Lewis did not grin. He glared into the dimness of the night, at
the great spreading tree that he knew could not be there. And as he
gazed he saw that what at first appeared the dense blackness of foliage
was fretted and starred with wonderful appearances of lights and
colours.
Afterwards he said to me: "I remember thinking to myself: Look here,
I am not delirious; my temperature is perfectly normal. I am not drunk;
I only had a pint of Graves with my dinner, over three hours ago. I
have not eaten any poisonous fungus; I have not taken Anhelonium
Lewinii experimentally. So, now then! What is happening?"
The night had gloomed over; clouds obscured the faint moon and the
misty stars. Lewis rose, with some kind of warning and inhibiting
gesture to Remnant, who, he was conscious was gaping at him in
astonishment. He walked to the open French window, and took a pace
forward on the path outside, and looked, very intently, at a dark shape
of the tree, down below the sloping garden, above the washing of the
waves. He shaded the light of the lamp behind him by holding his hands
on each side of his eyes.
The mass of the tree—the tree that couldn't be
there—stood out against the sky, but not so clearly, now that the
clouds had rolled up. Its edges, the limits of its leafage, were not so
distinct.
Lewis thought that he could detect some sort of quivering movement
in it; though the air was at a dead calm. It was a night on which one
might hold up a lighted match and watch it burn without any wavering or
inclination of the flame.
"You know," said Lewis, "how a bit of burnt paper will sometimes
hang over the coals before it goes up the chimney, and little worms of
fire will shoot through it. It was like that, if you should be standing
some distance away. Just threads and hairs of yellow light I saw, and
specks and sparks of fire, and then a twinkling of a ruby no bigger
than a pin point, and a green wandering in the black, as if an emerald
were crawling, and then little veins of deep blue. 'Woe is me!' I said
to myself in Welsh, 'What is all this color and burning?' And, then, at
that very moment there came a thundering rap at the door of the room
inside, and there was my man telling me that I was wanted directly up
at the Garth, as old Mr. Trevor Williams had been taken very bad. I
knew his heart was not worth much, so I had to go off directly and
leave Remnant to make what he could of it all."
Dr. Lewis was kept some time at the Garth. It was past twelve when
he got back to his house. He went quickly to the room that overlooked
the garden and the sea and threw open the French window and peered into
the darkness. There, dim indeed against the dim sky but unmistakable,
was the tall pine with its sparse branches, high above the dense growth
of the ilex-trees. The strange boughs which had amazed him had
vanished; there was no appearance now of colours or of fires.
He drew his chair up to the open window and sat there gazing and
wondering far into the night, till brightness came upon the sea and
sky, and the forms of the trees in the garden grew clear and
evident.
He went up to his bed at last filled with a great perplexity, still
asking questions to which there was no answer.
The doctor did not say anything about the strange tree to Remnant.
When they next met, Lewis said that he had thought there was a man
hiding amongst the bushes—this in explanation of that warning
gesture he had used, and of his going out into the garden and staring
into the night. He concealed the truth because he dreaded the Remnant
doctrine that would undoubtedly be produced; indeed, he hoped that he
had heard the last of the theory of the Z ray. But Remnant firmly
reopened this subject.
"We were interrupted just as I was putting my case to you," he said.
"And to sum it all up, it amounts to this: that the Huns have made one
of the great leaps of science. They are sending 'suggestions' (which
amount to irresistible commands) over here, and the persons affected
are seized with suicidal or homicidal mania. The people who were killed
by falling over the cliffs or into the quarry probably committed
suicide; and so with the man and boy who were found in the bog. As to
the Highway case, you remember that Thomas Evans said that he stopped
and talked to Williams on the night of the murder. In my opinion Evans
was the murderer. He came under the influence of the ray, became a
homicidal maniac in an instant, snatched Williams's spade from his hand
and killed him and the others."
"The bodies were found by me on the road."
"It is possible that the first impact of the ray produces violent
nervous excitement, which would manifest itself externally.
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