"I think," said he, "we must make another attempt, for her condition may become the more serious the longer it is left. We'll set the Sister and the nurse to try this time, and we'll turn her bed north and south, in the line of the earth's magnetism." But just then the lady's father, the old Lord Rivercourt, appeared in response to the doctor's telegram, and the experiment with the women had to wait. The old lord was naturally filled with wonder and anxiety when he saw his apparently lifeless daughter. He was amazed that she should have been overcome by such influence as, he understood, the old gentleman must wield. She had always, he said, enjoyed the finest health, and was as little inclined to hysteria as woman well could be. Lefevre told the father that this was something other than hystero-hypnotism, which, while it reassured him as to his daughter's former health, made him the more anxious regarding her present condition.

"It is very extraordinary," said the old lord; "but whatever it is,—and you say it is like the young man's case that we have all read about,—whatever it is,"—and he laid his hand emphatically on the doctor's arm,—"she could not be in more capable hands than yours."

That assurance, though soothing to the doctor's self-esteem, added gravely to his sense of responsibility.

While they were yet speaking, Lefevre was further troubled by the announcement that a detective-inspector desired to speak with him! Should he tell the inspector all that he had seen the night before, and all that he suspected now, or should he hold his peace? His duty as a citizen, as a doctor, and as, in a sense, the protector of his patient, seemed to demand the one course, while his consideration for Julius and for his own family suggested the other. Surely, never was a simple, upright doctor involved in a more bewildering imbroglio!

The detective-inspector entered, and opened an interview which proved less embarrassing than Lefevre had anticipated. The detective had already made up his mind about the case and his course regarding it. He put no curious questions; he merely inquired concerning the identity and the condition of the lady. When he heard who she was, and when he caught the import of an aside from Lord Rivercourt that it would be worth any one's while to discover the mysterious offender, professional zeal sparkled in his eye.

"I think I know my man," said he; and the doctor looked the lively interest he felt. "I am right, I believe, Dr Lefevre, in setting this down to the author of that other case you had,—that from the Brighton train?" Lefevre thought he was right in that. "'M. Dolaro:' that was the name. I had charge of the case, and was baffled. I shan't miss him this time. I shall get on his tracks at once; he can't have left the Park in broad daylight, a singular man like him, without being noticed."

"It rather puzzles me," said the doctor, "what crime you will charge him with."

"It is an outrage," said Lord Rivercourt; "and if it is not criminal, it seems about time it were made so."

"Oh, we'll class it, my lord," said the detective; "never fear."

The detective departed; but Lord Rivercourt seemed not inclined to stir.

"You will excuse me," said Lefevre; "but I must perform a very delicate operation."

"To be sure," said the old lord; "and you want me to go. How stupid of me! I kept waiting for my daughter to wake up; but I see that, of course, you have to rouse her. It did not occur to me what that machine meant. Something magneto-electric—eh? Forgive one question, Lefevre. I can see you look anxious: is Mary's condition very serious?—most serious? I can bear to be told the complete truth."

The doctor was touched by the old gentleman's emotion. He took his hand. "It is serious," said he—"most serious, for this reason, that I cannot account for her obstinate lethargy; but I think there is no immediate danger. If necessity arises, I shall send for you again."

"To the House," said Lord Rivercourt. "I shall be sitting out a debate on our eternal Irish question."

Lefevre was left seriously discomposed, but at once he sent for the house-physician, summoned the Sister and the nurse, and set about his third attempt to revive his patient. He got the bed turned north and south. He carefully explained to the two women what was demanded of them, and applied them to their task; but, whatever the cause, the failure was completer than before: there was not even a tremor of muscle in the unconscious lady, and the doctor was suffused with alarm and humiliation. Failure!—failure!—failure! Such a concatenation had never happened to him before!

But failure only nerves the brave and capable man to a supreme effort for success. Still self-contained, and apparently unmoved, the doctor gave directions for some liquid nourishment to be artificially administered to his patient, said he would return after dinner, and went his way. The society of friends or acquaintances was distasteful to him then; the thought even of seeing his own familiar dining-room and his familiar man in black, whose silent obsequiousness he felt would be a reproach, was disagreeable. All his thought, all his attention, all his faculties were drawn tight to this acute point—he must succeed; he must accomplish the task he had set himself: life at that hour was worth living only for that purpose. But how was success to be compelled?

He walked for a while about the streets, and then he went into a restaurant and ordered a modest dinner. He broke and crumbled his bread with both hands, his mind still intent on that one engrossing, acute point. While thus he sat he heard a voice, as in a dream, say, "The very doctor you read about. That's the second curious case he's got in a month or so.... Oh yes—very clever; he treats them, I understand, in the same sort of way as the famous Dr Charbon of Paris would.... I should say so; quite as good, if not better than Charbon. I'd rather have an English doctor any day than a French.... His name's in the paper—Lefevre." Then the doctor woke to the fact that he was being talked about. He perceived his admirers were sitting at a table a little behind him, and he judged from what had been said that his fresh case was already being made "copy" of in the evening papers. The flattering comparison of himself with Dr Charbon had an oddly stimulating effect upon him, notwithstanding that it had been uttered by he knew not whom,—a mere vox et praeterea nihil. He disclaimed to himself the truth of the comparison, but all the same he was encouraged to bend his attention with his utmost force to the solution of his difficult problem—what to do to rouse his patient?

He sat thus, amid the bustle and buzz of the restaurant, the coming and going of waiters, completely abstracted, assailing his difficulty with questions on this side and on that,—when suddenly out of the mists that obscured it there rose upon his mental vision an idea, which appealed to him as a solution of the whole, and, more than that, as a secret that would revolutionise all the treatment of nervous weakness and derangement. How came the idea? How do ideas ever come? As inspirations, we say, or as revelations; and truly they come upon us with such amazing and inspiriting freshness, that they may well be called either the one or the other. But no great idea had ever yet an epiphany but from the ferment of more familiar small ideas,—just as the glorious Aphrodite was born of the ferment and pother of the waves of the sea. Lefevre's new idea clothed itself in the form of a comparative question—Why should there not be Transfusion of Nervous Force, Ether, or Electricity, just as there is Transfusion of Blood?

He pushed his dinner away (he could scarcely have told what he had been eating and drinking), called for his bill, and returned with all speed to the hospital. He entered his female ward just as evening prayers were finished, before the lights were turned out and night began for the patients. He summoned his trusted assistant, the house-physician, again.

"I am about to attempt," said he, "an altogether new operation: the patient has remained just as I left her, I suppose?"

"Just the same."

"Nervous Force, whether it be Electricity or not, is manifestly a fluid of some sort: why should it not be transfused as the other vital fluid is?"

"Indeed, sir, when you put it so," said the house-physician, suddenly steeled and brightened into interest, "I should say, 'why not?' The only reason against it is what can be assigned against all new things—it has not, so far as I know, been done."

"Exactly. I am going to try. I think, in case we need a current, so to say, to draw it along, that we shall use the apparatus too; we shall therefore need the women."

"You mean, of course," said the young man, "you will cut a main nerve."

"I shall use this nerve," said Lefevre, indicating the main nerve in the wrist,—upon which the young man, in his ready enthusiasm, began to bare his arm.

"My dear fellow," said Lefevre, "do you consider what you are so promptly offering? Do you know that my experiment, if successful, might leave you a paralytic, or an imbecile, or even—a corpse?"

"I'll take the risk, sir," said the young man.

"I can't permit it, my boy," said Lefevre, laying his hand on his arm, and giving him a look of kindness. "Nobody must run this risk but me. I don't mean, however, to cut the nerve."

"What then, sir?"

"Well," said Lefevre, "this Nervous Force, or Nervous Ether, is clearly a very volatile, and at the same time a very searching fluid. It can easily pass through the skin from a nerve in one person to a nerve in another. There is no difficulty about that; the difficulty is to set up a rapid enough vibration to whirl the current through!" He said that in meditative fashion: he was clearly at the moment repeating the working out of the problem.

"I see," said the young man, looking thoughtful.

"Now, you are a musician, are you not?"

"I play a little," said the young man, with a bewildered look.

"You play the violin?"

"Yes."

"And, of course, you have it in your rooms. Would you be so good as to bring me the bow of your violin, and borrow for me anywhere a tuning-fork of as high a note as possible?"

The young man looked at Dr Lefevre in puzzled inquiry; but the doctor was considering the electrical apparatus before him, and the young man set off on his errands. When he returned with the fiddle-bow and the tuning-fork, he saw Lefevre had placed the machine ready, with fresh chemicals in the vessels.

"Do you perceive my purpose?" asked Lefevre. He placed one handle of the apparatus in the unconscious patient's right hand, while he himself took hold of her left arm with his right hand, so that the inner side of his wrist was in contact with the inner side of hers; and then, to complete the circle of connection, he took in his left hand the other handle of the apparatus. "You don't understand?"

"I do not," answered the young man.

"We want a very rapid vibration—much more rapid than usual," said the doctor. "I can apply no more rapid vibration at present than that which the note of that tuning-fork will produce. I want you to sound the tuning-fork with the fiddle-bow, and then apply the fork to this wire."

"Oh," said the young man, "I understand!"

"Now," said Lefevre, "you'd better call the Sister to set the electricity going."

The Sister came and took her place as before described—with her hands, that is, on the cylinder of the electrode, her fingers dipping over into the vessels of chemicals. She opened her eyes and smiled at sight of the fiddle-bow and tuning-fork.

"I am trying a new thing, Sister," said Lefevre, with a touch of severity. "I do not need you, I do not wish you, to exert yourself this time; I only wish you to keep that position, and to be calm. Maintain your composure, and attend.... Now!" said he, addressing the young man.

The fiddle-bow was drawn across the tuning-fork, and the fork applied with its thrilling note to the conducting wire which Lefevre held. The wire hummed its vibration, and electricity tingled wildly through Lefevre's nerves... There was an anxious, breathless pause for some seconds, and fear of failure began to contract the doctor's heart.

"Take your hands away, Sister," said he. Then, turning to his assistant, "Apply that to the other wire," said he; and dropping his own wire, he put his hand over the cylinder, with his fingers dipping into the vessel from which the other wire sprang. When the wire hummed under the tuning-fork and the vibration thrilled again, instantly he felt as if an inert obstruction had been removed. The vibratory influence whirled wildly through him, there was a pause of a second or two (which seemed to him many minutes in duration), and then suddenly a kind of rigor passed upon the form and features of his patient, as if each individual nerve and muscle were being threaded with quick wire, a sharp rush of breath filled her chest, and she opened her eyes and closed them again.

"That will do," said Lefevre in a whisper, and, releasing his hands, he sank back in a chair. "It's a success," said he, turning his eyes with a thin smile on the house-physician, and then closing them in a deadly exhaustion.



Chapter VI.

At the Bedside of the Doctor.

For the first time since he had come into the world Dr Lefevre was that night attended by another doctor. The resident assistant-physician took him home to Savile Row in a cab, assisted him to bed, and sat with him a while after he had administered a tonic and soporific. Then he left him in charge of the silent man in black, whom he reassured by saying that there was no danger; that his master had a magnificent constitution; that he was only exhausted—though exhausted very much; and that all he needed was rest, sleep, nourishment,—sleep above all.

Lefevre slept the night through like a child, and awoke refreshed, though still very weak. He was bewildered with his condition for a moment or two, till he recalled the moving and exhausting experiences of the day before, and then he was suffused with a glow of elation,—elation which was not all satisfaction in the successful performance of a new experiment, nor in a good deed well done. His friend came to see him early, to anticipate the risk of his rising. He insisted that he should keep his bed, for that day at least, if not for a second and a third day. He reported that the patient was doing well; that she had asked with particularity, and had been informed with equal particularity, concerning the method of her recovery, upon which she was much bemused, and asked to see her physician.

"It is a pity she was told," said Lefevre; "it is not usual to tell a patient such a thing, and I meant it to be kept secret, at least till it was better established." But for all his protest he was again suffused with that new sense of inward joy.

Alone, and lying idle in bed, it was but natural—it was almost inevitable—that the doctor's thoughts should begin to run upon the strange events and suspicions of the past two days; and their current setting strongly in one channel, made him long to be resolved whether or no the Man of the Crowd, the author of yesterday's outrage, the "M. Dolaro" of whom the detective had gone in search, and who, if captured, would be certainly overwhelmed with contumely, if not with punishment,—whether or not that strange creature was Julius's father, or any relation at all of Julius. He was not clear how he could well put the matter to Julius, since he so evidently shrank from discourse upon it, yet he thought some kind of certainty might be arrived at from an interview with him. On the chance of his having returned to his chambers, he called for pen and paper and wrote a note, asking him to look in, as he would be resting all day. "Try to come," he urged; "I have something important to speak about."

This he sent by the trusty hand of his man in black; and by mid-day Julius was announced. He came in confident, and bright as sunshine (Lefevre thought he had never seen him looking more serene); but suddenly the sunshine was beclouded, and Julius ceased to be himself, and became a restless, timorous kind of creature, like a bird put in a cage under the eye of his captor.

"What?" he cried when he entered, with an eloquent gesture. "Lazying in bed on such a day as this? What does this mean?" But when he observed the pallor and weakness of Lefevre's appearance, he paused abruptly, refrained from the hand stretched out to greet him, and exclaimed in a tone of something like terror, "Good heavens! Are you ill?" A paleness, a shudder, and a dizziness passed upon him as if he sickened. "May I," he said, "open the window?"

"Certainly, Julius," said Lefevre, in surprise and alarm. "Do you feel ill?"

"No—no," said Julius from the window, where he stood letting the air play upon his face, and speaking as if he had to put considerable restraint upon himself. "I—I am unfortunately, miserably constituted: I cannot help it. I cannot bear the sight of illness, or lowness of health even. It appals me; it—it horrifies me with a quite instinctive horror; it deadens me."

Lefevre, whose abundant sympathy and vitality went out instinctively to succour and bless the weak and the ill, was inexpressibly shocked and offended by this confession of what to his sense appeared selfish cowardice and inhumanity. He had again and again heard it said, and he had with pleasure assented to the opinion, that Julius was a rare, finely-strung being, with such pure and glowing health that he shrank from contact with, or from the sight of, pain or ill-health, and even from their discussion; but now that the singularity of Julius's organization impinged upon his own experience, now that he saw Julius shrink from himself, he was shocked and offended. Julius, on his part, was pitiably moved. He kept away from the bed; he fidgeted to and fro, looking at this thing and that, without a sparkle of interest in his eye, yet all with his own peculiar grace.

"You wanted to speak to me," he said. "Do you mind saying what you have to say and letting me go?"

"I reckoned upon your staying to lunch," said Lefevre.

"I can't!—I can't!... Very sorry, my dear Lefevre, but I really can't! Forgive what seems my rudeness. It distresses me that at such a time as this my sensations are so acute. But I cannot help it!—I cannot!"

"You have been in the country,—have you not?" said Lefevre, beginning with a resolve to get at something.

"I have just come back," said Julius. "My man told me you had called."

"Yes. My mother wrote in a state of great anxiety about you, and asked me to go and look at you. She said that she and my sister had seen a good deal of you lately; that you began to look unwell, and then ceased to appear, and she was afraid you might be ill."

This was put forth as an invitation to Julius to expound not only his own situation, but also his relations with Lady and Miss Lefevre, but Julius took no heed of it. He merely said, "No; I was not ill. I only wanted a little change to refresh me,"—and walked back to the window to lave himself in the air.

"Well," continued Lefevre, "since I called to see you, I have had an adventure or two. You never look at a newspaper except for the weather, and so it is probable you do not know that I had brought to me yesterday afternoon another strange case like that of the young officer a month ago,—a similar case, but worse."

"Worse?" exclaimed Julius, dropping into the chair by the window, and glancing, as a less preoccupied observer than the doctor would have remarked, with a wistful desire at the door.

"Much worse—though, I believe, from the same hand," said Lefevre. "A lady this time,—titularly and really a lady,—Lady Mary Fane, the daughter of Lord Rivercourt."

"Oh, good heavens!" exclaimed Julius, and there were manifest so keen a note of apprehension in his voice and so deep a shade of apprehension on his face, that Lefevre could not but note them and confirm himself in his suspicion of the intimate bond of connection between him and the author of the outrage. He pitied Julius's distress, and hurried through the rest of his revelation, careless of the result he had sought.

"It may prove," said he, "a far more serious affair than the other. Lord Rivercourt is not the man to sit quietly under an outrage like that."

Julius astonished him by demanding, "What is the outrage? Has the lady given an account of it? What does she accuse the man of?"

"She has not spoken yet,—to me, at least," said Lefevre; "and I don't know what the outrage can be called, but I am sure Lord Rivercourt—and he is a man of immense influence—will move heaven and earth to give it a legal name, and to get it punishment. There is a detective on the man's track now."

"Oh!" said Julius. "Well, it will be time enough to discuss the punishment when the man is caught. Now, if that is all your news," he added hurriedly, "I think—" He took up his hat, and was as if going to the door.

"It is not quite all," said the doctor, and Julius went back to the window, with his hat in his hand.

"I wonder," he broke out, "if we shall ever be simple enough and intelligent enough to perceive that real wickedness—the breaking of any of the laws of Nature, I mean (or, if you prefer to say so, the laws of God)—is best punished by being left to itself? Outraged nature exacts a severe retribution! But you were going to say—?"

"The night before last," continued Lefevre, determined to be brief and succinct, "I was walking in the Strand, and I could not help observing a man who fulfilled completely the description given of the author of this case and my former one."

"Well?"

"That is not all. When I caught sight of his face I was completely amazed; for—I must tell you—it looked for all the world like you grown old, or, as I said to myself at the time, like a death-mask of you."

"You—you saw that?" exclaimed Julius, leaning against the window with a sudden look of terror which Lefevre was ashamed to have seen: it was like catching a glimpse of Julius's poor naked soul. "And you thought—?" continued Julius.

"You shall hear. Dr Rippon—you remember the old doctor?—had a sight of a man in the Strand the night before, who, he believes, was his old friend Courtney that he thought dead, and who, I believe, was the man I saw."

Lefevre stopped. There was a pause, in which Julius put his head out of the window, as if he had a mind to be gone that way. Then he turned with a marked control upon himself.

"Really, Lefevre," said he, "this is the queerest stuff I've heard for a long time! This is hallucination with a vengeance! I don't like to apply such a tomfool word to anything, but observe how all this has come about. An excellent old gentleman, who has been dining out or something, has a glimpse at night, on a crowded pavement, of a man who looks like a friend of his youth. Very well. The excellent old gentleman tells you of that, and it impresses you. You walk on the same pavement the next evening—I won't emphasise the fact of its being after dinner, though I daresay it was—"

"It was."

"—You have a glimpse of a man who looks—well, something like me; and you instantly conclude, 'Ah! the Courtney person—the friend of Dr Rippon's youth!—and, surely, some relative of my friend Julius!' Next day this hospital case turns up, and because the description of its author, given by more or less unobservant persons, fits the person you saw, argal, you jump to the conclusion that the three are one! Is your conclusion clear upon the evidence? Is it inevitable? Is it necessary? Is it not forced?"

"Well," began Lefevre.

"It is bad detective business," broke in Julius, "though it may be good friendship. You have thought there was trouble in this for me, and you wished to give me warning of it. But—que diable vas-tu faire dans cette galere? You are the best friend in the world, and whenever I am in trouble—and who knows? who knows? 'Man is born unto trouble, as the sparks fly upward'—I may ask of you both your friendship and your skill. One thing I ask of you here: don't speak of me as you see me now, thus miserably moved, to any one! Now I must go. Good-bye." And before Lefevre could find another word, Julius had opened the door and was gone.

"If it moves him like that," said the doctor to himself, through his bewilderment, "there must be something worse in it—God forgive me for thinking so!—than I have ever imagined."



Chapter VII.

Contains a Love Interlude.

Next day Lefevre learned that the police had been again baffled in their part of the inquiry. The detective had contrived to trace his man—though not till the morning after the event—to the St Pancras Hotel, where he had dined in private, and gone to bed early, and whence he had departed on foot before any one was astir, to catch, it was surmised, the first train. But wherever he had gone, it was just as in the former case: from the time the hotel door had closed on his cloaked figure, all trace of him was lost.

Nor could Lady Mary Fane add anything of moment to what Lefevre already knew or guessed. Her account of her adventure (which she gave him in her father's house, whither she had been removed on the third day) was as follows: She was returning home from St Thomas's Hospital, dressed according to her habit when she went there; she had crossed Westminster Bridge, and was proceeding straight into St James's Park, when she became aware of a man walking in the same direction as herself, and at the same pace. She casually noted that he looked like a distinguished foreigner, and that he had about him an indefinable suggestion of death clinging with an eager, haggard hope to life,—a suggestion which melted the heart of the beholder, as if it were the mute appeal of a drowning sailor. She was stirred to pity; and when he suddenly appeared to reel from weakness, she stepped out to him on an overwhelming impulse, laid a steadying hand on his arm, and asked what ailed him. He turned on her a pair of wonderful dark eyes, which were animal-like in their simple, direct appeal, and their moist softness. He begged her to lead him aside into a path by which few would pass: he disliked being stared at. Thinking only of him as a creature in sickness and distress, she obeyed without a thought for herself. She helped him to sit down upon a bench, and sat down by him and felt his pulse. He looked at her with an open, kindly eye, with a simple-seeming gratitude, which held her strangely (though she only perceived that clearly on looking back). He said to her suddenly,—

"There was a deep, mystical truth in the teaching of the Church to its children—that they should prefer in their moments of human weakness to pray to the Virgin-mother; for woman is always man's best friend."

She looked in his face, wondering at him, still with her finger on his pulse, when she felt an unconsciousness come over her, not unlike "the thick, sweet mystery of chloroform;" and she knew no more till she opened her eyes in the hospital bed. "Revived by you," she said to Lefevre.

He inquired further, as to her sensations before unconsciousness, and she replied in these striking words: "I felt as if I were strung upon a complicated system of threads, and as if they tingled and tingled, and grew tighter to numbness." That answer, he saw, was kindred to the description given by the young officer of his condition. It was clear that in both cases the nerves had been seriously played upon; but for what purpose? What was the secret of the stranger's endeavour? What did he seek?—and what find? To these questions no satisfactory answer would come for the asking, so that in his impatience he was tempted to break through the severe self-restraint of science, and let unfettered fancy find an answer.

But, most of all, he longed to see close to him the man whom the police sought for in and out, to judge for himself what might be the method and the purpose of his strange outrages. He scarcely desired his capture, for he thought of the possible results to Julius, and yet—Day after day passed, and still the man was unfound, and very soon a change came over Lefevre's life, which lifted it so far above the plane of his daily professional experience, that all speculation about the mysterious "M. Dolaro," and his probable relation to Julius, fell for a time into the dim background. The doctor had been calling daily in Carlton Terrace to see his patient, when, on a certain memorable day, he intimated to her father that she was so completely recovered that there was no need of his calling on her professionally again. The old lord, looking a little flustered, asked him if he could spare a few minutes' conversation, and led him into his study.

"My dear Lefevre," said he, "I am at a loss how to make you any adequate return for what you have done for my daughter. Money can't do it; no, nor my friendship either, though you are so kind as to say so. But I have an idea, which I think it best to set before you frankly. You are a bachelor: it is not good to be a bachelor," he went on, laying his hand affectionately on the doctor's arm, and flushing—old man of the world though he was—flushing to the eyes. "What—what do you think of my daughter? I mean, not as a doctor, but as a man?"

Lefevre was not in his first youth, and he had had his admirations for women in his time, as all healthy men must have, but yet he was made as deliriously dizzy as if he were a boy by his guess at what Lord Rivercourt meant.

"Why," he stammered, "I think her the most beautiful, intelligent, and—and attractive woman I know."

"Yes," said her father, "I believe she is pretty well in all these ways. But—and you see I frankly expose my whole position to you—what would you think of her for a wife?"

"Frankly, then," said Lefevre, "I find I have admired her from the beginning of this, but I had no notion of letting my admiration go farther, because I conceived that she was quite beyond my hopes."

"My dear fellow," said Lord Rivercourt, "you have relieved me and delighted me immensely. I know no man that I would like so well for a son-in-law. And after all, it is only fitting that the life you have saved with such risk to yourself—oh, I know all about it—should be devoted to making yours happy. And—and I understand from her mother that Mary is quite of the same opinion herself. Now, will you go and speak to her at once, or will you wait till another day? You will have to decide that," said he, with a smile, "not only as lover, but as doctor."

Lefevre hesitated for but an instant; for what true, manly lover would have decided to withdraw till another day when the door to his mistress was held open to him?

"I'll see her now," he said.

Lord Rivercourt led the doctor back to his daughter, and left him with her. There were some moments of chilling doubt and cold uncertainty, and then came a rush of warm feeling at the bidding of a shy glance from Lady Mary. He bent over her and murmured he scarcely knew what, but he heard clearly and with a divine ecstasy a softly-whispered "Yes!" which thrilled in his heart for days and months afterwards, and then he turned to him her face, her beautiful face illumined with love, and kissed it: between two who had been drawn together as they had, what words were needed, or what could poor words convey?

About an hour later he walked to Savile Row to dress and return for dinner. He walked, because he felt surcharged with life. He desired peace and goodwill among men; he pitied with all his soul the weary and the broken whom he met, and wondered with regret that men should get irremediably involved in the toils of their own misdeeds; he was profuse with coppers, and even small silver, to the wretched waifs of society who swept the crossings he had to take on his triumphant way; he would even have bestowed forgiveness on his greatest enemy if he had met him then;—for the divine joy of love was singing in his heart and raising him to the serene and glorious empyrean of heroes and gods. Oh matchless magic of the human heart, which confounds all the hypotheses of science, and flouts all its explanations!

It was that evening when he and Lady Mary sat in sweet converse that she said to him these words, which he hung for ever after about his heart—

"Surely, never before did a man win a wife as you have won me! You made me well by putting your own life into me; so what could I do but give you the life that was already your own!"

Thus day followed day on golden wings: Lefevre in the morning occupied with the patients that thronged his consulting-room; in the afternoon dispensing healing, and, where healing was impossible, cheerfulness and courage, in his hospital wards; and in the evening finding inspiration and strength in the company of Lady Mary—for her love was to him better than wine. All who went to him in those days found him changed, and in a sense glorified. He had always been considerate and kind; but the weakness, the folly, and the wickedness of poor human nature, which were often laid bare to his searching scrutiny, had frequently plunged him into a welter of despondency and shame, out of which he would cry, "Alas for God's image! Alas for the temple of the Holy Ghost!" But in those days it seemed as if disease and death appeared to him mere trivial accidents of life, with the result that no "case," however bad, was sent away empty of hope.



Chapter VIII.

Strange Scenes in Curzon Street.

It happened, however, that just when all the bays and creeks of Dr Lefevre's attention were occupied, as by a springtide, with the excellent, the divine fortune that had come to him,—when he seemed thus most completely divorced from anxious speculation about Julius Courtney and "M. Dolaro," his attention was suddenly and in unexpected fashion hurried again to the mystery. The doctor had not seen Julius since the day he had received him in his bedroom—it must be admitted he had not sought to see him—but he had heard now and then from his mother, in casual notes and postscripts, that Courtney continued to call in Curzon Street.

On a certain evening Lady Lefevre gave a dinner and a reception, designed to introduce Lady Mary to the Lefevre circle. Julius was not at dinner (at which only members of the two families sat down), but he was expected to appear later. It is probable, under the circumstances, that Lefevre would not have remarked the absence of Julius from the dinner-table, had it not been for Nora. He was painfully struck with her appearance and demeanour. She seemed to have lost much of her beautiful vigour and bloom of health, like a flower that has been for some time cut from its stem; and she, who had been wont to be ready and gay of speech, was now completely silent, yet without constraint, and as if wrapt in a dream.

"What has come over Nora?" asked Lefevre of his mother when they had gone to the drawing-room.

"Ah," said Lady Lefevre, "you have noticed something, have you? Do you find her very changed, then?"

"Very much changed."

"It's this attachment of hers to Julius. I want to have a talk with you about it presently. She seems scarcely to live when he is not with her. She sits like that always when he is gone, and appears only to dream and wait,—wait with her life as if suspended till he comes back."

"Has it, indeed, got so far as that?" said her son with concern. "I had better have a word or two with Julius about it."

Just then Mr Courtney was announced, and there were introductions on this side and on that. He turned to be introduced to Lady Mary, and for the time Lefevre forgot his sister, so engrossed was he with the altered aspect of his friend. He looked worn and weary, like a student when the dawn finds him still at his books. Lady Lefevre expressed that in her question—

"Why, Julius, have you taken to hard work? You're not looking well, and we have not seen you for days."

A flush rose to tinge his cheek, but it sank as soon as it appeared.

"I have been out of sorts," said he; "that is all. And you have not seen me because I have bought a yacht and have been trying it on the river."

"A yacht!" exclaimed Lefevre. "I did not know you cared for the water."

"You know me," laughed Julius in his own manner, "and not know that I care for everything!" So saying, he laid his hand on Lefevre's arm. The act was not remarkable, but its result was, for Lefevre felt it as if it were a blow, and stood astonished at it.

During this interchange of words Lefevre (with Lady Mary) had been moving with Julius, as he drew off across the room to greet Nora, and the doctor could not help observing how the attention of all the company was bent on his friend. Before his entrance all had been chatting or laughing easily with their neighbours; now they seemed as constrained and belittled as is a crowd of courtiers when a royal personage appears in their midst. In truth, Julius at all times had a grace, an ease, and a distinction of manner not unworthy of a prince; but on this occasion he had an added something, an indefinable attraction which strangely held the attention. Lefevre, therefore, was scarcely surprised (though, perhaps, a trifle disappointed, considering that he was a lover) to note that Lady Mary was regarding Julius with a silent, wide-eyed fascination. They convoyed Julius to Nora, and then withdrew, leaving them together.

There were several fresh arrivals and new introductions to Lady Mary. These, Lefevre observed, she went through half-absently, still turning her eyes on Julius in the intervals with open and intense interest.

"Well," said Lefevre at length, smiling in spite of a twinge of jealousy, "what do you think, now you have seen him, of the fascinating Julius?"

She gave him no answering smile, but replied as if she painfully withdrew herself from abstraction,—"I—I don't know. He is very interesting and very strange. I—I can't make him out. I don't know."

Then Lefevre turned his eyes on Julius, and became aware of something strained in the relations of his sister and his friend. He could not forbear to look, and as he continued looking he instinctively felt that a passionate scene was being silently enacted between them. They sat markedly apart. Nora's bosom heaved with suppressed emotion, and her look, when raised to Julius, plied him with appeal or reproach—Lefevre could not determine which. The doctor's interest almost drew him over to them, when Lady Lefevre appeared and said to Julius—

"Do go to the piano, Julius, and wake us up."

Nora put out her hand with a gesture which plainly meant, "Don't!... Don't leave me!"

But Julius rose, and as he turned (the doctor noted) he bent an inscrutable look of pain on Nora. He sat down at the piano and struck a wild, sad chord. Instantly it became as if the people in the room were the instrument upon which he played,—as if the throbbing human hearts around him were directly connected by invisible strings with the ivory keys that pulsed beneath his fingers. What was the music he played no one knew, no one cared, no one inquired: each individual person was held and played upon, and was allowed no pause for reflection or criticism. The music carried all away as on the flood of time, showing them, on one hand, sunshine and beauty and joy, and all the pride of life; and on the other, darkness and cruelty, despair, and defiance, and death. It might have been, on the one hand, the music with which Orpheus tamed the beasts; and on the other, that which AEschylus arranged to accompany the last act of his tragedy of "Prometheus Bound." There was, however, no clear distinction between the joyous airs and the sombre: all were wrought and mingled into an exciting and bewildering atmosphere of melody, which thrilled the heart and maddened the brain. But as the music continued, its joyous strains died out; the instrument cried aloud in horror and pain, as if the vulture of Prometheus were tearing at its vitals; darkness seemed to descend upon the room—a darkness alive with the sighs and groans, the disillusions and tears, of lost souls. The men sat transfixed with agony and dread, the women were caught in the wild clutches of hysteria, and Courtney himself was as if possessed with a frenzy: his features were rigid, his eyes dilated, and his hair rose and clung in wavy locks, so that he seemed a very Gorgon's head. The only person apparently unmoved was old Dr Rippon, whose pale, gaunt form rose in the background, sinister and calm as Death!

The situation was at its height, when a black cat (a pet of Miss Lefevre's) suddenly leaped on the top of the piano with a canary in its mouth, and in the presence of them all, laid its captive before Julius Courtney. The music ceased with a dissonant crash. With a cry Julius rose and laid his hand on the cat's neck: to the general amazement the cat lay down limp and senseless, and the little golden bird fluttered away. Then the sobs of the women, hitherto controlled, broke out, and the murmurs of the men.

"O Julius! Julius! what have you done?" cried Nora, sweeping up to him in an ecstasy of emotion.

He caught her in his arms, when with a strange cry—a strained kind of laugh with a hysterical catch in it—she sank fainting on his breast. With a sharp exclamation of pain and fear he bore her swiftly from the room (he was near the door) and into a little conservatory that opened upon the staircase, casting his eyes upon Lefevre as he went, and saying, "Come! come quick!" Lefevre then woke to the fact that he had been fixedly regarding this last strange scene, while Lady Mary clung trembling to his arm. He hurried out after Julius, followed by Lady Mary and his mother.

"Take her!" cried Julius, standing away from Nora, and looking white and terror-stricken. "Restore her! Oh, I must not!—I dare not touch her!"

With nimble accustomed fingers Lady Mary undid Nora's dress, while the doctor applied the remedies usual in hysterical fainting. Nora opened her eyes and fixed them upon Julius.

"O Julius, Julius!" she cried. "Do not leave me! Come near me! Oh!... I think I am going to die!"

"My love! my life! my soul!" said Julius, stretching out his hands to her, but approaching no nearer. "I cannot—I must not touch you! No, no! I dare not!"

"O Julius!" said she. "Are you afraid of me? How can I harm you?"

"Nora, my life! I am afraid of myself! You would not harm me, but I would harm you! Ah, I know it now only too well!"

Then, as she closed her eyes again, she said, "I had better die!"

"No, you must not die!" he exclaimed. "Your time is not yet! Yes, you will live!—live! But I must be cut off—though not for ever—from the sweetest and dearest, the noblest and purest of all God's creatures!"

In the meantime Lefevre had been examining his sister with closer scrutiny. He raised her eyelid and looked at her eye; he pricked her on the arm and wrist; and then he turned to Julius.

"Julius," said he, "what does this mean?"

"It means," answered Julius, covering his face with his hands, "that I am of all living things the most accurst!" Then with a cry of horror and anguish he fled from the room and down the stairs.

Lady Lefevre followed him in a flutter of fear. Presently she returned, and said, in answer to a look from her son, "He snatched his hat and coat, and was gone before I came up with him."

Without a word Lefevre set himself to recover his sister, and in half an hour she was well enough to walk with Lady Mary's assistance to bed.

The guests, meanwhile, had departed, all but two or three intimates; and in less than an hour Dr Lefevre was returning home in the Fane carriage. Lord Rivercourt and he talked of the strange events of the evening, while Lady Mary leaned back and half-absently listened. They were proceeding thus along Piccadilly, when she suddenly caught the doctor's arm and exclaimed—

"Oh! Look! The very man I met in the Park! I am sure of it! I can never forget the face!"

Lefevre, alert on the instant, looked to recognise Hernando Courtney, the Man of the Crowd: he saw only the back of a person in a loose cape and a slouch hat turning in at the gateway of the Albany courtyard. In flashes of reflection these questions arose: Who could he be but Hernando Courtney?—and where could he be going but to Julius's chambers? Julius, therefore (whose own conduct had been that night so extraordinary), must be familiar with his whole mysterious course, and consequently with the peril he was in. Before Lefevre could out of his perplexity snatch a resolution, Lord Rivercourt had pulled the cord to stop the coachman. The coachman, however, having received orders to drive home, was driving at a goodly pace, and it was only on a second summons through the cord that he slackened speed, and obeyed his master's direction to "draw up by the kerb."

"I'll get out," said Lefevre, "and look after him. You'd better get Mary home; she's not very strong yet, and she has been upset to-night."

He put himself thus forward for another reason besides,—on the impulse of his friendship for Julius, without considering whether in the event of an arrest and an exposure, he could do anything to shield Julius from shame and pain.

He got out, saying his adieus, and the carriage drove on. He found himself well past the Albany. He hurried back, nerved by the desire to encounter Julius's visitor, and at the same time by the hope that he would not. In his heart was a turmoil of feeling, to the surface of which continued to rise pity for Julius. The events of the evening had forced him to the conclusion that Julius possessed the same singular, magnetic, baleful influence on men and women as his putative father Hernando; but Julius's burst of agony, when Nora lay overcome, had declared to him that till then he had scarcely been aware of the destructive side of his power. All resentment, therefore, all sense of offence and suspicion which had lately begun to arise in his mind, was swallowed up in pity for his afflicted friend. His chief desire, now that he seemed reduced to the level of suffering humanity, was to give him help and counsel.

Thus he entered the Albany, and passed the porter. The lamps in the flagged passage were little better than luminous shadows in the darkness, and the hollow silence re-echoed the sound of his hurried steps. No one was to be seen or heard in front of him. He came to the letter which marked Julius's abode. He looked into the gloomy doorway, and resolved he would see and speak to Julius in any case. He passed into the gloom and knocked at Julius's door. After a pause the door was opened by Jenkins. Lefevre could not well make out the expression of the serving-man's face, but he was satisfied that his voice was shaken as by a recent shock.

"I wish to see Mr Courtney," said Lefevre, in the half hope that Jenkins would say, "Which Mr Courtney?"

"Not at home, sir," said Jenkins in his flurried voice, and prepared to shut the door.

"Not at home, Jenkins? You don't mean that!"

"Oh, it's you, Dr Lefevre, sir. Mr Courtney is not at home, but perhaps he will see you, sir! I hope he will; for he don't seem to me at all well."

"But if he is engaged, Jenkins—?"

"Oh, sir, you know what 'not-at-home' means," answered Jenkins. "It means anything or nothing. Will you step into the drawing-room, sir, while I inquire? Mr Courtney is in his study."

"Thank you, Jenkins," said the doctor; "I'll wait where I am."

Jenkins returned with deep concern on his face. "Mr Courtney's compliments, sir," said he, "and he is very sorry he cannot see you to-night. It is a pity, sir," he added, in a burst of confidence, "for he don't seem well. He's a-settin' there with the lamp turned down, and his face in his hands."

"Is he alone, then?" asked the doctor.

"Oh yes, sir," answered Jenkins, in manifest surprise.

"Has nobody been to see him since he came in?"

"No, sir, nobody," said Jenkins, in wider surprise than before.

It appeared to Lefevre that his friend must be sitting alone with the terrible discovery he had that night made of himself. His heart, therefore, urged him to go in and take him by the hand, and give what help and comfort he could.

"I think," said he to Jenkins, "I'll try and have a word with him."

"Yes, sir," said Jenkins, and led the way to the study. He tapped at the door, and then turned the handle; but the door remained closed.

"Who is there?" asked a weary voice within, which scarce sounded like the voice of Julius.

"I—Lefevre," said the doctor, putting Jenkins aside. "May not I come in? I want a friendly word with you."

"Forgive me, Lefevre," said the voice, "that I do not let you in. I am very busy at present."

"You are alone," said Lefevre, "are you not?"

"Alone," said Julius; "yes, all alone!" There was a melting note of sadness in the words which went to the doctor's heart.

"My dear Julius," said he, "I think I know what's troubling you. Don't you think a talk with me might help you?"

"You are very good, Lefevre." (That was an unusual form of speech to come from Julius.) "I shall come to your house in a few minutes, if you will allow me."

"Do," answered Lefevre, for the moment completely satisfied. "Do!" And he turned away.

But when Jenkins had closed the outer door upon him, doubts arose. Ought he not to have insisted on seeing whether Julius was in truth alone in the study? And why could they not have had their talk there as well as in Savile Row? These doubts, however, he thrust down with the promise to himself that, if Julius did not come to him within half an hour, he would return to him. Yet he had not gone many steps before an unworthy suspicion shot up and arrested him: Suppose Julius had got rid of him to have the opportunity of sending a mysterious companion away unseen? But Jenkins had said he had let no one in, and it was shameful to suspect both master and man of lying. Yet Lady Mary Fane had distinctly recognised the man who passed into the Albany courtyard: had he merely passed through on his unceasing pursuit of something unknown? or were father and son somehow aware of each other? Between this and that his mind became a jumble of the wildest conjectures. He imagined many things, but never conceived that which soon showed itself to be the fact.



Chapter IX.

An Apparition and a Confession.

He let himself in with his latch-key, went into his dining-room, and sat down dressed as he was to wait. He listened through minute after minute for the expected step. The window was open (for the midsummer night was warm), and all the sounds of belated and revelling London floated vaguely in the air. Twelve o'clock boomed softly from Westminster, and made the heavy atmosphere drowsily vibrate with the volume of the strokes. The reverberation of the last had scarcely died away when a light, measured footfall made him sit up. It came nearer and nearer, and then, after a moment's hesitation, sounded on his own doorstep. With that there came the tap of a cane on the window. With thought and expectation resolutely suspended, Lefevre swung out of the room and to the hall-door. He opened it, and stood and gazed. The light of the hall-lamp fell upon a figure, the sight of which sent the blood in a gush to his heart, and pierced him with horror. He expected Julius, and he looked on the man whom he had followed on the crowded pavements some weeks before,—the man whom the police had long sought for ineffectually!

"Won't you let me in, Lefevre?" said the man.

The doctor stood speechless, with his eyes fixed: the face and dress of the person before him were those of Hernando Courtney, but the voice was the voice of Julius, though it sounded strange and distant, and bore an accent as of death. Lefevre was involved in a wild turmoil and horror of surmise, too appalling to be exactly stated to himself; for he shrank with all his energy from the conclusion to which he was being forced. He turned, however, upon the request for admission, and led the way into the dining-room, letting his visitor close the door and follow.

"Lefevre," said the strange voice, "I have come to show myself to you, because I know you are a true-hearted friend, and because I think you have that exquisite charity that can forgive all things."

"Show myself!" ... As Lefevre listened to the strange voice and looked at the strange person, the suspicion came upon him—What if he were but regarding an Illusion? He had read in some of his mystical and magical writers, that men gifted with certain powers could project to a distance eidola or phantasms of varying likeness to themselves: might not this be such a mocking phantasm of Julius? He drew his hand across his eyes, and looked again: the figure still sat there. He put out his hand to test its substantiality, and the voice cried in a keen pitch of terror—

"Don't touch me!—for your own sake!... Why, Lefevre, do you look so amazed and overcome? Is not my wretched secret written in my face?"

"And you are really Julius Courtney?" asked Lefevre, at length finding utterance, with measured emphasis, and in a voice which he hardly recognised as his own.

"I am Julius Courtney—"

He paused, for Lefevre had put his head in his hands, shaken with a silent paroxysm of grief. It wrung the doctor's heart, as if in the person that sat opposite him, all that was noblest and most gracious in humanity were disgraced and overthrown.

"Yes," continued the voice, "I am Julius; there is no other Courtney that I know of, and soon there will be none at all." The doctor listened, but he could not endure to look again. "I am dying—I have been dying for a dozen years, and for a dozen years I have resisted and overcome death; now I surrender. I have come to my period. I shall never enter your house again. I have only come now to confess myself, and to ask a last favour of you—a last token of friendship."

"I will freely do what I can for you, Julius," said the doctor, still without looking at him, "though I am too overcome, too bewildered, yet to say much to you."

"Thank you. You will hear my story and understand. It contains a secret which I, like a blind fool, have only used for myself, but which you will apply for the wide benefit of mankind. The request I have to make of you is small, but it may seem extraordinary,—be my companion for twelve hours. I cannot talk to you here, enclosed and oppressed with streets of houses. Come with me for a few hours on the water; I have a fancy to see the sun rise for the last time over the sea. I have my yacht ready near London Bridge, and a boat waiting at the steps by Cleopatra's Needle; a cab will soon take us there. Will you come?"

Lefevre did not look up. The voice of Julius sounded like an appeal from the very abode of death. Then he glanced in spite of himself in his face, and was moved and melted to unreserved compassion by the strained weariness of his expression—the open, luminous wistfulness of his eyes.

"Yes; I'll go," said he. "But can't I do something for you first? Let me consider your case."

"There's nothing now to be done for me, Lefevre," said Julius, shaking his head. "You will perceive that when you have heard me out."

The doctor went to find his man and tell him that he was going out for the night to attend on an urgent case. When he returned he stood a moment touched with misgiving. He thought of Lady Mary—he thought of his mother and sister. Ought he not to leave some hint behind him of the strange adventure upon which he was about to embark, and which might end he knew not how or where? Julius was observing him, and seemed to divine his doubt.

"You need have no hesitation," said he. "I ask you only for twelve hours. You can easily get back here by noon to-morrow. There is a south-west wind blowing, with every prospect of settled weather. I am quite certain about it."

Fortified with that assurance, Lefevre put on a thicker overcoat and an old soft hat, turned out the lights in the dining-room and in the hall, closed the door with a slam, and stood with the new, the strange Julius in the street, fairly embarked upon his adventure. It was only with an effort that he could realise he was in the company of one who had been a familiar friend. They walked towards Regent Street without speaking. At the corner of Savile Row they came upon a policeman, and Lefevre had a sudden thrill of fear lest his companion should, at length, be recognised and arrested. Courtney himself, however, appeared in no wise disturbed. In Regent Street he hailed a passing four-wheeler.

"Wouldn't a hansom be quicker?" said Lefevre.

"It is better on your account," said Julius, "that we should sit apart."

When they entered the cab, Courtney ensconced himself in the remote corner of the other seat from Lefevre; and thus without another word they drove to the Embankment. At the foot of the steps by Cleopatra's Needle, they found a waterman and a boat in waiting. They entered the boat, Lefevre going forward while Julius sat down at the tiller. The waterman pulled out. The tide was ebbing, and they slipped swiftly down the dark river, with broken reflections of lamps and lanterns on either bank streaming deep into the water like molten gold as they passed, and with tall buildings and chimney-shafts showing black against the calm night sky. Lefevre found it necessary at intervals to assure himself that he was not drifting in a dream, or that the ghastly, burning-eyed figure, wrapped in a dark cloak in the stern, was not a strange visitor from the nether world.

Soon after they had shot through London Bridge they were alongside a yacht almost in mid-stream. It was clear that all had been prearranged for Julius's arrival; for as soon as they were on board, the yacht (loosed from her upper mooring by the waterman who had brought them down the river) began to stand away.

"We had better go forward," said Courtney. "Are you warm enough?"

The doctor answered that he was. Courtney gave an order to one of the men, who went below and returned with a fur-lined coat which his master put on. That little incident gave a curious shock to Lefevre: it made him think of the mysterious stranger who had sat down opposite the young officer in the Brighton train, and it showed him that he had not been completely satisfied that his friend Julius and the person he had been wont to think of as Hernando Courtney were one and the same.

They went forward to be free of the sail and its tackling. Courtney, wrapped in his extra, his fur-lined coat, pointing to a low folding-chair for Lefevre, threw himself on a heap of cordage. He looked around and above him, at the rippling, flashing water and the black hulls of ships, and at the serene, starlit heavens stretching over all.

"How wonderful!—how beautiful it all is!" he exclaimed. "All, all!—even the dullest and deadest-seeming things are vibrating, palpitating with the very madness of life! He set the world in my heart, and oh, how I loved!—how I loved the world!"

"It is a wonderful world," said Lefevre, trying to speak cheerfully; "and you will take delight in it again when this abnormal fit of depression is over."

"Never, Lefevre!—never, never!" said Courtney in strenuous tones. "I regret it deeply, bitterly, madly,—but yet I know that I have about done with it!"

"Julius," said Lefevre, "I have been so amazed and bewildered, that I have found little to say: I can scarcely believe that you are in very deed the Julius I have known for years. But now let me remind you I am your friend—"

"Thank you, Lefevre."

"—And I am ready to help you to the uttermost in this crisis, which I but dimly understand. Tell me about yourself, and let me see what I can do."

"You can do nothing," said Julius, sadly shaking his head. "Understand me; I am not going to state a case for diagnosis. Put that idea aside; I merely wish to confess myself to my friend."

"But surely," said Lefevre, "I may be your physician as well as your friend. As long as you have life there is hope of life."

"No, no, no, Lefevre! There is a depth of life—life on the lees—that is worse than death! If I could retrace my steps to the beginning of this, taking my knowledge with me, then—! But no, I must go my appointed way, and face what is beyond.... But let me tell you my story.

"You have heard something of my parentage from Dr Rippon, I believe. My father was Spanish, and my mother was English. I think I was born without that sense of responsibility to a traditional or conventional standard which is called Conscience, and that sense of obligation to consider others as important as myself, which, I believe, they call Altruism. I do not know whether the lack of these senses had been manifest in my mother's family, but I am sure it had been in my father's. For generations it had been a law unto itself; none of its members had known any duty but the fulfilment of his desires; and I believe even that kind of outward conscience called Honour had scarcely existed for some of them. I had from my earliest recollection the nature of these ancestors: they, though dead, desired, acted, lived in me,—with something of a difference, due to I know not what. Let me try to state the fact as it appears to me looking back: I was for myself the one consciousness, the one person in the world, all else—trees, beasts, men and women, and what not—being the medium in which, and on which, I lived. I conceived of nothing around me but as existing to please, to amuse, to delight me, and if anything showed itself contrary to these ends, I simply avoided it. What I wished to do I did; what I wished to have I had;—and nothing else. I do not suppose that in these points I was different from most other children of wealthy parents. Where I differed, I believe, was in having a peculiarly sensitive, and at the same time admirably healthy, constitution of body, which induced a remarkable development of desire and gratification. I can hardly make you understand, I am sure I cannot make you feel—I myself cannot feel, I can only remember—what a bright natural creature I was when I was young."

"Don't I remember well," said Lefevre, "what you were like when I first met you in Paris?"

"Ah," said Julius, "the change had begun then,—the change that has brought me to this. I contemplate myself as I was before that with bitter envy and regret. I was as a being sprung fresh from the womb of primitive Nature. I delighted in Nature as a child delights in its mother, and I throve on my delight as a child thrives. I refused to go to school—and indeed little pressure was put upon me—to be drilled in the paces and hypocrisy of civilised mankind. I ran wild about the country; I became proficient in all bodily exercises; I fenced and wrestled and boxed; I leaped and swam; I rowed for days alone in a skiff; I associated with simple peasants, and with all kinds of animals; I delighted in air and water, and grass and trees: to me they were as much alive as beasts are. Oh, what an exquisite, abounding, unclouded pleasure life was! When I was hungry I ate; when I was thirsty I drank; when I was tired I slept; and when I woke I stretched myself like a giant refreshed. It was a pure joy to me in those days to close my fingers into a fist and see the beauty and firmness of my muscles. When solemn, civilised people spoke to me of duty and work, I listened like an idiot. I had nothing in my consciousness to help me to understand them. I knew no more of duty than Crusoe on his island; and as for work, I had no ambition,—why, then, should I work? I read, of course; but I read because I liked it, not because I had tasks set me. I read everything that came in my way; and very soon all literature and science—all good poetry and romance, and all genuine science—came to mean for me a fine, orderly expression of nature and life. And religion, too, I felt as the ecstasy of nature. So I fed and flourished on the milk of life and the bread of life.

"But a time came when I longed to live deeper, and to get at the pith and marrow of life. I was over twenty when it was revealed to me in a noonday splendour and warmth of light, that the human is unspeakably the highest and most enthralling expression of life in all Nature. That discovery happened to me when I was in Morocco with my father, who died there—no matter how—among those whom he liked to believe were his own people: my mother had died long before. I had considerable wealth at my command, and I began to live at the height of all my faculties; I lived in every nerve, and at every pore.

"And then I began to perceive a reverse to the bounteous beauty and the overflowing life of Nature,—a threatening quality, a devouring faculty in her by which she fed the joyous abundance of her life. I saw that all activity, all the pleasant palpitation and titillation in the life of Nature and of Man, merely means that one living thing is feeding upon or is feeding another. I began to perceive that all the interest of life centres in this alter-devouring principle. I discovered, moreover, this strange point,—that the joy of life is in direct proportion to the rapidity with which we lose or surrender life."

"Yes," said Lefevre, "the giving of pleasure is always more exquisite and satisfactory than the getting it."

"I lost life," continued Julius, without noting Lefevre's remark,—"I lost life,—vital force, nervous ether, electricity, whatever you choose to call it,—at an enormous rate, but I as quickly replenished my loss. I had revelled for some time in this deeper life of give and take before I discovered that this faculty of recuperation also was curiously and wonderfully active in me. Whenever I fell into a state of weakness, well-nigh empty of life, I withdrew myself from company, and dwelt for a little while with the simplest forms of Nature."

"But," asked Lefevre, "how did you get into such a low condition?"

"How? I lived!" said he with fervour. "Yes; I lived: that was how! I had always delighted in animals, but then I began to find that when I caressed them they were not merely tamed, as they had been wont, but completely subdued; and I felt rapid and full accessions of life from contact with them. If I lay upon a bank of rich grass or wild flowers, I had to a slight extent the same revivifying sensation. The fable of Antaeus was fulfilled in me. The constant recurrence and vigour of this recuperation not only filled me with pride, but also set me thinking. I turned to medical science to find the secret of it. I entered myself as a student in Paris: it was then I met you. I read deeply, too, in the books of the mediaeval alchemists and sages of Spain, which my father had left me. It came upon me in a clear flood of evidence that Nature and man are one and indivisible, being animated by one identical Energy or Spirit of Life, however various may be the material forms; and that all things, all creatures, according to the activity of their life, have the power of communicating, of giving or taking, this invisible force of life. It furthermore became clear to me that, though the force resides in all parts of a body, floating in every corpuscle of blood, yet its proper channels of circulation and communication are the nerves, so that as soon as a nerve in any one shape of life touches a nerve in any other, there is an instant tendency to establish in them a common level of the Force of Life. If I or you touch a man or woman with a finger, or clasp their hand, or embrace them more completely, the tendency is at once set up, and the force seeks to flow, and, according to certain conditions, does flow, from one to another, evermore seeking to find a common level,—always, that is, in the direction of the greater need, or the greater capacity. I saw then that not only had I a greater storage capacity, so to say, than most men, but also, therefore, when exhaustion came, I had a more insistent need for replenishment, and a more violent shrinking at all times from any weak or unhealthy person who might even by chance contact make a demand on my store of life."

"And is that your secret?" asked Lefevre. "I have arrived in a different way at something like the same discovery."

"I know you have," said Julius. "But my peculiar secret is not that, though it is connected with it. I am growing very tired," said he, abruptly. "I must be quick, Lefevre," he continued in a hurried, weak voice of appeal; "grant me one little last favour to enable me to finish."

"Anything I can do I will, Julius," said Lefevre, suddenly roused out of the half-drowsiness which the soft night induced. He was held between alarm and fascination by the look which Julius bent on him.

"I am ashamed to ask, but you are full of life," said Julius: "I am at the shallowest ebb. Just for one minute help me. Of your free-will submit yourself to me for but a moment. Will you do me that service?"

"Yes," said Lefevre, after an instant's hesitation; "certainly I will."

Julius half rose from his reclining position; he turned on Lefevre his wonderful eyes, which in the mysterious twilight that suffused the midsummer night burned with a surprising brilliance. Lefevre felt himself seized and held in their influence.

"Give me your hand," said Julius.

The doctor gave his hand, his eyes being still held by those of Julius, and instantly, as it seemed to him, he plunged, as a man dives into the sea, into a gulf of unconsciousness, from which he presently emerged with something like a gasp and with a tremulous sensation about his heart. What had happened to him he did not know; but he felt slacker of fibre, as if virtue had gone out of him, while Julius, when he spoke, seemed refreshed as by a draught of wine.

"How are you?" asked Julius. "For heaven's sake don't let me think that at the last I have troubled much the current of your life! Will you have something to eat and drink? There's wine and food below."

"Thank you; no," said Lefevre. "I am well enough, only a little drowsy."

"I am stronger," said Julius, "but it will not last; so let me finish my story."

Then he continued. "Having explained to myself, in the way I have told you, the ease of my unwitting replenishment of force whenever I was brought low, I set myself to improve on my discovery. I saw before me a prospect of enjoyment of all the delights of life, deeper and more constant than most men ever know,—if I could only ensure to myself with absolute certainty a still more complete and rapid reinvigoration as often soever as I sank into exhaustion. I was quite sure that no energy of life is finer or fuller than the human at its best."

"Good God!" exclaimed Lefevre, turning away with an involuntary shudder.

"For heaven's sake!" cried Julius, "don't shrink from me now, or you will tempt me to be less frank than I have been. I wish to make full confession. I know, I see now, I have been cruelly, brutally selfish—as selfish as Nature herself!—none knows that better than I. But remember, in extenuation, what I have told you of my origin and my growth. And I had not the suspicion of a thought of injuring any one. Fool! fool! egregious fool that I was! I who understood most things so clearly did not guess that no creature, no being in the universe—god, or man, or beast—can indulge in arrogant, full, magnificent enjoyment without gathering and living in himself, squandering through himself, the lives of others, to their eternal loss and his own final ruin! But, as I said, I did not think, and it was not evident until recently, that I injured any one. I had for a long time been aware that I had an unusual mesmeric or magnetic influence—call it what you will—over others. I cultivated that power in eye and hand, so that I was soon able to take any person at unawares whom I considered fit for my purpose, and subdue him or her completely to myself. Then after one or two failures I hit upon a method, which I perfected at length into entire simplicity, by which I was able to tap the nervous system and draw into myself as much as ever I needed of the abounding force of life, without leaving any sign which even the most skilful doctor could detect."

"Julius, you sicken me!" exclaimed Lefevre. "I am a doctor, but you sicken me!"

"I explain myself so in detail," said Julius, "because you are a doctor. But let me finish. I lived that life of complete wedlock with Nature for I dare not think how many years."

"And you did not get weary of it?" asked Lefevre.

"Weary of it? No! I returned to it always, after a pause of a few days for the reinvigoration I needed,—I returned to it with all the freshness of youth, with the advantage which, of course, mere youth can never have,—an amazingly rich experience. I revelled in the full lap of life. I passed through many lands, civilised and barbaric; but it was my especial delight to strike down to that simple, passionate, essential nature which lies beneath the thickest lacquer of refinements in our civilised societies. Oh, what a life it was!—what a life!

"But a change came: it must have been growing on me for some time without my knowledge. I commonly removed from society when I felt exhaustion coming on me; but on one occasion it chanced that I stayed on in the pleasant company I was in (I was then in Vienna). I did not exactly feel ill; I felt merely weary and languid, and thought that presently I would go to bed. Gradually I began to observe that the looks of my companions were bent strangely on me, and that the expression of their countenances more and more developed surprise and alarm. 'What is the matter with you all?' I demanded; when they instantly cried, 'What is the matter with you? Have you been poisoned?' I rose and went and looked in a mirror; I saw, with ghastly horror, what I was like, and I knew then that I was doomed. I fled from that company for ever. I saw that, when the alien life on which I flourished was gone out of me, I was a worn old man—that the Fire of Life which usually burned in my body, making me look bright and young, was now none of it my own; a few hot ashes only were mine, which Death sat cowering by! I could not but sit and gaze at the reflection of the seared ghastliness of that face, which was mine and yet not mine, and feel well-nigh sick unto death. After a while, however, I plucked up heart. I considered that it was impossible this change had come all at once; I must have looked like that—or almost like that—once or twice or oftener before, and yet life and reinvigoration had gone on as they had been wont. I wrapped myself well up, and went out. I found a fit subject. I replenished my life as theretofore; my youthful, fresh appearance returned, and my confidence with it. I refused to look again upon my own, my worn face, from that time until tonight.

"But alarm again seized me about a year ago, when I chanced by calculation to note that my periods of abounding life were gradually getting shorter,—that I needed reinvigoration at more frequent intervals;—not that I did not take as much from my subjects as formerly—on the contrary, I seemed to take more—but that I lost more rapidly what I took, as if my body were becoming little better than a fine sieve. The last stage of all was this that you are familiar with, when my subjects began to be so utterly exhausted as to attract public notice. Yet that is not what has given me pause, and made me resolve to bring the whole weary, selfish business to an end. Could I not have gone elsewhere—anywhere, the wide world over—and lived my life? But I was kept, I was tethered here, to this London by a feeling I had never known before. Call it by the common fool's name of Love; call it what you will. I was fascinated by your sister Nora, even as others had been fascinated by me, even as I had been in my youth by the bountiful, gracious beauty of Nature."

"I have wanted to ask you," said Lefevre, "for an explanation of your conduct towards Nora. Why did you—with your awful life—life which, as you say, was not your own, and your extraordinary secret—why did you remain near her, and entangle her with your fascinations? What did you desire?—what did you hope for?"

"I scarcely know for what I hoped. But let me speak of her; for she has traversed and completely eclipsed my former vision of Nature. I have told you what my point of view was,—alone in the midst of Nature. I was for myself the only consciousness in the world, and all the world besides was merely a variety of material and impression, to be observed and known, to be interested in and delighted with. I was thus lonely, lonely as a despot, when Nora, your sister, appeared to me, and instantly I became aware there was another consciousness in the world as great as, or greater than, my own,—another person than myself, a person of supreme beauty and intelligence and faculty. She became to me all that Nature had been, and more. She expressed for me all that I had sought to find diffused through Nature, and at the same time she stood forth to me as an equal of my own kind, with as great a capacity for life. At first I had a vision of our living and reigning together, so to say, though the word may seem to you absurd; but I soon discovered that there was a gulf fixed between us,—the gulf of the life I had lived; she stood pure where I had stood a dozen years ago. So, gradually, she subverted my whole scheme of life; more and more, without knowing it, she made me see and judge myself with her eyes, till I felt altogether abased before her. But that which finally stripped the veil from me, and showed me myself as the hateful incarnation of relentlessly devouring Self, was my influence upon her, which culminated in the event of last night. Can you conceive how I was smitten and pierced with horror by the discovery that rose on me like a nightmare, that even on her sweet, pure, sumptuous life, I had unwittingly begun to prey? For that discovery flung wide the door of the future and showed me what I would become.

"Beautiful, calm, divine Nora! If I could but have continued near her without touching her, to delight in the thought and the sight of her, as one delights in the wind and the sunshine! But it could not be. I could only appear fit company for her if I refreshed and strengthened myself as I had been wont; but my new disgust of myself, and pity for my victims, made me shudder at the thought. What then? Here I am, and the time has come (as that old doctor said it would) when death appears more beautiful and friendly and desirable than life. Forgive me, Lefevre—forgive me on Nora's part,—and forgive me in the name of human nature."

Lefevre could not reply for the moment. He sat convulsed with heartrending sobs. He put out his hand to Julius.

"No, no!" exclaimed Julius, "I must not take your hand. You know I must not."

"Take my hand," cried Lefevre. "I know what it means. Take my life! Leave me but enough to recover. I give it you freely, for I wish you to live. You shall not die. By heaven! you shall not die. O Julius, Julius! why did you not tell me this long ago? Science has resource enough to deliver you from your mistake."

"Lefevre," said Julius,—and his eyes sparkled with tears and his weakening voice was choked,—"your friendship moves me deeply—to the soul. But science can do nothing for me: science has not yet sufficient knowledge of the principle on which I lived. Would you have me, then, live on,—passing to and fro among mankind merely as a blight, taking the energy of life, even from whomsoever I would not? No, I must die! Death is best!"

"I will not let you die," said Lefevre, rising to take a pace or two on the deck. "You shall come home with me. I shall feed your life—there are dozens besides myself who will be glad to assist—till you are healed of the devouring demon you have raised within you."

"No, no, no, my dear friend!" cried Julius. "I have steadily sinned against the most vital law of life."

"Julius," said Lefevre, standing over him, "my friendship, my love for you may blind me to the enormity of your sin, but I can find it in me to say, in the name of humanity, 'I forgive you all! Now, rise up and live anew! Your intelligence, your soul is too rare and admirable to be snuffed out like a guttering candle!'"

"Lefevre," said Julius, "you are a perfect friend! But your knowledge of this secret force of Nature, which we have both studied, is not so great as mine. Let me tell you, then, that this mystical saying, which I once scoffed at, is the profoundest truth:—

"'Who loveth life shall lose it all; Who seeketh life shall surely fall!'

"There is no remedy for me but death, which (who knows?) may be the mother of new life!"

"It would have been better for you," said Lefevre, sitting down again with his head in his hands, "better—if you had never seen Nora."

"Nay, nay," cried Julius, sitting up, animate with a fresh impulse of life. "Better for her, dear, beautiful soul, but not for me! I have truly lived only since I saw her, and I have the joy of feeling that I have beheld and known Nature's sole and perfect chrysolite. But I must be quick, my friend; the dawn will soon be upon us. There is but one other thing for me to speak of—my method of taking to myself the force of life. It is my secret; it is perfectly adapted for professional use, and I wish to give it to you, because you are wise enough in mind, and great enough of soul, to use it for the benefit of mankind."

"I will not hear you, Julius!" exclaimed Lefevre. "I am neither wise nor great. Your perfect secret would be too much for me. I might be tempted to keep it for my own use. Come home with me, and apply it well yourself."

Julius was silent for a space, murmuring only, "I have no time for argument." Then his face assumed the white sickness of death, and his dark eyes seemed to grow larger and to burn with a concentrated fire.

"Lefevre!" he panted in amazement, "do you know that you are refusing such a medical and spiritual secret as the world has not known for thousands of years? A secret that would enable you—you—to work cures more wonderful than any that are told of the greatest Eastern Thaumaturge?"

"I have discovered a method," answered the doctor,—"an imperfect, clumsy method—for myself, of transmitting nervous force or ether for curative purposes. That, for the present, must be enough for me. I cannot hear your secret, Julius."

"Lefevre, I beg of you," pleaded Julius, "take it from me. I have promised myself, as a last satisfaction, that the secret I have guarded—it is not altogether mine: it is an old oriental secret—that now I would hand it over to you for the good of mankind, that at the last I might say to myself, 'I have, after all, opened my hand liberally to my fellow-men!' For pity's sake, Lefevre, don't deny me that small final satisfaction!"

"Julius," said Lefevre, firmly, "if your method is so perfect—as I believe it must be from what I have seen—I dare not lay on myself the responsibility of possessing its secret."

"Would not my example keep you from using it selfishly?"

"Does the experience of another," demanded the doctor, "however untoward it may be, ever keep a man from making his own? I dare not—I dare not trust myself to hold your perfect secret."

"Then share it with others," responded Julius, promptly; "and I daresay it is not so perfect, but that it could be made more perfect still."

"I'll have nothing to do with it, Julius; you must keep and use it yourself."

"Then," cried Julius, throwing himself on his bed of cordage, "then there will be, indeed, an end of me!"

There was no sound for a time, but the soft rush of the sea at the bows of the yacht. They had left the Thames water some distance behind, and were then in that part of the estuary where it is just possible in mid-channel to descry either coast. The glorious rose of dawn was just beginning to flame in the eastern sky. Lefevre looked about him, and strove to shake off the sensation, which would cling to him, that he was involved in a strange dream. There lay Julius or Hernando Courtney before him; or at least the figure of a man with his face hid in his hands. What more could be said or done?

In the meantime light was swiftly rushing up the sky and waking all things to life. A flock of seagulls came from the depth of the night and wheeled about the yacht, their shrill screams strangely softened in the morning air. At the sound of them Julius roused himself, and raised himself on his elbow to watch their beautiful evolutions. As he watched, one and another swooped gracefully to the water, and hanging there an instant, rose with a fish and flew away. Julius flung himself again on his face.

"O God!" he cried. "Is it not horrible? Even on such a beautiful day as this death wakes as early as life! Devouring death is ushered in by the dawn, hand in hand with generous life! Awful, devilish Nature! that makes all creatures full of beauty and delight, and then condemns them to live upon each other! Nature is the sphinx: she appears soft and gentle and more lovely than heart can bear, but if you look closer, you see she is a creature with claws and teeth that rend and devour! I thought, fool that I was! that I had found the secret to solve her riddle! But it was an empty hope, a vain imagination.... Yet, I have lived! Yes, I have lived!"

He rose and stood erect, facing the dawn, with his back to Lefevre. He stood thus for some time, with one foot on the low bulwark of the vessel, till the sun leaped above the horizon and flamed with blinding brilliance across the sea.

"Ah!" he murmured. "The superb, the glorious sun! Unwearied lord of Creation! Generous giver of all light and life! And yet, who knows what worlds he may not have drawn into his flaming self, and consumed during the aeons of his existence? It is ever and everywhere the same: death in company with life! And swift, strong death is better than slow, weak life!... Almost the splendour and inspiration of his rising tempt me to stay! Great nourisher and renewer of life's heat!"

He put off his fur coat, and let it fall on the deck, and stood for a while as if wrapt in ecstasy. Then, before Lefevre could conceive his intention, his feet were together on the bulwark, and with a flash and a plunge he was gone!

Amazement held the doctor's energies congealed, though but for an instant or two. Then he threw off hat and coat, and stood alert and resolute to dive to Julius's rescue when he rose, while those who manned the yacht prepared to cast a buoy and line. Not a ripple or flash of water passed unheeded; the flood of sunshine rose fuller and fuller over the world; moments grew to minutes, and minutes swelled to hopeless hours under the doctor's weary eyes, till it seemed to them as if the universe were only a swirling, greedy ocean;—but no sign appeared of his night's companion: his life was quenched in the depths of the restless waters, as a flaming meteor is quenched in night. At length Lefevre ordered the yacht to stand away to the shore, his heart torn with grief and self-upbraiding. He had called Courtney his friend, and yet until that last he had never won his inner confidence; and now he knew that his friend—he of the gentle heart, the peerless intelligence, and the wildly erring life—was dead in the hour of self-redemption.

When he had landed, however, given to the proper authorities such information as was necessary, and set off by train on his return to town, the agitation of his grief began to assuage; and when next day, upon the publication in the papers of the news of Courtney's death by drowning, a solicitor called in Savile Row with a will which he had drawn up two days before, and by which all Julius Courtney's property was left to Dr Lefevre, to dispose of as he thought best, "for scientific and humane ends," the doctor admitted to his reason that a death that could thus calmly be prepared was not lightly to be questioned.

"He must have known best," he said to himself, as he bowed over his hands—"he must have known best when to put off the poisoned garment of life he had woven for himself."

THE END