“I think,” he said slowly, “it must have been perhaps twenty years or more ago. I had just entered my teens. My sister and I were in a tree in our yard and she fell out and was badly hurt. She—she has never recovered. It was a good deal of a shock to me. I began to notice the dreams soon afterward. But they weren’t very frequent.”
“Just so. It might have been that.” The doctor was tapping his finger-tips together thoughtfully. There was something he wanted to know, which he must find out. But he did not believe that the man before him would answer truthfully the questions he needed to ask. So he decided to experiment in another direction. “This—this other you,” he went on, “this Hugh Gordon, came to see me once and——”
“Don’t call him my other self!” Felix cried out angrily, jumping to his feet and scowling. “He is a thief, a murderer! He has stolen my good name, my money, my body, he is trying to kill me! I know he came here and tried to poison your feeling against me—and I think he must have succeeded, too. He has tried to set my own mother and sister against me in that same way. He goes snooping out to their home and makes them believe all sorts of tales about me. He’s even been whispering his lies into the ear of my secretary, until she’s going to leave me.”
In his rage, which grew with each fresh accusation that he brought against his enemy, Brand was rushing about with uneven steps and now and then smiting a table or a chair with his fist. “He is determined to pull me down and cover me with disgrace and then annihilate me for his own benefit. Damn him, I won’t have him spoken of as my other self!”
“Try to be calm, Felix,” urged the doctor quietly. “You only make your task the harder every time you give up to such outbursts of rage.” He was looking at the other’s trembling hands and working face and thinking that here was at least a beginning of what he wished to know.
“Has this abnormal condition affected you in the exercise of your special gift?” he asked. Brand’s face brightened and his manner quieted at once.
“Ah! That’s something he’s not been able to filch from me, the damned thief!” he exclaimed exultantly as he seated himself again. “I’ve kept all the talent I ever had in that line, and it has developed and increased wonderfully—I don’t mean to boast, Dr. Annister, but I know what I’m talking about—since this has been going on. If you saw the pictures that were published and the things all the critics said of me a few weeks ago you would know that is true. I’m astonished myself lately at the ease, the rapidity and the success with which I work. But it’s all he has not stolen,” Brand continued more gloomily. “He has taken all my business sense. I used to have a good deal of it. I could make money and I would soon have been a rich man. Now I’m getting poorer every day, and he’s getting rich.”
“Yes, I see.” The physician was nodding and softly beating his fingers together. “I get an idea of how the cleavage has been. Your nature was broken into two parts—as clean and sharp and complete a break as in any case I know of. Our task now is to reunite them and make a whole man again out of the halves into which you have separated.”
Brand leaned forward eagerly. “Then you’ll help me?” he demanded. “You won’t go over to his side? The damned hypocrite! He says he is more entitled to life than I am, because he’s a better man, because he wants to do good. Why, Doctor, in the last letter he sent me—” Brand’s anger was rising again—“he ordered me to make my will, and to leave a letter for some one that would explain my disappearance so that it would be known that I was gone for good, that I was never coming back!” The physician held his patient with a calm gaze and made a sign that he was to control himself. And in a moment Felix sank back into his seat, trembling with the reaction from his burst of temper, and imploring the other for the gift of a longer lease of life.