IN THE LAND OF PHANTOMS.
When the barrister came to consciousness, he found himself lying in a
bed in an unfamiliar place, a small, light-coloured room, with only the
most indispensable articles of furniture in it. His brain was too
deranged by the effect of the poison to allow him to speculate where he
might be and how he got there. To think was agony, and sent his head
whirling round with a dizzy sickness and horror.
His reason returned to him in fitful glimpses only, and then he realised
that he was in a room, in bed, and that people who were strangers to him
came in and out. But all around him was changing and indistinct and full
of confused noise, and the bed and room seemed to shake and heave
beneath him as if he were on some small craft tossing on a stormy sea.
Then all the real faded away from his vision, and his mind set forth to
travel through a land of phantoms.
The delusions of delirium vary much with the individual. The finer the
fabric of the mind, the more vivid, the less gross become the wandering
fancies; and all the learning and experiences and ideas of its past are
wrought by the disordered brain into long and complicated histories of
agony, all the store-house of the memory is ransacked for instruments of
torture.
Again, it may have happened in his case that the poison administered by
Susan Riley in some way modified the effects of the alcohol; but,
whatever the cause, his delirium did not assume the form generally
produced by drink. He passed through a long series of strange and highly
imaginative dreams, all full of terrible and consistent adventures of
calamity; and the key-note of every one of these dreams was WOMAN. In
every one was some beautiful evil female form that tempted him on into
varieties of new and indescribably horrible ruin. The dominant idea, the
morbid bias of his mind, coloured each delusion.
* * * * *
A desolate coast in the extreme sad North; along the sea stretches a
narrow beach of black rocks; behind this tower huge mountains, bare of
any vegetation, cloven by black ravines streaked here and there with the
ghastly white snow. It is the region of eternal death, of endless winter
sprinkling daily snows to be the sport of the Arctic hurricane.
A leaden-coloured sea moans incessantly on the dismal beach, and on it
sail fast to the southward, silently, great icebergs riven from the
mountains by the storms. And beyond the lea of the shore, the sea breaks
and shivers beneath the keen blast that sweeps down the dayless gorges
from the awful glaciers. And there is no horizon anywhere around, for
above is a sky of rolling clouds through which the sun never shines, and
the mists of the mountain-tops mingle with the clouds of the sky, and
so, too, does the sullen haze that lies on the grey sea. It is the
region of death--no life, no light, no love.
On the black rocks between the mountains and the sea, a wretched man is
lying. The deadly cold wind blows through him, but he cannot die. It
seems to him that he has lain there for ages, and will lie there for
evermore, away from all things human; and there is not even so much as a
flower to comfort the castaway--no life, no light, no love.
Of a sudden, a faint pink flush illumines the northern sky.
Hope comes back doubtfully to his despairing soul. He raises himself on
his elbows, and looks with straining eyes up the icy north wind at the
new light.
The rosy light deepens and collects into a form, first thin and vague as
a ghost, then gradually becoming distinct and solid.
There is standing before him the figure of a woman, a gigantic woman,
whose head reaches to the clouds--a Titan. Her beauty is beyond the
beauty of earth. Her massive rosy limbs are more delicious than ever
Greek sculptor dreamt of, and her long, fair locks blow out all over the
heavens, crowning her head with a golden halo.
Her lips are red and voluptuous, and pleasure sparkles in her eyes.
She does not look down at the man, but gazes far away over the mountains
and the seas towards the South.
A breath of hope thaws the despair in his soul. Life and light and love
are coming back to the regions of death.
He lies there at her feet and looks up, and his spirit is filled with
the sense of her beauty. His soul is faint with an impossible love for
her, a love greater than the awe he feels in the presence of the
goddess. He lies prone on the ground and longs that her great white feet
may crush him, and that he may die at once. To be killed by her were
sweet!
Oh, that he were not a pigmy! that he, too, were a god, and might become
fit mate of hers, might know her love!
His desire, his intense aspiration reaches her. The Titan looks down
upon him with a smile whose meaning he cannot understand; then she
stoops and touches his heart with her hand.
At that moment his wish commences to be realised. He feels that his body
is extending rapidly; his stature is becoming that of a god.
But now a fantastic and horrible idea seizes him. As he grows larger and
larger, his senses, his consciousness, spreading through the mass,
dilute lessen. As he increases in bulk, vitality diminishes; the
numbness and coldness of death comes gradually on him.
As his senses dim, the Titan woman fades away into mist, and all is
darkness. He can no longer hear the sound of the waves, and his body
still increases till it becomes as a vast mountain, the extremes of
which are so far off as to be almost out of sensation.
* * * * *
Possessed by this fearful delusion, mathematical calculations kept
running through the barrister's disordered brain--distracting sums ever
repeating themselves, and he could not shake them off.
Life, the wild train of his reasoning ran on continually. "Life filling
one body--the body doubles in size--then the life is half as strong. Now
my body is three times as big--life is three times as weak--now five
times--six times--now a hundred times. Oh, this numbness is reaching my
heart! Oh, this horrible, horrible death!" and his frame shook and his
muscles were drawn up in hard knots, and great beads of sweat rolled
down his agonised features.
* * * * *
Then a hand that waited on him unseen took a cup in which some white
crystals had been dissolved and placed it to his lips.
As his teeth rattled against it, he drank the draught fiercely, as if
for life, though he knew not what he did.
* * * * *
His delusions then became softer, even happy, as of one under the
influence of opium.
He saw around him an immense landscape--plains and rivers and hills
spreading for hundreds of leagues beneath a blue sky--a nature bathed in
a pellucid atmosphere that lent all a beauty beyond earth. Scattered
over the plain were many cities, and by merely willing it he found
himself walking within any of them--strange, beautiful cities of bright
colour, whose banner-hung streets were thronged with processions of
people clad in a medieval costume. The quaintness of an olden time was
over all.
All these processions tripped on to one tune, a tune to which they sang
a song in an unknown language--a song low, monotonous, sweet; and the
church bells rang out the same tune perpetually, and the very air shook
to it, and the trees waved to it, and so did the banners that hung from
the houses; and all his own words and thoughts ran on ever to the same
jingle without his power to prevent it.
Then he turned off from the main into the side streets, tempted by the
glance of a white-faced woman with a face of marvellous beauty,
fascinating, yet ominous, with immovable, inscrutable expression of
features.
Knowing that he was plunging into danger, horror, death, he yet followed
recklessly, led on by the magic of the woman. And from one side street
she would turn off at right angles into another, and from that to
another, and so on; and each street was narrower than the last and more
gloomy. The brightness and loveliness of the main thoroughfares was not
in these. There were no longer the gaily-dressed throngs and the harmony
of that universal tune; but these streets were silent, deserted, with
dark, moss-grown pavements, in which here and there were pools of black
water. The grim houses rose on either side storey upon storey of black,
hideous stones, ancient, rotten, crumbling with age; and each storey
overlapped the lower, till the upmost of either side of the street met,
high, high up, rickety structures of rotten wood from which black rags
flaunted. And for thirty feet or so up, there were no windows to these
houses--bare, leaning walls alone. After that were the windows,
irregular in size and in position, with wooden balconies running along
them carved into shapes of grinning monsters.
As he advanced from narrower street to narrower, the silence and the
sense of impending horror intensified. And the woman brought him to a
crevice half-way up in a sort of battlement; a recess which seemed to be
her bower wherein to receive her lovers--a foul recess where was a pile
of bones, and where the dark mould was discoloured with soaking blood.
Then she stopped, turned and looked him in the face; for the first time
her features moved--relaxed into a smile, he fled shrieking.
* * * * *
Again in those horrible narrow stifling alleys, which became darker and
filthier as he went on; and though he met no one in them, yet he saw
that from each of the innumerable windows there looked out at him the
beautiful, melancholy, deadly-white face of a woman, with black eyes as
of a basilisk burning out of it.
None of the women spoke, or moved, or beckoned, or looked glad or wroth.
But he knew, as he passed by them, that they came down the stairs of
their houses behind him and followed him. He could not see them or hear
them, but he felt their terrible presence. They poured out behind him,
silent, invisible crowds ever increasing.
He rushed on, but the streets were still ever narrower and loftier; oh,
the deadly fear that was on him, the desire to find escape to the broad,
bright streets again, and flee this horrible thing!
But he could not--it was not to be--not broader but ever narrower were
the foul alleys that he hurried through. Would he never come out to the
light? Was he altogether cut off? Would he reach some blind alley and be
at the mercy of the pursuing crowd?
At last the streets were so narrow that the houses altogether joined. He
found himself no longer on the stone pavements, but going through the
crazy houses themselves. He passed along old wooden corridors that shook
and crumbled beneath his tread, while below were black depths of rushing
water--open sewers whose filth was alive with fearful reptiles; then
along great galleries, and through rooms; door after door, yet no escape
for the phantom-pursued wretch. And the rooms were of all characters,
but all deserted and all terrible to the fancy. Now he was in a garret
with noisome walls, with their dirty paper torn, waving in a cold wind,
and hideous vermin crawling over it; now in a magnificent boudoir with
sofas of purple pile and great mirrors, and a thousand nicknacks
glittering with diamonds, a chamber heavy with voluptuous odours, fit
nest for some loveliest, young Hetaira or Cleopatra's self, but always
with some unspeakable loathsome thing in it; then into cellars, foul
charnel-houses strewed with bones--bones of men that a voice within him
told had been former victims of the horror, even as he should be--and so
on and on and on before the nameless terror, fleeing from the unseen
women that were ever noiselessly following.
At last he felt a breath of fresh air on his cheek. O, God, was it
escape at last?
No! No! He was at the end of an alley, but it terminated on the foul mud
of a river bank, a broad, dark river--no escape, and the crowd behind
neared--neared--they had surrounded him--seized him....
* * * * *
Once more the precious crystals calmed the overwrought brain for awhile.
* * * * *
The mouth of a pit--a pit of endless depths of suffocating darkness, and
this darkness and the suffocating poisonous density of the air of it
increased with the depth.
A pit of indefinite breadth, it might be a hundred miles or a hundred
yards or of no breadth at all, for it was in a realm beyond the limits
of space.
In the middle of the pit--that is at an equal distance from the edges,
and on a level with them--the wretch was poised.
He breathed labouriously--a difficult painful expiration, an agonising
inspiration; and as he breathed out the air he sank--sank into the
darkness of the pit--down into the suffocating darkness, into horror and
death.
Then he gasped for life; drank the difficult thick air and rose again to
the surface; with each expiration sinking, with each inspiration rising
to the lighter air of the surface.
There was present to him all the agony of the drowning with a horror
such as no death can give. But when he rose, he was not able to stay
above the pit long; for he could not hold his breath--after a few
minutes he was forced to breathe out--breathe out and sink down--down
into that unutterable horror.
And the whole mouth of the pit was domed with a gigantic dome of
millions of human heads, grinning, laughing, jeering at the wretch;
mocking him that he could not stay on the surface but must breathe out
and sink again--the heads of beautiful, bad women, some that he
recognised as erst the companions of his orgies, the hideous heads too
of satyr-like old men, that shook with palsy as they grinned with lust,
in which he seemed to recognize his own distorted likeness; and heads of
horrible things not describable in the language of the sane world.
So up and down he rose and fell between the grinning faces and the
suffocating darkness, each time weaker, more unable to fight upwards to
life, each time sinking deeper, staying longer in the stifling depths.
* * * * *
Once more the hand that ministered unseen, placed the glass to his
chattering teeth; the crystals again did their blessed work, and his
delirious fancy changed. He was in an old ivy-grown parsonage in a
pleasant, western village among hills and apple-orchards; a child once
more in his old home. He wandered up the valley, by the crystal
trout-streams, between the heathery hills; a child so glad, so pure, and
he wept bitterly for the very delight of the flowers and all the beauty
of the land, wept, though so simple and innocent; with a foreboding of
future sin and misery and vain, vain, regrets.
Then the clouds darkened and gathered, and a girl walked towards him by
the river bank, a beautiful girl with golden hair and purple eyes, with
a great sorrow in her young face--and she passed, seeing him not,
turning not aside, though he stretched out his hands in passionate
yearning and pleading--but he could not step one step towards her, nor
could he cry out to her to stay, though he knew that she alone could
save him.
Then another woman followed, beautiful also, but with the eyes of a
snake; and she saw him and looked into him till his heart chilled and
his veins tingled, but with a terrible fascination. To look at her, to
love her was death; but he would look and love notwithstanding, and die
with a laugh of joy on his lips.
* * * * *
"This is the poor wretch, Mary. He is asleep now. Do you think you can
recognize who it is?"
It was Susan who spoke; she and Mary were standing alone by the bed-side
of the unconscious Hudson.
Mary scanned his features closely--a look of pity on her face; but in
reply to the other's question, shook her head--she did not know him.
"Yet from what he said this morning he evidently knows you," went on
Susan.
"I cannot remember the face--and yet there is something in it"--Mary
said, doubtfully, as she paused to consider again the altered features.
"I think I know what he is," interrupted Susan. "I made out from his
ravings that he was a barrister."
"A barrister!" cried Mary, and she started back and her cheek blanched.
Yes! she knew him now. And was this poor wretch so changed, so degraded,
indeed the bright, young man who had first befriended her?
"Oh, Susan, I know who it is now. Poor fellow! poor fellow! I have not
seen him for years--Then he was so different, so noble. Oh! what could
have caused this? He was my first friend in the world, when I had no
others and was sorely in need of one! Oh! what can I do? what can I do?"
and she wrung her hands with anguish. "Oh, Susan! if I had but known of
this."
Susan interrupted her. "If you had but known you might have prevented
this. Yes! I dare say."
"What did the doctor say, Susan? Will he recover?"
"The doctor says the case is a bad one; but then the man is young, so
there is hope of recovery, unless--unless something happens to
complicate the mischief."
So strange was the tone in which the woman uttered these last words,
that Mary turned round and looked at her, and felt a great terror creep
over her when she perceived the glitter in her eye and the sinister
smile about her mouth.
Even a coward will become recklessly brave when possessed by some strong
passion. Susan was at heart a coward, yet she now did what she well knew
was an extremely imprudent thing. She could not control herself; her
malice overcame her fear of consequences. She so hated Mary, the girl
who she believed had robbed her of two lovers, that she could not resist
the dear temptation of torturing her, of watching her agony as she
played with her feelings like a cat with a mouse, though she was aware
how perilous the amusement was. So she went on with a voice that could
scarcely conceal her delightful sense of triumphant cruelty.
"Now, Mary, listen carefully to what I am saying--I know who this old
lover of yours is. We of the Inner Six know everything. Nothing can
escape our vigilance--no treason especially"--and she looked earnestly
into the other eyes. "This Mr. Thomas Hudson--you see I know him--has
just come into a considerable fortune--poor fool, if he had but known
it! His uncle died two days ago. It's a pity you did not know that, is
it not, Mary?"
"I don't know what you mean," exclaimed the girl, "and I don't
understand how you can speak in so heartless a manner. Has this man ever
done you any injury?"
"That is not the question, my dear Mary," said the woman in bland tones.
"Now follow me carefully and don't interrupt. This Mr. Hudson, you see,
is now entitled to a large landed estate. Now Mr. Hudson may marry, may
have children, may leave tyrants after him to hold the people's land. We
should have to remove those children, should we not, Mary?"
Mary made no reply, so Susan, after a pause, continued: "But, on the
other hand, if Mr. Hudson happened to die now, the estate would go to a
certain old gentleman who is over seventy. This old gentleman is
unmarried, and is hardly likely to beget children if he does marry; so
when he dies in his turn, there will be no descendant of his to take the
land, and so it will revert to the State--that is, unless he dies before
this new Landed Property Act is passed, and becomes law--an improbable
contingency; as next session of Parliament will certainly settle
that--you follow me, don't you, Mary?"
Mary, scarcely knowing what she did, replied with an affirmative motion
of the head, but she said nothing.
Susan proceeded: "Now, Mary, this is the question: which will be the
better plan, to put this Thomas Hudson out of the way now, and so secure
this property to the people by one stroke, or to wait till by-and-bye
and then contrive, not without much danger and difficulty, perhaps, to
put away his children? I consult you because I look on you as one of the
cleverest members of the Sisterhood. Let us have the benefit of your
opinion."
The malicious woman never took her glittering eyes off the girl as she
said these words, and waited for an answer.
But the girl only trembled, and turned deadly pale, staring at the other
with fixed dilated eyes. She could not speak, for she felt a strange
numbness creeping over her whole body, gradually intensifying, and
paralysing her every sense.
Susan left her in suspense for a minute or so, gloating over the agony
of her rival, and then continued in a cold voice, calmer and more
deliberate than most women would employ when discussing how a gown was
to be made up, or some such equally important matter:
"To me it seems absurd to miss such a glorious chance. What an
opportunity, too, of watching the working of Jane's poison! So I
have--look here, dear--" She raised one sleeve of the man's shirt, and
pointed to a small blue spot, surrounded by a slightly inflamed circle,
which stood out in contrast to the white flesh.
Susan then looked up with a smile into the girl's face, but when she
perceived the expression on it, she felt frightened at what she had
done; for Mary was gazing straight in front of her with a fixed stupid
stare, as if not understanding what she heard or saw. Susan dropped the
man's arm and ran towards her, just in time to support her as she fell
fainting to the ground.
Having now satisfied her malice, the cowardly element of the woman's
nature came to the front again. She shook with fear, and cursed her
folly at having told this thing to Mary; why, the girl in her hysterical
weakness, or in the delirium that might come of this shock, might easily
reveal the whole transaction.
She laid Mary down on the floor, and stood staring at her without
rendering any assistance for a few minutes. In her fear, she had lost
all her presence of mind. Then somewhat recovering herself, she was
about to employ measures to bring the girl back to consciousness, when
her eyes happened to fall on the barrister.
One of his eyes was covered by the bandage across his forehead, but the
other was open wide, staring fixedly at her out of the pale face, while
his swollen lips moved, as if trying to give utterance to words, but
unable to do so.
The sudden sight of this, the suspicion that he had perhaps overheard
and understood all that she had revealed to Mary, completely unnerved
her, and in the shock of the moment she screamed aloud, so that Dr.
Duncan and one or two others hearing the cry ran into the ward.