A Strange Story | Page 9

children so soon to be orphans, as one
after one went out into the dark chill shadow, and amidst the bloodless
forms of the dumb brute nature, ranged in grisly vista beyond the
death-room of man. And when the last infant shape had vanished, and
the door closed with a jarring click, my sight wandered loiteringly
around the chamber before I could bring myself to fix it on the broken
form, beside which I now stood in all that glorious vigour of frame
which had fostered the pride of my mind. In the moment consumed by
my mournful survey, the whole aspect of the place impressed itself
ineffaceably on lifelong remembrance. Through the high, deepsunken
casement, across which the thin, faded curtain was but half drawn, the
moonlight rushed, and then settled on the floor in one shroud of white
glimmer, lost under the gloom of the death-bed. The roof was low, and
seemed lower still by heavy intersecting beams, which I might have
touched with my lifted hand. And the tall guttering candle by the
bedside, and the flicker from the fire struggling out through the fuel but
newly heaped on it, threw their reflection on the ceiling just over my

head in a reek of quivering blackness, like an angry cloud.
Suddenly I felt my arm grasped; with his left hand (the right side was
already lifeless) the dying man drew me towards him nearer and nearer,
till his lips almost touched my ear, and, in a voice now firm, now
splitting into gasp and hiss, thus he said, "I have summoned you to gaze
on your own work! You have stricken down my life at the moment
when it was most needed by my children, and most serviceable to
mankind. Had I lived a few years longer, my children would have
entered on manhood, safe from the temptations of want and undejected
by the charity of strangers. Thanks to you, they will be penniless
orphans. Fellow-creatures afflicted by maladies your pharmacopoeia
had failed to reach came to me for relief, and they found it. 'The effect
of imagination,' you say. What matters, if I directed the imagination to
cure? Now you have mocked the unhappy ones out of their last chance
of life. They will suffer and perish. Did you believe me in error? Still
you knew that my object was research into truth. You employed against
your brother in art venomous drugs and a poisoned probe. Look at me!
Are you satisfied with your work?"
I sought to draw back and pluck my arm from the dying man's grasp. I
could not do so without using a force that would have been inhuman.
His lips drew nearer still to my ear.
"Vain pretender, do not boast that you brought a genius for epigram to
the service of science. Science is lenient to all who offer experiment as
the test of conjecture. You are of the stuff of which inquisitors are
made. You cry that truth is profaned when your dogmas are questioned.
In your shallow presumption you have meted the dominions of nature,
and where your eye halts its vision, you say, 'There nature must close;'
in the bigotry which adds crime to presumption, you would stone the
discoverer who, in annexing new realms to her chart, unsettles your
arbitrary landmarks. Verily, retribution shall await you! In those spaces
which your sight has disdained to explore you shall yourself be a lost
and bewildered straggler. Hist! I see them already! The gibbering
phantoms are gathering round you!"
The man's voice stopped abruptly; his eye fixed in a glazing stare; his

hand relaxed its hold; he fell back on his pillow. I stole from the room;
on the landing-place I met the nurse and the old woman-servant.
Happily the children were not there. But I heard the wail of the female
child from some room not far distant.
I whispered hurriedly to the nurse, "All is over!" passed again under the
jaws of the vast anaconda, and on through the blind lane between the
dead walls, on through the ghastly streets, under the ghastly moon,
went back to my solitary home.
CHAPTER III.
It was some time before I could shake off the impression made on me
by the words and the look of that dying man.
It was not that my conscience upbraided me. What had I done?
Denounced that which I held, in common with most men of sense in or
out of my profession, to be one of those illusions by which quackery
draws profit from the wonder of ignorance. Was I to blame if I refused
to treat with the grave respect due to asserted discovery in legitimate
science pretensions to powers akin to the fables of wizards? Was I to
descend from the Academe