Tales of the Wonder Club Volume I Part 8

"What! you say she has never been to London--not even for a day?"

"Never," she replied.

I began musing to myself, when I was interrupted from my train of thought by the voice of the patient calling out, in agonising tones, "Charles! Charles!"

"Edith, my love! what _is_ the matter?" cried Mrs. L----, rising and leaving the room.

"Edith!" I muttered to myself. "How strange! What a strange link between the two cases." I did not know what to make of it all. However, I kept the particulars of Charles' case to myself for the present, and determined to investigate the matter closely.

"Can I see the patient?" I asked of my old friend.

"Certainly; we will go together," he said.

"Thank you, but I should prefer a private interview with her, if possible. Patients sometimes will not be communicative to the doctor in presence of others, even though they be their own relations. It is always my plan to----"

"Ah, exactly, doctor," he replied; "but I am afraid she will not give you a very warm reception."

"Oh," I replied, "as to that, I am accustomed to the very worst of receptions from some of my patients."

My friend led me to the chamber of the young lady, whom I discovered in bed, propped up by cushions, talking to Mrs. L----.

"This is Dr. Bleedem, my love," said the squire. "Now, don't be shy, but tell him all that you feel the matter with you. I shall leave him alone with you. Don't be nervous; he is a very old friend of mine."

Then, beckoning to his wife, he drew her away, and left me alone with my patient.

The first thing that struck me upon entering the chamber was the remarkable likeness my new patient bore to Charles. They might well have been brother and sister, though the hair of Edith was dark and her eyes a deep grey. The features were wonderfully alike, and the eyes had that same strange unearthly expression I have already described as belonging to Charles. Contrary to my expectations, she received me most civilly; very differently to the manner in which I was treated by Charles on our first interview. I was at a loss to account for this, as my friend had warned me not to hope for a very warm reception.

"Oh, doctor!" she exclaimed, "I am so glad you have come. Your presence brings me relief. You are the only person whose sight I have been able to tolerate for this last year and more."

I was thunderstruck. What could she mean? "Some caprice, I suppose.

Perhaps my old friend has been putting in a good word for me."

"No, doctor," she said, answering to my thoughts in a manner that perfectly amazed me; "no; it is not as you think. The squire never told me until this moment that you were an old friend of his. It is not for that that I feel myself drawn towards you by some almost unaccountable sympathy; but, to tell you the truth, doctor, I have long felt the want of someone to confide in, and you are just the one; you must forgive my boldness, if it offends you, whom I should like to make my father confessor."

I smiled at the innocent want of restraint with which she uttered these words, and said I should be most happy to fulfil the office.

"Should you, doctor?" she replied. "Well, I shall be most unreserved towards you, and I hope you will return the compliment, and tell me all it is in your power to communicate."

I looked surprised, and asked, "Of what--of whom would you hear?"

"Doctor," she said, fixing upon me those deep grey orbs, with a glance that seemed to read my inmost soul, "do not deceive me; you _know_ that you have been with _him_."

"Who can she mean?" I mentally asked. "Can she mean Charles?"

"Yes," she answered to my thought, "with _him_--with _Charles_. Hide nothing from me, doctor. I see you look surprised that I should know where you come from; but my senses are too keen, too abnormally acute, not to perceive that you carry about you _the particles of his being_ as unmistakably as if you had been amongst roses or honeysuckles. Can I be deceived when you come to me directly from the chamber of the only man I ever loved in my life, with the atoms of his nature clinging to you? Think you that I know aught of your doings? That I have been informed as to where _he_ lives? I tell you, No; I know nothing but what my senses tell me. I feel you have been with him, and whatever you might tell me to the contrary would not make me believe otherwise."

"Well," I said smiling, "I don't deny that I _have_ just come from a patient in London, whose name is Charles; but London is large, and there are many Charleses."

"I do not care _where_ your patient is--whether at London or the North Pole, I shall probably never come across him; in fact, I don't see that it would aid matters much if I were to. I have never seen him--that is to say, with these eyes--and probably never may," she said, with a deep sigh.

"Do I understand you to say that you have never seen this young man you talk about, and yet you take so much interest in him?"

"Never with the eyes of the body," she replied.

"How, then?" I asked.

"With the eyes of the spirit."

"That is to say," I resumed, "that this young man named Charles is but a creature of the imagination--that he has no real existence."

"Oh, pardon me," she replied; "decidedly he has an existence--a double one. A bodily one, of which I know nothing; and a spiritual one, of which I know more."

"How?" I asked. "You have never seen him in the flesh, but are yet acquainted with his spirit. Does the spirit leave his body and appear to you?"

"Precisely so."

"Oh! but these are hallucinations, my dear young lady," I said, "that patients in your state of health are frequently subject to."

"No, doctor; say not so," she answered. "It is now more than a year since, that in my dream, as I was walking alone in a beautiful garden, I met a young man, also quite alone and reading. He was of extraordinary personal beauty. He looked at me a moment and pa.s.sed by. The very next evening I had the same dream--there he was again. The dream was so very vivid, that I could not believe it to be one of those ordinary dreams so common to persons suffering from indigestion. There was such a reality about the whole--the garden, the terraces, the old house--altogether had too much truth about it to have been a dream."

"And what do you think it was, if not a dream?" I asked, smiling.

"Nothing less," she replied "than a glimpse into that world so zealously guarded from our mortal eyes as to make us doubt of its existence, or, at least, to hold it as something so ethereal and visionary that we tremble even to speculate on it; but which, nevertheless, exists, has existed, and will exist to all eternity in form as palpable as the earth we this day inhabit."

I mused a little, then said, "Dreams are often very vivid; I know that by experience, but upon waking I have always been able to account for them in some way or other."

"Don't call this a dream of mine, doctor," she said. "In everything it is most unlike the dreams of your experience. Those you allude to are vivid only for one night, and disperse into air on waking. Such is not the case with my dreams. The dream of each night to me is the continuation of the dream of the preceding night, and this has been regularly going on for more than a year, each dream being crowded with a series of events such as would be sufficient to fill up a lifetime; and so vivid, indeed, is the colouring of everything in these visions, that I no more doubt in a double existence than that I am talking to you at the present moment. In awaking, too, I find, that instead of vanishing like an ordinary dream, I bear ever afterwards the strongest recollection of everything that has happened during my period of sleep."

"Indeed!" I exclaimed. "It is very strange. I am just attending a young man in London who shares your complaint. The case is a rare one; I never came across one before at all like it. The coincidence about the whole affair is so strange, too. His name happens to be Charles, and whilst talking in his sleep as they tell me you do, I have heard him mention the name Edith. Your name, is it not?"

"'Tis he! 'Tis he!" exclaimed my patient, enthusiastically, throwing up her arms and clasping her hands above her head. "I knew it, I knew it!

But tell me more about him, doctor! I did not see him last night, and I was so unhappy. The night before he appeared to me less distinct than he had ever done before. Oh, doctor," she cried, in an agonising tone, "you are _curing_ him, you are _curing_ him!" much in the same way as she might have called out, "You are _killing_ him!"

"Yes, I hope to some day. There is no great harm in that, I suppose?" I remarked.

"Oh, yes, indeed!" she cried; "you are imprisoning his spirit within his body, and I shall never see him again."

"Well," I thought to myself, "this is about the oddest courtship _I_ ever heard of; but," I continued, aloud, "supposing I could cure you both; then, afterwards, you might meet in the flesh; and how much better that would be. You would preserve your health and----"

"No, no," she cried. "Do you think our joys could be half so intense, so ethereal, in a fleshly life as when walking in the spirit? No, doctor, have mercy upon both of us, and leave us to die; we shall then be all spirit."

"Charles' sentiments exactly," I muttered.

"Are they not?" she said, brightening up. "He, then, has let you into the secret of this phenomenon of his being! Oh, doctor," she exclaimed, "don't, don't, _cure him_!"

She spoke with such agony of feeling, that I could not help feeling the deepest sympathy for her, and I actually for a moment began to waver in my duties as a medical man. I began to think that, if, as it now appears, two human beings, having never met in the body, are nevertheless by some occult law of nature, permitted to hold communion with each other in the spirit as lovers, what cruelty in me to try and cut short their happy time of courtship! Would it not be kinder in me (seeing that the order of their beings differs so from that of the rest of the herd) to go against the common duties of my profession, and instead of trying to remedy the malady, to accelerate it, till it resulted in death.

"But no," I said to myself, immediately; "my reputation, my conscience.

What! _I_ a poisoner! No," I said; "we must all die some day, and my two lover patients must hold out in this life a little longer. Death comes soon enough for all, and then, if their spirit love was as lasting as it appeared to be intense, they might resume their amours after this mortal coil was doffed. What are a few paltry years compared with the immeasurable gulf of eternity?" Thus I mused, but suddenly I said, "You will not mind taking a little light physic, will you?"