The Man with a Shadow

He shivered and looked hastily round as he drew in his breath hard and with a curious catch.

“Good heavens! of what am I afraid? The first amputator, the first explorer into Nature’s hidden paths, where she guards her secrets so religiously – they only felt the same. Have I gone so far only to hesitate to go further?”

He stood shrinking, with his hand clutching the white cloth spread over the table, and his eyes fixed on vacancy.

“Am I – an experienced medical man – to be frightened by a shadow? I say that there is nothing wrong in my researches,” he cried passionately, as if addressing some one in the corner of the vault. “It is for the benefit of posterity. My experiments upon this vile body here are right.

“And yet I feel as if I cannot go further,” he muttered, with the same abject shiver attacking him again; “as if I dared not – as if I must pause, and I have learned so much. I dare not! It is as if the hand of one’s guardian angel were laid upon my breast, and a voice whispered – ‘Rash man, pause before it is too late!’”

He caught at the nearest object for support, for he was weak with excitement, and his face looked ghastly in the gloom, as he stood there trembling till he realised what he, the living, had seized to sustain him – a coffin handle – and snatched his fingers away with a cry of horror, to shrink back and rest against the further side of the vault, but only to start away again, for his shoulder was against another coffin.

He glanced at Moredock, but the old man was sleeping heavily, and once more he looked wildly round the vault.

“I cannot go on,” he groaned; “it is too horrible. There is a terror beyond that dark veil which seems to hold me back. I’ll wake him up. This night shall end it all, and I’ll rest in peace, contented with what I know. I dare go no further.”

He drew a long breath, as if relieved, and felt stimulated by his thoughts. It was all so simple to try and leave everything as nearly as possible in its old state, generously recompense the old sexton, and return to his regular course. The proceedings of the past would be the joint secret of Moredock and himself.

“I’ve done,” he said. “I’ll be satisfied. It is too horrible to go on.”

He crossed to the old man, who was now sleeping quite peacefully, and had raised his hand to shake him and bid him rise and help, but his hand stopped within a few inches of the old sexton’s shoulder, and he stepped back with an ejaculation full of anger.

“Coward! idiot!” he exclaimed. “That ignorant old boor sleeps as calmly as a child among these grisly relics of mortality, and you, enlightened by science, educated, a seeker after wisdom, shrink and shiver and dare do no more.

“No,” he added, after a pause; “it is too horrible. There is a something holds me back.

“And fame – the praise of men? And love? The kisses of Leo? Her bright looks – her pride in the man she will call husband? Horace North, are you going mad? Pause? Now? When there is triumph waiting, and a little further research will teach me all I want – maybe give me the great success?

“No; not if fifty guardian angels barred my way. I will win now in spite of all.”

The coward fit of shrinking had gone, and, with a laugh full of contempt for himself, he took a step to the table and snatched the white cloth from the great stone slab.

Volume Two – Chapter Ten.

A Friendly Visit

A week had passed since Horace North’s straggle with the strange fits of repugnance and dread that had assailed him on his researches: six nights, during each of which he had battled with the same feelings and mastered, and gone on, with Moredock revelling in his opiate-produced sleep in the corner.

Night after night the old man slept in that vault for hours, among the remains of the Candlishes whom he had robbed, and enjoying a voluptuous pleasure in his sleep, which made him the doctor’s willing servant, whose dread was lest the visits to the mausoleum should come to an end.

But these nightly visits were not without their effects, and these intense studies could not be carried on without leaving their traces on the man.

Mrs Berens was taken ill, and the doctor was called in.

In her lonely widowed state, with nothing but her money, her dress, her mirror, and the visits and gossip of Duke’s Hampton to amuse her, thirsting the while for the communings of a kindred spirit who would tell her she was far too young yet to give up thoughts of love, Mrs Berens felt that she must have some relaxation, and she took it in the form of fits of illness of the body and ditto ditto of the mind.

For the former she called in Dr North, and told her pains.

For the latter, the Reverend Hartley Salis, to whom she recounted her doubts, her sorrows, and her sufferings of mind; and in each case she felt better, though she did not take the medicine of the one nor follow out the precepts of the other.

It was very wrong, no doubt, but it was very natural; and Mrs Berens, not middle-aged, and plump, and pleasing, and anxious to please, was very full of human nature.

There was such satisfaction, too, in having her hand held by the doctor. So there was, too, when it was grasped at coming, and again at leaving, by bluff, manly Parson Salis; but they neither of them proposed, or went a step further than to be gently courteous and kind to the loving and lovable weak woman, who longed to empty the urn of her affection upon either head.

And now poor Mrs Berens was in sad trouble.

“I know it,” she sobbed to herself, after a visit from the doctor. “Mary Salis will not confess, and Leo always holds one off; but he does love Leo, and she is holding him in her wicked chains, like one of those terrible witches we read about; and, poor dear man, she is breaking his heart. I’ve tried so hard to wean him from that dreadful love of a bad, base girl, and the more I try the worse he is.”

Mrs Berens sobbed till her eyes ached, and she bathed them with eau-de-cologne and water.

“How dare I say she is bad and base?” she said half aloud, speaking to herself in the glass, as her handsome, large, blue swimming eyes looked appealingly at her; “because I know it. I’m sure of it. I can always feel it. I’m weak and foolish, but I should love him and cherish him, while she is trifling with him – I’m sure – and breaking his heart.

“Oh, poor man, poor man!” she sighed; “how worn out and ill he looks! What shall I do? What shall I do?”

Mrs Berens made up her mind what she would do. She could not send for the curate. She was not sufficiently ill for that.

“And it would look so.”

She could not go and see him, for that would also “look so.” Leo detested her, she knew, quite as much as she detested Leo, whom she declared to be so horribly young. But she could go and see poor Mary; and after well bathing her eyes, she stripped her little conservatory to get a good bunch of flowers for the invalid, and then went across to the Rectory.

Leo was out for a ride, to Mrs Berens’ great delight.

“Master’s in his study over his sermon, ma’am,” said Dally Watlock; “but Miss Mary’s in, ma’am.”

“Yes, Dally, it is Miss Mary I want to see,” sighed Mrs Berens; and then, as much out of genuine kindness as with the idea of making a friend at the Rectory: “How pretty, and young, and well you do look, Dally!”

“Thank ye, ma’am,” said Dally, with a distant bob, but gratified all the same.

“Do you know, Dally, I’ve got a silk dress, a pale red, that would make up so nicely for you? It isn’t old, but I shall not wear it any more.”

Daily’s eyes sparkled at pale red silk.

“It wouldn’t fit you,” continued the widow, “but you could make it up nicely with your clever little fingers;” and she compared her own redundant charms with the trim, tight little figure of the maid.

“Thank ye, ma’am. May I come for it?”

“Yes, Dally, do. Now show me in to Miss Mary.”

Dally ushered in the widow, and then stood in the passage thinking.

“I wouldn’t go for it, that I wouldn’t, if I was quite sure. I don’t want to wear her old dresses. Nice thing for a lady who’s going to have a title and live up at the Hall to have to wear somebody else’s old silk frocks.

“I think I’ll go, though,” said Dally. “No, I won’t, for it’s coming to a nice blow up for some one I know, and I’ll let ’em all see.”

“Ah, my dear,” said Mrs Berens, entering the room, flower-bearing, and bending down over the invalid with a good deal of gushing sentiment, but plenty of genuine affection.

“It’s very good of you to come, Mrs Berens,” cried Mary, flushing. “And the flowers – for me?”

“For you? Yes,” said the widow, plumping down on her knees by Mary’s couch, and playfully laying the bouquet upon Mary’s bosom, and holding it there beneath her chin. “Now it’s perfect. It only wanted your sweet rose of a face added to it. My dear, what an angel’s face you have!”