II.
KNOWING what I now know, I think I might almost have guessed, from my first glance at him as the bandy-legged servant closed the rosewood door of the library behind me, what manner of man he was; nevertheless, this knowledge was not long delayed. The bed he seldom left was wheeled into the octagonal window-bay; he was propped up in wraps and blankets, with a book set against his sharp knees; and as he turned, his profile, for flat brow and beak, was for all the world like some grotesque bird carved on a pillar or spout. His large dull eyes, too, protruded remarkably; and the tying of the clout wherewith his head was bound as if for study resembled ears laid back.
“Ye are a day late, sir,” he said at once in a sick, querulous voice; and when I answered that I had been stayed on the road, “Ay,” he complained, “it was a dark night last night; enough.—And now that ye have seen the place in the daylight, ye’ll be of the same mind as the rest of them, eh?”
For all his sickness, this nettled me a little, and I replied that if the opinion of others was that the coast in the immediate vicinity was not a pleasing sight, I was disposed to agree with them; “but,” I added, “for that matter, I have some acquaintance with the sciences, and am free from superstition.”
“Eh?” he said sharply. “And what may that amount to?”
Certainly he had in some measure the right to catechise me, albeit not to be both petulant and domineering, as he was; and as I answered his questions as to the extent of my reading, I noticed with what ease I could have taken up his shrivelled figure. By and by he changed abruptly to matters of business; and as in this I wish to imitate his own brevity, I will only say that to a factor’s ordinary duties was to be added all the care of a considerable déménagement. He ceased; and I had bowed and was for leaving him when he beckoned me to come nearer. I stooped over the couch.
“Tell me,” he said, dropping his voice to a whisper, “tell me, has it been your chance in the course of your reading to come across—this?”
His face was within a foot of mine, and I barely checked a sound that, for all the early morning, was one of fright. Few men but in an idle moment now and then have tried that trick of gazing into metals, and phials, and flames of candles; and of the stupor or lethargy a man can work in himself by these means I had read in Olaus Magnus, in Suavius, and elsewhere. Neither was I entirely ignorant of that disordered function of the mind whereby a man can people the world with images of his own raising; but he was an ugly devil at best, and the abominable expression into which for a moment his eyeballs were deliberately set—the Squint Upwards and Inwards—added a sensible horror to the already horrible.... As I turned away his gaze righted again; but I knew him now. “I see ye know it,” he said.
“I do, sir,” I answered curtly over my shoulder. “What good the Platonists had of it I could never see, and, by your leave, I will confine myself to my stewardship, which I take to be the godlier business.”
“He, he!” he chuckled weakly. “Free from superstition, too!—So we both know it; good, we will talk of it later.”
“You shall pardon me,” thought I; and left him.
Here, then, was Cardan out-Cardaned; and there rose in my mind an image, not of this terrestrial sea that overwhelms the pleasant habitations of men, but of a dreader ocean, that of the terror of the Spirit, which, when men with anguish and labour have raised creeds and customs and laws against the void the thought of which they could not else endure, licks and laps till darkness cover all again. In this more heinous destruction and treason against all mankind this man trafficked. But if I am to tell my tale—or, rather, to set down this inconclusive record—I must trust you to take my meaning without further words.
The conversation of the bandy-legged servant was, as I should have expected, of the commonplace of desolate neighbourhoods, and I omit it that I may come the sooner to the man under whose influence, within a week, I found myself. For it was easier to say that I would have no commerce with him other than that of my office than it was to perform it; and, being inveigled willy-nilly into it, I salved my conscience by persuading myself that my study was of him and not of his theories. Unless you had read somewhat of the books I have mentioned, you would have found the fabric of folly that composed even the ordinary of his conjectures hard to credit; and since I cannot omit it altogether, it was of such stuff as this: Whether spirits do not commonly assume the globular shape, as being the most perfect of shapes; whether, could we but see them, the air might not be (as Leo Suavius held) thick with them as with snowflakes; whether that be true of the witches of Lapland, ecstasi omnia prædicere; and, above all, of the substance of spirits and of the texture of those light essences that, being divided, come with such celerity together again. That he should need a doctor to come over from Kingston twice in the week was little wonder to me; and when, shortly, this doctor persuaded me that my companionship would be good for my employer’s unsettled mind, I only stipulated that I should be spared that distortion of his face that had first shocked me.
The night whereon the invalid first broke his word in this respect was one evening in the middle of October, when I had been, maybe, a month at Skelf-Mary. For several days we had had thick, misty weather (I remember I had been that afternoon to the Decoy, and I leave it to you which was the more dismal, carr or coast), and the fog, penetrating the library, made haloes about the two tapers. The master’s face was very white and peaked that evening, and the little nodule of his hooked nose where bone joined cartilage showed sharply. The chamber was full of vague mists and shadows; now and then a ship’s horn hooted far out; we had ceased to talk; and while I had settled down to a bundle of lawyer’s tangle, he had apparently dozed over the book that was propped against his knees.
I know not what it was that caused me to look up, but I did so as if I had been bidden; and from the way his glassy corneas were set they might have been so for hours. He would no more have felt it had a fly crossed his eyeballs than do cattle. He had managed again to put himself into his trance, and instinctively I glanced over my shoulder to the upper end of the library.
“This is beyond the bargain, sir!” I cried, bringing my hand down on the table. He did not hear. I passed a taper before his eyes, but he did not see. It lasted for some minutes; then the balls traversed the farther end of the library, and the lids flickered and fell. He was asleep. Again I thumped the table, and he woke sluggishly.
“I had your promise,” I said sternly.
“Eh, eh? What’s that ye say?... I have been asleep.”
“Man, do you call that sleep?——”
“Eh?... Ah, yes!... It is my weakness, sir, and ye shall pardon it,” he replied; and I truly believe that for the moment the creature felt a sort of contrition. Suddenly there came over me a feeling nearer to compassion than to disgust; God knows I am backward to judge those He has seen fit to set in the world with me; and I turned to him earnestly.
“’Tis for your own good,” I said in a moved voice; “good Heaven!... Tell me what you were looking at yonder.”
The weakness following that vile ecstasy seemed to have made him tractable. “’Tis not in the classics,” he muttered; “ye may walk through them without resistance ... how then should there be a mutilation?... I cannot see.”...
This I set down in pity to his lunacy, and he continued to mutter fragments. “A mischance to the mortal remains ... but the hinds in yonder vault were too terrified ... and then, what correspondence.... I tell ye, sir, ye know nothing ... why does it not reunite?”...
And as he chattered thus, I wondered that I, who dreaded no spectre, should dread exceedingly the mind that could so conjure one up.
On the morrow I again sought Watt the keeper; I had now a purpose, and as he packed hampers in a flat-bottomed boat he again sought to ward off my questions.
“What did he mean by mutilation? You said nothing to me,” I demanded; and “Ye didn’t ask me,” Watt replied; “——come, Bess!”
“And what’s this about a vault?”—“Ay, that’ll be th’ vault i’ th’ churchyard,” he answered; “ye’ll find th’ door there yet, all red wi’ rust and green wi’ verdigris.”
“Don’t fool me,” I cried; and with that the keeper turned fairly on me.
“So ye willn’t let it bide? Very well.—There’s little gossip i’ Skelf-Mary now, by reason o’ there being few folk, but I’ll be rid o’ what I know. They say it’ll be Eustace he sees, that was a priest; but ye needn’t tak’ that fro’ me. When he had th’ vault oppened he asked this and that and t’other, and if he says th’ men was flayed, he’s right.—They couldn’t sort out which were which—ye understand—and th’ breed’s as ugly living as dead to my way o’ thinking. He talked about nowt but ‘knees’ ... faugh! Whose knees he wanted ye know as much as me; but th’ sexton lives ower at Windlesea. Mysel’, I’m a decent wed man, and tak’ no count o’ ghosts and such, ye understand?”...
And Watt’s way of thinking being a good deal my own, I troubled him no further. But, busy as I was, I had found time within three days to see the sexton (who, professionally, had little reluctance), and had pieced roughly together this delusion of the afflicted Master’s. I know not whether it was Eustace who walked the library. That to all intents and purposes his mind conjured up some figure I was as convinced as I was that I myself should never see it. It has been enough for me that, looking where he looked, I have seen but air, while he has seen, stumping across a floor of boards, a shape on thighs that were broken midway.