“It
was simply my duty! And now I am ready to face the consequences, and
Thorpe will be proud of me. For justice has been done and the gods are
satisfied.”
He made not the slightest resistance, and when the two policemen
marched him off through the crowd of shuddering little clerks in the
office, he again saw the veiled figure moving majestically in front of
him, making slow sweeping circles with the flaming sword, to keep back
the host of faces that were thronging in upon him from the Other
Region.
(A Nightmare)
1
Professor Mark Ebor, the scientist, led a double life, and the only
persons who knew it were his assistant, Dr. Laidlaw, and his
publishers. But a double life need not always be a bad one, and, as Dr.
Laidlaw and the gratified publishers well knew, the parallel lives of
this particular man were equally good, and indefinitely produced would
certainly have ended in a heaven somewhere that can suitably contain
such strangely opposite characteristics as his remarkable personality
combined.
For Mark Ebor, F.R.S., etc., etc., was that unique combination
hardly ever met with in actual life, a man of science and a mystic.
As the first, his name stood in the gallery of the great, and as the
second—but there came the mystery! For under the pseudonym of
“Pilgrim” (the author of that brilliant series of books that appealed
to so many), his identity was as well concealed as that of the
anonymous writer of the weather reports in a daily newspaper. Thousands
read the sanguine, optimistic, stimulating little books that issued
annually from the pen of “Pilgrim,” and thousands bore their daily
burdens better for having read; while the Press generally agreed that
the author, besides being an incorrigible enthusiast and optimist, was
also—a woman; but no one ever succeeded in penetrating the veil of
anonymity and discovering that “Pilgrim” and the biologist were one and
the same person.
Mark Ebor, as Dr. Laidlaw knew him in his laboratory, was one man;
but Mark Ebor, as he sometimes saw him after work was over, with rapt
eyes and ecstatic face, discussing the possibilities of “union with
God” and the future of the human race, was quite another.
“I have always held, as you know,” he was saying one evening as he
sat in the little study beyond the laboratory with his assistant and
intimate, “that Vision should play a large part in the life of the
awakened man—not to be regarded as infallible, of course, but to be
observed and made use of as a guide-post to possibilities—”
“I am aware of your peculiar views, sir,” the young doctor put in
deferentially, yet with a certain impatience.
“For Visions come from a region of the consciousness where
observation and experiment are out of the question,” pursued the other
with enthusiasm, not noticing the interruption, “and, while they should
be checked by reason afterwards, they should not be laughed at or
ignored. All inspiration, I hold, is of the nature of interior Vision,
and all our best knowledge has come—such is my confirmed belief—as a
sudden revelation to the brain prepared to receive it—”
“Prepared by hard work first, by concentration, by the closest
possible study of ordinary phenomena,” Dr. Laidlaw allowed himself to
observe.
“Perhaps,” sighed the other; “but by a process, none the less, of
spiritual illumination. The best match in the world will not light a
candle unless the wick be first suitably prepared.”
It was Laidlaw’s turn to sigh. He knew so well the impossibility of
arguing with his chief when he was in the regions of the mystic, but at
the same time the respect he felt for his tremendous attainments was so
sincere that he always listened with attention and deference, wondering
how far the great man would go and to what end this curious combination
of logic and “illumination” would eventually lead him.
“Only last night,” continued the elder man, a sort of light coming
into his rugged features, “the vision came to me again—the one that
has haunted me at intervals ever since my youth, and that will not be
denied.”
Dr. Laidlaw fidgeted in his chair.
“About the Tablets of the Gods, you mean—and that they lie
somewhere hidden in the sands,” he said patiently. A sudden gleam of
interest came into his face as he turned to catch the professor’s
reply.
“And that I am to be the one to find them, to decipher them, and to
give the great knowledge to the world—”
“Who will not believe,” laughed Laidlaw shortly, yet interested in
spite of his thinly-veiled contempt.
“Because even the keenest minds, in the right sense of the word, are
hopelessly—unscientific,” replied the other gently, his face
positively aglow with the memory of his vision. “Yet what is more
likely,” he continued after a moment’s pause, peering into space with
rapt eyes that saw things too wonderful for exact language to describe,
“than that there should have been given to man in the first ages of the
world some record of the purpose and problem that had been set him to
solve? In a word,” he cried, fixing his shining eyes upon the face of
his perplexed assistant, “that God’s messengers in the far-off ages
should have given to His creatures some full statement of the secret of
the world, of the secret of the soul, of the meaning of life and
death—the explanation of our being here, and to what great end we are
destined in the ultimate fullness of things?”
Dr. Laidlaw sat speechless. These outbursts of mystical enthusiasm
he had witnessed before. With any other man he would not have listened
to a single sentence, but to Professor Ebor, man of knowledge and
profound investigator, he listened with respect, because he regarded
this condition as temporary and pathological, and in some sense a
reaction from the intense strain of the prolonged mental concentration
of many days.
He smiled, with something between sympathy and resignation as he met
the other’s rapt gaze.
“But you have said, sir, at other times, that you consider the
ultimate secrets to be screened from all possible—”
“The ultimate secrets, yes,” came the unperturbed reply; “but
that there lies buried somewhere an indestructible record of the secret
meaning of life, originally known to men in the days of their pristine
innocence, I am convinced. And, by this strange vision so often
vouchsafed to me, I am equally sure that one day it shall be given to
me to announce to a weary world this glorious and terrific message.”
And he continued at great length and in glowing language to describe
the species of vivid dream that had come to him at intervals since
earliest childhood, showing in detail how he discovered these very
Tablets of the Gods, and proclaimed their splendid contents—whose
precise nature was always, however, withheld from him in the vision—to
a patient and suffering humanity.
“The Scrutator, sir, well described ‘Pilgrim’ as the Apostle
of Hope,” said the young doctor gently, when he had finished; “and now,
if that reviewer could hear you speak and realize from what strange
depths comes your simple faith—”
The professor held up his hand, and the smile of a little child
broke over his face like sunshine in the morning.
“Half the good my books do would be instantly destroyed,” he said
sadly; “they would say that I wrote with my tongue in my cheek. But
wait,” he added significantly; “wait till I find these Tablets of the
Gods! Wait till I hold the solutions of the old world-problems in my
hands! Wait till the light of this new revelation breaks upon confused
humanity, and it wakes to find its bravest hopes justified! Ah, then,
my dear Laidlaw—”
He broke off suddenly; but the doctor, cleverly guessing the thought
in his mind, caught him up immediately.
“Perhaps this very summer,” he said, trying hard to make the
suggestion keep pace with honesty; “in your explorations in
Assyria—your digging in the remote civilization of what was once
Chaldea, you may find—what you dream of—”
The professor held up his hand, and the smile of a fine old face.
“Perhaps,” he murmured softly, “perhaps!”
And the young doctor, thanking the gods of science that his leader’s
aberrations were of so harmless a character, went home strong in the
certitude of his knowledge of externals, proud that he was able to
refer his visions to self-suggestion, and wondering complaisantly
whether in his old age he might not after all suffer himself from
visitations of the very kind that afflicted his respected chief.
And as he got into bed and thought again of his master’s rugged
face, and finely shaped head, and the deep lines traced by years of
work and self-discipline, he turned over on his pillow and fell asleep
with a sigh that was half of wonder, half of regret.
It was in February, nine months later, when Dr. Laidlaw made his way
to Charing Cross to meet his chief after his long absence of travel and
exploration. The vision about the so-called Tablets of the Gods had
meanwhile passed almost entirely from his memory.
There were few people in the train, for the stream of traffic was
now running the other way, and he had no difficulty in finding the man
he had come to meet. The shock of white hair beneath the low-crowned
felt hat was alone enough to distinguish him by easily.
“Here I am at last!” exclaimed the professor, somewhat wearily,
clasping his friend’s hand as he listened to the young doctor’s warm
greetings and questions. “Here I am—a little older, and much
dirtier than when you last saw me!” He glanced down laughingly at his
travel-stained garments.
“And much wiser,” said Laidlaw, with a smile, as he bustled
about the platform for porters and gave his chief the latest scientific
news.
At last they came down to practical considerations.
“And your luggage—where is that? You must have tons of it, I
suppose?” said Laidlaw.
“Hardly anything,” Professor Ebor answered. “Nothing, in fact, but
what you see.”
“Nothing but this hand-bag?” laughed the other, thinking he was
joking.
“And a small portmanteau in the van,” was the quiet reply. “I have
no other luggage.”
“You have no other luggage?” repeated Laidlaw, turning sharply to
see if he were in earnest.
“Why should I need more?” the professor added simply.
Something in the man’s face, or voice, or manner—the doctor hardly
knew which—suddenly struck him as strange. There was a change in him,
a change so profound—so little on the surface, that is—that at first
he had not become aware of it. For a moment it was as though an utterly
alien personality stood before him in that noisy, bustling throng.
Here, in all the homely, friendly turmoil of a Charing Cross crowd, a
curious feeling of cold passed over his heart, touching his life with
icy finger, so that he actually trembled and felt afraid.
He looked up quickly at his friend, his mind working with startled
and unwelcome thoughts.
“Only this?” he repeated, indicating the bag. “But where’s all the
stuff you went away with? And—have you brought nothing home—no
treasures?”
“This is all I have,” the other said briefly. The pale smile that
went with the words caused the doctor a second indescribable sensation
of uneasiness. Something was very wrong, something was very queer; he
wondered now that he had not noticed it sooner.
“The rest follows, of course, by slow freight,” he added tactfully,
and as naturally as possible. “But come, sir, you must be tired and in
want of food after your long journey.
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