rapport_ with the person acting on us? No. What is commonly called
mesmerism could not do this; but there may be a power akin to mesmerism,
and superior to it,--the power that in the old days was called Magic.
That such a power may extend to all inanimate objects of matter, I do
not say; but if so, it would not be against nature, only a rare power in
nature, which might be given to constitutions with certain
peculiarities, and cultivated by practice to an extraordinary degree.
That such a power might extend over the dead,--that is, over certain
thoughts and memories that the dead may still retain,--and compel, not
that which ought properly to be called the soul, and which is far beyond
human reach, but rather a phantom of what has been most earth-stained on
earth, to make itself apparent to our senses,--is a very ancient though
obsolete theory, upon which I will hazard no opinion. But I do not
conceive the power would be supernatural. Let me illustrate what I mean,
from an experiment which Paracelsus describes as not difficult, and
which the author of the ‘Curiosities of Literature’ cites as credible: A
flower perishes; you burn it. Whatever were the elements of that flower
while it lived are gone, dispersed, you know not whither; you can never
discover nor re-collect them. But you can, by chemistry, out of the
burnt dust of that flower, raise a spectrum of the flower, just as it
seemed in life. It may be the same with a human being. The soul has as
much escaped you as the essence or elements of the flower. Still you may
make a spectrum of it. And this phantom, though in the popular
superstition it is held to be the soul of the departed, must not be
confounded with the true soul; it is but the eidolon of the dead form.
Hence, like the best-attested stories of ghosts or spirits, the thing
that most strikes us is the absence of what we hold to be soul,--that
is, of superior, emancipated intelligence. They come for little or no
object; they seldom speak, if they do come; they utter no ideas above
those of an ordinary person on earth. These American spiritseers have
published volumes of communications in prose and verse, which they
assert to be given in the names of the most illustrious
dead,--Shakespeare, Bacon, Heaven knows whom. Those communications,
taking the best, are certainly of not a whit higher order than would be
communications from living persons of fair talent and education; they
are wondrously inferior to what Bacon, Shakespeare, and Plato said and
wrote when on earth. Nor, what is more notable, do they ever contain an
idea that was not on the earth before. Wonderful, therefore, as such
phenomena may be (granting them to be truthful), I see much that
philosophy may question, nothing that it is incumbent on philosophy to
deny, namely, nothing supernatural. They are but ideas conveyed somehow
or other (we have not yet discovered the means) from one mortal brain to
another. Whether in so doing tables walk of their own accord, or
fiend-like shapes appear in a magic circle, or bodiless hands rise and
remove material objects, or a thing of darkness, such as presented
itself to me, freeze our blood,--still am I persuaded that these are but
agencies conveyed, as by electric wires, to my own brain from the brain
of another. In some constitutions there is a natural chemistry, and
those may produce chemic wonders; in others a natural fluid, call it
electricity, and these produce electric wonders. But they differ in this
from normal science: they are alike objectless, purposeless, puerile,
frivolous. They lead on to no grand results, and therefore the world
does not heed, and true sages have not cultivated them. But sure I am,
that of all I saw or heard, a man, human as myself, was the remote
originator; and, I believe, unconsciously to himself as to the exact
effects produced, for this reason: no two persons, you say, have ever
told you that they experienced exactly the same thing; well, observe, no
two persons ever experience exactly the same dream. If this were an
ordinary imposture, the machinery would be arranged for results that
would but little vary; if it were a supernatural agency permitted by the
Almighty, it would surely be for some definite end. These phenomena
belong to neither class. My persuasion is, that they originate in some
brain now far distant; that that brain had no distinct volition in
anything that occurred; that what does occur reflects but its devious,
motley, ever-shifting, half-formed thoughts; in short, that it has been
but the dreams of such a brain put into action and invested with a
semi-substance. That this brain is of immense power, that it can set
matter into movement, that it is malignant and destructive, I believe.
Some material force must have killed my dog; it might, for aught I know,
have sufficed to kill myself, had I been as subjugated by terror as the
dog,--had my intellect or my spirit given me no countervailing
resistance in my will.”
“It killed your dog! that is fearful! Indeed, it is strange that no
animal can be induced to stay in that house; not even a cat. Rats and
mice are never found in it.”
“The instincts of the brute creation detect influences deadly to their
existence. Man’s reason has a sense less subtle, because it has a
resisting power more supreme. But enough; do you comprehend my theory?”
“Yes, though imperfectly; and I accept any crotchet (pardon the word),
however odd, rather than embrace at once the notion of ghosts and
hobgoblins we imbibed in our nurseries. Still, to my unfortunate house
the evil is the same. What on earth can I do with the house?”
“I will tell you what I would do. I am convinced from my own internal
feelings that the small unfurnished room, at right angles to the door of
the bedroom which I occupied, forms a starting-point or receptacle for
the influences which haunt the house; and I strongly advise you to have
the walls opened, the floor removed, nay, the whole room pulled down. I
observe that it is detached from the body of the house, built over the
small back yard, and could be removed without injury to the rest of the
building.”
“And you think if I did that--”
“You would cut off the telegraph-wires. Try it. I am so persuaded that I
am right, that I will pay half the expense, if you will allow me to
direct the operations.”
“Nay, I am well able to afford the cost; for the rest, allow me to write
to you.”
About ten days afterwards I received a letter from Mr. J----, telling me
that he had visited the house since I had seen him; that he had found
the two letters I had described replaced in the drawer from which I had
taken them; that he had read them with misgivings like my own; that he
had instituted a cautious inquiry about the woman to whom I rightly
conjectured they had been written. It seemed that thirty-six years ago
(a year before the date of the letters) she had married, against the
wish of her relatives, an American of very suspicious character; in
fact, he was generally believed to have been a pirate. She herself was
the daughter of very respectable tradespeople, and had served in the
capacity of nursery governess before her marriage. She had a brother, a
widower, who was considered wealthy, and who had one child about six
years old. A month after the marriage, the body of this brother was
found in the Thames, near London Bridge; there seemed some marks of
violence about his throat, but they were not deemed sufficient to
warrant the inquest in any other verdict than that of “found drowned.”
The American and his wife took charge of the little boy, the deceased
brother having by his will left his sister the guardian of his only
child, and in event of the child’s death the sister inherited. The child
died about six months afterward; it was supposed to have been neglected
and ill-treated. The neighbors deposed to have heard it shriek at night.
The surgeon who had examined it after death said that it was emaciated
as if from want of nourishment, and the body was covered with livid
bruises. It seemed that one winter night the child had sought to escape;
had crept out into the back yard, tried to scale the wall, fallen back
exhausted, and had been found at morning on the stones in a dying state.
But though there was some evidence of cruelty, there was none of murder;
and the aunt and her husband had sought to palliate cruelty by alleging
the exceeding stubbornness and perversity of the child, who was declared
to be half-witted. Be that as it may, at the orphan’s death the aunt
inherited her brother’s fortune. Before the first wedded year was out,
the American quitted England abruptly, and never returned to it. He
obtained a cruising vessel, which was lost in the Atlantic two years
afterwards. The widow was left in affluence; but reverses of various
kinds had befallen her; a bank broke, an investment failed, she went
into a small business and became insolvent, then she entered into
service, sinking lower and lower, from housekeeper down to
maid-of-all-work, never long retaining a place, though nothing peculiar
against her character was ever alleged. She was considered sober,
honest, and peculiarly quiet in her ways; still nothing prospered with
her. And so she had dropped into the workhouse, from which Mr. J---- had
taken her, to be placed in charge of the very house which she had rented
as mistress in the first year of her wedded life.
Mr. J---- added, that he had passed an hour alone in the unfurnished
room which I had urged him to destroy, and that his impressions of dread
while there were so great, though he had neither heard nor seen
anything, that he was eager to have the walls bared and the floors
removed, as I had suggested. He had engaged persons for the work, and
would commence any day I would name.
The day was accordingly fixed. I repaired to the haunted house; we went
into the blind, dreary room, took up the skirting, and then the floors.
Under the rafters, covered with rubbish, was found a trap-door, quite
large enough to admit a man. It was closely nailed down with clamps and
rivets of iron. On removing these we descended into a room below, the
existence of which had never been suspected. In this room there had been
a window and a flue, but they had been bricked over, evidently for many
years. By the help of candles we examined this place; it still retained
some mouldering furniture,--three chairs, an oak settee, a table,--all
of the fashion of about eighty years ago. There was a chest of drawers
against the wall, in which we found, half rotted away, old-fashioned
articles of a man’s dress, such as might have been worn eighty or a
hundred years ago, by a gentleman of some rank; costly steel buckles and
buttons, like those yet worn in court-dresses, a handsome court-sword;
in a waistcoat which had once been rich with gold-lace, but which was
now blackened and foul with damp, we found five guineas, a few silver
coins, and an ivory ticket, probably for some place of entertainment
long since passed away. But our main discovery was in a kind of iron
safe fixed to the wall, the lock of which it cost us much trouble to get
picked.
In this safe were three shelves and two small drawers. Ranged on the
shelves were several small bottles of crystal, hermetically stopped.
They contained colorless volatile essences, of what nature I shall say
no more than that they were not poisons; phosphor and ammonia entered
into some of them. There were also some very curious glass tubes, and a
small pointed rod of iron, with a large lump of rock-crystal, and
another of amber, also a loadstone of great power.
In one of the drawers we found a miniature portrait set in gold, and
retaining the freshness of its colors most remarkably, considering the
length of time it had probably been there. The portrait was that of a
man who might be somewhat advanced in middle life, perhaps forty-seven
or forty-eight.
It was a most peculiar face, a most impressive face. If you could fancy
some mighty serpent transformed into man, preserving in the human
lineaments the old serpent type, you would have a better idea of that
countenance than long descriptions can convey; the width and flatness of
frontal, the tapering elegance of contour, disguising the strength of
the deadly jaw; the long, large, terrible eye, glittering and green as
the emerald, and withal a certain ruthless calm, as if from the
consciousness of an immense power. The strange thing was this: the
instant I saw the miniature I recognized a startling likeness to one of
the rarest portraits in the world; the portrait of a man of rank only
below that of royalty, who in his own day had made a considerable noise.
History says little or nothing of him; but search the correspondence of
his contemporaries, and you find reference to his wild daring, his bold
profligacy, his restless spirit, his taste for the occult sciences.
While still in the meridian of life he died and was buried, so say the
chronicles, in a foreign land. He died in time to escape the grasp of
the law; for he was accused of crimes which would have given him to the
headsman. After his death, the portraits of him, which had been
numerous, for he had been a munificent encourager of art, were bought up
and destroyed, it was supposed by his heirs, who might have been glad
could they have razed his very name from their splendid line. He had
enjoyed vast wealth; a large portion of this was believed to have been
embezzled by a favorite astrologer or soothsayer; at all events, it had
unaccountably vanished at the time of his death. One portrait alone of
him was supposed to have escaped the general destruction; I had seen it
in the house of a collector some months before. It had made on me a
wonderful impression, as it does on all who behold it; a face never to
be forgotten; and there was that face in the miniature that lay within
my hand. True, that in the miniature the man was a few years older than
in the portrait I had seen, or than the original was even at the time of
his death. But a few years!--why, between the date in which flourished
that direful noble, and the date in which the miniature was evidently
painted, there was an interval of more than two centuries. While I was
thus gazing, silent and wondering, Mr. J---- said,--
“But is it possible? I have known this man.”
“How? where?” cried I.
“In India. He was high in the confidence of the Rajah of----, and
wellnigh drew him into a revolt which would have lost the Rajah his
dominions. The man was a Frenchman, his name De V----; clever, bold,
lawless. We insisted on his dismissal and banishment; it must be the
same man, no two faces like his, yet this miniature seems nearly a
hundred years old.”
Mechanically I turned round the miniature to examine the back of it, and
on the back was engraved a pentacle; in the middle of the pentacle a
ladder, and the third step of the ladder was formed by the date 1765.
Examining still more minutely, I detected a spring; this, on being
pressed, opened the back of the miniature as a lid. Within-side the lid
were engraved, “Mariana, to thee. Be faithful in life and in death
to----.” Here follows a name that I will not mention, but it was not
unfamiliar to me. I had heard it spoken of by old men in my childhood as
the name borne by a dazzling charlatan, who had made a great sensation
in London for a year or so, and had fled the country on the charge of a
double murder within his own house,--that of his mistress and his rival.
I said nothing of this to Mr. J----, to whom reluctantly I resigned the
miniature.
We had found no difficulty in opening the first drawer within the iron
safe; we found great difficulty in opening the second: it was not
locked, but it resisted all efforts, till we inserted in the chinks the
edge of a chisel. When we had thus drawn it forth, we found a very
singular apparatus, in the nicest order. Upon a small, thin book, or
rather tablet, was placed a saucer of crystal; this saucer was filled
with a clear liquid; on that liquid floated a kind of compass, with a
needle shifting rapidly round; but instead of the usual points of a
compass, were seven strange characters, not very unlike those used by
astrologers to denote the planets. A very peculiar, but not strong nor
displeasing odor came from this drawer, which was lined with a wood that
we afterward discovered to be hazel. Whatever the cause of this odor, it
produced a material effect on the nerves. We all felt it, even the two
workmen who were in the room; a creeping, tingling sensation, from the
tips of the fingers to the roots of the hair. Impatient to examine the
tablet, I removed the saucer. As I did so, the needle of the compass
went round and round with exceeding swiftness, and I felt a shock that
ran through my whole frame, so that I dropped the saucer on the floor.
The liquid was spilt, the saucer was broken, the compass rolled to the
end of the room, and at that instant the walls shook to and fro as if a
giant had swayed and rocked them.
The two workmen were so frightened that they ran up the ladder by which
we had descended from the trap-door; but, seeing that nothing more
happened, they were easily induced to return.
Meanwhile, I had opened the tablet; it was bound in plain red leather,
with a silver clasp; it contained but one sheet of thick vellum, and on
that sheet were inscribed, within a double pentacle, words in old
monkish Latin, which are literally to be translated thus: “On all that
it can reach within these walls, sentient or inanimate, living or dead,
as moves the needle, so works my will! Accursed be the house, and
restless the dwellers therein.”
We found no more. Mr. J---- burnt the tablet and its anathema. He razed
to the foundation the part of the building containing the secret room,
with the chamber over it. He had then the courage to inhabit the house
himself for a month, and a quieter, better conditioned house could not
be found in all London. Subsequently he let it to advantage, and his
tenant has made no complaints.
But my story is not yet done. A few days after Mr. J---- had removed
into the house, I paid him a visit. We were standing by the open window
and conversing. A van containing some articles of furniture which he was
moving from his former house was at the door. I had just urged on him my
theory, that all those phenomena regarded as supermundane had emanated
from a human brain; adducing the charm, or rather curse, we had found
and destroyed, in support of my theory. Mr. J---- was observing in
reply, “that even if mesmerism, or whatever analogous power it might be
called, could really thus work in the absence of the operator, and
produce effects so extraordinary, still could those effects continue
when the operator himself was dead? and if the spell had been wrought,
and, indeed, the room walled up, more than seventy years ago, the
probability was, that the operator had long since departed this
life,”--Mr. J----, I say, was thus answering, when I caught hold of his
arm and pointed to the street below.
A well-dressed man had crossed from the opposite side, and was accosting
the carrier in charge of the van. His face, as he stood, was exactly
fronting our window. It was the face of the miniature we had discovered;
it was the face of the portrait of the noble three centuries ago.
“Good heavens!” cried Mr. J----, “that is the face of De V----, and
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 down stairs; 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 any one, 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 could 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 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; afterward 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
mesmerizer. 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 honor ’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 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
Oxford 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 as 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 password.
“Well, 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.”