VI.
Within about three paces of me he stopped, and passed his hand two or three times through the black and white masses of his hair. He had the air of trying to rouse himself from a mood of painful preoccupation. At length he spoke in a faint, unaccented tone, like a voice heard far off.
“I want your sympathy,” said he.
“Have we met before?” I asked, rather taken aback. “I really don’t remember—but I believe I’ve been half asleep, and am hardly awake yet.”
He shook his head slowly, his black eyes curiously perusing my face. “You have chosen an ill place to sleep in,” he remarked after a pause. “Many a year have I sought repose there—in vain.”
“Indeed? Well, I came here quite by accident, and judging by the aspect of the place, I shouldn’t have supposed it would have been often visited.”
“You are right, few come hither now; but as many as do so are liable to meet with me.”
I looked more narrowly at my queer companion, and all at once the thought struck me, the man is mad! Yes, it must be so. How otherwise could the strangeness of his appearance, behaviour, and conversation be accounted for? He did not look dangerous, probably he was incapable of doing harm, and therefore permitted to wander about as he liked. In the moral atmosphere of these ruins he was sensible of somewhat congenial to his own forlornness, and hence haunted them rather than any more cheerful spot. Certainly, this was an appropriate haunt for a madman—for one whose mind had fallen into that ugliest chaos which was once beauty and order. But I liked the spectacle of mental even less than that of material decay; and though the poor gentleman had asked me for my sympathy, I scarcely knew how to give it to him.
By I know not what faculty of divination, he appeared to suspect what was passing in my mind.
“I am not mad,” he said quietly, but with a tremor of the finely-cut though irresolute lips. “I am not mad, I have passed beyond insanity. Let me sit down here and talk to you. Nay—do not rise! Recline as you were doing, and close your eyes if you will; I need only your ears.”
While speaking thus he passed behind me, and apparently seated himself at the foot of the oak-tree, outside of my range of vision. But no sooner was he out of plain sight, than I was seized with an odd fantasy that he had actually vanished into thin air, and that were I to look round, I should not find him. His voice only was left, and even that now seemed unearthly. Was it a human voice? and not rather the rustling of leaves and the gurgling of water, translated by my feverish imagination into weird speech?
“You were dreaming,” resumed the voice; “what dreams had you of the wheel?”
“What dreams had I of the wheel?” I repeated, leaning back on the mound, and clasping my hands across my eyes. Here was another instance of my new friend’s insight. How had he known that the wheel was in my thoughts at all! Yet it was true that I had given rein to all sorts of fanciful speculations concerning it, and was now, moreover, quite in the mood to give them utterance. And what better auditor could I desire than a madman, whom the wildest extravagance could not disconcert, nor the most palpable absurdities annoy? The opportunity was too fair to lose.
“What dreamt I of the wheel?” I exclaimed again: “I dreamt it was the mighty Wheel of Fortune, who, weary of trundling it about the world, had left it here amidst the sedge and spray of the waterfall. Henceforth, therefore, there shall be no more ups and downs in life, but mankind shall move for ever across one level plain, unchecked by darkness and uncheered by light!”
“Would you have it thus?”
“Oh no—not I! Come back, fair goddess! come back and wrest thy wheel from amidst those clinging vines and brambles—the arms wherewith reluctant nature strives to hold it back! Bring it forth once again upon the dusty road, and turn it as you go, lest our sluggish hearts forget to beat, and we cease to draw the very breath of life, and our souls, torpid and uninspired, grovel earthwards, nor dream of climbing higher than themselves! Bring forth thy wheel, and turn it for ever even as the world turns; for thy fickleness is the life of our lives!”
“Methinks the wheel of misfortune were its truer title; for it turns ever between a fool above and a corpse beneath; and the laugh of madness sounds before, and behind is a track of blood!”
“Nay, name it how you will; since all of human joy and grief, and life and death, have clustered round its course, as the moss and the vines cluster about it now. See how Nature seeks to make the awful symbol of destiny into a plaything for her own beautiful idleness! How fearlessly the light and shadow rest upon it! Yet it is bloodstained. Those rank ferns bend and peer in quest of some lurking horror? What is it? I feel its influence upon me.”
“Aye, you feel it!” murmured my unseen companion, tremulously; “and how could you help but feel it? Do not the tragedies of human life instil their essence into the things we call inanimate? You have shuddered when handling the rack and the Iron Virgin of the Inquisition, and felt faint at the sight of the guillotine and the gallows. You were awed by an evil influence breathed from the actual wood and iron—not by the mere knowledge of ghastly scenes in which they had borne a part.”
“How came the influence there?” I asked, humouring his grotesque theory.
“That which has existed in an atmosphere of revenge, hatred, and despair, becomes at last impregnated with a malignant intelligence derived from them; an intelligence both devilish in itself and able to endow you with its own deformity. And if you hold not aloof from it, you shall surely be destroyed—in soul, if not in body likewise!”
“But do we feel this influence unless aware beforehand that it is there?”
“Fix your thought constantly upon yonder wheel,” was the reply, “and mark if it does not answer you.”
Still with my hands clasped across my eyes, I concentrated my mind as directed, and presently felt my veins crawl with a slow chill of dismay—a chill which deprived me of control over my faculties, while awakening them to unnatural activity. That the wheel had a conscious personality, instinct with evil, seemed no longer open to doubt. Now the plash and gurgle of the water changed to the stealthy drip of blood; and I shrank from the breeze that moved my hair as from a pestilential breath. Was I going mad too? My will seemed to falter; a tremor which I could not repress passed through me from head to foot.
“Aye, you feel it,” murmured the voice again. “You are answered!”
By a determined effort I regained command of myself. Perhaps it was none too soon. Nothing is easier than to indulge this morbid vein, and few indulgences, I believe, are more perilous. With my change of mood came a change of tone; I cast aside the hysteric style, and adopted one more brusque and matter-of-fact, to which the reaction from sentimentality may have added a touch of asperity.
“Come, come!” I said. “We are overdoing this folly. I know well enough what place this is; Mr. Poyntz began to tell me about it this afternoon. An amusing story—all about the Laughing Mill, and the fellow who was drowned, and the nymph of the pearl-shell necklace. You see, I know what I am talking about! But the tale broke off in the middle; perhaps you can finish it?”
“It is you who must finish it!” returned the other. “But I want your sympathy; so let me tell my part.”
“Do so,” said I, “by all means. When I know you better, I shall be better able to sympathise with you. As to my finishing the story, I think I’m more likely to succeed as a listener than as a narrator; however, if it must be so, I’ll give it the best ending I can. And I do sympathise with you already,” I added, after a pause, in a less flippant tone. “I am a man, and I believe in human brotherhood.”
My eccentric companion made no rejoinder, though I fancied he gave a sigh. Presently he began to speak in the same evenly-pitched, far-away voice that he had used throughout. The effect was rather as of a weary reader reading from a book than as of one who talks spontaneously, there was no hesitation, no rise and fall, no fire, no faltering. Yet the recital moved me more deeply than if it had been delivered with impassioned eloquence. Through the sad colourless medium I seemed to behold the direct movement of events, and almost to take part in them. Moreover, as the narrator proceeded, the notion more than once possessed me that his words reached my ears from some inward source—that I was merely thinking the things I seemed to hear. His tone was so attuned to the desolateness of the surroundings, as to appear like the mystic interpretation of their significance, such as might result from intense brooding over them. Indeed, taking into consideration all that I had seen, heard, and fancied that day, I almost believe I could have fallen asleep and dreamed just such a story as he told me. Certainly no dream could have been stranger than the things he told.