Weeks passed, and the reports were scarcely more cheering. The patient had to be watched lest be should do himself harm; and as he resented such watching with savage impatience, his attendant's place was no sinecure.
Indeed, Verheyden writhed in his circumstances as upon burning fagots. Wrapped in his art as in an atmosphere, the wrench that tore his hand away left him breathless. Music, the glory and the sweetness of his life, floated back only just out of reach, tantalizing him with remembered and almost possible bliss. Melodies brushed his lips and left a sting; chords stretched broad, golden, electric, and, reaching to grasp them, he fell into darkness. His passionate heart rose and swelled, and found no outlet, but beat and broke against an impossibility, like the sea on its rocks. Verheyden's occupation was gone.
True, he could study phenomena. He was haunted by the ghost of a hand that he could clench but could not see, that sometimes itched at the finger-tips. It would seem that the nerves, confounded at being cut short from their usual station, had not yet learned to send new messages, even sent the old ones blunderingly, overdoing in their anxiety to do the best they could. He had sometimes to recollect that this troublesome hand was preserved in spirits in a glass jar set in Dr. Herne's laboratory, on a shelf just behind his pet skeleton.
Verheyden read treatises on nerves till his own were no longer telegraphic lines under control, but the wires of a rack to which he was bound. He studied spiritualism till in dim night-watches the veil before the unseen seemed to glide back. He dived into mesmerism till all the powers of his mind centred in a will that glittered hard and bright in his eyes, causing the timid to shrink and the pugilistic to make fists.
But through all these noxious parasites of the tree of knowledge which he recklessly gathered about him moaned ceaselessly his unforgotten bereavement. Or, if he forgot for a moment, it was like drawing the knife from a wound to drive it back again.
Having exhausted every other distraction, he started one day for a long walk in the country. He could not walk the city streets without meeting at every step some piercing reminder of his loss. It was Scylla and Charybdis. His fancy had caught a spark from everything beautiful in nature, and there was not an outline nor motion, not a sound nor a tint, but found in him some echo. Stately, swaying trees in his path waved the grave movement of an Andante; the shrill little bird that slid down on a sunbeam through the branches mimicked a twittering strain of Rossini's; a sigh of air that rose, and swelled, and sank again, echoed a phrase of Beethoven; and an unseen rivulet played one of Chopin's murmuring soliloquies.
Verheyden trod savagely on yielding moss, and crackling twigs, and dry leaves of last year, and on the bluest of blue violets that bloomed bathed in the noon sunshine. He plunged into a by-path, and came to a brook that fled as though pursued. It stumbled dizzily over shining pebbles, glided with suspended breath around grassy curves; it was all a-tremble with inextricably tangled sunshine and shadow; it gushed here and there into sweet complaining; it leaped with white feet down the rocks. Verheyden threw himself upon the bank beside it. He had played such dances, measures that made the dancers giddy, and sent the ladies dazed and laughing to their seats.
"Does he think we are dervishes? Do take me into the air."
Verheyden laughed; and the fingers in Dr. Herne's glass jar behind the skeleton played a caprice as saucy as Puck plunging with headlong somersaults and alighting on tiptoe. Then, with a groan, he recollected.