Volume Two—Chapter Twenty Two.
Something Coming On.
Horace North stood in the old mausoleum for a while, appalled by the thoughts that flooded his soul. The silence was awful. At other times, wrapped up in his pursuit, the presence of the dead had been as nothing to him; the fact that he was surrounded by the grisly relics of generations of the Candlishes had not troubled him in the least. There was a professional air about everything he did, and he watched results with the keen eagerness that a chemist watches his experiments.
But now, all at once, a change seemed to have come over him. He had lost the spur given to him by his love for Leo; but, after fighting hard with his misery, he had conquered, and forced himself to go on with his task solely in the cause of science, and a strange awakening had been the result.
He had brought all the knowledge he could collect to bear upon his task, and had reached a certain point. Then he had been checked, and the whole of his work had been thrown out of gear; so that now, when he had taken it up again, feverishly determined to carry it on to the end, he found himself face to face with a horror which at first his mind could hardly conceive.
He stood listening, and for a time it seemed that he was alone—that Moredock had been overcome by the close he had administered; but by degrees his stunned senses took in the fact that the old man was breathing calmly and peacefully, and that he was not alone with the appalling thought which troubled him.
“I ought not to have gone on with it now,” he said, at last. “I am mentally and bodily shaken, and unfit to undertake such a task. I’m ready to imagine all manner of follies—weak as a frightened child. How idiotic to fancy that!”
For the time being his mental strength was in statu quo, and, striding forward, he made up his mind to clear away the apparatus of instruments and chemicals, rouse up Moredock to help restore everything to its normal state, and continue his experiment when a fresh opportunity occurred.
He glanced down at the uncovered body, and then, turning to his various preparations, he replaced instruments in cases, bottles in the black bag, and nothing now remained to do but to lay Luke Candlish where he might continue his long sleep with his fathers.
“Poor wretch!” muttered North; “if that miserable interruption had not taken place, you might have been the means of doing more good to posterity than all your predecessors could have achieved had they lived on right until now.
“Yes,” he continued, as he made a final examination previous to awakening Moredock, “I had succeeded up to then. Decay was arrested, and Nature seemed to be working on my side to prove that I was right. Now I must begin again, for it is as if I had done nothing. No, no; the toil has not been thrown away. I have learned more than I think for; I have—”
He shrank back, and looked sharply round, as if puzzled. He turned his gaze upon the sleeping figure before him, and saw only too plainly that the decay he had held at defiance for a time had now definitely set in, and yet how he could not tell, for mentally all seemed misty and obscure. Something seemed to suggest that after all he had arrested the progress of death.
“Pish! What strange fancy is upon me now?” he exclaimed angrily.
But even as he said this in a low whisper, he felt a consciousness that in some manner his work had not been in vain. There before him, surely enough, lay the remains of Luke Candlish, passing back into the elements of which they were composed—ashes to ashes, dust to dust; but the man did not seem to him to be dead. There was a feeling almost like oppression troubling him and making him feel that he had succeeded—that he had stayed the flight of the hale, strong man, but not wholly; that his work had partially been successful, and that had he continued, a complete triumph would have been the result.
“Absurd!” he muttered, jerking the cloth over the subject of his experiment, and going towards Moredock, but only to spin round, as if he had been arrested by a hand clapped suddenly upon his shoulder.
He stared sharply round the vault again and then laughed aloud.
“How childish!” he exclaimed. “Well, no,” he added thoughtfully; “it is a lesson worth learning how, under certain circumstances connected with violence and terrible mental distress, the brain acts as in a case of delirium tremens. I was not fit to come here to-night. Better finish, go home, and sleep—and forget,” he added softly, “if I can.
“I must be going mad,” he exclaimed the next moment; and, making an effort over himself, he sat down upon the edge of the stone slab to try and think out consistently the mental trouble which kept attacking him.
“It cannot be that,” he said, at last. “I am perfectly cool and consistent; I know everything about me. I can go right back through my experiments to the beginning, analyse every thought and feeling, and yet I cannot master this idea.”
He sat thinking and gazing at the body by his side, with its form grotesquely marked through the covering sheet.
“It is getting the better of me,” he said aloud, “and I must not give way. Lunacy is often the development of one idea, while, in other respects, the patient is compos mentis. No, no; a lunatic could not feel as I do. I am too calm and self-contained, and yet here it is. Great Heaven! is it possible that I could have arrested the ethereal, the spiritual, part of this man—have retained his essence here, while the body is going back to decay?”
He stood staring down at the slab from which he had started, his eyes dilated, and a wild look of horror in his countenance, till once more the teachings of his scientific education combined with the man’s strong common-sense to bring calm matter-of-fact reasoning to bear.
“Yes,” he said, “it’s time I went home to bed; and to-morrow I’ll ask old Benson to come over and look after my patients while I go to the seaside and look after myself. I want bodily and mental rest. Here, old chap, wake up!”
Moredock started to his feet and stared at the doctor, for he had been rudely awakened by a heavy slap on the back, while North in turn shrank back and stared at the sexton, as if astounded at what had taken place—an act so foreign to his ordinary way.
“You shouldn’t do that, doctor,” grumbled the old man, rubbing his shoulder in a testy way. “Works is a bit shaky, and you jar ’em up.”
“I—I beg your pardon, Moredock,” stammered North confusedly.
“Oh, it don’t matter much, doctor, only I was in a beautiful sleep, and dreaming I’d gone to see my Dally as was living in a great house—quite the lady, and the man going to give me a glass o’ something when you hit me on the back and woke me. Done?”
“Yes. Help me,” said North hastily. “The experiment is at an end.”
“Well, I arn’t sorry, doctor. I arn’t sorry for some things. Hey! but you have been busy clearing up. Quite done, then?”
“Yes, quite done. We’ll leave everything as it should be to-night.”
“Mornin’, you mean, doctor. Well, all right.”
The ghastly task was quickly performed, the old man displaying a surprising activity as he replaced the ornamental coffin-lid and screws, after which the place seemed to have resumed its former state.
“No one won’t come to see whether the lead coffin’s soddered down, eh, doctor?” chuckled the old man, after giving the heavy casket a final thrust with his shoulder to get it exactly in its place. “They don’t do that only when the coroner’s set to work, and people think there’s been poisoning.”
“No, old chap,” cried North, slapping the sexton on the shoulder in a jocular way. “Here, have a drop of brandy. After me; I’d rather drink first.”
Moredock stared again as the doctor produced a second flask from his pocket, poured some spirit gurgling out into the flattened silver cup, and tossed it off.
“That’s good brandy, old man. Stunning. Here you are.”
“Doctor’s glad he’s finished his job,” laughed the sexton. “No wonder. I wouldn’t ha’ been a patticary for no money. Thankye, sir. Hah! that’s good stuff. That goes into your finger-ends; but that other stuff’s best: goes right to the roots of your hair and into your toes. Rare stuff; good brandy.”
“Yes, you old toper,” cried North; and then he seemed to drag his hand down just as he was raising it to slap the old man once more upon the shoulder.
“Toper, eh, doctor? No; I like a drop now and then, just to do a man good. He was a toper—Squire Luke, yonder.”
“Yes,” said North slowly, as he poured out some more brandy and tossed it off. “The poor fellow used to drink.”
“Hi—hi—hi!” chuckled Moredock. “Yes; they say he used to drink, doctor. Job’s done, eh?”
He stared hard at the flask, and in so peculiar a manner that North poured out some more.
“Here, have another drop, old chap,” he cried; “it’ll warm you up.”
“Thankye, doctor, thankye. Hah! yes; it’s good stuff. Does you good too. Makes you cheery like, and free. Why, doctor, I didn’t know you could be so hearty; you keep a man like me a long ways off in general. What’s the matter—not well?”
“Eh?” said North, speaking strangely. “I’m not well, Moredock. I’ll get out of this stifling place.”
“Stifling? Nay, it’s not stifling; you only say so because you’re done. Here, let me carry the tool bag, as you may say.”
The bag was heavy, for packed within it was the lamp as well as the doctor’s bottles, and such instruments as he had not put in his pocket.
“Looks precious queer,” muttered the old man, going to and unfastening the door.
“Ready, sir?”
North did not answer, but followed the sexton, after a hurried glance round.
“It’s all right, sir; nothing left,” muttered Moredock, extinguishing the candle in his lanthorn. “Why, any one would think he was growing skeered. Brandy upsets some, and does others good.”
The old man closed the massive door of the mausoleum, and locked the gates of the iron railing, and as he did so, North uttered a low sigh full of relief, as if with the shutting up of the grim receptacle certain troublous feelings had been dismissed, and a strange haunting sensation had gone.
“S’pose you’d like me to take the bag on to my place, doctor, and bring it up to the Manor House to-night?”
“Yes, I should,” said North hastily; “I’ll talk to you then, Moredock. I’ll—”
He shuddered, and in place of parting at once from the old man, he kept close to his side, and followed him into his cottage, where he sat down while the old sexton drew the thin curtain over the casement and struck a light.
“Why, doctor,” he said, looking wonderingly at the white, scared face before him; “you’d better go home and mix yourself a dose. You’ve got something coming on.”
“Yes,” said North, with a ghastly smile; “I’m afraid I have something coming on. No—no! Nonsense! I’m tired. Not quite got over my fall. I shall be better soon.”
The old sexton shook his head and went to his locked-up chest, in which, with a good deal of rattling of keys, he deposited the doctor’s bag. He was in the act of shutting the heavy lid, when something made him turn to where he had left his companion seated, and he stared in amazement, for the chair was tenantless!
He had not heard North start from his seat and literally rush out of the cottage, as if pursued by some invisible force.