“The parapoutra.”
“What is that?”
“Blessed if I know. But that is what would happen if he didn’t.”
“Do you know what it is?” Lady Silverstairs inquired of me.
I had not an idea. But though I am an ignorant brute, I saw no use in admitting it.
“Yes,” I modestly answered. “The parapoutra is the nameless shame.”
“What sort of a shame is that?”
“Oh,” I replied, “it is hardly a subject for the drawing room.”
“It must be very chaste, then,” Lady Silverstairs joyously concluded, while the young lord ran on:
“Yes, that is what was to happen if he didn’t retract. Whether he got in a funk over it or not I don’t know, but shortly he began to see things. He told Miss Rivers that one night, on entering his library, he saw a man whose back was turned toward him seated at the table. The man was writing. Ferrol said that he could hear the quill squeak on the paper. He went forward to find out who he was, but when he got to him there was nobody.”
“What!” we all exclaimed.
“Yes, that is what he told Miss Rivers. He told her that when he got to the table the man broke like a bubble. That was his expression.”
“It is most unusual,” said the dear duchess, though whether she referred to the incident or to the simile or to both, she omitted to state.
“Ferrol told Miss Rivers,” Lord Nevis continued, “that of course he was rather rattled, but that he was absolutely flabbergasted when, on looking down on the paper which was there, he found written the name Anagarika.”
“Then he had written it himself,” the Lady Agatha indignantly interjected.
“I dare say. But he did not believe it. What he did believe was that it was written by that yogi and that he had seen him there and seen him vanish. When he told that to Miss Rivers and she saw that he was telling it in dead earnest she broke the engagement, and if I had been her I’ll be shot if I would not have done the same.”
“Is that all?” Mr. Yorke, who had been ambling about, soothingly inquired.
“What more would you have?” Lord Nevis retorted.
“You see,” Mr. Yorke answered, in his consoling way, “it doesn’t quite explain—now, does it?—how Ferrol came to be strangled.”
Lord Nevis helped himself to a liquor. “No, it doesn’t. And when I told them at Sandringham about it he said that he didn’t like the looks of it all.”
“It is most unusual!” the duchess repeated. “Most!”
On this occasion I quite agreed with her, and presently in the general conversation which ensued, after telling her so, I got away.
But the mystery accompanied me. It followed me through Berkeley Square, through the lovely quiet of the spacious street. Then, unconsciously, such knowledge as I had once had of the Patandjali sutras emerged from some one of memory’s ablated cells. I recalled that these sutras taught of union with the supersensible, and of the supernatural powers which that union confer. I remembered that among other things they taught how the devout may exteriorize themselves from the body, project themselves through space, materialize partially or wholly, appear and disappear at will.
Tenets such as these are to the Occidental just so much nonsense. But is it not, I reflected, a beneficent Providence that has enabled us to despise whatever we do not understand? Then, too, may it not be that there are possibilities to which we are blind? May it not be that there are forces of which we know nothing, but which subtler intellects have grasped? May it not be that with those forces there are powers of which we know less, but of which acuter minds make use? May it not be as we learned—or should have learned at school—that everything is possible? And granting these forces and powers and the possibilities of them, might it not be that, among the apes and the peacocks in a grove of the sacred temple at Benares, a yogi was now, perhaps, recovering from a catalepsy, self-induced, during which his entity, exteriorized, had crossed the seas, crouched in that room of Ferrol’s, waited for him and strangled him there?
If everything be possible, that is possible, also. If not, then there is, I concluded, but one other solution. The threat of the parapoutra, the meaning of which Ferrol necessarily knew, may have so affected him that he imagined the presence of the yogi, really believed that he had seen him, and then, still more affected by the hallucination and affected more greatly yet by the rupture of his engagement, had, in an access of desperation, throttled himself.
At the inquest Simpson had denied that such a thing was feasible. But it is feasible. It is a form of suicide of which the old galley slaves and a few modern actors know the art. Histrionically, it is utilized to cause the appearance of suffocation which it produces and which is effected by swallowing the tip of the tongue.
It is that, perhaps, which Ferrol had done. Simpson had testified that death was due to heart failure, superinduced by compression of the carotid artery. Even so, the diagnosis would be the same. But where is the physician, in or out the witness box, who does not like to air a phrase, particularly when there is no one to refute him?
In this instance a layman could have refuted that ass. Heart failure is not induced by compression of the carotid artery. Only narcosis is. Heart failure may of course occur, but, in that event, it is merely coincidental. Yet, assuming that in Ferrol’s case it had occurred, what could have caused it? What but fright? What but the sinister and sudden return of the intangible something which he had once seen break like a bubble before his eyes—what but Anagarika abruptly clutching and gibbering at his throat?
Such an adventure might, I thought, induce heart failure in me, and, if in me, why not in Ferrol? The hypothesis was so
