Project Gutenberg Australia


Title: Collected Stories
Author: Bernard Capes
* A Project Gutenberg of Australia eBook *
eBook No.: 0605291.txt
Language: English
Date first posted: August 2006
Date most recently updated: August 2006

This eBook was produced by: Richard Scott

Project Gutenberg of Australia eBooks are created from printed editions
which are in the public domain in Australia, unless a copyright notice
is included. We do NOT keep any eBooks in compliance with a particular
paper edition.

Copyright laws are changing all over the world. Be sure to check the
copyright laws for your country before downloading or redistributing this
file.

This eBook is made available at no cost and with almost no restrictions
whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms
of the Project Gutenberg of Australia License which may be viewed online at
http://gutenberg.net.au/licence.html


To contact Project Gutenberg of Australia go to http://gutenberg.net.au


Collected Stories
Bernard Capes



Table of Contents

An Eddy on the Floor
The Marble Hands
A Ghost-Child
The Widow's Clock




AN EDDY ON THE FLOOR

I had the pleasure of an invitation to one of those reunions or
séances at the house, in a fashionable quarter, of my distant
connection, Lady Barbara Grille, whereat it was my hostess's humour to
gather together those many birds of alien feather and incongruous
habit that will flock from the hedgerows to the least little
flattering crumb of attention. And scarce one of them but thinks the
simple feast is spread for him alone. And with so cheap a bait may a
title lure.

That reference to so charming a personality should be in this place is
a digression. She affects my narrative only inasmuch as I happened to
meet at her house a gentleman who for a time exerted a considerable
influence over my fortunes.

The next morning after the séance, my landlady entered with a card,
which she presented to my consideration:

Major James Shrike.

H. M. Prison, D--

All astonishment, I bade my visitor up.

He entered briskly, fur-collared, hat in hand, and bowed as he stood
on the threshold. He was a very short man--snub-nosed; rusty-
whiskered; indubitably and unimpressively a cockney in appearance. He
might have walked out of a Cruikshank etching.

I was beginning, 'May I enquire--' when the other took me up with a
vehement frankness that I found engaging at once.

'This is a great intrusion. Will you pardon me? I heard some remarks
of yours last night that deeply interested me. I obtained your name
and address from our hostess, and took the liberty of--'

'Oh! pray be seated. Say no more. My kinswoman's introduction is all-
sufficient. I am happy in having caught your attention in so motley a
crowd.'

'She doesn't--forgive the impertinence--take herself seriously
enough.'

'Lady Barbara? Then you've found her out?'

'Ah!--you're not offended?'

'Not in the least.'

'Good. It was a motley assemblage, as you say. Yet I'm inclined to
think I found my pearl in the oyster. I'm afraid I interrupted--eh?'

'No, no, not at all. Only some idle scribbling. I'd finished.'

'You are a poet?'

'Only a lunatic. I haven't taken my degree.'

'Ah! it's a noble gift--the gift of song; precious through its
rarity.'

I caught a note of emotion in my visitor's voice, and glanced at him
curiously.

'Surely,' I thought, 'that vulgar, ruddy little face is transfigured.'

'But,' said the stranger, coming to earth, 'I am lingering beside the
mark. I must try to justify my solecism in manners by a straight
reference to the object of my visit. That is, in the first instance, a
matter of business.'

'Business!'

'I am a man with a purpose, seeking the hopefullest means to an end.
Plainly: if I could procure you the post of resident doctor at D---
gaol, would you be disposed to accept it?'

I looked my utter astonishment.

'I can affect no surprise at yours, said the visitor. 'It is perfectly
natural. Let me forestall some unnecessary expression of it. My offer
seems unaccountable to you, seeing that we never met until last night.
But I don't move entirely in the dark. I have ventured in the interval
to inform myself as to the details of your career. I was entirely one
with much of your expression of opinion as to the treatment of
criminals, in which you controverted the crude and unpleasant
scepticism of the lady you talked with. Combining the two, I come to
the immediate conclusion that you are the man for my purpose.'

'You have dumbfounded me. I don't know what to answer. You have views,
I know, as to prison treatment. Will you sketch them? Will you talk
on, while I try to bring my scattered wits to a focus?'

'Certainly I will. Let me, in the first instance, recall to you a few
words of your own. They ran somewhat in this fashion: Is not the man
of praetical genius the man who is most apt at solving the little
problems of resourcefulness in life? Do you remember them?'

'Perhaps I do, in a cruder form.'

'They attracted me at once. It is upon such a postulate I base my
practice. Their moral is this:

To know the antidote the moment the snake bites. That is to have the
intuition of divinity. We shall rise to it some day, no doubt, and
climb the hither side of the new Olympus. Who knows?

Over the crest the spirit of creation may be ours.'

I nodded, still at sea, and the other went on with a smile:

'I once knew a world-famous engineer with whom I used to breakfast
occasionally. He had a patent egg-boiler on the table, with a little
double-sided ladle underneath to hold the spirit. He complained that
his egg was always undercooked. I said, "Why not reverse the ladle so
as to bring the deeper cut uppermost?" He was charmed with my
perspicacity. The solution had never occurred to him. You remember,
too, no doubt, the story of Coleridge and the horse collar. We aim too
much at great developments. If we cultivate resourcefulness, the rest
will follow. Shall I state my system in nuce? It is to encourage this
spirit of resourcefulness.'

'Surely the habitual criminal has it in a marked degree?'

'Yes; but abnormally developed in a single direction. His one object
is to out-manoeuvre in a game of desperate and immoral chances. The
tactical spirit in him has none of the higher ambition. It has felt
itself in the degree only that stops at defiance.'

'That is perfectly true.'

'It is half self-conscious of an individuality that instinctively
assumes the hopelessness of a recognition by duller intellects.
Leaning to resentment through misguided vanity, it falls "all
oblique". What is the cure for this? I answer, the teaching of a
divine egotism. The subject must be led to a pure devotion to self
What he wishes to respect he must be taught to make beautiful and
interesting. The policy of sacrifice to others has so long stunted his
moral nature because it is a hypocritical policy. We are responsible
to ourselves in the first instance; and to argue an eternal system of
blind self-sacrifice is to undervalue the fine gift of individuality.
In such he sees but an indefensible policy of force applied to the
advantage of the community. He is told to be good---not that he may
morally profit, but that others may not suffer inconvenience.'

I was beginning to grasp, through my confusion, a certain clue of
meaning in my visitor's rapid utterance. The stranger spoke fluently,
but in the dry, positive voice that characterizes men of will.

'Pray go on,' I said; 'I am digesting in silence.'

'We must endeavour to lead him to respect of self by showing him what
his mind is capable of.

I argue on no sectarian, no religious grounds even. Is it possible to
make a man's self his most precious possession? Anyhow, I work to that
end. A doctor purges before building up with a tonic. I eliminate cant
and hypocrisy, and then introduce self-respect. It isn't enough to
employ a man's hands only. Initiation in some labour that should prove
wholesome and remunerative is a redeeming factor, but it isn't all.
His mind must work also, and awaken to its capacities. If it rusts,
the body reverts to inhuman instincts.'

'May I ask how you--?'

'By intercourse--in my own person or through my officials. I wish to
have only those about me who are willing to contribute to my designs,
and with whom I can work in absolute harmony.

All my officers are chosen to that end. No doubt a dash of
constitutional sentimentalism gives colour to my theories. I get it
from a human trait in me that circumstances have obliged me to put a
hoarding round.'

'I begin to gather daylight.'

'Quite so. My patients are invited to exchange views with their
guardians in a spirit of perfect friendliness; to solve little
problems of practical moment; to acquire the pride of self-reliance.

We have competitions, such as certain newspapers open to their readers
in a simple form. I draw up the questions myself. The answers give me
insight into the mental conditions of the competitors. Upon insight I
proceed. I am fortunate in private means, and I am in a position to
offer modest prizes to the winners, Whenever such a one is discharged,
he finds awaiting him the tools most handy to his vocation. I bid him
go forth in no pharisaical spirit, and invite him to communicate with
me. I wish the shadow of the gaol to extend no further than the road
whereon it lies. Henceforth, we are acquaintances with a common
interest at heart. Isn't it monstrous that a state-fixed degree of
misconduct should earn a man social ostracism? Parents are generally
inclined to rule extra tenderness towards a child whose peccadilloes
have brought him a whipping. For myself have no faith in police
supervision. Give a culprit his term and have done with it. I find the
majority who come back to me are ticket-of-leave men, 'Have I said
enough? I offer you the reversion of the post. The present holder of
it leaves in a month's time. Please to determine here and at once.'

'Very good. I have decided,'

'You will accept?'

'Yes.'

With my unexpected appointment as doctor to D---gaol, I seemed to have
put on the seven-league boots of success. No doubt it was an
extraordinary degree of good fortune, even to one who had looked
forward with a broad view of confidence; yet, I think, perhaps on
account of the very casual nature of my promotion, I never took the
post entirely seriously.

At the same time I was fully bent on justifying my little cockney
patron's choice by a resolute subscription to his theories of prison
management.

Major James Shrike inspired me with a curious conceit of impertinent
respect. In person the very embodiment of that insignificant
vulgarity, without extenuating circumstances, which is the type in
caricature of the ultimate cockney, he possessed a force of mind and
an earnestness of purpose that absolutely redeemed him on close
acquaintanceship. I found him all he had stated himself to be, and
something more.

He had a noble object always in view--the employment of sane and
humanitarian methods in the treatment of redeemable criminals, and he
strove towards it with completely untiring devotion. He was of those
who never insist beyond the limits of their own understanding, clear-
sighted in discipline, frank in relaxation, an altruist in the larger
sense.

His undaunted persistence, as I learned, received ample illustration
some few years prior to my acquaintance with him, when--his system
being experimental rather than mature--a devastating epidemic of
typhoid in the prison had for the time stultified his efforts. He
stuck to his post; but so virulent was the outbreak that the prison
commissioners judged a complete evacuation of the building and
overhauling of the drainage to be necessary. As a consequence, for
some eighteen months--during thirteen of which the Governor and his
household remained sole inmates of the solitary pile (so sluggishly do
we redeem our condemned social bog-lands)--the 'system' stood still
for lack of material to mould. At the end of over a year of
stagnation, a contract was accepted and workmen put in, and another
five months saw the prison reordered for practical purposes.

The interval of forced inactivity must have sorely tried the patience
of the Governor. Practical theorists condemned to rust too often eat
out their own hearts. Major Shrike never referred to this period, and,
indeed, laboriously snubbed any allusion to it.

He was, I have a shrewd notion, something of an officially petted
reformer. Anyhow, to his abolition of the insensate barbarism of crank
and treadmill in favour of civilizing methods no opposition was
offered. Solitary confinement--a punishment outside all nature to a
gregarious race--found no advocate in him. 'A man's own suffering
mind,' he argued, 'must be, of all moral food, the most poisonous for
him to feed on. Surround a scorpion with fire and he stings himself to
death, they say. Throw a diseased soul entirely upon its own resources
and moral suicide results.'

To sum up: his nature embodied humanity without sentimentalism,
firmness without obstinacy, individuality without selfishness; his
activity was boundless, his devotion to his system so real as to admit
no utilitarian sophistries into his scheme of personal benevolence.
Before I had been with him a week, I respected him as I had never
respected man before.

One evening (it was during the second month of my appointment) we were
sitting in his private study--a dark, comfortable room lined with
books. It was an occasion on which a new characteristic of the man was
offered to my inspection.

A prisoner of a somewhat unusual type had come in that day--a
spiritualistic medium, convicted of imposture. To this person I
casually referred.

'May I ask how you propose dealing with the newcomer?'

'On the familiar lines.'

'But, surely--here we have a man of superior education, of imagination
even?'

'No, no, no! A hawker's opportuneness; that describes it. These
fellows would make death itself a vulgarity.'

'You've no faith in their--'

'Not a tittle. Heaven forfend! A sheet and a turnip are poetry to
their manifestations It's as crude and sour soil for us to work on as
any I know. We'll cart it wholesale.'

'I take you--excuse my saying so--for a supremely sceptical man.'

'As to what?'

'The supernatural'.There was no answer during a considerable interval.
Presently it came, with deliberate insistence:

'It is a principle with me to oppose bullying. We are here for a
definite purpose--his duty plain to any man who wills to read it.
There may be disembodied spirits who seek to distress or annoy where
they can no longer control. If there are, mine, which is not yet
divorced from its means to material action, declines to be influenced
by any irresponsible whimsy, emanating from a place whose denizens
appear to be actuated by a mere frivolous antagonism to all human
order and progress.'

'But supposing you, a murderer, to be haunted by the presentment of
your victim?'

'I will imagine that to be my case. Well, it makes no difference. My
interest is with the great human system, in one of whose veins I am a
circulating drop. It is my business to help to keep the system sound,
to do my duty without fear or favour. If disease--say a fouled
conscience---contaminates me, it is for me to throw off the incubus,
not accept it, and transmit the poison.

Whatever my lapses of nature, I owe it to the entire system to work
for purity in my allotted sphere, and not to allow any microbe bugbear
to ride me roughshod, to the detriment of my fellow drops.'

I laughed.

'It should be for you,' I said, 'to learn to shiver, like the boy in
the fairy-tale.'

'I cannot,' he answered, with a peculiar quiet smile; 'and yet
prisons, above all places, should be haunted.'

Very shortly after his arrival I was called to the cell of the medium,
F--. He suffered, by his own statement, from severe pains in the head.

I found the man to be nervous, anaemic; his manner characterized by a
sort of hysterical effrontery.

'Send me to the infirmary,' he begged. 'This isn't punishment, but
torture.'

'What are your symptoms?'

'I see things; my case has no comparison with others. To a man of my
super-sensitiveness close confinement is mere cruelty.'

I made a short examination. He was restless under my hands.

'You'll stay where you are,' I said.

He broke out into violent abuse, and I left him.

Later in the day I visited him again. He was then white and sullen;
but under his mood I could read real excitement of some sort.

'Now, confess to me, my man,' I said, 'what do you see?'

He eyed me narrowly, with his lips a little shaky.

'Will you have me moved if I tell you?'

'I can give no promise till I know.'

He made up his mind after an interval of silence.

'There's something uncanny in my neighbourhood. 'Who's confined in the
next cell--there, to the left?'

'To my knowledge it's empty.'

He shook his head incredulously.

'Very well,' I said, 'I don't mean to bandy words with you'; and I
turned to go.

At that he came after me with a frightened choke.

'Doctor, your mission's a merciful one. I'm not trying to sauce you.
For God's sake have me moved! I can see further than most, I tell
you!'

The fellow's manner gave me pause. He was patently and beyond the
pride of concealment terrified.

'What do you see?' I repeated stubbornly.

'It isn't that I see, but I know. The cell's not empty!' I stared at
him in considerable wonderment.

'I will make enquiries,' I said. 'You may take that for a promise. If
the cell proves empty, you stop where you are.'

I noticed that he dropped his hands with a lost gesture as I left him.
I was sufficiently moved to accost the warder who awaited me on the
spot.

'Johnson,' I said, 'is that cell--'

'Empty, sir,' answered the man sharply and at once.

Before I could respond, F---came suddenly to the door, which I still
held open.

'You lying cur!' he shouted. 'You damned lying cur!' The warder thrust
the man back with violence.

'Now you, 49,' he said, 'dry up, and none of your sauce!' and he
banged to the door with a sounding slap, and turned to me with a
lowering face. The prisoner inside yelped and stormed at the studded
panels.

'That cell's empty, sir,' repeated Johnson.

'Will you, as a matter of conscience, let me convince myself? I
promised the man.'

'No, I can't.'

'You can't?'

'No, sir.'

'This is a piece of stupid discourtesy. You can have no reason, of
course?'

'I can't open it--that's all.'

'Oh, Johnson! Then I must go to the fountainhead.'

'Very well, sir.'

Quite baffled by the man's obstinacy, I said no more, but walked off.
If my anger was roused, my curiosity was piqued in proportion.

I had no opportunity of interviewing the Governor all day, but at
night I visited him by invitation to play a game of piquet.

He was a man without 'incumbrances'--as a severe conservatism
designates the lares of the cottage--and, at home, lived at his ease
and indulged his amusements without comment.

I found him 'tasting' his books, with which the room was well lined,
and drawing with relish at an excellent cigar in the intervals of the
courses.

He nodded to me, and held out an open volume in his left hand. 'Listen
to this fellow,' he said, tapping the page with his fingers:

'"The most tolerable sort of Revenge, is for those wrongs which there
is no Law to remedy. But then, let a man take heed, the Revenge be
such, as there is no law to punish. Else, a man's Enemy, is still
before hand, and it is two for one. Some, when they take Revenge, are
Desirous the party should know, whence it cometh. This is the more
Generous. For the Delight seemeth to be, not so much in doing the
Hurt, as in making the Party repent: But Base and Crafty Cowards, are
like the Arrow that flyeth in the Dark. Cosmus, Duke of Florence, had
a Desperate Saying against Perfidious or Neglecting Friends, as if
these Wrongs were unpardonable. You shall read saith he) that we are
commanded to forgive our Enemies: But you never read, that we are
commanded to forgive our Friends."'

'Is he not a rare fellow?'

'Who?' said I.

'Francis Bacon, who screwed his wit to his philosophy, like a hammer-
head to its handle, and knocked a nail in at every blow. How many of
our friends round about here would be picking oakum now if they had
made a gospel of that quotation?'

'You mean they take no heed that the Law may punish for that for which
it gives no remedy?'

'Precisely; and specifically as to revenge. The criminal, from the
murderer to the petty pilferer, is actuated solely by the spirit of
vengeance--vengeance blind and speechless--towards a system that
forces him into a position quite outside his natural instincts.'

'As to that, we have left Nature in the thicket. It is hopeless
hunting for her now.'

'We hear her breathing sometimes, my friend. Otherwise Her Majesty's
prison locks would rust. But, I grant you, we have grown so unfamiliar
with her that we call her simplest manifestations supernatural
nowadays.'

'That reminds me. I visited F---this afternoon. The man was in a queer
way--not foxing, in my opinion. Hysteria, probably.'

'Oh! What was the matter with him?'

'The form it took was some absurd prejudice about the next cell--
number 47. He swore it was not empty--was quite upset about it--said
there was some infernal influence at work in his neighbourhood.
Nerves, he finds, I suppose, may revenge themselves on one who has
made a habit of playing tricks with them. To satisfy him, I asked
Johnson to open the door of the next cell--'

'He refused.'

'It is closed by my orders.'

'That settles it, of course. The manner of Johnson's refusal was a bit
uncivil, but--'

He had been looking at me intently all this time--so intently that I
was conscious of a little embarrassment and confusion. His mouth was
set like a dash between brackets, and his eyes glistened. Now his
features relaxed, and he gave a short high neigh of a laugh.

'My dear fellow, you must make allowances for the rough old lurcher.
He was a soldier. He is all cut and measured out to the regimental
pattern. With him Major Shrike, like the king, can do no wrong. Did I
ever tell you he served under me in India? He did; and, moreover, I
saved his life there.'

'In an engagement?'

'Worse--from the bite of a snake. It was a mere question of will. I
told him to wake and walk, and he did. They had thought him already in
rigor mortis; and, as for him--well, his devotion to me since has been
single to the last degree.'

'That's as it should be.'

'To be sure. And he's quite in my confidence. You must pass over the
old beggar's churlishness.'

I laughed an assent. And then an odd thing happened. As I spoke, I had
walked over to a bookcase on the opposite side of the room to that on
which my host stood. Near this bookcase hung a mirror--an oblong
affair, set in brass repoussé work--on the wall; and, happening to
glance into it as I approached, I caught sight of the Major's
reflection as he turned his face to follow my movement.

I say 'turned his face'--a formal description only. What met my
startled gaze was an image of some nameless horror--of features
grooved, and battered, and shapeless, as if they had been torn by a
wild beast.

I gave a little indrawn gasp and turned about. There stood the Major,
plainly himself, with a pleasant smile on his face.

'What's up?' said he.

He spoke abstractedly, pulling at his cigar; and I answered rudely,
'That's a damned bad looking-glass of yours!'

'I didn't know there was anything wrong with it,' he said, still
abstracted and apart. And, indeed, when by sheer mental effort I
forced myself to look again, there stood my companion as he stood in
the room.

I gave a tremulous laugh, muttered something or nothing, and fell to
examining the books in the case. But my fingers shook a trifle as I
aimlessly pulled out one volume after another.

'Am I getting fanciful?' I thought--'I whose business it is to give
practical account of every bugbear of the nerves. Bah! My liver must
be out of order. A speck of bile in one's eye may look a flying
dragon.'

I dismissed the folly from my mind, and set myself resolutely to
inspecting the books marshallcd before me. Roving amongst them, I
pulled out, entirely at random, a thin, worn duodecimo, that was trust
well back at a shelf end, as if it shrank from comparison with its
prosperous and portly neighbours. Nothing but chance impelled me to
the choice; and I don't know to this day what the ragged volume was
about. It opened naturally at a marker that lay in it--a folded slip
of paper, yellow with age; and glancing at this, a printed name caught
my eve.

With some stir of curiosity, I spread the slip out. It was a title-
page to a volume, of poems, presumably; and the author was James
Shrike.

I uttered an exclamation, and turned, book in hand.

'An author!' I said. 'You an author, Major Shrike!'

To my surprise, he snapped round upon me with something like a glare
of fury on his face.

This the more startled me as I believed I had reason to regard him as
a man whose principles of conduct had long disciplined a temper that
was naturally hasty enough.

Before I could speak to explain, he had come hurriedly across the room
and had rudely snatched the paper out of my hand.

'How did this get--' he began; then in a moment came to himself, and
apologized for his ill manners.

'I thought every scrap of the stuff had been destroyed,' he said, and
tore the page into fragments. 'It is an ancient effusion, doctor--
perhaps the greatest folly of my life; but it's something of a sore
subject with me, and I shall be obliged if you'll not refer to it
again.'

He courted my forgiveness so frankly that the matter passed without
embarrassment; and we had our game and spent a genial evening
together. But memory of the queer little scene stuck in my mind, and I
could not forbear pondering it fitfully.

Surely here was a new side-light that played upon my friend and
superior a little fantastically.

Conscious of a certain vague wonder in my mind, I was traversing the
prison, lost in thought, after my sociable evening with the Governor,
when the fact that dim light was issuing from the open door of cell
number 49 brought me to myself and to a pause in the corridor outside.

Then I saw that something was wrong with the cell's inmate, and that
my services were required.

The medium was struggling on the floor, in what looked like an
epileptic fit, and Johnson and another warder were holding him from
doing an injury to himself.

The younger man welcomed my appearance with relief.

'Heard him guggling,' he said, 'and thought as something were up. You
come timely, sir.'

More assistance was procured, and I ordered the prisoner's removal to
the infirmary. For a minute, before following him, I was left alone
with Johnson.

'It came to a climax, then?' I said, looking the man steadily in the
face.

'He may be subject to 'em, sir,' he replied evasively.

I walked deliberately up to the closed door of the adjoining cell,
which was the last on that side of the corridor. Huddled against the
massive end wall, and half embedded in it, as it seemed, it lay in a
certain shadow, and bore every sign of dust and disuse. Looking
closely, I saw that the trap in the door was not only firmly bolted,
but screwed into its socket.

I turned and said to the warder quietly--'Is it long since this cell
was in use?'

'You're very fond of asking questions,' he answered doggedly.

It was evident he would baffle me by impertinence rather than yield a
confidence. A queer insistence had seized me--a strange desire to know
more about this mysterious chamber. But, for all my curiosity, I
flushed at the man's tone.

'You have your orders,' I said sternly, and do well to hold by them. I
doubt, nevertheless, if they include impertinence to your superiors.'

'I look straight on my duty, sir,' he said, a little abashed. 'I don't
wish to give offence.'

He did not, I feel sure. He followed his instinct to throw me off the
scent, that was all.

I strode off in a fume, and after attending F---in the infirmary, went
promptly to my own quarters.

I was in an odd frame of mind, and for long tramped my sitting-room to
and fro, too restless to go to bed, or, as an alternative, to settle
down to a book. There was a welling up in my heart of some emotion
that I could neither trace nor define. It seemed neighbour to terror,
neighbour to an intense fainting pity, yet was nor distinctly either
of these. Indeed, where was cause for one, or the subject of the
other? F---might have endured mental sufferings which it was only
human to help to end, yet F---was a swindling rogue, who, once
relieved, merited no further consideration.

It was not on him my sentiments were wasted. Who, then, was
responsible for them?

There was a very plain line of demarcation between the legitimate
spirit of enquiry and mere apish curiosity. I could recognize it, I
have no doubt, as a rule, yet in my then mood, under the influence of
a kind of morbid seizure, inquisitiveness took me by the throat. I
could not whistle my mind from the chase of a certain graveyard will-
o'-wisp; and on it went stumbling and floundering through bog and
mire, until it fell into a state of collapse, and was useful for
nothing else.

I went to bed and to sleep without difficulty, but I was conscious of
myself all the time, and of a shadowless horror that seemed to come
stealthily out of corners and to bend over and look at me, and to be
nothing but a curtain or a hanging coat when I started and stared.

Over and over again this happened, and my temperature rose by leaps,
and suddenly I saw that if I failed to assert myself, and promptly,
fever would lap me in a consuming fire. Then in a moment I broke into
a profuse perspiration, and sank exhausted into delicious
unconsciousness.

Morning found me restored to vigour, but still with the maggot of
curiosity in my brain. It worked there all day, and for many
subsequent days, and at last it seemed as if my every faculty were
honeycombed with its ramifications. Then 'this will not do', I
thought, but still the tunnelling process went on.

At first I would not acknowledge to myself what all this mental to-do
was about. I was ashamed of my new development, in fact, and nervous,
too, in a degree of what it might reveal in the matter of moral
degeneration; but gradually, as the curious devil mastered me, I grew
into such harmony with it that I could shut my eyes no longer to the
true purpose of its insistence. It was the closed cell about which my
thoughts hovered like crows circling round carrion.

'In the dead waste and middle' of a certain night I awoke with a
strange, quick recovery of consciousness. There was the passing of a
single expiration, and I had been asleep and was awake. I had gone to
bed wit no sense of premonition or of resolve in a particular
direction; I sat up a monomaniac. It was as if, swelling in the silent
hours, the tumour of curiosity had come to a head, and in a moment it
was necessary to operate upon it.

I make no excuse for my then condition. I am convinced I was the
victim of some undistinguishable force, that I was an agent under the
control of the supernatural, if you like.

Some thought had been in my mind of late that in my position it was my
duty to unriddle the mystery of the closed cell. This was a sop
timidly held out to and rejected by my better reason. I sought--and I
knew it in my heart--solution of the puzzle, because it was a puzzle
with an atmosphere that vitiated my moral fibre. Now, suddenly, I knew
I must act, or, by forcing self-control, imperil my mind's stability.

All strung to a sort of exaltation, I rose noiselessly and dressed
myself with rapid, nervous hands. My every faculty was focused upon a
solitary point. Without and around there was nothing but shadow and
uncertainty. I seemed conscious only of a shaft of light, as it were,
traversing the darkness and globing itself in a steady disc of
radiance on a lonely door.

Slipping out into the great echoing vault of the prison in stockinged
feet, I sped with no hesitation of purpose in the direction of the
corridor that was my goal. Surely some resolute Providence guided and
encompassed me, for no meeting with the night patrol occurred at any
point to embarrass or deter me. Like a ghost myself, I flitted along
the stone flags of the passages, hardly waking a murmur from them in
my progress.

Without, I knew, a wild and stormy wind thundered on the walls of the
prison. Within, where the very atmosphere was self-contained, a cold
and solemn peace held like an irrevocable judgement.

I found myself as if in a dream before the sealed door that had for
days harassed my waking thoughts. Dim light from a distant gas jet
made a patch of yellow upon one of its panels; the rest was buttressed
with shadow.

A sense of fear and constriction was upon me as I drew softly from my
pocket a screwdriver I had brought with mc. It never occurred to me, I
swear, that the quest was no business of mine, and that even now I
could withdraw from it, and no one be the wiser. But I was afraid--I
was afraid. And there was not even the negative comfort of knowing
that the neighbouring cell was tenanted. It gaped like a ghostly
garret next door to a deserted house.

What reason had Ito be there at all, or, being there, to fear? I can
no more explain than tell how it was that I, an impartial follower of
my vocation, had allowed myself to be tricked by that in the nerves I
had made it my interest to study and combat in others.

My hand that held the tool was cold and wet. The stiff little shriek
of the first screw, as it turned at first uneasily in its socket, sent
a jarring thrill through me. But I persevered, and it came out readily
by-and-by, as did the four or five others that held the trap secure.

Then I paused a moment; and, I confess, the quick pant of fear seemed
to come grey from my lips. There were sounds about me--the deep
breathing of imprisoned men; and I envied the sleepers their hard-
wrung repose.

At last, in one access of determination, I put out my hand and sliding
back the bolt, hurriedly flung open the trap. An acrid whiff of dust
assailed my nostrils as I stepped back a pace and stood expectant of
anything--or nothing. What did I wish, or dread, or foresee? The
complete absurdity of my behaviour was revealed to me in a moment. I
could shake off the incubus here and now, and be a sane man again.

I giggled, with an actual ring of self-contempt in my voice, as I made
a forward movement to close the aperture. I advanced my face to it,
and inhaled the sluggish air that stole forth, and---God in heaven!

I had staggered back with that cry in my throat, when I felt fingers
like iron clamps close on my arm and hold it. The grip, more than the
face I turned to look upon in my surging terror, was forcibly human.

It was the warder Johnson who had seized mc, and my heart bounded as I
met the cold fury of his eyes.

'Prying!' he said, in a hoarse, savage whisper. 'So you will, will
you? And now let the devil help you!'

It was not this fellow I feared, though his white face was set like a
demon's; and in the thick of my terror I made a feeble attempt to
assert my authority.

'Let me go!' I muttered. What! you dare?'

In his frenzy he shook my arm as a terrier shakes a rat, and, like a
dog, he held on, daring me to release myself.

For the moment an instinct half-murderous leapt in me. It sank and was
overwhelmed in a slough of some more secret emotion.

'Oh!' I whispered, collapsing, as it were, to the man's fury, even
pitifully deprecating it. 'What is it? What's there? It drew me--
something unnameable.'

He gave a snapping laugh like a cough. His rage waxed second by
second. There was a maniacal suggestiveness in it; and not much
longer, it was evident, could he have it under control. I saw it run
and congest in his eyes; and, on the instant of its accumulation, he
tore at me with a sudden wild strength, and drove me up against the
very door of the secret cell.

The action, the necessity of self-defence, restored me to some measure
of dignhy and sanity.

'Let me go, you ruffian!' I cried, struggling to free myself from his
grasp.

It was useless. He held me madly. There was no beating him off: and,
so holding me, he managed to produce a single key from one of his
pockets, and to slip it with a rusty clang into the lock of the door.

'You dirty, prying civilian!' he panted at me, as he swayed this way
and that with the pull of my body. 'You shall have your wish, by G--!
You want to see inside, do you? Look, then!'

He dashed open the door as he spoke, and pulled me violently into the
opening. A great waft of the cold, dank air came at us, and with it--
what?

The warder had jerked his dark lantern from his belt, and now--an arm
of his still clasped about one of mine--snapped the slide open.

'Where is it?' he muttered, directing the disc of light round and
about the floor of the cell, I ceased struggling. Some counter
influence was raising an odd curiosity in me.

'Ah!' he cried, in a stifled voice, 'there you are, my friend!'. He
was setting the light slowly travelling along the stone flags close by
the wall over against us, and now, so guiding it, looked askance at me
with a small, greedy smile.

'Follow the light, sir,' he whispered jeeringly.

I looked, and saw twirling on the floor, in the patch of radiance cast
by the lamp, a little eddy of dust, it seemed. This eddy was never
still, but went circling in that stagnant place without apparent cause
or influence; and, as it circled, it moved slowly on by wall and
corner, so that presently in its progress it must reach us where we
stood.

Now, draughts will play queer freaks in quiet places, and of this
trifling phenomenon I should have taken little note ordinarily. But, I
must say at once, that as I gazed upon the odd moving thing my heart
seemed to fall in upon itself like a drained artery.

'Johnson!' I cried, 'I must get out of this. I don't know what's the
matter, or--Why do you hold mc? D---it! man, let me go; let me go, I
say!'

As I grappled with him he dropped the lantern with a crash and flung
his arms violently about me.

'You don't!' he panted, the muscles of his bent and rigid neck seeming
actually to cut into my shoulder-blade. 'You don't, by G--! You came
of your own accord, and now you shall take your bellyfull!'

It was a struggle for life or death, or, worse, for life and reason.
But I was young and wiry, and held my own, if I could do little more.
Yet there was something to combat beyond the mere brute strength of
the man I struggled with, for I fought in an atmosphere of horror
unexplainable, and I knew that inch by inch the thing on the floor was
circling round in our direction.

Suddenly in the breathing darkness I felt it close upon us, gave one
mortal yell of fear, and, with a last despairing fury, tore myself
from the encircling arms, and sprang into the corridor without. As I
plunged and leapt, the warder clutched at me, missed, caught a foot on
the edge of the door, and, as the latter whirled to with a clap, fell
heavily at my feet in a fit. Then, as I stood staring down upon him,
steps sounded along the corridor and the voices of scared men hurrying
up.

Ill and shaken, and, for the time, little in love with life, yet
fearing death as I had never dreaded it before, I spent the rest of
that horrible night huddled between my crumpled sheets, fearing to
look forth, fearing to think, wild only to be far away, to be housed
in some green and innocent hamlet, where I might forget the madness
and the terror in learning to walk the unvext paths of placid souls.
That unction I could lay to my heart, at least. I had done the manly
part by the stricken warder, whom I had attended to his own home, in a
row of little tenements that stood south of the prison walls. I had
replied to all enquiries with some dignity and spirit, attributing my
ruffled condition to an assault on the part of Johnson, when he was
already under the shadow of his seizure. I had directed his removal,
and grudged him no professional attention that it was in my power to
bestow. But afterwards, locked into my room, my whole nervous system
broke up like a trodden ant-hill, leaving me conscious of nothing but
an aimless scurrying terror and the black swarm of thoughts, so that I
verily fancied my reason would give under the strain.

Yet I had more to endure and to triumph over.

Near morning I fell into a troubled sleep, throughout which the drawn
twitch of muscle seemed an accent on every word of ill-omen I had ever
spelt out of the alphabet of fear. If my body rested, my brain was an
open chamber for any toad of ugliness that listed to 'sit at squat'
in.

Suddenly I woke to the fact that there was a knocking at my door--that
there had been for some little time.

I cried, 'Come in!' finding a weak restorative in the mere sound of my
own human voice; then, remembering the key was turned, bade the
visitor wait until I could come to him.

Scrambling, feeling dazed and white-livered, out of bed, I opened the
door, and met one of the warders on the threshold. The man looked
scared, and his lips, I noticed, were set in a somewhat boding
fashion.

'Can you come at once, sir?' he said. 'There's summat wrong with the
Governor.'

'Wrong?' What's the matter with him?'

'Why'--he looked down, rubbed an imaginary protuberance smooth with
his foot, and glanced up at me again with a quick, furtive
expression--'he's got his face set in the grating of 47, and danged if
a man Jack of us can get him to move or speak.'

I turned away, feeling sick. I hurriedly pulled on coat and trousers,
and hurriedly went off with my summoner, Reason was all absorbed in a
wildest phantasy of apprehension.

'Who found him?' I muttered, as we sped on.

'Vokins see him go down the corridor about half after eight, sir, and
see him give a start like when he noticed the trap open. It's never
been so before in my time. Johnson must ha' done it last night, before
he were took.'

'Yes, yes.'

'The man said the Governor went to shut it, it seemed, and to draw his
face to'ards the bars in so doin'. Then he see him a-lookin' through,
as he thought; but nat'rally it weren't no business of his'n, and he
went off about his work. But when he come anigh agen, fifteen minutes
later, there were the Governor in the same position; and he got scared
over it, and called out to one or two of us.'

'Why didn't one of you ask the Major if anything was wrong?'

'Bless you! we did; and no answer. And we pulled him, compatible with
discipline, but--'

'But what?'

'He's stuck.'

'Stuck!'

'See for yourself, sir. That's all I ask.'

I did, a moment later. A little group was collected about the door of
cell 47, and the members of it spoke together in whispers, as if they
were frightened men. One young fellow, with a face white in patches,
as if it had been floured, slid from them as I approached, and
accosted me tremulously.

'Don't go anigh, sir. There's something wrong about the place.'

I pulled myself together, forcibly beating down the excitement
reawakened by the associations of the spot. In the discomfiture of
others' nerves I found my own restoration.

'Don't be an ass!' I said, in a determined voice. 'There's nothing
here that can't be explained.

Make way for me, please!

They parted and let me through, and I saw him. He stood, spruce,
frock-coated, dapper, as he always was, with his face pressed against
and into the grill, and either hand raised and clenched tightly round
a bar of the trap. His posture was as of one caught and striving
frantically to release himself; yet the narrowness of the interval
between the rails precluded so extravagant an idea. He stood quite
motionless--taut and on the strain, as it were--and nothing of his
face was visible but the back ridges of his jawbones, showing white
through a bush of red whiskers.

'Major Shrike!' I rapped out, and, allowing myself no hesitation,
reached forth my hand and grasped his shoulder. The body vibrated
under my touch, but he neither answered nor made sign of hearing me.
Then I pulled at him forcibly, and ever with increasing strength. His
fingers held like steel braces. He seemed glued to the trap, like
Theseus to the rock.

Hastily I peered round, to see if I could get a glimpse of his face. I
noticed enough to send me back with a little stagger.

'Has none of you got a key to this door?' I asked, reviewing the
scared faces about me, than which my own was no less troubled, I feel
sure.

'Only the Governor, sir,' said the warder who had fetched me. 'There's
not a man but him amongst us that ever seen this opened.'

He was wrong there, I could have told him; but held my tongue, for
obvious reasons.

'I want it opened. Will one of you feel in his pockets?'

Not a soul stirred. Even had not sense of discipline precluded, that
of a certain inhuman atmosphere made fearful creatures of them all.

'Then,' said I, 'I must do it myself.'

I turned once more to the stiff-strung figure, had actually put hand
on it, when an exclamation from Vokins arrested me.

'There's a key--there, sir!' he said--'stickin' out yonder between his
feet.'

Sure enough there was--Johnson's, no doubt, that had been shot from
its socket by the clapping to of the door, and afterwards kicked aside
by the warder in his convulsive struggles.

I stooped, only too thankful for the respite, and drew it forth. I had
seen it but once before, yet I recognized it at a glance.

Now, I confess, my heart felt ill as I slipped the key into the wards,
and a sickness of resentment at the tyranny of Fate in making me its
helpless minister surged up in my veins.

Once, with my fingers on the iron loop, I paused, and ventured a
fearful side glance at the figure whose crooked elbow almost touched
my face; then, strung to the high pitch of inevitability, I shot the
lock, pushed at the door, and in the act, made a back leap into the
corridor.

Scarcely, in doing so, did I look for the totter and collapse outwards
of the rigid form. I had expected to see it fall away, face down, into
the cell, as its support swung from it. Yet it was, I swear, as if
something from within had relaxed its grasp and given the fearful dead
man a swingeing push outwards as the door opened.

It went on its back, with a dusty slap on the stone flags, and from
all its spectators--me included--came a sudden drawn sound, like a
wind in a keyhole.

What can I say, or how describe it? A dead thing it was--but the face!

Barred with livid scars where the grating rails had crossed it, the
rest seemed to have been worked and kneaded into a mere featureless
plate of yellow and expressionless flesh.

And it was this I had seen in the glass!

There was an interval following the experience above narrated, during
which a certain personality that had once been mine was effaced or
suspended, and I seemed a passive creature, innocent of the least
desire of independence. It was not that I was actually ill or actually
insane.

A merciful Providence set my finer wits slumbering, that was all,
leaving me a sufficiency of the grosser faculties that were necessary
to the right ordering of my behaviour.

I kept to my room, it is true, and even lay a good deal in bed; but
this was more to satisfy the busy scruples of a locum tenens--a
practitioner of the neighbourhood, who came daily to the prison to
officiate in my absence--than to cosset a complaint that in its
inactivity was purely negative. I could review what had happened with
a calmness as profound as if I had read of it in a book. I could have
wished to continue my duties, indeed, had the power of insistence
remained to me. But the saner medicus was acute where I had gone
blunt, and bade me to the restful course. He was right. I was mentally
stunned, and had I not slept off my lethargy, I should have gone mad
in an hour--leapt at a bound, probably, from inertia to flaming
lunacy.

I remembered everything, but through a fluffy atmosphere, so to speak.
It was as if I looked on bygone pictures through ground glass that
softened the ugly outlines.

Sometimes I referred to these to my substitute, who was wise to answer
me according to my mood; for the truth left me unruffled, whereas an
obvious evasion of it would have distressed me.

'Hammond,' I said one day, 'I have never yet asked you. How did I give
my evidence at the inquest?'

'Like a doctor and a sane man.'

'That's good. But it was a difficult course to steer. You conducted
the post-mortem. Did any peculiarity in the dead man's face strike
you?'

'Nothing but this: that the excessive contraction of the bicipital
muscles had brought the features into such forcible contact with the
bars as to cause bruising and actual abrasion. He must have been dead
some little time when you found him.'

'And nothing else? You noticed nothing else in his face--a sort of
obliteration of what makes one human, I mean?'

'Oh, dear, no! nothing but the painful constriction that marks any
ordinary fatal attack of angina pectoris.--There's a rum breach of
promise case in the paper today. You should read it; it'll make you
laugh.'

I had no more inclination to laugh than to sigh; but I accepted the
change of subject with an equanimity now habitual to me.

One morning I sat up in bed, and knew that consciousness was wide
awake in me once more. It had slept, and now rose refreshed, but
trembling. Looking back, all in a flutter of new responsibility, along
the misty path by way of which I had recently loitered, I shook with
an awful thankfulness at sight of the pitfalls I had skirted and
escaped--of the demons my witlessness had baffled.

The joy of life was in my heart again, but chastened and made pitiful
by experience.

Hammond noticed the change in me directly he entered, and
congratulated me upon it.

'Go slow at first, old man,' he said. 'You've fairly sloughed the old
skin; but give the sun time to toughen the new one. Walk in it at
present, and be content.'

I was, in great measure, and I followed his advice. I got leave of
absence, and ran down for a month in the country to a certain house we
wot of, where kindly ministration to my convalescence was only one of
the many blisses to be put to an account of rosy days.

Then did my love awake, Most like a lily-flower, And as the lovely
queene of heaven, So shone shee in her bower.

Ah, me! ah, me! when was it? A year ago, or two-thirds of a lifetime?
Alas! 'Age with stealing steps hath clawde me with his erowch.' And
will the yews root in my heart, I wonder?

I was well, sane, recovered, when one morning, towards the end of my
visit, I received a letter from Hammond, enclosing a packet addressed
to me, and jealously sealed and fastened. My friend's communication
ran as follows: There died here yesterday afternoon a warder,
Johnson--he who had that apoplectic seizure, you will remember, the
night before poor Shrike's exit. I attended him to the end, and, being
alone with him an hour before the finish, he took the enclosed from
under his pillow, and a solemn oath from me that I would forward it
direct to you sealed as you will find it, and permit no other soul to
examine or even touch it. I acquit myself of the charge, but, my dear
fellow, with an uneasy sense of the responsibility I incur in thus
possibly suggesting to you a retrospect of events which you had much
best consign to the limbo of the--not inexplainable, but not worth
trying to explain. It was patent from what I have gathered that you
were in an overstrung and excitable condition at that time, and that
your temporary collapse was purely nervous in its character. It seems
there was some nonsense abroad in the prison about a certain cell, and
that there were fools who thought fit to associate Johnson's attack
and the other's death with the opening of that cell's door. I have
given the new Governor a tip, and he has stopped all that. We have
examined the cell in company, and found it, as one might suppose, a
very ordinary chamber. The two men died perfectly natural deaths, and
there is the last to be said on the subject. I mention it only from
the fear that the enclosed may contain some allusion to the rubbish, a
perusal of which might check the wholesome convalescence of your
thoughts. If you take my advice, you will throw the packet into the
fire unread. At least, if you do examine it, postpone the duty till
you feel impervious to any mental trickery, and--bear in mind that you
are a worthy member of a particularly matter-of-fact and unemotional
profession.

I smiled at the last clause, for I was now in a condition to feel a
rather warm shame over my erst weak-knee'd collapse before a sheet and
an illuminated turnip. I took the packet to my bedroom, shut the door,
and sat myself down by the open window. The garden lay below me, and
the dewy meadows beyond. In the one, bees were busy ruffling the ruddy
gillyflowers and April stocks; in the other, the hedge twigs were all
frosted with Mary buds, as if Spring had brushed them with the fleece
of her wings in passing.

I fetched a sigh of content as I broke the seal of the packet and
brought out the enclosure.

Somewhere in the garden a little sardonic laugh was clipt to silence.
It came from groom or maid, no doubt; yet it thrilled me with an odd
feeling of uncanniness, and I shivered slightly.

'Bah!' I said to myself determinedly. 'There is a shrewd nip in the
wind, for all the show of sunlight'; and I rose, pulled down the
window, and resumed my seat.

Then in the closed room, that had become deathly quiet by contrast, I
opened and read the dead man's letter.

Sir, I hope you will read what I here put down. I lay it on you as a
solemn injunction, for I am a dying man, and I know it. And to who is
my death due, and the Governor's death, if not to you, for your pryin'
and curiosity, as surely as if you had drove a nife through our harts?
Therefore, I say, Read this, and take my burden from me, for it has
been a burden; and now it is right that you that interfered should
have it on your own mortal shoulders. The Major is dead and I am
dying, and in the first of my fit it went on in my head like cimbells
that the trap was left open, and that if he passed he would look in
and it would get him. For he knew not fear, neither would he submit to
bullying by God or devil.

Now I will tell you the truth, and Heaven quit you of your
responsibility in our destruction.

There wasn't another man to me like the Governor in all the countries
of the world. Once he brought me to life after doctors had given me up
for dead; but he willed it, and I lived; and ever afterwards I loved
him as a dog loves it master. That was in the Punjab; and I came home
to England with him, and was his servant when he got his appointment
to the jail here. I tell you he was a proud and fierce man, but under
control and tender to those he favoured; and I will tell you also a
strange thing about him. Though he was a soldier and an officer, and
strict in discipline as made men fear and admire him, his hart at
bottom was all for books, and literature, and such-like gentle crafts.
I had his confidence, as a man gives his confidence to his dog, and
before others. In this way I learnt the bitter sorrow of his life. He
had once hoped to be a poet, acknowledged as such before the world. He
was by natur' an idelist, as they call it, and God knows what it meant
to him to come out of the woods, so to speak, and swet in the dust of
cities; but he did it, for his will was of tempered steel. He buried
his dreams in the clouds and came down to earth greatly resolved, but
with one undying hate. It is not good to hate as he could, and worse
to be hated by such as him; and I will tell you the story, and what it
led to.

It was when he was a subaltern that he made up his mind to the plunge.
For years he had placed all his hopes and confidents in a book of
verses he had wrote, and added to, and improved during that time. A
little encouragement, a little word of praise, was all he looked for,
and then he was redy to buckle to again, profitin' by advice, and do
better. He put all the love and beauty of his hart into that book, and
at last, after doubt, and anguish, and much diffidents, he published
it, and give it to the world. Sir, it fell what they call still-born
from the press. It was like a green leaf flutterin' down in a dead
wood. To a proud and hopeful man, bubblin' with music, the pain of
neglect, when he come to relize it, was terrible. But nothing was
said, and there was nothing to say. In silence he had to endure and
suffer.

But one day, during manoovers, there came to the camp a grey-faced
man, a newspaper correspondent, and young Shrike nocked up a
friendship with him. Now how it come about I cannot tell, but so it
did that this skip-kennel wormed the lad's sorrow out of him, and his
confidents, swore he'd been damnabilly used, and that when he got back
he'd crack up the book himself in his own paper. He was a fool for his
pains, and a serpent in his croolty. The notice come out as promised,
and, my God! the author was laughed and mocked at from beginning to
end. Even confidentses he had given to the creature was twisted to his
ridicule, and his very appearance joked over. And the mess got wind of
it, and made a rare story for the dog days.

He bore it like a soldier and that he became hart and liver from the
moment. But he put something to the account of the grey-faced man and
locked it up in his breast.

He come across him again years afterwards in India, and told him very
politely that he hadn't forgotten him, and didn't intend to. But he
was anigh losin' sight of him there for ever and a day, for the
creature took cholera, or what looked like it, and rubbed shoulders
with death and the devil before he pulled through. And he come across
him again over here, and that was the last of him, as you shall see
presently.

Once, after I knew the Major (be were Captain then), I was a-brushin'
his coat, and he stood a long while before the glass. Then he twisted
upon me, with a smile on his mouth, and says he---'The dog was right,
Johnson: this isn't the face of a poet. I was a presumtious ass, and
born to east up figgers with a pen behind my ear.'

Captain, I says, if you was skinned, you'd look like any other man
without his. The quality of a soul isn't expressed by a coat.'

'Well,' he answers, 'my soul's pretty clean-swept, I think, save for
one Bluebeard chamber in it that's been kep' locked ever so many
years. It's nice and dirty by this time, I expect,' he says, Then the
grin comes on his mouth again. 'I'll open it some day,' he says, 'and
look. There's something in it about comparing me to a dancing dervish,
with the wind in my petticuts. Perhaps I'll get the chance to set
somebody else dancing by-and-by.'

He did, and took it, and the Bluebeard chamber come to be opened in
this very jail.

It was when the system was lying fallow, so to speak, and the prison
was deserted. Nobody was there but him and me and the echoes from the
empty courts. The contract for restoration hadn't been signed, and for
months, and more than a year, we lay idle, nothing bein' done.

Near the beginnin' of this period, one day comes, for the third time
of the Major's seein' him, the grey-faced man. 'Let bygones be
bygones,' he says. 'I was a good friend to you, though you didn't know
it; and now, I expect, you're in the way to thank me.'

'I am,' says the Major.

'Of course,' he answers. 'Where would be your fame and reputation as
one of the leadin' prison reformers of the day if you had kep' on in
that timing nonsense?'

'Have you come for my thanks?' says the Governor.

'I've come, says the grey--faced man, 'to examine and report upon your
system.'

'For your paper?'

'Possibly; but to satisfy myself of its efficacy, in the first
instance.'

'You aren't commissioned, then?'

'No; I come on my own responsibility.'

'Without consultation with any one?'

'Absolutely without. I haven't even a wife to advise me,' he says,
with a yellow grin. What once passed for cholera had set the bile on
his skin like paint, and he had caught a manner of coughing behind his
hand like a toast-master.

'I know,' says the Major, looking him steady in the face, 'that what
you say about me and my affairs is sure to be actuated by
conscientious motives.'

'Ah,' he answers. 'You're sore about that review still, I see.'

'Not at all,' says the Major; 'and, in proof, I invite you to be my
guest for the night, and tomorrow I'll show you over the prison and
explain my system.'

The creature cried, 'Done!' and they set to and discussed jail matters
in great earnestness. I couldn't guess the Governor's intentions, but,
somehow, his manner troubled me. And yet I can remember only one point
of his talk. He were always dead against making public show of his
birds. 'They're there for reformation, not ignominy' he'd say. Prisons
in the old days were often, with the asylum and the work'us, made the
holiday showplaces of towns. I've heard of one Justice of the Peace,
up North, who, to save himself trouble, used to sign a lot of blank
orders for leave to view, so that applicants needn't bother him when
they wanted to go over. They've changed all that, and the Governor
were instrumental in the change.

'It's against my rule,' he said that night, 'to exhibit to a stranger
without a Government permit; but, seein' the place is empty, and for
old remembrance' sake, I'll make an exception in your favour, and you
shall learn all I can show you of the inside of a prison.'

Now this was natural enough; but I was uneasy.

He treated his guest royly; so much that when we assembled the next
mornin' for the inspection, the grey-faced man were shaky as a wet
dog. But the Major were all set prim and dry, like the soldier he was.

We went straight away down corridor B, and at cell 47 we stopped.

'We will begin our inspection here,' said the Governor. Johnson, open
the door.

I had the keys of the row; fitted in the right one, and pushed open
the door.

'After you, sir,' said the Major; and the creature walked in, and he
shut the door on him.

I think he smelt a rat at once, for he began beating on the wood and
calling out to us. But the Major only turned round to me with his face
like a stone.

'Take that key from the bunch,' he said, 'and give it to me.'

I obeyed, all in a tremble, and he took and put it in his pocket.

'My God, Major.' I whispered, 'what are you going to do with him?'

'Silence, sir!' he said; 'How dare you question your superior
officer!'

And the noise inside grew louder.

The Governor, he listened to it a moment like music; then he unbolted
and flung open the trap, and the creature's face came at it like a
wild beast's.

'Sir,' said the Major to it, 'you can't better understand my system
than by experiencing it. What an article for your paper you could
write already--almost as pungint a one as that in which you ruined the
hopes and prospects of a young cockney poet.'

'The man mouthed at the bars. He was half-mad, I think, in that one
minute.

'Let me out!' he screamed. 'This is a hidius joke! Let me out!'

'When you are quite quiet--deathly quiet,' said the Major, 'you shall
come out. Not before'; and he shut the trap in its face very softly.

'Come, Johnson, march!' he said, and took the lead, and we walked out
of the prison.

I was like to faint, but I dared not disobey, and the man's screeching
followed us all down the empty corridors and halls, until we shut the
first great door on it.

It may have gone on for hours, alone in that awful emptiness. The
creature was a reptile, but the thought sickened my heart.

And from that hour till his death, live months later, he rotted and
maddened in his dreadful tomb.'

There was more, but I pushed the ghastly confession from me at this
point in uncontrollable loathing and terror. Was it possible--
possible, that injured sanity could so falsify its victim's even'
tradition of decency?

'Oh!' I muttered, 'what a disease is ambition! Who takes one step
towards it puts his foot on Alsirat!'

It was minutes before my shocked nerves were equal to a resumption of
the task; but at last I took it up again, with a groan.

I don't think at first I realized the full mischief the Governor
intended to do. At least, I hoped he only meant to give the man a good
fright and then let him go. I might have known better. How could he
ever release him without ruining himself?

The next morning he summoned me to attend him. There was a strange new
look of triumph in his face, and in his hand he held a heavy hunting-
crop. I pray to God he acted in madness, but my duty and obedience was
to him.

'There is sport towards, Johnson,' he said. 'My dervish has got to
dance.'

I followed him quiet. We listened when I opened the jail door, but the
place was silent as the grave. But from the cell, when we reached it,
came a low, whispering sound.

The Governor slipped the trap and looked through.

'All right,' he said, and put the key in the door and flung it open.

He were sittin' crouched on the ground, and he looked up at us vacant-
like. His face were all fallen down, as it were, and his mouth never
ceased to shake and whisper.

The Major shut the door and posted me in a corner. Then he moved to
the creature with his whip.

'Up!' he cried. 'Up, you dervish, and dance to us!' and he brought the
thong with a smack across his shoulders.

The creature leapt under the blow, and then to his feet with a cry,
and the Major whipped him till he danced. All round the cell he drove
him, lashing and cutting--and again, and many times again, until the
poor thing rolled on the floor whimpering and sobbing. I shall have to
give an account of this some day. I shall have to whip my master with
a red-hot serpent round the blazing furnace of the pit, and I shall do
it with agony, because here my love and my' obedience was to him.

When it was finished, he bade me put down food and drink that I had
brought with me, and come away with him; and we went, leaving him
rolling on the floor of the cell, and shut him alone in the empty
prison until we should come again at the same time tomorrow.

So day by day this went on, and the dancing three or four times a
week, until at last the whip could be left behind, for the man would
scream and begin to dance at the mere turning of the key in the lock.
And he danced for four months, but not the fifth.

Nobody official came near us all this time. The prison stood lonely as
a deserted ruin where dark things have been done.

Once, with fear and trembling, I asked my master how he would account
for the inmate of 47 if he was suddenly called upon by authority to
open the cell; and he answered, smiling--'I should say it was my mad
brother. By his own account, he showed me a brother's love, you know.
It would be thought a liberty; but the authorities, I think, would
stretch a point for me. But if I got sufficient notice, I should clear
out the cell.'

I asked him how, with ms eyes rather than my' lips, and he answered me
only with a look.

And all this time he was, outside the prison, living the life of a
good man--helping the needy, ministering to the poor. He even
entertained occasionally, and had more than one noisy party in his
house.

But the fifth month the creature danced no more. He was a dumb, silent
animal then, with matted hair and beard; and when one entered he would
only look up at one pitifully, as if he said, 'My long punishment is
nearly ended.' How it came that no enquiry was ever made about him I
know not, but none ever was.

Perhaps he was one of the wandering gentry that nobody ever knows
where they are next. He was unmarried, and had apparently not told of
his intended journey to a soul.

And at the last he died in the night. We found him lying stiff and
stark in the morning, and scratched with a piece of black crust on a
stone of the wall these strange words: 'An Eddy on the Floor.' Just
that---nothing else.

Then the Governor came and looked down, and was silent. Suddenly he
caught me by the shoulder.

'Johnson,' he cried, 'if it was to do again, I would do it! I repent
of nothing. But he has paid the penalty, and we call quits. May he
rest in peace!'

'Amen!' I answered low. Yet I knew our turn must come for this.

We buried him in quicklime under the wall where the murderers lie, and
I made the cell trim and rubbed out the writing, and the Governor
locked all up and took away the key. But he locked in more than he
bargained for.

For months the place was left to itself, and neither of us went anigh
47. Then one day the workmen was to be put in, and the Major he took
me round with him for a last examination of the place before they
come.

He hesitated a bit outside a particular cell; but at last he drove in
the key and kicked open the door.

'My God!' he say's, 'he's dancing still!'.My heart was thumpin', I
tell you, as I looked over his shoulder. What did we see? What you
well understand, sir; but, for all it was no more than that, we knew
as well as if it was shouted in our ears that it was him, dancin'. It
went round by the walls and drew towards us, and as it stole near I
screamed out, 'An Eddy on the floor!' and seized and dragged the Major
out and clapped to the door behind us.

'Oh!' I said, 'in another moment it would have had us.'

He looked at me gloomily.

'Johnson,' he said, 'I'm not to be frightened or coerced. He may
dance, but he shall dance alone. Get a screwdriver and some screws and
fasten up this trap. No one from this time looks into this cell.'

I did as he bid me, swetin'; and I swear all the time I wrought I
dreaded a hand would come through the trap and clutch mine.

On one pretex' or another, from that day till the night you meddled
with it, he kep' that cell as close shut as a tomb. And he went his
ways, discardin' the past from that time forth. Now and again a over-
sensitive prisoner in the next cell would complain of feelin'
uncomfortable. If possible, he would be removed to another; if not, he
was dam'd for his fancies. And so it might be goin' on to now, if you
hadn't pried and interfered, I don't blame you at this moment, sir.
Likely you were an instrument in the hands of Providence; only, as the
instrument, you must now take the burden of the truth on your own
shoulders. I am a dying man, but I cannot die till I have confessed.
Per'aps you may find it in your hart some day to give up a prayer for
me--but it must be for the Major as well.

Your obedient servant.

J. Johnson

What comment of my own can I append to this wild narrative?
Professionally, and apart from personal experiences, I should rule it
the composition of an epileptic. That a noted journalist, nameless as
he was and is to me, however nomadic in habit, could disappear from
human ken, and his fellows rest content to leave him unaccounted for,
seems a tax upon credulity so stupendous that I cannot seriously
endorse the statement.

Yet, also--there is that little matter of my personal experience.




THE MARBLE HANDS

We left our bicycles by the little lych-gate and entered the old
church yard. Heriot had told me frankly that he did not want to come;
but at the last moment, sentiment or curiosity prevailing with him, he
had changed his mind. I knew indefinitely that there was something
disagreeable to him in the place's associations, though he had always
referred with affection to the relative with whom he had stayed here
as a boy. Perhaps she lay under one of these greening stones.

We walked round the church, with its squat, shingled spire. It was
utterly peaceful, here on the brow of the little town where the
flowering fields began. The bones of the hill were the bones of the
dead, and its flesh was grass. Suddenly Heriot stopped me. We were
standing then to the northwest of the chancel, and a gloom of
motionless trees overshadowed us.

'I wish you'd just look in there a moment,' he said, 'and come back
and tell me what you see.

He was pointing towards a little bay made by the low boundary wall,
the green floor of which was hidden from our view by the thick
branches and a couple of interposing tombs, huge, coffer-shaped, and
shut within rails. His voice sounded odd; there was a 'plunging' look
in his eyes, to use a gambler's phrase. I stared at him a moment,
followed the direction of his hand; then, without a word, stooped
under the heavy-brushing boughs, passed round the great tombs, and
came upon a solitary grave.

It lay there quite alone in the hidden bay--a strange thing, fantastic
and gruesome. There was no headstone, but a bevelled marble curb,
without name or epitaph, encloscd a graveled space from which
projected two hands. They were of white marble, very faintly touched
with green, and conveyed in that still, lonely spot a most curious
sense of reality, as if actually thrust up, deathly and alluring, from
the grave beneath. The impression grew upon me as I looked, until I
could have thought they moved stealthily, consciously, turning in the
soil as if to greet me. It was absurd, but--I turned and went rather
hastily back to Heriot.

'All right. I see they are there still,' he said; and that was all.
Without another word we left the place and, remounting, continued our
way.

Miles from the spot, lying on a sunny downside, with the sheep about
us in hundreds cropping the hot grass, he told me the story:

'She and her husband were living in the town at the time of my first
visit there, when I was a child of seven. They were known to Aunt
Caddie, who disliked the woman. I did not dislike her at all, because,
when we met, she made a favourite of me. She was a little pretty
thing, frivolous and shallow; but truly, I know now, with an
abominable side to her.

'She was inordinately vain of her hands; and indeed they were the
loveliest things, softer and shapelier than a child's. She used to
have them photographed, in fifty different positions; and once they
were exquisitely done in marble by a sculptor, a friend of hers. Yes,
those were the ones you saw. But they were cruel little hands, for all
their beauty. There was something wicked and unclean about the way in
which she regarded them.

'She died while I was there, and she was commemorated by her own
explicit desire after the fashion you saw. The marble hands were to be
her sole epitaph, more eloquent than letters. They should preserve her
name and the tradition of her most exquisite feature to remoter ages
than any crumbling inscription could reach. And so it was done.

'That fancy was not popular with the parishioners, but it gave me no
childish qualms. The hands were really beautifully modelled on the
originals, and the originals had often caressed me.'

'I was never afraid to go and look at them, sprouting like white
celery from the ground.'

'I left, and two years later was visiting Aunt Caddie a second time.
In the course of conversation I learned that the husband of the woman
had married again--a lady belonging to the place---and that the hands,
only quite recently, had been removed. The new wife had objected to
them--for some reason perhaps not difficult to understand--and they
had been uprooted by the husband's order.'

'I think I was a little sorry--the hands had always seemed somehow
personal to me--and, on the first occasion that offered, I slipped
away by myself to see how the grave looked without them. It was a
close, lowering day, I remember, and the churchyard was very still.
Directly, stooping under the branches, I saw the spot. I understood
that Aunt Caddie had spoken prematurely. The hands had not been
removed so far, but were extended in their old place and attitude,
looking as if held out to welcome me. I was glad; and I ran and knelt,
and put my own hands down to touch them. They were soft and cold like
dead meat, and they closed caressingly about mine, as if inviting me
to pull--to pull.'

'I don't know what happened afterwards. Perhaps I had been sickening
all the time for the fever which overtook me. There was a period of
horror, and blankness--of crawling, worm-threaded immurements and
heaving bones--and then at last the blessed daylight.'

Heriot stopped, and sat plucking at the crisp pasture.

'I never learned,' he said suddenly, 'what other experiences
synchronized with mine. But the place somehow got an uncanny
reputation, and the marble hands were put back. Imagination, to be
sure, can play strange tricks with one.'




A GHOST-CHILD

In making this confession public, I am aware that I am giving a
butterfly to be broken on a wheel. There is so much of delicacy in its
subject, that the mere resolve to handle it at all might seem to imply
a lack of the sensitiveness necessary to its understanding; and it is
certain that the more reverent the touch, the more irresistible will
figure its opportunity to the common scepticism which is bondslave to
its five senses. Moreover one cannot, in the reason of things, write
to publish for Aristarchus alone; but the gauntlet of Grub Street must
be run in any bid for truth and sincerity.

On the other hand, to withhold from evidence, in these days of what
one may call a zetetic psychology, anything which may appear
elucidatory, however exquisitely and rarely, of our spiritual
relationships, must be pronounced, I think, a sin against the Holy
Ghost.

All in all, therefore, I decide to give, with every passage to
personal identification safeguarded, the story of a possession, or
visitation, which is signified in the title to my narrative.

Tryphena was the sole orphaned representative of an obscure but gentle
family which had lived for generations in the east of England. The
spirit of the fens, of the long grey marshes, whose shores are the
neutral ground of two elements, slumbered in her eyes. Looking into
them, one seemed to see little beds of tiny green mosses luminous
under water, or stirred by the movement of microscopic life in their
midst. Secrets, one felt, were shadowed in their depths, too frail and
sweet for understanding. The pretty love-fancy of babies seen in the
eyes of maidens, was in hers to be interpreted into the very cosmic
dust of sea-urchins, sparkling like chrysoberyls. Her soul looked out
through them, as if they were the windows of a water-nursery.

She was always a child among children, in heart and knowledge most
innocent, until Jason came and stood in her field of vision. Then
spirit of the neutral ground as she was, inclining to earth or water
with the sway of the tides, she came wondering and dripping, as it
were, to land, and took up her abode for final choice among the
daughters of the earth. She knew her woman's estate, in fact, and the
irresistible attraction of all completed perfections to the light that
burns to destroy them.

Tryphena was not only an orphan, but an heiress. Her considerable
estate was administered by her guardian, Jason's father, a widower,
who was possessed of this single adored child. The fruits of parental
infatuation had come early to ripen on the seedling. The boy was self-
willed and perverse, the more so as he was naturally of a hot-hearted
disposition. Violence and remorse would sway him in alternate moods,
and be made, each in its turn, a self-indulgence. He took a delight in
crossing his father's wishes, and no less in atoning for his
gracelessness with moving demonstrations of affection.

Foremost of the old man's most cherished projects was, very naturally,
a union between the two young people. He planned, manoeuvred, spoke
for it with all his heart of love and eloquence.

And, indeed, it seemed at last as if his hopes were to be crowned.
Jason, returning from a lengthy voyage (for his enterprising spirit
had early decided for the sea, and he was a naval officer), saw, and
was struck amazed before, the transformed vision of his old child-
play-fellow. She was an opened flower whom he had left a green bud--a
thing so rare and flawless that it seemed a sacrilege for earthly
passions to converse of her. Familiarity, however, and some sense of
reciprocal attraction, quickly dethroned that eucharist. Tryphena
could blush, could thrill, could solicit, in the sweet ways of
innocent womanhood. She loved him dearly, wholly, it was plain---had
found the realisation of her old formless dreams in this wondrous
birth of a desire for one, in whose new-impassioned eves she had known
herself reflected hitherto only for the most patronised of small
gossips. And, for her part, fearless as nature, she made no secret of
her love.

She was absorbed in, a captive to, Jason from that moment and for
ever.

He responded. What man, however perverse, could have resisted, on
first appeal, the attraction of such beauty, the flower of a radiant
soul? The two were betrothed; the old man's cup of happiness was
brimmed.

Then came clouds and a cold wind, chilling the garden of Hesperis.
Jason was always one of those who, possessing classic noses, will cut
them off, on easy provocation, to spite their faces.

He was so proudly independent, to himself, that he resented the least
assumption of proprietorship in him on the part of other people--even
of those who had the best claim to his love and submission. This pride
was an obsession. It stultified the real good in him, which was
considerable. Apart from it, he was a good, warm-tempered fellow,
hasty but affectionate. Under its dominion, he would have broken his
own heart on an imaginary grievance.

He found one, it is to be supposed, in the privileges assumed by love;
in its exacting claims upon him; perhaps in its little unreasoning
jealousies. He distorted these into an implied conceit of authority
over him on the part of an heiress who was condescending to his meaner
fortunes.

The suggestion was quite base and without warrant; but pride has no
balance. No doubt, moreover, the rather childish self-depreciations of
the old man, his father, in his attitude towards a match he had so
fondly desired, helped to aggravate this feeling. The upshot was that,
when within a few months of the date which was to make his union with
Tryphena eternal, Jason broke away from a restraint which his pride
pictured to him as intolerable, and went on a yachting expedition with
a friend.

Then, at once, and with characteristic violence, came the reaction. He
wrote, impetuously, frenziedly, from a distant port, claiming himself
Tryphena's, and Tryphena his, for ever and ever and ever. They were
man and wife before God. He had behaved like an insensate brute, and
he was at that moment starting to speed to her side, to beg her
forgiveness and the return of her love.

He had no need to play the suitor afresh. She had never doubted or
questioned their mutual bondage, and would have died a maid for his
sake. Something of sweet exultation only seemed to quicken and leap in
her body, that her faith in her dear love was vindicated.

But the joy came near to upset the reason of the old man, already
tottering to its dotage; and what followed destroyed it utterly.

The yacht, flying home, was lost at sea, and Jason was drowned.

I once saw Tryphena about this time. She lived with her near mindless
charge, lonely, in an old grey house upon the borders of a salt mere,
and had little but the unearthly cries of seabirds to answer to the
questions of her widowed heart. She worked, sweet in charity, among
the marsh folk, a beautiful unearthly presence; and was especially to
be found where infants and the troubles of child-bearing women called
for her help and sympathy. She was a wife herself, she would say
quaintly; and some day perhaps, by grace of the good spirits of the
sea, would be a mother. None thought to cross her statement, put with
so sweet a sanity; and, indeed, I have often noticed that the
neighbourhood of great waters breeds in souls a mysticism which is
remote from the very understanding of land-dwellers.

How I saw her was thus:---I was fishing, on a day of chill calm, in a
dinghy off the flat coast.

The stillness of the morning had tempted me some distance from the
village where I was staying. Presently a sense of bad sport and
healthy famine 'plumped' in me, so to speak, for luncheon, and I
looked about for a spot picturesque enough to add a zest to
sandwiches, whisky, and tobacco. Close by, a little creek or estuary
ran up into a mere, between which and the sea lay a cluster of low
sand-hills; and thither I pulled. The spot, when I reached it, was
calm, chill desolation manifest--lifeless water and lifeless sand,
with no traffic between them but the dead interchange of salt. Low
sedges, at first, and behind them low woods were mirrored in the water
at a distance, with an interval between me and them of sheeted glass;
and right across this shining pool ran a dim, half-drowned causeway--
the seapath, it appeared, to and from a lonely house which I could
just distinguish squatting among trees. It was Tryphena's house.

Now, paddling dispiritedly, I turned a cold dune, and saw a mermaid
before me. At least, that was my instant impression. The creature sat
coiled on the strand, combing her hair--that was certain, for I saw
the gold-green tresses of it whisked by her action into rainbow
threads. It appeared as certain that her upper half was flesh and her
lower fish; and it was only on my nearer approach that this latter
resolved itself into a pale green skirt, roped, owing to her posture,
about her limbs, and the hem fanned out at her feet into a tail fin.
Thus also her bosom, which had appeared naked, became a bodice, as
near to her flesh in colour and texture as a smock is to a lady's-
smock, which some call a cuckoo-flower.

It was plain enough now; yet the illusion for the moment had quite
startled me.

As I came near, she paused in her strange business to canvass me. It
was Tryphena herself, as after-inquiry informed me. I have never seen
so lovely a creature. Her eyes, as they regarded me passing, were
something to haunt a dream: so great in tragedy--not fathomless, but
all in motion near their surfaces, it seemed, with green and rooted
sorrows. They were the eyes, I thought, of an Undine late-humanised,
late awakened to the rapturous and troubled knowledge of the woman's
burden. Her forehead was most fair, and the glistening thatch divided
on it like a golden cloud revealing the face of a wondering angel.

I passed, and a sand-heap stole my vision foot by foot. The vision was
gone when I returned. I have reason to believe it was vouchsafed me
within a few months of the coming of the ghost-child.

On the morning succeeding the night of the day on which Jason and
Tryphena were to have been married, the girl came down from her
bedroom with an extraordinary expression of still rapture on her face.
After breakfast she took the old man into her confidence. She was
childish still; her manner quite youthfully thrilling; but now there
was a newborn wonder in it that hovered on the pink of shame.

'Father! I have been under the deep waters and found him. He came to
me last night in my dreams--so sobbing, so impassioned--to assure me
that he had never really ceased to love me, though he had near broken
his own heart pretending it. Poor boy! poor ghost! What could I do but
take him to my arms? And all night he lay there, blest and forgiven,
till in the morning he melted away with a sigh that woke me; and it
seemed to mc that I came up dripping from the sea.'.

'My boy! He has come back!' chuckled the old man. 'What have you done
with him, Tryphena?'.

'I will hold him tighter the next time,' she said.

But the spirit of Jason visited her dreams no more.

That was in March. In the Christmas following, when the mere was
locked in stillness, and the wan reflection of snow mingled on the
ceiling with the red dance of firelight, one morning the old man came
hurrying and panting to Tryphena's door.

'Tryphena! Come down quickly! My boy, my Jason, has come back! It was
a lie that they told us about his being lost at sea!'.

Her heart leapt like a candle-flame! What new delusion of the old
man's was this? She hurried over her dressing and descended. A
garrulous old voice mingled with a childish treble in the breakfast-
room. Hardly breathing, she turned the handle of the door, and saw
Jason before her.

But it was Jason, the prattling babe of her first knowledge; Jason,
the flaxen-headed, apple-cheeked cherub of the nursery; Jason, the
confiding, the merry, the loving, before pride had come to warp his
innocence. She fell on her knees to the child, and with a burst of
ecstasy caught him to her heart.

She asked no question of the old man as to when or whence this
apparition had come, or why he was here. For some reason she dared
not. She accepted him as some waif, whom an accidental likeness had
made glorious to their hungering hearts. As for the father, he was
utterly satisfied and content. He had heard a knock at the door, he
said, and had opened it and found this. The child was naked, and his
pink, wet body glazed with ice. Yet he seemed insensible to the
killing cold. It was Jason--that was enough. There is no date nor time
for imbecility. Its phantoms spring from the clash of ancient
memories. This was just as actually his child as--more so, in fact,
than--the grown young figure which, for all its manhood, had dissolved
into the mist of waters. He was more familiar with, more confident of
it, after all. It had come back to be unquestioningly dependent on
him; and that was likest the real Jason, flesh of his flesh.

'Who are you, darling?' said Tryphena.

'I am Jason,' answered the child.

She wept, and fondled him rapturously.

'And who am I?' she asked. 'If you are Jason, you must know what to
call me.'.

'I know,' he said; 'but I mustn't, unless you ask me.'.

'I won't,' she answered, with a burst of weeping. 'It is Christmas
Day, dearest, when the miracle of a little child was wrought. I will
ask you nothing but to stay and bless our desolate home.'.

He nodded, laughing.

'I will stay, until you ask me.'.

They found some little old robes of the baby Jason, put away in
lavender, and dressed him in them. All day he laughed and prattled;
yet it was strange that, talk as he might, he never once referred to
matters familiar to the childhood of the lost sailor.

In the early afternoon he asked to be taken out--seawards, that was
his wish. Tryphena clothed him warmly, and, taking his little hand,
led him away. They left the old man sleeping peacefully.

He was never to wake again.

As they crossed the narrow causeway, snow, thick and silent, began to
fall. Tryphena was not afraid, for herself or the child. A rapture
upheld her; a sense of some compelling happiness, which she knew
before long must take shape on her lips.

They reached the seaward dunes--mere ghosts of foothold in that smoke
of flakes. The lap of vast waters seemed all around them, hollow and
mysterious. The sound flooded Tryphena's ears, drowning her senses.
She cried out, and stopped.

'Before they go,' she screamed--'before they go, tell me what you were
to call me!'.The child sprang a little distance, and stood facing her.
Already his lower limbs seemed dissolving in the mists.

'I was to call you "mother"!' he cried, with a smile and toss of his
hand.

Even as he spoke, his pretty features wavered and vanished. The snow
broke into him, or he became part with it. Where he had been, a gleam
of iridescent dust seemed to show one moment before it sank and was
extinguished in the falling cloud. Then there was only the snow,
heaping an eternal chaos with nothingness.

Tryphena made this confession, on a Christmas Eve night, to one who
was a believer in dreams. The next morning she was seen to cross the
causeway, and thereafter was never seen again. But she left the
sweetest memory behind her, for human charity, and an elf-life gift of
loveliness.




THE WIDOW'S CLOCK

I was moved to pause outside the premises of Bull Hacker, auctioneers.
Unaccountable excitement exhaled from their very windows, grew
intricate on their steps, congested at their doorway. Something out of
the common, it was evident, was passing within.

I accosted a young man who was battling his way forth at the moment.
The young man's face was a red mask of hilarity.

"What's up?" said he. "Oh, Lord! go and look. Old Bull's took mad, and
he's knocking down the lots like skittles. There's some stuff goin'
cheap there, there is."

He was borne past me, and I fought my way into the auction-room. I had
a hard struggle to get within view of the rostrum; and then I saw a
figure, with eyes like a Cheshire cat's, standing--or rather dancing--
therein. It (the figure) was that, assuredly, of the urbane Mr. Bull;
but he had put a copper saucepan on his head, and tied up his side-
whiskers with ribbons.

Two grinning, embarrassed-looking men in shirt-sleeves had just placed
upon the long table under the pulpit a very presentable plaster cast
of the Capitoline Venus. The auctioneer addressed the company with
quite exaggerated suavity.

"Look at that, gentlemen," said he: "pray don't look at me! My better
half, gentlemen, and much better worth your consideration. A little
stiff and cold, but a rare bargain if you keep her from putting rat
poison in the soup.--How much for Mrs. Bull, now?--how much for the
hard, unsympathetic lady? She's given me many a dressing, gentlemen,
or she'd be better accommodated in that respect herself. A charitable
soul indeed."

Here he cocked his saucepan over me eye, folded his arms, and ogling
the company insinuatingly suddenly bent down and bonneted with his
hammer an old white-hatted broker who sat chuckling just underneath.

"The property of a gentleman going abroad!" he bellowed, recovering
himself. "Must sell---must sell! Start your bids, and earn a
reputation for gallantry in the Babylonian marriage market."

"A shillun," sniggered a sheepish-faced individual at the table.

Mr. Bull snatched off his saucepan and beat it flat on the desk.

"Gone for a shilling!" he roared, "and dear at the price."

There had been a flank movement up the room. Blue-coated figures now
rose from the crowd and seized the madman. A scene of wild uproar and
confusion ensued. Presently I found myself in the street.

"How did it come about?" I said to a neighbour, as I endeavoured to
coax the creases out of a crumpled tile.

"Drink," said he laconically. "Old Bull was always a soaker, he was."

"The sales won't hold, I suppose?' said I.

"They'll hold tight enough for them as cut their lucky with the stuff
afore he was found out.
"
answered my friend gruffly. "Why, he was a-selling things for songs at
first--rail good things, mind you," he said.

I departed, wondering; and certain inquiries I prosecuted set me
wondering yet more.

The following day I made occasion to call upon my acquaintance Aubrey
Standish. He is a curioso, and a young man of a most fastidious and
delicate dilettanteism--of Catholic taste also, within the liberal
limits of Art. At the same time he holds (or held) it his particular
principle that, given such tact and knowledge as his own, an extreme
virtuosity could be indulged on nothing larger than an ordinary
household income, so to speak; in illustration of which his rooms (he
had but three) were shrines containing treasures of heavenly
marqueterie and bijouterie. Enamels, by Jean Pctitot; cinquecento
intaglios in amethyst, and earlier cameos by Dioscorides; unique bits
of gomroon porcelain ware from Chelsea; pot-pourri in old Nanking
vases; fragments of tapestry; exquisite painted fans from the studios
of M. Duvelleroy; swords in niello; a bronze fish, presumptively by
Benvenuto Cellini,--such and varied bric-a-brac, sleeking from the
chestnut glooms of Chippendale corner cupboards, disposed with a
crafty affectation of insouciance on Louis XV commodes, blinking soft
slumberous eyes from green plush-lined showcase tables, was the
practical expression of Aubrey's boasted principle. And he would
assure you, with all the enthusiasm of a nervous, lisping speech, that
it needed but the knowledge of how to sit effectively in the sunshine
for the rarest butterflies of Art to settle on one's hand. That was
his rendering of the Tout vient à qui sait attendre, which was a
proverb too much in the common way for one of his ultra-refinement;
yet he was not exalted above the exercise of some particularly mean
qualities--or, at least, so my Philistinism interpreted him.

Now he came skipping, in a Japanese silk dressing-gown, from his
bedroom, and put a thin, scented hand on each of my shoulders.

"What a sweet tie!" said he. "Permit me. It tones, with your face,
into the very aurelian tints of Giovanni Bellini."

"Oh, go to the devil!" said I crossly. "If I'm jaundiced, I'm
jaundiced, that's all."

"My dear friend," said he, releasing me, "you're fretful. You take
life at too high a pressure. You exhale a humanity before which I seem
to shrink like a sensitive plant. I can never escape the feeling when
you visit me, that my little museum will fly into prismatic splinters,
like an opal too rudely unearthed."

I wanted, of course, to kick him; but bethought myself that this was
scarcely the way to enforce a certain mission on which I had entered.

"Standish--" said I.

"Now, now," said he, lifting his hands, palms to me, and closing his
eyes; "not the Charity Organisation again, my very sweet fellow! Not
some malodorous citizen with a compound fracture of his tail, or a
widow respectable in everything but the possession of twins. You
wouldn't besmirch my preserves with such smut?"

"I'm to be bought out."

"Oh dear!" he said, with a little deprecating smile. "This is
terrible. Do let me entreat your attention to that exquisite
Bartolozzi. I picked it up last week for a mere song--literally, the
merest swan-song of a dying consumptive."

"Standish, I want to put it to you--"

He sank upon an Adams settee, sniffed at a tiny filagree vinaigrette,
and fluttered a whisp of a handkerchief.

"I have learned to gather flowers of the wilderness. I have made a
rose-crown of patience, till it blossoms about my head. Go on!" he
murmured faintly.

"Standish, I will take no denial that you were at Bull Hacker's sale
yesterday."

"The subtlest penetration!" he whispered. "Were you there too?"

"Yes."

"Then," said he, "you were witness of a strange seizure."

"Not of yours," said I--"for it amounts to nothing else.".He only
shrugged his eyebrows--a momentary spasm of astonishment.

"Was it not?" said I. "There is the very article, I see."

I had already 'spotted,' standing in the corner, what I sought--a lank
"grandfather" clock in a Chippendale case. I nodded towards it
significantly.

"It's by Smith of Crowland," said Standish, rallying, in the
excitement of the collector. "His work was unique--the best of kind. I
assure you, I cannot recall a more vital illustration of principles
than is presented in that bargain."

"It is unique, you say?"

"I believe entirely. My one regret is, it doesn't go--or at least, as
yet I haven't been able to make it. And it was the durable quality of
the Crownland clocks that gained them their reputation."

"Shall I examine it? I have a clever mechanical turn."

"By all means. I can trust you to handle it, I am sure."

He did not look as if he meant it; but I went and unbuttoned the door
in the belly of the thing, and felt with my hand up along the
pendulum.

"What would you say," said I, as I was thus engaged, "that this have
fetched under favourable conditions?"

"Eighty pounds," said Standish, with all the decision of a dealer.

"And you gave for it yesterday?"

"Eighteen pence."

His whole face creased with goblin merriment. His laugh was always a
little hoarse, as if it were only the broken-out expression of what
had been choking him for some time internally.

Suddenly he came to his feet.

"You have set it going?" he cried.

"The pendulum was merely wired high up to the case. What time is it?"

He affected a fob, with dangling seals. He drew out what the Regency
bucks called a warming-pan.

"Twenty minutes to twelve," he said.

Fortuitously, I had but to move the hands of the bargain a minute or
two.

"There's your clock going," said I, and shut the case.

"You are a genius!" he cried. "My happiness is complete. What an
engaging possession is a practical head!"

"I'm glad you think so. It can always command its price, you mean; and
so I may as well state it."

"Ha, ha! to be sure. The service of a friend is beyond price."

"Not in the least. I want eighty pounds for mine."

"Oh! of course. You're rating yourself higher than you do to the
Income Tax assessors."

"I'm perfectly serious. I want eighty pounds--less eighteen-pence."

He was beginning to laugh--checked himself, and stared at me in
amazement, already with a touch of anger in it.

"Are you daft?" he said.

"Not in the least. I'll explain myself. In taking advantage of that
man's madness yesterday, Standish, I'm not at all sure you didn't give
your economic principles an ugly look of felony."

His lip lifted, and he did not answer for a moment. Then said he, in a
straitened voice: "I see, I see. This is a blackmailing affair."

I kept my temper royally.

"No," I said. "And I shan't be at the trouble to refute such a charge.
I appeal only to your sense of fair-play. You must have it, Standish,
for all your virtuosity. Will you listen while I tell you the facts of
the case?"

"Oh! I'll listen," he said.

"Very well. Now, I'll explain. That clock was the property of a
wretched widow--a woman once in decent circumstances, but at last
reduced to the hardest necessity. I've come across her way of my work
on behalf of the Society; and a certain association of guess and
inquiry had led me to the truth. Her husband was a Liverpool-Irish
'patriot' of '81. I believe he was mixed up in the dynamite business.
He died, however, years ago in prison. Piece by piece she has parted
with every stick of their common property, till at last only the clock
remained. That she could not find it in her heart to sell. He had
always shown such an affection for it. No doubt even the worst of us
have our little emotional associations. Perhaps it had once stood in
his father's cottage. And so--though from the date of his arrest it
had proved useless as a timepiece"--("Ha!" murmured Standish, with a
happy nod to me)--"she stuck to it. Then, at last, hunger and the
devil broke her loyalty. Mr. Bull happened on the relic in a
professional way, presumed its value, and being for all his sins
something better than a collector, didn't offer to buy it for
eighteenpence, but proposed, like an honest man, to include it, with a
reserve, in one of his sales."

I came to an end, and looked at Standish.

"Without reserve, I think," said he.

"With," said I. "The man was as mad as a hatter. He had to be removed
in the end."

"You greatly interest me," said Standish. "I assure you that--though,
of course, I thought there was something a little exceptional about
our friend's conduct--I had no inkling, at that early stage, that
things would reach so disastrous a climax."

"I am quite ready to believe it. And, now you know, you will draw the
widow a cheque for eighty pounds."

Standish shook his head, with quite a rippling little laugh.

"You are a sweet, droll fellow," he said: "the dearest utilitarian, by
way of your friends' pockets. If I could materialise such a rare piece
of Quixotism and put it in a case, I would give you the money on the
spot--if I had it."

"At least send back the clock and let it be re-sold."

He looked at me, as if politeness alone restrained him from a positive
guffaw.

"Unconscious humourist!" he murmured thickly. Then he explained very
kindly. "The whole text of my capital is sunk in these things--these
glorious trifles, every one of which represents an opportunity most
patiently coveted. The margin only stands for my living expenses. Now,
do you really imagine I will forego the little rewards, when they
reach me, of such devotion?--and for the benefit of a dead savage's
widow?" he added, with an irrepressible laugh.

"It was an accident, Standish."

"Such is our chance.

"Is it hopeless my trying to move you?"

"You have moved me already, my dear soul. Positively, a new value
attaches in my eyes to this bargain in the knowledge that it is
pronounced, in a certain sense, historical. Pray look at the matter
impartially. Why should all the unselfishness be demanded of me who
make no profession of dealing in these common virtues? Probably your
bombazine widow is much better equipped with the article than I am.
Comfort her with the Christian assurance that my expectations are
realised, if hers are not. Now, pray don't say any more. It is painful
and unprofitable to both of us. Let me show you an almost perfect
example of a gemma potaria--a sardonyx drinking-cup that I picked--".I
burst out, without more ado.

"Hang your drinking-cup!" I shouted; "you're just an inhuman swindler.
Hang your drinking-cup, I say!"--and I made for the door.

Standish followed me, with imperturbable unconcern, down the stairs.
At the moment, the liberated clock above began to strike midday.

"Hear it!" he cried triumphantly, pausing on a step. "It proclaims its
emancipation! It speaks to its deliverer with a voice of silver! 'A
bargain is a bargain,' it shrills. 'A--'"

Where was I! My brain was stuffed with wool, it seemed, and my eyes
were mere balls of smoked glass. In a moment I staggered to my feet.
Another shape was poised tottering just above me. The stairway rolled
with choking vapour, through which--as it slowly dissipated by way of
an open skylight--a wreck of burst paper and broken banister rails was
revealed.

As sight returned to me, I stared up at Standish. He looked like
nothing so much as a torn Japanese doll. Then with one impulse we
laboured up through the inferno, and stood at the doorway of the
shattered museum.

I think there cannot have remained two consecutive inches of sound
material anywhere in the room. The entire show was exploded into
shivers. Porcelain, tapestry, enamels, with the cabinets that had
enshrined them--all were committed in undistinguishable fragments to a
common ruin.

Tout vient à sait attendre: Everything comes to him that knows how to
wait--even a very lively retribution for his sins.

"Standish," I said (I could only speak in croaks)---"the patriot's
clock, Standish--it must have been set to midday! Standish--you have
been a good angel to the bombazine widow."



THE END


Project Gutenberg Australia