“I am not so superstitious as some of your physicians—men of science, as
you are pleased to be called,” said Hawver, replying to an accusation
that had not been made. “Some of you—only a few, I confess—believe in
the immortality of the soul, and in apparitions which you have not the
honesty to call ghosts. I go no further than a conviction that the
living are sometimes seen where they are not, but have been—where they
have lived so long, perhaps so intensely, as to have left their impress
on everything about them. I know, indeed, that one’s environment may be
so affected by one’s personality as to yield, long afterward, an image of
one’s self to the eyes of another. Doubtless the impressing personality
has to be the right kind of personality as the perceiving eyes have to be
the right kind of eyes—mine, for example.”
“Yes, the right kind of eyes, conveying sensations to the wrong kind of
brain,” said Dr. Frayley, smiling.
“Thank you; one likes to have an expectation gratified; that is about the
reply that I supposed you would have the civility to make.”
“Pardon me. But you say that you know. That is a good deal to say,
don’t you think? Perhaps you will not mind the trouble of saying how you
learned.”
“You will call it an hallucination,” Hawver said, “but that does not
matter.” And he told the story.
“Last summer I went, as you know, to pass the hot weather term in the
town of Meridian. The relative at whose house I had intended to stay was
ill, so I sought other quarters. After some difficulty I succeeded in
renting a vacant dwelling that had been occupied by an eccentric doctor
of the name of Mannering, who had gone away years before, no one knew
where, not even his agent. He had built the house himself and had lived
in it with an old servant for about ten years. His practice, never very
extensive, had after a few years been given up entirely. Not only so,
but he had withdrawn himself almost altogether from social life and
become a recluse. I was told by the village doctor, about the only
person with whom he held any relations, that during his retirement he had
devoted himself to a single line of study, the result of which he had
expounded in a book that did not commend itself to the approval of his
professional brethren, who, indeed, considered him not entirely sane. I
have not seen the book and cannot now recall the title of it, but I am
told that it expounded a rather startling theory. He held that it was
possible in the case of many a person in good health to forecast his
death with precision, several months in advance of the event. The limit,
I think, was eighteen months. There were local tales of his having
exerted his powers of prognosis, or perhaps you would say diagnosis; and
it was said that in every instance the person whose friends he had warned
had died suddenly at the appointed time, and from no assignable cause.
All this, however, has nothing to do with what I have to tell; I thought
it might amuse a physician.
“The house was furnished, just as he had lived in it. It was a rather
gloomy dwelling for one who was neither a recluse nor a student, and I
think it gave something of its character to me—perhaps some of its former
occupant’s character; for always I felt in it a certain melancholy that
was not in my natural disposition, nor, I think, due to loneliness. I
had no servants that slept in the house, but I have always been, as you
know, rather fond of my own society, being much addicted to reading,
though little to study. Whatever was the cause, the effect was dejection
and a sense of impending evil; this was especially so in Dr. Mannering’s
study, although that room was the lightest and most airy in the house.
The doctor’s life-size portrait in oil hung in that room, and seemed
completely to dominate it. There was nothing unusual in the picture; the
man was evidently rather good looking, about fifty years old, with
iron-gray hair, a smooth-shaven face and dark, serious eyes. Something
in the picture always drew and held my attention. The man’s appearance
became familiar to me, and rather ‘haunted’ me.
“One evening I was passing through this room to my bedroom, with a
lamp—there is no gas in Meridian. I stopped as usual before the
portrait, which seemed in the lamplight to have a new expression, not
easily named, but distinctly uncanny. It interested but did not disturb
me. I moved the lamp from one side to the other and observed the effects
of the altered light. While so engaged I felt an impulse to turn round.
As I did so I saw a man moving across the room directly toward me! As
soon as he came near enough for the lamplight to illuminate the face I
saw that it was Dr. Mannering himself; it was as if the portrait were
walking!
“‘I beg your pardon,’ I said, somewhat coldly, ‘but if you knocked I did
not hear.’
“He passed me, within an arm’s length, lifted his right forefinger, as in
warning, and without a word went on out of the room, though I observed
his exit no more than I had observed his entrance.
“Of course, I need not tell you that this was what you will call an
hallucination and I call an apparition. That room had only two doors, of
which one was locked; the other led into a bedroom, from which there was
no exit. My feeling on realizing this is not an important part of the
incident.
“Doubtless this seems to you a very commonplace ‘ghost story’—one
constructed on the regular lines laid down by the old masters of the art.
If that were so I should not have related it, even if it were true. The
man was not dead; I met him to-day in Union street. He passed me in a
crowd.”
Hawver had finished his story and both men were silent. Dr. Frayley
absently drummed on the table with his fingers.
“Did he say anything to-day?” he asked—“anything from which you inferred
that he was not dead?”
Hawver stared and did not reply.
“Perhaps,” continued Frayley, “he made a sign, a gesture—lifted a finger,
as in warning. It’s a trick he had—a habit when saying something
serious—announcing the result of a diagnosis, for example.”
“Yes, he did—just as his apparition had done. But, good God! did you
ever know him?”
Hawver was apparently growing nervous.
“I knew him. I have read his book, as will every physician some day. It
is one of the most striking and important of the century’s contributions
to medical science. Yes, I knew him; I attended him in an illness three
years ago. He died.”
Hawver sprang from his chair, manifestly disturbed. He strode forward
and back across the room; then approached his friend, and in a voice not
altogether steady, said: “Doctor, have you anything to say to me—as a
physician?”
“No, Hawver; you are the healthiest man I ever knew. As a friend I
advise you to go to your room. You play the violin like an angel. Play
it; play something light and lively. Get this cursed bad business off
your mind.”
The next day Hawver was found dead in his room, the violin at his neck,
the bow upon the strings, his music open before him at Chopin’s funeral
march.