Kate stopped. "You want me?"
"Me want my 'ittle Kittie--my 'ittle b'indled Kittie! Dey put my Kittie in de hole in de darden! Me want her to p'ay wiz!" And with this, and with the tears streaming down his cheeks, poor Archie toddled forward with the uncertain step and outstretched arms of a little child. But Kate had already gained the door, and was running screaming across the next room, and so down the long corridor.
Poor Archie toddled after, his baby heart filled with mourning for the brindled cat that had been buried in the back garden seven years before. Seven years?--or was it only yesterday?
VI.
Miss Kate Battledown's screams, as she ran down the corridor, must speedily have summoned the household; and then the dreadful news was told, not losing anything of its horror, we may be sure, in the recital; and then appeared poor Archie in confirmation. The greatest confusion and bewilderment prevailed. No one comprehended anything. It was not known what had happened. What was this story about Archie's having suddenly appeared, where before there had been only empty air--just as his great grandfather, Sir Charles, had done before him? Kate, to whom we may pardon a little incorrectness or exaggeration under the circumstances, solemnly asseverated that she had been looking straight at the centre of the room, and that nobody was there; and that all at once "Archie grew together out of nothing!" Such is the version of her words given by Lady Malmaison in a letter to her sister, Miss Tremount, of Cornwall, soon after the occurrence. Miss Tremount, it may be remembered, had intimated years ago her intention of making Archibald her heir; and Lady Malmaison's letter is an amusing and rather ingenious attempt to convey the information about poor Archie, in such a way as not to frighten off this inheritance. Doctor Rollinson, she wrote, had seen dear Archie, and had said that what had happened was only what might have been expected; and that the dear child's health would certainly not suffer, but, on the contrary, be strengthened, and his life prolonged. For that there could be no doubt that poor Archie had been laboring under an almost unnatural excitement, or tension of the nerves, during the last few years, which had caused Lady Malmaison the greatest anxiety; and she was truly thankful, for her part, that things had come out no worse than they had. She could feel secure, now, that her darling Archie would live to be a quiet, good, sensible English gentleman, fitted to discharge efficiently, and conscientiously, an English gentleman's duties, whether it were to manage an estate, or--or in fact whatever it might be. And then came the little story about the mysterious apparition of Archie out of vacancy, which Lady Malmaison treated humorously; though in her own heart she was very much scared at it, and was moreover privately convinced that Archie was, and would remain, very little better than an idiot all his life long. Now, it is well known that English country gentlemen are never idiotic.
What was the elder Dr. Rollinson's real opinion about Archie's relapse? The only direct evidence worth having on this point--his own--is unfortunately not forthcoming, and we are obliged to depend on such inaccurate or interested hearsay as has just been quoted above. It seems likely that he came to the conclusion that stupidity was the boy's normal condition and that his seven years of brilliance had been something essentially abnormal and temporary, and important only from a pathological point of view. Indeed, there was nothing in the transmuted Archibald's condition that was susceptible of being treated as a disease. He was as healthy as the average of boys of fourteen (if he were a boy of fourteen, and not a child of seven). He knew nothing, and had retained nothing, of his other life; he had to be taught his letters--and a terrible job that was, by all accounts; he occasionally expressed a desire to see his nurse Maggie--who, the charitable reader will rejoice to hear, had been honestly married since we last heard of her. He was greatly puzzled to find himself so much taller than when he last knew himself; and it was a long time before he could be induced to recognize his own reflection in the looking-glass. Needless to say that everything connected with the secret chamber and the silver rod was completely erased from his mind; and though he had been found with the rod in his hand, he could not tell what it was or where he got it.
In this connection, however, I will mention something which, if it be true, throws a new and strange light upon his psychological condition. There is reason to believe that he visited the secret chamber in a somnambulistic state. The evidence on which this supposition is founded appears, at this distance of time, rather imperfect; but it is certain that a few weeks after the boy's entrance upon his unintelligent state, the silver rod was lost sight of; and it is almost certain that during the time of its disappearance it was lying in its hidden receptacle under the floor beside the mantelpiece. But in that case, who but Archibald could have put it there? and when could he have put it there save in his sleep? It is known that he was a somnambulist during his unenlightened period, though never in his alternate state; and if he, as a somnambulist, remembered the hiding-place of the rod, it follows that he must also have remembered the rod's use, and visited the secret chamber. Thus it would seem that only in the boy's waking hours was he oblivious and stupid; in his dreams he truly lived and was awake! Here, then, is a complication of absorbing interest, which I will leave for physicians and metaphysicians to fight out between themselves. For my part, I can only look on in respectful bewilderment.
But we must leave Archibald for the present, and occupy our minds with the proceedings of the other personages of this drama. An era of disaster was in store for most of them. It is curious to note how the proverb that misfortunes never come single was illustrated in the case of these people. Fate seems to have launched its thunderbolts at them all at once, as if making up for lost time; or like a playwright, who clears his stage of all secondary and superfluous characters, and leaves a free field wherein the two or three principal people may meet and work out their destiny unimpeded.
Colonel Battledown fought under Wellington against Soult at Orthez; and in a charge of the French cavalry the gallant officer and genial gentleman was cut in the head by a sabre-stroke and ridden down; and when picked up after the battle he was dead. He was buried on the spot; the practice of sending the corpses of heroes and others careering over the face of the earth, in search of a spot of loam worthy to receive them, was not at that time so fashionable as it has since become. But the news of his death came home, and put his friends in mourning, and made Mistress Kate the heiress of a great property at the age of fourteen. But she was older than her years, and was generally considered to be "just the sort of person to be an heiress," whatever that may be. I suppose she was exceedingly handsome, with a proper sense of her importance, and a capacity of keeping an eye upon what she considered her interests. At the same time many actions of hers indicate that she was occasionally liable to ungovernable impulses, and that her temper was fitful and wayward. Such a woman would make a capital heroine for a modern novel; she would stand a lot of analyzing.
The tender relations which had subsisted between her and Archibald were perforce broken off. What can you do with a lover who suddenly ceases to have the most distant recollection of you, who does not believe you when you tell him your name, and whose only associations with that name date seven years back and are disagreeable? Nobody can blame Kate for giving Archibald up; she would have been more than human if she could have intrusted her heart to the keeping of a half-witted wizard, whose mysterious likeness to, or connection with, a charming young gentleman rendered him only the more undesirable. Poor Kate! If she gave her heart to Archibald, and then Archibald became somebody else, what shall we say became of her heart? Must it not have been irretrievably lost, and shall we be surprised if we hereafter detect in her a tendency to heartlessness?