He threw himself back on the seat of his carriage. What mattered murders or tragedies to him? In heart he knew himself a murderer by desire and fierce hatred—in reality, his life had turned to tragedy deep and bitter and terrible, with a hopelessness that the coming years could never brighten, and the dawn of Hope would never bless.
The shrill whistle of the engine sounded above all the clamor. The train moved slowly out of the station, and still clear and distinct those words reached him like a meaningless echo: “Murder of a foreign count! Mysterious occurrence! Special edition! Special edition!”
CHAPTER VIII.
BY JOSEPH HATTON.
Out, out, damned spot!—Shakspere.
It was during these hours that had “dropped one by one into the gulf of time” that the miserable count had been done to death by as fierce a murderer as had ever mutilated Nature’s handiwork, albeit unconscious of his sanguinary deed. While mind and body had, so far as Lord Francis knew, been absorbed in sleep, both had been cruelly awake under a strange mesmeric or electro-biologic influence.
The wrong by which his soul was vexed had carried him out of himself, and brought him under the control of what unsophisticated people call sleep-walking, with suicidal or murderous impulse. Scientists have found in this hypnological condition new examples of unconscious evolution of the mind; but it is not our business to describe or investigate the various discoveries which, in the direction of hypnotic trance or mesmeric constraint, have of late occupied public attention; we have merely to record the facts that in this present history are stranger than fiction.
Illustrations of the possibilities of a dual existence have been given to the world in the case of Hyde and Jekyll, but sleep-walking is as old as the hills, and give the hypnological subject the original impulse of a bitter wrong sufficient to excite a vengeful desire, then such a deed as that which was proclaimed by the newsboys, as Lord Francis left his chambers to take the tidal train to Paris, is quite conceivable.
The victim of the dream in action, the sleepwalker—the subject of the mesmerizer—comes out of his trance oblivious of his hypnotic adventures.
And thus it was with Lord Francis. But what a crime he had unconsciously committed! And with what heroic self-denial the wife had taken upon herself all the responsibility of the criminal’s vengeful act!
The male figure which Lord Francis had seen stealing toward his wife’s room was the Count de Mürger. In this Lord Francis was not mistaken, but Fenella was. We know how at the moment her heart was yearning for its rightful lord, but De Mürger little thought that Lady Francis had taken him for Frank. Her feelings had been so wrought up to the pitch of hope, that leaving her room to find her husband and throw herself at his feet, she fancied him in a similar frame of mind—as indeed he was—and love interpreted the approach of the count into that of her husband.