Part 10 (1/2)
”Yes. You must bring, they say, the mystic number, three souls to Satan.”
Suddenly I laughed.
”I could never do that,” I said. ”I have no power to seduce man or woman. I cannot win souls to heaven or to h.e.l.l.”
”But if you received new powers, such as you desire, would you use them to win souls, three souls, to Lucifer?”
”Yes,” I said with pa.s.sionate earnestness. ”I swear to you that I would.”
Suddenly the boy's voice laughed.
”_Quomodo cecidisti_, Lucifer!” he said. ”When thou canst not contrive to capture souls for thyself! But,” he added, as if addressing himself once more to me, after this strange e.j.a.c.u.l.a.t.i.o.n, ”your words have, perhaps, sealed the bond. Who knows? Words that come from the very heart are often deeds. For, as we can never go back from things that we have done, it may be that, sometimes, we can never go back from things that we have said.”
On the words he moved, and pa.s.sed so swiftly by me into the twilight down the glen that I never saw his face. I turned instinctively to look after him; and, this was strange, it seemed that the wind at that very moment must have turned with me, blowing from, instead of towards, the mountain. This certainly was so; for the tongues of flame from my fire bent backward on a sudden and leaned after the grey traveller, whose steps died swiftly away among the rocks, and on the shuffling dead wood and leaves of the birches and the oaks.
And then there came a singing in my ears, a beating of many drums in my brain. I drooped and sank down by the fire in the mist. My fever came upon me like a giant, and presently Gavin and Doctor Wedderburn, searching in the night, found me in a delirium, and bore me back to Carlounie.
II
THE SOUL OF DR WEDDERBURN
To emerge from a great illness is sometimes dreadful, sometimes divine.
To one man the return from the gates of death is a progress of despair.
He feels that he cannot face the wild contrasts of the surprising world again, that his courage has been broken upon the wheel, that energy is desolation, and sleep true beauty. To another this return is a marvellous and superb experience. It is like the vivid re-awakening of youth in one who is old, a rapture of the past committing an act of brigandage upon the weariness of the present, a glorious subst.i.tution of Eden for the outer courts where is weeping and gnas.h.i.+ng of teeth. It will be supposed that I found myself in the first category, a terror-stricken and rebellious mortal when the fever gave me up to the world again. For the world had always been cruel to me, because I was afraid of it, and was a puny thing in it. Yet this was not so. My convalescence was like a beautiful dream of rest underneath which riot stirred. A simile will explain best exactly what I mean. Let me liken the calm of my convalescence to the calm of earth on the edge of Spring.
What a riot of form, of scent, of colour, of movement, is preparing beneath that enigmatic, and apparently profound, repose. In the simile you have my exact state. And I alone felt that, within this womb of inaction, the child, action, lay hid, developing silently, but inexorably, day by day. This knowledge was my strange secret. It came upon me one night when I lay awake in the faint twilight, shed by a carefully shaded lamp over my bed. Rain drummed gently against the windows. There was no other sound. By the fire, in a great armchair, the trained nurse, Kate Walters, was sitting with a book--”Jane Eyre” it was--upon her knees. I had been sleeping and now awoke thirsty. I put out my hand to get at a tumbler of lemonade that stood on a table by my pillow. And suddenly a thought, a curious thought, was with me. My hand had grasped the tumbler and lifted it from the table; but, instead of bringing my hand to my mouth I kept my arm rigidly extended, the tumbler poised on my palm as upon the palm of a juggler.
”How long my arm is!” that was my thought, ”and how strong!” Formerly it had been short, weak, awkward. Now, surely, after my illness, my arms would naturally be nerveless, useless things. The odd fact was that now, for the first time in my life, I felt joy in a physical act. An absurd and puny act, you will say, I daresay. What of that? With it came a sudden stirring of triumph. I lay there on my back and kept my arm extended for full five minutes by the watch that ticked by my bed-head.
And with each second that pa.s.sed joy blossomed more fully within my heart. I drank the lemonade as one who drinks a glad toast. Yet I was puzzled. ”Is this--can this be a remnant of delirium?” I asked myself.
And beneath the clothes drawn up to my chin I fingered my arm above the elbow. It was the limb of a big, strong man. Surprise, supreme astonishment forced an exclamation from my lips. Kate got up softly and came towards me; but I feigned to be asleep, and she returned to the fire. Yet, peering under my lowered eyelids, I noticed an expression of amazement upon her young and pretty face. I knew afterwards that it was the sound of my voice--my new voice--that drew it there. After that night my convalescence was more than a joy to me, it was a rapture, touched by, and mingled with something that was almost awe. Is not the earth awe-struck when she considers that Spring and Summer nestle silently in her bosom? With each day the secret which I kept grew more mysterious, more profound. Soon I knew it could be a secret no longer.
The fever--it must be that!--had wrought magic within my body, driving out weakness, impotence, la.s.situde, developing my physical powers to an extent that was nothing less than astounding. Lying there in my bed, I felt the dwarf expand into the giant. Think of it! Did ever living man know such an experience before? A bodily spring came about within me.
And I was already twenty-two years old before the fever took me. My limbs grew large and strong; the muscles of my chest and back were tensely strung and knit as firmly as the muscles of an athlete. I lay still, it is true, and felt much of the peculiar vagueness that follows fever; but I was conscious of a supine, latent energy never known before. I was conscious that when I rose, and went out into the world again, it would be as a man, capable of holding his own against other strong, straight men. That was a wonder. But it was succeeded by a greater marvel yet.
One afternoon, while I was still in bed, Doctor Wedderburn came to see me and to sit with me. He had been away on a holiday, and, consequently, had not visited me before, except once when I had been delirious. The doctor was a short, spare man, with a sharply cut brick-red face, lively and daring dark eyes, and straight hair already on the road to grey. His self-possession bordered on self-satisfaction; and, despite his good heart and the real and anxious sanct.i.ty of his life, he could seldom entirely banish from his manner the contempt he felt for those less intellectual, less swift-minded than himself. Often had I experienced the stinging lash of his sarcasm. Often had I withered beneath one of his keen glances that dismissed me from an argument as a profound sage might kick an urchin from the study into the street. Often had I hated him with a sick hatred and ground my teeth because my mind was so clouded and so helpless, while his was so lucent and so adroit.
So now, when I heard his tap on the door, his deep voice asking to come in, a rage of self-contempt seized me, as in the days before my illness.
The doctor entered with an elaborate softness, and walked, flat-footed, to my bed, pursing his large lips gently as men do when filled with cautious thoughts. I could see he desired to moderate his habitual voice and manner; but, arrived close to me, he suddenly cried aloud, with a singularly full-throated amazement.
”Boy--boy, what's come to you?” he called. Then, abruptly putting his finger to his lips, he sank down in a chair, his bright eyes fixed upon me.
”It's a miracle,” he said slowly.
”What is?” I asked with an invalid's pettishness.
”The voice, too--the voice!”
I grew angry easily, as men do when they are sick.