Dr. Duncan went into the private ward in which the man lay. He found him asleep and breathing stertorously. Drugs had done their work for the time.

The nurse who was in attendance on him had left his bedside a few minutes before, so the doctor was alone with the sick man.

He approached the bed. It was as he expected. He recognised Hudson's face at once, partly concealed though it was by the bandages that had been placed on the wounds the barrister had inflicted on himself against the stones of Devereux Court.

He re-arranged the pillow of the insensible man, and then stood by him a few moments, contemplating the altered features of his old school-fellow.

Dr. Duncan was anything but a religious man, but the idea came to him then to do a thing which he had not perhaps done for several years.

Recent circ.u.mstances had made the strong wilful man feel as a little child again. He knelt down by the bedside of his friend and prayed for him, or rather did something very like it; for his thoughts as he knelt were not framed into distinct language.

No _words_ came to his mind, but he was filled with a vague aspiration, a sense of his own weakness, a consciousness of higher things, a confident belief that the Universal Mercy would have a pity for his poor friend infinitely greater than was even his own pity--a prayer without a pet.i.tion, without words, or even distinct ideas, but perchance a true prayer for all that.

CHAPTER XV.

IN THE LAND OF PHANTOMS.

When the barrister came to consciousness, he found himself lying in a bed in an unfamiliar place, a small, light-coloured room, with only the most indispensable articles of furniture in it. His brain was too deranged by the effect of the poison to allow him to speculate where he might be and how he got there. To think was agony, and sent his head whirling round with a dizzy sickness and horror.

His reason returned to him in fitful glimpses only, and then he realised that he was in a room, in bed, and that people who were strangers to him came in and out. But all around him was changing and indistinct and full of confused noise, and the bed and room seemed to shake and heave beneath him as if he were on some small craft tossing on a stormy sea.

Then all the real faded away from his vision, and his mind set forth to travel through a land of phantoms.

The delusions of delirium vary much with the individual. The finer the fabric of the mind, the more vivid, the less gross become the wandering fancies; and all the learning and experiences and ideas of its past are wrought by the disordered brain into long and complicated histories of agony, all the store-house of the memory is ransacked for instruments of torture.

Again, it may have happened in his case that the poison administered by Susan Riley in some way modified the effects of the alcohol; but, whatever the cause, his delirium did not a.s.sume the form generally produced by drink. He pa.s.sed through a long series of strange and highly imaginative dreams, all full of terrible and consistent adventures of calamity; and the key-note of every one of these dreams was WOMAN. In every one was some beautiful evil female form that tempted him on into varieties of new and indescribably horrible ruin. The dominant idea, the morbid bias of his mind, coloured each delusion.

A desolate coast in the extreme sad North; along the sea stretches a narrow beach of black rocks; behind this tower huge mountains, bare of any vegetation, cloven by black ravines streaked here and there with the ghastly white snow. It is the region of eternal death, of endless winter sprinkling daily snows to be the sport of the Arctic hurricane.

A leaden-coloured sea moans incessantly on the dismal beach, and on it sail fast to the southward, silently, great icebergs riven from the mountains by the storms. And beyond the lea of the sh.o.r.e, the sea breaks and shivers beneath the keen blast that sweeps down the dayless gorges from the awful glaciers. And there is no horizon anywhere around, for above is a sky of rolling clouds through which the sun never shines, and the mists of the mountain-tops mingle with the clouds of the sky, and so, too, does the sullen haze that lies on the grey sea. It is the region of death--no life, no light, no love.

On the black rocks between the mountains and the sea, a wretched man is lying. The deadly cold wind blows through him, but he cannot die. It seems to him that he has lain there for ages, and will lie there for evermore, away from all things human; and there is not even so much as a flower to comfort the castaway--no life, no light, no love.

Of a sudden, a faint pink flush illumines the northern sky.

Hope comes back doubtfully to his despairing soul. He raises himself on his elbows, and looks with straining eyes up the icy north wind at the new light.

The rosy light deepens and collects into a form, first thin and vague as a ghost, then gradually becoming distinct and solid.

There is standing before him the figure of a woman, a gigantic woman, whose head reaches to the clouds--a t.i.tan. Her beauty is beyond the beauty of earth. Her ma.s.sive rosy limbs are more delicious than ever Greek sculptor dreamt of, and her long, fair locks blow out all over the heavens, crowning her head with a golden halo.

Her lips are red and voluptuous, and pleasure sparkles in her eyes.

She does not look down at the man, but gazes far away over the mountains and the seas towards the South.

A breath of hope thaws the despair in his soul. Life and light and love are coming back to the regions of death.

He lies there at her feet and looks up, and his spirit is filled with the sense of her beauty. His soul is faint with an impossible love for her, a love greater than the awe he feels in the presence of the G.o.ddess. He lies p.r.o.ne on the ground and longs that her great white feet may crush him, and that he may die at once. To be killed by her were sweet!

Oh, that he were not a pigmy! that he, too, were a G.o.d, and might become fit mate of hers, might know her love!

His desire, his intense aspiration reaches her. The t.i.tan looks down upon him with a smile whose meaning he cannot understand; then she stoops and touches his heart with her hand.

At that moment his wish commences to be realised. He feels that his body is extending rapidly; his stature is becoming that of a G.o.d.

But now a fantastic and horrible idea seizes him. As he grows larger and larger, his senses, his consciousness, spreading through the ma.s.s, dilute lessen. As he increases in bulk, vitality diminishes; the numbness and coldness of death comes gradually on him.

As his senses dim, the t.i.tan woman fades away into mist, and all is darkness. He can no longer hear the sound of the waves, and his body still increases till it becomes as a vast mountain, the extremes of which are so far off as to be almost out of sensation.

Possessed by this fearful delusion, mathematical calculations kept running through the barrister's disordered brain--distracting sums ever repeating themselves, and he could not shake them off.

Life, the wild train of his reasoning ran on continually. "Life filling one body--the body doubles in size--then the life is half as strong. Now my body is three times as big--life is three times as weak--now five times--six times--now a hundred times. Oh, this numbness is reaching my heart! Oh, this horrible, horrible death!" and his frame shook and his muscles were drawn up in hard knots, and great beads of sweat rolled down his agonised features.

Then a hand that waited on him unseen took a cup in which some white crystals had been dissolved and placed it to his lips.

As his teeth rattled against it, he drank the draught fiercely, as if for life, though he knew not what he did.

His delusions then became softer, even happy, as of one under the influence of opium.

He saw around him an immense landscape--plains and rivers and hills spreading for hundreds of leagues beneath a blue sky--a nature bathed in a pellucid atmosphere that lent all a beauty beyond earth. Scattered over the plain were many cities, and by merely willing it he found himself walking within any of them--strange, beautiful cities of bright colour, whose banner-hung streets were thronged with processions of people clad in a medieval costume. The quaintness of an olden time was over all.

All these processions tripped on to one tune, a tune to which they sang a song in an unknown language--a song low, monotonous, sweet; and the church bells rang out the same tune perpetually, and the very air shook to it, and the trees waved to it, and so did the banners that hung from the houses; and all his own words and thoughts ran on ever to the same jingle without his power to prevent it.

Then he turned off from the main into the side streets, tempted by the glance of a white-faced woman with a face of marvellous beauty, fascinating, yet ominous, with immovable, inscrutable expression of features.

Knowing that he was plunging into danger, horror, death, he yet followed recklessly, led on by the magic of the woman. And from one side street she would turn off at right angles into another, and from that to another, and so on; and each street was narrower than the last and more gloomy. The brightness and loveliness of the main thoroughfares was not in these. There were no longer the gaily-dressed throngs and the harmony of that universal tune; but these streets were silent, deserted, with dark, moss-grown pavements, in which here and there were pools of black water. The grim houses rose on either side storey upon storey of black, hideous stones, ancient, rotten, crumbling with age; and each storey overlapped the lower, till the upmost of either side of the street met, high, high up, rickety structures of rotten wood from which black rags flaunted. And for thirty feet or so up, there were no windows to these houses--bare, leaning walls alone. After that were the windows, irregular in size and in position, with wooden balconies running along them carved into shapes of grinning monsters.

As he advanced from narrower street to narrower, the silence and the sense of impending horror intensified. And the woman brought him to a crevice half-way up in a sort of battlement; a recess which seemed to be her bower wherein to receive her lovers--a foul recess where was a pile of bones, and where the dark mould was discoloured with soaking blood.

Then she stopped, turned and looked him in the face; for the first time her features moved--relaxed into a smile, he fled shrieking.

Again in those horrible narrow stifling alleys, which became darker and filthier as he went on; and though he met no one in them, yet he saw that from each of the innumerable windows there looked out at him the beautiful, melancholy, deadly-white face of a woman, with black eyes as of a basilisk burning out of it.

None of the women spoke, or moved, or beckoned, or looked glad or wroth.

But he knew, as he pa.s.sed by them, that they came down the stairs of their houses behind him and followed him. He could not see them or hear them, but he felt their terrible presence. They poured out behind him, silent, invisible crowds ever increasing.