Читать книгу The Gilded Man - Smyth Clifford - Страница 6

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A strange thing happened that night at Stoneleigh.

For the first time in the annals of the younger Rysdale generation, the great bare room at the top of the house, adjoining Harold Leighton’s laboratory, had a guest. In the days of the St. Maur Brotherhood the monks used this room as an oratory. The shadowy outline of a crucifix, which had once risen above an unpretentious altar, could still be traced in the rough plaster on the narrow east wall. At either side of this crucifix the blackened marks of bygone sconces were visible, while in the north and south walls of the apartment there still remained a number of huge spikes, rusty with age and swathed in cobwebs, from which had hung the Fourteen Stations of the Cross.

Since the departure of the monks this oratory had been practically abandoned by their successors at Stoneleigh. The earlier members of the Leighton family had shared the dislike of their fellow townsmen for anything approaching “papistry.” To this prejudice, as it affected the use of the oratory, was afterwards added the belief that the gloomy chamber was still frequented by certain ghostly members of the ancient Brotherhood into whose spectral doings it was just as well not to pry too closely. A live monk was bad enough, according to some of Harold Leighton’s ancestors; but a dead monk who “haunted” was too disreputable altogether to have anything to do with. Hence, as there was more room at Stoneleigh than could profitably be used, it was thought best to close up this ancient oratory, leaving it to such grim visitants from the past as might choose it for a meeting place.

There had been seasons, however, when dust and cobwebs were sufficiently disturbed to bring some semblance of cheer into the desolate apartment. Thus, the festivities accompanying the marriage of Una’s grandparents had reached their climax here in a ball at which the local worthies mingled with a number of excellent persons from that outside world of fashion vaguely known as “the city.” No spectral guest, tonsured or otherwise, appeared on this occasion, and when the revels were ended the legend that Stoneleigh’s oratory was haunted no longer commanded the respect, or even the interest, of the credulous.

That was more than half a century ago; and now David Meudon was the guest of this neglected chamber. He was in a joyous mood. A man more tenacious of impressions could not have thrown off so easily the irritation caused by the meeting with Harold Leighton in the garden. The elder man’s suspicions would have poisoned whatever possibility there might be of immediate enjoyment. The presence of Una, however, her unqualified acceptance of him, her uncle’s suddenly changed attitude, effectually dulled David’s resentment. Leighton had agreed, apparently, to the plan for an early wedding, and had even proposed that the married couple should live at Stoneleigh. In spite of David’s great wealth, neither he nor his immediate ancestors had been identified with a locality peculiarly their own; they had never had a family home. With Una, on the contrary, the last of the Leightons, the ancestral tie that roots itself under some particular hearthstone was especially strong. She was pleased, therefore, with the offer that promised to make Stoneleigh hers—and so, in the main, was David.

He liked the old house; its history appealed to his imagination. He stood somewhat in awe, it is true, of its present owner, and the prospect of living with him did not promise unalloyed happiness. But there was something about Harold Leighton, a suggestion of mystery, that went well with this ancient place, and completely satisfied David. He laughed at the Stoneleigh traditions; but when Leighton proposed spending the evening in the oratory he gladly assented. David had never been in this part of the house, although he had often wanted to explore its possible mysteries. The opportunity to do this had not come until now.

“Yes, there are ghosts here,” Harold Leighton replied to the young man’s jesting query as he, David and Una entered the great bare room together.

“Then you believe in ghosts?”

“Of course Uncle Harold believes in them,” exclaimed Una. “I believe in them, and so do you.”

“That depends. Show me one and I might.”

“Well,” commented Leighton; “this is the ghost room, and here we are. Perhaps your skepticism will find something to try its teeth on. In honor of St. Maur we ought to have a demonstration.”

“Splendid!” laughed David. “But you don’t mean it. People never mean what they say when they talk approvingly of ghosts. You are known for a skeptic yourself, Mr. Leighton. You accept nothing that has not passed muster with science.”

“There may be a science of ghosts,” retorted the savant. “Science is not limited to any department of human knowledge. A scientific theory is based on a collection of facts. How do you know I have not made a collection of ghost-facts?”

“And so have a new theory of ghosts to offer!”

“You don’t really think those old monks come back, uncle?” objected Una.

“Oh, I’m not going to tell the secrets of my laboratory so easily—and to such a pair of tyros,” was the evasive answer.

They stood before the great fireplace which a thrifty ancestor had built into the east wall, and enjoyed to the full the warmth that had not as yet reached the remote spaces of the gloomy chamber. It needed a fire to bring some show of comfort to this wilderness of dust and cobwebs. A few pieces of colonial furniture stood out in the melancholy wastes—a faded lounge, a gargantuan dresser, several stiff-backed chairs still nursing their puritanism. At the far end of the room various objects of a decidedly modern appearance, suggesting the workshop of a physicist, aroused David’s curiosity. For an explanation of these he turned to Leighton.

“Is this your laboratory?” he asked.

“What do you think of it?” was the reply. “Plenty of space, isn’t there? A man could have a score of ghosts here—ghosts of monks, you know—nosing about for their comfortable old quarters.”

“Not so very comfortable in their day, Uncle,” suggested Una; “nor in ours, for that matter.”

Leighton chuckled grimly. “Are you interested in ghosts, David?” he asked, looking keenly at him.

“What do you mean by ghosts?”

“Ah, that’s it! This old room—are there ghosts in it, I wonder? The nail marks in the walls, the stains where the lights were hung, the shadowy remains of the altar—can you shake off the feeling that the Brotherhood is still at prayers here, that it still has Stoneleigh for its home?”

“The Brotherhood no longer exists.”

“There’s a family tradition, anyway, that assures us of its ability to produce some excellent examples of the old-fashioned, conventional ghost. A very great aunt of mine, for instance, once ventured alone into this room and was met by a stalwart being who scowled at her from under his brown hood and waved her majestically out of his presence.”

“That’s the kind of ghost one likes to hear about and see,” commented David.

“It didn’t please my aunt particularly. The fright prostrated her for months. Other imaginative ancestors have heard the monks chanting together, and seen spectral lights moving about here at midnight.”

“You speak as if you believed it all.”

“I can’t be defrauded of my family traditions.”

“How queer it is!” exclaimed Una, who had been wandering about the room and now rejoined Harold and David before the fireplace. “I like it, even if it is dirty. Why have you broken your rule and brought us here, Uncle? And why do you talk as if you believed in the Stoneleigh ghosts? You know you don’t.”

“Ghosts!” he ejaculated. “I have been making some experiments recently. I thought you might be interested in them.”

“Experiments in ghosts,” ruminated David, who believed Leighton capable of anything.

“Yes,” said the old man, enjoying his bewilderment. “My ghosts may be different from those you have in mind. If you have followed the recent developments in psychology you probably know that there are ghosts attached to the living, whatever the case may be in regard to the dead.”

“No, I never heard that.”

“Not in those words. ‘Ghosts’ is not a term used by the scientist. It involves a medieval superstition. But I am interested in things more than in words, and I am not afraid to say that we have been rediscovering ghosts.”

“Uncle, don’t talk enigmas—or nonsense,” remonstrated Una.

“I confess, sir, I don’t follow you,” added David.

“Did you ever feel that you had lost yourself?” asked Leighton abruptly.

“I don’t understand.”

“If you forget a thing, you lose just that much of yourself, don’t you? When you sleep, you enter a world of dreams. In that world you think, speak, go through a set of vivid experiences. Awake, you are aware that you have had these vivid experiences—and yet, you can’t possibly remember them. You are dimly conscious that you were in another world and that while there you thought, suffered, rejoiced, much in the same way that you do here. At times you have a vague feeling that you have undergone some important crisis in your dream-existence, or you wake up with the sensation of having reached some high peak of happiness. But you cannot recall the details, or even the general outlines, of what has happened. Not a scene of this dreamland, of which you are an occasional inhabitant, can you picture to your waking thought; nor does your waking memory hold the visage, or even the name, of one of your dream-associates.”

“All this has to do with dreams,” objected David. “It is admittedly unreal.”

“Don’t rely too much on old definitions. A part of you that sleeps now does experience this dream-life and finds it real. The trouble is, this dream part of you forgets; it is unable to report to the waking personality what it has seen.

“But it is not only in sleep that this dream-personality takes the place of that which we call the real self. The opium-eater inhabits a world, opened to him by his drug, and closed, even to his memory, when the effects of that drug wear off. Then, there is that curious phase of dipsomania in which the victim, apparently possessed of all his faculties, goes through actual experiences—travels, talks with people, transacts business—and when he recovers from his fit of intoxication finds it impossible to remember a single circumstance of the many known to him while under the sway of alcohol. The phenomena of hypnotism give instances of similar independent mental divisions in a single human personality. All this is the familiar material of modern psychology, out of which the scientists build strange and varied theories. I call these divided, or lost, personalities ‘ghosts.’”

“Ghosts of the living, not of the dead.”

“More uncanny than the old-fashioned kind,” mused Una. “Fancy meeting one’s own ghost!”

“Cases of such meetings are on record; Shelley’s, for instance,” said Leighton drily.

“The thing is strange and worth investigating. But,” added David laughingly, “I am not an investigator.”

“It is fascinating,” declared Una emphatically. “Tell us more about it, Uncle Harold. You spoke of an experiment——”

“The experiment, by all means,” said David. “Just what is it?”

“Trapping a ghost,” was the laconic answer.

“And if you succeed in trapping it——?”

“Ah, then—science generally leaves its ghosts to take care of themselves. It’s a good rule.”

“You say you are going to trap a ghost: you don’t really mean that,” protested Una.

“Remember, there are two kinds of ghosts. As a scientist I am not interested in the ghosts of the dead. If they exist outside of fairy tales and theology let some one else hunt them. But I am interested in the other and more profitable kind—the ghosts of the living.”

“I don’t understand,” said David.

“It needs explanation. Remember what I said as to the phenomena presented by the dreamer, the hypnotic subject, the dipsomaniac, the narcomaniac. In each of these cases one human mind seems capable of division into two independent halves. And each half seems to forget, or to be ignorant of the doings of its mate. Now, I am hunting for this Ghost of the Forgotten.”

“Sounds romantic,” remarked David. “According to your theory, don’t you need a hypnotized subject—or at least a dipsomaniac—for your experiment?”

“No. The Ghost of the Forgotten lurks in all of us. The man or woman in whom this Ghost is not to be found is exceptional. I doubt if such a being exists—a being whose Book of the Past is as clear, as legible, as his Book of the Present.”

“But, your experiment, Uncle,” demanded Una; “show it to us.”

“I need help for a satisfactory trial. An experiment isn’t a picture, or a book, you know. It needs a victim of some kind. What do you say, David?” he asked, turning abruptly to him.

“You want me for the victim?” laughed David. “I’m ready. Feel just like my namesake before he tackled that husky Philistine. Tell me what I’m to do.”

They were standing at the fireplace, Una with one arm through her lover’s, the other resting on her uncle’s shoulder. A scarcely perceptible frown clouded Leighton’s features before he accepted David’s offer.

“I merely want you to answer some questions,” he said finally. “You will think them trivial; but I want you to answer them under unusual conditions. Let me show you my latest prize and explain things.”

Leighton strode to the center of the room and thence down to that end of it where the tools of his laboratory were kept. David and Una followed, enjoying the momentary relief from the scrutiny of the old savant, who was now, apparently, engrossed in his scientific apparatus. There was not much of the latter in sight, and to the novice unfamiliar with the interior of a physicist’s laboratory, and who carries away a confused impression of glass and metal jars, tubes, coils of wire, electric batteries, revolving discs, and all the nameless paraphernalia of such a place, the appointments of Harold Leighton’s workshop would seem simple enough. Yet, the machine before which Leighton paused comprised one of the newest discoveries in this branch of science. Its sensational purpose was to measure and probe the mind through the purely physical operations of the body.

What appeared to be, at first glance, an ordinary galvanometer stood by itself on a table. Its polished brass frame, its flawless glass cylinder enclosing the coils of wire, recording discs and needle, suggested nothing more than the instrument, familiar to the physicist, by which an electric current is measured and tested. Connected with this galvanometer, however, was a curious contrivance consisting of a mirror, over the spotless surface of which, when the machine was in operation, a ray of light, projected from an electrified metal index, or finger, moved back and forth. The exact course of this ray of light, the twists and turns made by it in traversing the mirror, was transferred by an automatic pencil to a sheet of paper carried on a revolving cylinder. This paper thus became a permanent record of whatever experiment had been attempted.

That the subjects investigated by this unique galvanometer were human and not inanimate was indicated by two electrodes, attached by wires hanging from the machine, intended to be grasped by the hands of a person undergoing the test. Its use, also, as a detector of human thought and emotion, and not of mechanical force, was described by its name—the Electric Psychometer.