Complete Works of F Marion Crawford

by F. Marion Crawford

  Unorna covered her ears with her hands to shut out the hideous, unearthly noise. She closed her eyes lest she should see those dead things move. Then came another noise. Were they descending from their pedestals and cases and marching upon her, a heavy-footed company of corpses?

  Fearless to the last, she dropped her hands and opened her eyes.

  “In spite of you all,” she cried defiantly, “I will give my soul to have him safe!”

  Something was close to her. She turned and saw Keyork Arabian at her elbow. There was an odd smile on his usually unexpressive face.

  “Then give me that soul of yours, if you please,” he said. “He is quite safe and peacefully asleep. You must have grown a little nervous while I was away.”

  CHAPTER X

  UNORNA LET HERSELF sink into a chair. She stared almost vacantly at Keyork, then glanced uneasily at the motionless specimens, then stared at him again.

  “Yes,” she said at last. “Perhaps I was a little nervous. Why did you lock me in? I would have gone with you. I would have helped you.”

  “An accident — quite an accident,” answered Keyork, divesting himself of his fur coat. “The lock is a peculiar one, and in my hurry I forgot to show you the trick of it.”

  “I tried to get out,” said Unorna with a forced laugh. “I tried to break the door down with a club. I am afraid I have hurt one of your specimens.”

  She looked about the room. Everything was in its usual position, except the body of the African. She was quite sure that when she had head that unearthly cry, the dead faces had all been turned towards her.

  “It is no matter,” replied Keyork in a tone of indifference which was genuine. “I wish somebody would take my collection off my hands. I should have room to walk about without elbowing a failure at every step.”

  “I wish you would bury them all,” suggested Unorna, with a slight shudder.

  Keyork looked at her keenly.

  “Do you mean to say that those dead things frightened you?” he asked incredulously.

  “No; I do not. I am not easily frightened. But something odd happened — the second strange thing that has happened this evening. Is there any one concealed in this room?”

  “Not a rat — much less a human being. Rats dislike creosote and corrosive sublimate, and as for human beings — —”

  He shrugged his shoulders and smiled.

  “Then I have been dreaming,” said Unorna, attempting to look relieved. “Tell me about him. Where is he?”

  “In bed — at his hotel. He will be perfectly well to-morrow.”

  “Did he wake?” she asked anxiously.

  “Yes. We talked together.”

  “And he was in his right mind?”

  “Apparently. But he seems to have forgotten something.”

  “Forgotten? What? That I had made him sleep?”

  “Yes. He had forgotten that too.”

  “In Heaven’s name, Keyork, tell me what you mean! Do not keep me—”

  “How impatient women are!” exclaimed Keyork with exasperating calm. “What is it that you most want him to forget?”

  “You cannot mean — —”

  “I can, and I do. He has forgotten Beatrice. For a witch — well, you are a very remarkable one, Unorna. As a woman of business — —” He shook his head.

  “What do you mean, this time? What did you say?” Her questions came in a strained tone and she seemed to have difficulty in concentrating her attention, or in controlling her emotions, or both.

  “You paid a large price for the information,” observed Keyork.

  “What price? What are you speaking of? I do not understand.”

  “Your soul,” he answered, with a laugh. “That was what you offered to any one who would tell you that the Wanderer was safe. I immediately closed with your offer. It was an excellent one for me.”

  Unorna tapped the table impatiently.

  “It is odd that a man of your learning should never be serious,” she said.

  “I supposed that you were serious,” he answered. “Besides, a bargain is a bargain, and there were numerous witnesses to the transaction,” he added, looking round the room at his dead specimens.

  Unorna tried to laugh with him.

  “Do you know, I was so nervous that I fancied all those creatures were groaning and shrieking and gibbering at me, when you came in.”

  “Very likely they were,” said Keyork Arabian, his small eyes twinkling.

  “And I imagined that the Malayan woman opened her mouth to scream, and that the Peruvian savages turned their heads; it was very strange — at first they groaned, and then they wailed, and then they howled and shrieked at me.”

  “Under the circumstances, that is not extraordinary.”

  Unorna stared at him rather angrily. He was jesting, of course, and she had been dreaming, or had been so overwrought by excitement as to have been made the victim of a vivid hallucination. Nevertheless there was something disagreeable in the matter-of-fact gravity of his jest.

  “I am tired of your kind of wit,” she said.

  “The kind of wit which is called wisdom is said to be fatiguing,” he retorted.

  “I wish you would give me an opportunity of being wearied in that way.”

  “Begin by opening your eyes to facts, then. It is you who are trying to jest. It is I who am in earnest. Did you, or did you not, offer your soul for a certain piece of information? Did you, or did you not, hear those dead things moan and cry? Did you, or did you not, see them move?”

  “How absurd!” cried Unorna. “You might as well ask whether, when one is giddy, the room is really going round? Is there any practical difference, so far as sensation goes, between a mummy and a block of wood?”

  “That, my dear lady, is precisely what we do not know, and what we most wish to know. Death is not the change which takes place at a moment which is generally clearly defined, when the heart stops beating, and the eye turns white, and the face changes colour. Death comes some time after that, and we do not know exactly when. It varies very much in different individuals. You can only define it as the total and final cessation of perception and apperception, both functions depending on the nerves. In ordinary cases Nature begins of herself to destroy the nerves by a sure process. But how do you know what happens when decay is not only arrested but prevented before it has begun? How can you foretell what may happen when a skilful hand has restored the tissues of the body to their original flexibility, or preserved them in the state in which they were last sensitive?”

  “Nothing can ever make me believe that a mummy can suddenly hear and understand,” said Unorna. “Much less that it can move and produce a sound. I know that the idea has possessed you for many years, but nothing will make me believe it possible.”

  “Nothing?”

  “Nothing short of seeing and hearing.”

  “But you have seen and heard.”

  “I was dreaming.”

  “When you offered your soul?”

  “Not then, perhaps. I was only mad then.”

  “And on the ground of temporary insanity you would repudiate the bargain?”

  Unorna shrugged her shoulders impatiently and did not answer. Keyork relinquished the fencing.

  “It is of no importance,” he said, changing his tone. “Your dream — or whatever it was — seems to have been the second of your two experiences. You said there were two, did you not? What was the first?”

  Unorna sat silent for some minutes, as though collecting her thoughts. Keyork, who never could have enough light, busied himself with another lamp. The room was now brighter than it generally was in the daytime.

  Unorna watched him. She did not want to make confidences to him, and yet she felt irresistibly impelled to do so. He was a strange compound of wisdom and levity, in her opinion, and his light-hearted moods were those which she most resented. She was never sure whether he was in reality tactless, or frankly brutal. She inclined to the latter view of his character
, because he always showed such masterly skill in excusing himself when he had gone too far. Neither his wisdom nor his love of jesting explained to her the powerful attraction he exercised over her whole nature, and of which she was, in a manner, ashamed. She could quarrel with him as often as they met, and yet she could not help being always glad to meet him again. She could not admit that she liked him because she dominated him; on the contrary, he was the only person she had ever met over whom she had no influence whatever, who did as he pleased without consulting her, and who laughed at her mysterious power so far as he himself was concerned. Nor was her liking founded upon any consciousness of obligation. If he had helped her to the best of his ability in the great experiment, it was also clear enough that he had the strongest personal interest in doing so. He loved life with a mad passion for its own sake, and the only object of his study was to find a means of living longer than other men. All the aims and desires and complex reasonings of his being tended to this simple expression — the wish to live. To what idolatrous self-worship Keyork Arabian might be capable of descending, if he ever succeeded in eliminating death from the equation of his immediate future, it was impossible to say. The wisdom of ages bids us beware of the man of one idea. He is to be feared for his ruthlessness, for his concentration, for the singular strength he has acquired in the centralization of his intellectual power, and because he has welded, as it were, the rough metal of many passions and of many talents into a single deadly weapon which he wields for a single purpose. Herein lay, perhaps, the secret of Unorna’s undefined fear of Keyork and of her still less definable liking for him.

  She leaned one elbow on the table and shaded her eyes from the brilliant light.

  “I do not know why I should tell you,” she said at last. “You will only laugh at me, and then I shall be angry, and we shall quarrel as usual.”

  “I may be of use,” suggested the little man gravely. “Besides, I have made up my mind never to quarrel with you again, Unorna.”

  “You are wise, my dear friend. It does no good. As for your being of use in this case, the most I can hope is that you may find me an explanation of something I cannot understand.”

  “I am good at that. I am particularly good at explanations — and, generally, at all post facto wisdom.”

  “Keyork, do you believe that the souls of the dead can come back and be visible to us?”

  Keyork Arabian was silent for a few seconds.

  “I know nothing about it,” he answered.

  “But what do you think?”

  “Nothing. Either it is possible, or it is not, and until the one proposition or the other is proved I suspend my judgment. Have you seen a ghost?”

  “I do not know. I have seen something — —” She stopped, as though the recollections were unpleasant.

  “Then” said Keyork, “the probability is that you saw a living person. Shall I sum up the question of ghosts for you?”

  “I wish you would, in some way that I can understand.”

  “We are, then, in precisely the same position with regard to the belief in ghosts which we occupy towards such questions as the abolition of death. The argument in both cases is inductive and all but conclusive. We do not know of any case, in the two hundred generations of men, more or less, with whose history we are in some degree acquainted, of any individual who has escaped death. We conclude that all men must die. Similarly, we do not know certainly — not from real, irrefutable evidence at least — that the soul of any man or woman dead has ever returned visibly to earth. We conclude, therefore, that none ever will. There is a difference in the two cases, which throws a slight balance of probability on the side of the ghost. Many persons have asserted that they have seen ghosts, though none have ever asserted that men do not die. For my own part, I have had a very wide, practical, and intimate acquaintance with dead people — sometimes in very queer places — but I have never seen anything even faintly suggestive of a ghost. Therefore, my dear lady, I advise you to take it for granted that you have seen a living person.”

  “I never shivered with cold and felt my hair rise upon my head at the sight of any living thing,” said Unorna dreamily, and still shading her eyes with her hand.

  “But might you not feel that if you chanced to see some one whom you particularly disliked?” asked Keyork, with a gentle laugh.

  “Disliked?” repeated Unorna in a harsh voice. She changed her position and looked at him. “Yes, perhaps that is possible. I had not thought of that. And yet — I would rather it had been a ghost.”

  “More interesting, certainly, and more novel,” observed Keyork, slowly polishing his smooth cranium with the palm of his hand. His head, and the perfect hemisphere of his nose, reflected the light like ivory balls of different sizes.

  “I was standing before him,” said Unorna. “The place was lonely and it was already night. The stars shone on the snow, and I could see distinctly. Then she — that woman — passed softly between us. He cried out, calling her by name, and then fell forward. After that, the woman was gone. What was it that I saw?”

  “You are quite sure that it was not really a woman?”

  “Would a woman, and of all women that one, have come and gone without a word?”

  “Not unless she is a very singularly reticent person,” answered Keyork, with a laugh. “But you need not go so far as the ghost theory for an explanation. You were hypnotised, my dear friend, and he made you see her. That is as simple as anything need be.”

  “But that is impossible, because — —” Unorna stopped and changed colour.

  “Because you had hypnotised him already,” suggested Keyork gravely.

  “The thing is not possible,” Unorna repeated, looking away from him.

  “I believe it to be the only natural explanation. You had made him sleep. You tried to force his mind to something contrary to its firmest beliefs. I have seen you do it. He is a strong subject. His mind rebelled, yielded, then made a final and desperate effort, and then collapsed. That effort was so terrible that it momentarily forced your will back upon itself, and impressed his vision on your sight. There are no ghosts, my dear colleague. There are only souls and bodies. If the soul can be defined as anything it can be defined as Pure Being in the Mode of Individuality but quite removed from the Mode of Matter. As for the body — well, there it is before you, in a variety of shapes, and in various states of preservation, as incapable of producing a ghost as a picture or a statue. You are altogether in a very nervous condition to-day. It is really quite indifferent whether that good lady be alive or dead.”

  “Indifferent!” exclaimed Unorna fiercely. Then she was silent.

  “Indifferent to the validity of the theory. If she is dead, you did not see her ghost, and if she is alive you did not see her body, because, if she had been there in the flesh, she would have entered into an explanation — to say the least. Hypnosis will explain anything and everything, without causing you a moment’s anxiety for the future.”

  “Then I did not hear shrieks and moans, nor see your specimens moving when I was here along just now?”

  “Certainly not! Hypnosis again. Auto-hypnosis this time. You should really be less nervous. You probably stared at the lamp without realising the fact. You know that any shining object affects you in that way, if you are not careful. It is a very bright lamp, too. Instantaneous effect — bodies appear to move and you hear unearthly yells — you offer your soul for sale and I buy it, appearing in the nick of time? If your condition had lasted ten seconds longer you would have taken me for his majesty and lived, in imagination, through a dozen years or so of sulphurous purgatorial treatment under my personal supervision, to wake up and find yourself unscorched — and unredeemed, as ever.”

  “You are a most comforting person, Keyork,” said Unorna, with a faint smile. “I only wish I could believe everything you tell me.”

  “You must either believe me or renounce all claim to intelligence,” answered the little man, climbing from his chair a
nd sitting upon the table at her elbow. His short, sturdy legs swung at a considerable height above the floor, and he planted his hands firmly upon the board on either side of him. The attitude was that of an idle boy, and was so oddly out of keeping with his age and expression that Unorna almost laughed as she looked at him.

  “At all events,” he continued, “you cannot doubt my absolute sincerity. You come to me for an explanation. I give you the only sensible one that exists, and the only one which can have a really sedative effect upon your excitement. Of course, if you have any especial object in believing in ghosts — if it affords you any great and lasting pleasure to associate, in imagination, with spectres, wraiths, and airily-malicious shadows, I will not cross your fancy. To a person of solid nerves a banshee may be an entertaining companion, and an apparition in a well-worn winding-sheet may be a pretty toy. For all I know, it may be a delight to you to find your hair standing on end at the unexpected appearance of a dead woman in a black cloak between you and the person with whom you are engaged in animated conversation. All very well, as a mere pastime, I say. But if you find that you are reaching a point on which your judgment is clouded, you had better shut up the magic lantern and take the rational view of the case.”

  “Perhaps you are right.”

  “Will you allow me to say something very frank, Unorna?” asked Keyork with unusual diffidence.

  “If you can manage to be frank without being brutal.”

  “I will be short, at all events. It is this. I think you are becoming superstitious.” He watched her closely to see what effect the speech would produce. She looked up quickly.

  “Am I? What is superstition?”

  “Gratuitous belief in things not proved.”

  “I expected a different definition from you.”