Master of His Fate | Page 3

follows:--
"About a month ago a strange case of complete mental collapse was received into the H?tel-Dieu. A fresh healthy girl, of the working class, about twenty years of age, and comfortably dressed, presented herself at a police-station near the Od��on and asked for shelter. As she did not appear to be in full possession of her mental faculties, she was sent to the H?tel-Dieu, where she remained in a semi-comatose condition. Her memory did not go farther back than the hour of her application at the police-station. She was entirely ignorant of her previous history, and had even forgotten her name. The minds of the medical staff of the H?tel-Dieu were very much exercised with her condition; but it was not till about a week ago that they succeeded in restoring to any extent her mental consciousness and her memory. She then remembered the events immediately preceding her application to the police. It had come on to rain, she said, and she was hurrying along to escape from it, when a gentleman in a cloak came to her side and politely offered to give her the shelter of his umbrella. She accepted; the gentleman seemed old and ill. He asked her to take his arm. She did so, and very soon she felt as if her strength had gone from her; a cold shiver crept over her; she trembled and tottered; but with all that she did not find her sensations disagreeable exactly or alarming; so little so, indeed, that she never thought of letting go the gentleman's arm. Her head buzzed, and a kind of darkness came over her. Then all seemed to clear, and she found herself alone near the police-station, remembering nothing. Being asked to further describe the gentleman, she said he was tall and dark, with a pleasant voice and wonderful eyes, that made you feel you must do whatever he wished. The police have made inquiries, but after such a lapse of time it is not surprising that no trace of him can be found."
"Well?" asked Embro, when Lefevre had raised his eyes from the paper. "What do you think of it?"
"Curious," said Lefevre. "I can't say more, since I know nothing of it but this. Have you read it, Julius?"
"No," said Julius; "I hate what people call news; and when I take up a paper, it's only to look at the Weather Forecasts." Lefevre handed him the paper, which he took with an unconcealed look of repulsion. "If it's some case of disease," said he, "it will make me ill."
"Oh no," said Lefevre; "it's not painful, but it's curious;" and so Julius set himself to read it.
"But come," said Embro, posing the question with his forefinger; "do you believe that story, Lefevre?"
"Though it's French, and from the 'Telegraph,'" said Lefevre, "I see no reason to disbelieve it."
"Come," said Embro, "come--you're shirking the question."
"I confess," said Lefevre, "I've no desire to discuss it. You think me prejudiced in favour of anything of the kind; perhaps I think you prejudiced against it: where, then, is the good of discussion?"
"Well, now," said the unabashed Embro, "I'll tell you what I think. Here's a story"--Julius at that instant handed back the paper to him--"of a healthy young woman mesmerised, hypnotised, or somnambulised, or whatever you like to call it, in the public street, by some man that casually comes up to her, and her brain so affected that her memory goes! I say it's inconceivable!--impossible!" And he slapped the paper down on the table.
The others looked on with grim satisfaction at the prospect of an argument between the two representatives of rival schools; and it was noteworthy that, as they looked, they turned a referring glance on Courtney, as if it were a foregone conclusion that he must be the final arbiter. He, however, sat abstracted, with his eyes on the floor, and with one hand propping his chin and the other drumming on the arm of his chair.
"I'm not a scientific man," said the journalist who was not an Art critic, "and I am not prejudiced either way about this story; but it seems to me, Embro, that you view the thing through a very ordinary fallacy, and make a double mistake. You confound the relatively inconceivable with the absolutely impossible: this story is relatively inconceivable to you, and therefore you say it is absolutely impossible."
"Is there such a thing as an absolute impossibility?" murmured Julius, who still sat with his chin in his hand, looking as if he considered the "thing" from a long way off as one of a multitude of other things.
"I do not believe there is," said the journalist; "but--"
"Don't let us lose ourselves in metaphysics," broke in Embro. Then, turning to Courtney, whose direct intelligent gaze seemed to disconcert him, he said,