Before taking leave of her, I succeeded in procuring from her a promise that she would write to Eber Nicholson, giving him that free forgiveness which would at least ease his conscience and make his burden somewhat lighter to bear. Then, feeling that it was not in my power to do more, I rose to depart. Taking her hand, which lay cold and passive in mine, so much like a dead hand that it required a strong effort in me to repress a nervous shudder, I said, “Farewell, Rachel Emmons, and remember that they who seek peace in the right spirit will always find it at last.”
“It won’t be many years before I find it,” she replied calmly; and the weird, supernatural light of her eyes shone upon me for the last time.
* * * *
I reached New York in due time and did not fail, sitting around the broiled oysters and celery with my partners, to repeat the story of the Haunted Shanty. I knew, beforehand, how they would receive it; but the circumstances had taken such hold of my mind, so burned me, like a boy’s money, to keep buttoned up in the pocket, that I could no more help telling the tale than the man I remember reading about, a great while ago, in a poem called “The Ancient Mariner.” Beeson, who, I suspect, doesn’t believe much of anything, is always apt to carry his raillery too far; and thenceforth, whenever the drum of a target-company marching down Broadway passed the head of our street, he would whisper to me, “There comes Rachel Emmons!” until I finally became angry, and insisted that the subject should never again be mentioned.
But I none the less recalled it to my mind, from time to time, with a singular interest. It was the one supernatural, or, at least, inexplicable experience of my life, and I continued to feel a profound curiosity with regard to the two principal characters. My slight endeavor to assist them by such counsel as had suggested itself to me was actuated by the purest human sympathy, and upon further reflection I could discover no other means of help. A spiritual disease could be cured only by spiritual medicine, unless, indeed, the secret of Rachel Emmons’s mysterious condition lay in some permanent dislocation of the relation between soul and body, which could terminate only with their final separation.
* * * *
With the extension of our business, and the increasing calls upon my time during my Western journeys, it was three years before I again found myself in Toledo, with sufficient leisure to repeat my visit. I had some difficulty in finding the little frame house; for, although it was unaltered in every respect, a number of stately brick “villas” had sprung up around it and quite disguised the locality. The door was opened by the same little black-eyed woman, with the addition of four artificial teeth, which were altogether too large and loose. They were attached by plated hooks to her eye-teeth, and moved up and down when she spoke.
“Is Rachel Emmons at home?” I asked.
The woman stared at me in evident surprise.
“She’s dead,” said she, at last, and then added, “let’s see, ain’t you the gentleman that called here, some three or four years ago?”
“Yes,” said I, entering the room; “I should like to hear about her death.”
“Well, ’twas rather queer. She was failin’ when you was here. After that she got softer and weaker-like, an’ didn’t have her deathlike sleeps so often, but she went just as fast for all that. The doctor said ’twas heart-disease, and the nerves was gone, too; so he only giv’ her morphy, and sometimes pills, but he knowed she’d no chance from the first. ’Twas a year ago last May when she died. She’d been confined to her bed about a week, but I’d no thought of her goin’ so soon. I was settin’ up with her, and ’twas a little past midnight, maybe. She’d been layin’ like dead awhile, an’ I was thinkin’ I could snatch a nap before she woke. All ’t once she rose right up in bed, with her eyes wide open, an’ her face lookin’ real happy, an’ called out, loud and strong, ‘Farewell, Eber Nicholson! Farewell! I’ve come for the last time! There’s peace for me in Heaven, an’ peace for you on Earth! Farewell! Farewell!’ Then she dropped back on the piller, stone-dead. She’d expected it, it seems, and got the doctor to write her will. She left me this house and lot. I’m her second cousin on the mother’s side, but all her money in the Savin’s Bank, six hundred and seventy-nine dollars and a half, went to Eber Nicholson. The doctor writ out to Illinois, an’ found he’d gone to Kansas a year before. So the money’s in bank yet; but I s’pose he’ll git it, some time or other.”
* * * *
As I returned to the hotel, conscious of a melancholy pleasure at the news of her death, I could not help wondering. Did he hear that last farewell, far away in his Kansas cabin? Did he hear it, and fall asleep with thanksgiving in his heart, and arise in the morning to a liberated, life? I have never visited Kansas, nor have I ever heard from him since; but I know that the living ghost which haunted him is laid for ever.
Reader, you will not believe my story; but it is true.
ABOUT DR. MARTIN HESSELIUS
Dr. Martin Hesselius is the man who started the “psychic investigator” and “occult detective” tradition. After him comes Abram van Helsing, John Silence, Carnacki the Ghost-Finder, Jules de Grandin, and many others.
Dr. Hesselius is primarily seem through the introductions to the stories in J. Sheridan Le Fanu’s collection, In a Glass Darkly. Dr. Hesselius appears directly only in “Green Tea” (which follows).
Dr. Martin Hesselius in “GREEN TEA,” by Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu
PROLOGUE
Martin Hesselius, the German Physician
Though carefully educated in medicine and surgery, I have never practised either. The study of each continues, nevertheless, to interest me profoundly. Neither idleness nor caprice caused my secession from the honourable calling which I had just entered. The cause was a very trifling scratch inflicted by a dissecting knife. This trifle cost me the loss of two fingers, amputated promptly, and the more painful loss of my health, for I have never been quite well since, and have seldom been twelve months together in the same place.
In my wanderings I became acquainted with Dr. Martin Hesselius, a wanderer like myself, like me a physician, and like me an enthusiast in his profession. Unlike me in this, that his wanderings were voluntary, and he a man, if not of fortune, as we estimate fortune in England, at least in what our forefathers used to term “easy circumstances.” He was an old man when I first saw him; nearly five-and-thirty years my senior.
In Dr. Martin Hesselius, I found my master. His knowledge was immense, his grasp of a case was an intuition. He was the very man to inspire a young enthusiast, like me, with awe and delight. My admiration has stood the test of time and survived the separation of death. I am sure it was well-founded.
For nearly twenty years I acted as his medical secretary. His immense collection of papers he has left in my care, to be arranged, indexed and bound. His treatment of some of these cases is curious. He writes in two distinct characters. He describes what he saw and heard as an intelligent layman might, and when in this style of narrative he had seen the patient either through his own hall-door, to the light of day, or through the gates of darkness to the caverns of the dead, he returns upon the narrative, and in the terms of his art and with all the force and originality of genius, proceeds to the work of analysis, diagnosis and illustration.
Here and there a case strikes me as of a kind to amuse or horrify a lay reader with an interest quite different from the peculiar one which it may possess for an expert. With slight modifications, chiefly of language, and of course a change of names, I copy the following. The narrator is Dr. Martin Hesselius. I find it among the voluminous notes of cases which he made during a tour in England about sixty-four years ago.
It is related in series of letters to his friend Professor Van Loo of Leyden. The professor was not a physician, but a chemist, and a man who read history and metaphysics and medicine, and had, in his day, written a play.
The narrative is therefore, if somewhat less valuable as a medical record, necessarily written in a manner more likely to interest an unlearned reader
.
These letters, from a memorandum attached, appear to have been returned on the death of the professor, in 1819, to Dr. Hesselius. They are written, some in English, some in French, but the greater part in German. I am a faithful, though I am conscious, by no means a graceful translator, and although here and there I omit some passages, and shorten others, and disguise names, I have interpolated nothing.
CHAPTER I
Dr. Hesselius Relates How He Met the Rev. Mr. Jennings
The Rev. Mr. Jennings is tall and thin. He is middle-aged, and dresses with a natty, old-fashioned, high-church precision. He is naturally a little stately, but not at all stiff. His features, without being handsome, are well formed, and their expression extremely kind, but also shy.
I met him one evening at Lady Mary Heyduke’s. The modesty and benevolence of his countenance are extremely prepossessing.
We were but a small party, and he joined agreeably enough in the conversation. He seems to enjoy listening very much more than contributing to the talk; but what he says is always to the purpose and well said. He is a great favourite of Lady Mary’s, who it seems, consults him upon many things, and thinks him the most happy and blessed person on earth. Little knows she about him.
The Rev. Mr. Jennings is a bachelor, and has, they say sixty thousand pounds in the funds. He is a charitable man. He is most anxious to be actively employed in his sacred profession, and yet though always tolerably well elsewhere, when he goes down to his vicarage in Warwickshire, to engage in the actual duties of his sacred calling, his health soon fails him, and in a very strange way. So says Lady Mary.
There is no doubt that Mr. Jennings’ health does break down in, generally, a sudden and mysterious way, sometimes in the very act of officiating in his old and pretty church at Kenlis. It may be his heart, it may be his brain. But so it has happened three or four times, or oftener, that after proceeding a certain way in the service, he has on a sudden stopped short, and after a silence, apparently quite unable to resume, he has fallen into solitary, inaudible prayer, his hands and his eyes uplifted, and then pale as death, and in the agitation of a strange shame and horror, descended trembling, and got into the vestry-room, leaving his congregation, without explanation, to themselves. This occurred when his curate was absent. When he goes down to Kenlis now, he always takes care to provide a clergyman to share his duty, and to supply his place on the instant should he become thus suddenly incapacitated.
When Mr. Jennings breaks down quite, and beats a retreat from the vicarage, and returns to London, where, in a dark street off Piccadilly, he inhabits a very narrow house, Lady Mary says that he is always perfectly well. I have my own opinion about that. There are degrees of course. We shall see.
Mr. Jennings is a perfectly gentlemanlike man. People, however, remark something odd. There is an impression a little ambiguous. One thing which certainly contributes to it, people I think don’t remember; or, perhaps, distinctly remark. But I did, almost immediately. Mr. Jennings has a way of looking sidelong upon the carpet, as if his eye followed the movements of something there. This, of course, is not always. It occurs now and then. But often enough to give a certain oddity, as I have said, to his manner, and in this glance travelling along the floor there is something both shy and anxious.
A medical philosopher, as you are good enough to call me, elaborating theories by the aid of cases sought out by himself, and by him watched and scrutinised with more time at command, and consequently infinitely more minuteness than the ordinary practitioner can afford, falls insensibly into habits of observation, which accompany him everywhere, and are exercised, as some people would say, impertinently, upon every subject that presents itself with the least likelihood of rewarding inquiry.
There was a promise of this kind in the slight, timid, kindly, but reserved gentleman, whom I met for the first time at this agreeable little evening gathering. I observed, of course, more than I here set down; but I reserve all that borders on the technical for a strictly scientific paper.
I may remark, that when I here speak of medical science, I do so, as I hope some day to see it more generally understood, in a much more comprehensive sense than its generally material treatment would warrant. I believe the entire natural world is but the ultimate expression of that spiritual world from which, and in which alone, it has its life. I believe that the essential man is a spirit, that the spirit is an organised substance, but as different in point of material from what we ordinarily understand by matter, as light or electricity is; that the material body is, in the most literal sense, a vesture, and death consequently no interruption of the living man’s existence, but simply his extrication from the natural body—a process which commences at the moment of what we term death, and the completion of which, at furthest a few days later, is the resurrection “in power.”
The person who weighs the consequences of these positions will probably see their practical bearing upon medical science. This is, however, by no means the proper place for displaying the proofs and discussing the consequences of this too generally unrecognized state of facts.
In pursuance of my habit, I was covertly observing Mr. Jennings, with all my caution—I think he perceived it—and I saw plainly that he was as cautiously observing me. Lady Mary happening to address me by my name, as Dr. Hesselius, I saw that he glanced at me more sharply, and then became thoughtful for a few minutes.
After this, as I conversed with a gentleman at the other end of the room, I saw him look at me more steadily, and with an interest which I thought I understood. I then saw him take an opportunity of chatting with Lady Mary, and was, as one always is, perfectly aware of being the subject of a distant inquiry and answer.
This tall clergyman approached me by-and-by; and in a little time we had got into conversation. When two people, who like reading, and know books and places, having travelled, wish to discourse, it is very strange if they can’t find topics. It was not accident that brought him near me, and led him into conversation. He knew German and had read my Essays on Metaphysical Medicine which suggest more than they actually say.
This courteous man, gentle, shy, plainly a man of thought and reading, who moving and talking among us, was not altogether of us, and whom I already suspected of leading a life whose transactions and alarms were carefully concealed, with an impenetrable reserve from, not only the world, but his best beloved friends—was cautiously weighing in his own mind the idea of taking a certain step with regard to me.
I penetrated his thoughts without his being aware of it, and was careful to say nothing which could betray to his sensitive vigilance my suspicions respecting his position, or my surmises about his plans respecting myself.
We chatted upon indifferent subjects for a time but at last he said:
“I was very much interested by some papers of yours, Dr. Hesselius, upon what you term Metaphysical Medicine—I read them in German, ten or twelve years ago—have they been translated?”
“No, I’m sure they have not—I should have heard. They would have asked my leave, I think.”
“I asked the publishers here, a few months ago, to get the book for me in the original German; but they tell me it is out of print.”
“So it is, and has been for some years; but it flatters me as an author to find that you have not forgotten my little book, although,” I added, laughing, “ten or twelve years is a considerable time to have managed without it; but I suppose you have been turning the subject over again in your mind, or something has happened lately to revive your interest in it.”
At this remark, accompanied by a glance of inquiry, a sudden embarrassment disturbed Mr. Jennings, analogous to that which makes a young lady blush and look foolish. He dropped his eyes, and folded his hands together uneasily, and looked oddly, and you would have said, guiltily, for a moment.
I helped him out of his awkwardness in the best way, by appearing not to observe it, and going straight on, I said: “Those revivals of interest in a subject happen to me often;
one book suggests another, and often sends me back a wild-goose chase over an interval of twenty years. But if you still care to possess a copy, I shall be only too happy to provide you; I have still got two or three by me—and if you allow me to present one I shall be very much honoured.”
“You are very good indeed,” he said, quite at his ease again, in a moment: “I almost despaired—I don’t know how to thank you.”
“Pray don’t say a word; the thing is really so little worth that I am only ashamed of having offered it, and if you thank me any more I shall throw it into the fire in a fit of modesty.”
Mr. Jennings laughed. He inquired where I was staying in London, and after a little more conversation on a variety of subjects, he took his departure.
CHAPTER II
The Doctor Questions Lady Mary and She Answers
“I like your vicar so much, Lady Mary,” said I, as soon as he was gone. “He has read, travelled, and thought, and having also suffered, he ought to be an accomplished companion.”
“So he is, and, better still, he is a really good man,” said she. “His advice is invaluable about my schools, and all my little undertakings at Dawlbridge, and he’s so painstaking, he takes so much trouble—you have no idea—wherever he thinks he can be of use: he’s so good-natured and so sensible.”
“It is pleasant to hear so good an account of his neighbourly virtues. I can only testify to his being an agreeable and gentle companion, and in addition to what you have told me, I think I can tell you two or three things about him,” said I.
“Really!”
“Yes, to begin with, he’s unmarried.”
“Yes, that’s right—go on.”
“He has been writing, that is he was, but for two or three years perhaps, he has not gone on with his work, and the book was upon some rather abstract subject—perhaps theology.”
The Occult Detective Megapack Page 8
