The Familiar - Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu (best summer reads .TXT) 📗
- Author: Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu
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“What did he say? — I did not hear it — what was it?” asked
Barton, wholly disregarding the question.
“Nonsense,” said –-, greatly surprised, “who cares what
the fellow said ? You are unwell Barton, decidedly unwell;
let me call
a coach.”
“Unwell! No — not unwell,” he said, evidently making an
effort to recover his self-possession; “but, to say the
truth, I am fatigued — a little over-worked — and perhaps
over-anxious. You know I have been in Chancery, and the
winding-up of a suit is always a nervous affair. I have
felt uncomfortable all this evening; but I am better now.
Come, come — shall we go on?”
“No, no. Take my advice, Barton, and go home; you really
do need rest; you are looking quite ill. I really do insist
on your allowing me to see you home,” replied his friend.
I seconded –-‘s advice, the more readily as it was
obvious that Barton was not himself disinclined to be
persuaded. He left us, declining our offered escort. I was
not sufficiently intimate with — to discuss the scene we had
both just witnessed. I was, however, convinced from his
manner in the few common-place comments and regrets we
exchanged, that he was just as little satisfied as I with
the extempore plea of illness with which he had accounted
for the strange exhibition, and that we were both agreed in
suspecting some lurking mystery in the matter.
I called next day at Barton’s lodgings to inquire for him,
and learned from the servant that he had not left his room
since his return the night before; but that he was not
seriously indisposed, and hoped to be out in a few days.
That evening he sent for Dr. R–- , then in large and
fashionable practice in Dublin, and their interview was, it
is said, an odd one.
He entered into a detail of his own symptoms in an
abstracted and desultory way, which seemed to argue a
strange want of interest in his own cure, and, at all
events, make it manifest that there was some topic engaging
his mind of more engrossing importance than his present
ailment. He complained of occasional palpitations and
headache.
Doctor R–- asked him, among other questions, whether
there was any irritating circumstance or anxiety then
occupying his thoughts. This he denied quickly and almost
peevishly; and the physician thereupon declared his opinion
that there was nothing amiss except some slight derangement
of the digestion, for which he accordingly wrote a
prescription, and was about to withdraw when Mr. Barton, with
the air of a man who recollects a topic which had nearly
escaped him, recalled him.
“I beg your pardon, Doctor, but I really almost forgot;
will you permit me to ask you two or three medical
questions — rather odd ones, perhaps, but a wager depends
upon their solution; you will, I hope, excuse my
unreasonableness?”
The physician readily undertook to satisfy the inquirer.
Barton seemed to have some difficulty about opening the
proposed interrogatories, for he was silent for a minute,
then walked to his book-case, and returned as he had gone;
at last he sat down, and said:
“You’ll think them very childish questions, but I can’t
recover my wager without a decision; so I must put them. I
want to know first about lockjaw. If a man actually has had
that complaint, and appears to have died of it — so much so,
that a physician of average skill pronounces him actually
dead — may he, after all, recover?”
The physician smiled, and shook his head.
“But — but a blunder may be made,” resumed Barton.
“Suppose an ignorant pretender to medical skill; may he be
so deceived by any stage of the complaint, as to mistake
what is only a part of the progress of the disease, for
death itself?”
“No one who had ever seen death,” answered he, “could
mistake it in a case of lockjaw.”
Barton mused for a few minutes. “I am going to ask you a
question, perhaps, still more childish; but first, tell me,
are the regulations of foreign hospitals, such as that of,
let us say, Naples, very lax and bungling. May not all
kinds of blunders and slips occur in their entries of names,
and so forth?”
Doctor R–- professed his incompetence to answer that
query.
“Well, then, Doctor, here is the last of my questions.
You will, probably, laugh at it; but it must out
nevertheless. Is there any disease, in all the range of
human maladies, which would have the effect of perceptibly
contracting the stature and the whole frame — causing the man
to shrink in all his proportions, and yet to preserve his
exact resemblance to himself in every particular — with the
one exception, his height and bulk; any disease, mark — no
matter how rare — how little believed in, generally — which
could possibly result in producing such an effect?”
The physician replied with a smile, and a very decided
negative.
“Tell me, then,” said Barton, abruptly, “if a man be in
reasonable fear of assault from a lunatic who is at large,
can he not procure a warrant for his arrest and detention?”
“Really, that is more a lawyer’s question than one in my
way,” replied Doctor R–-; “but I believe, on applying to a
magistrate, such a course would be directed.”
The physician then took his leave; but, just as he reached
the hall-door, remembered that he had left his cane
upstairs, and returned. His reappearance was awkward, for a
piece of paper, which he recognized as his own prescription,
was slowly burning upon the fire, and Barton sitting close
by with an expression of settled gloom and dismay.
Doctor R–- had too much tact to observe what presented
itself; but he had seen quite enough to assure him that the
mind, and not the body, of Captain Barton was in reality the
seat of suffering.
A few days afterwards, the following advertisement
appeared in the Dublin newspapers:
“If Sylvester Yelland, formerly a foremast man on board His Majesty’s frigate ‘Dolphin,’ or his nearest of kin, will apply to Mr. Hubert Smith, attorney, at his office, Dame Street, he or they may hear of something greatly to his or their advantage. Admission may be had at any hour up to twelve o’clock at night, should parties desire to avoid observation; and the strictest secrecy, as to all communications intended to be confidential, shall be honourably observed.”
The “Dolphin,” as I have mentioned, was the vessel which
Captain Barton had commanded; and this circumstance,
connected with the extraordinary exertions made by the
circulation of hand-bills, etc., as well as by repeated
advertisements, to secure for this strange notice the utmost
possible publicity, suggested to Dr. R–- the idea that
Captain Barton’s extreme uneasiness was somehow connected
with the individual to whom the advertisement was addressed,
and he himself the author of it.
This, however, it is needless to add, was no more than a
conjecture. No information, whatsoever, as to the real
purpose of the advertisement was divulged by the agent, nor
yet any hint as to who his employer might be.
HE TALKS WITH A CLERGYMAN
MR. BARTON, although he had latterly begun to earn for
himself the character of an hypochondriac, was yet very far
from deserving it. Though by no means lively, he had yet,
naturally, what are termed “even spirits,” and was not
subject to undue depressions.
He soon, therefore, began to return to his former habits;
and one of the earnest symptoms of this healthier tone of
spirits was his appearing at a grand dinner of the
Freemasons, of which worthy fraternity he was himself a
brother. Barton, who had been at first gloomy and
abstracted, drank much more freely than was his
wont — possibly with the purpose of dispelling his own secret
anxieties — and under the influence of good wine and pleasant
company, became gradually (unlike himself) talkative,
and even noisy.
It was under this unwonted excitement that he left his
company at about half-past ten o’clock; and, as conviviality
is a strong incentive to gallantry, it occurred to him to
proceed forthwith to Lady L–-‘s, and pass the remainder of
the evening with her and his destined bride.
Accordingly, he was soon at –- Street and chatting gaily
with the ladies. It is not to be supposed that Captain
Barton had exceeded the limits which propriety prescribes to
good fellowship — he had merely taken enough wine to raise
his spirits, without, however, in the least degree
unsteadying his mind or affecting his manners.
With this undue elevation of spirits had supervened an
entire oblivion or contempt of those undefined apprehensions
which had for so long weighed upon his mind, and to a
certain extent estranged him from society; but as the night
wore away, and his artificial gaiety began to flag, these
painful feelings gradually intruded themselves again, and he
grew abstracted and anxious as heretofore.
He took his leave at length, with an unpleasant foreboding
of some coming mischief, and with a mind haunted with a
thousand mysterious apprehensions, such as, even while he
acutely felt their pressure, he, nevertheless, inwardly
strove or affected to contemn.
It was this proud defiance of what he regarded as his own
weakness, which prompted him upon the present occasion to
that course which brought about the adventure I am now about
to relate.
Mr. Barton might have easily called a coach, but he was
conscious that his strong inclination to do so proceeded
from no cause other than what he desperately persisted in
representing to himself to be his own superstitious tremors.
He might also have returned home by a route different from
that against which he had been warned by his mysterious
correspondent; but for the same reason he dismissed this
idea also, and with a dogged and half desperate resolution
to force matters to a crisis of some kind, if there were any
reality in the causes of his former suffering, and if not,
satisfactorily to bring their delusiveness to the proof, he
determined to follow precisely the course which he had
trodden upon the night so painfully memorable in his own
mind as that on which his strange persecution commenced.
Though, sooth to say, the pilot who for the first time
steers his vessel under the muzzles of a hostile battery,
never felt his resolution more severely tasked than did
Captain Barton, as he breathlessly pursued this solitary
path — a path which, spite of every effort of scepticism and
reason, he felt to be infested by some (as respected him)
malignant being.
He pursued his way steadily and rapidly, scarcely
breathing from intensity of suspense; he, however, was
troubled by no renewal of the dreaded footsteps, and was
beginning to feel a return of confidence as, more than
three-fourths of the way being accomplished with impunity,
he approached the long line of twinkling oil lamps which
indicated the frequented streets.
This feeling of self-congratulation was, however, but
momentary. The report of a musket at some hundred yards
behind him, and the whistle of a bullet close to his head,
disagreeably and startlingly dispelled it. His first
impulse was to retrace his steps in pursuit of the assassin;
but the road on either side was, as we have said,
embarrassed by the foundations of a street, beyond which
extended waste fields, full of rubbish and neglected lime
and brick-kilns, and all now as utterly silent as though no
sound had ever disturbed their dark and unsightly solitude.
The futility of, single-handed, attempting, under such
circumstances, a search for the murderer,
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