On the Age of Souls.”
“Where have I seen that before?” he asked himself.
The words were familiar, and recalled sensations the reverse of pleasant.
He pondered for a few minutes: then he recollected. Memory carried his mind back to the night at the Pinewood when, after the day spent with Lilia, Sir Roderick had lent him a treatise written by a Dutch author. He had, so he afterwards believed, fallen asleep while reading it—and had dreamt that he read a chapter or chapters of its second part (which was entitled, “On the Age of Souls”).
This finding in black and white that of which he had dreamt years ago was weird. He turned over the pages that followed, and the sense of the uncanny was intensified. Here, almost word for word, was the strange treatise which he had read in his vision long ago; here was the history of the old doctrine of Metempsychosis, or the passage of the Soul through many bodies in various lives. There was also the speculation of the author (or commentator), that the object of all life upon the planet was to develop high spiritual force: gradually, slowly, through its friction with material frames. The speculator assumed this plan to be a merciful idea of a beneficent Creator, by which the Soul, when finally attaining to its eternal grandeur, might not be overwhelmed with the magnitude of its obligations, because it would recognise glory as principally earned by its long course of suffering and struggle.
Meanwhile, the author suggested that while the spiritual essence called the Soul, being eternal, could have no age, there being no such thing as Time in Eternity, the duration of its inhabitance of matter was of different length in different cases. Courageous souls that fought bravely for perfection would attain it sooner than the less enterprising. Those who lent themselves to evil would retrograde—would, like Sisyphus, be perpetually at work at the same step-in-advance. And those who failed to believe in the Eternal might revolve in fleshly forms even while the globe itself continued in the Universe in its present form.
Hugh read and re-read. Certain ideas he had vaguely felt floating among his troubled thoughts of late were assuming definite shape.
Throughout that hardest, most perplexed reverie of his life he remembered certain facts. Lilia’s unbelief during life: her rebellion against the law of Death at the last. The strange knowledge the Princess Mercedes had had from her earliest years of the awful scene in his life—Mercedes, who was born nine months after Lilia’s death.
“If I tell Helven this,” he said to himself, with a ghastly laugh at his own thoughts, “he will say that Mercedes is Lilia re-embodied. Did ever a romantic dreamer on subjects beyond our mortal powers of comprehension find such a case in point to bear out his wild imaginings?”
Lilia’s death—Mercedes’ birth—Lilia’s wild love for him—Mercedes’ feeling that his presence was necessary to her wellbeing.