The Man with a Shadow

by George Manville Fenn

This, to the most extreme point, he had carefully written out, showing, in addition, the time when he felt that he must have gone wrong, as that where a different course must be pursued by the daring scientist who would venture so much in the great cause.

For he wrote clearly and impressively: failure meant such a fate as his, the constant presence of the spirit of the person who had died, and with it the being compelled to suffer for every wild act or speech this essence would do or make. He told how helpless he was, how he had striven to bring scientific knowledge to bear, fought with his position as a man should who was in the full possession of his faculties, but that he could do no more.

Success meant a crown of triumphant honour; failure, a kind of sane madness, whose only end could be death—a death he was compelled to seek to save himself at once—to save himself from being treated as a maniac, and then to spend a few weeks or months of torture which he knew he could not bear.

In his last paragraphs he pointed out his position. He was believed to be mad, and to clear himself he would have to explain his experiment and his abnormal position, which he owned that no one would or could be expected to believe, save such a savant as the one he addressed—a man who had made the brain his study, and who could feel for the sufferings of the writer.

This letter was enclosed in the packet addressed to his executors for delivery to Mr Delton, and lay in the study, waiting till those executors should receive the last commands.

All was at an end now, and with a feeling of calmness approaching to content, Horace North looked round his surgery with its many familiar objects; and without the slightest feeling of dread took down a small medicine glass from the set standing all ready upon a shelf, and then lifted a large bottle from one particular spot at the end where it always stood, veiling a little recess wherein were a couple of smaller bottles, carefully labelled and marked as to their degree of strength.

“Is it cowardly?” he said quietly. “Is it a sin? Surely not, when I know my position, and—yes, that is my fate.”

For at that moment there was a sharp crack: the door had yielded, and he knew that his cousin’s emissaries—the people from some private asylum—had forced their way into the study, and their next step would be to make their way to where he was.

He could have opened the door, and fled by way of the meadows; but where? To whom? Perhaps at the moment when he made his first appeal for help, the living shadow that he had, as it were, taken to him, would utter some wild cry or absurd jest, and people would believe his pursuers in spite of all that he could declare.

No, it was not cowardice, this hastening of his end; and, withdrawing the stopper, he began pouring out the liquid contents of the little bottle, as the handle of the surgery door was turned, and the panel gave an ominous crack.