Dr. Paull's Theory: A Romance

Am I awake? Is my visit to the Pinewood a dream? No, no, it has all happened—one of the strangest experiences that ever befell mortal man.

It has been like a visit to some new world: the impressions have been so strong. It is the Pinewood which seems the reality, and this, my hospital life, a dream. To my horror, things are growing shadowy. I cannot concentrate my thoughts upon my cases; and when the fellows or the nurses ask me anything, I am not “all there.” At last the climax came this morning. An epileptic case came in, and Dr. Hildyard asked my opinion upon his diagnosis. My mind was a blank. Suddenly I could have sworn I heard a laugh—her laugh.

I will write it all down, that is what I will do; then perhaps I may forget.

I left London last Saturday week morning, in the full possession of my senses (of that I feel sure). I can remember everything—all the details of the journey down to F——, through the heathery moorland, the firwoods, the cornfields.

No one waiting at F—— station. Taking my bag, I was leaving, intending to make inquiries as to the whereabouts of the Pinewood and to walk, when an old coachman, perched up on the driving-seat of a high dogcart, touched his hat and said:

“The gentleman for the Pinewood?”

“I am going to the Pinewood,” I said.

“The doctor, sir, what attended Sir Roderick in London?”

“Yes.”

I got up, and we drove off. The skittish bay (Reindeer) went like the wind at first along the smooth highroad, through snug villages, past outhouses, between hop-gardens, till we came to the hills covered with pine-forest.

“This is the Pinewood, sir,” said the old man; “as far as you can see a tree.”

That was much farther than I could see. The slopes were clad with the straight, tall trees, from slim saplings to lofty giants, until the dark green outlines of the hills melted into the lilac haze of the horizon.

Driving less quickly uphill, he told me something about his master and his habits.

“You must excuse my not believin’ in you at first sight, sir,” he said; “but so few gen’l’men comes here, and they’re not young gen’l’men, but them as pokes about after beetles or goes butterfly catching. Some goes out with a hammer, and knocks the stones about. And as for a lady—well, sir, I suppose you know Sir Roderick can’t abide the sight of a petticoat?”

I murmured something. I was certainly not going to discuss my host with one of his servants. Fortunately, we were now in the grounds.

What a dream of beauty!

Velvety, mosslike hillocks, among the stern clumps of pines; whole glades of bracken in narrow dells, fairy sporting grounds; then, an occasional oasis of garden, apparently growing spontaneously among the woodland. Here and there a flight of steps, leading to the shrubbery of high laurels and conifers, or a small white-stone temple; now and again a stone bench, flanked by cypresses and urns on pedestals—such a bench as one sees in the gardens in Italy.

Then, suddenly, a dip in the land to the right, disclosing a tiny park, with some beeches and elms, and in its centre a circular garden, surrounding a white-domed building.

“A chapel?” I asked.

“It was wonst,” my conductor told me; “but not in my time. We none of us knows nothink about wot’s inside. They do talk about that chapel, folks do. My opinion is, that there’s nothink in it; it just amuses Sir Roderick to tease their curiosity.”

Then a sharp turn and a short drive between thick firwoods brought us to a strange place.

A long, high wall—the wall of a solid building; for there was a porch, a door, and long, narrow windows on either side. If the whole façade had had windows it would have looked like a museum, for on the top there was a balustrade crowned at intervals with small, funereal-looking urns.

The place looked mouldy and dismal even on this glorious summer day.

“Well?” I said, for Thomas drew up before the door.

“Well, sir, if you just give that bell hanging to the right of the door a good pull, they’ll hear you.”

Did Sir Roderick’s eccentricity extend to his living in a semi-tomb? As I pulled the bell, and heard a distant, feeble clang, I looked somewhat disconsolately after the comfortable-looking dogcart driving away, remembering some of the ancient Greek philosophers’ predilections for doing their work among the tombs.

Out of perversity, I daresay, I felt utterly disinclined for philosophical disquisitions in this tomb-like place; in fact, I yearned for a real boyish holiday in those grounds with young, merry companions (I had better be truthful with myself).

What was my dismay when a solemn-looking old servitor in black (he had white hair and a “white choker,” and looked like a major-domo of State funerals) ushered me into a vault-like crypt. There were niches in the walls and more urns. He offered to take my bag. I clutched it tight, expecting some grim jest on the part of my host. When he said, “Will you please walk this way, sir,” and, opening a door, disclosed a long, vault-like passage, I hesitated; but he slouched off at such a rate, and the echo of his footsteps clattering on the stone pavement was so loud, I could not stop him, so I followed in silence—down a flight of stone steps, round a corner, down another darker and narrower staircase (all lighted dimly by tiny yellow-glass windows in the wall), until, when I was emerging into total darkness, I paused.

“I can’t see!” I shouted, really annoyed.

Sir Roderick could not be living underground—that was all nonsense. He was playing a trick upon me, and would think it fine fun.

“I will strike a match,” I added, crossly; but the old man pulled open a door.

The landing just below me was suddenly flooded with light. Stepping down, I turned and followed him into a large conservatory.

What a magical change! The blue clear light from the glass dome showed up each frond of the great tree-ferns, each grand leaf of the palms, each yellow orange and white-waxen blossom of the orange-trees. Huge crimson blooms hung upon the thick festoons of the sub-tropical creeping plants, and there was my friend the Cape jessamine strengthening the warm, intoxicating perfume of the gardenias, daphnes, and, above all, of the orange-blossom.

It was a relief to be out of the scented atmosphere and in an ordinary, square hall, which had a billiard-table in the centre.

My cicerone asked me to wait; but after opening various doors and exploring several rooms, he came to me with a rueful expression.

“They was here half-an-hour ago,” he said; “but they must be out now. Lor! why they’re on the lawn. Come along, sir!”

He must have caught sight of “them” through a window. He opened the hall-door, and I saw a lawn with spreading trees, under one of which Sir Roderick was seated in a basket-chair, smoking. At his feet lay a huge mastiff. By his side sat a lady, bending over a book, her face shaded by a broad-brimmed hat.

My conductor had shut the door, and left me to my fate. I walked across the lawn, thinking to myself that under that hat was the face I had seen in Sir Roderick’s locket.

No—as she suddenly looked up—it was not the same! What! that wild-rose, tender young face, with large grey eyes, the same as that saucy, imperious minx of the portrait? No relation, I could swear it.

“Well, Hamlet!” Sir Roderick was quite warm in his welcome.

“I didn’t look myself. No, unmistakably I did not. Overwork, of course; the foul atmosphere, too. Oh! I might say what I liked. Mine was a good hospital in its way, doubtless; but all the same, the atmosphere was a foul one. Else, why the disinfectants?”

“You mentioned some unheard-of sum that you annually spend in disinfectants, and you can’t deny it,” he said. “Well, here you will have Nature’s disinfectants—pure air, and the scent of the pines and the heather and the hay. But I have not introduced you. Lilia, this is Dr. Paull.”

The lovely girl, who wore white stuff with something red twisted round her waist, had been looking at me like children taken to the Zoo for the first time look at the wild beasts.

She did not bow to me. I felt the blood come to my face. What on earth was she staring at? Then she turned to him, and said slowly:

“Doctor Paull?”

It was not flattering, but I understood.

“You are right—not Doctor,” I said. “There is much work before me before I can claim that title. I am only a medical student—”

“Bosh!” interrupted Sir Roderick. “I know what Lilia means. I never have any young men here; she expected one of the old fogies. That’s it, isn’t it, child?”

“Yes,” she said, nodding. “But—do you care for butterflies or beetles? No? Dear me! Oh, you are a botanist!”

I hastened to disclaim the soft impeachments.

“Then”—she knit her brow, and looked like a child making up an old woman’s face—“then you like geology?”

I remembered Thomas’ mention of the visitors who went about with hammers, and responded gravely to my catechist.

“I prefer to look at Nature and to ask no questions,” I said.

Then there was some talk of the covered way from the road above, which my host informed me was built by his father.

“He had some peculiar pleasure in startling people,” he said. “He used to give out that he was a social hermit; and although he lived down here much like other people live, would go about in town strangely dressed and behave oddly. My poor father was very eccentric.”

He made the remark so innocently that I involuntarily glanced at his companion. She seemed unaware that there was anything naïf in those words, and met my eyes with a deep, enquiring look. I have never seen such child eyes in a woman’s face.

Then the luncheon bell rang, and I was conducted to my room by a blushing youth in livery. I was burning to know who “Lilia” was—for that brief introduction was all that I had had—but I could not ask the gauche young footman (evidently a “new hand”). So I washed my hands and wondered, as I gazed round the quaint old room. It must be an old house, although from the lawn it looked modern, and foreign, with its brilliantly white walls and bright green shutters. The flooring, though spotless, was old; the ceiling low. There was a fourposter of carved wood black with age, and the mahogany furniture, which shone like mirrors, was of an ancient pattern. White dimity hung about, and there was a fresh scent of lavender.

Going downstairs, I noticed that the shallow stairs were of old oak, likewise the balustrade; but the dining-room, to which Sir Roderick, who met me in the hall, escorted me, was of newer fashion—a square room with massive furniture, and hung with paintings.

“All Pyms,” said my host, following my eyes as, seated at “Lilia’s” right, I ate my soup. Then ensued some talk about the various dark visages that frowned down from the black canvases. To all appearance, misanthropy ran in the family. Most of these bilious-looking ancestors seemed to have done something strange; and the nearer they had drifted to contempt of social law, the more unctuously Sir Roderick related their exploits. Meanwhile the gentle Lilia listened with wide-open eyes and evident interest.

“But that? Surely that one is not a Pym!” I said, indicating a portrait in an oval Florentine frame that hung conspicuously over the mantelpiece—in fact, in solitary glory, while the other portraits were somewhat huddled together.

“And pray, why not?” asked my host dryly, after a moment’s pause.

I looked again. A sunbeam lighted up the laughing face of a fair young man, with large blue eyes and the very much-curved lips which always produce the effect of a sneer. To me they are painful, recalling the cruel risus sardonicus which I have never seen without distress.

“Why not?” I repeated, stupidly. “Oh! because he is so unlike all the others, I suppose.”

“Do you not see any likeness?” he quietly asked presently, after he had carved a fowl and insisted on giving me the breast.

I looked around.

“Oh, not to the pictures—to Lilia!” he cried, impatiently.

“No, I cannot say I do,” I said, glancing at my hostess.

I smiled; but I did not feel at all like smiling. My—was it dread?—to find so young a girl the wife of so old a man made me flinch at any suggestion which strengthened such a possibility.

“They are both Pyms!” he said, quite irritably. “You have evidently no eye for likenesses. Of course, there are dark Pyms and fair Pyms. The fair Pyms are upstairs in a corridor.”

“Women,” said the fair Lilia explanatorily to me. “Papa dislikes women so much, he won’t have their portraits about him.”

I had been on the point of calling the child Lady Pym, and she was his daughter! Fool that I had been!

“Because they simper and attitudinise,” said Sir Roderick. “If they behaved as sensibly as men I should like them as well.”

“That’s not saying very much,” said Lilia, with an amused look at me. “Papa is not enamoured of his fellow-men.”

“Do you want me to be hail-fellow well-met with Tom, Dick, and Harry?” he said, frowning at the daughter who was so unlike him that I began to think more charitably of my mistake.

“You know I don’t. I like you just as you are!” said his daughter, looking adorable with an infantine smile of love and trust brightening her sweet face.

It was like a personal sunshine. I felt it so, later, when she deigned to shine upon me; and every time it humbled me, and made me feel coarse, clumsy, unworthy, a very clod; and now it, or the memory of it, comes back here—it shines suddenly upon a poor sufferer’s face upon the pillow, and the patient vanishes and I see Lilia.

This won’t do. I must return to my statement.

After luncheon, Sir Roderick sent me out into the grounds with his daughter. From first to last he purposely threw us together. What his motive was I cannot imagine. Motive he has: I have seen enough to know that he never acts without one.

Lilia told me so much as we wandered, first about the Italian garden just outside the dining-room windows, then across the lawns into the pinewoods. It was so difficult to check her childish confidences, which she poured out as a little creature just finding the use of its tongue will babble as it trots along holding one’s hand. They treated me, all of them, at the Pinewood, except one, of whom more presently, with simple trust; even Nero, the old mastiff, slouched along at our heels with his big tongue out, panting, as if I were an old friend. I must never, even in thought, betray that trust. I must never forget that to aspire would be a breach of that sacred confidence—never, never! On this subject I pray, as the octogenarian said in Dickens’ Haunted Man, “Lord, keep my memory green!”

She talked of her father—well and good.

“Papa has no patience with frivolity,” she said. “He only has sympathy with people who do their duty. That is what every one ought to feel, is it not? Ah! I thought you would say ‘Yes.’ Of course, it is much nicer when you like doing your duty, isn’t it? Those old men who come here and beetle-hunt and botanise, or go poring over the books in the library, not only like what they have to do in life, they love it. I do envy them.”

“But you—you like your life, do you not?” I asked.

Just then we came to a clearing in the wood. A giant pine, lately felled, lay prone among the ferns and mosses. She stopped.

“Let us sit down a moment,” she said; “you take my breath away.”

She seated herself on the trunk, looking like the embodied spirit of the pinewood in her white gown. Nero stood for a few minutes watching me as I sat down beside her, then slouched up and lay down at his mistress’ feet, one eye fixed on me. Evidently this proceeding was new to him. The botanists and gentlemen of the hammer did not care to sit on felled trunks and talk with the daughter of the house.

“I said that,” she went on, “because it was just as if you knew how treasonable my thoughts have been lately. I have actually been wishing to travel, and see the world!”

I asked her what treason there was in that.

“Such an idea, in me, is treason itself!” she said, almost indignantly—“when my father despises the world, and would rather anything should happen than that I should go beyond the Pinewood.”

Then I was amazed by the disclosure that this sweet young creature had lived all her life shut up in the Pinewood, almost as much a prisoner as a princess in a fairy-tale immured in a high tower. Her only companions and friends had been her nurses, the clergyman and his wife, and her cousin Roderick, the fair young man with a sneer whose portrait I had said to be unlike the Pyms.

Without governesses or tutors, Lilia has managed to learn a great deal. Latin and Greek are not dead languages to her, and she and her father chatter away in Italian like natives. But in the ordinary affairs of life, poor dear child, how ignorant she is!

Sitting there with myself, still almost an absolute stranger, she spoke out her heart as if I were a dear old friend returned after a long separation, and actually asked my advice. Mine!

It seemed that she had mentioned this desire to see other places to her cousin Roderick, who was a favourite nephew of her father’s, although he would not have anything to do with his family. She and this Roderick had been brought up together like brother and sister playing and sympathising and bickering in the usual fashion. Only when she had confided her treasonable ideas to him had he shocked her by a supplementary suggestion, which seemed to have made a terrible impression upon her.

“We have quarrelled, and never, never can be the same again,” she told me in much agitation. “My father does not know it, and has asked Roderick to dinner to meet you. What shall I do?”

She was quite tragic. I could hardly help smiling. But seeing how sensitive she was—a natural sensibility greatly increased by a life of unnatural seclusion—I repressed a smile, and said:

“See your cousin before dinner, and ‘make it up,’ as the children say.”

“Oh, I couldn’t!” she said, in distress. “He won’t make it up.”

“Then you have tried him?”

She nodded.

“It has been a dreadful shock to me,” she said. “If you knew, you would understand.”

After a little coaxing, she spoke, or rather blurted out:

“If you must know—he actually—asked me—to marry him!”

Nothing so very dreadful, I suppose; but, under the circumstances, rash, to say the least—for Lilia admitted that her father was in total ignorance.

“He would never look at Roderick again,” she assured me. “Don’t say ‘nonsense.’ I tell you he would not. I am never to marry!”

“Why not?” I asked, perversely.

She looked at me almost with indignation.

“Marriage means misery,” she said, oracularly.

“You mean, that Sir Roderick thinks it does,” I suggested.

“He knows it,” she said, with emphasis, below her breath.

I was silent with confusion. The next word, and Lilia might unbosom herself of secrets not her own—sacred to her father—not from any malice aforethought, but through the spontaneity to which she was bred by that very father. It behoved me to be cautious.

“I really should tell Sir Roderick if I were you,” I hazarded. “It is only what he would reasonably expect. Cousins often marry. The contingency must have occurred to him.”

At that moment I was inclined to think that such an issue might even have been planned by my self-sufficient host.

“I thought you knew him!” she cried, recoiling from me a little.

Nero got up and stood between us, looking suspiciously at me.

I explained, apologetically, that although Sir Roderick and I had talked over the questions of humanity in the abstract, we had not arrived at the domestic problems.

“The most important of all,” she said, somewhat pompously.

“Granted,” I said. “And problems that can, unfortunately, only be solved by individual experience.”

“Ah! you acknowledge that,” she said, with a sort of exultation. “You really uphold my father’s theory—that the risk is too great. He loves both Roderick and myself so well that he has preached the delights of celibacy to us ever since I can recollect.”

“His preaching has had more effect upon you than upon your cousin, evidently,” I suggested.

“I fear so,” she said, in a sorrowful tone which reproached me for my feeling this talk, so seriously in her estimation, almost absurd. “Poor, dear Roderick! I would rather do anything than ‘sneak,’ as he used to call it. But papa will be sure to notice something.”

“Cannot you act—pretend?” I hazarded.

She shook her head.

“I never tried,” she said; “it has never been necessary.”

“I daresay he will be equal to the occasion,” I said. “Your cousin is in the army, is he not? Oh! he is captain already? He has told you a good deal about life in camp, in barracks?”

“Lots,” she said.

(Doubtless lots, Captain Pym!)

“Well, you know, officers can be silent when necessary, and know how to veil their opinions and feelings.” (I yearned to say, “know how to tell lies,” but checked myself.) “If I were you, I should be just the same to him to-night: I should ignore his unlucky suggestion, and behave exactly as if he had never made it.”

Lilia resolved to take my advice, and we strolled in the gardens and into the enclosed park. I tried to find out something about the chapel in the circular garden, but she was evidently on guard.

I thought of her, dear child, while I was dressing. How few real friends she could have had! These Mervyns, the rector and his wife, seemed the only ones. I was anxious to see them. They had been invited for the evening. Lilia told me “they never would come to dinner; it was no use asking them.”

I went downstairs very soon after the second dressing bell rang. The drawing-room, which is all chocolate-colour, white, and gilding, struck me as like a picture I had recently seen. The room was lighted by short, thick wax-candles in wall candelabra. In the middle of the room an enormous china bowl of white roses on a round black table perfumed the air. The other object which attracted my attention was a huge grand piano in ebony.

I was just going round to ascertain the maker’s name, when someone jumped up from an easy-chair—Captain Roderick.

“Hulloa!” he said (he had a newspaper in his hand), “it’s Mr. Paull, isn’t it?”

I shook hands with him. A prodigiously good-looking fellow, this cousin, and good company. It was a lively dinner-table. Lilia, child as she is, soon cast aside the stately manner she had put on outside the drawing-room door when she came sailing in to interrupt our tête-à-tête; and she laughed and talked with us all till over dessert we none of us noticed how time fled, until the footman announced that “Mr. and Mrs. Mervyn were in the drawing-room, and coffee was served.”

Mr. Mervyn, the clergyman of the parish, is a tall, dark man with white hair and keen black eyes. His wife is one of those large, soft, fair women with gentle faces and sweet manners, who can nevertheless be stern and unflinching when there is a question of right and wrong—the very woman for a sick nurse.

While we men talked over our coffee, Roderick sat down to the piano and sang: little Italian folk-songs and German lieder. When he was singing, there was a simplicity about him that gave him a likeness to her. She hung over the piano, and seemed almost to forget where she was. When I remembered her confidences a few hours ago, I was puzzled.

Did she love him—or his music?

Presently, my question was answered. When he had sung half-a-dozen chansonnettes, he rose and came across to us.

“You like music, doctor?” he asked.

“I like yours,” I said emphatically.

“Has Lilia sung to you yet?” he asked.

“No, and I do not intend to,” said the young lady, jumping up from the sofa where she was sitting by Mrs. Mervyn, and joining us.

“And pray why not?” asked Sir Roderick.

She shook her head and turned aside. For a minute or two I naturally felt embarrassed. But I saw that Mrs. Mervyn was expostulating with her, and presently, after I had taken part in a conversation suddenly started by Mr. Mervyn on the strange vagaries of nervous diseases, apropos of an afflicted poor person he wished me to see, Lilia rose and came back, looking penitent.

“Can I speak?” she began, humbly, when a pause came. “Thanks! I will sing for you with pleasure, Mr. Paull.”

“Not unless you tell us the reason of your extraordinary caprice,” said Sir Roderick, half-bantering, half annoyed. “Come, out with it!”

“You insist, papa?” She spoke pleadingly.

“I do.”

“Mr. Paull reminds me of that dreadful time you were ill—away. I could not sing anything lively; I should choke.”

It was good to see the expression on that old man’s face. There was such a royal content on his fine old features as he looked up at his child.

“Sing one of your morbidities, then,” he said. “Ha! I know! Sing Hamlet that little Danish song. He ought to like that, naturally.” He was suddenly in high good humor.

She went obediently to the piano, took off her long mittens and bracelets (which she handed to Roderick as a matter of course), and sang a sweet, weird melody to Ophelia’s pitiful verses; sang it simply, with a clear, noble voice, the voice of a human being with a great soul.

It affected me, and I think that my emotion was the cause of my curious nervous condition that night.

We retired to our rooms pretty early. My old-looking chamber, with the blackened mahogany furniture, was flooded with moonlight. I had no intention of dreaming thoughts of the day over again all night long, as I have done when sleep has followed some hours’ concentration of thought on one subject; so I had borrowed a book from Sir Roderick—a treatise on “Somnambulism and other irregular manifestations of the Nervous Force,” translated from a work by some Dutch writer, name unknown, which he had spoken of.

Armed with this, I subsided into my feather-bed. (That feather-bed had something to do with what followed, I believe. I here vow myself to further the abolition of feather-beds; they should be taxed, and heavily.) I placed two candles on the little table by my bed, propped myself up against my pillows, and began to read.

The first chapters of the ponderous tome were soon dismissed. Exploded pathology and ancient fallacies filled Part I. of the Dutchman’s treatise. Had I felt at all sleepy, I should have laid down the book there and then, and have chaffed Sir Roderick next day for recommending me such old-fashioned stuff. But I felt absurdly wideawake. So I went on.

The introductory page to Part II. of the volume startled me somewhat. At first I doubted my eyesight. But there, sure enough, were the words—

“What does he mean, the fool?” I thought, turning over. I soon knew.

The man, whoever he may have been, believed in that doctrine of transmigration, attributed in its raw state to Pythagoras, who is by some thought to have learnt it from the Egyptians; a fantastic notion which is still believed in by many Easterns, notably by the Buddhists.

This Dutchman spoke of the soul (the “breath of God”) as being born again and again, according to its moral progress; incarnations being its rule, until it should become sufficiently purified to be reabsorbed into the atmosphere of Divinity (something very like the Nirvana of Buddhism). I smiled, and thought that, judging by the people I had met, the world (according to the Dutchman) is likely to be well populated for a good many years to come.

“By their fruits shall ye know them,” wrote the Hollander, who was addicted to quotations, especially from Holy Writ. The good man, in enumerating the fatal signs of future reincarnation in individuals (whom he spoke of compassionately, for he evidently regarded human life as the greatest of ills), mentioned two particular signs, frivolity and self-absorption. Frivolity he seemed to hold in special abhorrence, as being so very far away from any attribute that might be termed eternal or divine.

This chapter “On the Age of Souls” was such diverting reading, that I grew wider and wider awake. At last, when two o’clock struck, I got up and dressed.

Looking out of window, the garden, bathed in moonlight, was such a ravishing sight that I thought—Why not go out for a stroll?

I would. I blew out my candles (I am certain I did), and opening my bedroom door as quietly as possible, crept downstairs, shoes in hand. Did ever stairs creak like those? Certainly not in my experience. Wondering where the dog Nero was, and whether he would be as amiably disposed towards a midnight marauder as he was towards his master’s guest in broad daylight, I gained the hall.

Then I remembered the bolts and bars. Should they be in as noisy a humour as the stairs, I should have to give up and go back—not to that hot feather-bed, but to my room.

Without in the least thinking it possible that the door to the garden would be unlocked, I tried the handle.

To my surprise, the door was unlocked. I was so astonished, that I stood there for a whole minute thinking how foolhardy was Sir Roderick, or how culpably careless were his servants. Open gates to the grounds, open doors to the house! It was positively inviting burglars to do their worst!

I thought of this as I walked along the white path, which crackled under my feet. I wanted to get out of sight and out of the hearing of any wakeful member of the household, so I went on and on, disregarding the tempting odour of the orange-blossoms in the Italian garden, the tempting sight of the terrace, with its white marble urns, benches, straight cypresses, and picturesque aloes, and was soon in the pinewood, among the gloomy trees.

It was gloomy. Standing still to listen, the silence was oppressive. Then, all of a sudden, there was a shrill skreel that made me start; and some bird, I suppose, came flapping out of the darkness and went fluttering away into the shadow. It must have been a bird, although it looked too big even to be a giant owl or a raven.

I laughed at my scared sensation, and walked briskly onward. Presently I came to a clearing where the grass was mown, and there was a bench against a clump of tall laurels.

I was going towards this with the intention of resting awhile, when I stopped short. A lady was seated in the corner, in the shadow.

Good heavens! It might be Lilia! She was just the girl to wander about out of doors on a hot night. I did not know whether I was glad or sorry when the being rose and came towards me. To my amazement, I saw a very graceful woman, in a white gown of some stuff which shimmered in the moonlight. A veil of black gauze or lace was about her head and neck.

“You are not—angry?” she said in a slow way; she had a foreign accent. “Come, I must speak.”

As she said the word “must,” she actually placed her hand on my arm in the most familiar way, and half led me across the grass plat.

“We will go to the terrace and talk,” she said presently, in quite an imperious manner.

I was so numbed by surprise, that I had gone passively with her some distance along the path that led away from the house or grounds before I had made up my mind what to do. She was no ghost. As she pressed close against my arm, I felt solidity and warmth. Then it flashed across me. She was dressed in quite queenly fashion. Of course! An escaped lunatic from a well-known private asylum in the neighbourhood. I stopped, withdrew her hand gently and respectfully, and suggested that she must be very tired.

“Allow me to take you home, princess,” I said, haphazard.

I had seemingly struck the right chord.

“Do not call me that any more!” she said, passionately. “I am less than you! Far less!”

Once more she took my arm, and hurried me along an uphill path I had not seen. To our left, below us, was the park, with the round chapel in the garden; to our right was a plateau, a long, wide, grassy avenue, with fine trees on either side.

My strange companion turned abruptly to the right, and almost dragged me along a grassy path that went straight to the end of the avenue, between beds of overgrown shrubs and tangled weeds. My wits were returning. I felt inclined to go through with the adventure. She was evidently a lady. There was no hidden danger, I felt that.

Half-way up this avenue there was a broken-down fountain. Around was a circular grass plat. As we reached this the lady relinquished my arm, stepped back, and began speaking rapidly in a language I have not yet heard. At the end, she seized my hand, and before I could snatch it away, kissed it.

I felt horribly unnerved. I begged her to let me take her home.

“It is by far too late for you to be here—alone,” I said.

“Late?” she cried, in English. “It is not late!”

“It must be three o’clock,” I said.

Then I took out my watch and tried to see it in the moonlight. Just as I did so, a clock struck three.

“You hear?” I said, turning round.

She was not there!

It gave me a shock. Then I remembered how swift and noiseless lunatics can be. There had been time enough for her to slip away under the trees. First, I listened. Not a sound; not the rustle of a falling leaf, not the crackle of a twig. Then I searched, and called; until a sudden uncanny sensation that I was the subject of some temporary delirium sent me, flying almost, towards the house.

I was thankful to see its white walls, to find the door open, and to gain my room.

As soon as I had done so, I felt such sudden fatigue that I got back into bed again as quickly as I could, and fell asleep directly.

I have set this down just as it seemed to me to be happening, neither more nor less.

Now comes the, to me, most curious part.

I was awakened by the footman bringing me the hot water. After he had gone out of the room, I turned to get up, when my attention was arrested by the china candlesticks on the table by the bed. The candles were burnt out, and the china rims were blackened.

“I put those out; I could have sworn it,” I said to myself. I remembered noticing the peculiar shape of one of the gutterings. It was like a monkey crawling up a stick. Could I have lit them on my return? I thought. No! I remembered throwing off my clothes in the moonlight, my eyelids weighed down by sudden drowsiness.

While I had my bath and dressed I pondered. No result came from my ponderings.

Then I heard fresh young voices, and hurried my dressing. Some feeling urged me to interrupt a bantering tête-à-tête between Roderick and Lilia. Going down, I found them in the hall: Lilia was standing against the billiard-table, frowning; Roderick was talking earnestly to her. He stopped speaking when I came in. She blushed.

Why blush? It was no business of mine, of course; but I did not wish to find that charming young creature utterly inconsistent. And any parleying from a lover point of view, with her cousin, after yesterday’s confidences, would prove her undeniably inconsistent.

But the blush faded, and she looked grave when she saw me.

“I am afraid you have had a bad night, Dr. Paull,” she said, kindly.

“Why?” I asked, nodding back good-morning to Captain Pym.

“You look so tired.”

I vouchsafed that I had an early morning stroll, and spoke of the unfastened door.

“The door into the garden?”

She looked amazed; and then walked to that door and tried it.

“It is locked and bolted now, whatever it was then,” she said.

I joined her, and sure enough it was.

“The omission must have been found out and rectified,” I said.

Indeed, I was absolutely certain on that point. That door was unchained and unbolted at two o’clock that morning.

She was concerned, and begged me as a favour not to mention the fact to her father. I did not. He just came into the hall then, and we went in to breakfast.

After breakfast, Captain Pym took leave, and started for the camp. Sir Roderick settled, in his dogmatic way, that after church (this was Sunday) Lilia should take me round the grounds. He seemed astonished that I should wish to accompany her to morning service.

“I thought you and I agreed on those subjects,” he said. “I had been looking forward to a pipe and a chat while Lilia was on her knees trying to propitiate her Fetishes.”

“Just as you please,” I said.

Glancing at Lilia, I fancied she looked disappointed. But Fancy seemed to have got me in a vice and to shake me like a dog shakes a rat, all the time I was at the Pinewood.

It was settled I should accompany her. Meanwhile I went into the study with Sir Roderick, and presently we got upon the subject of the Dutchman’s treatise.

“How did you like it?” he asked.

“It is hardly a question of liking,” I said. “The man is as illogical as Swedenborg, without the originality or the power.”

He looked surprised.

“How?” he said.

“That chapter ‘On the Age of Souls’ seems to me almost an absurdity,” I could not help saying.

“On what?” he said, taking his long pipe from his mouth, and staring curiously at me.

I repeated what I had said, adding comments on the extravagance of that part of the treatise.

He shook his head, puzzled.

“You must be dreaming,” he said. “I have no book in my library containing stuff of that sort. Where is it?”

I offered to fetch it, but he had already sounded his hand-gong, and James was sent for the volume.

He was absent but a minute, but the time seemed long to me. Sir Roderick puffed away at his pipe, with an amused smile which was peculiarly exasperating.

His hand went out for the volume as soon as James appeared, and of course the young man gave it to his master, who carefully looked it through, then handed it to me.

“I cannot find this redoubtable chapter,” he said; “perhaps you can. But I flattered myself I knew the book well.”

I began at the beginning, turning over the pages carefully one by one, and recognising what I had read overnight. By the time I had come to the end of the first chapter I felt more assured. But when I turned over to the second, it was totally unfamiliar. I had certainly never read a word of it before; and its heading was “On Ordinary Somnambulism.”

I went on turning the pages, feeling as if I was bewitched, until I came to the end; but there was no chapter that even alluded to any doctrine of transmigration, and certainly no heading bearing the faintest resemblance to that curious title, “On the Age of Souls.”

“It is most extraordinary!” I cried. “I could swear to having read what I told you about. I remember the very words and the quaint turning of the phrases.”

He asked me how I had read it; then laughed at me.

“I hit the mark when I said you were dreaming, Hamlet,” he said. “It has often happened to me to continue thinking after dropping asleep, and nice bathos the thoughts are!”

He dismissed the matter as a joke; but it was no joke to me. I was bewildered. When I think of it now the bewilderment is greater, the sense of confused perceptions more alarming.

During the talk which followed, I tried to gain a clue to the strange lady I met in the grounds. I casually alluded to the asylum in the neighbourhood, and asked if the authorities there were not almost lax in their vigilance.

“I cannot help thinking that I met an escaped madwoman, when I was taking a walk early this morning,” I said. “She looked, and I think must be, insane.”

“You could not have met a lady patient of Dr. Walters’, my dear Hamlet,” said Sir Roderick.

I asked, “Why not?”

“For a very good reason, the best of reasons,” he replied: “he hasn’t any. He only takes men. In which, I may add, he shows his wisdom, for female lunatics are the most disgusting creatures on earth. Pah! let us change the subject.”

I was only too glad. But I was not in the least fit for a scientific discussion with my host. I felt a dread gradually investing me—a dread lest I should find that the deserted spot the strange lady dragged me to last night actually existed in the grounds.

If I should come upon it just as it was, I should believe in my adventure as a fact. In that case, how about the missing chapter “On the Age of Souls”? For if my adventure actually happened, I was not asleep and dreaming immediately beforehand; at all events, it was extremely improbable that I was.

I was getting considerably strung up, when a tap came at the door, and Lilia came in, fresh, sweet in her muslin summer dress, like Dawn dispelling the dismal darkness of my thoughts.

“A quarter-past ten, and service begins at eleven,” she said.

“And it is about seven minutes’ walk to the church. Sit down, we are talking,” said Sir Roderick, dictatorially.

She looked wistfully at me.

“I thought you wanted to see the grounds,” she said.

“So I do, very much indeed,” I said.

My host did not look best pleased. He little knew what was in my mind.

Nor did she, sweet girl, as we started; and she would stop here and there to show me some choice foreign shrub or some new plant, or the view from this or that particular spot. All the time I was wondering how I should introduce the subject of the neglected plateau with the broken-down fountain.

The opportunity came.

“Your father does not allow any part of his shrubberies to run wild,” I said; “but I fancied I saw a wild-looking spot among the pines, where there were neglected flower-beds and the grass was unmown.”

She shook her head.

“I don’t know of any place about like that,” she said, reflectively. “No! I am sure that none of the flower-beds have weeds. Papa hates weeds: and weeding gives employment to people who cannot do much else.”

I had hardly time to be reassured by this support of the theory that the events of last night meant nightmare and nothing else, when we suddenly came upon that clearing with the grass plat. That bench under the laurels, where the lady had been sitting, was there. It was the same spot I had seen by moonlight—the very same.

“I come here and read sometimes on summer afternoons,” said Lilia, looking up at me innocently. “Why, what is the matter, Mr. Paull? You are frowning.”

“I was thinking that this is rather a damp place,” I said, “and cheerless looking.”

“Not to me,” she said. “But I only come here on really sultry days. When it is simply mild, I prefer the terrace. You haven’t seen the terrace. Do come, it has a history.”

The terrace! The terrace with a history! So it was not a dream; no, something far more disagreeable. Then and there I began to wonder whether I had not hit upon a family mystery. As we strolled along the path I had walked over but a few hours since with an unknown lady hanging familiarly upon my arm, I was imagining a possible elucidation of my mystery. Lilia’s mother—of whom I had heard absolutely nothing—perhaps mentally afflicted, shut up in some cottage or house on the estate, and wandering by night? Other even more extravagant ideas occurred to me.

No! that idea was untenable, for my moonlight acquaintance was indisputably a very young woman, almost a girl.

At that moment we came to the upward path leading to the plateau. I recognised it at once. Below was the park, with the chapel.

But—yes, it was the plateau, but not as I had seen it. The trees were pruned, the grass-walks smooth as green velvet, the flower-beds brilliant with blossom.

“We often have tea here, papa and I,” said Lilia. “The story goes that this was the flower-garden of the old house two hundred years ago, and that they used to have afternoon gatherings here, like the garden-parties people have now.”

She must have thought me abnormally stupid that Sunday morning. When I saw a marble fountain, with water splashing into a basin where gold-fish were swimming, instead of the wrecked, broken-down object in my dream, I took refuge in silence; and as soon as I could, I left the uncanny spot. Whether I had dreamt of it, or of some place like it, of that I felt sure—the spot was uncanny.

While we walked through the wood towards the church, Lilia talked, but I heard little of what she said. She was telling me some story of a duel between the former proprietor of the Pinewood and a supposed friend, which had taken place on the terrace, and the chapel below was erected in memory of the event. If it was not exactly this, it was very much like it; and really I do not care. All that I want now is to find out whether my brain played me false that night, and whether I am likely to be the victim of brain disease if I go on working as hard as I have worked.

That darling girl! How good she was to me, how patient!

In spite of my inward anxiety, I shall always remember that Sunday with pleasure. The little whitewashed church, with the honest rustics singing hearty hymns to the quavering organ, while sunbeams came and went upon the walls, and the quivering foliage of an elm in the churchyard cast green lights upon my open prayer-book. The Mervyns are nice people. Mrs. Mervyn is a trifle too sharp, perhaps; I saw her eyes fixed upon me now and then with rather too scrutinising an expression. But it is very pretty, almost touching, to see her ways with that motherless girl. She loves her really, the good woman! When we were walking in the garden, Lilia and Mr. Mervyn strolling on in front of us, she was so good as to tell me she was glad I had come.

“Lilia knows so few young people, and no girls,” she said. “It is a law of her father’s, and always has been. Poor dear child! she is really not fit to face the world. She knows absolutely nothing of it.”

“Let us hope she may not be called upon to face the world,” I said.

[Here the written pages in a notebook of Hugh Paull’s abruptly ended.]