He caught my arm fiercely with his left hand, and his grip nearly made me cry out. As we walked down the hall I could feel his arm twitching from the elbow to the shoulder. Clearly he was in pain, and I set it down to some form of cardiac affection, which might possibly issue in paralysis.
I settled him in the biggest armchair, and took one of his cigars. The library is the pleasantest room in the house, and at night, when a peat-fire burned on the old hearth and the great red curtains were drawn, it used to be the place for comfort and good talk. Now I noticed changes. Ladlaw’s bookshelves had been filled with the proceedings of antiquarian societies and many lighthearted works in belles-lettres. But now the Badminton Library had been cleared out of a shelf where it stood most convenient to the hand, and its place taken by an old Leyden reprint of Justinian. There were books on Byzantine subjects of which I never dreamed he had heard the names. There were volumes of history and speculation, all of a slightly bizarre kind; and to crown everything, there were several bulky medical works with gaudily coloured plates. The old atmosphere of sport and travel had gone from the room, with the medley of rods, whips, and gun-cases which used to cumber the tables. Now the place was moderately tidy and slightly learned—and I did not like it.
Ladlaw refused to smoke, and sat for a little while in silence. Then of his own accord he broke the tension—
“It was devilish good of you to come, Harry. This is a lonely place for a man who is a bit seedy.”
“I thought you might be alone,” I said, “so I looked you up on my way down from Glenaicill. I’m sorry to find you looking ill.”
“Do you notice it?” he asked sharply.
“It’s tolerably patent,” I said. “Have you seen a doctor?”
He said something uncomplimentary about doctors, and kept looking at me with his curious dull eyes.
I remarked the strange posture in which he sat—his head screwed round to his right shoulder, and his whole body a protest against something at his left hand.
“It looks like your heart,” I said. “You seem to have pains in your left side.”
Again a spasm of fear. I went over to him and stood at the back of his chair.
“Now, for goodness’ sake, my dear fellow, tell me what is wrong? You’re scaring Sybil to death. It’s lonely work for the poor girl, and I wish you would let me help you.”
He was lying back in his chair now, with his eyes half shut, and shivering like a frightened colt. The extraordinary change in one who had been the strongest of the strong kept me from realising its gravity. I put a hand on his shoulder, but he flung it off.
“For God’s sake sit down!” he said hoarsely. “I’m going to tell you; but I’ll never make you understand.”
I sat down promptly opposite him.
“It’s the Devil,” he said very solemnly. I am afraid that I was rude enough to laugh. He took no notice, but sat with the same tense, miserable air, staring over my head.
“Right,” said I. “Then it is the Devil. It’s a new complaint, so it’s as well I did not bring a doctor. How does it affect you?” He made the old impotent clutch at the air with his left hand. I had the sense to become grave at once. Clearly this was some mental affection, some hallucination born of physical pain.
Then he began to talk in a low voice, very rapidly, with his head bent forward like a hunted animal’s. I am not going to set down what he told me in his own words, for they were incoherent often, and there was much repetition. But I am going to write the gist of the odd story which took my sleep away on that autumn night, with such explanations and additions as I think needful. The fire died down, the wind arose, the hour grew late, and still he went on in his mumbling recitative. I forgot to smoke, forgot my comfort—everything but the odd figure of my friend and his inconceivable romance. And the night before I had been in cheerful Glenaicill!
He had returned to the House of More, he said, in the latter part of May, and shortly after he fell ill. It was a trifling sickness—influenza or something—but he had never quite recovered. The rainy weather of June depressed him, and the extreme heat of July made him listless and weary. A kind of insistent sleepiness hung over him, and he suffered much from nightmare. Towards the end of July his former health returned; but he was haunted with a curious oppression. He seemed to himself to have lost the art of being alone. There was a perpetual sound in his left ear, a kind of moving and rustling at his left side, which never left him by night or day. In addition he had become the prey of nerves and an insensate dread of the unknown.
Ladlaw, as I have explained, was a commonplace man, with fair talents, a mediocre culture, honest instincts, and the beliefs and incredulities of his class. On abstract grounds I should have declared him an unlikely man to be the victim of a hallucination. He had a kind of dull, bourgeois rationalism, which used to find reasons for all things in heaven and earth. At first he controlled his dread with proverbs. He told himself it was the sequel of his illness, or the lightheadedness of summer heat on the moors. But it soon outgrew his comfort. It became a living second presence, an alter ego which dogged his footsteps. He became acutely afraid of it. He dared not be alone for a moment, and clung to Sybil’s company despairingly. She went off for a week’s visit in the beginning of August, and be endured for seven days the
