He became, again, vividly aware of the power and presence of "N. H."
He was not far from his house now on the shoulder of the hill. He
turned his eyes upwards, where the three-quarter moon sailed above
transparent cirrus clouds that scarcely dimmed her light. Like dappled
sands of silver, they sifted her soft shining, moving slowly across the
heavens before an upper wind. The sound continued.
For a moment or two, in the pale light of dawn, he watched and
listened, then lowered his gaze, caught his breath sharply, and stood
stock still. He stared in front of him. Next, turning slowly, he stared
right and left. He stared behind as well.
Yes, it was true. The lines and rows of crowding houses trembled,
disappeared. The heavy buildings dissolved before his very eyes. The
solid walls and roofs were gone, the chimneys, railings, doors and
porches vanished. There were no more conservatories. There were no
lamp-posts. The streets themselves had melted. He gazed in amazement
and delight. The entire hill lay bare and open to the sky.
Across the rising upland swept a keen fresh morning wind. Yet bare
they were not, this rising upland and this hill. As far as he could
see, the landscape flowed waist-deep in flowers, whose fragrance lay
upon the air; dew trembled, shimmering on a million petals of blue and
gold, of orange, purple, violet; the very atmosphere seemed painted.
Flowering trees, both singly and in groves, waved in the breeze, birds
sang in chorus, there was a murmur of streams and falling waters. Yet
that other sound rose too, rose from the entire hill and all upon it,
a continuous gentle rhythm, as though, he felt, the actual scenery
poured forth its being in spontaneous, natural expression of sound as
well as of form and colour. It was the simplest, happiest music he had
ever heard.
Unable to deal with the rapture of delight that swept upon him, he
stood stock still among the blossoms to his waist. Eyes, ears and
nostrils were inadequate to report a beauty which, simple though it
was, overbore nerves and senses accustomed to a lesser scale. Horizons
indeed had lifted, the joy and confidence of fuller life poured in.
His own being grew immense, stretched, widened, deepened, till it
seemed to include all space. He was everywhere, or rather everything
was happening somewhere in him all at once.... In place of the heavy
suburb lay this garden of primal beauty, while yet, in a sense, the
suburb itself remained as well. Only--it had flowered ... revealing the
subconscious soul the bricks and pavements hid.... Its potential self
had blossomed into loveliness and wonder.
The sound drew nearer. He was aware of movement. Figures were
approaching; they were coming in his direction, coming towards him over
the crest of the hill, nearer and nearer. Concealed by the forest of
tall flowers, he watched them come. Yet as Presences he perceived them,
rather than as figures, already borrowing power from them, as sails
borrow from a rising wind. His consciousness expanded marvellously to
let them in.
Their stature was conveyed to him, chiefly, at first, by the fact that
these flowers, though rising to his own waist, did not cover the feet
of them, yet that the flowers in the immediate line of their advance
still swayed and nodded, as though no weight had lain upon their
brilliance. The footsteps were of wind, the figures light as air; they
shone; their radiant presences lit the acres. Their own atmosphere,
too, came with them, as though the landscape moved and travelled with
and in their being, as though the flowers, the natural beauty, emanated
from them. The landscape _was_ their atmosphere. They created, brought
it with them. It seemed that they "expressed" the landscape and "were"
the scenery, with all its multitudinous forms.
They approached with a great and easy speed that was not measurable.
Over the crest of the living, sunlit hill they poured, with their bulk,
their speed, their majesty, their sweet brimming joy. Fillery stood
motionless watching them, his own joy touched with awed confusion, till
wonder and worship mastered the final trace of fear.
Though he perceived these figures first as they topped the skyline, he
was aware that great space also stretched behind them, and that this
immense perspective was in some way appropriate to their appearance.
Born of a greater space than his "mind" could understand, they
flowed towards him across that windy crest and at the same time from
infinitely far beyond it. Above the continuous humming sound, he heard
their music too, faint but mighty, filling the air with deep vibrations
that seemed the natural expression of their joyful beings. Each figure
was a chord, yet all combining in a single harmony that had volume
without loudness. It seemed to him that their sound and colour and
movement wove a new pattern upon space, a new outline, form or growth,
perhaps a flower, a tree, perhaps a planet.... They were creative. They
expressed themselves naturally in a million forms.
He heard, he saw. He knew no other words to use. But the "hearing" was,
rather, some kind of intimate possession so that his whole being filled
and overbrimmed; and the "sight" was greater than the customary little
irritation of the optic nerve--it involved another term of space. He
could describe the sight more readily than the hearing. The apparent
contradiction of distance and proximity, of vast size yet intimacy,
made him tremble in his hiding-place.
His "sight," at any rate, perceived the approaching figures all round,
all over, all at once, as they poured like a wave across the hill from
far beyond its visible crest. For into this space below the horizon he
saw as well, though, normally speaking, it was out of sight. Nor did he
see one side only; he saw the backs of the towering forms as easily as
the portion facing him; he saw behind them. It was not as with ordinary
objects refracting light, the back and underneath and further edges
invisible. All sides were visible at once. The space beyond, moreover,
whence the mighty outlines issued, was of such immensity that he could
think only of interstellar regions. Not to the little planet, then, did
these magnificent shapes belong. They were of the Universe. The symbol
of his valley, he knew suddenly, belonged here too.
Silent with wonder, motionless with worship, he watched the singing
flood of what he felt to be immense, non-human nature-life pour past
him. The procession lasted for hours, yet was over in a minute's flash.
All categories his mind knew hitherto were useless. The faces, in their
power, their majesty, the splendour even of their extent, were both
appalling, yet infinitely tender. They were filled with stars, blue
distance, flowers, spirals of fire, space and air, interwoven too,
with shining geometrical designs whose intricate patterns merged in a
central harmony. They brought their own winds with them.
Yet of features precisely, he was not aware. Each face was, rather,
an immense expression, but an expression that was permanent and could
not change. These were immutable, eternal faces. He borrowed from
human terms the only words that offered, while aware that he falsely
introduced the personal into that which was essentially impersonal.
There stole over him a strange certainty that what he worshipped was
the grandeur of joyful service working through unalterable law--the
great compassion of some untiring service that was deathless.... He
stood _within_ the Universe, face to face with its elemental builders,
guardians, its constructive artizans, the impersonal angelic powers
... the region, the state, he now felt convinced, to which "N. H."
belonged, and whence, by some inexplicable chance, he had come to
occupy a human body.... And the sounds--the flash came to him with
lightning conviction--were those essential rhythms which are the
kernels of all visible, manifested forms....
* * * * *
He was not aware that he was moving, that he had left the spot where he
had stood--so long, yet for a single second only--and had now reached
the corner of a street again. The flowers were gone, and the trees and
groves gone with them; no waters rippled past; there was no shining
hill. The moon, the stars, the breaking dawn remained, but he saw
windows, walls and villas once again, while his feet echoed on dead
stone pavements....
Yet the figures had not wholly gone. Before a house, where he now
paused a moment, the towering, flowing outlines were still faintly
visible. Their singing still audible, their shapes still gently
luminous, they stood grouped about an open window of the second story.
In the front garden a big plane tree stirred its leafless branches; the
tree and figures interpenetrated. Slowly then, the outlines grew dim
and shadowy, indistinguishable almost from the objects in the twilight
near them. Chimneys, walls and roofs stole in upon the great shapes
with foreign, grosser details that obscured their harmony, confused
their proportion, as with two sets of values. The eye refused to focus
both at once. A roof, a chimney obtruded, while sight struggled,
fluttered, then ended in confusion. The figures faded and melted out.
They merged with the tree, the reddening sky, the murky air close
to the house which a street lamp made visible. Suddenly they were
lost--they were no longer there.
But the rhythmical sound, though fainter, still continued--and Fillery
looked up.
It was a sound, he realized in a flash, evocative and summoning. Type
called to type, brother to brother, across the universe. The house
before him was his own, and the open window through which the music
issued was the bedroom of "N. H."
He stood transfixed. Both sides of his complex nature operated
simultaneously. His mind worked more clearly--the entire history
of the "case" in that upstairs room passed through it: he was a
doctor. But his speculative, emotional aspect, the dreamer in him, so
greatly daring, all that poetic, transcendental, half-mystical part
which classed him, he well knew, with the unstable; all this, long
and dangerously repressed, worked with opposite, if equal pressure.
From the subconscious rose violent hands as of wind and fire,
lovely, fashioning, divine, tearing away the lid of the reasoning
surface-consciousness that confined, confused them.
To disentangle, to define these separate functions, were a difficult
problem even for the most competent psychiatrist. Creative imaginative
powers, hitherto merely fumbling, half denied as well, now stretched
their wings and soared. With them came a blinding clarity of sight
that enabled him to focus a vast field of detail with extraordinary
rapidity. Horizons had lifted, perspective deepened and lit up. In a
few brief seconds, before his front door opened, a hundred details
flashed towards a focus and shone concentrated:
The Vision, of course--the Figures had now melted into the night--had
no objective reality. Suppressed passion had created them, forbidden
yearnings had passed the Censor and dramatized a dream, set aside yet
never explained, that heredity was responsible for. Both were born
of his lost radiant valley. His Note Books held a thousand similar
cases....
But the speculative dreamer flashed coloured lights against this common
white. The prism blazed. From the inter-stellar spaces came these
radiant figures, from Sirius, immense and splendid sun, from Aldebaran
among the happy Hyades, from awful Betelgeuse, whose volume fills a
Martian orbit. Their dazzling, giant grandeur was of stellar origin.
Yet, equally, they came from the dreadful back gardens of those sordid
houses. Nature was Nature everywhere, in the nebulæ as in the stifled
plane tree of a city court. That he saw them as "figures" was but his
own private, personal interpretation of a prophecy the whole Universe
announced. They were not figures necessarily; they were Powers. And "N.
H." was of their kind.
He suddenly remembered the small, troubled earth whereon he lived--a
neglected corner of the universe that was in distress and cried
frantically for help.... Alcyone caught it in her golden arms perhaps;
Sirius thundered against its little ears....
He found his latchkey and fumblingly inserted it, but, even while he
did so, the state of the planet at the moment poured into his mind with
swift, concentrated detail; he remembered the wireless excitement of
the instant--and smiled. Not that way would it come. The new order was
of a spiritual kind. It would steal into men's hearts, not splutter
along the waves of ether, as the "dead" are said to splutter to the
"living." The great impulse, the mighty invitation Nature sent out to
return to simple, natural life, would come, without "phenomena" from
_within_.... He remembered Relativity--that space is local, space and
time not separate entities. He understood. He had just experienced
it. Another, a fourth dimension! Space as a whole was annihilated! He
smiled.
His latchkey turned.
The transmutation of metals flashed past him--all substance one. His
latchkey was upside down. He turned it round and reinserted it, and the
results of advanced psychology rushed at him, as though the sun rushed
over the horizon of some Eastern clime, covering all with the light of
a new, fair dawn.
In a few seconds this accumulation of recent knowledge and discovery
flooded his state of singular receptiveness--as thinker and as poet.
The Age was crumbling, civilization passing like its predecessors. The
little planet lay certainly in distress. No true help lay within it;
its reservoirs were empty. No adequate constructive men or powers were
anywhere in sight. It was exhausted, dying. Unless new help, powers
from a new, an inexhaustible source, came quickly ... a new vehicle for
their expression....
And wonder took him by the throat ... as the key turned in the lock
with its familiar grating sound, and the door, without actual pressure
on his part, swung open.
Paul Devonham, a look of bright terror in his eyes, stood on the
threshold.
* * * * *
The expression, not only of the face but of the whole person, he had
seen once only in another human countenance--a climber, who had slipped
by his very side and dropped backward into empty space. The look of
helpless bewilderment as hands and feet lost final touch with solidity,
the air of terrible yet childlike amazement with which he began his
descent of a thousand feet through a gulf of air--the shock marked the
face in a single second with what he now saw in his colleague's eyes.
Only, with Devonham--Fillery felt sure of his diagnosis--the lost hold
was mental.
His outward control, however, was admirable. Devonham's voice,
apart from a certain tenseness in it, was quiet enough: "I've been
telephoning everywhere.... There's been a--a crisis----"
"Violence?"
But the other shook his head. "It's all beyond me quite," he said,
with a wry smile. "The first outbreak was nothing--nothing compared to
this." The continuous sound of humming which filled the hall, making
the air vibrate oddly, grew louder. Devonham seized his friend's arm.
"Listen!" he whispered. "You hear that?"
"I heard it outside in the street," Fillery said. "What is it?"
Devonham glared at him. "God knows," he said, "I don't. He's been doing
it, on and off, for a couple of hours. It began the moment you left, it
seems. They're all about him--these vibrations, I mean. He does it with
his whole body somehow. And"--he hesitated--"there's meaning in it of
some kind. Results, I mean," he jerked out with an effort.
"Visible?" came the gentle question.
Devonham started. "How did you know?" There was a thrust of intense
curiosity in the eyes.
"I've had a similar experience myself, Paul. You opened the front door
in the middle of it. The figures----"
"You saw figures?" Devonham looked thunderstruck. In his heart was
obviously a touch of panic.
As the two men stood gazing into each other's eyes a moment silently,
the sound about them increased again, rising and falling, its great
separate rhythmical waves almost distinguishable. In Fillery's mind
rose patterns, outlines, forms of flowers, spirals, circles....
"He knows you're in the house," said Devonham in a curious voice,
relieved apparently no answer came to his question. "Better come
upstairs at once and see him." But he did not turn to lead the way.
"That's not auditory hallucination, Edward, whatever else it is!" He
was still clinging to the rock, but the rock was crumbling beneath his
desperate touch. Space yawned below him.
"Visual," suggested Fillery, as though he held out a feeble hand to the
man whose whole weight already hung unsupported before the plunge. His
friend spoke no word; but his expression made words unnecessary: "We
must face the facts," it said plainly, "wherever these may lead. No
shirking, no prejudice of mine or yours must interfere. There must be
no faltering now."
So plainly was his passion for truth and knowledge legible in the
expression of the shocked but honest mind, that Fillery felt compassion
overpower the first attitude of privacy he had meant to take. This time
he must share. The honesty of the other won his confidence too fully
for him to hold back anything. There was no doubt in his mind that he
read his colleague's state aright.
"A moment, Paul," he said in a low voice, "before we go upstairs," and
he put his hand out, oddly enough meeting Devonham's hand already
stretched to meet it. He drew him aside into a corner of the hall,
while the waves of sound surged round and over them like a sea. "Let
me first tell you," he went on, his voice trembling slightly, "my own
experience." It seemed to him that any moment he must see the birth of
a new form, an outline, a "body" dance across before his very eyes.
"Neither auditory nor visual," murmured Devonham, burning to hear
what was coming, yet at the same time shrinking from it by the laws
of his personality. "Hallucination of any kind, there is absolutely
none. There's nothing transferred from your mind to his. This thing is
real--original."
Fillery tightened his grip a second on the hand he held.
"Paul," he said gravely, yet unable to hide the joy of recent ecstasy
in his eyes, "it is also--new!"
The low syllables seemed borne away and lifted beyond their reach by an
immense vibration that swept softly past them. And so actual was this
invisible wave that behind it lay the trough, the ebb, that awaits, as
in the sea, the next advancing crest. Into this ebb, as it were, both
men dropped simultaneously the same significant syllables: their lips
uttered together:
"N. H." The wave of sound seemed to take their voices and increase
them. It was the older man who added: "Coming into full possession."
The two stood waiting, listening, their heads turned sideways, their
bodies motionless, while the soft rhythmical uproar rose and fell about
them. No sign escaped them for some minutes; no words, it seemed,
occurred to either of them.
Through the transom over the front door stole the grey light of the
late autumn dawn; the hall furniture was visible, chairs, hat-rack,
wooden chests that held the motor rugs. A china bowl filled with
visiting cards gleamed white beside it. Soon the milkman, uttering
his comic earthly cry, would clatter down the area staircase, and the
servants would be up. As yet, however, but for the big soft sound, the
house was perfectly still. This part of it, almost a separate wing, was
completely cut off from the main building. No one had been disturbed.
Fillery moved his head and looked at his companion. The expression of
both face and figure arrested him. He had taken off his dinner jacket,
and the old loose golfing coat he wore hung askew; he had one hand in
a pocket of it, the other thrust deep into his trousers. His glasses
hung down across his crumpled shirt-front, his black tie made an untidy
cross. He looked, thought Fillery, whose sense of the ludicrous became
always specially alert in his gravest moments, like an unhappy curate
who had presided over some strenuous and worrying social gathering
in the local town hall. Only one detail denied this picture--the
expression of something mysterious and awed in the sheet-white face.
He was listening with sharp dislike yet eager interest. His repugnance
betrayed itself in the tightened lips, the set of the angular
shoulders; the panic was written in the glistening eyes. There were
things in his face he could never, never tell. The struggle in him was
natural to his type of mind: he had experienced something himself, and
a personal experience opens new vistas in sympathy and understanding.
But--the experience ran contrary to every tenet of theory and practice
he had ever known. The moment of new birth was painful. This was his
colleague's diagnosis.
Fillery then suddenly realized that the gulf between them was without a
bridge. To tell his own experience became at once utterly impossible.
He saw this clearly. He could not speak of it to his assistant. It was,
after all, incommunicable. The bridge of terms, language, feeling, did
not exist between them. And, again, up flashed for a second his sense
of the comic, this time in an odd touch of memory--Povey's favourite
sentence: "Never argue with the once-born!" Only to older souls was
expression possible.
For the first time then his diagnosis wavered oddly. Why, for
instance, did Paul persist in that curious, watchful stare...?
Devonham, conscious of his chief's eyes and mind upon him, looked up.
Somewhere in his expression was a glare, but nothing revealed his state
of mind better than the fact that he stupidly contradicted himself:
"You're putting all this into him, Edward," a touch of anger, perhaps
of fear, in the intense whispering voice. "The hysteria of the studio
upset him, of course. If you'd left him alone, as you promised, he'd
have always stayed LeVallon. He'd be cured by now." Then, as Fillery
made no reply or comment, he added, but this time only the anxiety of
the doctor in his tone: "Hadn't you better go up to him at once? He's
your patient, not mine, remember!"
The other took his arm. "Not yet," he said quietly. "He's best alone
for the moment." He smiled, and it was the smile that invariably won
him the confidence of even the most obstinate and difficult patient.
He was completely master of himself again. "Besides, Paul," he went on
gently. "I want to hear what you have to tell me. Some of it--if not
all. I want your Report. It is of value. I must have that first, you
know."
They sat on the bottom stair together, while Devonham told briefly what
had happened. He was glad to tell it, too. It was a relief to become
the mere accurate observer again.
"I can summarize it for you in two words," he said: "light and sound.
The sound, at first, seemed wind--wind rising, wind outside. With the
light, was perceptible heat. The two seemed correlated. When the sound
increased, the heat increased too. Then the sound became methodical,
rhythmical--it became almost musical. As it did so the light became
coloured. Both"--he looked across at the ghostly hat-rack in the
hall--"were produced--by him."
"Items, please, Paul. I want an itemized account."
Devonham fumbled in the big pockets of his coat and eventually lit
a cigarette, though he did not in the least want to smoke. That
watchful, penetrating stare persisted, none the less. Amid the anxiety
were items of carelessness that almost seemed assumed.
"Mrs. Soames sent Nurse Robbins to fetch me," he resumed, his voice
harshly, as it seemed, cutting across the waves of pleasant sound that
poured down the empty stairs behind them and filled the hall with
resonant vibrations. "I went in, turned them both out, and closed
the door. The room was filled with a soft, white light, rather pale
in tint, that seemed to emanate from nowhere. I could trace it to
no source. It was equally diffused, I mean, yet a kind of wave-like
vibration ran through it in faint curves and circles. There was a
sound, a sound like wind. A wind was in the room, moaning and sighing
inside the walls--a perfectly natural and ordinary sound, if it had
been outside. The light moved and quivered. It lay in sheets. Its
movement, I noticed, was in direct relation to the wind: the louder
the volume of sound, the greater the movement of the air--the brighter
became the light, and vice versa. I could not take notes at the actual
moment, but my memory"--a slight grimace by way of a smile indicated
that forgetting was impossible--"is accurate, as you know."
Fillery did not interrupt, either by word or gesture.
"The increase of light was accompanied by colour, and the increase of
sound led into a measure--not actual bars, and never melody, but a
distinct measure that involved rhythm. It was musical, as I said. The
colour--I'm coming to that--then took on a very faint tinge of gold
or orange, a little red in it sometimes, flame colour almost. The air
was luminous--it was radiant. At one time I half expected to see fire.
For there was heat as well. Not an unpleasant heat, but a comforting,
stimulating, agreeable heat like--I was going to say, like the heat
of a bright coal fire on a winter's day, but I think the better term
is sunlight. I had an impression this heat must burst presently into
actual flame. It never did so. The sheets of coloured light rose and
fell with the volume of the sound. There were curves and waves and
rising columns like spirals, but anything approaching a definite
outline, form, or shape"--he broke off for a second--"figures," he
announced abruptly, almost challengingly, staring at the white china
bowl in front of him, "I could _not_ swear to."
He turned suddenly and stared at his chief with an expression half
of question, half of challenge; then seemed to change his mind,
shrugging his shoulders a very little. But Fillery made no sign. He
did not answer. He laid one hand, however, upon the banisters, as
though preliminary to getting to his feet. The sound about them had
been gradually growing less, the vibrations were smaller, its waves
perceptibly decreasing.
Devonham finished his account in a lower voice, speaking rapidly, as
though the words burnt his tongue:
"The sound, I had already discovered, issued from himself. He was lying
on his back, the eyes wide open, the expression peaceful, even happy.
The lips were closed. He was humming, continuously humming. Yet the
sound came in some way I cannot describe, and could not examine or
ascertain, from his whole body. I detected no vibration of the body. It
lay half naked, only a corner of the sheet upon it. It lay quite still.
The cause of the light and heat, the cause of the movement of air I
have called wind--I could not ascertain. They came _through_ him, as it
were." A slight shiver ran across his body, noticed by his companion,
but eliciting no comment from him. "I--I took his pulse," concluded
Devonham, sinking his voice now to a whisper, though a very clear one;
"it was very rapid and extraordinarily strong. He seemed entirely
unconscious of my presence. I also"--again the faint shiver was
perceptible--"felt his heart. It was--I have never felt such perfect
action, such power--it was beating like an engine, like an engine. And
the sense of vitality, of life in the room everywhere was--electrical.
I could have sworn it was packed to the walls with--with others."
Devonham never ceased to watch his companion keenly while he spoke.
Fillery then put his first question.
"And the effect upon yourself?" he asked quietly. "I mean--any
emotional disturbance? Anything, for instance, like what you _saw_ in
the Jura forests?" He did not look at his colleague; he stood up; the
sound about them had now ceased almost entirely and only faint, dying
fragments of it reached them. "Roughly speaking," he added, making a
half movement to go upstairs. He understood the inner struggle going
on; he wished to make it easy for him. For the complete account he did
not press him.
Devonham rose too; he walked over to the china bowl, took up a card,
read it and let it fall again. The sun was over the horizon now, and
a pallid light showed objects clearly. It showed the whiteness of the
thin, tired face. He turned and walked slowly back across the hall. The
first cart went clattering noisily down the street. At the same moment
a final sound from the room upstairs came floating down into the chill
early air.
"My interest, of course," began Devonham, his hands in his pockets,
his body rigid, as he looked up into his companion's eyes, "was
very concentrated, my mind intensely active." He paused, then added
cautiously: "I may confess, however--I must admit, that is, a certain
increase of--of--well, a general sense of well-being, let me call it.
The heat, you see. A feeling of peace, if you like it better--beyond
the--fear," he blurted out finally, changing his hands from his coat to
his trouser pockets, as though the new position protected him better
from attack. "Also--I somehow expected--any moment--to see outlines,
forms, something new!" He stared frankly into the eyes of the man who,
from the step above him, returned his gaze with equal frankness. "And
_you_--Edward?" he asked with great suddenness.
"Joy? Could you describe it as joy?" His companion ignored the
reference to new forms. He also ignored the sudden question. "Any
increase of----?"
"Vitality, you want to say. The word joy is meaningless, as you know."
"An intensification of consciousness in any way?"
But Devonham had reached his limit of possible confession. He did not
reply for a moment. He took a step forward and stood beside Fillery on
the stairs. His manner had abruptly changed. It was as though he had
come to a conclusion suddenly. His reply, when it came, was no reply at
all:
"Heat and light are favourable, of course, to life," he remarked. "You
remember Joaquin Mueller: 'the optic nerve, under the action of light,
acts as a stimulus to the organs of the imagination and fancy.'"
Fillery smiled as he took his arm and they went quietly upstairs
together. The quoting was a sign of returning confidence. He said
something to himself about the absence of light, but so low it was
under his breath almost, and even if his companion heard it, he made no
comment: "There was no moon at all to-night till well past three, and
even then her light was of the faintest...."
No sound was now audible. They entered a room that was filled with
silence and with peace. A faint ray of morning sunlight showed the form
of the patient sleeping calmly, the body entirely uncovered. There was
an expression of quiet happiness upon the face whose perfect health
suggested perhaps radiance. But there was a change as well, though
indescribable--there was power. He did not stir as they approached the
bed. The breathing was regular and very deep.
Standing beside him a moment, Fillery sniffed the air, then smiled.
There was a perfume of wild flowers. There was, in spite of the cool
morning air, a pleasant warmth.
"You notice--anything?" he whispered, turning to his colleague.
Devonham likewise sniffed the air. "The window's wide open," was the
low rejoinder. "There are conservatories at the back of every house all
down the row."
And they left the room on tiptoe, closing the door behind them very
softly. Upon Devonham's face lay a curious expression, half anxiety,
half pain.