on what I had seen; but it struck me as remarkable, that, while he got
into contortions and general restlessness, putting his hand to his brow,
throwing one leg over another, closing his hands, and heaving long
sighs, he never so much as thought it worth his pains to ask my opinion
of the scene in the wood. It seemed as if he was so thoroughly convinced
of a divine manifestation against him, that he despised any exceptional
scepticism as utterly beneath his notice or attention--thoroughly
engrossed, as he appeared to be, with the terrible sanction of a portent
of some coming retribution. His silence in some degree distressed me, as
I thought he resented my levity in commenting upon his convictions; so
it was with some relief that Dr. Rogers came in and sat down at the
table, apparently to wait for a call to the bedroom. A man this of
ostentatious gloom,--too grave to deign to be witty, too sanctified to
stoop to be cheerful, and therefore not the man I could have wished to
see as the medical adviser, and perhaps the religious confidant, of my
friend and his wife. A temperate man, too, by his own confession,
pronounced over the top of a bottle; and he drank as if for health,
while his manner of beslabbering the glass with his thick lips indicated
a contempt for its confined capacity; a tumbler would have suited him
better; and he waxed apparently graver when the delightful aroma of the
Bordeaux grape fondled his nostrils. We got into supernaturals
immediately, though how the subject was introduced I cannot remember;
but Dr. Rogers was a grave and heavy advocate for divine manifestation,
and Graeme's ear, circumcised to delicacy, hung upon his thick lips. I
asked for instances beyond the domain of the addled brains of old women,
or the excited fancies of young; and Graeme looked at me intently,
without saying a word.
"I have seen hundreds die," said the doctor, "ay, strong men, the
tissues of whose brain were, in comparison of those of your old women
and young enthusiasts, as iron wires to pellicles of flesh. And how do
they die if they are Christians, as all men ought to be? What is there
in death, think you, to subvert the known laws of physiology? We might
suppose, that as the spirit is about to leave the mortal frame, it will
be fitful, and flit from tissue to tissue, and gleam and die away, to
flare up again in some worldly image, perhaps, of the past; as where I
have known it show the face of an early beloved one, long since gone, in
all its first glory, to the eyes of a lover. Such are mere exceptions,
from which no rule can be drawn; but they occur, and we admit them as
consonant enough to natural causes. So far we all agree; but where is
that consonance in all those numerous cases which have come under my own
observation, where the man--a strong man even in death--is rapt into a
vision set in a halo of light, and showing forth, as an assurance of
divine favour, the very form and features of Him who died on the cross
of Calvary? Is there anything in physiology to account for this? And
then it occurs so often as almost to amount to a rule."
"I have too much respect for religion," replied I, "to throw a doubt on
certain workings of the spirit in that mysterious condition when it
hovers between the two worlds, and when it can hardly be said to belong
to earth; but the case is entirely different where the common agencies
are all working through their fitted and natural means. We can never say
that any of those means are superseded--only others are substituted; and
we do not understand the substitution."
"You are unfortunate," said the doctor, with a triumphant gravity. "If
you admit that supernatural agencies ever have--in any stage of the
world, in any place, way, or manner, or by any means--had to do with
earthly things, or have to do in those days, or will have to do in any
future time or place on the earth's surface, your admission closes up
your mouth for ever."
"To do, in those days, on this night, not many hours agone!" cried
Graeme, with rolling eyes. "Who cares for admissions of those who see,
when one's own eyes are nearer the brain than are the eyes or lips of
him who admits, or of him who denies?"
"Not hours ago!" said the doctor, fixing his big eyes on the face of
Graeme; "and so near a birth?"
"Oh, she knows nothing," said Graeme.
"And I am supremely ignorant," said I.
"Of what?" inquired Rogers, turning his face again to Graeme, as if he
would take him into his mouth.
But just as he expected an answer, a slight rap sounded from the door.
Rogers himself opened it, and found that the call was for him. Graeme
and I were left again together, but not to resume the former silence.
"I did not ask you," said he, "what you thought of the figure in the
wood, for I expected nothing but a sceptical sneer. You have heard
Rogers. He is a shrewd fellow, belonging to a profession not remarkable
for credulity."
"Answer me this," said I: "Did no one know the duplicate card you used
in the cheat?"
"You were present and Ruggieri, no others; did you know it?"
"No."
"Then do you know that Ruggieri is dead in Italy? and even if he had
more penetration than you, the secret died with him. But, I tell you, he
could not have known. Nothing transpired at the play to show that a
duplicate card was used at all, far less to show that it was a
particular card."
"You may stagger me," said I, "but never can convince me that you are
not having a nice game played off upon you, something similar to your
own; only in place of duplicates, I fear there are triplicates. Why
might not Gourlay have been aware of the fact you think only known to
yourself?"
"And yet have shot himself as a ruined gambler?"
"Certainly it is more probable," said I, somewhat caught, "that he would
have insisted upon your repaying him, under the threat of exposure. Yet
one does not know what a man may do or not do, even if we knew the
circumstances. Two doves will not pick up for their nests a straw each
of the same shape. But I believe it is now settled, that no case of
mystery has ever happened, or can be supposed by the most ingenious
imagination, where the chances are more for supernatural agency than for
human ingenuity or chance. The latter I put away out of your case,
though the marvels of coincidence are stranger than fiction. Every one
of us has a little record within his heart of such experiences. I have
been startled by a coincidence into a five minutes' belief in
supernatural agency. One opens a book of six hundred pages, and catches,
on the instant, the passage for which he looked the whole day before. An
actor dies in ranting 'there is another and a better world.' A soldier
is saved from the punishment of death for sleeping on his post, by the
fact of having been able to say that St. Paul's on a certain night
struck thirteen, which it never did before. Andrew Gordon, the miser,
drew a prize of twenty thousand pounds for the number 2001, which he
dreamed of the night previous he bought the ticket. A shepherd was the
discoverer of the Australian diggings, by having taken up a piece of
what he considered quartz to throw at his dog called Goldy. Human
history is full of such things; but, marvellous as they are, they are
not more so than the ways by which man manufactures mysteries, and gets
them believed as the work of Heaven. As to that illuminated figure I saw
in the wood"----
My speech was interrupted by a strange sound from the other end of the
house. Graeme started to his feet. It was not one of pain coming from a
sick-room, but rather one of surprise, and there seemed a bustle among
the servants. The door opened, and a woman's face, with two wild staring
eyes, looked in. "Come here, sir," she cried, and disappeared upon the
instant.
"Something more," ejaculated Graeme, as he hurried away. I was allowed
no time for an absurd monologue. Graeme was not absent many minutes,
when he hurried in as he had hurried out, but his face was not that
which he took with him, braced up into surprise and fear, as that was.
He was now as pale as death's pale horse, and nearly as furious. His eye
beamed an unnatural light--his breathing was quick and snatchy, as if
every inspiration and expiration pained the lungs. He seemed to wish
some one to bind him with ropes, that he might escape the vibrations of
his muscles, and be steadied to be able to speak.
"Be calm," said I, taking him by the shoulders; "what new discovery is
this? Nothing wrong with Mrs. Graeme, I hope?"
"The child," he cried; but he could get no further.
"The child is"--
"Is what?" said I.
"Is marked on the back with the figure of the ten of diamonds."
"Pity it was not marked where it will wear its pockets," said I; "but
it will assuredly be a very fortunate child, nevertheless, and shall
bear a load of diamonds on his back like the Arabian Alcansar."
"Are you mad?" he cried.
"Yes, with reason," I replied. "You know, nothing appears so
outrageously insane to a madman, as that same God's gift called reason.
They say, those who are bitten by the tarantula, and get dancing mad,
think the wondering crowd about them raving maniacs. And there was the
weeping philanthropist in the asylum of Montrose, in Scotland, who wept
all day, and could not be consoled, because of all the people outside
the asylum being mad."
"But," he gasped, "the thing is there."
"No doubt on't," said I, "and you ought to be grateful. I have read
somewhere of one John Zopyrus, who went mad when he heard of a son being
born to him; and here you are not mad, though you have a son (I hope)
born to you, with ten diamonds besides."
"But the thing is there," he again cried.
"Ay, there's the rub, my dear fellow; the rub is there--let the rub _be_
there; that is, go and rub, and the thing rubbed will not be there after
the rubbing."
"Madness, man! It is a true mother's mark."
"Verily, a real _noevus maternus_" said I, "impressed by an avenging
angel on the mother's brain, and transferred by nature's daguerreotype
to the back of the child."
"You have said it."
"Nay, it is you who have said it," I continued; "and I will even suppose
it is a mother's mark, to please you for a little, though it has no more
that character than this sword-prick in my left cheek. But taking it in
your own way, I have a theory I could propound to you about these marks.
We say that the soul is in the body. It is just as true that the body
is in the soul. Every member of the entire physical person is
represented in the brain, though we cannot discern the form in these
white viscera. Now, see you, if a man loses his finger, his son will not
be awanting in that member. But there are cases where the want of a
member is hereditary. Why? Because the member was not represented in the
cerebral microcosm of the first deficient person. From this small
epitome in the brain, the child is an extended copy--_extended_ from a
mathematical point, where all the members and lineaments are _intended_.
So, when the fancy of the mother is working in the brain--say, in
realizing some external image--it will impress it in the cerebral person
(woman) there epitomized; and if she is in a certain way, the image will
go to a corresponding part of the foetal point, which is the epitome of
the child. A most ingenious, and satisfactory, and simple theory, which
will explain the ten-of-diamond naevus, for"----
"Dreadful imbecility!" he exclaimed, as he threw himself on his chair;
"most unaccountable and cruel trifling with a notable visitation of
retributive justice, indicated by visible signs of terrible import to
him who must bear the cross, and be reconciled to an angry Deity."
"Against all that may tend to penitence for a past crime," said I,
getting grave, where gravity might avail for good, "I have nothing to
say. But Heaven does not work through the mean of man's deceit and
stratagem, and the good that comes of fear goes with returning courage."
Conscious of getting into a puling humour, I had no objection to an
interruption by the entrance of Rogers, who, having finished his work,
was probably intent upon the gratification which generally follows.
"I wish you joy of the boy and the diamonds," he said, as he seized
Graeme by the half-palsied hand. "The nurse is reconciled to the omen of
a fortune; and surely never was omen more auspicious, for no sooner had
the strange indication shown its mute vaticination than it disappeared,
that there might be no deduction of beauty from the favourite of the
gods." And drawing, with his lumbering hand, the tumbler near him, he
filled it two-thirds up of pure wine, and presently his lips grappled
with it like a camel at the bucket in the desert, with such effect that
the contents changed vessels in a twinkling.
"Disappeared!" said I musingly.
"Yea, temperance hath her demands on occasions," said he, thinking I
alluded to the exit of the wine, and not the ominous mark; "for there be
two kinds of this noble virtue, the jejune and the hearty, whereof the
former observes no plethoric gratifications, and the other is not averse
to an extreme of cordial indulgence."
"Disappeared!" said I in a harping way, once again, "and left the skin
discoloured."
"But it was there, and I saw it with these eyes," cried Graeme, "and the
doctor saw it, and Betha, but, thank God, not the mother."
"The vouchsafing of the eyes is an easy task," drawled Rogers. "The
truth of present fact is of the moment of experience as regards the
seer; but, as a moral entity, it never dies. The great Author of nature
has his intention in these mysterious signs. We know only that there are
two kinds of these God's finger-touches--the enduring and the
evanescent. That we have now witnessed was of the latter kind, which we
also call superficial in opposition to the other, which is painted on
the _rete mucosum_, and never goes off. The difference of indications
we know not, further than that a mysterious purpose is served by both.
But might I ask if ever there was any occasion on which the figure of
this card might, as connected with some thrilling incident, have been
impressed upon the imagination of the mother?"
"Never," cried Graeme, as he shook violently.
"Then it betokens fortune to the heir of the Moated Grange," said
Rogers.
"It betokens vengeance!" roared Graeme, no longer able to contain
himself; and he began to pace rapidly the room. Then stopping before
me--
"How long will you torment me with your scepticism? Here, Betha," he
cried to the woman, who at the instant again called Rogers, "what did
you see on the back of the boy?"
"The ten of diamonds, sir," replied she, evidently frightened by the
wild eyes of her master. "But you are not to be feared. Do I not know
God's signs when I see them fresh from his very finger? I have seen them
aforetime; and no man or woman on earth, no, even our minister, will
convince me they are meant for nothing. This bairn will be a rich man,
but it will not be by the devil's books; for he who made the mark does
not tempt to evil by promises printed on the bodies of them he loves."
"I want not this drivelling," said her master, on whom her reading of
the sign had an effect the very opposite of that intended. "You're a
fool, but you have eyes. Say, once for all, you saw it, and will swear.
Take her words, Rymer."
"As clear as I see the mark on your cheek, sir," she said, addressing
me. "It was not from one who loved you so well as your mother did when
she bore you, you got that mark."
"I got it from a villain called Ruggieri," I replied, caring nothing
for the start I produced in Graeme, but keeping my eye on the face of
Rogers.
I will say nothing of what I observed on that long, sombre, saturnine
index. It was an experiment on my part, and I might have found
something, merely because I expected it; nor do I think Graeme knew my
object, though he felt the words as a surprise.
"And who is Ruggieri?" said the doctor, by way of putting a simple
question.
"_Perhaps_ an Italian," said I. "Rogers is, they say, the Scotch
representative of that name."
"It is a lie, sir!" cried the grave son of Aesculapius; but finding he
had committed a mistake, he beat up an apology close upon the heels of
his insult. "I beg your pardon; I simply meant that the two names are
different, and that you were out in your etymology."
"I am satisfied," I replied.
"And so am I," growled the doctor, as he shuffled out, followed by
Betha.
"What the devil do you mean?" said the colonel, coming up, and looking
me sternly in the face. "Is not this business serious enough for me and
this house already, without the mention to that man, who knows nothing
of me or of my history, of a name hateful to both you and me?"
"At present I have no intention of telling you what I meant by
introducing that name in the presence of Rogers."
"More mystery!" said he.
"No mystery--all as plain as little Edith's card she got from Trott, or
the blazon in the wood, or the mark on the child's back. But I do not
wish to dwell longer on a subject which gives you so much pain. I am to
be off in the morning, and I should wish, before I go, to know what is
to be the issue of all this wonderful working."
Graeme had now seated himself; and I resumed my chair also, to wait an
answer, which his manner seemed to indicate might be slow and delicate.
We looked, in the dim light of the room, at two in the morning, like two
wizards trying our skill in working out some scheme of _diablerie_; yet,
in reality, how unlike! For though we had both been gamblers, and
consequently bad men, we had for years renounced the wild ways of an
ill-regulated youth, and settled down to tread, with pleasure to
ourselves and profit to others, the decent paths of virtue.
"I am resolved," said Graeme at length----
"On what?" I inquired.
"On making amends. That money, which by means of the substituted card I
took from Gourlay, sticks like a bone-splint in the red throat of my
penitence. I cannot pray myself, nor join Annabel, nor listen to Edith,
when they send up their supplications to that place where mercy is, and
where, too, vengeance is--vengeance which, in the very form of my
pictured crime, dogs me everywhere, as you have seen, though a
philosophical pride prevents you from giving faith to what you have
seen--vengeance which, though using no earthly instruments, is yet the
stronger, and more terrible to me, for that very circumstance that it
brings up my conscience, and parades its pictured whisperings before my
vision, scorching my brain, and making me mad--vengeance, breaking no
bones, nor lacerating flesh, nor spilling blood, yet going to the heart
of the human organism, among the fine tissues where begin the rudiments
of being, and whence issue the springs of feeling, sympathy, hope, love,
and justice, all of which it poisons, and turns into agonies. Yes, sir,
vengeance which, claiming the assistance of the fairest virtues,
conjugal love and angelic purity, makes them smite with shame, so that
it were even a relief to me that the wife of my bosom were wicked, and
the child of my affections a creature of sin. What are these signs that
haunt me but instigators to redemption? and can I hesitate when Heaven
asks obedience?"
"A useless harangue," said I, "when you have the means of saving
yourself. Pay the money, read your Bible, and the signs will cease."
"You have said it. I will pay the money; but I do not know where the
woman Gourlay lives."
"That is not a difficult matter. Where money is to be paid, the
recipient will start out of the bosom of the earth. I am about sick of
this chamber of mysteries--though no mysteries to me; and I go to bed. I
doubt if you may expect to see me at the breakfast table in the
morning."
"Will you leave me in this condition?" he said, with an imploring eye.
"You will hear from me. Good night."
In the midst of all these supernaturals, I remained myself pretty
natural--got naturally among the comfortable bed-clothes, fell naturally
asleep, and, in consequence of late hours, slept naturally longer than I
intended. I started at seven, got my bag, and, without seeing Graeme,
set out for C---- town, got breakfast, and then took the stage for a
seaport not very far distant. Having arrived at my destination, I sought
out the Eastergate, a dirty street inhabited by poor people, mounted
three pair of stairs till I saw through a slate-pane, knocked at a door,
and was met by a woman, with an umbrageously bearded face peering out
from the side of her head-gear--that is, there was a head there in
addition to her own.
"The devil!" said the man. "How did you find me out?"
"By the trail of evil," I said, as I walked in, and shut the door
behind me.
"Did you not know I was dead?" he continued, by way of desperate
raillery.
"Yes, the devil was once reported to be dead and buried in a certain
long town, but it was only a feint, whereby to catch the unwary Whigs.
Let us have seats. I want a little quiet conversation with you both."
We seemed rather a comfortable party round the fire.
"Ruggieri," said I, "do you know that scar?"
"I have certainly seen it before," replied he, with the utmost
composure.
"Well, you know the attack you made upon me at Brussels, for the
convenient purpose of getting buried along with your victim a certain
little piece of dirty paper I have in my pocket, whereby you became
bound to pay to me a thousand florins which I lent you, on the faith of
one I took for a gentleman."
"The scar I deny," he replied, unblushingly; "and as for the bit of
paper, if you can find any one in these parts who can prove that the
signature thereto was written by this hand belonging to this person now
sitting before you, you will accomplish something more wonderful than
finding me out here." And he laughed in his old boisterous way.
"The more difficult, I daresay," replied I, as I fixed a pretty
inquisitive gaze on him, "that you have a duplicate to your real name of
Charles Rogers."
"'Tis a lie!" he exclaimed. "My father was--was--yes--an artist in
Bologna--the cleverest magician in Italy."
"And that is the reason," said I calmly, "that your brother the doctor
works his tricks so cleverly at the Moated Grange."
Subtle officers accomplish much by attacks of surprise--going home with
a fact known to the criminal to be true, but supposed by him to be
unknown to all the world besides. I had acted on this principle, and the
effect was singular. His tongue, which had laid in a stock of nervous
fluid for roaring like a steam-boiler a little opened, was palsied. He
turned on me a blank look; then, directing his eye to the woman, "You
infernal hag," he exclaimed, "all this comes from you!"
"I deny it," said the woman, as she left his side and came round to
mine. "But I now know, what I always suspected, that you are a villain.
Sir," she continued, "this man, and his brother Dr. Rogers, prevailed
upon me to give them a paper, to enable them to get out of Colonel
Graeme the money he won from my husband. I believe they have got it, and
that they are keeping it from me."
"They have not got it," said I, "and never will. The money is yours, and
will be paid to you, if to any."
"Thank God!" she exclaimed. "No good could come out of the designs of
this man and his brother. They made it up to terrify the colonel"----
A look from the man stopped her; but the broken sentence was to me a
volume. They sat and looked lightnings at each other; and I contented
myself with thinking, that when a rotten tree splits, bears catch honey.
"Oh, I'm not to be frightened," she continued, as she gathered up
courage to dare the villain. "I will tell all about the ten of diamonds
which I heard made up between them."