A QUESTIONABLE DOCTRINE.
Dr. Paull had but little sleep that night. He spent it reading a book
which had been presented to him by its author a few months ago, and
which he had then shelved at the top of his bookcases among works not
likely to be required.
The author was an old man, a Mr. Helven, who had been a celebrated
analytical chemist, but who had retired from active practice to pursue
certain fantastic theories which had taken possession of his mind. He
had been a frequent visitor at the Pinewood during Sir Roderick’s
lifetime. Hugh had seen him once since at a learned conversazione, and
they had had some discussion, the result of which was that Mr. Helven
sent him a copy of his book, “The result,” he wrote in the accompanying
note, “of the research of a lifetime.”
Dr. Paull had thoughts which he chose to hide, not only from the whole
world, but even, if possible, from himself. He took the book to his
bedroom and only began to read when the last sounds of daily life had
ceased within and without the house.
The title of the work was: “_On Certain Ancient Doctrines._ By a Modern
Pythagorean.”
While cutting the pages Hugh’s attention was arrested by certain words
on the flyleaf:
“BOOK II.
ON THE AGE OF SOULS.”
“Where have I seen that before?” he asked himself.
The words were familiar, and recalled sensations the reverse of
pleasant.
He pondered for a few minutes: then he recollected. Memory carried his
mind back to the night at the Pinewood when, after the day spent with
Lilia, Sir Roderick had lent him a treatise written by a Dutch author.
He had, so he afterwards believed, fallen asleep while reading it—and
had dreamt that he read a chapter or chapters of its second part (which
was entitled, “On the Age of Souls”).
This finding in black and white that of which he had dreamt years ago
was weird. He turned over the pages that followed, and the sense of the
uncanny was intensified. Here, almost word for word, was the strange
treatise which he had read in his vision long ago; here was the history
of the old doctrine of Metempsychosis, or the passage of the Soul
through many bodies in various lives. There was also the speculation of
the author (or commentator), that the object of all life upon the planet
was to develop high spiritual force: gradually, slowly, through its
friction with material frames. The speculator assumed this plan to be a
merciful idea of a beneficent Creator, by which the Soul, when finally
attaining to its eternal grandeur, might not be overwhelmed with the
magnitude of its obligations, because it would recognise glory as
principally earned by its long course of suffering and struggle.
Meanwhile, the author suggested that while the spiritual essence called
the Soul, being eternal, could have no age, there being no such thing as
Time in Eternity, the duration of its inhabitance of matter was of
different length in different cases. Courageous souls that fought
bravely for perfection would attain it sooner than the less
enterprising. Those who lent themselves to evil would retrograde—would,
like Sisyphus, be perpetually at work at the same step-in-advance. And
those who failed to believe in the Eternal might revolve in fleshly
forms even while the globe itself continued in the Universe in its
present form.
Hugh read and re-read. Certain ideas he had vaguely felt floating among
his troubled thoughts of late were assuming definite shape.
Throughout that hardest, most perplexed reverie of his life he
remembered certain facts. Lilia’s unbelief during life: her rebellion
against the law of Death at the last. The strange knowledge the Princess
Mercedes had had from her earliest years of the awful scene in his
life—Mercedes, who was born nine months after Lilia’s death.
“If I tell Helven this,” he said to himself, with a ghastly laugh at his
own thoughts, “he will say that Mercedes is Lilia re-embodied. Did ever
a romantic dreamer on subjects beyond our mortal powers of comprehension
find such a case in point to bear out his wild imaginings?”
Lilia’s death—Mercedes’ birth—Lilia’s wild love for him—Mercedes’
feeling that his presence was necessary to her wellbeing.
“Bah! I am trying to justify my passion for that girl—that is what I am
doing!” he cried to himself in an excess of self-anger. “I want to
justify my unfaithfulness to Lilia, whom, if _this_ is love, I never
loved! God! I would die a thousand times for this girl—she has me, soul,
body, _all_!”
No more would he deceive himself. He knew now—he knew that he was in the
grasp of the one great passion of his whole life.
What should he do? Fly? To-morrow, if he chose, he could cancel all
engagements, cast off all responsibilities, leave all arrangements to
his lawyer, and start for—anywhere—without detriment to his one duty in
life—Ralph. His father was dead, his sisters absorbed in their husbands
and families. He had no ties. Would it not be best to turn his back upon
his great temptation?
He resisted the thought. The fact was, he shrank from the daily and
hourly struggle against the longing for Mercedes’ presence which he felt
would arise when he had cut himself adrift.
“I am exaggerating the situation,” he told himself, summoning his
ordinary common sense to his aid. “It throws one off one’s mental
balance to be confronted by such a coincidence as my dreaming of that
fantastic stuff years before the man wrote it.”
Meanwhile he felt as if he would like to see Helven again. The feeling
was so strong next morning that after he had finished his hospital work
he drove to the publishers of the book his thoughts had so curiously
anticipated, to obtain its author’s address.
The address was a street in Bloomsbury. With the new instinct to hide
his doings dominating him, Dr. Paull would not drive there in his own
carriage.
He telegraphed to Helven asking him for an audience that evening. The
reply arrived during the afternoon:
“_With pleasure—at eight.—Helven._”
So, with an excuse for his absence to Ralph, at twenty minutes to eight
Hugh strolled out of the house, and hailing a hansom in Oxford street,
drove to Blank street, Bloomsbury.
It was a large, old, neglected house, smelling of damp and stale tobacco
smoke. A maid ushered Dr. Paull up the blackened staircase into the
large drawing-rooms, once, in their early days, the reception-rooms of
fashionable dames, and doubtless gorgeous with tapestries and crystal
chandeliers; now dismal with dirt and dingy books, papers, and dusty
odds and ends of crazy furniture.
There was one bright spot in the room—a large lamp on the centre table,
where Mr. Helven was bending over his papers, a long pipe in his mouth.
“Ah!” he said, in a pleased tone, looking up from his work over his
spectacles and laying aside his pipe, “I am glad to see you, Dr. Paull.
A chair for Dr. Paull, Margaret, if you please. Allow me, I will help
you;” and as courteously as if the dirtily-dressed servant girl had been
a refined lady, the old man assisted her to remove some twenty or so
large volumes from a chair, and bowing her out of the room, invited Hugh
to be seated.
“This is unexpected,” he said, beaming at his guest. “I remember meeting
you about ten years ago. You were then a confirmed materialist, doctor.”
“Scarcely that,” said Hugh. “I have never altogether given up the simple
tenets I learned in my mother’s lap.”
Now that he was here, burning to tell his story and to see the effect it
would produce on the Pythagorean, a certain awkwardness made him preface
his disclosures by ordinary talk. For some minutes the two scientists
spoke of the recent discoveries in physiology and other of Nature’s
storehouses, and of the careers or deaths of well-known scholars who had
been present at the conversazione where they had met. Then old Helven
grew absent in manner, and suddenly interrupted Hugh in the middle of a
sentence.
“Dr. Paull, you have something to tell me,” he said. “What is it?”
Their eyes met, they smiled.
“I have a strange story to tell you,” said Hugh. “But first you must
understand that, without my express permission, it must go no further
than your memory. You will remember, no fear of that!”
Then he told him of his last night’s perusal of his work _On Certain
Ancient Doctrines_, and of his strange dream of the part “On the Age of
Souls,” twenty years ago, at the Pinewood.
Helven was amazed.
“I cannot doubt your impressions,” he said, after hearing details. “But,
visionary though people think me, I confess to but small belief in
dreams. I can believe that there may appear to be a strong similarity in
a vivid dream to facts that afterwards ensue. But you, in your own book
_On the Physiology of Sleep_, refute the idea of impressions we receive
in dreams and our waking memory of those impressions coinciding. The
fact is, that when you thought you dreamt of those chapters I headed ‘On
the Age of Souls,’ I had not even planned out their synopsis.”
“But you knew the doctrines then, Mr. Helven,” said Hugh.
“The doctrines are as old as the hills, Dr. Paull,” said Helven. “But is
your story a story of dreams?”
“I wish it were!” said Hugh. “No, what I have to tell you is simple
fact. I trust you; so I will not disguise identities. The tale is of my
own life.”
He briefly recounted his acquaintance with Sir Roderick, his affection
for Lilia, and their marriage, not omitting his dream of a strange lady
who spoke strange words to him with a foreign accent: the dream which he
believed now to have been a prevision of Mercedes.
“My wife loved me unreasonably,” he said. “At times I feared the feeling
might become a monomania. Poor child! when I had to tell her that she
must resign herself to die, there was a terrible scene.”
He recounted the awful hour of his life, when Lilia exacted a promise
that as soon as she was dead he would commit self-murder, and how he was
saved by the accident to the babe, and Mrs. Mervyn’s consequent
interruption with the child in her arms.
“I was sitting at the table in the library when this friend, with my
child in her arms, suddenly appeared,” he said. “Pistols were on the
table before me. I was resting my arms on the table and my head was bent
down upon them. I am telling you these details because they bear upon
the extraordinary part of my story.
“Well, I was saved. Then followed nineteen years of hard work and
solitude. I have shunned society; I went weekly to the Pinewood, to my
wife’s grave. I did all I could to prevent my poor child from feeling
her loss; and in this sort of life I hoped to atone to my wife’s spirit
for breaking the terrible promise she forced from me on her death-bed. I
had many hours of wretchedness when I remembered her frame of mind when
she passed into the Infinite. Often and often I reproached myself that I
had not taken her atheism more seriously, that I had not made her
realisation of Eternity my constant work. Since her death I have tried
constantly, in all possible ways, to communicate with her soul, wherever
it may be. But pray, struggle, do what I might, I failed.”
“You, with your knowledge, believed it possible for an embodied spirit
to communicate with the immaterial?” asked Helven, leaning back in his
chair, surprised.
“I did not believe, but I—shall I say, hoped? No, scarcely that. Mr.
Helven, when loss and grief and anxiety are brought close home to us, to
our very hearts, where are we? Where are theories, beliefs?”
Helven looked at Hugh, whose pale cheeks were flushed with excitement,
as he might have looked at a newly-found specimen of a rare _genus_.
“I have never married,” he said, dryly. “I do not understand these
family feelings.”
“Would you understand a being who rose from the dead to bear witness to
your theories?” asked Hugh.
“When it happens, I will tell you my opinion,” said Helven.
“It has happened to me,” said Dr. Paull. “At least, when you hear what I
have to tell you, you will, I think, be glad that we have met—years ago
and now.”
Helven assured him he was not credulous, nor easily convinced.
“Hear me before you say more,” said Hugh. Then he recounted his meeting
with the princess, the attraction she had felt for him, the deep, almost
terribly strong affection that he had discovered to exist for her in his
mind, and the mystery of her visions of the crucial hour of his life.
“What you say is peculiar, and would certainly bear favourably upon the
development of a case of transmigration,” Helven admitted. “But there
are other theories to be considered. We do not at present understand the
influence that embodied spirits have upon each other.”
Then he discoursed learnedly about natural affinities, of the attraction
between certain human beings of opposite sexes, even at a first most
cursory meeting.
“When material law meets spiritual law, it is difficult, almost
impossible, to detect which of the two is at work,” he concluded by
saying. “I can assure you, doctor, I could have filled volumes with
cases of possible metempsychosis as plausible, as well authenticated as
yours, had I believed that the record would further faith in that which
I believe to be a fundamental truth.”
“The most staggering fact of all I have not yet told you,” said Hugh,
somewhat repelled by the cool and calculating reception of his
experiences by the philosopher. “My wife died on a certain date. Nine
months, less two days afterwards, this girl, who is conversant with my
life story without ever having learned it, who knows more of my true
history than any one alive, was born.”
Helven looked curiously at him.
“That is certainly strange,” he said, more interested. Then he entered
notes, in a shorthand of his own invention, in one of the manuscript
volumes devoted to cases of this sort, and Hugh, somewhat astonished,
took leave.
He could not understand Helven’s apathy. Placing himself in imagination
in the old scientist’s place, he fancied that he would have been excited
to enthusiasm at the statement of a case such as his.
If he could have seen and heard Helven as he left him!
The old philosopher looked after him with a smile and a sigh.
“Fifty years old at least,” he muttered to himself, “and as much in
love, as they call it, with a girl as if he were a boy!”
Then he took a few notes of the interview, and resuming his work
speedily forgot Hugh and his throes as if no one existed but himself.
Hugh, dissatisfied, a trifle disgusted too, he hardly knew why, strolled
westward. A fresh breeze met him as he walked up Oxford Street. It made
him think yearningly of the country, of the heathery hills lying purple
under a wind-blown sky, of the pine-clad valley where the solemn trees
stood as sentinels about—a grave.
The busy thoroughfare was comparatively still: only a few passengers
were strolling west or east. The street lamps twinkled redly in the
clear summer night in contrast to the white glimmer of the stars in the
fathomless dark blue above. Deep in thought, Hugh, without noticing,
wended his way homewards through the square where Lady Forwood lived.
As he passed he saw her brougham waiting and the half-door open. He was
hurrying past to avoid a meeting—he was in no humour for ordinary
talk—but Lady Forwood, just as she was coming out, had seen him, and
called out “Dr. Paull!” so eagerly, there was no escape. He reluctantly
turned back.
“I am going to a concert at Lady M——’s,” she said; “positively the last
entertainment this season, and very few are in town to go, so my absence
would be noticed. But you must come in; I have something most important
to ask you.”
She caught the long train of her dress over her arm and preceded him to
the dining-room. There was something new in her manner to him which was
half annoyed, half-bantering.
“Now, sir, perhaps you will explain,” she said, half-laughingly. “The
first intimation we had that we are to be your guests next month was a
newspaper paragraph, and you must acknowledge that that is hardly fair.”
Hugh stared at her.
“You—a newspaper paragraph—I do not understand,” he stammered.
“Surely——” she began; then, with a glance at his face, on which there
was a comical expression of horror, she turned aside and, repressing a
laugh, fetched a newspaper from a side-table, and, opening it, showed
him a paragraph in a column headed “Fashionable Intelligence.”
“The Prince and Princess Andriocchi and Sir David and Lady Forwood
will be the guests of Dr. Paull at his residence, the Pinewood,
Surrey, next month.”
Hugh read it twice, thrice, before he believed that this experience was
a reality. Then he turned to Lady Forwood with a laugh—a laugh of a
strange exhilaration which was produced by the surprise, the shock
almost, following upon his interview with Helven.
“Do you mean to say you have not received my letter?” he had said,
before he had even had the idea of speaking. It seemed to him as if some
other entity was speaking through his lips, while his will remained
passive. And what the other entity uttered was a falsity!
“Not a line, not a word!” said Lady Forwood, becoming serious. “Whose
fault can it be? If the servants——”
“Whatever fault there is in the matter is mine, and mine only,” said
Hugh, reckless with a feeling which was half delirious joy, half
despair. “But do you think, when the princess’ name has been taken in
vain like this, that they will come?”
“Come?” Lady Forwood looked blank surprise with her beautiful blue eyes.
“You don’t mean to say you have not asked _her_?” she cried.
“I had hoped _you_ would arrange it with her,” he said in desperation.
“I thought—I fancied—the change and the quiet might be good for her, so
I was having the place done up.”
“I think myself I should have made sure of the birds before I got the
cage ready,” said Lady Forwood, demurely (although her inward comment
was an amused “It is really high time the poor man had a woman to look
after him”). “However, you know, you and I are old friends, as friends
go now-a-days, and I should so much enjoy invading you in your Surrey
hermitage, that I will undertake to make it all right with the
Andriocchis. Only tell me exactly _when_ you want us.”
“You saw—next month,” said Hugh, half-savagely. He would investigate the
affair of the paragraph. He would find out whose hand had precipitated
his fate, had cast the last straw to balance his destiny.
“Any day?” asked Lady Forwood, smiling.
“Any day,” he said, somewhat brusquely.
Just then Sir David’s voice was audible in the hall asking where “my
lady” was.
“Here,” she called out. “It is all settled,” she said, as her husband
appeared. “An important letter miscarried—thus the mistake.”
Then she entered into a voluble explanation which astonished Hugh, but
appeared perfectly intelligible to Sir David, who shook his hand quite
warmly as he stepped into the brougham after his wife.
Who had done this thing? Who was it who had fathomed not only his secret
thoughts, but had dared to publish them to the world?
“I will know some day,” he promised himself.
Then he went home, and wrote to Mrs. Mervyn. The gist of the letter was
that he and the house party might arrive any day after the 1st of
September.