Chapter V (1)

For a fortnight this state continued in me, through alternations of depression, self-accusation, and savage bursts of rebellion. On the sixteenth day a brief note, begging me to call at his rooms, reached me from Valentine.

“I won’t go,” I swore through my teeth, feeling an inclination to tear the paper in them; and five minutes later was on my way.

“He shall justify me to myself,” I had thought. “I’ll let my conscience be his footstool no longer.”

The fellow lived _en prince_ in Piccadilly. I found him in the midst of a litter—boxes and packages and strewed floors—evidently on the eve of a journey. He greeted me, twinkling, in high excitement—not a trace of grievance or embarrassment in his manner.

“Leave those things, Phillips,” he said to his staid valet. “We’ll finish by and by.”

The man left the room; and his master took me by the sleeve, while I held myself in reserve—unconsciously, at the same time, softening to his geniality.

“We’re off to Capri—Egypt,” he said, “following our late summer with the swallows.”

“You and—Phillips?” I asked.

“I and my wife,” said he, with a laugh. “Hush! She’s seeing the baby to sleep.”

He could say it without a blush; and they had been married, as I came to learn, just a week! He led me on tiptoe to a distant room, and bade me look through the opened door. Nanny, crowned, proud as any young queen, with conscious maternity, was bent, singing softly, above a little cot. The sight of her—Val’s wife—restored me at once to my self-respect. I had done nothing after all, it seemed, but help to precipitate an event I deplored. My shout had brought down the avalanche. Henceforth my position was to be that of the amused onlooker.

He let me stare; then led me away with all his old affectation of pregnant mystery. We went out together—I don’t know why—into the Green Park. It seemed remote and silent, and the better shadows of night were beginning to troop under its trees. Then he spoke to me, as follows:

“Verender, you have a right to know. You remember what you told me that evening? I wasn’t just to you, perhaps. I foresaw issues to which you must necessarily be blind. The baby stood between us, you said. It did, but not in the way you meant to imply. I am its father.”

I listened perfectly silent, and very grave, as we stepped on together.

“I will say of, not for, myself,” he continued, “that I had known nothing of the fruits of a little moonlight idyll out in that Kent village. I was hop-picking, as she was, but for a worser reason. Our encounter in B—— Hospital was my first intimation of the truth. Till that moment I had never considered, at least had been careless of, a sequel; had never, of course, had a shadow of thought to identify the patient with my victim. Then in a moment—Verender, her helplessness found all that wasn’t bad in me. She didn’t know me—the curtain was too thick. I determined to woo and win, as a stranger, what was already my own. Was I right?”

I nodded. “Yes, you were right.”

“Then came the strange part,” he said—“a sort of subconsciousness of an impediment she could not define. It was her dishonour, Verender—my God! Verender, _her_ dishonour!—that found some subtle expression in the little life introduced into her home. She always feared and distrusted the child; and I tell you I lived in horror that some day her witlessness would arm her gentle hand to do it a hurt. For she wanted to come to me, Verender, she wanted to come, and it was as if she couldn’t, and nobody would tell her why.

“_You_ told her, you old rascal! And with what result, do you think? When I followed her, I found her gone—she had taken the baby from its cot, and hurried out. The old harpy was there, raving and gobbling beyond reason. I had her down on her knees to confess. She admitted that the girl had come in, in a fever to proclaim her knowledge of the bar which separated us. Nanny had rounded upon her, it appeared, and accused her, Aunt Mim, of wantonly causing the scandal which had brought this shadow into her life. And then—perhaps it wasn’t to be wondered at—Auntie exploded, and gave up all.”

“The truth?”

“All of it but what the old hag herself didn’t know—the name of the villain. That, circumstances had kept from her, you see. She let loose, did Auntie—we’ll allow her a grain of justification; to have her forbearance turned upon herself like that, you know!—and screamed to the girl to pack, and dispose of her rubbish somewhere else. And Nanny understood at last, and went.”

“Where?”

“Ah, where? That was the question. I’d only one clue—Skene and the river; but I seized upon it, and my inspiration proved right. She’d gone instinctively to the only place where, it seemed, her trouble could be resolved. You see, she hadn’t yet come to identify _me_ with it. But I followed, and I caught her in time.”

He hung his head, and spoke very low.

“I took the next train possible to Skene. Verender, I’m not going to talk. It was one of those fainting, indescribable experiences, like the voice in the burning bush. Cold dawn it was, with a white bubbling river and the ghost of an old moon. She had intended to commit _it_ to the water—the fog wasn’t yet out of her brain—and then, all in an instant, the mother came upon her, and the memory of me; and she ran to cast herself in instead, and saw me coming.”

There followed a long interval of silence.

“And Aunt Mim?” I asked drily, chiefly to keep up my character.

He laughed.

“O! we’ve added an honourable moiety to a dishonourable pension, and settled her,” he said.

Another silence followed.

“Well, I apologize,” I said grumpily.

THE SOUL OF THE PROFESSOR

John Stannary hungrily paced his laboratory, awaiting an expected advent. A brilliant coronal of candles, concentrated within a shade and pendent from a black beam over the dissecting table, regularly identified him as he came within its radiance, and as regularly, when he had passed without it, returned to its scrutiny of the empty slab beneath, as if it were trying to trace on that blank surface the unwritten hieroglyphics of his development. Yet, if each of its half-score fiery tongues had been as polyglot as the Apostles’ tongues of flame, it could have found among them all no voice to dispute his lifelong consistency with himself. From the hard, ungracious child, who had rejoiced to discomfit the love which sought to hedge him; from the cynic schoolboy, to whom to awaken and analyze pain in the living had been the only absorbing sport; from the unimpassioned student, who had walked the hospitals like a very spectre of moral insensibility; from the calculating libertine, whose experimental phase of animalism had been as brief as it was savage; from the lust of life, soon spent, to the bloodless analysis of its organic motives; from the soulless child to the virile monster of science; from nothingness to a great early reputation, to honours, to a fine house, to his present self and condition, in short, Professor Stannary’s progress had been entirely and unerringly consistent. He was one of those born to account for results, not by any means with a view to clearing the stream of tendency by cleansing its source. On the contrary, he never would have hesitated further to contaminate it, could he by so doing have evolved some novel epidemic. His fight was not to win Nature to God, but to the laboratory; and, if he had a conqueror’s ambition, it was to die gloriously upon a protoplast, at that beginning of things which his fathers had struggled through æons to forget. To have called him a dog nosing back for a scent, would have been to libel the sorriest of mongrels with an inch of tail to wag at a kind word. Yet he had routled so much, nevertheless, that his eyes were inflamed, and his features pimpled, and his nose itself sharpened as with much whetting on carrion. And, still unappeased, he paced his shambles that evening like a caged ravening jackal.

In those early decades of the nineteenth century, anthropophagous science, especially when non-official, was often hard put to it for a meal. The “ringing grooves of change” were sounding; discovery was a new-risen star; ghoulish explorers shouldered one another in their struggle for the scientific pabulum which the grave afforded. But the supply, die as men would, was unequal to the demand. The hospitals kept their own; the others, _à contre-cœur_, must keep the resurrection-men. They pulled the blinds down on their consciences; they were willing to accept the least plausible of explanations, for the _Cause_ was paramount. But, indeed, we are all casuists when we want to justify our lusts to ourselves. Still the material lacked, only, according to the universal law of necessity, to evolve its more desperate instruments of supply. And then at last, hard-driven, first one, and after him another and another, had the panic courage to pull up those blinds, and let in the light on some very shocking suspicions—with the result that Burke was hanged in Edinburgh, and Bishop and Williams in London.

Professor Stannary was not of these white-livers. He pulled up no blind, for the simple reason that he had let none down. He would have diagnosed conscience as a morbid disease characterized by a diathetic condition, and peculiar to fools of both sexes and all ages. He would have said that to ask any question in this world was to invite a lie, and that in all his thirty years’ experience he had found none but the dead to answer back the unswerving truth. Well, if they did? Did it matter to them, being dead? But it mattered greatly to the cause of science to get at the truth; and he, for one, was certainly not going to question the means so long as the results came to justify them.

While yet, however, the blinds were down and the pitch-plaster but an ugly suspicion, the competition for material had not so ceased of its keenness but that Professor Stannary had found himself checked, one day, under the very near-conquered crest of a physiological peak, for want of the final clue to that crowning achievement—a clue which, like Bluebeard’s key, turned upon nothing so intimately as dead bodies. Step by step he had reasoned his way to this position, only, when within touch of the end, to find himself held up, tantalized, irritated by an inability to proceed farther until a nice necessity should be provided. His material, in fact and in short, had given out at the psychologic moment. His laboratory was already a museum of shredded particles—the pickings from much inevitable waste of dead humanity. There needed only the retraversing of certain nerves, or ducts, or canals to put the finishing touches to a great discovery. And then—the summit, the tribune, as it were, from which he was engaged to announce on the morrow to the Royal Society the triumphant term to his investigations.

Already, pacing to and fro, eager and impatient, in the silent room, he foresaw himself the recipient of the highest honour it was in the power of that body to bestow. He was not above desiring it. He was not himself so superlatively rational but he could covet applause for knocking yet another long nail into the coffin of irrationality; could expect the recognition of the world for his services in helping to reduce it, its passions and its hopes and its pathetic fallacies, to some mathematical formulæ. There is nothing so incomprehensible to the men of science as the reluctance of the unscientific to part with their doting illusions. To be content to rejoice or sorrow in things as they seem, and not to wish to know them as they are—that, they think, is so foolish as to justify their hardest castigation of the folly. At least so thought John Stannary, as, with his lips set sourly, he paused, and consulted his watch, and listened for a sound of expected footsteps shuffling down the hang-dog passage which skirted that wall of the house, and into which his laboratory door conveniently opened.

Not a whisper, however, rewarded him. He put his ear to the panels. Even then, the surf-like murmur of distant traffic—or the thud of his own excited heart, he could not tell which—was the only articulate sound. He glanced up angrily at the shortening candles before resuming his tramp. As he passed to and fro, from dusk to light, and into dusk again, he seemed to be demonstrating to a theatre of spectral monstrosities the hieroglyphics of that same empty slab. For the central core of radiance, concentrating itself with deadly expectancy upon its surface, had, nevertheless, its own ghostly halo—a dim auditorium, tier over tier, peopled with shadows of misbegotten horrors. Sets of surgical steel in the pit, arrayed symmetrically on a table as if for a dinner party of vampires; nameless writhed specimens on cards or in bottles, standing higher behind the dry sleek of glass; over all, murderous busts in the gallery, the dust on their heads and upper features giving them the appearance of standing above some infernal sort of footlights—with such shapes, watchful and gloating in suggestion, was the man hemmed in. They touched his nerves with just such an emotion as the ordinary citizen feels towards his domestic _lares_; they affected him in just such proportion as he was moved by the thought of the possible manner in which an order he had given to some friends of his that morning might be executed. That is to say, his feeling towards these dead members, as towards the means taken by others to procure him the use of them, was utterly impersonal. He had had at this pass a great truth to demonstrate. “A body, this night, at any cost,” he had simply ordered, and had straightway shut the door on his caterers. He had had no thought of scruple. His responsibility in these matters was to the ages; never to the individual.

A low tap sounded at the door. He was there in three strides, and opening swiftly, let in two men, the one shouldering a sack, the other hovering about his comrade in a sort of anxious moral support.

Professor Stannary, without a word, pointed to the table. The laden one, as mutely, shuffled across, backed, heaved his burden down, and stood to take off his hat and mop his brow. He was a burly, humorous-looking fellow, with a sort of cheerful popularity written across his face—an expression in strong contrast with that of the other, who, tall and stealthy, stood lank behind him, like his shadow at a distance, watching the persuasive effect of his principal on the customer. It was he who had closed the door gently upon them all as soon as they were in, and now stood, his teeth and eyeballs the prominent things in him, softly twirling his hat in his hand.

“Take away the sack,” said the Professor quietly.

The burly man obeyed, sliding it off like a petticoat; and revealed the body of a young woman. Lowering and rubbing his jaw, the Professor stood some moments pondering the vision. Then he turned sharply.

“You are late. I expected you sooner.”

“The notice was short, sir,” answered the man coolly. “These ’ere matters can’t be accommodated in a moment. As it is she’s warm. I bought the body off of——”

The other interrupted him—

“I don’t want to know. You can hold your tongue, and take your price, and go.”

“Short and sweet,” said the man.

He laughed, and his friend laughed in echo, putting his long hand to his mouth as if in apology for such an unpardonable ebullition of nature.

“As to the price,” said the former, “taking into _con_sideration the urgency, and the special providence, so to speak, in purwiding, at a moment’s notice too, this ’ere comely young——”

A certain full chink of money stopped him.

“Thankee,” he said, after a short negotiation. “I’ll own you’ve done the handsome, sir, and we’ve no cause to complain. Not but what I had to give——”

“Good night!” said the Professor.

Not till they were gone, locked out, and the very trail of their filthy footsteps hidden under the black droppings of the night, did he turn, for all his impatience, and regard the body again.

“Nancy,” he murmured to himself; “yes, it’s Nancy.”

Into the vast study of biology it is perfectly certain that a personal knowledge of biogenesis must enter. Here, too, the individual must be sacrificed to the cause. Well, by virtue of that phase in his career before-mentioned, he had already once made of Nancy a holocaust to science. If the fruits of that sacrifice had been to be found in a ruined life, a social degradation, a gradual decline upon infamy, what was it all to him? As german to the general subject as the dead specimens on his walls was the living specimen of his passion. _Ex abusu non arguitur ad usum._ Still, it was a strange coincidence that she should come thus to consummate his work.

Looking upon her frozen face, he was aware of certain tell-tale, rudely-erased tokens about the mouth. He never had a doubt as to what they signified. It was a rude kiss that of the pitch-plaster, more close and savage than any he himself had once pressed upon those blistered lips. So, the murderous beasts had gone the short way to supply his urgency! Would they have taken it none the less, he wondered, if they could have known in what relation their victim once stood towards their employer? Very likely. Very justly, too, could they believe him consistent with himself.

Nevertheless, though he had no conscience, though he had too often scored that fact on human flesh with a knife to be in any doubt about it, it was notable that, as he moved now, perfectly cold and collected, to make some selection of tools from the table hard by, he was registering to himself a vow, mortal to some folks, that no effort of his should be lacking to help bring certain vile instruments to their judgment—so soon as his disuse of them should find warrant in a fuller supply of the legitimate material.

As he groped for what he wanted, a sparrow twittered somewhere in the dark outside. He started, and dwelt a moment listening. Birds! the little false priests of haunted woods, who sang their lying benedictions over every folly perpetrated in their green shades! Why, he had loathed them, even while he had been making their loves the text for this early experiment of his in rustic nature. They had been singing when——grasping his knife firmly, he returned to the table.

Something had happened there. For one moment the blade shook in his hand. To his practised eye there were signs—the ghostliest, the most remote—but signs still. A movement—a tremor—the faintest, faintest vibration of a soul, unreleased, struggling to return to the surface—that was what he felt rather than saw. He recalled the hasty character of the deed; he thought of the shock, of the suspended trance into which such a deed might cast a sensitive subject. Mastering himself, with the dry firm will of an operator, he walked once more unhurriedly to the instrument table, and made a further selection.

The sparrow twittered again. Birds in the wood—small procuresses to Sentiment! What a trollop she was, that Sentiment! He had known ethereal creatures go from picking the bones of stuffed larks, to moralize sweetly on the song of nightingales under the moon. For himself, barring his natural asceticism, he would have no remorse whatever in devouring nightingales. Such emotions were born of surfeit, and the moral of them all was that a bird in the stomach was worth two, or two hundred, in the bush. The one was the decoy which brought the many into notice. Why, he himself, when flushed with passion——

Harder than steel, hard as flesh can be, he stepped back to the table.

Yes, there was no longer doubt about it. He must decide quickly. Decide! What was there in all his life to warrant in him a moment’s indecision? His pledge to to-morrow was paramount over his pledge to yesterday. It was by very virtue of the past that he owed everything to the future. The _Cause_ was himself, bone of his bone, flesh of his flesh. As she had made _her_self one with him, so must she consummate the gift. He chose to believe, even, that she would not hesitate could she know. He grasped his knife.

Her hair! He had said some foolish things about it once. In a sudden fury he seized it, and sliced it off close by her head, and flung it aside. She looked strangely innocent and boyish thus shorn. He had a momentary grotesque thought that he would excuse himself to himself by pretending that she was a boy. It passed on the instant. What excuse was necessary? He remembered how once, to his idle amusement, when she had fancied herself secure of him, she had coveted greatness for his future. Well, it was within his grasp at length, and by her final means.

Damn the sparrow! What was there in all the murky town to tempt his twittering? He had blunted his knife’s edge on the hair. He must fetch another.

As he came back with it, the bird seemed to flutter and cry out against his very door. In a swift access of passion he strode to it, and opened. Whether old, or wounded, or poisoned in the drooping fog, there lay the little thing, gasping, with outspread wings, upon the pavement. One moment the Professor hesitated; then, crushing out the tiny shrieking life under his foot, he relocked the door and returned with a firm step to the table.

* * * * *

His treatise, read the next day before an august body, was said masterly to resolve an intricate and long obscure physiologic problem.

It brought him additional and great honour, and, what he prized above all, that gift of the Society’s gold medal, which is only granted to discoveries of the first importance. But then, it must be remembered, he had given his soul to the Cause. The stain of its sacrifice was yet red on the stones outside his door.

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, manœuvred, 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-playfellow. 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 realization of all her old formless dreams in this wondrous birth of a desire for one, in whose new-impassioned eyes she had known herself reflected hitherto only for the most patronized 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 sea-path, it appeared, to and from a lonely house which I could just distinguish squatting among trees. It was Tryphena’s home.

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-humanized, 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 new-born 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 me 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-like gift of loveliness.

HIS CLIENT’S CASE

The “Personal Reminiscences” of the late Mr. Justice Ganthony, now in process of being edited, are responsible for the following drollery:—

My first “chambers” were on the top, not to say the attic, floor of a house in (the now defunct) Furnival’s Inn. I called _it_ “chambers,” in the plural, on the strength of a coal-cellar, in the window-seat, and a turn-up bedstead which became a cupboard by day. That accounted for two rooms, and “the usual offices,” as the house-agents say, when they refer to a kitchen six feet by eight in the basement. Trousers, after all, are only one garment, although they are called a pair.

There I sat among the cobwebs, like a spider, and waited for my first brief. In the meanwhile, I lived as the spiders do—on hope, flavoured with a little attic salt. It was not a cheering repast; but, such as it was, there was no end to it. By and by I was almost convinced (of what I had been friendlily advised) that it was a forlorn hope—the sort that leads to glory and the grave; probably by starvation. A spider has always, as a last resource, his web to roll up and devour. I ate up my chambers by degrees; that is to say, I dined, figuratively, day in day out, at the sign of the Three Balls. But this was to consume my own hump, like the camel. When that should be all gone, what next? There is a vulgar expression for prog, which is “belly-timber.” I only realized its applicability to my own case when my chairs and tables, and other furniture, had gone the primrose way of digestion. It was the brass fender, a “genuine antique,” that sat heaviest on my chest.

Furnival’s Inn was not a cheerful place to starve in. There was an atmosphere of gloom and decay about it, which derived, no doubt, from its former dealings in Chancery. In the days of its prosperity it had fed the Inns of Court, as Winchester feeds New College; in my time it could not feed itself. The rats were at it, and the bugs, which are the only things I know of that can thrive on crumbling plaster. I had the distinction of providing some of their rare debauches to the latter; but that was before I began to crumble myself. Some of my blood was certainly incorporated in the ancient walls, and was included in their downfall.

My view, from Furnival’s Inn, was dismally introspective. It commanded, in the first place, a quadrangle of emptiness; and included, in the second, an array of lowering and mouldy tenements like my own, at whose stark windows hungry expectant faces would glimmer fitfully, and scan the yard for the clients who never came, and disappear.

There was a decrepit inn, of another and the social type, budded, like a vicious intestinal growth, within Furnival’s. I used to speculate, as I looked down at night on its tottering portico, and solemn old frequenters, and the lights blinking behind its blinds like corpse-candles, if it were not a half-way house of call for the dead. For, by day, all business seemed withdrawn from it, and its upper rooms might have been mortuaries for any life they exhibited. No cheery housemaid ever looked from their windows to chaff the amorous Boots below. There was none to chaff. The dead need no boots.

Furnival’s Inn had one gullet, by which the roar of the world came in from Holborn. Little else came in but tradesmen, and bailiffs, and an occasional policeman in a thoughtful archæological mood. But the gullet was a vent as much of exit as of entrance; and by it one could escape from the madness of ghostly isolation, and mingle with the world, and look in the pastry-cooks’ windows. Whenever I was moved to one of these chameleonic foraging expeditions, I would pin a ticket on my door: “Called away. Please leave message with housekeeper,” and light my pipe with it when I returned. I wonder if any one ever read the fatuous legends? To Hope’s eyes, I am sure, they must have been dinted, like phonographic records, with the echoes of all the footsteps that ever sounded on the stairs during my absences.

Those footsteps! How they marked the measure of my desperation! They were not many, and they were far between; but not one in all the dreary tale ever reached my attic. Why should they, indeed? I am free to acknowledge its moral inaccessibility. Jurisprudence does not, in its convincing phases, inhabit immediately under the roof. The higher one lives, in practice, the lower one’s practice is like to be. The law is not an elevating pursuit.

I recognized this in the end; and the moment I recognized it I got my first client.

One November evening, very depressed at last, I was sitting smoking, and ruminating over my doleful fate, and thinking if I had not better shut myself up for good and all in the bed-cupboard, when I heard steps enter the hall below. My ears pricked, of course, from force of habit, and from force of habit I uttered a scornful stage laugh—for the withering of Fortune, if she happened to be by. But, in spite of my scorn, the steps, ignoring the architects’ offices on the ground floor (Frost and Driffel, contractors for Castles in Spain), ascended and continued to ascend—past the deed-engrosser’s closet on the half-way landing; past the empty chambers immediately below mine (whence, on gusty nights, the tiny creaking of the rope, by which the last tenant had hanged himself from a beam, would speak through the floor under my bed), and higher yet, right up to my door.

Hope, dying on a pallet up three flights of stairs, sprang alert on the instant. It might be a friend, a creditor, the housekeeper: something telepathic, flowing through the panels, assured me that it was none of these things. Tap-tap! so smart on the woodwork that it made me jump. I swept pipes and tobacco into a drawer. “Come in!” I cried. Then, as the visitor entered, “John, throw up the window a little! O, bother the boy! he’s out.”

I don’t know if the new-comer was imposed on. He nodded and sniffed.

“Tobacco!” he exclaimed. “What an age since I’ve tasted it! Mr. Ganthony, I presume?”

I bowed.

“Barrister-at-law?”

I bowed again. My plate was in the hall to inform him.

“Accept my instructions for a brief.”

He stated it so abruptly that it took my breath away. If all this was outside procedure, I was not going to quarrel with my bread and butter. I motioned him to a chair, and, taking up pen and paper tentatively, was in a position to scrutinize my visitor.

His appearance was certainly odd—a marked exaggeration, I should have pronounced it, of the legal type. His face was very red; his enormous side-whiskers very white. Large spectacles obscured his eyes, and he wore his silk hat (of an obsolete pattern) cocked rakishly over one of them. Add to this that his voluminous frock-coat looked like a much larger man’s misfit; that his black cotton gloves were preposterously long in the fingers; that he carried a “gamp” of the pantomime pattern, and it will be obvious that I had some reason for my astonishment. But I kept that in hand. A lawyer, after all, must come to graduate in the eccentricities of clients.

He looked perkily, with an abrupt action of his head, round about him; then came to me again.

“Large practice?” he asked.

“Large enough for my needs,” I answered winningly.

“H’m!” He sniffed. “They don’t appear to be many.”

“That—excuse me—is my affair,” I said with dignity.

“Of course,” he said; “of course. Only I looked you up—accident serving intuition—on the supposition that you were green, you know—one of the briefless ones—called to the Bar, but not chosen, eh?”

I plumped instantly for frankness.

“You are my first retainer,” I said.

His manner changed at once. He pulled his chair a little nearer me, with an eager motion.

“That’s what I wanted,” he said. “That’s it. The sort that are suffering to win their spurs. None of your egregious old-stagers, who require their briefs to be endorsed to the tune of three figures before they’ll move—‘monkey’-in-the-slot men, _I_ call ’em. Thinks I to myself, Here’s the sort that’ll be willing to take up a case on spec’.”

My enthusiasm shot down to zero.

“O!” I said, with a falling face; “on speculation!”

“There’s a fortune in it for a clever advocate,” he answered eagerly. “A fortune! all Pactolus in a nutshell. I’ve had my experiences of the other kind. They squeeze you, and throw you away; take the wages of sin, and hand you over to the deuce. What do _you_ say?”

“If you will give me the particulars,” I answered, without heart, “I shall be able to judge better. Your client——?”

He laughed joyously; frowned; put his hat on the floor; crossed his arms over his umbrella-handle, and glowered ferociously at me, squinting through his glasses.

“Exactly,” he said; “my client, ha-ha! Here, then, young sir, is my client’s case.

“His name is Buggins” (I glanced involuntarily at the wall). “He is, or was, until envy combined with detraction to ruin him, a company-promoter. As such, his trend was always towards insurance. It offered the best opportunities to a great creative genius. Buggins, being all that, recognized the still amazing potentialities in a field of commerce, which, though much worked, remains unexhausted—almost, one might say, inexhaustible. In his younger days he showed a pretty invention in devising and engineering what I may call personal essays in this line. His Insurance against Waterspouts, which he worked principally in the Midlands, brought him some handsome returns with a single generation of farmers. It was based on a cloud-burst at Bethesda, in Wales, which ruined quite a number. Other flights of his immature genius were, respectively, Insurance against Death in Diving-bells; against Death of a Broken Heart; against Official Strangulation; against Non-fatal Disfiguration by Lightning; against Death by Starvation (this last was largely patronized by millionaires). On a somewhat higher plane were his _Provident Dipsomaniary_, whose policies matured, or ‘burst,’ as Buggins phrased it, at the age of eighty-five, an essential condition being that the holders must put in their claims in person; his _Physical Promotion League_, which guaranteed to pay to the parents of any child, insured in it during his teens, a sum of ten pounds on the child’s reaching twenty-five years of age and a minimum height of six feet, and a thousand pounds for every additional inch which it grew afterwards; his _Anti-Fiction Mutual_, whose policies were forfeitable on first conviction of having written a novel (this proved one of the most profitable of all Buggins’s enterprises for a time; but in the end the national malady proved incurable, and subscribers fell off); his _Psychical Pocket Research Society_, which offered an Insurance against Ghost-seeing, the policy-holder forfeiting his claim on proof of his first supernatural visitation (but this was so violently assailed by the opposition society, which offered to prove that there were not three people in the United Kingdom who were insusceptible to spooks, that the scheme had to be abandoned); finally, in this category, his _Bachelors’ Protection Association_, which provided that, if a member reached the age of ninety without having married, he should receive an annuity beginning at fifty pounds, and rising, by yearly increments of ten pounds, to ten thousand pounds—figures which, in a centenarian age, were successful in dazzling a great many.

“But, by then, Buggins was beginning to master the deep ethics of his trade, and to realize that its heaviest emoluments were rooted in the grand principle of profitable self-denial. People _will_ be unselfish if they see money in it; you can’t stop ’em.

“One other notable venture marks this period of what I may call his moral transition. That was his inspired scheme for insuring _against_ illness, in the sense that any policy-holder admitting him or herself to be seriously indisposed, lost the right to compensation. It would have proved a godsend in a neurotic age; but the antagonism of the entire medical profession, with the single exception of the officer appointed by the company, killed it.

“We come now to Buggins’s final matured achievements. I beg your pardon?”

I had said nothing; but I suppose there is such a thing as a “speaking” silence. Certainly, if I had looked as I felt, I was a more drivelling maniac by now than Buggins himself. The visitor seemed to shoot out his eyes like an angry crab.

“Young man, young man!” he said warningly, “I begin to be suspicious that, after all, I may be misplacing my confidence.”

He looked banefully into his hat, where it stood rim upwards on the floor; then, suddenly overwrought, kicked it fiercely across the room. The action seemed to restore him to complete urbanity. He smiled.

“So perish all Buggins’s enemies!” he said loftily; “and hail the grand climacteric!”

He pinned me, like a live butterfly, to the wall behind me with a fixed and penetrating gaze.

“What would you say,” he said quietly, “to an Insurance against Brigandage, available to all travelling in Sicily or the Balkans, and realizable” (his watchfulness was intense) “on the receipt, at the head-offices in the Shetland Islands, of a nose, ear, or other organ, attested, under urgency, by the nearest consul, to be the personal property of the applicant desiring a ransom?”

He paused significantly. “I should say,” I responded drivellingly, “that, as a feat of pure inspiration, it—it takes the cake.”

“Ah!” He shouted it, and sprang to his feet joyously. “You are the man for me! You justify my confidence, as the returns justified Buggins’s daring conception. Would you believe it: within the first few months, bushels of noses were received at the head-offices, every one of which Buggins had no difficulty in proving to be false! But, hush! stay!—there was to be a higher flight!”

He had been pacing riotously up and down. Now he flounced to a stop before me, and held me once more with his glittering eye.

“It took the form,” he whispered, “of a _Purgatory Mutual_, on the Tontine principle, the last out to take the pool!”

I rose, trembling, to my feet, as he burst into a violent fit of laughter.