instant, as if some unforeseen catastrophe in whatever region it came
from had suddenly recalled the eidolon, or projected presence, or
whatever the thing might be.
More confounded and disturbed than ever, my friend retired to bed,
but he was too much excited to sleep. He had much the feeling that
one fancies a prince to have over whose heritage distant armies are
contending, while he in forced inaction awaits the result. No clue had
been given which enabled him to reach a solution of the mystery that
involved him, and nothing further transpired during the night to render
matters any plainer.
On the following afternoon he was obliged to start for Boston on
business. As he was elbowing his way through the crowd in the Grand
Central station, he heard at his ear the well known voice of the
"Great Mogul," speaking as usual in the unknown tongue which Vantine
understood, yet the identity of which he had never established. There
was no visible appearance this time, and the voice, although distinctly
audible, seemed to come from a great distance.
"Great Master," the voice said, "they are beheading me. All is lost."
* * * * *
"It would be some comfort," John Vantine said, rather irritably, when he
confided this strange story to me, "to know what was lost. It would have
been uncommonly civil of the 'Great Mogul' to be a little more definite
in his information. If the poor fellow lost his head in my service I
am profoundly grateful, of course; but precious little good does it
do me. Do you think the Psychical Society would undertake the job of
discovering in what part of the universe I am rightfully dubbed the
Great Master and that young rascal in the nursery is a prince! Unless
they can do something, I'm afraid I shall be a half-starved New York
lawyer to the end of the chapter."
To which I had nothing satisfactory to answer.
Interlude Fourth.
THE RADIATOR.
THE RADIATOR.
A STUDY IN THE MODERN STYLE OF COLLOQUIAL FICTION.
[_Scene, the chamber of Mr. and Mrs. Ellston, in an apartment hotel.
Time, three A. M. The silence of the night is unbroken, save by the
regular breathing of the sleepers, until suddenly, from the steam
radiator, bursts a sound like the discharge of a battery of forty-pound
guns._]
_Mrs. E._ (_springing up in bed_) Oh! eh? what is that?
[_Her husband moves uneasily in his sleep, but does not reply. The noise
of the sledge-hammer score of the "Anvil Chorus" rings out from the
radiator._]
_Mrs. E._ George! George! Something is going to happen! Do wake up, or
we shall be murdered in our sleep!
_Mr. E._ (_with mingled ferocity and amusement_) There is small danger
of anybody's being murdered in his sleep, my dear, where you are. It's
only that confounded radiator; it's always making some sort of an
infernal tumult. It can't do any harm.
_Mrs. E._ But it will wake baby.
_Mr. E._ Well, if it does, the nurse can get him to sleep again, I
suppose.
[_From the room adjoining is heard a clattering din, as if all the
kettles and pans in the house were being thrown violently across the
floor._]
_Mrs. E._ There! The nursery radiator has begun. I must go and get baby.
_Mr. E._ Let baby alone. If the youngster will sleep, for heaven's sake
let him. The steam-pipes make noise enough for this time of night, one
would think, without your taking the trouble to wake baby.
_Mrs. E._ (_with volumes of reproach in her tone_) Your own little baby!
You never loved him as his mother does.
[_The disturbances now assume the likeness to a thoroughly inebriated
drum corps practising upon sheet-iron air-tight stoves._]
_Mr. E._ Of all unendurable rackets--
[_A sudden and sharp boom interrupts him. Mrs. Ellston screams, while
her husband indulges in language which, although somewhat inexcusably
forcible, is yet to be regarded as not unnatural under the
circumstances._]
_Mrs. E._ Oh, George, don't swear. It always seems so much worse to
swear in danger; like tempting Providence; and I know there's going to
be an explosion!
_Mr. E._ (_severely_) Don't talk nonsense! The engineer has gone to
sleep and left the drafts open, that's all. Don't be so absurd.
[_There is another fusillade from the radiator, reinforced by the
reverberations from the nursery, where a regiment of artillery seem to
have begun target practice._]
_Mrs. E._ I _will_ go and get my baby! I know-- Oh, George, just hear it
crash! Do get up and put the screen in front of it; that may turn off
the pieces so they won't come this way.
_Mr. E._ (_scornfully_) Pieces of what? Noise?
_Mrs. E._ How can you make fun? If the engineer has gone to sleep, he's
sure to blow up the whole hotel. I'm going to get up and dress myself,
and take baby over to mother's!
_Mr. E._ (_with calm but cutting irony_) At three o'clock in the
morning? Shall you walk, or call a carriage?
_Mrs. E._ (_beginning to sob in a dry and perfunctory fashion_) Oh, you
are too cruel! You are perfectly heartless. I wonder you don't take that
dear little innocent baby and hold him between you and the radiator for
a shield.
_Mr. E._ That might be a good scheme, my dear, only the little beggar
would probably howl so that I haven't really the moral courage to wake
him.
[_The indignant reply of Mrs. Ellston is lost in the confused sound of
the brays of a drove of brazen donkeys, which appear to be disporting
themselves in the radiator. The noise of mighty rushing waters,
the clanking of chains, the din of a political convention, the
characteristic disturbances of a hundred factories and machine-shops,
with the deafening whirr of all the elevated railways in the universe
follow in turn._]
_Mrs. E._ I _will_ go and get my baby, and I will _go_ to mother's;
and, what is more, we will never, never come back!
_Mr. E._ Oh, just as you please about going, my dear; only you know that
if you desert my bed and board, the law gives the boy to me.
_Mrs. E._ I don't _believe_ it's any such thing; and if it is, it is
because men made the law. Women wouldn't take a baby away from its
mother.
_Mr. E._ Have what theories you choose, my dear; only please let me get
a few crumbs of sleep, now the radiator has had the mercy to subside.
_Mrs. E._ You are a brute, and I won't ever speak to you again!
[_She firmly assumes a stony silence, and the radiator, after a few
concluding ejaculations and metallic objurgations, also relapses into
comparative stillness. Mr. Ellston's breathing begins to give strong
indications that slumber has re-descended upon his weary frame._]
_Mrs. E._ (_starting up with the inspiration of an entirely new and
startling idea_) George! George! George!
_Mr. E._ (_with less good humor than might be desired_) Eh?
_Mrs. E._ Wasn't it wonderful for baby to sleep through it all?
_Mr. E._ (_drowsily_) Yes; droll little beggar. His mother wasn't in the
nursery to wake him, though.
_Mrs. E._ You don't suppose there is anything the matter with him?
George! George, I say! you don't suppose the reason he sleeps so soundly
is because he's sick?
[_To this conundrum Mr. Ellston offers no solution, and equally passes
in silence queries in regard to the probability of the nurse's being
awake, alive, well-disposed, and able to take care of baby in case of
emergency. Mrs. Ellston sighs with the desperation of long-suffering
anguish, and once more stillness reigns in the chamber. The lady again
arouses herself, however, from an apparently sound nap to ask, in
penetrating tones,--_]
"George, _do_ you think it will begin all over again?"
(_To which her brutal worser half grumbles out the reply_) "No! and
that's where it is more endurable than a woman."
[_At which the radiator gives a chuckle so apt as to suggest the
possession of a sinister consciousness on the part of that noisy
instrument of torture. Mrs. Ellston groans, with the discouraged
conviction that she is but one against two, and upon this theory at
length consents to resume her interrupted slumbers._]
Tale the Fifth.
MÈRE MARCHETTE.
MÈRE MARCHETTE.
I.
It was half-past eleven of a hot July day in Paris. The sunlight lay
over the whole city and shone nowhere more strongly than upon the great
hospital of the Salpêtrière. The hush of noon brooded over all the
place. Nobody was stirring unless forced to activity by some pressing
duty. In the long white wards the patients were asleep or lying quiet in
exhaustion under the burning fervor of the summer heat.
Down one of the corridors, where it seemed refreshingly cool after the
warmth of the outer air from which he had come, a young man was passing.
His step, though rapid, had the noiseless quality which bespeaks
familiarity with the sick-room and the hospital. His figure was compact
and nervous, his glance clear and keen. Dr. Jean Lommel was one of
the house physicians of the Salpêtrière, although that he was not now
making his regular rounds was evident from the fact that entering a
certain ward he passed quickly to a bed near the middle of it without
stopping at any of the others.
On the bed lay an old woman. Her face was one which showed great
strength of character. It was of a marked peasant type, and for all its
innumerable wrinkles, its sunken temples, the coarse texture of its
skin, and the shrunken lips which showed the lack of teeth behind them,
it was full of a nobility and kindliness which no ravages of time or
disease could wholly hide. The hair that straggled in thin locks from
beneath the white cap was hardly less snowy than the lawn which covered
it; and when the patient opened her sunken eyes, as the doctor stopped
beside the bed, they were bright and shining with a lustre which was not
all either fever or anxiety. Her glance was one of intense and pitiful
inquiry. The young man touched her white hair with the tips of his long,
fine fingers in a pitying caress before he took hold of the withered
wrist, shrunken and marked with blue veins, that lay outside the
coverlid.
"In an hour, Mère Marchette," he said, answering her look--"in an hour
he will be here; keep up a good heart. You do not suffer?"
The old woman feebly shook her head. The ghost of a smile, faint but
full of happiness, shone on her face. She did not speak, but she thanked
him with a look before she closed her eyes and lay motionless as before
he had come.
The young man looked at her a moment, an expression of pity in his brown
eyes; then with a sigh he turned away and moved softly down the ward
again. By the door he encountered one of the nurses, who had risen and
come forward to speak with him.
"Will she live, M. Lommel?"
"Yes," the doctor answered. "She has given all her energies for days to
keeping alive till her grandson gets here. It is very singular," he went
on, in a voice of low distinctness that could have been acquired only in
sick-rooms, "how her instinct has taught her to save her strength. She
neither moves nor speaks; she simply lives."
"She has been that way," the nurse returned, "ever since we told her
that Pierre was coming. Will he be here by twelve?"
"Not till half-past twelve," Dr. Lommel replied. "I will return before
then."
And he went out into the hot sunshine.
II.
Everybody connected with the ward of the Salpêtrière wherein she was had
a kindly feeling for poor old Mère Marchette. The doctors and the nurses
could not have been more kind or more tender had she been of their
own blood. She was one of those who always win affection. She was so
patient, so simple, so kindly. She was a peasant woman from Normandy,
who had in her old age drifted to Paris with her grandson Pierre, a lad
of sixteen years. All the rest of the family were dead. Pierre's father
had been a soldier, and it was with the hope of securing a pension for
the son that Mère Marchette had left her home and the life in Normandy
she loved, to throw herself into Paris as into the sea. The dead
soldier, however, had been mustered out before the malarial fever,
contracted in the swamps of the Landes, had developed itself, and the
pension could not be obtained. The disappointment was a bitter one, made
worse by the fact that Mère Marchette had been told by one and another
that the claim would have been granted had the case been properly
managed. The poor old creature could not escape a feeling of self-blame
in thinking that it was her want of keenness which had deprived Pierre
of his pension. Her grandson for her represented the world, and to
him she devoted all her energies. She toiled for him, and watched and
suffered with that unselfish egotism possible only to the old and
lonely.
Fortunately Pierre was a good lad, who returned his grandmother's love
with a devotion hardly less complete than her own. They lived together
in two attic rooms, where they passed the evenings sitting in the dark
and talking of their Normandy home. They recalled the past and built
endless air castles of the time when they should be able to return. They
had grand plans of repurchasing the old cot where both of them had been
born, and which had been lost by the foreclosure of a mortgage after
the long illness of Pierre's father had ended. They were never tired of
talking of what they would do then, and of devising little ways in which
the worn-out old farm might be made more profitable. They remained as
truly children of the soil as if they had been still in Normandy instead
of in their attic in the midst of Paris.
In the daytime Mère Marchette went out to do work as charwoman, while
Pierre had been fortunate enough to obtain a place as assistant in a
little grocery in Rue M. le Prince. It was in connection with this that
Pierre gave his grandmother the only real grief he ever caused her while
they were together. Suddenly the boy began to stay away in the evening,
and when Mère Marchette sought to know the reason he put her questions
aside. One evening as she was making her way home she saw her grandson
chatting with a girl at the door of a milliner's dingy shop. The heart
of poor old Mère Marchette sunk within her. The castles in the air, from
whose glittering towers had shone delusive lights to strengthen and
encourage her, fell in ruins before her eyes. In a moment the burden of
her age, her poverty, her weariness, seemed increased tenfold. Feebly
she climbed the long stairs and sat down to wait, heartbroken. She had
all the peasant's instinctive distrust of Paris: she had not been able
to live in the Latin Quarter without comprehending something of the evil
about her, although, happily for her, the worst features of Parisian
life would have been so unintelligible that she might have seen them
unmoved. She thought no evil now of Pierre, but she was seized with a
terrible fear lest he might fall a victim to one of the sirens of the
Latin Quarter, who, to Mère Marchette's thinking, destroyed soul and
body alike.
Mère Marchette did not tell Pierre of the discovery she had made.
She was only more gentle with him, while in secret she prayed more
fervently. For some days longer the lad's mysterious absence continued,
the sad hours of the evening stretching like long deserts of agony,
over which the soul of Mère Marchette walked painfully with bleeding
feet. And then one night Pierre came home with eyes aglow, and all was
explained. He put into his grandmother's hand a little pile of francs, a
sum pitiful enough in itself but large to them, and told how a milliner
in the street beyond had employed him in moving boxes and clearing out
the attics of her house, which were to be remodelled into lodgings. This
had been his secret, and in his thought of the joyful surprise he was
to give his grandmother he had forgotten the pain she might endure by
misunderstanding his absence.
It was such trifles as this that were the great events in the life of
Mère Marchette and Pierre. There was a tenderness, an unselfishness, an
idyllic devotion in their love which no amount of wealth, or culture,
or rank could have heightened; but in the lad's veins was the blood of a
soldier, that stirred hot with the currents of a vigorous youth. Of the
army he had dreamed from his cradle, and strong as was his love for Mère
Marchette the force of destiny was stronger. It was the old tragedy
of youth and age, of the absorption of maternal love and the restless
impulses of the boy's heart. Pierre justified his desire to himself
with the excuse that he could earn more money in the ranks; but his
grandmother knew, only too well, the force of the instinct he had
inherited. She had seen the same struggle in the life of his father.
When Pierre was eighteen he shouldered his musket and marched away,
leaving poor old Mère Marchette as much a stranger in Paris as when she
had come to it two years before to weep and pray alone. It would hardly
be within the power of words to paint the anguish which lay between
Pierre's departure and that hot July noon when Mère Marchette lay dying
at the Salpêtrière. Always in Paris she had been like a wild thing,
caged and bewildered, confused by the life that swirled about her in the
great city, even when she had been sustained by the presence of Pierre.
When he was gone the gentle old soul began to die of homesickness and
heartbreak. For two years she fought death stolidly but persistently,
refusing to acknowledge to herself that she was breaking down under the
stress of loneliness and sorrow. She came of a race that died hard, and
although she was past eighty she looked forward hopefully to the time
when Pierre should leave the army and come back to live with her again.
But the struggle for existence in Paris was hard, even when the joy
of working for Pierre sustained her; when he was gone it became
intolerable. At the end of two years the strength and courage even of
the sturdy Norman peasant woman were exhausted; and then a dreadful
disease, which had before shown itself in her family, seemed to take
advantage of her weakness to spring upon her. She had been a charwoman
in the family of Jean Lommel's mother, and so it came about that
through the influence of the young doctor she had been admitted to the
Salpêtrière when she was already dying from cancer in the stomach.
There was no patient in the ward who was not of better birth than Mère
Marchette. She was of all most deficient in education, in knowledge of
the world, in the graces of life; and yet of them all it was only the
poor old peasant woman who awakened in the minds of the attendants a
glow of genuine affection. There are some people who are born to be
loved, and when these rare beings remain worthy of it, neither age, nor
poverty, nor sickness can destroy their power of awaking affection.
The hired nurses touched their lips to her forehead in kisses given
furtively, as if they were surprised, and prepared to be ashamed of the
emotion which called from them this unwonted display. The doctors spoke
to her in tones unprofessionally soft, while Dr. Lommel, who had charge
of the ward, treated her with an affectionate courtesy scarcely less
warm than that he would have shown to his own grandmother. They all knew
that Mère Marchette must die, and from counting the time in weeks they
had dropped to days, and then to hours. Indeed it seemed only the old
woman's will which kept her alive now until Pierre should come. She had
borne all her sufferings without a murmur, but she had not been able
wholly to repress the cry of her heart. The young soldier's regiment was
in Algiers, and there had been difficulties about his furlough. Had it
been any other death-bed in the hospital to which he had been summoned
these difficulties would hardly have been surmounted; but in behalf of
Mère Marchette the physicians had worked so zealously that all obstacles
were removed and Pierre's leave of absence granted. From the moment she
had been told that her grandson was on his way she had been perfectly
quiet, and, as the doctor said, had devoted her whole being to keeping
alive until Pierre should come.
And on this hot July noon the train which was bringing Pierre was
drawing nearer to Paris, and Mère Marchette lay so still that she seemed
scarcely to breathe,--so still that one might fancy she would not even
think, lest in so doing she exhaust some precious grain of strength and
so should die without the blessing of that last embrace.
III.
Whoever keeps himself informed of the course of modern scientific
investigations is likely to be aware that during the last decade
especial attention has been given at the Salpêtrière to that strange
physical or psychical force known as hypnotism. M. Charcot, chief of
the school of the Salpêtrière, has particularly distinguished himself by
his researches. Attacked at first by his professional brethren, it has
been his good fortune to live to see the scientific value of hypnotism
acknowledged, and to be triumphantly readmitted to the Academy of
Sciences, which had at first stigmatized his investigations as mere
charlatanism. Charles Féré, an assistant physician at the Salpêtrière,
with Richer, Bourneville, and nearly a score other distinguished men,
have pursued their investigations with great zeal and thoroughness, and
have produced a valuable literature devoted to this intricate subject.
It will be easily understood that all the physicians at the Salpêtrière,
and especially the younger men, could not fail to be deeply interested
in this new and fascinating branch of science. The facts upon which had
been founded the theories of mesmerism, animal magnetism, and other
shadowy systems were reduced to order and scientifically tested. M.
Charcot and his associates worked with much care and thoroughness, and,
without being able to solve the mystery of the force with which they
dealt, they proved its value as a therapeutic agent. In the cure
of nervous diseases, and in dealing with hysterical patients, they
obtained remarkable and satisfactory results. They were even able to
alleviate suffering by simply assuring the patient, while in a hypnotic
sleep, that he would be free from pain on waking.
To the outside observer no feature of this strange power is more
remarkable than the influence the hypnotist may exert over his subject
after the trance is broken. A hypnotized person may be told to perform
any act on awaking, and, when seemingly restored to his normal
condition, bears the impress of that command so strongly that he is
urged to obey it by an irresistible impulse. It is quite as easy,
moreover, to foist upon the patients the most extraordinary delusions.
The subject is told that upon awaking a bottle will seem to be a lamp, a
blank card a picture, or any other deception which comes into the mind
of the hypnotist; and so perfect is the working of this mysterious and
terrible law that the delusion is accomplished to its minutest details.
Dr. Lommel, like all his young confrères, had become intensely
interested in all these researches, so like a scientific realization of
the fairy tales of the Orient. He had even tried some experiments on his
own account; and when the sufferings of Mère Marchette became pitifully
intense he had ventured to attempt the substitution of hypnotism for
opiates in relieving her distress. The old woman had not easily yielded
to this influence. Susceptibility to hypnotism is more apt to be found
in hysterical or nervously sensitive subjects than in such sturdy
characters. By degrees, however, Dr. Lommel established control over
her. In the end, to throw her into a hypnotic sleep he had only to hold
his forefinger an inch or two from her forehead, so that her eyes in
looking at it turned upward and inward a little. He did not experiment
with Mère Marchette; he felt too tenderly toward the old woman to make
her the subject of scientific investigation outside of the direct line
of treatment. He simply said, "When you awaken you will be free from
pain, Mère Marchette;" then he would breathe lightly on her forehead and
the sick woman would awaken, to lie as peaceful and painless as if no
terrible disease was gnawing like a tiger at her vitals.
The case had attracted a good deal of attention at the Salpêtrière, and
although Mère Marchette was utterly ignorant of it, her sick-bed was a
point of interest toward which were turned the thoughts of physicians
over half of Europe. The unlearned peasant, to whom the simplest terms
of science would have been unintelligible, was furnishing data for
future scientific treatises; and people of whose very existence she
was unaware read the daily bulletins of her condition with closest
eagerness.
IV.