“Father, I can’t tell you. I come not of myself. There must be something in it, though I don’t know what it is. This is the second time I have been brought to you here.”
“Are you going—?” He stopped himself. The exclamation had been begun with an angry intention. He stopped, looking at me with a scared look, as if perhaps it might be true.
“Do you mean mad? I don’t think so. I have no delusions that I know of. Father, think—do you know any reason why I am brought here? for some cause there must be.”
I stood with my hand upon the back of his chair. His table was covered with papers, among which were several letters with the broad black border which I had before observed. I noticed this now in my excitement without any distinct association of thoughts, for that I was not capable of; but the black border caught my eye. And I was conscious that he too gave a hurried glance at them, and with one hand swept them away.
“Philip,” he said, pushing back his chair, “you must be ill, my poor boy. Evidently we have not been treating you rightly; you have been more ill all through than I supposed. Let me persuade you to go to bed.”
“I am perfectly well,” I said. “Father, don’t let us deceive one another. I am neither a man to go mad nor to see ghosts. What it is that has got the command over me I can’t tell; but there is some cause for it. You are doing something or planning something with which I have a right to interfere.”
He turned round squarely in his chair, with a spark in his blue eyes. He was not a man to be meddled with. “I have yet to learn what can give my son a right to interfere. I am in possession of all my faculties, I hope.”
“Father,” I cried, “won’t you listen to me? No one can say I have been undutiful or disrespectful. I am a man, with a right to speak my mind, and I have done so; but this is different. I am not here by my own will. Something that is stronger than I has brought me. There is something in your mind which disturbs—others. I don’t know what I am saying. This is not what I meant to say; but you know the meaning better than I. Some one—who can speak to you only by me—speaks to you by me; and I know that you understand.”
He gazed up at me, growing pale, and his underlip fell. I, for my part, felt that my message was delivered. My heart sank into a stillness so sudden that it made me faint. The light swam in my eyes; everything went round with me. I kept upright only by my hold upon the chair; and in the sense of utter weakness that followed, I dropped on my knees I think first, then on the nearest seat that presented itself, and, covering my face with my hands, had hard ado not to sob, in the sudden removal of that strange influence,—the relaxation of the strain.
There was silence between us for some time; then he said, but with a voice slightly broken, “I don’t understand you, Phil. You must have taken some fancy into your mind which my slower intelligence—Speak out what you want to say. What do you find fault with? Is it all—all that woman Jordan?”