Master of His Fate Part 11

"I am Julius Courtney--"

He paused, for Lefevre had put his head in his hands, shaken with a silent paroxysm of grief. It wrung the doctor's heart, as if in the person that sat opposite him, all that was n.o.blest and most gracious in humanity were disgraced and overthrown.

"Yes," continued the voice, "I am Julius; there is no other Courtney that I know of, and soon there will be none at all." The doctor listened, but he could not endure to look again. "I am dying--I have been dying for a dozen years, and for a dozen years I have resisted and overcome death; now I surrender. I have come to my period. I shall never enter your house again. I have only come now to confess myself, and to ask a last favour of you--a last token of friends.h.i.+p."

"I will freely do what I can for you, Julius," said the doctor, still without looking at him, "though I am too overcome, too bewildered, yet to say much to you."

"Thank you. You will hear my story and understand. It contains a secret which I, like a blind fool, have only used for myself, but which you will apply for the wide benefit of mankind. The request I have to make of you is small, but it may seem extraordinary,--be my companion for twelve hours. I cannot talk to you here, enclosed and oppressed with streets of houses. Come with me for a few hours on the water; I have a fancy to see the sun rise for the last time over the sea. I have my yacht ready near London Bridge, and a boat waiting at the steps by Cleopatra's Needle; a cab will soon take us there. Will you come?"

Lefevre did not look up. The voice of Julius sounded like an appeal from the very abode of death. Then he glanced in spite of himself in his face, and was moved and melted to unreserved compa.s.sion by the strained weariness of his expression--the open, luminous wistfulness of his eyes.

"Yes; I'll go," said he. "But can't I do something for you first? Let me consider your case."

"There's nothing now to be done for me, Lefevre," said Julius, shaking his head. "You will perceive that when you have heard me out."

The doctor went to find his man and tell him that he was going out for the night to attend on an urgent case. When he returned he stood a moment touched with misgiving. He thought of Lady Mary--he thought of his mother and sister. Ought he not to leave some hint behind him of the strange adventure upon which he was about to embark, and which might end he knew not how or where? Julius was observing him, and seemed to divine his doubt.

"You need have no hesitation," said he. "I ask you only for twelve hours. You can easily get back here by noon to-morrow. There is a south-west wind blowing, with every prospect of settled weather. I am quite certain about it."

Fortified with that a.s.surance, Lefevre put on a thicker overcoat and an old soft hat, turned out the lights in the dining-room and in the hall, closed the door with a slam, and stood with the new, the strange Julius in the street, fairly embarked upon his adventure. It was only with an effort that he could realise he was in the company of one who had been a familiar friend. They walked towards Regent Street without speaking. At the corner of Savile Row they came upon a policeman, and Lefevre had a sudden thrill of fear lest his companion should, at length, be recognised and arrested. Courtney himself, however, appeared in no wise disturbed. In Regent Street he hailed a pa.s.sing four-wheeler.

"Wouldn't a hansom be quicker?" said Lefevre.

"It is better on your account," said Julius, "that we should sit apart."

When they entered the cab, Courtney ensconced himself in the remote corner of the other seat from Lefevre; and thus without another word they drove to the Embankment. At the foot of the steps by Cleopatra's Needle, they found a waterman and a boat in waiting. They entered the boat, Lefevre going forward while Julius sat down at the tiller. The waterman pulled out. The tide was ebbing, and they slipped swiftly down the dark river, with broken reflections of lamps and lanterns on either bank streaming deep into the water like molten gold as they pa.s.sed, and with tall buildings and chimney-shafts showing black against the calm night sky. Lefevre found it necessary at intervals to a.s.sure himself that he was not drifting in a dream, or that the ghastly, burning-eyed figure, wrapped in a dark cloak in the stern, was not a strange visitor from the nether world.

Soon after they had shot through London Bridge they were alongside a yacht almost in mid-stream. It was clear that all had been prearranged for Julius's arrival; for as soon as they were on board, the yacht (loosed from her upper mooring by the waterman who had brought them down the river) began to stand away.

"We had better go forward," said Courtney. "Are you warm enough?"

The doctor answered that he was. Courtney gave an order to one of the men, who went below and returned with a fur-lined coat which his master put on. That little incident gave a curious shock to Lefevre: it made him think of the mysterious stranger who had sat down opposite the young officer in the Brighton train, and it showed him that he had not been completely satisfied that his friend Julius and the person he had been wont to think of as Hernando Courtney were one and the same.

They went forward to be free of the sail and its tackling. Courtney, wrapped in his extra, his fur-lined coat, pointing to a low folding-chair for Lefevre, threw himself on a heap of cordage. He looked around and above him, at the rippling, flas.h.i.+ng water and the black hulls of s.h.i.+ps, and at the serene, starlit heavens stretching over all.

"How wonderful!--how beautiful it all is!" he exclaimed. "All, all!--even the dullest and deadest-seeming things are vibrating, palpitating with the very madness of life! He set the world in my heart, and oh, how I loved!--how I loved the world!"

"It is a wonderful world," said Lefevre, trying to speak cheerfully; "and you will take delight in it again when this abnormal fit of depression is over."

"Never, Lefevre!--never, never!" said Courtney in strenuous tones. "I regret it deeply, bitterly, madly,--but yet I know that I have about done with it!"

"Julius," said Lefevre, "I have been so amazed and bewildered, that I have found little to say: I can scarcely believe that you are in very deed the Julius I have known for years. But now let me remind you I am your friend--"

"Thank you, Lefevre."

"--And I am ready to help you to the uttermost in this crisis, which I but dimly understand. Tell me about yourself, and let me see what I can do."

"You can do nothing," said Julius, sadly shaking his head. "Understand me; I am not going to state a case for diagnosis. Put that idea aside; I merely wish to confess myself to my friend."

"But surely," said Lefevre, "I may be your physician as well as your friend. As long as you have life there is hope of life."

"No, no, no, Lefevre! There is a depth of life--life on the lees--that is worse than death! If I could retrace my steps to the beginning of this, taking my knowledge with me, then--! But no, I must go my appointed way, and face what is beyond.... But let me tell you my story.

"You have heard something of my parentage from Dr Rippon, I believe. My father was Spanish, and my mother was English. I think I was born without that sense of responsibility to a traditional or conventional standard which is called Conscience, and that sense of obligation to consider others as important as myself, which, I believe, they call Altruism. I do not know whether the lack of these senses had been manifest in my mother's family, but I am sure it had been in my father's. For generations it had been a law unto itself; none of its members had known any duty but the fulfilment of his desires; and I believe even that kind of outward conscience called Honour had scarcely existed for some of them. I had from my earliest recollection the nature of these ancestors: they, though dead, desired, acted, lived in me,--with something of a difference, due to I know not what. Let me try to state the fact as it appears to me looking back: I was for myself the one consciousness, the one person in the world, all else--trees, beasts, men and women, and what not--being the medium in which, and on which, I lived. I conceived of nothing around me but as existing to please, to amuse, to delight me, and if anything showed itself contrary to these ends, I simply avoided it. What I wished to do I did; what I wished to have I had;--and nothing else. I do not suppose that in these points I was different from most other children of wealthy parents. Where I differed, I believe, was in having a peculiarly sensitive, and at the same time admirably healthy, const.i.tution of body, which induced a remarkable development of desire and gratification. I can hardly make you understand, I am sure I cannot make you feel--I myself cannot feel, I can only remember--what a bright natural creature I was when I was young."

"Don't I remember well," said Lefevre, "what you were like when I first met you in Paris?"

"Ah," said Julius, "the change had begun then,--the change that has brought me to this. I contemplate myself as I was before that with bitter envy and regret. I was as a being sprung fresh from the womb of primitive Nature. I delighted in Nature as a child delights in its mother, and I throve on my delight as a child thrives. I refused to go to school--and indeed little pressure was put upon me--to be drilled in the paces and hypocrisy of civilised mankind. I ran wild about the country; I became proficient in all bodily exercises; I fenced and wrestled and boxed; I leaped and swam; I rowed for days alone in a skiff; I a.s.sociated with simple peasants, and with all kinds of animals; I delighted in air and water, and gra.s.s and trees: to me they were as much alive as beasts are. Oh, what an exquisite, abounding, unclouded pleasure life was! When I was hungry I ate; when I was thirsty I drank; when I was tired I slept; and when I woke I stretched myself like a giant refreshed. It was a pure joy to me in those days to close my fingers into a fist and see the beauty and firmness of my muscles. When solemn, civilised people spoke to me of duty and work, I listened like an idiot. I had nothing in my consciousness to help me to understand them. I knew no more of duty than Crusoe on his island; and as for work, I had no ambition,--why, then, should I work? I read, of course; but I read because I liked it, not because I had tasks set me. I read everything that came in my way; and very soon all literature and science--all good poetry and romance, and all genuine science--came to mean for me a fine, orderly expression of nature and life. And religion, too, I felt as the ecstasy of nature. So I fed and flourished on the milk of life and the bread of life.

"But a time came when I longed to live deeper, and to get at the pith and marrow of life. I was over twenty when it was revealed to me in a noonday splendour and warmth of light, that the human is unspeakably the highest and most enthralling expression of life in all Nature. That discovery happened to me when I was in Morocco with my father, who died there--no matter how--among those whom he liked to believe were his own people: my mother had died long before. I had considerable wealth at my command, and I began to live at the height of all my faculties; I lived in every nerve, and at every pore.

"And then I began to perceive a reverse to the bounteous beauty and the overflowing life of Nature,--a threatening quality, a devouring faculty in her by which she fed the joyous abundance of her life. I saw that all activity, all the pleasant palpitation and t.i.tillation in the life of Nature and of Man, merely means that one living thing is feeding upon or is feeding another. I began to perceive that all the interest of life centres in this alter-devouring principle. I discovered, moreover, this strange point,--that the joy of life is in direct proportion to the rapidity with which we lose or surrender life."

"Yes," said Lefevre, "the giving of pleasure is always more exquisite and satisfactory than the getting it."

"I lost life," continued Julius, without noting Lefevre's remark,--"I lost life,--vital force, nervous ether, electricity, whatever you choose to call it,--at an enormous rate, but I as quickly replenished my loss.

I had revelled for some time in this deeper life of give and take before I discovered that this faculty of recuperation also was curiously and wonderfully active in me. Whenever I fell into a state of weakness, well-nigh empty of life, I withdrew myself from company, and dwelt for a little while with the simplest forms of Nature."

"But," asked Lefevre, "how did you get into such a low condition?"

"How? _I lived!_" said he with fervour. "_Yes; I lived:_ that was how! I had always delighted in animals, but then I began to find that when I caressed them they were not merely tamed, as they had been wont, but completely subdued; and I felt rapid and full accessions of life from contact with them. If I lay upon a bank of rich gra.s.s or wild flowers, I had to a slight extent the same revivifying sensation. The fable of Antaeus was fulfilled in me. The constant recurrence and vigour of this recuperation not only filled me with pride, but also set me thinking. I turned to medical science to find the secret of it. I entered myself as a student in Paris: it was then I met you. I read deeply, too, in the books of the mediaeval alchemists and sages of Spain, which my father had left me. It came upon me in a clear flood of evidence that Nature and man are one and indivisible, being animated by one identical Energy or Spirit of Life, however various may be the material forms; and that all things, all creatures, according to the activity of their life, have the power of communicating, of giving or taking, this invisible force of life. It furthermore became clear to me that, though the force resides in all parts of a body, floating in every corpuscle of blood, yet its proper channels of circulation and communication are the nerves, so that as soon as a nerve in any one shape of life touches a nerve in any other, there is an instant tendency to establish in them a common level of the Force of Life. If I or you touch a man or woman with a finger, or clasp their hand, or embrace them more completely, the tendency is at once set up, and the force seeks to flow, and, according to certain conditions, does flow, from one to another, evermore seeking to find a common level,--always, that is, in the direction of the greater need, or the greater capacity. I saw then that not only had I a greater storage capacity, so to say, than most men, but also, therefore, when exhaustion came, I had a more insistent need for replenishment, and a more violent shrinking at all times from any weak or unhealthy person who might even by chance contact make a demand on my store of life."

"And is that your secret?" asked Lefevre. "I have arrived in a different way at something like the same discovery."

"I know you have," said Julius. "But my peculiar secret is not that, though it is connected with it. I am growing very tired," said he, abruptly. "I must be quick, Lefevre," he continued in a hurried, weak voice of appeal; "grant me one little last favour to enable me to finish."

"Anything I can do I will, Julius," said Lefevre, suddenly roused out of the half-drowsiness which the soft night induced. He was held between alarm and fascination by the look which Julius bent on him.

"I am ashamed to ask, but you are full of life," said Julius: "I am at the shallowest ebb. Just for one minute help me. Of your free-will submit yourself to me for but a moment. Will you do me that service?"

"Yes," said Lefevre, after an instant's hesitation; "certainly I will."

Julius half rose from his reclining position; he turned on Lefevre his wonderful eyes, which in the mysterious twilight that suffused the midsummer night burned with a surprising brilliance. Lefevre felt himself seized and held in their influence.

"Give me your hand," said Julius.

The doctor gave his hand, his eyes being still held by those of Julius, and instantly, as it seemed to him, he plunged, as a man dives into the sea, into a gulf of unconsciousness, from which he presently emerged with something like a gasp and with a tremulous sensation about his heart. What had happened to him he did not know; but he felt slacker of fibre, as if virtue had gone out of him, while Julius, when he spoke, seemed refreshed as by a draught of wine.

"How are you?" asked Julius. "For heaven's sake don't let me think that at the last I have troubled much the current of your life! Will you have something to eat and drink? There's wine and food below."

"Thank you; no," said Lefevre. "I am well enough, only a little drowsy."

"I am stronger," said Julius, "but it will not last; so let me finish my story."

Then he continued. "Having explained to myself, in the way I have told you, the ease of my unwitting replenishment of force whenever I was brought low, I set myself to improve on my discovery. I saw before me a prospect of enjoyment of all the delights of life, deeper and more constant than most men ever know,--if I could only ensure to myself with absolute certainty a still more complete and rapid reinvigoration as often soever as I sank into exhaustion. I was quite sure that no energy of life is finer or fuller than the human at its best."

"Good G.o.d!" exclaimed Lefevre, turning away with an involuntary shudder.