“It may seem rather abrupt to you, this sudden tame ending,” said
Arthur Vezin, glancing with flushed face and timid eyes at Dr. Silence
sitting there with his notebook, “but the fact is--er--from that moment
my memory seems to have failed rather. I have no distinct recollection
of how I got home or what precisely I did.
“It appears I never went back to the inn at all. I only dimly recollect
racing down a long white road in the moonlight, past woods and
villages, still and deserted, and then the dawn came up, and I saw the
towers of a biggish town and so came to a station.
“But, long before that, I remember pausing somewhere on the road and
looking back to where the hill-town of my adventure stood up in the
moonlight, and thinking how exactly like a great monstrous cat it lay
there upon the plain, its huge front paws lying down the two main
streets, and the twin and broken towers of the cathedral marking its
torn ears against the sky. That picture stays in my mind with the
utmost vividness to this day.
“Another thing remains in my mind from that escape--namely, the sudden
sharp reminder that I had not paid my bill, and the decision I made,
standing there on the dusty highroad, that the small baggage I had left
behind would more than settle for my indebtedness.
“For the rest, I can only tell you that I got coffee and bread at a
café on the outskirts of this town I had come to, and soon after found
my way to the station and caught a train later in the day. That same
evening I reached London.”
“And how long altogether,” asked John Silence quietly, “do you think
you stayed in the town of the adventure?”
Vezin looked up sheepishly.
“I was coming to that,” he resumed, with apologetic wrigglings of his
body. “In London I found that I was a whole week out in my reckoning of
time. I had stayed over a week in the town, and it ought to have been
September 15th,--instead of which it was only September 10th!”
“So that, in reality, you had only stayed a night or two in the inn?”
queried the doctor.
Vezin hesitated before replying. He shuffled upon the mat.
“I must have gained time somewhere,” he said at length--“somewhere or
somehow. I certainly had a week to my credit. I can’t explain it. I can
only give you the fact.”
“And this happened to you last year, since when you have never been
back to the place?”
“Last autumn, yes,” murmured Vezin; “and I have never dared to go
back. I think I never want to.”
“And, tell me,” asked Dr. Silence at length, when he saw that the
little man had evidently come to the end of his words and had nothing
more to say, “had you ever read up the subject of the old witchcraft
practices during the Middle Ages, or been at all interested in the
subject?”
“Never!” declared Vezin emphatically. “I had never given a thought to
such matters so far as I know----”
“Or to the question of reincarnation, perhaps?”
“Never--before my adventure; but I have since,” he replied
significantly.
There was, however, something still on the man’s mind that he wished
to relieve himself of by confession, yet could with difficulty bring
himself to mention; and it was only after the sympathetic tactfulness
of the doctor had provided numerous openings that he at length availed
himself of one of them, and stammered that he would like to show him
the marks he still had on his neck where, he said, the girl had touched
him with her anointed hands.
He took off his collar after infinite fumbling hesitation, and lowered
his shirt a little for the doctor to see. And there, on the surface of
the skin, lay a faint reddish line across the shoulder and extending
a little way down the back towards the spine. It certainly indicated
exactly the position an arm might have taken in the act of embracing.
And on the other side of the neck, slightly higher up, was a similar
mark, though not quite so clearly defined.
“That was where she held me that night on the ramparts,” he whispered,
a strange light coming and going in his eyes.
* * * * *
It was some weeks later when I again found occasion to consult John
Silence concerning another extraordinary case that had come under my
notice, and we fell to discussing Vezin’s story. Since hearing it,
the doctor had made investigations on his own account, and one of his
secretaries had discovered that Vezin’s ancestors had actually lived
for generations in the very town where the adventure came to him. Two
of them, both women, had been tried and convicted as witches, and had
been burned alive at the stake. Moreover, it had not been difficult to
prove that the very inn where Vezin stayed was built about 1700 upon
the spot where the funeral pyres stood and the executions took place.
The town was a sort of headquarters for all the sorcerers and witches
of the entire region, and after conviction they were burnt there
literally by scores.
“It seems strange,” continued the doctor, “that Vezin should have
remained ignorant of all this; but, on the other hand, it was not the
kind of history that successive generations would have been anxious to
keep alive, or to repeat to their children. Therefore I am inclined to
think he still knows nothing about it.
“The whole adventure seems to have been a very vivid revival of the
memories of an earlier life, caused by coming directly into contact
with the living forces still intense enough to hang about the place,
and, by a most singular chance too, with the very souls who had taken
part with him in the events of that particular life. For the mother
and daughter who impressed him so strangely must have been leading
actors, with himself, in the scenes and practices of witchcraft which
at that period dominated the imaginations of the whole country.
“One has only to read the histories of the times to know that
these witches claimed the power of transforming themselves into
various animals, both for the purposes of disguise and also to
convey themselves swiftly to the scenes of their imaginary orgies.
Lycanthropy, or the power to change themselves into wolves, was
everywhere believed in, and the ability to transform themselves into
cats by rubbing their bodies with a special salve or ointment provided
by Satan himself, found equal credence. The witchcraft trials abound in
evidences of such universal beliefs.”
Dr. Silence quoted chapter and verse from many writers on the subject,
and showed how every detail of Vezin’s adventure had a basis in the
practices of those dark days.
“But that the entire affair took place subjectively in the man’s own
consciousness, I have no doubt,” he went on, in reply to my questions;
“for my secretary who has been to the town to investigate, discovered
his signature in the visitors’ book, and proved by it that he had
arrived on September 8th, and left suddenly without paying his bill.
He left two days later, and they still were in possession of his dirty
brown bag and some tourist clothes. I paid a few francs in settlement
of his debt, and have sent his luggage on to him. The daughter was
absent from home, but the proprietress, a large woman very much as he
described her, told my secretary that he had seemed a very strange,
absent-minded kind of gentleman, and after his disappearance she had
feared for a long time that he had met with a violent end in the
neighbouring forest where he used to roam about alone.
“I should like to have obtained a personal interview with the daughter
so as to ascertain how much was subjective and how much actually took
place with her as Vezin told it. For her dread of fire and the sight of
burning must, of course, have been the intuitive memory of her former
painful death at the stake, and have thus explained why he fancied more
than once that he saw her through smoke and flame.”
“And that mark on his skin, for instance?” I inquired.
“Merely the marks produced by hysterical brooding,” he replied, “like
the stigmata of the _religieuses_, and the bruises which appear on
the bodies of hypnotised subjects who have been told to expect them.
This is very common and easily explained. Only it seems curious that
these marks should have remained so long in Vezin’s case. Usually they
disappear quickly.”
“Obviously he is still thinking about it all, brooding, and living it
all over again,” I ventured.
“Probably. And this makes me fear that the end of his trouble is not
yet. We shall hear of him again. It is a case, alas! I can do little to
alleviate.”
Dr. Silence spoke gravely and with sadness in his voice.
“And what do you make of the Frenchman in the train?” I asked
further--“the man who warned him against the place, _à cause du sommeil
et à cause des chats_? Surely a very singular incident?”
“A _very_ singular incident indeed,” he made answer slowly, “and one I
can only explain on the basis of a highly improbable coincidence----”
“Namely?”
“That the man was one who had himself stayed in the town and undergone
there a similar experience. I should like to find this man and ask him.
But the crystal is useless here, for I have no slightest clue to go
upon, and I can only conclude that some singular psychic affinity, some
force still active in his being out of the same past life, drew him
thus to the personality of Vezin, and enabled him to fear what might
happen to him, and thus to warn him as he did.
“Yes,” he presently continued, half talking to himself, “I suspect in
this case that Vezin was swept into the vortex of forces arising out of
the intense activities of a past life, and that he lived over again a
scene in which he had often played a leading part centuries before. For
strong actions set up forces that are so slow to exhaust themselves,
they may be said in a sense never to die. In this case they were not
vital enough to render the illusion complete, so that the little man
found himself caught in a very distressing confusion of the present
and the past; yet he was sufficiently sensitive to recognise that it
was true, and to fight against the degradation of returning, even in
memory, to a former and lower state of development.
“Ah yes!” he continued, crossing the floor to gaze at the darkening
sky, and seemingly quite oblivious of my presence, “subliminal
up-rushes of memory like this can be exceedingly painful, and sometimes
exceedingly dangerous. I only trust that this gentle soul may soon
escape from this obsession of a passionate and tempestuous past. But I
doubt it, I doubt it.”
His voice was hushed with sadness as he spoke, and when he turned back
into the room again there was an expression of profound yearning upon
his face, the yearning of a soul whose desire to help is sometimes
greater than his power.