An episode in the doings of the dualized

by Eveleen Laura Mason

And to this the doctors agreed. This was the end of poor Reginald Grove; and as his fate seemed settled, the older Mr. Grove, when he arrived, accepted the statement that Reginald was a wrecked man, body and mind. And when Mrs. Mancredo had made herself known to Mr. Grove on his arrival, in a softened state of feeling toward both the father and son she found herself promising more in the way of help and responsibility than she at first realized, or afterwards wanted to perform. And the elder Grove (deeply interested in speculations in Mexico, and interested in his own approaching third marriage) was well content to turn this responsibility over to Mrs. Mancredo, with (it was popularly said) the promise of all the money necessary for Reginald’s needs or fancies. It was not until Mr. Grove had steamed away to Mexico that Mrs. Mancredo really began to look about her; and then she did it with some disgust at her own stupidity, as she was pleased to name the sympathy that had overwhelmed her and swept her on to undertake, in an indefinite way, all that the care of Reginald involved.

One warm day in the late fall she brought Reginald in her carriage down to the Dakshas. He was urgent to go there every day, and was often brought down and placed in a long-chair out on their piazza, where, with his volume of Petrarch (from which he was inseparable) he passed many pleasant hours. His facial disfigurement was not as marked as at first. But he was paralyzed through one arm and leg, and the sense of taste, touch and smell seemed deadened. His hearing and his sight were not perceptibly injured, and the childlike alertness of his questions seemed to show that the gray matter of the brain, like a galvanic battery, still generated the electric current sufficiently to produce and accumulate nervous force for the few demands which the partially deadened coarser part of the brain now made upon it. There was evinced by Reginald an utter deadness to the passions of fear, desire, etc. The central ganglia, which serves to do the drudgery of the brain, leaving the gray matter free for higher, more difficult kinds of work, was injured; thus overthrowing the balance of power between the highest meditative, spiritual faculties, and the seat of those practical faculties which insure energetic daily activities.

It was as if the partial paralysis which had befallen Reginald Grove had sent a partial sleep to the abused and overtaxed faculties of his animal being; while the higher hemisphere of his brain, so long crippled by inaction, now arousing from that lethargy of disuse, put forth dormant strength. Whether true or not, this was Ethelbert’s theory of the case, and her study of developments confirmed her in it. He was, in a sense, helpless and forceless; yet the childlike, placid clearness of his ideals, and the exhalation of sentiment in view of nature’s beauties, were so inherently clear-cut and rare, that, broken and disorganized though he was, Reginald Grove was now a less disagreeable person to Ethelbert than he had been on his first tumultuous visit. He was seldom pettish or unmanageable when with Ethelbert; but to Mrs. Mancredo his talk was unendurable. She called him a miserable fellow, blaming him passionately to Ethelbert.

“But I don’t think he is miserable,” said Ethelbert, in her quiet way. “He was miserable, when in other moments he loathed himself for his self-mismanagement. He acted like a soul in torment the first time he was here; and I fancy he was not then at his worst.”

“I am sure I can’t understand your notions. Do you mean, you think he is less miserable than before?” said Mrs. Mancredo, looking toward Reginald, who sat reading the book from which he was inseparable, as a very little child reads. The sight of that book made her wild with nervousness. There seemed something uncanny in the way he had identified himself with the personages and ideas there. And his numerous polyglot questions asked in regard to things she could not explain, and his weird, childlike shrewdness of imagination as to some unseen world of mind and spirit, were getting to be the horrible thing to Mrs. Mancredo.

From what in the apparently stolid, noncommittal old Reginald, this spirit of occult divination of the purposes, powers and results of Petrarch’s struggles, had evolved itself, she could not fancy. And she was getting so nervous at the steady illumination of his eyes that she would have given half she was worth to have removed from her memory all knowledge of his existence. Whether he had become absolutely foolish, or uncannily wise and weird, she did not know. But her refuge was Ethelbert; and Reginald’s unaltered fancy for calling Ethelbert “mother,” seemed to favor Mrs. Mancredo’s dawning hope of a way to get rid of him helpfully. And as she so thinking stood there, down in the garden, looking back at him up on the piazza, he called out: “Mother! mother!” and they both walked quickly to him.

“Let’s have a nice read about ‘of such is the kingdom of heaven,’ and about the poor boy out of whom the devils were cast. I want to know about those mighty works, and how power did them.”

Mrs. Mancredo, with an ignorant person’s horror of what may result from irregularity of mental action, felt it was awful that a man who had lost the gustatory appetites which render nice food a pleasure to the palate, should yet, as Ethelbert said, feast on the high thoughts and things of the unseen realms. For Ethelbert believed he did not think in the sense of concentrating attention; but, instead, she believed his mind simply reflected back to his attention what passed in the realms of life above and anear him, as a lake reflects all that shadows itself upon its surface; and this she explained to Mrs. Mancredo, adding:

“It is for this reason that I wish he could be always cared for by some discerning person, who, dwelling unmoved in that beautiful realm which now has hold on his mind, and who, reading his very thought, would thus sustain him at peace there, as a student under these angelic teachers, and so educate him for a real manhood which he would thus yet attain. Do you understand?”

“No, I don’t understand,” was the blunt response. “All I know is, he has played out his little play on the stage of life, and has made a tragedy or farce of it, common enough in this age. He makes me wild with nervousness sometimes. What do you want me to do with him, for heaven’s sake?”