scarcely a day older than when I saw it in the Rajah's court in my
youth!"
Seized by the same thought, we both hastened downstairs. I was first in
the street; but the man had already gone. I caught sight of him,
however, not many yards in advance, and in another moment I was by his
side.
I had resolved to speak to him, but when I looked into his face I felt
as if it were impossible to do so. That eye--the eye of the
serpent--fixed and held me spellbound. And withal, about the man's whole
person there was a dignity, an air of pride and station and superiority,
that would have made anyone, habituated to the usages of the world,
hesitate long before venturing upon a liberty or impertinence. And what
could I say? what was it I would ask? Thus ashamed of my first impulse,
I fell a few paces back, still, however, following the stranger,
undecided what else to do. Meanwhile he turned the corner of the street;
a plain carriage was in waiting, with a servant out of livery, dressed
like a _valet-de-place_, at the carriage door. In another moment he had
stepped into the carriage, and it drove off. I returned to the house. Mr
J---- was still at the street door. He had asked the carrier what the
stranger had said to him.
"Merely asked whom that house now belonged to."
The same evening I happened to go with a friend to a place in town
called the Cosmopolitan Club, a place open to men of all countries, all
opinions, all degrees. One orders one's coffee, smokes one's cigar. One
is always sure to meet agreeable, sometimes remarkable, persons.
I had not been two minutes in the room before I beheld at a table,
conversing with an acquaintance of mine, whom I will designate by the
initial G----, the man--the Original of the Miniature. He was now
without his hat, and the likeness was yet more startling, only I
observed that while he was conversing there was less severity in the
countenance; there was even a smile, though a very quiet and very cold
one. The dignity of mien I had acknowledged in the street was also more
striking; a dignity akin to that which invests some prince of the
East--conveying the idea of supreme indifference and habitual,
indisputable, indolent, but resistless power.
G---- soon after left the stranger, who then took up a scientific
journal, which seemed to absorb his attention.
I drew G---- aside. "Who and what is that gentleman?"
"That? Oh, a very remarkable man indeed. I met him last year amidst the
caves of Petra--the scriptural Edom. He is the best Oriental scholar I
know. We joined company, had an adventure with robbers, in which he
showed a coolness that saved our lives; afterwards he invited me to
spend a day with him in a house he had bought at Damascus--a house
buried amongst almond blossoms and roses--the most beautiful thing! He
had lived there for some years, quite as an Oriental, in grand style. I
half suspect he is a renegade, immensely rich, very odd; by the by, a
great mesmeriser. I have seen him with my own eyes produce an effect on
inanimate things. If you take a letter from your pocket and throw it to
the other end of the room, he will order it to come to his feet, and you
will see the letter wriggle itself along the floor till it has obeyed
his command. 'Pon my honour, 'tis true: I have seen him affect even the
weather, disperse or collect clouds, by means of a glass tube or wand.
But he does not like talking of these matters to strangers. He has only
just arrived in England; says he has not been here for a great many
years; let me introduce him to you."
"Certainly! He is English, then? What is his name?"
"Oh!--a very homely one--Richards."
"And what is his birth--his family?"
"How do I know? What does it signify?--no doubt some parvenu, but
rich--so infernally rich!"
G---- drew me up to the stranger, and the introduction was effected. The
manners of Mr Richards were not those of an adventurous traveller.
Travellers are in general constitutionally gifted with high animal
spirits: they are talkative, eager, imperious. Mr Richards was calm and
subdued in tone, with manners which were made distant by the loftiness
of punctilious courtesy--the manners of a former age. I observed that
the English he spoke was not exactly of our day. I should even have said
that the accent was slightly foreign. But then Mr Richards remarked that
he had been little in the habit for many years of speaking in his native
tongue. The conversation fell upon the changes in the aspect of London
since he had last visited our metropolis. G---- then glanced off to the
moral changes--literary, social, political--the great men who were
removed from the stage within the last twenty years--the new great men
who were coming on. In all this Mr Richards evinced no interest. He had
evidently read none of our living authors, and seemed scarcely
acquainted by name with our younger statesmen. Once and only
once he laughed; it was when G---- asked him whether he had
any thoughts of getting into Parliament. And the laugh was
inward--sarcastic--sinister--a sneer raised into a laugh. After a few
minutes G---- left us to talk to some other acquaintances who had just
lounged into the room, and I then said quietly:
"I have seen a miniature of you, Mr Richards, in the house you once
inhabited, and perhaps built, if not wholly, at least in part, in ----
Street. You passed by that house this morning."
Not till I had finished did I raise my eyes to his, and then his fixed
my gaze so steadfastly that I could not withdraw it--those fascinating
serpent eyes. But involuntarily, and if the words that translated my
thought were dragged from me, I added in a low whisper, "I have been a
student in the mysteries of life and nature; of those mysteries I have
known the occult professors. I have the right to speak to you thus." And
I uttered a certain pass-word.
"Well," said he, dryly, "I concede the right--what would you ask?"
"To what extent human will in certain temperaments can extend?"
"To what extent can thought extend? Think, and before you draw breath
you are in China!"
"True. But my thought has no power in China."
"Give it expression, and it may have: you may write down a thought
which, sooner or later, may alter the whole condition of China. What is
a law but a thought? Therefore thought is infinite--therefore thought
has power; not in proportion to its value--a bad thought may make a bad
law as potent as a good thought can make a good one."
"Yes; what you say confirms my own theory. Through invisible currents
one human brain may transmit its ideas to other human brains with the
same rapidity as a thought promulgated by visible means. And as thought
is imperishable--as it leaves its stamp behind it in the natural world
even when the thinker has passed out of this world--so the thought of
the living may have power to rouse up and revive the thoughts of the
dead--such as those thoughts _were in life_--though the thought of the
living cannot reach the thoughts which the dead _now_ may entertain. Is
it not so?"
"I decline to answer, if, in my judgment, thought has the limit you
would fix to it; but proceed. You have a special question you wish to
put."
"Intense malignity in an intense will, engendered in a peculiar
temperament, and aided by natural means within the reach of science, may
produce effects like those ascribed of old to evil magic. It might thus
haunt the walls of a human habitation with spectral revivals of all
guilty thoughts and guilty deeds once conceived and done within those
walls; all, in short, with which the evil will claims _rapport_ and
affinity--imperfect, incoherent, fragmentary snatches at the old dramas
acted therein years ago. Thoughts thus crossing each other haphazard, as
in the nightmare of a vision, growing up into phantom sights and sounds,
and all serving to create horror, not because those sights and sounds
are really visitations from a world without, but that they are ghastly
monstrous renewals of what have been in this world itself, set into
malignant play by a malignant mortal.
"And it is through the material agency of that human brain that these
things would acquire even a human power--would strike as with the shock
of electricity, and might kill, if the thought of the person assailed
did not rise superior to the dignity of the original assailer--might
kill the most powerful animal if unnerved by fear, but not injure the
feeblest man, if, while his flesh crept, his mind stood out fearless.
Thus, when in old stories we read of a magician rent to pieces by the
fiends he had evoked--or still more, in Eastern legends, that one
magician succeeds by arts in destroying another--there may be so far
truth, that a material being has clothed, from its own evil propensities
certain elements and fluids, usually quiescent or harmless, with awful
shape and terrific force--just as the lightning that had lain hidden and
innocent in the cloud becomes by natural law suddenly visible, takes a
distinct shape to the eye, and can strike destruction on the object to
which it is attracted."
"You are not without glimpses of a very mighty secret," said Mr
Richards, composedly. "According to your view, could a mortal obtain the
power you speak of, he would necessarily be a malignant and evil being."
"If the power were exercised as I have said, most malignant and most
evil--though I believe in the ancient traditions that he could not
injure the good. His will could only injure those with whom it has
established an affinity, or over whom it forces unresisted sway. I will
now imagine an example that may be within the laws of nature, yet seem
wild as the fables of a bewildered monk.
"You will remember that Albertus Magnus, after describing minutely the
process by which spirits may be invoked and commanded, adds emphatically
that the process will instruct and avail only to the few--that a _man
must be born a magician_!--that is, born with a peculiar physical
temperament, as a man is born a poet. Rarely are men in whose
constitution lurks this occult power of the highest order of
intellect;--usually in the intellect there is some twist, perversity, or
disease. But, on the other hand, they must possess, to an astonishing
degree, the faculty to concentrate thought on a single object--the
energic faculty that we call _will_. Therefore, though their intellect
be not sound, it is exceedingly forcible for the attainment of what it
desires. I will imagine such a person, pre-eminently gifted with this
constitution and its concomitant forces. I will place him in the loftier
grades of society. I will suppose his desires emphatically those of the
sensualist--he has, therefore, a strong love of life. He is an absolute
egotist--his will is concentrated in himself--he has fierce passions--he
knows no enduring, no holy affections, but he can covet eagerly what for
the moment he desires--he can hate implacably what opposes itself to his
objects--he can commit fearful crimes, yet feel small remorse--he
resorts rather to curses upon others, than to penitence for his
misdeeds. Circumstances, to which his constitution guides him, lead him
to a rare knowledge of the natural secrets which may serve his egotism.
He is a close observer where his passions encourage observation, he is a
minute calculator, not from love of truth, but where love of self
sharpens his faculties--therefore he can be a man of science.
"I suppose such a being, having by experience learned the power of his
arts over others, trying what may be the power of will over his own
frame, and studying all that in natural philosophy may increase that
power. He loves life, he dreads death; he _wills to live on_. He cannot
restore himself to youth, he cannot entirely stay the progress of death,
he cannot make himself immortal in the flesh and blood; but he may
arrest for a time so prolonged as to appear incredible, if I said
it--that hardening of the parts which constitutes old age. A year may
age him no more than an hour ages another. His intense will,
scientifically trained into system, operates, in short, over the wear
and tear of his own frame. He lives on. That he may not seem a portent
and a miracle, he _dies_ from time to time, seemingly, to certain
persons. Having schemed the transfer of a wealth that suffices to his
wants, he disappears from one corner of the world, and contrives that
his obsequies shall be celebrated. He reappears at another corner of the
world, where he resides undetected, and does not revisit the scenes of
his former career till all who could remember his features are no more.
He would be profoundly miserable if he had affections--he has none but
for himself. No good man would accept his longevity, and to no men, good
or bad, would he or could he communicate its true secret. Such a man
might exist; such a man as I have described I see now before me!--Duke
of ----, in the court of ----, dividing time between lust and brawl,
alchemists and wizards;--again, in the last century, charlatan and
criminal, with name less noble, domiciled in the house at which you
gazed to-day, and flying from the law you had outraged, none knew
whither; traveller once more revisiting London, with the same earthly
passions which filled your heart when races now no more walked through
yonder streets; outlaw from the school of all the nobler and diviner
mystics; execrable Image of Life in Death and Death in Life, I warn you
back from the cities and homes of healthful men; back to the ruins of
departed empires; back to the deserts of nature unredeemed!"
There answered me a whisper so musical, so potently musical, that it
seemed to enter into my whole being, and subdue me despite myself. Thus
it said:
"I have sought one like you for the last hundred years. Now I have found
you, we part not till I know what I desire. The vision that sees through
the Past, and cleaves through the veil of the Future, is in you at this
hour; never before, never to come again. The vision of no puling
fantastic girl, of no sick-bed somnambule, but of a strong man, with a
vigorous brain. Soar and look forth!"
As he spoke I felt as if I rose out of myself upon eagle wings. All the
weight seemed gone from air--roofless the room, roofless the dome of
space. I was not in the body--where I knew not--but aloft over time,
over earth.
Again I heard the melodious whisper,--"You say right. I have mastered
great secrets by the power of Will; true, by Will and by Science I can
retard the process of years: but death comes not by age alone. Can I
frustrate the accidents which bring death upon the young?"
"No; every accident is a providence. Before a providence snaps every
human will."
"Shall I die at last, ages and ages hence, by the slow, though
inevitable, growth of time, or by the cause that I call accident?"
"By a cause you call accident."
"Is not the end still remote?" asked the whisper, with a slight tremor.
"Regarded as my life regards time, it is still remote."
"And shall I, before then, mix with the world of men as I did ere I
learned these secrets, resume eager interest in their strife and their
trouble--battle with ambition, and use the power of the sage to win the
power that belongs to kings?"
"You will yet play a part on the earth that will fill earth with
commotion and amaze. For wondrous designs have you, a wonder yourself,
been permitted to live on through the centuries. All the secrets you
have stored will then have their uses--all that now makes you a stranger
amidst the generations will contribute then to make you their lord. As
the trees and the straws are drawn into a whirlpool--as they spin round,
are sucked to the deep, and again tossed aloft by the eddies, so shall
races and thrones be plucked into the charm of your vortex. Awful
Destroyer--but in destroying, made, against your own will, a
Constructor!"
"And that date, too, is far off?"
"Far off; when it comes, think your end in this world is at hand!"
"How and what is the end? Look east, west, south, and north."
"In the north, where you never yet trod towards the point whence your
instincts have warned you, there a spectre will seize you. 'Tis Death! I
see a ship--it is haunted--'tis chased--it sails on. Baffled navies sail
after that ship. It enters the region of ice. It passes a sky red with
meteors. Two moons stand on high, over ice-reefs. I see the ship locked
between white defiles--they are ice-rocks. I see the dead strew the
decks--stark and livid, green mould on their limbs. All are dead but one
man--it is you! But years, though so slowly they come, have then scathed
you. There is the coming of age on your brow, and the will is relaxed
in the cells of the brain. Still that will, though enfeebled, exceeds
all that man knew before you, through the will you live on, gnawed with
famine; and nature no longer obeys you in that death-spreading region;
the sky is a sky of iron, and the air has iron clamps, and the ice-rocks
wedge in the ship. Hark how it cracks and groans. Ice will imbed it as
amber imbeds a straw. And a man has gone forth, living yet, from the
ship and its dead; and he has clambered up the spikes of an iceberg, and
the two moons gaze down on his form. That man is yourself; and terror is
on you--terror; and terror has swallowed your will. And I see swarming
up the steep ice-rock, grey grisly things. The bears of the north have
scented their quarry--they come near you and nearer, shambling and
rolling their bulk. And in that day every moment shall seem to you
longer than the centuries through which you have passed. And heed
this--after life, moments continued make the bliss or the hell of
eternity."
"Hush," said the whisper; "but the day, you assure me, is far off--very
far! I go back to the almond and rose of Damascus!--sleep!"
The room swam before my eyes. I became insensible. When I recovered, I
found G---- holding my hand and smiling. He said, "You who have always
declared yourself proof against mesmerism have succumbed at last to my
friend Richards."
"Where is Mr Richards?"
"Gone, when you passed into a trance--saying quietly to me, 'Your friend
will not wake for an hour.'"
I asked, as collectedly as I could, where Mr Richards lodged.
"At the Trafalgar Hotel."
"Give me your arm," said I to G----; "let us call on him; I have
something to say."
When we arrived at the hotel, we were told that Mr Richards had
returned twenty minutes before, paid his bill, left directions with his
servant (a Greek) to pack his effects and proceed to Malta by the
steamer that should leave Southampton the next day. Mr Richards had
merely said of his own movements that he had visits to pay in the
neighbourhood of London, and it was uncertain whether he should be able
to reach Southampton in time for that steamer; if not, he should follow
in the next one.
The waiter asked me my name. On my informing him, he gave me a note that
Mr Richards had left for me, in case I called.
The note was as follows: "I wished you to utter what was in your mind.
You obeyed. I have therefore established power over you. For three
months from this day you can communicate to no living man what has
passed between us--you cannot even show this note to the friend by your
side. During three months, silence complete as to me and mine. Do you
doubt my power to lay on you this command?--try to disobey me. At the
end of the third month, the spell is raised. For the rest I spare you. I
shall visit your grave a year and a day after it has received you."
So ends this strange story, which I ask no one to believe. I write it
down exactly three months after I received the above note. I could not
write it before, nor could I show to G----, in spite of his urgent
request, the note which I read under the gas-lamp by his side.
VII
THE BOTATHEN GHOST
By the Rev. S.R. HAWKER
The legend of Parson Rudall and the Botathen Ghost will be recognised by
many Cornish people as a local remembrance of their boyhood.
It appears from the diary of this learned master of the
grammar-school--for such was his office, as well as perpetual curate of
the parish,--"that a pestilential disease did break forth in our town in
the beginning of the year A.D. 1665; yea, and it likewise
invaded my school, insomuch that therewithal certain of the chief
scholars sickened and died." "Among others who yielded to the malign
influence was Master John Eliot, the eldest son and the worshipful heir
of Edward Eliot, Esquire of Trebursey, a stripling of sixteen years of
age, but of uncommon parts and hopeful ingenuity. At his own especial
motion and earnest desire I did consent to preach his funeral sermon."
It should be remembered here that, howsoever strange and singular it may
sound to us that a mere lad should formally solicit such a performance
at the hands of his master, it was in consonance with the habitual usage
of those times. The old services for the dead had been abolished by law,
and in the stead of sacrament and ceremony, month's mind and year's
mind, the sole substitute which survived was the general desire "to
partake," as they called it, of a posthumous discourse, replete with
lofty eulogy and flattering remembrance of the living and the dead. The
diary proceeds:
"I fulfilled my undertaking and preached over the coffin in the presence
of a full assemblage of mourners and lachrymose friends. An ancient
gentleman who was then and there in the church, a Mr Bligh of Botathen,
was much affected by my discourse, and he was heard to repeat to himself
certain parentheses therefrom, especially a phrase from Maro Virgilius,
which I had applied to the deceased youth, 'Et puer ipse fuit cantari
dignus.'
"The cause wherefore this old gentleman was thus moved by my
applications was this: He had a first-born and only son--a child who,
but a very few months before, had been not unworthy of the character I
drew of young Master Eliot, but who, by some strange accident, had of
late quite fallen away from his parent's hopes, and become moody, and
sullen, and distraught. When the funeral obsequies were over, I had no
sooner come out of the church than I was accosted by this aged parent,
and he besought me incontinently, with a singular energy, that I would
resort with him forthwith to his abode at Botathen that very night; nor
could I have delivered myself from his importunity, had not Mr Eliot
urged his claim to enjoy my company at his own house. Hereupon I got
loose, but not until I had pledged a fast assurance that I would pay
him, faithfully, an early visit the next day."
"The Place," as it was called, of Botathen, where old Mr Bligh resided,
was a low-roofed gabled manor-house of the fifteenth century, walled and
mullioned, and with clustered chimneys of dark-grey stone from the
neighbouring quarries of Ventor-gan. The mansion was flanked by a
pleasaunce or enclosure in one space, of garden and lawn, and it was
surrounded by a solemn grove of stag-horned trees. It had the sombre
aspect of age and of solitude, and looked the very scene of strange and
supernatural events. A legend might well belong to every gloomy glade
around, and there must surely be a haunted room somewhere within its
walls. Hither, according to his appointment, on the morrow, Parson
Rudall betook himself. Another clergyman, as it appeared, had been
invited to meet him, who, very soon after his arrival, proposed a walk
together in the pleasaunce, on the pretext of showing him, as a
stranger, the walks and trees, until the dinner-bell should strike.
There, with much prolixity, and with many a solemn pause, his brother
minister proceeded to "unfold the mystery."