The doctor was sympathetic. Naturally she would want to know what it was and how it happened. Those were questions anyone would ask. Alas! who could answer them? He, the doctor, had attended the late Mrs. Gib; it had been his happiness to know Agnes before she could possibly know herself; but Mr. Gib, as they all knew, lived to himself. He had, so to speak, no pathological history. Three days before it happened he had begun to behave strangely at the mill. The men noticed it. He interfered with their work by having them hold the furnace doors open while he committed papers, bundles and various unidentified objects to the fire, thereby spoiling several heats of good iron. It was not a doctor’s business to know these things. He had taken it upon himself, nevertheless, to make inquiries.
On the third day there had been a conference between Mr. Gib and his lawyers. What took place at this conference a doctor would probably not understand if he were told; however, he had not been told. The lawyers were reticent to the point of being rude, not knowing, of course, how important it was for a doctor to be able to reconstruct the events that have immediately preceded the seizure. Mr. Gib, he had learned, never returned to the mill from that conference with his lawyers. The notice of the mill’s closing was posted by the lawyers; it was signed by them with power of attorney. Mr. Gib went straight home and was next seen in a state of frenzy. When the doctor arrived he was in a paroxysm of rage, very dangerous to himself but otherwise harmless, since it seemed to vent itself upon imaginary objects. This state was followed by others, in rapid, alarming alternation—despair, exultation, terror. It had been necessary, as they could realize, to put him under restraint. Two men nurses were by him constantly.
What was it? The Wilkes-Barre consultants had agreed upon one diagnosis. The patient, they said, had been attacked by delusional mania. If the attack subsided he would recover; if not he would die of exhaustion. That might be a matter of weeks. The Philadelphia alienist had only just now seen the patient; yet his mind was made up. He pronounced it a kind of progressive disintegration of the brain matter, with sudden, catastrophic lesions. Death would take place in a few hours. And it certainly was true that all the symptoms grew worse.
“What is your opinion?” Agnes asked.
“My own?” said the doctor, casting glances around. He lowered his voice to a nonprofessional tone. “We have different names for it,” he said. “That is scientific. No matter. We are all talking about the same thing.... He ... is ... possessed.”
Agnes shuddered.
“What does he want from these mill workers outside?” Thane asked.
Yes, yes. The doctor was just coming to that. Mr. Gib had lucid, coherent intervals. They were decreasing in frequency and duration and that was an ominous sign. In the very first of these intervals he seemed to be facing the thought of death and revealed an extreme horror of natural interment. He had in one such interval either conceived a way or remembered one of cheating the earth, which was to be cremated in one of his own furnaces. Thereupon he began to call for certain old puddlers and heaters by name and when they were brought up to him he demanded of them a promise to dispose of his body in that extraordinary way. While he looked at them they had not the strength to say outright they would not; but he could not make them promise, and each time he failed it was very bad for him. The state of terror returned, and if this continued the consequences would be fatal.
“Would it relieve him if I promised?” Thane asked.
“Promised what?” the doctor asked moving uneasily.