It is the night of the mayor’s ball! The guests are assembling fast;
county families twelve miles round have been invited, as well as the
principal families of the town. All, before proceeding to the room set
apart for the dance, moved in procession through the museum,--homage to
science before pleasure!
The building was brilliantly lighted, and the effect was striking,
perhaps because singular and grotesque. There, amidst stands of flowers
and evergreens, lit up with coloured lamps, were grouped the dead
representatives of races all inferior--some deadly--to man. The fancy of
the ladies had been permitted to decorate and arrange these types of the
animal world. The tiger glared with glass eyes from amidst artificial
reeds and herbage, as from his native jungle; the grisly white bear
peered from a mimic iceberg. There, in front, stood the sage elephant,
facing a hideous hippopotamus; whilst an anaconda twined its long spire
round the stem of some tropical tree in zinc. In glass cases, brought
into full light by festooned lamps, were dread specimens of the reptile
race,--scorpion and vampire, and cobra capella, with insects of gorgeous
hues, not a few of them with venomed stings.
But the chief boast of the collection was in the varieties of the
Genus Simia,--baboons and apes, chimpanzees, with their human visage,
mockeries of man, from the dwarf monkeys perched on boughs lopped from
the mayor’s shrubberies, to the formidable ourangoutang, leaning on his
huge club.
Every one expressed to the mayor admiration, to each other antipathy,
for this unwonted and somewhat ghastly, though instructive, addition to
the revels of a ballroom.
Margrave, of course, was there, and seemingly quite at home, gliding
from group to group of gayly-dressed ladies, and brilliant with
a childish eagerness to play off the showman. Many of these grim
fellow-creatures he declared he had seen, played, or fought with. He
had something true or false to say about each. In his high spirits he
contrived to make the tiger move, and imitated the hiss of the terribly
anaconda. All that he did had its grace, its charm; and the buzz of
admiration and the flattering glances of ladies’ eyes followed him
wherever he moved.
However, there was a general feeling of relief when the mayor led the
way from the museum into the ballroom. In provincial parties guests
arrive pretty much within the same hour, and so few who had once paid
their respects to the apes and serpents, the hippopotamus and the tiger,
were disposed to repeat the visit, that long before eleven o’clock the
museum was as free from the intrusion of human life as the wilderness in
which its dead occupants had been born.
I had gone my round through the rooms, and, little disposed to be
social, had crept into the retreat of a window-niche, pleased to think
myself screened by its draperies,--not that I was melancholy, far from
it; for the letter I had received that morning from Lilian had raised my
whole being into a sovereignty of happiness high beyond the reach of
the young pleasure-hunters, whose voices and laughter blended with that
vulgar music.
To read her letter again I had stolen to my nook, and now, sure that
none saw me kiss it, I replaced it in my bosom. I looked through the
parted curtain; the room was comparatively empty; but there, through the
open folding-doors, I saw the gay crowd gathered round the dancers,
and there again, at right angles, a vista along the corridor afforded a
glimpse of the great elephant in the deserted museum.
Presently I heard, close beside me, my host’s voice.
“Here’s a cool corner, a pleasant sofa, you can have it all to yourself.
What an honour to receive you under my roof, and on this interesting
occasion! Yes, as you say, there are great changes in L---- since you
left us. Society has much improved. I must look about and find some
persons to introduce to you. Clever! oh, I know your tastes. We have
a wonderful man,--a new doctor. Carries all before him; very high
character, too; good old family, greatly looked up to, even apart from
his profession. Dogmatic a little,--a Sir Oracle,--‘Lets no dog bark;’
you remember the quotation,--Shakspeare. Where on earth is he? My dear
Sir Philip, I am sure you would enjoy his conversation.”
Sir Philip! Could it be Sir Philip Derval to whom the mayor was giving
a flattering yet scarcely propitiatory description of myself? Curiosity
combined with a sense of propriety in not keeping myself an unsuspected
listener; I emerged from the curtain, but silently, and reached the
centre of the room before the mayor perceived me. He then came up to me
eagerly, linked his arm in mine, and leading me to a gentleman seated on
a sofa, close by the window I had quitted, said,--
“Doctor, I must present you to Sir Philip Derval, just returned to
England, and not six hours in L----. If you would like to see the museum
again, Sir Philip, the doctor, I am sure, will accompany you.”
“No, I thank you; it is painful to me at present to see, even under
your roof, the collection which my poor dear friend, Dr. Lloyd, was so
proudly beginning to form when I left these parts.”
“Ay, Sir Philip, Dr. Lloyd was a worthy man in his way, but sadly duped
in his latter years; took to mesmerism, only think! But our young doctor
here showed him up, I can tell you.”
Sir Philip, who had acknowledged my first introduction to his
acquaintance by the quiet courtesy with which a well-bred man goes
through a ceremony that custom enables him to endure with equal ease and
indifference, now evinced by a slight change of manner how little the
mayor’s reference to my dispute with Dr. Lloyd advanced me in his good
opinion. He turned away with a bow more formal than his first one, and
said calmly,
“I regret to hear that a man so simple-minded and so sensitive as Dr.
Lloyd should have provoked an encounter in which I can well conceive him
to have been worsted. With your leave, Mr. Mayor, I will look into your
ballroom. I may perhaps find there some old acquaintances.”
He walked towards the dancers, and the mayor, linking his arm in mine,
followed close behind, saying in his loud hearty tones,--
“Come along, you too, Dr. Fenwick, my girls are there; you have not
spoken to them yet.”
Sir Philip, who was then half way across the room, turned round
abruptly, and, looking me full in the face, said,--
“Fenwick, is your name Fenwick,--Allen Fenwick?”
“That is my name, Sir Philip.”
“Then permit me to shake you by the hand; you are no stranger, and no
mere acquaintance to me. Mr. Mayor, we will look into your ballroom
later; do not let us keep you now from your other guests.”
The mayor, not in the least offended by being thus summarily dismissed,
smiled, walked on, and was soon lost amongst the crowd.
Sir Philip, still retaining my hand, reseated himself on the sofa, and
I took my place by his side. The room was still deserted; now and then
a straggler from the ballroom looked in for a moment, and then sauntered
back to the central place of attraction.
“I am trying to guess,” said I, “how my name should be known to you.
Possibly you may, in some visit to the Lakes, have known my father?”
“No; I know none of your name but yourself,--if, indeed, as I doubt not,
you are the Allen Fenwick to whom I owe no small obligation. You were a
medical student at Edinburgh in the year ----?”
“Yes.”
“So! At that time there was also at Edinburgh a young man, named Richard
Strahan. He lodged in a fourth flat in the Old Town.”
“I remember him very well.”
“And you remember, also, that a fire broke out at night in the house
in which he lodged; that when it was discovered there seemed no hope
of saving him. The flames wrapped the lower part of the house; the
staircase had given way. A boy, scarcely so old as himself, was the only
human being in the crowd who dared to scale the ladder that even then
scarcely reached the windows from which the smoke rolled in volumes;
that boy penetrated into the room, found the inmate almost insensible,
rallied, supported, dragged him to the window, got him on the
ladder,--saved his life then: and his life later, by nursing with a
woman’s tenderness, through the fever caused by terror and excitement,
the fellow-creature he had rescued by a man’s daring. The name of that
gallant student was Allen Fenwick, and Richard Strahan is my nearest
living relation. Are we friends now?”
I answered confusedly. I had almost forgotten the circumstances referred
to. Richard Strahan had not been one of my more intimate companions, and
I had never seen nor heard of him since leaving college. I inquired what
had become of him.
“He is at the Scotch Bar,” said Sir Philip, “and of course without
practice. I understand that he has fair average abilities, but no
application. If I am rightly informed, he is, however, a thoroughly
honourable, upright man, and of an affectionate and grateful
disposition.”
“I can answer for all you have said in his praise. He had the qualities
you name too deeply rooted in youth to have lost them now.”
Sir Philip remained for some moments in a musing silence; and I took
advantage of that silence to examine him with more minute attention than
I had done before, much as the first sight of him had struck me.
He was somewhat below the common height,--so delicately formed that one
might call him rather fragile than slight. But in his carriage and air
there was remarkable dignity. His countenance was at direct variance
with his figure; for as delicacy was the attribute of the last, so power
was unmistakably the characteristic of the first. He looked fully
the age his steward had ascribed to him,--about forty-eight; at a
superficial glance, more, for his hair was prematurely white,--not gray,
but white as snow. But his eyebrows were still jet black, and his eyes,
equally dark, were serenely bright. His forehead was magnificent,--lofty
and spacious, and with only one slight wrinkle between the brows. His
complexion was sunburnt, showing no sign of weak health. The outline of
his lips was that which I have often remarked in men accustomed to
great dangers, and contracting in such dangers the habit of
self-reliance,--firm and quiet, compressed without an effort. And
the power of this very noble countenance was not intimidating, not
aggressive; it was mild, it was benignant. A man oppressed by some
formidable tyranny, and despairing to find a protector, would, on seeing
that face, have said, “Here is one who can protect me, and who will!”
Sir Philip was the first to break the silence.
“I have so many relations scattered over England, that fortunately not
one of them can venture to calculate on my property if I die childless,
and therefore not one of them can feel himself injured when, a few weeks
hence, he shall read in the newspapers that Philip Derval is married.
But for Richard Strahan at least, though I never saw him, I must do
something before the newspapers make that announcement. His sister was
very dear to me.”
“Your neighbours, Sir Philip, will rejoice at your marriage, since, I
presume, it may induce you to settle amongst them at Derval Court.”
“At Derval Court! No! I shall not settle there.” Again he paused a
moment or so, and then went on: “I have long lived a wandering life, and
in it learned much that the wisdom of cities cannot teach. I return to
my native land with a profound conviction that the happiest life is the
life most in common with all. I have gone out of my way to do what I
deemed good, and to avert or mitigate what appeared to me evil. I pause
now and ask myself, whether the most virtuous existence be not that
in which virtue flows spontaneously from the springs of quiet everyday
action; when a man does good without restlessly seeking it, does good
unconsciously, simply because he is good and he lives. Better, perhaps,
for me, if I had thought so long ago! And now I come back to England
with the intention of marrying, late in life though it be, and with such
hopes of happiness as any matter-of-fact man may form. But my hope will
not be at Derval Court. I shall reside either in London or its immediate
neighbourhood, and seek to gather round me minds by which I can correct,
if I cannot confide to them, the knowledge I myself have acquired.”
“Nay, if, as I have accidentally heard, you are fond of scientific
pursuits, I cannot wonder, that after so long an absence from England,
you should feel interest in learning what new discoveries have been
made, what new ideas are unfolding the germs of discoveries yet to be.
But, pardon me, if in answer to your concluding remark, I venture to say
that no man can hope to correct any error in his own knowledge, unless
he has the courage to confide the error to those who can correct. La
Place has said, ‘Tout se tient dans le chaine immense des verites;’
and the mistake we make in some science we have specially cultivated is
often only to be seen by the light of a separate science as specially
cultivated by another. Thus, in the investigation of truth, frank
exposition to congenial minds is essential to the earnest seeker.”
“I am pleased with what you say,” said Sir Philip, “and I shall be still
more pleased to find in you the very confidant I require. But what was
your controversy with my old friend, Dr. Lloyd? Do I understand our host
rightly, that it related to what in Europe has of late days obtained the
name of mesmerism?”
I had conceived a strong desire to conciliate the good opinion of a man
who had treated me with so singular and so familiar a kindness, and it
was sincerely that I expressed my regret at the acerbity with which I
had assailed Dr. Lloyd; but of his theories and pretensions I could not
disguise my contempt. I enlarged on the extravagant fallacies involved
in a fabulous “clairvoyance,” which always failed when put to plain test
by sober-minded examiners. I did not deny the effects of imagination on
certain nervous constitutions. “Mesmerism could cure nobody; credulity
could cure many. There was the well-known story of the old woman tried
as a witch; she cured agues by a charm. She owned the impeachment, and
was ready to endure gibbet or stake for the truth of her talisman,--more
than a mesmerist would for the truth of his passes! And the charm was a
scroll of gibberish sewn in an old bag and given to the woman in a freak
by the judge himself when a young scamp on the circuit. But the charm
cured? Certainly; just as mesmerism cures. Fools believed in it. Faith,
that moves mountains, may well cure agues.”
Thus I ran on, supporting my views with anecdote and facts, to which Sir
Philip listened with placid gravity.
When I had come to an end he said: “Of mesmerism, as practised in
Europe, I know nothing except by report. I can well understand that
medical men may hesitate to admit it amongst the legitimate resources of
orthodox pathology; because, as I gather from what you and others say
of its practice, it must, at the best, be far too uncertain in its
application to satisfy the requirements of science. Yet an examination
of its pretensions may enable you to perceive the truth that lies hid
in the powers ascribed to witchcraft; benevolence is but a weak agency
compared to malignity; magnetism perverted to evil may solve half the
riddles of sorcery. On this, however, I say no more at present. But
as to that which you appear to reject as the most preposterous and
incredible pretension of the mesmerists, and which you designate by
the word ‘clairvoyance,’ it is clear to me that you have never yourself
witnessed even those very imperfect exhibitions which you decide at once
to be imposture. I say imperfect, because it is only a limited number of
persons whom the eye or the passes of the mesmerist can effect; and
by such means, unaided by other means, it is rarely indeed that the
magnetic sleep advances beyond the first vague shadowy twilight-dawn of
that condition to which only in its fuller developments I would apply
the name of ‘trance.’ But still trance is as essential a condition of
being as sleep or as waking, having privileges peculiar to itself. By
means within the range of the science that explores its nature and its
laws, trance, unlike the clairvoyance you describe, is producible in
every human being, however unimpressible to mere mesmerism.”
“Producible in every human being! Pardon me if I say that I will give
any enchanter his own terms who will produce that effect upon me.”
“Will you? You consent to have the experiment tried on yourself?”
“Consent most readily.”
“I will remember that promise. But to return to the subject. By the
word ‘trance’ I do not mean exclusively the spiritual trance of the
Alexandrian Platonists. There is one kind of trance,--that to which all
human beings are susceptible,--in which the soul has no share: for of
this kind of trance, and it was of this I spoke, some of the inferior
animals are susceptible; and, therefore, trance is no more a proof of
soul than is the clairvoyance of the mesmerists, or the dream of our
ordinary sleep, which last has been called a proof of soul, though any
man who has kept a dog must have observed that dogs dream as vividly as
we do. But in this trance there is an extraordinary cerebral activity, a
projectile force given to the mind, distinct from the soul, by which
it sends forth its own emanations to a distance in spite of material
obstacles, just as a flower, in an altered condition of atmosphere,
sends forth the particles of its aroma. This should not surprise you.
Your thought travels over land and sea in your waking state; thought,
too, can travel in trance, and in trance may acquire an intensified
force. There is, however, another kind of trance which is truly called
spiritual, a trance much more rare, and in which the soul entirely
supersedes the mere action of the mind.”
“Stay!” said I; “you speak of the soul as something distinct from the
mind. What the soul may be, I cannot pretend to conjecture; but I cannot
separate it from the intelligence!”
“Can you not? A blow on the brain can destroy the intelligence! Do you
think it can destroy the soul?
‘From Marlbro’s eyes the tears of dotage flow,
And Swift expires, a driveller and a show.’
“Towards the close of his life even Kant’s giant intellect left him.
Do you suppose that in these various archetypes of intellectual man
the soul was worn out by the years that loosened the strings, or made
tuneless the keys, of the perishing instrument on which the mind
must rely for all notes of its music? If you cannot distinguish the
operations of the mind from the essence of the soul, I know not by
what rational inductions you arrive at the conclusion that the soul is
imperishable.”
I remained silent. Sir Philip fixed on me his dark eyes quietly and
searchingly, and, after a short pause, said,--
“Almost every known body in nature is susceptible of three several
states of existence,--the solid, the liquid, the aeriform. These
conditions depend on the quantity of heat they contain. The same object
at one moment may be liquid; at the next moment solid; at the next
aeriform. The water that flows before your gaze may stop consolidated
into ice, or ascend into air as a vapour. Thus is man susceptible of
three states of existence,--the animal, the mental, the spiritual; and
according as he is brought into relation or affinity with that occult
agency of the whole natural world, which we familiarly call heat, and
which no science has yet explained, which no scale can weigh, and no eye
discern, one or the other of these three states of being prevails, or is
subjected.”
I still continued silent, for I was unwilling discourteously to say to a
stranger so much older than myself, that he seemed to me to reverse
all the maxims of the philosophy to which he made pretence, in founding
speculations audacious and abstruse upon unanalogous comparisons that
would have been fantastic even in a poet. And Sir Philip, after another
pause, resumed with a half smile,--
“After what I have said, it will perhaps not very much surprise you
when I add that but for my belief in the powers I ascribe to trance, we
should not be known to each other at this moment.”
“How? Pray explain!”
“Certain circumstances, which I trust to relate to you in detail
hereafter, have imposed on me the duty to discover, and to bring human
laws to bear upon, a creature armed with terrible powers of evil. This
monster, for without metaphor, monster it is, not man like ourselves,
has, by arts superior to those of ordinary fugitives, however dexterous
in concealment, hitherto for years eluded my research. Through the
trance of an Arab child, who, in her waking state, never heard of his
existence, I have learned that this being is in England, is in L----. I
am here to encounter him. I expect to do so this very night, and under
this very roof.”
“Sir Philip!”
“And if you wonder, as you well may, why I have been talking to you with
this startling unreserve, know that the same Arab child, on whom I thus
implicitly rely, informs me that your life is mixed up with that of the
being I seek to unmask and disarm,--to be destroyed by his arts or his
agents, or to combine in the causes by which the destroyer himself shall
be brought to destruction.”
“My life!--your Arab child named me, Allen Fenwick?”
“My Arab child told me that the person in whom I should thus naturally
seek an ally was he who had saved the life of the man whom I then meant
for my heir, if I died unmarried and childless. She told me that I
should not be many hours in this town, which she described minutely,
before you would be made known to me. She described this house, with
yonder lights, and yon dancers. In her trance she saw us sitting
together, as we now sit. I accepted the invitation of our host, when he
suddenly accosted me on entering the town, confident that I should
meet you here, without even asking whether a person of your name were a
resident in the place; and now you know why I have so freely unbosomed
myself of much that might well make you, a physician, doubt the
soundness of my understanding. The same infant, whose vision has been
realized up to this moment, has warned me also that I am here at great
peril. What that peril may be I have declined to learn, as I have ever
declined to ask from the future what affects only my own life on this
earth. That life I regard with supreme indifference, conscious that
I have only to discharge, while it lasts, the duties for which it is
bestowed on me, to the best of my imperfect power; and aware that minds
the strongest and souls the purest may fall into the sloth habitual to
predestinarians, if they suffer the action due to the present hour to be
awed and paralyzed by some grim shadow on the future! It is only where,
irrespectively of aught that can menace myself, a light not struck out
of my own reason can guide me to disarm evil or minister to good, that
I feel privileged to avail myself of those mirrors on which things,
near and far, reflect themselves calm and distinct as the banks and the
mountain peak are reflected in the glass of a lake. Here, then, under
this roof, and by your side, I shall behold him who--Lo! the moment has
come,--I behold him now!”
As he spoke these last words, Sir Philip had risen, and, startled by
his action and voice, I involuntarily rose too. Resting one hand on
my shoulder, he pointed with the other towards the threshold of the
ballroom. There, the prominent figure of a gay group--the sole male
amidst a fluttering circle of silks and lawn, of flowery wreaths,
of female loveliness and female frippery--stood the radiant image of
Margrave. His eyes were not turned towards us. He was looking down, and
his light laugh came soft, yet ringing, through the general murmur.
I turned my astonished gaze back to Sir Philip; yes, unmistakably it was
on Margrave that his look was fixed. Impossible to associate crime with
the image of that fair youth! Eccentric notions, fantastic speculations,
vivacious egotism, defective benevolence,--yes. But crime! No!
impossible!
“Impossible,” I said aloud. As I spoke, the group had moved on. Margrave
was no longer in sight. At the same moment some other guests came from
the ballroom, and seated themselves near us.
Sir Philip looked round, and, observing the deserted museum at the end
of the corridor, drew me into it.
When we were alone, he said in a voice quick and low, but decided,--
“It is of importance that I should convince you at once of the nature
of that prodigy which is more hostile to mankind than the wolf is to the
sheepfold. No words of mine could at present suffice to clear your
sight from the deception which cheats it. I must enable you to judge for
yourself. It must be now and here. He will learn this night, if he has
not learned already, that I am in the town. Dim and confused though his
memories of myself may be, they are memories still; and he well knows
what cause he has to dread me. I must put another in possession of his
secret. Another, and at once! For all his arts will be brought to bear
against me, and I cannot foretell their issue. Go, then; enter that
giddy crowd, select that seeming young man, bring him hither. Take care
only not to mention my name; and when here, turn the key in the door, so
as to prevent interruption,--five minutes will suffice.”
“Am I sure that I guess whom you mean? The young light-hearted man,
known in this place under the name of Margrave? The young man with the
radiant eyes, and the curls of a Grecian statue?”
“The same; him whom I pointed out. Quick, bring him hither.”
My curiosity was too much roused to disobey. Had I conceived that
Margrave, in the heat of youth, had committed some offence which placed
him in danger of the law and in the power of Sir Philip Derval, I
possessed enough of the old borderer’s black-mail loyalty to have given
the man whose hand I had familiarly clasped a hint and a help to escape.
But all Sir Philip’s talk had been so out of the reach of common-sense,
that I rather expected to see him confounded by some egregious illusion
than Margrave exposed to any well-grounded accusation. All, then, that
I felt as I walked into the ballroom and approached Margrave was that
curiosity which, I think, any one of my readers will acknowledge that,
in my position, he himself would have felt.
Margrave was standing near the dancers, not joining them, but talking
with a young couple in the ring. I drew him aside.
“Come with me for a few minutes into the museum; I wish to talk to you.”
“What about,--an experiment?”
“Yes, an experiment.”
“Then I am at your service.”
In a minute more, he had followed me into the desolate dead museum. I
looked round, but did not see Sir Philip.