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