[p 118]
Fighting the vacant air, I strove to beat back those intangible weird Shapes that loomed above me, withering up my soul with the fixed stare of their angry eyes, and with a choking call for help, I fell, as it were, into a pit of darkness, where I lay mercifully unconscious.
[p 119]
XI
How the ensuing hours between this horrible episode and full morning elapsed I do not know. I was dead to all impressions. I woke at last, or rather recovered my senses to see the sunlight pouring pleasantly through the half-drawn curtains at my window, and to find myself in bed in as restful a position as though I had never left it. Was it then merely a vision I had seen?—a ghastly sort of nightmare? If so, it was surely the most abhorrent illusion ever evolved from dreamland! It could not be a question of health, for I had never felt better in my life. I lay for some time quiescent, thinking over the matter, with my eyes fixed on that part of the room where those Three Shapes had seemingly stood; but I had lately got into such a habit of cool self-analysis, that by the time my valet brought my early cup of coffee, I had decided that the whole thing was a dreadful fantasy, born of my own imagination, which had no doubt been unduly excited by the affair of Viscount Lynton’s suicide. I soon learned that there was no room left for doubt as to that unhappy young nobleman’s actual death. A brief account of it was in the morning papers, though as the tragedy had occurred so late at night there were no details. A vague hint of ‘money difficulties’ was thrown out in one journal,—but beyond that, and the statement that the body had been conveyed to the mortuary there to await an inquest, there was nothing said, either personal or particular. I found Lucio in the smoking-room, and it was he who first silently pointed [p 120] out to me the short paragraph headed ‘Suicide of a Viscount.’
“I told you he was a good shot!” he commented.
I nodded. Somehow I had ceased to feel much interest in the subject. My emotion of the previous evening had apparently exhausted all my stock of sympathy and left me coldly indifferent. Absorbed in myself and my own concerns, I sat down to talk and was not long before I had given a full and circumstantial account of the spectral illusion which had so unpleasantly troubled me during the night. Lucio listened, smiling oddly.
“That old Tokay was evidently too strong for you!” he said, when I had concluded my story.
“Did you give me old Tokay?” I responded laughing—“Then the mystery is explained! I was already overwrought, and needed no stimulant. But what tricks the imagination plays us to be sure! You have no idea of the distinct manner in which those three phantoms asserted themselves! The impression was extraordinarily vivid.”
“No doubt!” And his dark eyes studied me curiously. “Impressions often are very vivid. See what a marvellously real impression this world makes upon us, for example!”
“Ah! But then the world is real!” I answered.