Master of His Fate

by J. Maclaren Cobban

"Oh yes, sir," said the house-physician. "The man was brought in last night. Dr Dowling" [the resident assistant-physician] "saw him, and thought it a case of ordinary trance, that could easily wait till you came, as usual, to-morrow."

"Ah, well," said Lefevre, "let me see him."

Seen thus, the physician appeared a different person from the cheerful, modest man of the Hyacinth Club. He had now put on the responsibility of men's health and the enthusiasm of his profession. He seemed to swell in proportions and dignity, though his eye still beamed with a calm and kindly light.

The young man led the way down the echoing flagged passage, and up the flight of stone stairs. As they went they encountered many silent female figures, clean and white, going up or down (it was the time of changing nurses), so that a fanciful stranger might well have thought of the stairway reaching from earth to heaven, on which the angels of God were seen ascending and descending. A stranger, too, would have noted the peculiar odours that hung about the stairs and passages, as if the ghosts of medicines escaped from the chemist's bottles were hovering in the air. Opening first an outer and then an inner door, Lefevre and his companion entered a large and lofty ward. The room was dark, save for the light of the fire and of a shaded lamp, by which, within a screen, the night-nurse sat conning her list of night-duties. The evening was just beginning out of doors,—shop-fronts were flaring, taverns were becoming noisy, and brilliantly-lit theatres and music-halls were settling down to business,—but here night and darkness had set in more than an hour before. Indeed, in these beds of languishing, which stretched away down either side of the ward, night was hardly to be distinguished from day, save for the sunlight and the occasional excitement of the doctor's visit; and many there were who cried to themselves in the morning, "Would God it were evening!" and in the evening, "Would God it were morning!" But there was yet this other difference, that disease and doctor, fear and hope, gossip and grumbling, newspaper and Bible and tract, were all forgotten in the night, for some time at least, and Nature's kind restorer, sleep, went softly round among the beds and soothed the weary spirits into peace.

Lefevre and the house-physician passed silently up the ward between the rows of silent blue-quilted beds, while the nurse came silently to meet them with her lamp. Lefevre turned aside a moment to look at a man whose breathing was laboured and stertorous. The shaded light was turned upon him: an opiate had been given him to induce sleep; it had performed its function, but, as if resenting its bondage, it was impishly twitching the man's muscles and catching him by the throat, so that he choked and started. Dr Lefevre raised the man's eyelid to look at his eye: the upturned eye stared out upon him, but the man slept on. He put his hand on the man's forehead (he had a beautiful hand—the hand of a born surgeon and healer—fine but firm, the expression of nervous force), and with thumb and finger stroked first his temples and then his neck. The spasmodic twitching ceased, and his breath came easy and regular. The house-doctor and the nurse looked at each other in admiration of this subtle skill, while Lefevre turned away and passed on.

"Where is the man?" said he.

"Number Thirteen," answered the house-doctor, leading the way.

The lamp was set on the locker beside the bed of Thirteen, screens were placed round to create a seclusion amid the living, breathing silence of the ward, and Lefevre proceeded to examine the unconscious patient who had so strangely put himself in his hands.

He was young and well-favoured, and, it was evident from the firmness of his flesh, well-fed. Lefevre considered his features a moment, shook his head, and murmured, "No; I don't think I've seen him before." He turned to the nurse and inquired concerning the young man's clothes: they were evidently those of a gentleman, she said,—of one, at least, who had plenty of money. He turned again to the young man. He raised the left arm to feel the heart, but, contrary to his experience in such cases, the arm did not remain as he bent it, nor did the eyes open in obedience to the summons of the disturbed nerves. The breathing was scarcely perceptible, and the beating of the heart was faint.

"A strange case," said Lefevre in a low voice to his young comrade—"the strangest I've seen. He does not look a subject for this kind of thing, and yet he is in the extreme stage of hypnotism. You see." And the doctor, by sundry tests and applications, showed the peculiar exhausted and contractive condition of the muscles. "It is very curious."