The next day my house was filled with visitors. I had no notion that I
had so many friends. Mr. Vigors wrote me a generous and handsome letter,
owning his prejudices against me on account of his sympathy with poor
Dr. Lloyd, and begging my pardon for what he now felt to have been
harshness, if not distorted justice. But what most moved me was the
entrance of Strahan, who rushed up to me with the heartiness of old
college days. “Oh, my dear Allen, can you ever forgive me; that I should
have disbelieved your word,--should have suspected you of abstracting my
poor cousin’s memoir?”
“Is it found, then?”
“Oh, yes; you must thank Margrave. He, clever fellow, you know, came
to me on a visit yesterday. He put me at once on the right scent. Only
guess; but you never can! It was that wretched old housekeeper who
purloined the manuscript. You remember she came into the room while you
were looking at the memoir. She heard us talk about it; her curiosity
was roused; she longed to know the history of her old master, under his
own hand; she could not sleep; she heard me go up to bed; she thought
you might leave the book on the table when you, too, went to rest. She
stole downstairs, peeped through the keyhole of the library, saw you
asleep, the book lying before you, entered, took away the book softly,
meant to glance at its contents and to return it. You were sleeping so
soundly she thought you would not wake for an hour; she carried it into
the library, leaving the door open, and there began to pore over it. She
stumbled first on one of the passages in Latin; she hoped to find some
part in plain English, turned over the leaves, putting her candle close
to them, for the old woman’s eyes were dim, when she heard you make some
sound in your sleep. Alarmed, she looked round; you were moving uneasily
in your seat, and muttering to yourself. From watching you she was soon
diverted by the consequences of her own confounded curiosity and folly.
In moving, she had unconsciously brought the poor manuscript close to
the candle; the leaves caught the flame; her own cap and hand burning
first made her aware of the mischief done. She threw down the book; her
sleeve was in flames; she had first to tear off the sleeve, which
was, luckily for her, not sewn to her dress. By the time she recovered
presence of mind to attend to the book, half its leaves were reduced to
tinder. She did not dare then to replace what was left of the manuscript
on your table; returned with it to her room, hid it, and resolved to
keep her own secret. I should never have guessed it; I had never
even spoken to her of the occurrence; but when I talked over the
disappearance of the book to Margrave last night, and expressed my
disbelief of your story, he said, in his merry way: ‘But do you think
that Fenwick is the only person curious about your cousin’s odd ways
and strange history? Why, every servant in the household would have been
equally curious. You have examined your servants, of course?’ ‘No, I
never thought of it.’ ‘Examine them now, then. Examine especially that
old housekeeper. I observe a great change in her manner since I came
here, weeks ago, to look over the house. She has something on her
mind,--I see it in her eyes.’ Then it occurred to me, too, that the
woman’s manner had altered, and that she seemed always in a tremble and
a fidget. I went at once to her room, and charged her with stealing the
book. She fell on her knees, and told the whole story as I have told
it to you, and as I shall take care to tell it to all to whom I have so
foolishly blabbed my yet more foolish suspicions of yourself. But can
you forgive me, old friend?”
“Heartily, heartily! And the book is burned?”
“See;” and he produced a mutilated manuscript. Strange, the part
burned--reduced, indeed, to tinder--was the concluding part that related
to Haroun,--to Grayle: no vestige of that part was left; the earlier
portions were scorched and mutilated, though in some places still
decipherable; but as my eye hastily ran over those places, I saw only
mangled sentences of the experimental problems which the writer had so
minutely elaborated.
“Will you keep the manuscript as it is, and as long as you like?” said
Strahan.
“No, no; I will have nothing more to do with it. Consult some other
man of science. And so this is the old woman’s whole story? No
accomplice,--none? No one else shared her curiosity and her task?”
“No. Oddly enough, though, she made much the same excuse for her pitiful
folly that the madman made for his terrible crime; she said, ‘the Devil
put it into her head.’ Of course he did, as he puts everything wrong
into any one’s head. That does not mend the matter.”
“How! did she, too, say she saw a Shadow and heard a voice?”
“No; not such a liar as that, and not mad enough for such a lie. But
she said that when she was in bed, thinking over the book, something
irresistible urged her to get up and go down into the study; swore she
felt something lead her by the hand; swore, too, that when she first
discovered the manuscript was not in English, something whispered in her
ear to turn over the leaves and approach them to the candle. But I had
no patience to listen to all this rubbish. I sent her out of the
house, bag and baggage. But, alas! is this to be the end of all my wise
cousin’s grand discoveries?”
True, of labours that aspired to bring into the chart of science new
worlds, of which even the traditionary rumour was but a voice from the
land of fable--nought left but broken vestiges of a daring footstep! The
hope of a name imperishable amidst the loftiest hierarchy of Nature’s
secret temple, with all the pomp of recorded experiment, that applied to
the mysteries of Egypt and Chaldaea the inductions of Bacon, the tests
of Liebig--was there nothing left of this but what, here and there,
some puzzled student might extract, garbled, mutilated, perhaps
unintelligible, from shreds of sentences, wrecks of problems! O mind of
man, can the works, on which thou wouldst found immortality below, be
annulled into smoke and tinder by an inch of candle in the hand of an
old woman!
When Strahan left me, I went out, but not yet to visit patients. I stole
through by-paths into the fields; I needed solitude to bring my thoughts
into shape and order. What was delusion, and what not? Was I right or
the Public? Was Margrave really the most innocent and serviceable of
human beings, kindly affectionate, employing a wonderful acuteness for
benignant ends? Was I, in truth, indebted to him for the greatest
boon one man can bestow on another,--for life rescued, for fair name
justified? Or had he, by some demoniac sorcery, guided the hand of the
murderer against the life of the person who alone could imperil his own?
Had he, by the same dark spells, urged the woman to the act that had
destroyed the only record of his monstrous being,--the only evidence
that I was not the sport of an illusion in the horror with which he
inspired me?
But if the latter supposition could be admissible, did he use his
agents only to betray them afterwards to exposure, and that, without any
possible clew to his own detection as the instigator? Then, there came
over me confused recollections of tales of mediaeval witchcraft, which
I had read in boyhood. Were there not on judicial record attestation and
evidence, solemn and circumstantial, of powers analogous to those
now exercised by Margrave,--of sorcerers instigating to sin through
influences ascribed to Demons; making their apparitions glide through
guarded walls, their voices heard from afar in the solitude of dungeons
or monastic cells; subjugating victims to their will, by means which
no vigilance could have detected, if the victims themselves had not
confessed the witchcraft that had ensnared, courting a sure and infamous
death in that confession, preferring such death to a life so haunted?
Were stories so gravely set forth in the pomp of judicial evidence,
and in the history of times comparatively recent, indeed to be massed,
pell-mell together, as a moles indigesta of senseless superstition,--all
the witnesses to be deemed liars; all the victims and tools of the
sorcerers, lunatics; all the examiners or judges, with their solemn
gradations--lay and clerical--from Commissions of Inquiry to Courts of
Appeal,--to be despised for credulity, loathed for cruelty; or, amidst
records so numerous, so imposingly attested, were there the fragments of
a terrible truth? And had our ancestors been so unwise in those laws we
now deem so savage, by which the world was rid of scourges more awful
and more potent than the felon with his candid dagger? Fell instigators
of the evil in men’s secret hearts, shaping into action the vague,
half-formed desire, and guiding with agencies impalpable, unseen, their
spell-bound instruments of calamity and death.
Such were the gloomy questions that I--by repute, the sternest advocate
of common-sense against fantastic errors; by profession, the searcher
into flesh and blood, and tissue and nerve and sinew, for the causes
of all that disease the mechanism of the universal human frame; I,
self-boasting physician, sceptic, philosopher, materialist--revolved,
not amidst gloomy pines, under grim winter skies, but as I paced slow
through laughing meadows, and by the banks of merry streams, in the
ripeness of the golden August: the hum of insects in the fragrant grass,
the flutter of birds amid the delicate green of boughs checkered by
playful sunbeams and gentle shadows, and ever in sight of the resorts of
busy workday man,--walls, roof-tops, church-spires rising high; there,
white and modern, the handwriting of our race, in this practical
nineteenth century, on its square plain masonry and Doric shafts, the
Town-Hall, central in the animated marketplace. And I--I--prying into
long-neglected corners and dust-holes of memory for what my reason had
flung there as worthless rubbish; reviving the jargon of French law, in
the proces verbal, against a Gille de Retz, or an Urbain Grandier, and
sifting the equity of sentences on witchcraft!
Bursting the links of this ghastly soliloquy with a laugh at my own
folly, I struck into a narrow path that led back towards the city, by
a quiet and rural suburb; the path wound on through a wide and solitary
churchyard, at the base of the Abbey-hill. Many of the former dwellers
on that eminence now slept in the lowly burial-ground at its foot; and
the place, mournfully decorated with the tombs which still jealously
mark distinctions of rank amidst the levelling democracy of the grave,
was kept trim with the care which comes half from piety, and half from
pride.
I seated myself on a bench, placed between the clipped yew-trees that
bordered the path from the entrance to the church porch, deeming vaguely
that my own perplexing thoughts might imbibe a quiet from the quiet of
the place.
“And oh,” I murmured to myself, “oh that I had one bosom friend to
whom I might freely confide all these torturing riddles which I cannot
solve,--one who could read my heart, light up its darkness, exorcise its
spectres; one in whose wisdom I could welcome a guide through the Nature
which now suddenly changes her aspect, opening out from the walls with
which I had fenced and enclosed her as mine own formal garden;--all her
pathways, therein, trimmed to my footstep; all her blooms grouped and
harmonized to my own taste in colour; all her groves, all her caverns,
but the soothing retreats of a Muse or a Science; opening out--opening
out, desert on desert, into clewless and measureless space! Gone is the
garden! Were its confines too narrow for Nature? Be it so! The Desert
replaces the garden, but where ends the Desert? Reft from my senses are
the laws which gave order and place to their old questionless realm. I
stand lost and appalled amidst Chaos. Did my Mind misconstrue the laws
it deemed fixed and immutable? Be it so! But still Nature cannot be
lawless; Creation is not a Chaos. If my senses deceive me in some
things, they are still unerring in others; if thus, in some things,
fallacious, still, in other things, truthful. Are there within me senses
finer than those I have cultured, or without me vistas of knowledge
which instincts, apart from my senses, divine? So long as I deal
with the Finite alone, my senses suffice me; but when the Infinite is
obtruded upon me there, are my senses faithless deserters? If so, is
there aught else in my royal resources of Man--whose ambition it is,
from the first dawn of his glory as Thinker, to invade and to subjugate
Nature,--is there aught else to supply the place of those traitors, the
senses, who report to my Reason, their judge and their sovereign, as
truths seen and heard tales which my Reason forfeits her sceptre if she
does not disdain as lies? Oh, for a friend! oh, for a guide!”
And as I so murmured, my eye fell upon the form of a kneeling child,--at
the farther end of the burial-ground, beside a grave with its new
headstone gleaming white amidst the older moss-grown tombs, a female
child, her head bowed, her hands clasped. I could see but the outline
of her small form in its sable dress,--an infant beside the dead. My eye
and my thoughts were turned from that silent figure, too absorbed in my
own restless tumult of doubt and dread, for sympathy with the grief or
the consolation of a kneeling child. And yet I should have remembered
that tomb! Again I murmured with a fierce impatience, “Oh, for a friend!
oh, for a guide!”
I heard steps on the walk under the yews; and an old man came in sight,
slightly bent, with long gray hair, but still with enough of vigour for
years to come, in his tread, firm, though slow, in the unshrunken muscle
of his limbs and the steady light of his clear blue eye. I started.
Was it possible? That countenance, marked, indeed, with the lines of
laborious thought, but sweet in the mildness of humanity, and serene
in the peace of conscience! I could not be mistaken. Julius Faber was
before me,--the profound pathologist, to whom my own proud self-esteem
acknowledged inferiority, without humiliation; the generous benefactor
to whom I owed my own smooth entrance into the arduous road of fame
and fortune. I had longed for a friend, a guide; what I sought stood
suddenly at my side.