“What are they? Whence do they come? I have no memories of such in all my life. They are strangers to me, yet as clear and actual as yours I look on now. Human—the faces of men and women—some good, some evil; but, if I try to hold and fix ’em, they slide and melt, this one laughing, that wickedly deriding.”
“I know them, evanescent phantoms, that poise, like the shining dragonfly, one instant on wing, and, so you make a movement to look closer, are gone—darted to extinction. Well, may they not be the faces of those we saw through former eyes of ours, in lives before this life?”
The boy lay staring at him, pondering his words as if half tranced.
“I think you say truth,” he answered presently. “What odd surprises come floating sometimes into one’s head, like glimpses of a great secret—bright bubbles that break just as you seem on the point of remembering what the lovely little pictures in them are reflections of. That is a bubble of yours I have often tried to catch.”
“What does it seem to tell you, child?”
“It seems to tell me how I that am I must have been since the beginning of things; how I must have lain in the life that was the first life as surely as I lay in the life that was my mother. Think back, and you will find it must be. All through the countless ages I have been passed on from prison to prison, waiting the release which is to come to me at length in Death—is to come to me through this last phase of conscious existence, which is indeed my trial and sentence. And then the scaffold, Jack; we all have to mount the scaffold; and at last the opened door—the escape—the rapture—and I shall remember why it all was!” He clasped his thin hands; his face seemed lit up with an inward glow, like a porcelain lamp enclosing a dim flame. “Is not that what you mean?” he said.
“I think it is, Colin. Yet what could that imperishable seed have known, until this last phase of realities? For it the faces could not have existed.”
“Why not, since they existed for the lives of which it was?”
“That is true. Life is not contained in this or that of me, but is the sum of all.”
The casement formed a shallow recess of five lights. It stood opposite the bed, looking out on the street. Dimly, seen through its latticed lower half, the houses across the lane towered like dark phantoms. With their faces to the north, they were never but plunged in gloom; but when the south sun was high, and struck upon the stained glass, the contrastive glow, to tranced eyes, made them appear impalpable things. That was how the boy liked to regard them—silvery abodes of mystery, where any strange things might be happening, and appearing framed between the floor and that upper frieze of glowing transparencies. Then the lower windows looked mere cobwebs, in which sparks and glints of light hung caught like fireflies. It was all a dream of mist and sparkle, in which the sense of close confinement seemed dissolving.