"It makes me more inclined to believe in the Resurrection." "Oh, Dr. Walsh, we do not bring science to bear on the Gospels," remonstrated Dever. "The man was sinking fast at midnight; and at ten minutes past three his pulse was stronger than it had been eighteen hours before. It was the arrest of death rather than the return of life. The case is remarkable; but as I-as Dr. Dever and I think, it is the case of an intense vitality acting upon a fragile frame, the conquest of will over matter." "Undoubtedly," said Dever. "It sets one's mind wondering what this will-power is that can overrule the conditions of flesh. It certainly is a force outside the scope of medical diagnosis. From my personal knowledge of St. Just, after living with him nearly a year, I thought he would have slipped out of life without a struggle. Never could I have anticipated this fierce fight for existence in such a man." "And can he go on living?" "Yes; if he can get over this attack, he may live for years, with care. Post-mortem research has shown that the active mischief may be arrested, and the wounded lung may scar over; and although the injured organ can never regain the functions of the healthy organ, the man may live; if he will be satisfied with a restricted existence, a life regulated by medical control. For the sake of the poor of London, I hope that St. Just may survive this crisis for many years, or even live to be an old man.” "Then, after all our talk of miracles, this case comes within ordinary conditions, within the limits of the possible?" Walsh smiled at the question, and wondered at the questioner's agitated manner of asking it. But it is "Within the limits of the possible-yes. I suppose we all use the word miraculous in a modern sense. by no means an ordinary case." Dr. Dever was looking out of the window, a little bored by this interrogation from a layman. Surely it was enough for Mr. Arden to be told that his friend had a chance of recovery. "I must be getting on the road again," he said; "I have to drive ten miles to my next patient. Good day, Walsh. I shall look in at the same time to-morrow. Good day, Mr. Arden." Walsh went with him to his dog-cart, in which he had put a young horse that he was breaking in for next winter's hunting, and which was employing his superfluous energy on the gravel drive. "Nice-looking young 'un, ain't he?" Dr. Dever asked cheerily. "Rather too good for leather! But it makes 'em handy, and gives 'em a taste of the hills. He'll feel it a game to carry me over our country, after having the cart behind him;" and with a jovial wave of his doe-skin glove, Dr. Dever took leave of his brother practitioner. 66 Country versus town," thought Robert Walsh, sniffing the fresh morning air, and watching the smart dog-cart trundling down the avenue behind the eager young horse. And then he thought of the fœtid alleys, the insanitary tenement houses in which his medical experience had lain; the sickness, and hunger, and dirt; the misery he had been powerless to help, and for which the only panacea was the hospital or the workhouse. Town versus country; and the strength and intelligence of the land is all drifting to the town! He remembered a London workhouse under the smoke-darkened sky, hemmed round with bricks and mortar, and he thought of the Union at Stratton, which they had passed on their way from the station; a grey stone house in a garden, with windows that all looked to the sea or the wooded hills; a building that he had taken for the home of some prosperous squire, till St. Just enlightened him. XXIII. From Walter Arden to Douglas Campbell. MY DEAR DOUGLAS, Klosterberg, Switzerland, Strange things have happened since I received your comforting answer to my last letter, and again I find myself dominated by the same hideous idea that made my life by the Klondyke river a time to look back upon with horror: again I find myself in the power of a spirit from hell, recreated in the human semblance of an earthly saint. I think I must have told you in previous letters of our intimate acquaintance with St. Just, the well-known philanthropist, a man of strong religious bias and saintly character, who, during the time of my miserable isolation, became my wife's helper and counsellor in her mission of charity. Unfortunately for the poor of London, he broke down under the strain of incessant work, and after nearly a year's absence in Southern Italy, came back to his Cornish birthplace in a dying state, given over by every doctor who had seen him. He came home to die; and he summoned Rachel and me to his death-bed. No pang of jealousy had ever disturbed my mind. I knew my wife's purity of soul, and I knew St. Just's fine nature, lifted above the things of earth by a profound belief in the Unseen, an absolute submission to the law of an unknown God. I admired and revered that perfect faith which Fate or character had denied to me. I had never been jealous of his influence, or doubted his honour; but in that letter from a dying man I read the secret of a despairing love; and I felt that I had wronged both St. Just and my wife by the desertion which had given him the privilege of too close a friendship. I submitted that dying appeal to Rachel; and, at her desire, we started for Cornwall without an hour's delay. We found our friend apparently at the last extremity, but with his mind as luminous as in his best day, and his spirits exalted by the piety of the Christian enthusiast, for whom, in old Sir Thomas Browne's happy phrase, "Death is the Lucina of Life." He had his resident doctor-a young man who had been with him on his yacht for nearly a year-and two hospital nurses, in close attendance upon him; and these three people assured me, each unprompted by the other, that the case was hopeless, and the end only a question of hours. An experienced general practitioner from the neighbourhood, who had attended St. Just from his childhood, was of the same opinion. Not one of these persons entertained the faintest hope, or expressed the slightest uncertainty. The case had passed beyond the chance of any change for the better. I saw St. Just on the morning after our arrival, when he had received the last sacrament, and had, as it were, closed the book of religious observances. He talked to me of my mental trouble, which I had confided to him in an hour of supreme depression, and of the influence of that trouble on my wife. He spoke of Rachel with a pathetic earnestness, urging me to confide in her, and to look to her for the lifting of the shadow from my life; to look to her as my guide to that peace of mind which passeth all understanding. When I had clasped his feeble hand, and bent in silence over the emaciated form, I left him with the conviction that we had parted for ever. His words had affected me deeply, and they had inspired me with a faint hope that by Rachel's aid I might escape from the self-torments of the past. I went straight to her, and in that solemn hour, with death hovering near, as I believed, I bared my mind to her as I had never done before, yet keeping the secret of my misery. It was enough to tell her of a mind tortured to the verge of madness, and to throw myself upon her pitying love for help and consolation. I am thankful to say that from that hour she has been my friend and comforter, and that our union has become again as perfect as in those cloudless years when I thought my spectral foe was banished for ever. You will remember the history of Michael Dartnell's illness in our hut by the Klondyke river, and of a return to life so sudden, so swift, so altogether strange as to touch the border-line of the miraculous; a restoration to life that was followed by a total change in the character of the man, so that the creature who rose up from Michael's sick-bed, wearing his form and substance, had no quality or characteristic of the creature who lay there at the point of death. It may be that such a transformation in the nature of a man who has gone so near the final dissolution is not unknown to experience, that, in a malady which brings the subject so close to actual extinction, there may arise some subtle change in the brain of the man, the original intelligence fading into blankness, and a new mind being born in its place-new instincts, animal instincts, the vilest side of human nature, where previously the brain had held only generous impulses and noble desires. I have never heard of such a case; but it seems to me not impossible—the case of a mind new-born, and born for evil instead of for good. But in that last tragic experience of the Klondyke Rapids there had flashed upon me the horrible idea that in this loathsome being I beheld, not my old friend, but a new incarnation of the man I killed, and whose blood-bespattered lips had menaced me with an undying hate-a hate that should survive the clay I saw before me-inexorable, unextinguishable. I had known the fulfilment of that hideous threat in the haunting invisible presence that had made this gracious, beautiful earth a hell; and it was but natural that I should recognize a new form of that horror in the murderer who stood over me on the waters of the Klondyke. Hallucination, perhaps ; but to me reality. Only to you, Douglas, dare I write freely of these things, by reason of your dabblings in occult science, and your willingness to consider, if not to accept, every form of the supernatural, whether it bring us "airs from heaven or blasts from hell." You will bear with me then when I tell you of my instant feeling of horror when on the morning after my farewell conversation with St. Just I was told that he had taken a most unexpected turn for the better, rallying in a manner which his doctor called little short of the miraculous. The nightnurse, a somewhat hysterical young woman, had actually |