Gualtier was silent for a long time, and profoundly thoughtful.
"What are you thinking about?" asked Hilda at last, with some impatience.
"I am thinking that this event may be accounted for on natural grounds," said he.
"No," said Hilda, warmly; "nothing in nature can account for it. When the dead come back to life, reason falters."
She shuddered as she spoke.
"Yes, my lady," said Gualtier, "but the dead do _not_ come back to life. You have seen an apparition, I doubt not; but that is a very different thing from the actual manifestation of the dead. What you saw was but the emanation of your own brain. It was your own fancies which thus became visible, and the image which became apparent to your eye was precisely the same as those which come in delirium. A glass of brandy or so may serve to bring up before the eyes a thousand abhorrent spectres. You have been ill, you have been excited, you have been taking drugs; add to this that on that occasion you were in a state of almost frenzy, and you can at once account for the whole thing on the grounds of a stimulated imagination and weak or diseased optic nerves. I can bring forward from various treatises on the optic nerves hundreds of cases as singular as yours, and apparently as unaccountable. Indeed, if I find that this matter continues to affect you so deeply," he continued, with a faint smile, "my first duty will be to read up exclusively on the subject, and have a number of books sent here to you, so as to let you see and judge for yourself."
CHAPTER LXVII.
A SHOCK.
Gualtier made still further explanations on this point, and mentioned several special cases of apparitions and phantom illusions of which he had read. He showed how in the lives of many great men such things had taken place. The case of Brutus was one, that of Constantine another. Mohammed, he maintained, saw real apparitions of this sort, and was thus prepared, as he thought, for the prophetic office. The anchorites and saints of the Middle Ages had the same experience. Jeanne d'Arc was a most conspicuous instance. Above all these stood forth two men of a later day, the representatives of two opposite principles, of two systems which were in eternal antagonism, yet these two were alike in their intense natures, their vivid imaginations, and the force of their phantom illusions. Luther threw his ink-bottle at the head of the devil, and Loyola had many a midnight struggle with the same grim personage.
To all this Hilda listened attentively, understanding fully his theory, and fully appreciating the examples which he cited in order to illustrate that theory, whether the examples were those well-known ones which belong to general history, or special instances which had come under his own personal observation. Yet all his arguments and examples failed to have any effect upon her whatever. After all there remained fixed in her mind, and immovable, the idea that she had seen the dead, and in very deed; and that Zillah herself had risen up before her eyes to confound her at the moment of the execution of her vengeance. Such a conviction was too strong to be removed by any arguments or illustrations. That conviction, moreover, had been deepened and intensified by the horror which had followed when she had fled in mad fear, feeling herself pursued by that abhorrent shape, till she had fallen senseless. Nothing of this could be argued away. Nor did she choose to argue about it. While she listened carefully and attentively to Gualtier's words, she scarcely attempted any rejoinder, but contented herself with a quiet reiteration of her former belief.