
+impressive, though always low), 'Mother, he will be here in two minutes; I
+wish to leave the room and cannot,' I, too, have felt as if something
+constrained me against my will; as if, in short, I were under that
+influence which Mr. Vigors--whom I will never forgive for his conduct to
+you--would ascribe to mesmerism.  But will you not come in and see Lilian
+again?"
+
+"No, not to-night; but watch and heed her, and if you see aught to make
+you honestly believe that she regrets the rupture of the old tic from
+which I have released her--why, you know, Mrs. Ashleigh, that--that--"
+My voice failed; I wrung the good woman's hand, and went my way.
+
+I had always till then considered Mrs. Ashleigh--if not as Mrs. Poyntz
+described her--"commonplace weak"--still of an intelligence somewhat below
+mediocrity.  I now regarded her with respect as well as grateful
+tenderness; her plain sense had divined what all my boasted knowledge had
+failed to detect in my earlier intimacy with Margrave,--namely, that in
+him there was a something present, or a something wanting, which forbade
+love and excited fear.  Young, beautiful, wealthy, seemingly blameless in
+life as he was, she would not have given her daughter's hand to him!
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XLIV.
+
+The next day my house was filled with visitors.  I had no notion that I
+had so many friends.  Mr. Vigors wrote me a generous and handsome letter,
+owning his prejudices against me on account of his sympathy with poor Dr.
+Lloyd, and begging my pardon for what he now felt to have been harshness,
+if not distorted justice.  But what most moved me was the entrance of
+Strahan, who rushed up to me with the heartiness of old college days.
+"Oh, my dear Allen, can you ever forgive me; that I should have
+disbelieved your word,--should have suspected you of abstracting my poor
+cousin's memoir?"
+
+"Is it found, then?"
+
+"Oh, yes; you must thank Margrave.  He, clever fellow, you know, came to
+me on a visit yesterday.  He put me at once on the right scent.  Only
+guess; but you never can!  It was that wretched old housekeeper who
+purloined the manuscript.  You remember she came into the room while you
+were looking at the memoir.  She heard us talk about it; her curiosity was
+roused; she longed to know the history of her old master, under his own
+hand; she could not sleep; she heard me go up to bed; she thought you
+might leave the book on the table when you, too, went to rest.  She stole
+downstairs, peeped through the keyhole of the library, saw you asleep,
+the book lying before you, entered, took away the book softly, meant to
+glance at its contents and to return it.  You were sleeping so soundly
+she thought you would not wake for an hour; she carried it into the
+library, leaving the door open, and there began to pore over it.  She
+stumbled first on one of the passages in Latin; she hoped to find some
+part in plain English, turned over the leaves, putting her candle close to
+them, for the old woman's eyes were dim, when she heard you make some
+sound in your sleep.  Alarmed, she looked round; you were moving uneasily
+in your seat, and muttering to yourself.  From watching you she was soon
+diverted by the consequences of her own confounded curiosity and folly.
+In moving, she had unconsciously brought the poor manuscript close to the
+candle; the leaves caught the flame; her own cap and hand burning first
+made her aware of the mischief done.  She threw down the book; her sleeve
+was in flames; she had first to tear off the sleeve, which was, luckily
+for her, not sewn to her dress.  By the time she recovered presence of
+mind to attend to the book, half its leaves were reduced to tinder.  She
+did not dare then to replace what was left of the manuscript on your
+table; returned with it to her room, hid it, and resolved to keep her own
+secret.  I should never have guessed it; I had never even spoken to her of
+the occurrence; but when I talked over the disappearance of the book to
+Margrave last night, and expressed my disbelief of your story, he said, in
+his merry way: 'But do you think that Fenwick is the only person curious
+about your cousin's odd ways and strange history?  Why, every servant in
+the household would have been equally curious.  You have examined your
+servants, of course?'  'No, I never thought of it.'  'Examine them now,
+then.  Examine especially that old housekeeper.  I observe a great change
+in her manner since I came here, weeks ago, to look over the house.  She
+has something on her mind,--I see it in her eyes.' Then it occurred to me,
+too, that the woman's manner had altered, and that she seemed always in a
+tremble and a fidget.  I went at once to her room, and charged her with
+stealing the book.  She fell on her knees, and told the whole story as I
+have told it to you, and as I shall take care to tell it to all to whom I
+have so foolishly blabbed my yet more foolish suspicions of yourself.  But
+can you forgive me, old friend?"
+
+"Heartily, heartily!  And the book is burned?"
+
+"See;" and he produced a mutilated manuscript.  Strange, the part
+burned--reduced, indeed, to tinder--was the concluding part that related
+to Haroun,--to Grayle: no vestige of that part was left; the earlier
+portions were scorched and mutilated, though in some places still
+decipherable; but as my eye hastily ran over those places, I saw only
+mangled sentences of the experimental problems which the writer had so
+minutely elaborated.
+
+"Will you keep the manuscript as it is, and as long as you like?" said
+Strahan.
+
+"No, no; I will have nothing more to do with it.  Consult some other man
+of science.  And so this is the old woman's whole story?  No
+accomplice,--none?  No one else shared her curiosity and her task?"
+
+"No.  Oddly enough, though, she made much the same excuse for her pitiful
+folly that the madman made for his terrible crime; she said, 'the Devil
+put it into her head.' Of course he did, as he puts everything wrong into
+any one's head.  That does not mend the matter."
+
+"How! did she, too, say she saw a Shadow and heard a voice?"
+
+"No; not such a liar as that, and not mad enough for such a lie.  But she
+said that when she was in bed, thinking over the book, something
+irresistible urged her to get up and go down into the study; swore she
+felt something lead her by the hand; swore, too, that when she first
+discovered the manuscript was not in English, something whispered in her
+ear to turn over the leaves and approach them to the candle.  But I had no
+patience to listen to all this rubbish.  I sent her out of the house, bag
+and baggage.  But, alas! is this to be the end of all my wise cousin's
+grand discoveries?"
+
+True, of labours that aspired to bring into the chart of science new
+worlds, of which even the traditionary rumour was but a voice from the
+land of fable--nought left but broken vestiges of a daring footstep!  The
+hope of a name imperishable amidst the loftiest hierarchy of Nature's
+secret temple, with all the pomp of recorded experiment, that applied to
+the mysteries of Egypt and Chaldwa the inductions of Bacon, the tests of
+Liebig--was there nothing left of this but what, here and there, some
+puzzled student might extract, garbled, mutilated, perhaps unintelligible,
+from shreds of sentences, wrecks of problems!  O mind of man, can the
+works, on which thou wouldst found immortality below, be annulled into
+smoke and tinder by an inch of candle in the hand of an old woman!
+
+When Strahan left me, I went out, but not yet to visit patients.  I stole
+through by-paths into the fields; I needed solitude to bring my thoughts
+into shape and order.  What was delusion, and what not?  Was I right or
+the Public?  Was Margrave really the most innocent and serviceable of
+human beings, kindly affectionate, employing a wonderful acuteness for
+benignant ends?  Was I, in truth, indebted to him for the greatest boon
+one man can bestow on another,--for life rescued, for fair name
+justified?  Or had he, by some demoniac sorcery, guided the hand of the
+murderer against the life of the person who alone could imperil his own?
+Had he, by the same dark spells, urged the woman to the act that had
+destroyed the only record of his monstrous being,--the only evidence that
+I was not the sport of an illusion in the horror with which he inspired
+me?
+
+But if the latter supposition could be admissible, did he use his agents
+only to betray them afterwards to exposure, and that, without any possible
+clew to his own detection as the instigator?  Then, there came over me
+confused recollections of tales of mediaeval witchcraft, which I had read
+in boyhood.  Were there not on judicial record attestation and evidence,
+solemn and circumstantial, of powers analogous to those now exercised by
+Margrave,--of sorcerers instigating to sin through influences ascribed to
+Demons; making their apparitions glide through guarded walls, their voices
+heard from afar in the solitude of dungeons or monastic cells; subjugating
+victims to their will, by means which no vigilance could have detected, if
+the victims themselves had not confessed the witchcraft that had ensnared,
+courting a sure and infamous death in that confession, preferring such
+death to a life so haunted?  Were stories so gravely set forth in the pomp
+of judicial evidence, and in the history of times comparatively recent,
+indeed to be massed, pell-mell together, as a moles indigesta of senseless
+superstition,--all the witnesses to be deemed liars; all the victims and
+tools of the sorcerers, lunatics; all the examiners or judges, with their
+solemn gradations--lay and clerical--from Commissions of Inquiry to Courts
+of Appeal,--to be despised for credulity, loathed for cruelty; or, amidst
+records so numerous, so imposingly attested, were there the fragments of a
+terrible truth?  And had our ancestors been so unwise in those laws we now
+deem so savage, by which the world was rid of scourges more awful and more
+potent than the felon with his candid dagger?  Fell instigators of the
+evil in men's secret hearts, shaping into action the vague, half-formed
+desire, and guiding with agencies impalpable, unseen, their spell-bound
+instruments of calamity and death.
+
+Such were the gloomy questions that I--by repute, the sternest advocate of
+common-sense against fantastic errors; by profession, the searcher into
+flesh and blood, and tissue and nerve and sinew, for the causes of all
+that disease the mechanism of the universal human frame; I, self-boasting
+physician, sceptic, philosopher, materialist--revolved, not amidst gloomy
+pines, under grim winter skies, but as I paced slow through laughing
+meadows, and by the banks of merry streams, in the ripeness of the golden
+August: the hum of insects in the fragrant grass, the flutter of birds
+amid the delicate green of boughs checkered by playful sunbeams and gentle
+shadows, and ever in sight of the resorts of busy workday man,--walls,
+roof-tops, church-spires rising high; there, white and modern, the
+handwriting of our race, in this practical nineteenth century, on its
+square plain masonry and Doric shafts, the Town-Hall, central in the
+animated marketplace.  And I--I--prying into long-neglected corners and
+dust-holes of memory for what my reason had flung there as worthless
+rubbish; reviving the jargon of French law, in the proces verbal, against
+a Gille de Retz, or an Urbain Grandier, and sifting the equity of
+sentences on witchcraft!
+
+Bursting the links of this ghastly soliloquy with a laugh at my own folly,
+I struck into a narrow path that led back towards the city, by a quiet and
+rural suburb; the path wound on through a wide and solitary churchyard, at
+the base of the Abbey-hill.  Many of the former dwellers on that eminence
+now slept in the lowly burial-ground at its foot; and the place,
+mournfully decorated with the tombs which still jealously mark
+distinctions of rank amidst the levelling democracy of the grave, was kept
+trim with the care which comes half from piety, and half from pride.
+
+I seated myself on a bench, placed between the clipped yew-trees that
+bordered the path from the entrance to the church porch, deeming vaguely
+that my own perplexing thoughts might imbibe a quiet from the quiet of the
+place.
+
+"And oh," I murmured to myself, "oh that I had one bosom friend to whom I
+might freely confide all these torturing riddles which I cannot
+solve,--one who could read my heart, light up its darkness, exorcise its
+spectres; one in whose wisdom I could welcome a guide through the Nature
+which now suddenly changes her aspect, opening out from the walls with
+which I had fenced and enclosed her as mine own formal garden;--all her
+pathways, therein, trimmed to my footstep; all her blooms grouped and
+harmonized to my own taste in colour; all her groves, all her caverns, but
+the soothing retreats of a Muse or a Science; opening out--opening out,
+desert on desert, into clewless and measureless space!  Gone is the
+garden!  Were its confines too narrow for Nature?  Be it so!  The Desert
+replaces the garden, but where ends the Desert?  Reft from my senses are
+the laws which gave order and place to their old questionless realm.  I
+stand lost and appalled amidst Chaos.  Did my Mind misconstrue the laws it
+deemed fixed and immutable?  Be it so!  But still Nature cannot be
+lawless; Creation is not a Chaos.  If my senses deceive me in some things,
+they are still unerring in others; if thus, in some things, fallacious,
+still, in other things, truthful.  Are there within me senses finer than
+those I have cultured, or without me vistas of knowledge which instincts,
+apart from my senses, divine?  So long as I deal with the Finite alone, my
+senses suffice me; but when the Infinite is obtruded upon me there, are my
+senses faithless deserters?  If so, is there aught else in my royal
+resources of Man--whose ambition it is, from the first dawn of his glory
+as Thinker, to invade and to subjugate Nature,--is there aught else to
+supply the place of those traitors, the senses, who report to my Reason,
+their judge and their sovereign, as truths seen and heard tales which my
+Reason forfeits her sceptre if she does not disdain as lies?  Oh, for a
+friend! oh, for a guide!"
+
+And as I so murmured, my eye fell upon the form of a kneeling child,--at
+the farther end of the burial-ground, beside a grave with its new
+headstone gleaming white amidst the older moss-grown tombs, a female
+child, her head bowed, her hands clasped.  I could see but the outline of
+her small form in its sable dress,--an infant beside the dead.  My eye and
+my thoughts were turned from that silent figure, too absorbed in my own
+restless tumult of doubt and dread, for sympathy with the grief or the
+consolation of a kneeling child.  And yet I should have remembered that
+tomb!  Again I murmured with a fierce impatience, "Oh, for a friend! oh,
+for a guide!"
+
+I heard steps on the walk under the yews; and an old man came in sight,
+slightly bent, with long gray hair, but still with enough of vigour for
+years to come, in his tread, firm, though slow, in the unshrunken muscle
+of his limbs and the steady light of his clear blue eye.  I started.  Was
+it possible?  That countenance, marked, indeed, with the lines of
+laborious thought, but sweet in the mildness of humanity, and serene in
+the peace of conscience!  I could not be mistaken.  Julius Faber was
+before me,--the profound pathologist, to whom my own proud self-esteem
+acknowledged inferiority, without humiliation; the generous benefactor to
+whom I owed my own smooth entrance into the arduous road of fame and
+fortune.  I had longed for a friend, a guide; what I sought stood suddenly
+at my side.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XLV.
+
+Explanation on Faber's part was short and simple.  The nephew whom he
+designed as the heir to his wealth had largely outstripped the liberal
+allowance made to him, had incurred heavy debts; and in order to extricate
+himself from the debts, had plunged into ruinous speculations.  Faber had
+come back to England to save his heir from prison or outlawry, at the
+expense of more than three-fourths of the destined inheritance.  To add to
+all, the young man had married a young lady without fortune; the uncle
+only heard of this marriage on arriving in England.  The spendthrift was
+hiding from his creditors in the house of his father-in-law, in one of the
+western counties.  Faber there sought him; and on becoming acquainted
+with his wife, grew reconciled to the marriage, and formed hopes of his
+nephew's future redemption.  He spoke, indeed, of the young wife with
+great affection.  She was good and sensible; willing and anxious to
+encounter any privation by which her husband might reprieve the effects
+of his folly.  "So," said Faber, "on consultation with this excellent
+creature--for my poor nephew is so broken down by repentance, that others
+must think for him how to exalt repentance into reform--my plans were
+determined.  I shall remove my prodigal from all scenes of temptation.  He
+has youth, strength, plenty of energy, hitherto misdirected.  I shall take
+him from the Old World into the New.  I have decided on Australia.  The
+fortune still left to me, small here, will be ample capital there.  It is
+not enough to maintain us separately, so we must all live together.
+Besides, I feel that, though I have neither the strength or the experience
+which could best serve a young settler on a strange soil, still, under my
+eye, my poor boy will be at once more prudent and more persevering.  We
+sail next week."
+
+Faber spoke so cheerfully that I knew not how to express compassion; yet,
+at his age, after a career of such prolonged and distinguished labour, to
+resign the ease and comforts of the civilized state for the hardships and
+rudeness of an infant colony, seemed to me a dreary prospect; and, as
+delicately, as tenderly as I could to one whom I loved and honoured as a
+father, I placed at his disposal the fortune which, in great part, I owed
+to him,--pressing him at least to take from it enough to secure to
+himself, in his own country, a home suited to his years and worthy of his
+station.  He rejected all my offers, however earnestly urged on him, with
+his usual modest and gentle dignity; and assuring me that he looked
+forward with great interest to a residence in lands new to his experience,
+and affording ample scope for the hardy enjoyments which had always most
+allured his tastes, he hastened to change the subject.
+
+"And who, think you, is the admirable helpmate my scape-grace has had the
+saving good luck to find?  A daughter of the worthy man who undertook the
+care of poor Dr. Lloyd's orphans,--the orphans who owed so much to your
+generous exertions to secure a provision for them; and that child, now
+just risen from her father's grave, is my pet companion, my darling ewe
+lamb,--Dr. Lloyd's daughter Amy."
+
+Here the child joined us, quickening her pace as she recognized the old
+man, and nestling to his side as she glanced wistfully towards myself.  A
+winning, candid, lovable child's face, somewhat melancholy, somewhat more
+thoughtful than is common to the face of childhood, but calm, intelligent,
+and ineffably mild.  Presently she stole from the old man, and put her
+hand in mine.
+
+"Are you not the kind gentleman who came to see him that night when he
+passed away from us, and who, they all say at home, was so good to my
+brothers and me?  Yes, I recollect you now."  And she put her pure face to
+mine, wooing me to kiss it.
+
+I kind!  I good!  I--I!  Alas! she little knew, little guessed, the
+wrathful imprecation her father had bequeathed to me that fatal night!
+
+I did not dare to kiss Dr. Lloyd's orphan daughter, but my tears fell over
+her hand.  She took them as signs of pity, and, in her infant
+thankfulness, silently kissed me.
+
+"Oh, my friend!" I murmured to Faber, "I have much that I yearn to say to
+you--alone--alone!  Come to my house with me, be at least my guest as long
+as you stay in this town."
+
+"Willingly," said Faber, looking at me more intently than he had done
+before, and with the true eye of the practised Healer, at once soft and
+penetrating.
+
+He rose, took my arm, and whispering a word in the ear of the little girl,
+she went on before us, turning her head, as she gained the gate, for
+another look at her father's grave.  As we walked to my house, Julius
+Faber spoke to me much of this child.  Her brothers were all at school;
+she was greatly attached to his nephew's wife; she had become yet more
+attached to Faber himself, though on so short an acquaintance; it bad been
+settled that she was to accompany the emigrants to Australia.
+
+"There," said he, "the sum, that some munificent, but unknown friend of
+her father has settled on her, will provide her no mean dower for a
+colonist's wife, when the time comes for her to bring a blessing to some
+other hearth than ours."  He went on to say that she had wished to
+accompany him to L----, in order to visit her father's grave before
+crossing the wide seas; "and she has taken such fond care of me all the
+way, that you might fancy I were the child of the two.  I come back to
+this town, partly to dispose of a few poor houses in it which still belong
+to me, principally to bid you farewell before quitting the Old World, no
+doubt forever.  So, on arriving to-day, I left Amy by herself in the
+churchyard while I went to your house, but you were from home.  And now I
+must congratulate you on the reputation you have so rapidly acquired,
+which has even surpassed my predictions."
+
+"You are aware," said I, falteringly, "of the extraordinary charge from
+which that part of my reputation dearest to all men has just emerged!"
+
+He had but seen a short account in a weekly journal, written after my
+release.  He asked details, which I postponed.
+
+Reaching my home, I hastened to provide for the comfort of my two
+unexpected guests; strove to rally myself, to be cheerful.  Not till
+night, when Julius Faber and I were alone together, did I touch on what
+was weighing at my heart.  Then, drawing to his side, I told him all,--all
+of which the substance is herein written, from the deathscene in Dr.
+Lloyd's chamber to the hour in which I had seen Dr. Lloyd's child at her
+father's grave.  Some of the incidents and conversations which had most
+impressed me I had already committed to writing, in the fear that,
+otherwise, my fancy might forge for its own thraldom the links of
+reminiscence which my memory might let fall from its chain.  Faber
+listened with a silence only interrupted by short pertinent questions;
+and when I had done, he remained thoughtful for some moments; then the
+great physician replied thus:--
+
+"I take for granted your conviction of the reality of all you tell me,
+even of the Luminous Shadow, of the bodiless Voice; but, before admitting
+the reality itself, we must abide by the old maxim, not to accept as cause
+to effect those agencies which belong to the Marvellous, when causes less
+improbable for the effect can be rationally conjectured.  In this case are
+there not such causes?  Certainly there are--"
+
+"There are?"
+
+"Listen; you are one of those men who attempt to stifle their own
+imagination.  But in all completed intellect, imagination exists, and will
+force its way; deny it healthful vents, and it may stray into morbid
+channels.  The death-room of Dr. Lloyd deeply impressed your heart, far
+more than your pride would own.  This is clear from the pains you took to
+exonerate your conscience, in your generosity to the orphans.  As the
+heart was moved, so was the imagination stirred; and, unaware to yourself,
+prepared for much that subsequently appealed to it.  Your sudden love,
+conceived in the very grounds of the house so associated with
+recollections in themselves strange and romantic; the peculiar temperament
+and nature of the girl to whom your love was attracted; her own visionary
+beliefs, and the keen anxiety which infused into your love a deeper poetry
+of sentiment,--all insensibly tended to induce the imagination to dwell on
+the Wonderful; and, in overstriving to reconcile each rarer phenomenon to
+the most positive laws of Nature, your very intellect could discover no
+solution but in the Preternatural.
+
+"You visit a man who tells you he has seen Sir Philip Derval's ghost; on
+that very evening, you hear a strange story, in which Sir Philip's name is
+mixed up with a tale of murder, implicating two mysterious pretenders to
+magic,--Louis Grayle and the Sage of Aleppo.  The tale so interests your
+fancy that even the glaring impossibility of a not unimportant part of it
+escapes your notice,--namely, the account of a criminal trial in which
+the circumstantial evidence was more easily attainable than in all the
+rest of the narrative, but which could not legally have taken place as
+told.  Thus it is whenever the mind begins, unconsciously, to admit the
+shadow of the Supernatural; the Obvious is lost to the eye that plunges
+its gaze into the Obscure.  Almost immediately afterwards you become
+acquainted with a young stranger, whose traits of character interest and
+perplex, attract yet revolt you.  All this time you are engaged in a
+physiological work which severely tasks the brain, and in which you
+examine the intricate question of soul distinct from mind.
+
+"And, here, I can conceive a cause deep-hid amongst what metaphysicians
+would call latent associations, for a train of thought which disposed you
+to accept the fantastic impressions afterwards made on you by the scene in
+the Museum and the visionary talk of Sir Philip Derval.  Doubtless, when
+at college you first studied metaphysical speculation you would have
+glanced over Beattie's 'Essay on Truth' as one of the works written in
+opposition to your favourite, David Hume."
+
+"Yes, I read the book, but I have long since forgotten its arguments."
+
+"Well in that essay, Beattie[1] cites the extraordinary instance of Simon
+Browne, a learned and pious clergyman, who seriously disbelieved the
+existence of his own soul; and imagined that, by interposition of Divine
+power, his soul was annulled, and nothing left but a principle of animal
+life, which he held in common with the brutes!  When, years ago, a
+thoughtful imaginative student, you came on that story, probably enough
+you would have paused, revolved in your own mind and fancy what kind of a
+creature a man might be, if, retaining human life and merely human
+understanding, he was deprived of the powers and properties which
+reasoners have ascribed to the existence of soul.  Something in this young
+man, unconsciously to yourself, revives that forgotten train of meditative
+ideas.  His dread of death as the final cessation of being, his brute-like
+want of sympathy with his kind, his incapacity to comprehend the motives
+which carry man on to scheme and to build for a future that extends beyond
+his grave,--all start up before you at the very moment your reason is
+overtasked, your imagination fevered, in seeking the solution of problems
+which, to a philosophy based upon your system, must always remain
+insoluble.  The young man's conversation not only thus excites your
+fancies,--it disturbs your affections.  He speaks not only of drugs that
+renew youth, but of charms that secure love.  You tremble for your Lilian
+while you hear him!  And the brain thus tasked, the imagination thus
+inflamed, the heart thus agitated, you are presented to Sir Philip Derval,
+whose ghost your patient had supposed he saw weeks ago.
+
+"This person, a seeker after an occult philosophy, which had possibly
+acquainted him with some secrets in nature beyond the pale of our
+conventional experience, though, when analyzed, they might prove to be
+quite reconcilable with sober science, startles you with an undefined
+mysterious charge against the young man who had previously seemed to you
+different from ordinary mortals.  In a room stored with the dead things of
+the brute soulless world, your brain becomes intoxicated with the fumes of
+some vapour which produces effects not uncommon in the superstitious
+practices of the East; your brain, thus excited, brings distinctly before
+you the vague impressions it had before received.  Margrave becomes
+identified with the Louis Grayle of whom you had previously heard an
+obscure and, legendary tale, and all the anomalies in his character are
+explained by his being that which you had contended, in your physiological
+work, it was quite possible for man to be,--namely, mind and body without
+soul!  You were startled by the monster which man would be were your own
+theory possible; and in order to reconcile the contradictions in this very
+monster, you account for knowledge, and for powers that mind without soul
+could not have attained, by ascribing to this prodigy broken memories of a
+former existence, demon attributes from former proficiency in evil magic.
+My friend, there is nothing here which your own study of morbid
+idiosyncracies should not suffice to solve."
+
+"So, then," said I, "you would reduce all that have affected my senses as
+realities into the deceit of illusions?  But," I added, in a whisper,
+terrified by my own question, "do not physiologists agree in this: namely,
+that though illusory phantasms may haunt the sane as well as the insane,
+the sane know that they are only illusions, and the insane do not."
+
+"Such a distinction," answered Faber, "is far too arbitrary and rigid for
+more than a very general and qualified acceptance.  Muller, indeed, who is
+perhaps the highest authority on such a subject, says, with prudent
+reserve, 'When a person who is not insane sees spectres and believes, them
+to be real, his intellect must be imperfectly exercised.'[2]  He would,
+indeed, be a bold physician who maintained that every man who believed he
+had really seen a ghost was of unsound mind.  In Dr. Abercrombie's
+interesting account of spectral illusions, he tells us of a servant-girl
+who believed she saw, at the foot of her bed, the apparition of Curran, in
+a sailor's jacket and an immense pair of whiskers.[3]  No doubt the
+spectre was an illusion, and Dr. Abercrombie very ingeniously suggests the
+association of ideas by which the apparition was conjured up with the
+grotesque adjuncts of the jacket and the whiskers; but the servant-girl,
+in believing the reality of the apparition, was certainly not insane.
+When I read in the American public journals[4] of 'spirit manifestations,'
+in which large numbers of persons, of at least the average degree of
+education, declare that they have actually witnessed various phantasms,
+much more extraordinary than all which you have confided to me, and
+arrive, at once, at the conclusion that they are thus put into direct
+communication with departed souls, I must assume that they are under an
+illusion; but I should be utterly unwarranted in supposing that, because
+they credited that illusion, they were insane.  I should only say with
+Muller, that in their reasoning on the phenomena presented to them, 'their
+intellect was imperfectly exercised.'  And an impression made on the
+senses, being in itself sufficiently rare to excite our wonder, may be
+strengthened till it takes the form of a positive fact, by various
+coincidences which are accepted as corroborative testimony, yet which are,
+nevertheless, nothing more than coincidences found in every day matters
+of business, but only emphatically noticed when we can exclaim, 'How
+astonishing!' In your case such coincidences have been, indeed, very
+signal, and might well aggravate the perplexities into which your reason
+was thrown.  Sir Philip Derval's murder, the missing casket, the exciting
+nature of the manuscript, in which a superstitious interest is already
+enlisted by your expectation to find in it the key to the narrator's
+boasted powers, and his reasons for the astounding denunciation of the man
+whom you suspect to be his murderer,--in all this there is much to
+confirm, nay, to cause, an illusion; and for that very reason, when
+examined by strict laws of evidence, in all this there is but additional
+proof that the illusion was--only illusion.  Your affections contribute
+to strengthen your fancy in its war on your reason.  The girl you so
+passionately love develops, to your disquietude and terror, the visionary
+temperament which, at her age, is ever liable to fantastic caprices.  She
+hears Margrave's song, which you say has a wildness of charm that affects
+and thrills even you.  Who does not know the power of music? and of all
+music, there is none so potential as that of the human voice.  Thus, in
+some languages, charm and song are identical expressions; and even when a
+critic, in our own sober newspapers, extols a Malibran or a Grisi, you
+may be sure that he will call her 'enchantress.'  Well, this lady, your
+betrothed, in whom the nervous system is extremely impressionable, hears a
+voice which, even to your ear, is strangely melodious, and sees a form and
+face which, even to your eye, are endowed with a singular character of
+beauty.  Her fancy is impressed by what she thus hears and sees; and
+impressed the more because, by a coincidence not very uncommon, a face
+like that which she beholds has before been presented to her in a dream
+or a revery.  In the nobleness of genuine, confiding, reverential love,
+rather than impute to your beloved a levity of sentiment that would seem
+to you a treason, you accept the chimera of 'magical fascination.'  In
+this frame of mind you sit down to read the memoir of a mystical
+enthusiast.  Do you begin now to account for the Luminous Shadow?  A
+dream!  And a dream no less because your eyes were open and you believed
+yourself awake.  The diseased imagination resembles those mirrors which,
+being themselves distorted, represent distorted pictures as correct.
+
+"And even this Memoir of Sir Philip Derval's--can you be quite sure that
+you actually read the part which relates to Haroun and Louis Grayle?
+You say that, while perusing the manuscript, you saw the Luminous
+Shadow, and became insensible.  The old woman says you were fast asleep.
+May you not really have fallen into a slumber, and in that slumber
+have dreamed the parts of the tale that relate to Grayle,--dreamed that
+you beheld the Shadow?  Do you remember what is said so well by Dr.
+Abercrombie, to authorize the explanation I suggest to you: 'A
+person under the influence of some strong mental impression falls asleep
+for a few seconds, perhaps without being sensible of it: some scene or
+person appears in a dream, and he starts up under the conviction
+that it was a spectral appearance.'" [5]
+
+"But," said I, "the apparition was seen by me again, and when, certainly,
+I was not sleeping."
+
+"True; and who should know better than a physician so well read as
+yourself that a spectral illusion once beheld is always apt to return
+again in the same form?  Thus, Goethe was long haunted by one image,--the
+phantom of a flower unfolding itself, and developing new flowers.[6]
+Thus, one of our most distinguished philosophers tells us of a lady known
+to himself, who would see her husband, hear him move and speak, when he
+was not even in the house.[7]  But instances of the facility with which
+phantasms, once admitted, repeat themselves to the senses, are numberless.
+Many are recorded by Hibbert and Abercrombie, and every physician in
+extensive practice can add largely, from his own experience, to the list.
+Intense self-concentration is, in itself, a mighty magician.  The
+magicians of the East inculcate the necessity of fast, solitude, and
+meditation for the due development of their imaginary powers.  And I have
+no doubt with effect; because fast, solitude, and meditation--in other
+words, thought or fancy intensely concentred--will both raise apparitions
+and produce the invoker's belief in them.  Spinello, striving to conceive
+the image of Lucifer for his picture of the Fallen Angels, was at last
+actually haunted by the Shadow of the Fiend.  Newton himself has been
+subjected to a phantom, though to him, Son of Light, the spectre presented
+was that of the sun!  You remember the account that Newton gives to Locke
+of this visionary appearance.  He says that 'though he had looked at the
+sun with his right eye only, and not with the left, yet his fancy began
+to make an impression upon his left eye as well as his right; for if he
+shut his right and looked upon the clouds, or a book, or any bright object
+with his left eye, he could see the sun almost as plain as with the right,
+if he did but intend his fancy a little while on it;' nay, 'for some
+months after, as often as he began to meditate on the phenomena, the
+spectrum of the sun began to return, even though he lay in bed at
+midnight, with his curtains drawn!'  Seeing, then, how any vivid
+impression once made will recur, what wonder that you should behold in
+your prison the Shining Shadow that had first startled you in a wizard's
+chamber when poring over the records of a murdered visionary?  The more
+minutely you analyze your own hallucinations--pardon me the word--the more
+they assume the usual characteristics of a dream; contradictory,
+illogical, even in the marvels they represent.  Can any two persons be
+more totally unlike each other, not merely as to form and years, but as to
+all the elements of character, than the Grayle of whom you read, or
+believe you read, and the Margrave in whom you evidently think that Grayle
+is existent still?  The one represented, you say, as gloomy, saturnine,
+with vehement passions, but with an original grandeur of thought and will,
+consumed by an internal remorse; the other you paint to me as a joyous and
+wayward darling of Nature, acute yet frivolous, free from even the
+ordinary passions of youth, taking delight in innocent amusements,
+incapable of continuous study, without a single pang of repentance for the
+crimes you so fancifully impute to him.  And now, when your suspicions, so
+romantically conceived, are dispelled by positive facts, now, when it is
+clear that Margrave neither murdered Sir Philip Derval nor abstracted the
+memoir, you still, unconsciously to yourself, draw on your imagination in
+order to excuse the suspicion your pride of intellect declines to banish,
+and suppose that this youthful sorcerer tempted the madman to the murder,
+the woman to the theft--"
+
+"But you forget the madman said 'that he was led on by the Luminous Shadow
+of a beautiful youth,' that the woman said also that she was impelled by
+some mysterious agency."
+
+"I do not forget those coincidences; but how your learning would dismiss
+them as nugatory were your imagination not disposed to exaggerate them!
+When you read the authentic histories of any popular illusion, such as the
+spurious inspirations of the Jansenist Convulsionaries, the apparitions
+that invaded convents, as deposed in the trial of Urbain Grandier, the
+confessions of witches and wizards in places the most remote from each
+other, or, at this day, the tales of 'spirit-manifestation' recorded in
+half the towns and villages of America,--do not all the superstitious
+impressions of a particular time have a common family likeness?  What one
+sees, another sees, though there has been no communication between the
+two.  I cannot tell you why these phantasms thus partake of the nature of
+an atmospheric epidemic; the fact remains incontestable.  And strange as
+may be the coincidence between your impressions of a mystic agency and
+those of some other brains not cognizant of the chimeras of your own,
+still, is it not simpler philosophy to say, 'They are coincidences of the
+same nature which made witches in the same epoch all tell much the same
+story of the broomsticks they rode and the sabbats at which they danced to
+the fiend's piping,' and there leave the matter, as in science we must
+leave many of the most elementary and familiar phenomena inexplicable as
+to their causes,--is not this, I say, more philosophical than to insist
+upon an explanation which accepts the supernatural rather than leave the
+extraordinary unaccounted for?"
+
+"As you speak," said I, resting my downcast face upon my hand, "I should
+speak to any patient who had confided to me the tale I have told to you."
+
+"And yet the explanation does not wholly satisfy you?  Very likely: to
+some phenomena there is, as yet, no explanation.  Perhaps Newton himself
+could not explain quite to his own satisfaction why he was haunted at
+midnight by the spectrum of a sun; though I have no doubt that some later
+philosopher whose ingenuity has been stimulated by Newton's account, has,
+by this time, suggested a rational solution of that enigma.[8]  To return
+to your own case.  I have offered such interpretations of the mysteries
+that confound you as appear to me authorized by physiological science.
+Should you adduce other facts which physiological science wants the data
+to resolve into phenomena always natural, however rare, still hold fast to
+that simple saying of Goethe: 'Mysteries are not necessarily miracles.'
+And if all which physiological science comprehends in its experience
+wholly fails us, I may then hazard certain conjectures in which, by
+acknowledging ignorance, one is compelled to recognize the Marvellous (for
+as where knowledge enters, the Marvellous recedes, so where knowledge
+falters, the Marvellous advances); yet still, even in those conjectures, I
+will distinguish the Marvellous from the Supernatural.  But, for the
+present, I advise you to accept the guess that may best quiet the fevered
+imagination which any bolder guess would only more excite."
+
+"You are right," said I, rising proudly to the full height of my stature,
+my head erect and my heart defying.  "And so let this subject be renewed
+no more between us.  I will brood over it no more myself.  I regain the
+unclouded realm of my human intelligence; and, in that intelligence, I
+mock the sorcerer and disdain the spectre."
+
+[1] Beattie's "Essay on Truth," part i. c. ii. 3.  The story of
+Simon Browne is to be found in "The Adventurer."
+
+[2] Miller's Physiology of the Senses, p. 394.
+
+[3] Abercrombie on the Intellectual Powers, p. 281. (15th edition.)
+
+[4] At the date of Faber's conversation with Allen Fenwick, the
+(so-called) spirit manifestations had not spread from America over Europe.
+But if they had, Faber's views would, no doubt, have remained the same.
+
+[5] Abercrombie on the Intellectual Powers, p. 278. (15th edition.)
+
+This author, not more to be admired for his intelligence than his candour,
+and who is entitled to praise for a higher degree of original thought
+than that to which he modestly pretends, relates a curious anecdote
+illustrating "the analogy between dreaming and spectral illusion, which he
+received from the gentleman to which it occurred,--an eminent medical
+friend:" "Having sat up late one evening, under considerable anxiety for
+one of his children, who was ill, he fell asleep in his chair, and had a
+frightful dream, in which the prominent figure was an immense baboon.  He
+awoke with the fright, got up instantly, and walked to a table which was
+in the middle of the room.  He was then quite awake, and quite conscious
+of the articles around him; but close by the wall in the end of the
+apartment he distinctly saw the baboon making the same grimaces which he
+had seen in his dreams; and this spectre continued visible for about half
+a minute."  Now, a man who saw only a baboon would be quite ready to admit
+that it was but an optical illusion; but if, instead of a baboon, he had
+seen an intimate friend, and that friend, by some coincidence of time, had
+died about that date, he would be a very strong-minded man if he admitted
+for the mystery of seeing his friend the same natural solution which he
+would readily admit for seeing a baboon.
+
+[6] See Muller's observations on this phenomenon, "Physiology of the
+Senses," Baley's translation, p. 1395.
+
+[7] Sir David Brewster's Letters on Natural Magic, p. 39.
+
+[8] Newton's explanation is as follows:  "This story I tell you to
+let you understand, that in the observation related by Mr. Boyle, the
+man's fancy probably concurred with the impression made by the sun's
+light to produce that phantasm of the sun which he constantly saw in
+bright objects, and so your question about the cause of this phantasm
+involves another about the power of the fancy, which I must confess is
+too hard a knot for me to untie.  To place this effect in a constant
+motion is hard, because the sun ought then to appear perpetually.  It
+seems rather to consist in a disposition of the sensorium to move the
+imagination strongly, and to be easily moved both by the imagination and
+by the light as often as bright objects are looked upon."--Letter from Sir
+I. Newton to Locke, Lord Kinq's Life of Locke, vol. i. pp. 405-408.
+
+Dr. Roget (Animal and Vegetable Physiology considered with reference to
+Natural Theology, "Bridgewater Treatise," pp.  524, 525) thus refers to
+this phenomenon, which he states "all of us may experience ":--
+
+"When the impressions are very vivid" (Dr. Roget is speaking of visual
+impressions), "another phenomenon often takes place,--namely, their
+_subsequent recurrence after a certain interval, during which they are not
+felt, and quite independently of any renewed application of the cause
+which had originally excited them."_  (I mark by italics the words which
+more precisely coincide with Julius Faber's explanations.)  "If, for
+example, we look steadfastly at the sun for a second or two, and then
+immediately close our eyes, the image, or spectrum, of the sun remains for
+a long time present to the mind, as if the light were still acting on the
+retina.  It then gradually fades and disappears; but if we continue to
+keep the eyes shut, the same impression will, after a certain time, recur,
+and again vanish: and this phenomenon will be repeated at intervals, the
+sensation becoming fainter at each renewal.  It is probable that these
+reappearances of the image, after the light which produced the original
+impression has been withdrawn, are occasioned by spontaneous affections of
+the retina itself which are conveyed to the sensorium.  In other cases,
+where the impressions are less strong, the physical changes producing
+these changes are perhaps confined to the sensorium."
+
+It may be said that there is this difference between the spectrum of the
+sun and such a phantom as that which perplexed Allen Fenwick,--namely,
+that the sun has been actually beheld before its visionary appearance can
+be reproduced, and that Allen Fenwick only imagines he has seen the
+apparition which repeats itself to his fancy.  "But there are grounds for
+the suspicion" (says Dr. Hibbert, "Philosophy of Apparitions,"  p.  250),
+"that when ideas of vision are vivified to the height of sensation, a
+corresponding affection of the optic nerve accompanies the illusion."
+Muller ("Physiology of the Senses," p. 1392, Baley's translation) states
+the same opinion still more strongly; and Sir David Brewster, quoted by
+Dr. Hibbert (p. 251) says:  "In examining these mental impressions, I
+have found that they follow the motions of the eyeball exactly like the
+spectral impressions of luminous objects, and that they resemble them also
+in their apparent immobility when the eye is displaced by an external
+force.  If this result (which I state with much diffidence, from having
+only my own experience in its favour) shall be found generally true by
+others, it will follow that the objects of mental contemplation may be
+seen as distinctly as external objects, and will occupy the same local
+position in the axis of vision, as if they had been formed by the agency
+of light."  Hence the impression of an image once conveyed to the senses,
+no matter how, whether by actual or illusory vision, is liable to renewal,
+"independently of any renewed application of the cause which had
+originally excited it," and the image can be seen in that renewal "as
+distinctly as external objects," for indeed "the revival of the fantastic
+figure really does affect those points of the retina which had been
+previously impressed."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XLVI.
+
+Julius Faber and Amy Lloyd stayed in my house three day, I and in their
+presence I felt a healthful sense of security and peace.  Amy wished to
+visit her father's house, and I asked Faber, in taking her there, to seize
+the occasion to see Lilian, that he might communicate to me his impression
+of a case so peculiar.  I prepared Mrs. Ashleigh for this visit by a
+previous note.  When the old man and the child came back, both brought me
+comfort.  Amy was charmed with Lilian, who had received her with the
+sweetness natural to her real character, and I loved to hear Lilian's
+praise from those innocent lips.
+
+Faber's report was still more calculated to console me.
+
+"I have seen, I have conversed with her long and familiarly.  You were
+quite right,--there is no tendency to consumption in that exquisite, if
+delicate, organization; nor do I see cause for the fear to which your
+statement had pre-inclined me.  That head is too nobly formed for any
+constitutional cerebral infirmity.  In its organization, ideality, wonder,
+veneration, are large, it is true, but they are balanced by other organs,
+now perhaps almost dormant, but which will come into play as life passes
+from romance into duty.  Something at this moment evidently oppresses her
+mind.  In conversing with her, I observe abstraction, listlessness; but I
+am so convinced of her truthfulness, that if she has once told you she
+returned your affection, and pledged to you her faith, I should, in your
+place, rest perfectly satisfied that whatever be the cloud that now rests
+on her imagination, and for the time obscures the idea of yourself, it
+will pass away."
+
+Faber was a believer in the main divisions of phrenology, though he did
+not accept all the dogmas of Gall and Spurzheim; while, to my mind, the
+refutation of phrenology in its fundamental propositions had been
+triumphantly established by the lucid arguments of Sir W. Hamilton.[1]
+But when Faber rested on phrenological observations assurances in honour
+of Lilian, I forgot Sir W. Hamilton, and believed in phrenology.  As iron
+girders and pillars expand and contract with the mere variations of
+temperature, so will the strongest conviction on which the human intellect
+rests its judgment vary with the changes of the human heart; and the
+building is only safe where these variations are foreseen and allowed for
+by a wisdom intent on self-knowledge.[2]
+
+There was much in the affection that had sprung up between Julius Faber
+and Amy Lloyd which touched my heart and softened all its emotions.  This
+man, unblessed, like myself, by conjugal and parental ties, had, in his
+solitary age, turned for solace to the love of a child, as I, in the pride
+of manhood, had turned to the love of woman.  But his love was without
+fear, without jealousy, without trouble.  My sunshine came to me in a
+fitful ray, through clouds that had gathered over my noon; his sunshine
+covered all his landscape, hallowed and hallowing by the calm of declining
+day.
+
+And Amy was no common child.  She had no exuberant imagination; she was
+haunted by no whispers from Afar; she was a creature fitted for the
+earth,--to accept its duties and to gladden its cares.  Her tender
+observation, fine and tranquil, was alive to all the important household
+trifles by which, at the earliest age, man's allotted soother asserts her
+privilege to tend and to comfort.  It was pleasant to see her moving so
+noiselessly through the rooms I had devoted to her venerable protector,
+knowing all his simple wants, and providing for them as if by the
+mechanism of a heart exquisitely moulded to the loving uses of life.
+Sometimes when I saw her setting his chair by the window (knowing, as I
+did, how much he habitually loved to be near the light) and smoothing his
+papers (in which he was apt to be unmethodical), placing the mark in his
+book when he ceased to read, divining, almost without his glance, some
+wish passing through his mind, and then seating herself at his feet, often
+with her work--which was always destined for him or for one of her absent
+brothers,--now and then with the one small book that she had carried with
+her, a selection of Bible stories compiled for children,--sometimes when I
+saw her thus, how I wished that Lilian, too, could have seen her, and have
+compared her own ideal fantasies with those young developments of the
+natural heavenly Woman!
+
+But was there nothing in that sight from which I, proud of my arid reason
+even in its perplexities, might have taken lessons for myself?
+
+On the second evening of Faber's visit I brought to him the draft of deeds
+for the sale of his property.  He had never been a man of business out of
+his profession; he was impatient to sell his property, and disposed to
+accept an offer at half its value.  I insisted on taking on myself the
+task of negotiator; perhaps, too, in this office I was egotistically
+anxious to prove to the great physician that which he believed to be my
+"hallucination" had in no way obscured my common-sense in the daily
+affairs of life.  So I concluded, and in a few hours, terms for his
+property that were only just, but were infinitely more advantageous than
+had appeared to himself to be possible.  But as I approached him with the
+papers, he put his finger to his lips.  Amy was standing by him with her
+little book in her hand, and his own Bible lay open on the table.  He was
+reading to her from the Sacred Volume itself, and impressing on her the
+force and beauty of one of the Parables, the adaptation of which had
+perplexed her; when he had done, she kissed him, bade him goodnight, and
+went away to rest.  Then said Faber thoughtfully, and as if to himself
+more than me,--
+
+"What a lovely bridge between old age and childhood is religion!  How
+intuitively the child begins with prayer and worship on entering life, and
+how intuitively on quitting life the old man turns back to prayer and
+worship, putting himself again side by side with the infant!"
+
+I made no answer, but, after a pause, spoke of fines and freeholds,
+title-deeds and money; and when the business on hand was concluded, asked
+my learned guest if, before he departed, he would deign to look over the
+pages of my ambitious Physiological Work.  There were parts of it on which
+I much desired his opinion, touching on subjects in which his special
+studies made him an authority as high as our land possessed.
+
+He made me bring him the manuscript, and devoted much of that night and
+the next day to its perusal.
+
+When he gave it me back, which was not till the morning of his departure,
+he commenced with eulogies on the scope of its design, and the manner of
+its execution, which flattered my vanity so much that I could not help
+exclaiming, "Then, at least, there is no trace of 'hallucination' here!"
+
+"Alas, my poor Allen! here, perhaps, hallucination, or self-deception, is
+more apparent than in all the strange tales you confided to me.  For here
+is the hallucination of the man seated on the shores of Nature, and who
+would say to its measureless sea, 'So far shalt thou go and no farther;'
+here is the hallucination of the creature, who, not content with exploring
+the laws of the Creator, ends with submitting to his interpretation of
+some three or four laws, in the midst of a code of which all the rest are
+in a language unknown to him, the powers and free-will of the Lawgiver
+Himself; here is the hallucination by which Nature is left Godless,
+because Man is left soulless.  What would matter all our speculations on a
+Deity who would cease to exist for us when we are in the grave?  Why mete
+out, like Archytas, the earth and the sea, and number the sands on the
+shore that divides them, if the end of this wisdom be a handful of dust
+sprinkled over a skull!
+
+   "'Nec quidquam tibi prodest
+     Aerias tentasse dornos, animoque rotundum
+     Percurrisse polum naorituro.'
+
+"Your book is a proof of the soul that you fail to discover.  Without a
+soul, no man would work for a Future that begins for his fame when the
+breath is gone from his body.  Do you remember how you saw that little
+child praying at the grave of her father?  Shall I tell you that in her
+simple orisons she prayed for the benefactor,--who had cared for the
+orphan; who had reared over dust that tomb which, in a Christian
+burial-ground, is a mute but perceptible memorial of Christian hopes; that
+the child prayed, haughty man, for you?  And you sat by, knowing nought of
+this; sat by, amongst the graves, troubled and tortured with ghastly
+doubts, vain of a reason that was sceptical of eternity, and yet shaken
+like a reed by a moment's marvel.  Shall I tell the child to pray for you
+no more; that you disbelieve in a soul?  If you do so, what is the
+efficacy of prayer?  Speak, shall I tell her this?  Shall the infant pray
+for you never more?"
+
+I was silent; I was thrilled.
+
+"Has it never occurred to you, who, in denying all innate perceptions as
+well as ideas, have passed on to deductions from which poor Locke, humble
+Christian that he was, would have shrunk in dismay,--has it never
+occurred to you as a wonderful fact, that the easiest thing in the world
+to teach a child is that which seems to metaphysical schoolmen the
+abstrusest of all problems?  Read all those philosophers wrangling about a
+First Cause, deciding on what are miracles, and then again deciding that
+such miracles cannot be; and when one has answered another, and left in
+the crucible of wisdom a caput mortuum of ignorance, then turn your eyes,
+and look at the infant praying to the invisible God at his mother's knees.
+This idea, so miraculously abstract, of a Power the infant has never seen,
+that cannot be symbolled forth and explained to him by the most erudite
+sage,--a Power, nevertheless, that watches over him, that hears him, that
+sees him, that will carry him across the grave, that will enable him to
+live on forever,--this double mystery of a Divinity and of a Soul, the
+infant learns with the most facile readiness, at the first glimpse of his
+reasoning faculty.  Before you can teach him a rule in addition, before
+you can venture to drill him into his horn-book, he leaps, with one
+intuitive spring of all his ideas, to the comprehension of the truths
+which are only incomprehensible to blundering sages!  And you, as you
+stand before me, dare not say, 'Let the child pray for me no more!' But
+will the Creator accept the child's prayer for the man who refuses prayer
+for himself?  Take my advice, pray!  And in this counsel I do not overstep
+my province.  I speak not as a preacher, but as a physician.  For health
+is a word that comprehends our whole organization, and a just equilibrium
+of all faculties and functions is the condition of health.  As in your
+Lilian the equilibrium is deranged by the over-indulgence of a spiritual
+mysticism which withdraws from the nutriment of duty the essential pabulum
+of sober sense, so in you the resolute negation of disciplined spiritual
+communion between Thought and Divinity robs imagination of its noblest
+and safest vent.  Thus, from opposite extremes, you and your Lilian meet
+in the same region of mist and cloud, losing sight of each other and of
+the true ends of life, as her eyes only gaze on the stars and yours only
+bend to the earth.  Were I advising her, I should say: 'Your Creator has
+placed the scene of your trial below, and not in the stars.'  Advising
+you, I say: 'But in the trial below, man should recognize education for
+heaven.' In a word, I would draw somewhat more downward her fancy, raise
+somewhat more upward your reason.  Take my advice then,--Pray.  Your
+mental system needs the support of prayer in order to preserve its
+balance.  In the embarrassment and confusion of your senses, clearness of
+perception will come with habitual and tranquil confidence in Him who
+alike rules the universe and reads the heart.  I only say here what has
+been said much better before by a reasoner in whom all Students of Nature
+recognize a guide.  I see on your table the very volume of Bacon which
+contains the passage I commend to your reflection.  Here it is.  Listen:
+'Take an example of a dog, and mark what a generosity and courage he will
+put on when he finds himself maintained by a man who, to him, is instead
+of a God, or melior natura, which courage is manifestly such as that
+creature, without that confidence of a better nature than his own, could
+never attain.  So man, when he resteth and assureth himself upon Divine
+protection and favour, gathereth a force and faith which human nature
+could not obtain.'[3]  You are silent, but your gesture tells me your
+doubt,--a doubt which your heart, so femininely tender, will not speak
+aloud lest you should rob the old man of a hope with which your strength
+of manhood dispenses,--you doubt the efficacy of prayer!  Pause and
+reflect, bold but candid inquirer into the laws of that guide you call
+Nature.  If there were no efficacy in prayer; if prayer were as mere an
+illusion of superstitious fantasy as aught against which your reason now
+struggles, do you think that Nature herself would have made it amongst the
+most common and facile of all her dictates?  Do you believe that if there
+really did not exist that tie between Man and his Maker--that link
+between life here and life hereafter which is found in what we call Soul
+alone--that wherever you look through the universe, you would behold a
+child at Prayer?  Nature inculcates nothing that is superfluous.  Nature
+does not impel the leviathan or the lion, the eagle or the moth, to pray;
+she impels only man.  Why?  Because man only has soul, and Soul seeks to
+commune with the Everlasting, as a fountain struggles up to its source.
+Burn your book.  It would found you a reputation for learning and
+intellect and courage, I allow; but learning and intellect and courage
+wasted against a truth, like spray against a rock!  A truth valuable to
+the world, the world will never part with.  You will not injure the truth,
+but you will mislead and may destroy many, whose best security is in the
+truth which you so eruditely insinuate to be a fable.  Soul and Hereafter
+are the heritage of all men; the humblest, journeyman in those streets,
+the pettiest trader behind those counters, have in those beliefs their
+prerogatives of royalty.  You would dethrone and embrute the lords of the
+earth by your theories.  For my part, having given the greater part of my
+life to the study and analysis of facts, I would rather be the author of
+the tritest homily, or the baldest poem, that inculcated that imperishable
+essence of the soul to which I have neither scalpel nor probe, than be the
+founder of the subtlest school, or the framer of the loftiest verse, that
+robbed my fellow-men of their faith in a spirit that eludes the
+dissecting-knife,--in a being that escapes the grave-digger.  Burn your
+book!  Accept This Book instead; Read and Pray."
+
+He placed his Bible in my hand, embraced me, and, an hour afterwards, the
+old man and the child left my hearth solitary once more.
+
+[1] The summary of this distinguished lecturer's objections to phrenology
+is to be found in the Appendix to vol i. of "Lectures on Metaphysics," p.
+404, et seq. Edition 1859.
+
+[2] The change of length of iron girders caused by variation of
+temperature has not unfrequently brought down the whole edifice into which
+they were admitted.  Good engineers and architects allow for such changes
+produced by temperature.  In the tubular bridge across the Menai Straits,
+a self-acting record of the daily amount of its contraction and expansion
+is ingeniously Contrived.
+
+[3] Bacon's "Essay on Atheism."  This quotation is made with admirable
+felicity and force by Dr. Whewell, page 378 of Bridgewater Treatise on
+Astronomy and General Physics considered with reference to Natural
+Theology.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XLVII.
+
+That night, as I sat in my study, very thoughtful and very mournful, I
+resolved all that Julius Faber had said; and the impression his words had
+produced became gradually weaker and weaker, as my reason, naturally
+combative, rose up with all the replies which my philosophy suggested.
+No; if my imagination had really seduced and betrayed me into monstrous
+credulities, it was clear that the best remedy to such morbid tendencies
+towards the Superstitious was in the severe exercise of the faculties most
+opposed to Superstition,--in the culture of pure reasoning, in the science
+of absolute fact.  Accordingly, I placed before me the very book which
+Julius Faber had advised me to burn; I forced all my powers of
+mind to go again over the passages which contained the doctrines that his
+admonition had censured; and before daybreak, I had stated the substance
+of his argument, and the logical reply to it, in an elaborate addition to
+my chapter on "Sentimental Philosophers."  While thus rejecting the
+purport of his parting counsels, I embodied in another portion of my work
+his views on my own "illusions;" and as here my commonsense was in concord
+with his, I disposed of all my own previous doubts in an addition to my
+favourite chapter "On the Cheats of the Imagination."  And when the pen
+dropped from my hand, and the day-star gleamed through the window, my
+heart escaped from the labour of my mind, and flew back to the image of
+Lilian.  The pride of the philosopher died out of me, the sorrow of the
+man reigned supreme, and I shrank from the coming of the sun, despondent.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XLVIII.
+
+Not till the law had completed its proceedings, and satisfied the public
+mind as to the murder of Sir Philip Derval, were the remains of the
+deceased consigned to the family mausoleum.  The funeral was, as may be
+supposed, strictly private, and when it was over, the excitement caused by
+an event so tragical and singular subsided.  New topics engaged the public
+talk, and--in my presence, at least--the delicate consideration due to one
+whose name had been so painfully mixed up in the dismal story forbore a
+topic which I could not be expected to hear without distressful emotion.
+Mrs. Ashleigh I saw frequently at my own house; she honestly confessed
+that Lilian had not shown that grief at the cancelling of our engagement
+which would alone justify Mrs. Ashleigh in asking me again to see her
+daughter, and retract my conclusions against our union.  She said that
+Lilian was quiet, not uncheerful, never spoke of me nor of Margrave, but
+seemed absent and pre-occupied as before, taking pleasure in nothing that
+had been wont to please her; not in music, nor books, nor that tranquil
+pastime which women call work, and in which they find excuse to meditate,
+in idleness, their own fancies.  She rarely stirred out, even in the
+garden; when she did, her eyes seemed to avoid the house in which Margrave
+had lodged, and her steps the old favourite haunt by the Monks' Well.  She
+would remain silent for long hours together, but the silence did not
+appear melancholy.  For the rest, her health was more than usually good.
+Still Mrs. Ashleigh persisted in her belief that, sooner or later, Lilian
+would return to her former self, her former sentiments for me; and she
+entreated me not, as yet, to let the world know that our engagement was
+broken off.  "For if," she said, with good sense, "if it should prove not
+to be broken off, only suspended, and afterwards happily renewed, there
+will be two stories to tell when no story be needed.  Besides, I should
+dread the effect on Lilian, if offensive gossips babbled to her on a
+matter that would excite so much curiosity as the rupture of a union in
+which our neighbours have taken so general an interest."
+
+I had no reason to refuse acquiescence in Mrs. Ashleigh's request, but I
+did not share in her hopes; I felt that the fair prospects of my life
+were blasted; I could never love another, never wed another; I resigned
+myself to a solitary hearth, rejoiced, at least, that Margrave had not
+revisited at Mrs. Ashleigh's,--had not, indeed, reappeared in the town.
+He was still staying with Strahan, who told me that his guest had
+ensconced himself in Forman's old study, and amused himself with
+reading--though not for long at a time--the curious old books and
+manuscripts found in the library, or climbing trees like a schoolboy, and
+familiarizing himself with the deer and the cattle, which would group
+round him quite tame, and feed from his hand.  Was this the description of
+a criminal?  But if Sir Philip's assertion were really true; if the
+criminal were man without soul; if without soul, man would have no
+conscience, never be troubled by repentance, and the vague dread of a
+future world,--why, then, should not the criminal be gay despite his
+crimes, as the white bear gambols as friskly after his meal on human
+flesh?  These questions would haunt me, despite my determination to accept
+as the right solution of all marvels the construction put on my narrative
+by Julius Faber.
+
+Days passed; I saw and heard nothing of Margrave.  I began half to hope
+that, in the desultory and rapid changes of mood and mind which
+characterized his restless nature, he had forgotten my existence.
+
+One morning I went out early on my rounds, when I met Straban
+unexpectedly.
+
+"I was in search of you," he said, "for more than one person has told me
+that you are looking ill and jaded.  So you are!  And the town now is hot
+and unhealthy.  You must come to Derval Court for a week or so.  You can
+ride into town every day to see your patients.  Don't refuse.  Margrave,
+who is still with me, sends all kind messages, and bade me say that he
+entreats you to come to the house at which he also is a guest!"
+
+I started.  What had the Scin-Laeca required of me, and obtained to that
+condition my promise?"  If you are asked to the house at which I also am a
+guest, you will come; you will meet and converse with me as guest speaks
+to guest in the house of a host!"  Was this one of the coincidences which
+my reason was bound to accept as coincidences, and nothing more?  Tut,
+tut!  Was I returning again to my "hallucinations"?  Granting that Faber
+and common-sense were in the right, what was this Margrave?  A man to
+whose friendship, acuteness, and energy I was under the deepest
+obligations,--to whom I was indebted for active services that had saved my
+life from a serious danger, acquitted my honour of a horrible suspicion.
+"I thank you," I said to Strahan, "I will come; not, indeed, for a week,
+but, at all events, for a day or two."
+
+"That's right; I will call for you in the carriage at six o'clock.  You
+will have done your day's work by then?"
+
+"Yes; I will so arrange."
+
+On our way to Derval Court that evening, Strahan talked much about
+Margrave, of whom, nevertheless, he seemed to be growing weary.
+
+"His high spirits are too much for one," said he; "and then so
+restless,--so incapable of sustained quiet conversation.  And, clever
+though he is, he can't help me in the least about the new house I shall
+build.  He has no notion of construction.  I don't think he could build a
+barn."
+
+"I thought you did not like to demolish the old house, and would content
+yourself with pulling down the more ancient part of it?"
+
+"True.  At first it seemed a pity to destroy so handsome a mansion; but
+you see, since poor Sir Philip's manuscript, on which he set such store,
+has been too mutilated, I fear, to allow me to effect his wish with regard
+to it, I think I ought at least scrupulously to obey his other whims.
+And, besides, I don't know, there are odd noises about the old house.  I
+don't believe in haunted houses; still there is something dreary in
+strange sounds at the dead of night, even if made by rats, or winds
+through decaying rafters.  You, I remember at college, had a taste for
+architecture, and can draw plans.  I wish to follow out Sir Philip's
+design, but on a smaller scale, and with more attention to comfort."
+
+Thus he continued to run on, satisfied to find me a silent and attentive
+listener.  We arrived at the mansion an hour before sunset, the westering
+light shining full against the many windows cased in mouldering pilasters,
+and making the general dilapidation of the old place yet more mournfully
+evident.
+
+It was but a few minutes to the dinner-hour.  I went up at once to the
+room appropriated to me,--not the one I had before occupied.  Strahan had
+already got together a new establishment.  I was glad to find in the
+servant who attended me an old acquaintance.  He had been in my own employ
+when I first settled at L----, and left me to get married.  He and his
+wife were now both in Strahan's service.  He spoke warmly of his new
+master and his contentment with his situation, while he unpacked my
+carpet-bag and assisted me to change my dress.  But the chief object of
+his talk and his praise was Mr. Margrave.
+
+"Such a bright young gentleman, like the first fine day in May!"
+
+When I entered the drawing-room, Margrave and Strahan were both there.
+The former was blithe and genial, as usual, in his welcome.  At dinner,
+and during the whole evening till we retired severally to our own rooms,
+he was the principal talker,--recounting incidents of travel, always very
+loosely strung together, jesting, good-humouredly enough, at Strahan's
+sudden hobby for building, then putting questions to me about mutual
+acquaintances, but never waiting for an answer; and every now and then, as
+if at random, startling us with some brilliant aphorism, or some
+suggestion drawn from abstract science or unfamiliar erudition.  The whole
+effect was sparkling, but I could well understand that, if long continued,
+it would become oppressive.  The soul has need of pauses of
+repose,--intervals of escape, not only from the flesh, but even from the
+mind.  A man of the loftiest intellect will experience times when mere
+intellect not only fatigues him, but amidst its most original conceptions,
+amidst its proudest triumphs, has a something trite and commonplace
+compared with one of those vague intimations of a spiritual destiny which
+are not within the ordinary domain of reason; and, gazing abstractedly
+into space, will leave suspended some problem of severest thought, or
+uncompleted some golden palace of imperial poetry, to indulge in hazy
+reveries, that do not differ from those of an innocent, quiet child!  The
+soul has a long road to travel--from time through eternity.  It demands
+its halting hours of contemplation.  Contemplation is serene.  But with
+such wants of an immortal immaterial spirit, Margrave had no fellowship,
+no sympathy; and for myself, I need scarcely add that the lines I have
+just traced I should not have written at the date at which my narrative
+has now arrived.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XLIX.
+
+I had no case that necessitated my return to L---- the following day.  The
+earlier hours of the forenoon I devoted to Strahan and his building plans.
+Margrave flitted in and out of the room fitfully as an April sunbeam,
+sometimes flinging himself on a sofa, and reading for a few minutes one of
+the volumes of the ancient mystics, in which Sir Philip's library was so
+rich.  I remember it was a volume of Proclus.  He read that crabbed and
+difficult Greek with a fluency that surprised me.  "I picked up the
+ancient Greek," said he, "years ago, in learning the modern."  But the
+book soon tired him; then he would come and disturb us, archly enjoying
+Strahan's peevishness at interruption; then he would throw open the window
+and leap down, chanting one of his wild savage airs; and in another moment
+he was half hid under the drooping boughs of a broad lime-tree, amidst the
+antlers of deer that gathered fondly round him.  In the afternoon my host
+was called away to attend some visitors of importance, and I found myself
+on the sward before the house, right in view of the mausoleum and alone
+with Margrave.
+
+I turned my eyes from that dumb House of Death wherein rested the corpse
+of the last lord of the soil, so strangely murdered, with a strong desire
+to speak out to Margrave the doubts respecting himself that tortured me.
+But--setting aside the promise to the contrary, which I had given, or
+dreamed I had given, to the Luminous Shadow--to fulfil that desire would
+have been impossible,--impossible to any one gazing on that radiant
+youthful face!  I think I see him now as I saw him then: a white doe, that
+even my presence could not scare away from him, clung lovingly to his
+side, looking up at him with her soft eyes.  He stood there like the
+incarnate principle of mythological sensuous life.  I have before applied
+to him that illustration; let the repetition be pardoned.  Impossible, I
+repeat it, to say to that creature, face to face, "Art thou the master of
+demoniac arts, and the instigator of secret murder?"  As if from
+redundant happiness within himself, he was humming, or rather cooing, a
+strain of music, so sweet, so wildly sweet, and so unlike the music one
+hears from tutored lips in crowded rooms!  I passed my hand over my
+forehead in bewilderment and awe.
+
+"Are there," I said unconsciously,--"are there, indeed, such prodigies in
+Nature?"
+
+"Nature!" he cried, catching up the word; "talk to me of Nature!  Talk of
+her, the wondrous blissful mother!  Mother I may well call her.  I am her
+spoiled child, her darling!  But oh, to die, ever to die, ever to lose
+sight of Nature!--to rot senseless, whether under these turfs or within
+those dead walls--"
+
+I could not resist the answer,--
+
+"Like yon murdered man! murdered, and by whom?"
+
+"By whom?  I thought that was clearly proved."
+
+"The hand was proved; what influence moved the hand?"
+
+"Tush! the poor wretch spoke of a Demon.  Who can tell?  Nature herself is
+a grand destroyer.  See that pretty bird, in its beak a writhing worm!
+All Nature's children live to take life; none, indeed, so lavishly as man.
+What hecatombs slaughtered, not to satisfy the irresistible sting of
+hunger, but for the wanton ostentation of a feast, which he may scarcely
+taste, or for the mere sport that he finds in destroying!  We speak with
+dread of the beasts of prey: what beast of prey is so dire a ravager as
+man,--so cruel and so treacherous?  Look at yon flock of sheep, bred and
+fattened for the shambles; and this hind that I caress,--if I were the
+park-keeper, and her time for my bullet had come, would you think her life
+was the safer because, in my own idle whim, I had tamed her to trust to
+the hand raised to slay her?"
+
+"It is true," said I,--"a grim truth.  Nature, on the surface so loving
+and so gentle, is full of terror in her deeps when our thought descends
+into their abyss!"
+
+Strahan now joined us with a party of country visitors.  "Margrave is the
+man to show you the beauties of this park," said he.  "Margrave knows
+every bosk and dingle, twisted old thorn-tree, or opening glade, in its
+intricate, undulating ground."
+
+Margrave seemed delighted at this proposition; and as he led us through
+the park, though the way was long, though the sun was fierce, no one
+seemed fatigued.  For the pleasure he felt in pointing out detached
+beauties which escaped an ordinary eye was contagious.  He did not talk as
+talks the poet or the painter; but at some lovely effect of light amongst
+the tremulous leaves, some sudden glimpse of a sportive rivulet below, he
+would halt, point it out to us in silence, and with a kind of childlike
+ecstasy in his own bright face, that seemed to reflect the life and the
+bliss of the blithe summer day itself.
+
+Thus seen, all my doubts in his dark secret nature faded away,--all my
+horror, all my hate; it was impossible to resist the charm that breathed
+round him, not to feel a tender, affectionate yearning towards him as to
+some fair happy child.  Well might he call himself the Darling of Nature.
+Was he not the mysterious likeness of that awful Mother, beautiful as
+Apollo in one aspect, direful as Typhon in another?
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER L.
+
+"What a strange-looking cane you have, sir!" said a little girl, who was
+one of the party, and who had entwined her arm round Margrave's.  "Let me
+look at it."
+
+"Yes," said Strahan," that cane, or rather walking-staff, is worth looking
+at.  Margrave bought it in Egypt, and declares that it is very ancient."
+
+This staff seemed constructed from a reed: looked at, it seemed light, in
+the hand it felt heavy; it was of a pale, faded yellow, wrought with black
+rings at equal distances, and graven with half obliterated characters that
+seemed hieroglyphic.  I remembered to have seen Margrave with it before,
+but I had never noticed it with any attention until now, when it was
+passed from hand to hand.  At the head of the cane there was a large
+unpolished stone of a dark blue.
+
+"Is this a pebble or a jewel?" asked one of the party.
+
+"I cannot tell you its name or nature," said Margrave; "but it is said to
+cure the bite of serpents[1], and has other supposed virtues,--a talisman,
+in short."
+
+He here placed the staff in my hands, and bade me look at it with care.
+Then he changed the conversation and renewed the way, leaving the staff
+with me, till suddenly I forced it back on him.  I could not have
+explained why, but its touch, as it warmed in my clasp, seemed to send
+through my whole frame a singular thrill, and a sensation as if I no
+longer felt my own weight,--as if I walked on air.
+
+Our rambles came to a close; the visitors went away; I re-entered the
+house through the sash-window of Forman's study.  Margrave threw his hat
+and staff on the table, and amused himself with examining minutely the
+tracery on the mantelpiece.  Strahan and myself left him thus occupied,
+and, going into the adjoining library, resumed our task of examining the
+plans for the new house.  I continued to draw outlines and sketches of
+various alterations, tending to simplify and contract Sir Philip's general
+design.  Margrave soon joined us, and this time took his seat patiently
+beside our table, watching me use ruler and compass with unwonted
+attention.
+
+"I wish I could draw," he said; "but I can do nothing useful."
+
+"Rich men like you," said Strahan, peevishly, "can engage others, and are
+better employed in rewarding good artists than in making bad drawings
+themselves."
+
+"Yes, I can employ others; and--Fenwick, when you have finished with
+Strahan I will ask permission to employ you, though without reward; the
+task I would impose will not take you a minute."
+
+He then threw himself back in his chair, and seemed to fall into a doze.
+
+The dressing-bell rang; Strahan put away the plans,--indeed, they were now
+pretty well finished and decided on.  Margrave woke up as our host left
+the room to dress, and drawing me towards another table in the room,
+placed before me one of his favourite mystic books, and, pointing to an
+old woodcut, said,
+
+"I will ask you to copy this for me; it pretends to be a facsimile of
+Solomon's famous seal.  I have a whimsical desire to have a copy of it.
+You observe two triangles interlaced and inserted in a circle?--the
+pentacle, in short.  Yes, just so.  You need not add the astrological
+characters: they are the senseless superfluous accessories of the dreamer
+who wrote the book.  But the pentacle itself has an intelligible meaning;
+it belongs to the only universal language, the language of symbol, in
+which all races that think--around, and above, and below us--can establish
+communion of thought.  If in the external universe any one constructive
+principle can be detected, it is the geometrical; and in every part of the
+world in which magic pretends to a written character, I find that its
+hieroglyphics are geometrical figures.  Is it not laughable that the most
+positive of all the sciences should thus lend its angles and circles to
+the use of--what shall I call it?--the ignorance?--ay, that is the
+word--the ignorance of dealers in magic?"
+
+He took up the paper, on which I had hastily described the triangles and
+the circle, and left the room, chanting the serpent-charmer's song.
+
+[1] The following description of a stone at Corfu, celebrated as an
+antidote to the venom of the serpent's bite, was given to me by an eminent
+scholar and legal functionary in that island:--
+
+DESCRIPTION of THE BLUESTONE.--This stone is of an oval shape 1 2/10 in.
+long, 7/10 broad, 3/10 thick, and, having been broken formerly, is now set
+in gold.
+
+When a person is bitten by a poisonous snake, the bite must be opened by a
+cut of a lancet or razor longways, and the stone applied within
+twenty-four hours.  The stone then attaches itself firmly on the wound,
+and when it has done its office falls off; the cure is then complete.  The
+stone must then be thrown into milk, whereupon it vomits the poison it has
+absorbed, which remains green on the top of the milk, and the stone is
+then again fit for use.
+
+This stone has been from time immemorial in the family of Ventura, of
+Corfu, a house of Italian origin, and is notorious, so that peasants
+immediately apply for its aid.  Its virtue has not been impaired by the
+fracture.  Its nature or composition is unknown.
+
+In a case where two were stung at the same time by serpents, the stone was
+applied to one, who recovered; but the other, for whom it could not be
+used, died.
+
+It never failed but once, and then it was applied after the twenty-four
+hours.
+
+Its colour is so dark as not to be distinguished from black.
+
+                                                P. M. COLQUHOUN.
+
+Corfu, 7th Nov., 1860.
+
+Sir Emerson Tennent, in his popular and excellent work on Ceylon, gives an
+account of "snake stones" apparently similar to the one at Corfu, except
+that they are "intensely black and highly polished," and which are
+applied, in much the same manner, to the wounds inflicted by the
+cobra-capella.
+
+
+QUERY.-Might it not be worth while to ascertain the chemical properties of
+these stones, and, if they be efficacious in the extraction of venom
+conveyed by a bite, might they not be as successful if applied to the bite
+of a mad dog as to that of a cobra-capella?
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER LI.
+
+When we separated for the night, which we did at eleven o'clock, Margrave
+said,--
+
+"Good-night and good-by.  I must leave you to-morrow, Strahan, and before
+your usual hour for rising.  I took the liberty of requesting one of your
+men to order me a chaise from L----.  Pardon my seeming abruptness, but I
+always avoid long leave-takings, and I had fixed the date of my departure
+almost as soon as I accepted your invitation."
+
+"I have no right to complain.  The place must be dull indeed to a gay
+young fellow like you.  It is dull even to me.  I am meditating flight
+already.  Are you going back to L----?"
+
+"Not even for such things as I left at my lodgings.  When I settle
+somewhere and can give an address, I shall direct them to be sent to me.
+There are, I hear, beautiful patches of scenery towards the north, only
+known to pedestrian tourists.  I am a good walker; and you know, Fenwick,
+that I am also a child of Nature.  Adieu to you both; and many thanks to
+you, Strahan, for your hospitality."
+
+He left the room.
+
+"I am not sorry he is going," said Strahan, after a pause, and with a
+quick breath as if of relief.  "Do you not feel that he exhausts one?  An
+excess of oxygen, as you would say in a lecture."
+
+I was alone in my own chamber; I felt indisposed for bed and for sleep;
+the curious conversation I had held with Margrave weighed on me.  In that
+conversation, we had indirectly touched upon the prodigies which I had not
+brought myself to speak of with frank courage, and certainly nothing in
+Margrave's manner had betrayed consciousness of my suspicions; on the
+contrary, the open frankness with which he evinced his predilection for
+mystic speculation, or uttered his more unamiable sentiments, rather
+tended to disarm than encourage belief in gloomy secrets or sinister
+powers.  And as he was about to quit the neighbourhood, he would not again
+see Lilian, not even enter the town of L----.  Was I to ascribe this
+relief from his presence to the promise of the Shadow; or was I not
+rather right in battling firmly against any grotesque illusion, and
+accepting his departure as a simple proof that my jealous fears had been
+amongst my other chimeras, and that as he had really only visited Lilian
+out of friendship to me, in my peril, so he might, with his characteristic
+acuteness, have guessed my jealousy, and ceased his visits from a kindly
+motive delicately concealed?  And might not the same motive now have
+dictated the words which were intended to assure me that L---- contained
+no attractions to tempt him to return to it?  Thus, gradually soothed and
+cheered by the course to which my reflections led me, I continued to muse
+for hours.  At length, looking at my watch, I was surprised to find it was
+the second hour after midnight.  I was just about to rise from my chair
+to undress, and secure some hours of sleep, when the well-remembered cold
+wind passed through the room, stirring the roots of my hair; and before me
+stood, against the wall, the Luminous Shadow.
+
+"Rise and follow me," said the voice, sounding much nearer than it had
+ever done before.
+
+And at those words I rose mechanically, and like a sleepwalker.
+
+"Take up the light."
+
+I took it.  The Scin-Laeca glided along the wall towards the threshold,
+and motioned me to open the door.  I did so.  The Shadow flitted on
+through the corridor.  I followed, with hushed footsteps, down a small
+stair into Forman's study.  In all my subsequent proceedings, about to be
+narrated, the Shadow guided me, sometimes by voice, sometimes by sign.  I
+obeyed the guidance, not only unresistingly, but without a desire to
+resist.  I was unconscious either of curiosity or of awe,--only of a calm
+and passive indifference, neither pleasurable nor painful.  In this
+obedience, from which all will seemed extracted, I took into my hands the
+staff which I had examined the day before, and which lay on the table,
+just where Margrave had cast it on re-entering the house.  I unclosed the
+shutter to the casement, lifted the sash, and, with the light in my left
+hand, the staff in my right, stepped forth into the garden.  The night was
+still; the flame of the candle scarcely trembled in the air; the Shadow
+moved on before me towards the old pavilion described in an earlier part
+of this narrative, and of which the mouldering doors stood wide open.  I
+followed the Shadow into the pavilion, up the crazy stair to the room
+above, with its four great blank unglazed windows, or rather arcades,
+north, south, east, and west.  I halted on the middle of the floor: right
+before my eyes, through the vista made by breathless boughs, stood out
+from the moonlit air the dreary mausoleum.  Then, at the command conveyed
+to me, I placed the candle on a wooden settle, touched a spring in the
+handle of the staff; a lid flew back, and I drew from the hollow, first a
+lump of some dark bituminous substance, next a smaller slender wand of
+polished steel, of which the point was tipped with a translucent material,
+which appeared to me like crystal.  Bending down, still obedient to the
+direction conveyed to me, I described on the floor with the lump of
+bitumen (if I may so call it) the figure of the pentacle with the
+interlaced triangles, in a circle nine feet in diameter, just as I had
+drawn it for Margrave the evening before.  The material used made the
+figure perceptible, in a dark colour of mingled black and red.  I applied
+the flame of the candle to the circle, and immediately it became lambent
+with a low steady splendour that rose about an inch from the floor; and
+gradually front this light there emanated a soft, gray, transparent mist
+and a faint but exquisite odour.  I stood in the midst of the circle, and
+within the circle also, close by my side, stood the Scin-Laeca,--no longer
+reflected on the wall, but apart from it, erect, rounded into more
+integral and distinct form, yet impalpable, and from it there breathed an
+icy air.  Then lifting the wand, the broader end of which rested in the
+palm of my hand, the two forefingers closing lightly over it in a line
+parallel with the point, I directed it towards the wide aperture before
+me, fronting the mausoleum.  I repeated aloud some words whispered to me
+in a language I knew not: those words I would not trace on this paper,
+could I remember them.  As they came to a close, I heard a howl from the
+watch-dog in the yard,--a dismal, lugubrious howl.  Other dogs in the
+distant village caught up the sound, and bayed in a dirge-like chorus; and
+the howling went on louder and louder.  Again strange words were whispered
+to me, and I repeated them in mechanical submission; and when they, too,
+were ended, I felt the ground tremble beneath me, and as my eyes looked
+straight forward down the vista, that, stretching from the casement, was
+bounded by the solitary mausoleum, vague formless shadows seemed to pass
+across the moonlight,--below, along the sward, above, in the air; and then
+suddenly a terror, not before conceived, came upon me.
+
+And a third time words were whispered; but though I knew no more of their
+meaning than I did of those that had preceded them, I felt a repugnance to
+utter them aloud.  Mutely I turned towards the Scin-Laeca, and the
+expression of its face was menacing and terrible; my will became yet more
+compelled to the control imposed upon it, and my lips commenced the
+formula again whispered into my ear, when I heard distinctly a voice of
+warning and of anguish, that murmured "Hold!"  I knew the voice; it was
+Lilian's.  I paused; I turned towards the quarter from which the voice had
+come, and in the space afar I saw the features, the form of Lilian.  Her
+arms were stretched towards me in supplication, her countenance was deadly
+pale, and anxious with unutterable distress.  The whole image seemed in
+unison with the voice,--the look, the attitude, the gesture of one who
+sees another in deadly peril, and cries, "Beware!"
+
+This apparition vanished in a moment; but that moment sufficed to free my
+mind from the constraint which had before enslaved it.  I dashed the wand
+to the ground, sprang from the circle, rushed from the place.  How I got
+into my own room I can remember not,--I know not; I have a vague
+reminiscence of some intervening wandering, of giant trees, of shroud-like
+moonlight, of the Shining Shadow and its angry aspect, of the blind walls
+and the iron door of the House of the Dead, of spectral images,--a
+confused and dreary phantasmagoria.  But all I can recall with
+distinctness is the sight of my own hueless face in the mirror in my own
+still room, by the light of the white moon through the window; and,
+sinking down, I said to myself, "This, at least, is an hallucination or a
+dream!"
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER LII.
+
+A heavy sleep came over me at daybreak, but I did not undress nor go to
+bed.  The sun was high in the heavens when, on waking, I saw the servant
+who had attended me bustling about the room.
+
+"I beg your pardon, sir, I am afraid I disturbed you; but I have been
+three times to see if you were not coming down, and I found you so soundly
+asleep I did not like to wake you.  Mr. Strahan has finished breakfast,
+and gone out riding; Mr. Margrave has left,--left before six o'clock."
+
+"Ah, he said he was going early."
+
+"Yes, sir; and he seemed so cross when he went.  I could never have
+supposed so pleasant a gentleman could put himself into such a passion!"
+
+"What was the matter?"
+
+"Why, his walking-stick could not be found; it was not in the hall.  He
+said he had left it in the study; we could not find it there.  At last he
+found it himself in the old summerhouse, and said--I beg pardon--he said
+he was sure you had taken it there: that some one, at all events, had been
+meddling with it.  However, I am very glad it was found, since he seems to
+set such store on it."
+
+"Did Mr. Margrave go himself into the summer-house to look for it?"
+
+"Yes, sir; no one else would have thought of such a place; no one likes to
+go there, even in the daytime."
+
+"Why?"
+
+"Why, sir, they say it is haunted since poor Sir Philip's death; and,
+indeed, there are strange noises in every part of the house.  I am afraid
+you had a bad night, sir," continued the servant, with evident curiosity,
+glancing towards the bed, which I had not pressed, and towards the
+evening-dress which, while he spoke, I was rapidly changing for that which
+I habitually wore in the morning.  "I hope you did not feel yourself ill?"
+
+"No! but it seems I fell asleep in my chair."
+
+"Did you hear, sir, how the dogs howled about two o'clock in the morning?
+They woke me.  Very frightful!"
+
+"The moon was at her full.  Dogs will bay at the moon."
+
+I felt relieved to think that I should not find Strahan in the
+breakfast-room; and hastening through the ceremony of a meal which I
+scarcely touched, I went out into the park unobserved, and creeping round
+the copses and into the neglected gardens, made my way to the pavilion.  I
+mounted the stairs; I looked on the floor of the upper room; yes, there
+still was the black figure of the pentacle, the circle.  So, then, it was
+not a dream!  Till then I had doubted.  Or might it not still be so far a
+dream that I had walked in my sleep, and with an imagination preoccupied
+by my conversations with Margrave,--by the hieroglyphics on the staff I
+had handled, by the very figure associated with superstitious practices
+which I had copied from some weird book at his request, by all the strange
+impressions previously stamped on my mind,--might I not, in truth, have
+carried thither in sleep the staff, described the circle, and all the rest
+been but visionary delusion?  Surely, surely, so common-sense, and so
+Julius Faber would interpret the riddles that perplexed me!  Be that as it
+may, my first thought was to efface the marks on the floor.  I found this
+easier than I had ventured to hope.  I rubbed the circle and the pentacle
+away from the boards with the sole of my foot, leaving but an
+undistinguishable smudge behind.  I know not why, but I felt the more
+nervously anxious to remove all such evidences of my nocturnal visit to
+that room, because Margrave had so openly gone thither to seek for the
+staff, and had so rudely named me to the servant as having meddled with
+it.  Might he not awake some suspicion against me?  Suspicion, what of?  I
+knew not, but I feared!
+
+The healthful air of day gradually nerved my spirits and relieved my
+thoughts.  But the place had become hateful to me.  I resolved not to wait
+for Strahan's return, but to walk back to L----, and leave a message for
+my host.  It was sufficient excuse that I could not longer absent myself
+from my patients; accordingly I gave directions to have the few things
+which I had brought with me sent to my house by any servant who might be
+going to L----, and was soon pleased to find myself outside the park-gates
+and on the high-road.
+
+I had not gone a mile before I met Strahan on horseback.  He received my
+apologies for not waiting his return to bid him farewell without
+observation, and, dismounting, led his horse and walked beside me on my
+road.  I saw that there was something on his mind; at last he said,
+looking down,--
+
+"Did you hear the dogs howl last night?"
+
+"Yes! the full moon!"
+
+"You were awake, then, at the time.  Did you hear any other sound?  Did
+you see anything?"
+
+"What should I hear or see?"
+
+Strahan was silent for some moments; then he said, with great
+seriousness,--
+
+"I could not sleep when I went to bed last night; I felt feverish and
+restless.  Somehow or other, Margrave got into my head, mixed up in some
+strange way with Sir Philip Derval.  I heard the dogs howl, and at the
+same time, or rather a few minutes later, I felt the whole house tremble,
+as a frail corner-house in London seems to tremble at night when a
+carriage is driven past it.  The howling had then ceased, and ceased as
+suddenly as it had begun.  I felt a vague, superstitious alarm; I got up,
+and went to my window, which was unclosed (it is my habit to sleep with my
+windows open); the moon was very bright, and I saw, I declare I saw along
+the green alley that leads from the old part of the house to the
+mausoleum--No, I will not say what I saw or believed I saw,--you would
+ridicule me, and justly.  But, whatever it might be, on the earth without
+or in the fancy within my brain, I was so terrified, that I rushed back to
+my bed, and buried my face in my pillow.  I would have come to you; but I
+did not dare to stir.  I have been riding hard all the morning in order to
+recover my nerves.  But I dread sleeping again under that roof, and now
+that you and Margrave leave me, I shall go this very day to London.  I
+hope all that I have told you is no bad sign of any coming disease; blood
+to the head, eh?"
+
+"No; but imagination overstrained can produce wondrous effects.  You do
+right to change the scene.  Go to London at once, amuse yourself, and--"
+
+"Not return, till the old house is razed to the ground.  That is my
+resolve.  You approve?  That's well.  All success to you, Fenwick.  I will
+canter back and get my portmanteau ready and the carriage out, in time for
+the five o'clock train."
+
+So then he, too, had seen--what?  I did not dare and I did not desire to
+ask him.  But he, at least, was not walking in his sleep!  Did we both
+dream, or neither?
+
+
+
+
+
+*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK STRANGE STORY, LYTTON, V5 ***
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