Book: A Strange Story, Volume 4.
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Edward Bulwer Lytton >> A Strange Story, Volume 4.
Sir Philip took the casket, and with it directions for use, which he did
not detail. He then spoke to Haroun about Louis Grayle, who had inspired
him with a mingled sentiment of admiration and abhorrence, of pity and
terror. And Haroun answered thus, repeating the words ascribed to him, so
far as I can trust, in regard to them--as to all else in this marvellous
narrative--to a memory habitually tenacious even in ordinary matters, and
strained to the utmost extent of its power, by the strangeness of the
ideas presented to it, and the intensity of my personal interest in
whatever admitted a ray into that cloud which, gathering fast over my
reason, now threatened storm to my affections,--
"When the mortal deliberately allies himself to the spirits of evil, he
surrenders the citadel of his being to the guard of its enemies; and those
who look from without can only dimly guess what passes within the
precincts abandoned to Powers whose very nature we shrink to contemplate,
lest our mere gaze should invite them. This man, whom thou pitiest, is
not yet everlastingly consigned to the fiends, because his soul still
struggles against them. His life has been one long war between his
intellect, which is mighty, and his spirit, which is feeble. The
intellect, armed and winged by the passions, has besieged and oppressed
the soul; but the soul has never ceased to repine and to repent. And at
moments it has gained its inherent ascendancy, persuaded revenge to drop
the prey it had seized, turned the mind astray from hatred and wrath into
unwonted paths of charity and love. In the long desert of guilt, there
have been green spots and fountains of good. The fiends have occupied the
intellect which invoked them, but they have never yet thoroughly mastered
the soul which their presence appalls. In the struggle that now passes
within that breast, amidst the flickers of waning mortality, only Allah,
whose eye never slumbers, can aid."
Haroun then continued, in words yet more strange and yet more
deeply graved in my memory,--
"There have been men (thou mayst have known such), who, after an illness
in which life itself seemed suspended, have arisen, as out of a sleep,
with characters wholly changed. Before, perhaps, gentle and good and
truthful, they now become bitter, malignant, and false. To the persons
and the things they had before loved, they evince repugnance and loathing.
Sometimes this change is so marked and irrational that their kindred
ascribe it to madness,--not the madness which affects them in the
ordinary business of life, but that which turns into harshness and
discord the moral harmony that results from natures whole and complete.
But there are dervishes who hold that in that illness, which had for its
time the likeness of death, the soul itself has passed away, and an evil
genius has fixed itself into the body and the brain, thus left void of
their former tenant, and animates them in the unaccountable change from
the past to the present existence. Such mysteries have formed no part of
my study, and I tell you the conjecture received in the East without
hazarding a comment whether of incredulity or belief. But if, in this war
between the mind which the fiends have seized, and the soul which implores
refuge of Allah; if, while the mind of yon traveller now covets life
lengthened on earth for the enjoyments it had perverted its faculties to
seek and to find in sin, and covets so eagerly that it would shrink from
no crime and revolt from no fiend that could promise the gift, the soul
shudderingly implores to be saved from new guilt, and would rather abide
by the judgment of Allah on the sins that have darkened it than pass
forever irredeemably away to the demons,--if this be so, what if the
soul's petition be heard; what if it rise from the ruins around it; what
if the ruins be left to the witchcraft that seeks to rebuild them? There,
if demons might enter, that which they sought as their prize has escaped
them; that which they find would mock them by its own incompleteness even
in evil. In vain might animal life the most perfect be given to the
machine of the flesh; in vain might the mind, freed from the check of the
soul, be left to roam at will through a brain stored with memories of
knowledge and skilled in the command of its faculties; in vain, in
addition to all that body and brain bestow on the normal condition of man,
might unhallowed reminiscences gather all the arts and the charms of the
sorcery by which the fiends tempted the soul, before it fled, through the
passions of flesh and the cravings of mind: the Thing, thus devoid of a
soul, would be an instrument of evil, doubtless,--but an instrument that
of itself could not design, invent, and complete. The demons themselves
could have no permanent hold on the perishable materials. They might
enter it for some gloomy end which Allah permits in his inscrutable
wisdom; but they could leave it no trace when they pass from it, because
there is no conscience where soul is wanting. The human animal without
soul, but otherwise made felicitously perfect in its mere vital
organization, might ravage and destroy, as the tiger and the serpent may
destroy and ravage, and, the moment after, would sport in the sunlight
harmless and rejoicing, because, like the serpent and the tiger, it is
incapable of remorse."
"Why startle my wonder," said Derval, "with so fantastic an image?"
"Because, possibly, the image may come into palpable form! I know, while
I speak to thee, that this miserable man is calling to his aid the evil
sorcery over which he boasts his control. To gain the end he desires, he
must pass through a crime. Sorcery whispers to him how to pass through
it, secure from the detection of man. The soul resists, but in resisting,
is weak against the tyranny of the mind to which it has submitted so long.
Question me no more. But if I vanish from thine eyes, if thou hear that
the death which, to my sorrow and in my foolishness I have failed to
recognize as the merciful minister of Heaven, has removed me at last from
the earth, believe that the pale Visitant was welcome, and that I humbly
accept as a blessed release the lot of our common humanity."
Sir Philip went to Damascus. There he found the pestilence raging, there
he devoted himself to the cure of the afflicted; in no single instance, so
at least he declared, did the antidotes stored in the casket fail in their
effect. The pestilence had passed, his medicaments were exhausted, when
the news reached him that Haroun was no more. The Sage had been found,
one morning, lifeless in his solitary home, and, according to popular
rumour, marks on his throat betrayed the murderous hand of the strangler.
Simultaneously, Louis Grayle had disappeared from the city, and was
supposed to have shared the fate of Haroun, and been secretly buried by
the assassins who had deprived him of life. Sir Philip hastened to
Aleppo. There he ascertained that on the night in which Haroun died,
Grayle did not disappear alone; with him were also missing two of his
numerous suite,--the one, an Arab woman, named Ayesha, who had for some
years been his constant companion, his pupil and associate in the mystic
practices to which his intellect had been debased, and who was said to
have acquired a singular influence over him, partly by her beauty and
partly by the tenderness with which she had nursed him through his long
decline; the other, an Indian, specially assigned to her service, of whom
all the wild retainers of Grayle spoke with detestation and terror. He
was believed by them to belong to that murderous sect of fanatics whose
existence as a community has only recently been made known to Europe, and
who strangle their unsuspecting victim in the firm belief that they
thereby propitiate the favour of the goddess they serve. The current
opinion at Aleppo was, that if those two persons had conspired to murder
Haroun, perhaps for the sake of the treasures he was said to possess, it
was still more certain that they had made away with their own English
lord, whether for the sake of the jewels he wore about him, or for the
sake of treasures less doubtful than those imputed to Haroun, and of which
the hiding-place would be to them much better known.
"I did not share that opinion," wrote the narrator, "for I assured
myself that Ayesha sincerely loved her awful master; and that love
need excite no wonder, for Louis Grayle was one whom if a woman, and
especially a woman of the East, had once loved, before old age and
infirmity fell on him, she would love and cherish still more devotedly
when it became her task to protect the being who, in his day of power
and command, had exalted his slave into the rank of his pupil and
companion. And the Indian whom Grayle had assigned to her service was
allowed to have that brute kind of fidelity which, though it recoils
from no crime for a master, refuses all crime against him.
"I came to the conclusion that Haroun had been murdered by order
of Louis Grayle,--for the sake of the elixir of life,--murdered by
Juma the Strangler; and that Grayle himself had been aided in his
flight from Aleppo, and tended, through the effects of the
life-giving drug thus murderously obtained, by the womanly love of the
Arab woman Ayesha. These convictions (since I could not, without
being ridiculed as the wildest of dupes, even hint at the vital
elixir) I failed to impress on the Eastern officials, or even on a
countryman of my own whom I chanced to find at Aleppo. They only
arrived at what seemed the common-sense verdict,--namely, that Haroun
might have been strangled, or might have died in a fit (the body,
little examined, was buried long before I came to Aleppo); and that
Louis Grayle was murdered by his own treacherous dependents. But all
trace of the fugitives was lost.
"And now," wrote Sir Philip, "I will state by what means I discovered
that Louis Grayle still lived,--changed from age into youth; a new
form, a new being; realizing, I verily believe, the image which
Haroun's words had raised up, in what then seemed to me the
metaphysics of fantasy,---criminal, without consciousness of crime;
the dreadest of the mere animal race; an incarnation of the blind
powers of Nature,--beautiful and joyous, wanton and terrible and
destroying! Such as ancient myths have personified in the idols of
Oriental creeds; such as Nature, of herself, might form man in her
moments of favour, if man were wholly the animal, and spirit were no
longer the essential distinction between himself and the races to
which by superior formation and subtler perceptions he would still be
the king.
"But this being is yet more dire and portentous than the mere animal
man, for in him are not only the fragmentary memories of a pristine
intelligence which no mind, unaided by the presence of soul, could
have originally compassed, but amidst that intelligence are the
secrets of the magic which is learned through the agencies of spirits
the most hostile to our race. And who shall say whether the fiends do
not enter at their will this void and deserted temple whence the soul
has departed, and use as their tools, passive and unconscious, all the
faculties which, skilful in sorcery, still place a mind at the
control of their malice?
"It, was in the interest excited in me by the strange and terrible fate
that befell an Armenian family with which I was slightly acquainted,
that I first traced--in the creature I am now about to describe, and
whose course I devote myself to watch, and trust to bring to a
close--the murderer of Haroun for the sake of the elixir of youth.
"In this Armenian family there were three daughters; one of them--"
I had just read thus far when a dim shadow fell over the page, and a cold
air seemed to breathe on me,--cold, so cold, that my blood halted in my
veins as if suddenly frozen! Involuntarily I started, and looked up, sure
that some ghastly presence was in the room. And then, on the opposite
side of the wall, I beheld an unsubstantial likeness of a human form.
Shadow I call it, but the word is not strictly correct, for it was
luminous, though with a pale shine. In some exhibition in London there is
shown a curious instance of optical illusion; at the end of a corridor you
see, apparently in strong light, a human skull. You are convinced it is
there as you approach; it is, however, only a reflection from a skull at a
distance. The image before me was less vivid, less seemingly prominent
than is the illusion I speak of. I was not deceived. I felt it was a
spectrum, a phantasm; but I felt no less surely that it was a reflection
from an animate form,--the form and face of Margrave; it was there,
distinct, unmistakable. Conceiving that he himself must be behind me, I
sought to rise, to turn round, to examine. I could not move: limb and
muscle were overmastered by some incomprehensible spell. Gradually my
senses forsook me; I became unconscious as well as motionless. When I
recovered, I heard the clock strike three. I must have been nearly two
hours insensible! The candles before me were burning low. My eyes rested
on the table; the dead man's manuscript was gone!
[1] The reader will here observe a discrepancy between Mrs. Poyntz's
account and Sir Philip Derval's narrative. According to the former, Louis
Grayle was tried in his absence from England, and sentenced to three
years' imprisonment, which his flight enabled him to evade. According to
the latter, Louis Grayle stood his trial, and obtained an acquittal. Sir
Philip's account must, at least, be nearer the truth than the lady's,
because Louis Grayle could not, according to English law, have been tried
on a capital charge without being present in court. Mrs. Poyntz tells her
story as a woman generally does tell a story,--sure to make a mistake when
she touches on a question of law; and--unconsciously perhaps to
herself--the woman of the World warps the facts in her narrative so as to
save the personal dignity of the hero, who has captivated her interest,
not from the moral odium of a great crime, but the debasing position of a
prisoner at the bar. Allen Fenwick, no doubt, purposely omits to notice
the discrepancy between these two statements, or to animadvert on the
mistake which, in the eyes of a lawyer, would discredit Mrs. Poyntz's. It
is consistent with some of the objects for which Allen Fenwick makes
public his Strange Story, to invite the reader to draw his own inferences
from the contradictions by which, even in the most commonplace matters
(and how much more in any tale of wonder!), a fact stated by one person is
made to differ from the same fact stated by another. The rapidity with
which a truth becomes transformed into fable, when it is once sent on its
travels from lip to lip, is illustrated by an amusement at this moment in
fashion. The amusement is this: In a party of eight or ten persons, let
one whisper to another an account of some supposed transaction, or a piece
of invented gossip relating to absent persons, dead or alive; let the
person, who thus first hears the story, proceed to whisper it, as exactly
as he can remember what he has just heard, to the next; the next does the
same to his neighbour, and so on, till the tale has run the round of the
party. Each narrator, as soon as he has whispered his version of the
tale, writes down what he has whispered. And though, in this game, no one
has had any interest to misrepresent, but, on the contrary, each for his
own credit's sake strives to repeat what he has heard as faithfully as he
can, it will be almost invariably found that the story told by the first
person has received the most material alterations before it has reached
the eighth or the tenth. Sometimes the most important feature of the
whole narrative is altogether omitted; sometimes a feature altogether new
and preposterously absurd has been added. At the close of the experiment
one is tempted to exclaim, "How, after this, can any of those portions of
history which the chronicler took from hearsay be believed?" But, above
all, does not every anecdote of scandal which has passed, not through ten
lips, but perhaps through ten thousand, before it has reached us, become
quite as perplexing to him who would get at the truth, as the marvels he
recounts are to the bewildered reason of Fenwick the Sceptic?
CHAPTER XL.
The dead man's manuscript was gone. But how? A phantom might delude my
eye, a human will, though exerted at a distance, might, if the tales of
mesmerism be true, deprive me of movement and of consciousness; but
neither phantom nor mesmeric will could surely remove from the table
before me the material substance of the book that had vanished! Was I to
seek explanation in the arts of sorcery ascribed to Louis Grayle in the
narrative? I would not pursue that conjecture. Against it my reason rose
up half alarmed, half disdainful. Some one must have entered the room,
some one have removed the manuscript. I looked round. The windows were
closed, the curtains partly drawn over the shutters, as they were before
my consciousness had left me: all seemed undisturbed. Snatching up one of
the candles, fast dying out, I went into the adjoining library, the
desolate state-rooins, into the entrance-hall, and examined the outer
door. barred and locked! The robber had left no vestige of his stealthy
presence.
I resolved to go at once to Strahan's room and tell him of the loss
sustained. A deposit had been confided to me, and I felt as if there
were a slur on my honour every moment in which I kept its abstraction
concealed from him to whom I was responsible for the trust. I hastily
ascended the great staircase, grim with faded portraits, and found myself
in a long corridor opening on my own bedroom; no doubt also on Strahan's.
Which was his? I knew not. I opened rapidly door after door, peered into
empty chambers, went blundering on, when to the right, down a narrow
passage. I recognized the signs of my host's whereabouts,--signs
familiarly commonplace and vulgar; signs by which the inmate of any
chamber in lodging-house or inn makes himself known,--a chair before a
doorway, clothes negligently thrown on it, beside it a pair of shoes. And
so ludicrous did such testimony of common every-day life, of the habits
which Strahan would necessarily have contracted in his desultory
unluxurious bachelor's existence,--so ludicrous, I say, did these homely
details seem to me, so grotesquely at variance with the wonders of which I
had been reading, with the wonders yet more incredible of which I myself
had been witness and victim, that as I turned down the passage, I heard my
own unconscious half-hysterical laugh; and, startled by the sound of that
laugh as if it came from some one else, I paused, my hand on the door, and
asked myself: "Do I dream? Am I awake? And if awake what am I to say to
the common place mortal I am about to rouse? Speak to him of a phantom!
Speak to him of some weird spell over this strong frame! Speak to him of
a mystic trance in which has been stolen what he confided to me, without
my knowledge! What will he say? What should I have said a few days ago
to any man who told such a tale to me?" I did not wait to resolve these
questions. I entered the room. There was Strahan sound asleep on his
bed. I shook him roughly. He started up, rubbed his eyes. "You,
Allen,--you! What the deuce?--what 's the matter?"
"Strahan, I have been robbed!--robbed of the manuscript you lent me. I
could not rest till I had told you."
"Robbed, robbed! Are you serious?"
By this time Strahan had thrown off the bed-clothes, and sat upright,
staring at me.
And then those questions which my mind had suggested while I was standing
at his door repeated themselves with double force. Tell this man, this
unimaginative, hard-headed, raw-boned, sandy-haired North
countryman,--tell this man a story which the most credulous school-girl
would have rejected as a fable! Impossible!
"I fell asleep," said I, colouring and stammering, for the slightest
deviation from truth was painful to me, "and-and--when I awoke--the
manuscript was gone. Some one must have entered and committed the
theft--"
"Some one entered the house at this hour of the night and then only stolen
a manuscript which could be of no value to him! Absurd! If thieves have
come in it must be for other objects,--for plate, for money. I will
dress; we will see!"
Strahan hurried on his clothes, muttering to himself and avoiding my eye.
He was embarrassed. He did not like to say to an old friend what was on
his mind; but I saw at once that he suspected I had resolved to deprive
him of the manuscript, and had invented a wild tale in order to conceal my
own dishonesty.
Nevertheless, he proceeded to search the house. I followed him in
silence, oppressed with my own thoughts, and longing for solitude in my
own chamber. We found no one, no trace of any one, nothing to excite
suspicion. There were but two female servants sleeping in the house,--the
old housekeeper, and a country girl who assisted her. It was not possible
to suspect either of these persons; but in the course of our search we
opened the doors of their rooms. We saw that they were both in bed, both
seemingly asleep: it seemed idle to wake and question them. When the
formality of our futile investigation was concluded, Strahan stopped at
the door of my bedroom, and for the first time fixing his eyes on me
steadily, said,--
"Allen Fenwick, I would have given half the fortune I have come into
rather than this had happened. The manuscript, as you know, was
bequeathed to me as a sacred trust by a benefactor whose slightest wish it
is my duty to observe religiously. If it contained aught valuable to a
man of your knowledge and profession, why, you were free to use its
contents. Let me hope, Allen, that the book will reappear to-morrow."
He said no more, drew himself away from the hand I involuntarily extended,
and walked quickly back towards his own room.
Alone once more, I sank on a seat, buried my face in my hands, and strove
in vain to collect into some definite shape my own tumultuous and
disordered thoughts. Could I attach serious credit to the marvellous
narrative I had read? Were there, indeed, such powers given to man, such
influences latent in the calm routine of Nature? I could not believe it;
I must have some morbid affection of the brain; I must be under an
hallucination. Hallucination? The phantom, yes; the trance, yes. But
still, how came the book gone? That, at least, was not hallucination.
I left my room the next morning with a vague hope that I should find the
manuscript somewhere in the study; that, in my own trance, I might have
secreted it, as sleep-walkers are said to secrete things, without
remembrance of their acts in their waking state.
I searched minutely in every conceivable place. Strahan found me still
employed in that hopeless task. He had breakfasted in his own room, and
it was past eleven o'clock when he joined me. His manner was now hard,
cold, and distant, and his suspicion so bluntly shown that my distress
gave way to resentment.
"Is it possible," I cried indignantly, "that you, who have known me so
well, can suspect me of an act so base, and so gratuitously base?
Purloin, conceal a book confided to me, with full power to copy from it
whatever I might desire, use its contents in any way that might seem to me
serviceable to science, or useful to me in my own calling!"
"I have not accused you," answered Strahan, sullenly. "But what are we to
say to Mr. Jeeves; to all others who know that this manuscript existed?
Will they believe what you tell me?"
"Mr. Jeeves," I said, "cannot suspect a fellow-townsman, whose character
is as high as mine, of untruth and theft. And to whom else have you
communicated the facts connected with a memoir and a request of so
extraordinary a nature?"
"To young Margrave; I told you so!"
"True, true. We need not go farther to find the thief. Margrave has been
in this house more than once. He knows the position of the rooms. You
have named the robber!"
"Tut! what on earth could a gay young fellow like Margrave want with a
work of such dry and recondite nature as I presume my poor kinsman's
memoir must be?"
I was about to answer, when the door was abruptly opened, and the
servant-girl entered, followed by two men, in whom I recognized the
superintendent of the L---- police and the same subordinate who had found
me by Sir Philip's corpse.
The superintendent came up to me with a grave face, and whispered in my
ear. I did not at first comprehend him. "Come with you," I said, "and to
Mr. Vigors, the magistrate? I thought my deposition was closed."