CHAPTER III.

THE ISLE OF LIES.

If what has so far been given by Professor Reid be read as a sort of prologue, nearly nineteen years may well be passed over in silence, till, patching artfully into one a number of letters of Dr. Lepsius to the professor, we watch what then befell. The doctor writes:

The bubble’s burst then. We two, Shan Healy and I, have passed over to the island of Barra in the boat, this being the first time for over seven years that I have left the shores of Shunter; and at Barra we now are, my head bound in a handkerchief, aching, and this same fond Shan Healy looking as sad-hearted as a man handed over to be hanged. We really lack the grit for the moment to go to the mainland, or to take any course to get the matter looked into. But you, Reid, will do what you can at once. I am sure the police should be disposed to take an interest in it, if you can make them know the peril implied both to the public and to the poor fellow himself. And there can be no mistaking him! Middle-sized, swarthy, kind of dusky sallow, blackened over cheek, chin and lip by a bluish shade of hair which he would oftentimes shave twice a day—he’s so mighty hairy; and by the smile you should know the beggar—that cruel smile which hardly departs from his lips, and those dark eyes, with a glance, Reid, just so wild and sharp, I assure you, as the glance of the rupicapra gazelle. For the rest, no jacket, rough shirt of bauge-like stuff—but where’s the good? No police could ever get nigh him, I suppose. He’s gone, perhaps he’s drowned—he may be, I doubt it; but God knows. On the sands of the little bay at the north _a lady’s handkerchief_ has been found; can’t tell how it or she came there.

My friend, it was just on his nineteenth birthday, the 21st of July, that, strange to say, it was to happen; the day which I had long determined in my own mind as that on which I should present him the little stele to read.

All was as usual the evening before; we ran the usual race. For the past two years, you know, his highest ambition in life has been to be able to beat me at running—I, a poor old wreck of sixty-four years! I believe that this was his great dream and hope of glory. For four years an almost daily race has taken place, and Mr. Hannibal has once or twice come gallantly nigh victory, but has never won. Well, at 7.30 p.m. this eve of his birthday, down he bounds from his study, and stands in the castle courtyard, waiting for me to come, with the impulse, I dare say, to dart away pricking in his high health. The climate of these Outer Hebrides is a great deal too humid to be ideal; the ground is mostly of gneiss, too shallow for much culture, so drammach, with some barley, potatoes, and buckies, have formed the main part of our maintenance, apart from what provisions Shan Healy has brought over in the boat from Barra once every four months. But on this thin gruel my man has greatly thrived; is fully grown now, having the shoulders of a man, but a shape as limber as a Grace, sir, and about as supple as any greyhound pup.

Well then, aware that he is below waiting, I pull myself together now, put a bit of go into my gait and glance, and down I go to him; together we stand at the gate of our little home—alas, for the last time—my grey head reaching little higher than his shoulder, Reid, for the old spine bows a bit now, you know; and from the kitchen Shan Healy looks up to watch the race for the thousandth time, while away in the west the sun is going down all in a wild of clouds and glories, as often in this wet place. The sea is dead, just lapping the beach in a weary way; the sky grey, with a curlew or two skirling under it. It gives a little relief to live it over again....

There then, we stand, ready to renew the old, old trial of thews. You know that it has ever been my policy to speak as few words as possible to this creature, so now I only say to him, “Well, ready?”

“Ready, sir,” answers my man.

“Then one, two—_Three!_”

We are away, he to the left, I to the right, the goal of the race being a little flag-staff standing on the sands to the north of the island, two miles off, and so placed that the boy going over the east shore, and I over the west, we should run about equally far, the castle, our starting-point, being right at the rim of a bluff of rock at the south of the island. A very few instants after we start, we are quite hidden from each other behind the saddle of the hill, which, being all hard rock just by there, makes hardly any record of the foot-prints of this part of the race. So now, no sooner has my man lost sight of me than I pull up, and pant, and wipe my old brow, and turn back, just in time to catch a glimpse of the flying heels of Asahel going thirteen to the dozen round a corner—a sight, Reid, fit to make soft the eyes of an artist at so much charm of form, and such a pelting puissance of swiftness. Well, I imagine that you have already heard the rest of the business, how I climb back at my leisure to the ridge of the hill, where Shan Healy makes me the wink which means that the mare is ready, and how I descend to the bush in which she is trained to await me without budging, and take her quietly in my hand to the entrance of the tunnel, where I mount and am away. You may be aware that what we call the tunnel is a sort of gut or gorge, which, half natural, and half due to my re-organisation of the features of the island during the fellow’s first youth, was specially arranged for the purposes of this race. It runs pretty straight across the island, from south-west to north-east; is thick with peat-moss, so that hardly a sound of the mare’s hoofs is to be made out in it, and is fairly shut in by bushes at both ends. So, having galloped straight across to the north-east end, I get off, give the mare her hint to go back to Shan Healy, dive sharply and quietly through the growth of leaves, and am off like the devil afoot for the goal, only some seventy feet distant, but still hidden from me behind a bluff of rock: and as my right hand claps the flag-staff, with the wild eyes of a hart Hannibal darts into view, to fling his flying impetus at the post—a good half-minute or so too late.

No change in the smile, but a shadow now in the eyes, and I know just how my man is meditating in his head, thinking in himself, “It is so, then, that ‘Man’ can run, and how far beneath Him must _I_ be, when this old being, who is one of ‘Man’ can beat me, a youth, can beat me always and completely at running and at all else”: for it was never so much with _me_, I’m sure, that the fellow fought for victory as with “Man,” those angels and giants inhabiting the sunset of whose existence he knew, whom eye of his had never viewed, at the idea of whom in their lurid rule over nature his soul swooned with self-disdain.

Darkness was beginning to fall rapidly, the winds to pipe up a bit, as he and I together strolled back homeward in silence all over the western shores, upon which the waters were just moving themselves to moan and spume. I willed it so always, for along the eastern shores, where I was believed to have passed, there was ever a certain absence of foot-prints! And Mr. Hannibal often seemed to have the knack of seeing in the dark.

Have I done well? Have I done right? Never did a question of that sort arise in my mind till within the twelve months gone, when I have had to ask myself, “Have I, who forgot nothing, forgotten one thing—one thing needful?” God Almighty forgive His faulty ones. I am an old man now, with the back bowing down, and a head of white hairs, meekly aware of my own weaknesses and achings....

You know, my friend, something of the kind of life that during eighteen years nearly has whiled itself away on that island of delusion: like the shadow of a vapour it is vanished now. Not without the sacrifice of my career did I tackle it, Reid: but because of the thousand eyes and the acrobat activities of mind by which alone it could be accomplished, the years have been so packed with interest, and have passed so far from unhappily, that though the task has too soon done for me, yet when I look back over them they look to me more like two years than like eighteen; and, if after all one’s travail, one could only be certain that the work has been truly good, that one has not somewhere mishandled and bungled, then one could go to bed. Indeed, in some points, there need be no fear as to the meeds of my toils, for in his intellectual and physical features at least there breathes on the earth to-day (if he still breathes!) the highest human feat, a peerless being, at whose feet all the peoples of this planet may very well kneel, and wail because of him, crying, “Here is what we might have been.”

But oh, the web of imposture to which this being owes his soul! He is the child of lies—and I am his father. At _every_ moment of his life, from the age of four and before, the fellow has known my mould. Nothing was left undone, nothing for me was a bore, or more than I could afford. You know that his books alone cost me a sum of more than £14,000: for, owing to my purpose that his notions of the soul of “Man” should grow from his study of only the most glorious of human works, and owing to the fact that even those works as they stood would never do for those pure eyes, his whole library was formed solely of purged volumes, specially prepared for him, almost before he opened his eyes upon this world; and when he was old enough to study them, it was sown into his skull that only men made of very poor stuff ever wrote books. And so in everything; everywhere the same whip of deceit: the mass of principles, for instance, which we call mathematics, due to the shrewdness of fifty thinkers, adding and adding, each of them, to the achievements of the past, was for Hannibal, his books were so doctored, the discovery of a single ordinary wit, a certain “Peter Pitt,” who, as I had to give the lad to believe, lived in the ancient ages. His study of history, above all, was minutely nursed: wide, yet much pruned. The story of the ingenuity, zeal, and success of masterly adventurers like Alexander, Cæsar, Napoleon, he knew by heart: but he had no suspicion of their chutes; doesn’t even now know that Cæsar was assassinated, nor that Napoleon was plucked down at last, so that their victoriousness and force remain measureless in his imagination. He knew well the proportions of the pyramids of Shufu and Shafra, but he was not allowed to know how many multitudes, nor how many moons, were used to build them. And so on. It was dropped into his ear at a very early age that among men some few may be born with feeble bodies and wits, that these are called “idiots,” and that poor Shan Healy, who in reality is a rather sharp chap, is one of the feeblest of these: so Shan has always passed with us under the name of “The Idiot.” As to myself, Hannibal now at the age of nineteen cherishes, if he lives, a belief, ploughed into his brain by ten thousand stratagems, that I can shoot like doom, can swim like a fish, can run like a roe, can watch like a dog, can see like an eagle; and that this skull is the dome of all skill and of all wisdom.

Frauds. But the outcome, I say, is (or was!) without doubt a success, something of a success. What the father feigned to be, that the lad was led to be. I fancy that an average acrobat, after regarding some of the pranks of this young man, would be asking from what moon the beggar had gadded; he has a damnable habit of chucking about little dynamite or other bombs, which he turns out himself, and carries in his pocket—five, ten times a day for years have the curlews heard the burstings of this turbulent being’s play—and I am pretty sure that any other runner than he would long since have been shattered to the deuce by it. As to his mere knowledge, it is of a vastness which you would certainly call marvellous, though to me, who know the cause of it, it is hardly so: for if, for instance, he knows a good deal of most languages from Japanese and the Dravidic dialects to Portuguese, it is because he never, I think, forgets a word or thing which has once come within his consciousness, and so has learned a language within some weeks. I remember to have heard it said that Lord Macaulay could repeat word for word a book once read, a statement the truth of which I beg leave to disbelieve: but, even if true, his lordship differed from Hannibal here, that Hannibal, I imagine, is not quite clear with regard to the meaning of “forgetting”; I never heard him utter such a word; certainly, he never heard such a word escape _my_ lips. _Forgetting_ is, in fact, mainly a loose habit into which humanity has lapsed, for to observe vividly is to retain rigidly; and Hannibal, with his over-manly mental habit, observes each fact presented to him with a vividness which seems to be pretty absolute.

You will say, then, to yourself, my friend, that it was a strange pair of men that paced by the seashore in silence that evening, the eve of the young man’s nineteenth birthday—old Jack and his young giant; the giant in the meekest subjection to his Jack because of delusion, as all a world will sometimes meekly lie in shackles under the will of the weakest lie. My thoughts as I walked were of the morrow, of that dawn toward which for long years I had looked forward, when I should hand over to Hannibal my old problem of the stele to conquer for me, and I wondered in what manner the young man would manage it. Little doubt, however, had I as to the outcome, seeing that I am even now about to compile into a book quite a crowd of new scientific principles dropped from the mouth of my man in the course of his studies, with a thousand little observations about things in general, most of them bound, I should imagine, to astound you. So, then, that my man would read the stele I could readily believe; but indeed, Reid, I was no longer deeply interested in this miserable bit of a stele; I’m afraid it is too true that my interest had all shifted from the lifeless thing to the living fellow, all too much so, all too much for my peace....

Sometimes lately, Reid, I may avow to you, I have stolen out of my room in the dead of night and stood before his door, stood for hours, hearkening for a sound; couldn’t at all tell you why—bound there somehow—and I have shaken my poor head, saying to myself, “No, surely, I have to cure myself of this folly: a purely scientific interest in this savage, nothing more”; but still I have stuck at his door.

Do you understand that this boy is in some points an idiot? It is only lately that the amazingness of it all has struck and made me a wrecked man! To a thousand throes and heartburns, learned in a thousand social niceties by men who dwell with men, he remains a stranger. The different ways in which one should bend the mind toward one’s brother, toward one’s mother, one’s friend, and so on, seem to be unknown to him; I don’t know who is to blame. Never a little tenderness, never a sign. I _couldn’t_, of course, bring his mind into contact with the Christian faith from the very nature of the case, the Man of Christianity being a sorrowful type, while the Man of his fancy was bound to be a type of power; so that the name of Christ he has never heard; but his mind was presented with such naïve nature-worship as that of the Rig-Vedas, Genesis and Job: I thought that it was well....

But to return to this birthday-eve of his. We two had made our way back together in silence, nearly to the castle-gate, when out darts Shan Healy, wringing hands and crying, “Oh, Master Hannibal, do forgive me, sir, the glass pot has boiled all over, while I was attending to the dinner”; whereat Master Hannibal, without waiting to hear another word, threw Shan out of his way, and rushed into the house, no doubt to see for himself how the matter stood, for he seems to have left some mess simmering in his laboratory, had bid Shan look to it, and the thing had had some mischance.

“Now, here’s a go for a poor chap, doctor,” says Shan to me, in great distress; “believe me, I couldn’t avoid it, the thing boiled over so quick, and what’ll Master Hannibal say now?”

“Say?” said I, for I was angry, “what can he dare say? Let him go to the devil, you couldn’t help it, and I order you not to distress yourself in the slightest.”

“Ah, doctor, it’s all very well for you to talk,” says he.

Well, we went into the house, and Shan went down to his kitchen; but I still hung about the bottom of the stair, being a bit anxious as to what this being might take it into his nut to do now about his blessed chemical. All was still during some time, so presently I called sharply up to him, “What are you at, Hannibal?” No answer, no sound; only the faint sounds of Shan’s preparations for dinner downstairs. So now I ran very thievishly up the stairs, and peeped into the laboratory, but he wasn’t there, and I can only think now that at the sounds of my steps on the stair, faint as they were, the monkey must have passed out of the laboratory window, and slipped down the turret by the ivy; anyway, the next thing that I heard were Shan’s howls coming up out of the kitchen, upon which I ran down, to find myself locked out, and to hear within the kitchen the sounds of a head being beaten against the ground, mingled with Shan Healy’s exclaimings.

Beside myself with anger, I pounded upon the door, and now at once the row stopped, and in a moment Shan opened, saying despondently to me, poor chap, “Oh, doctor, he do use me cruel, sir, cruel, cruel, cruel. Oh, my poor head—what does he think anybody is made of?”

My own head was hung with shame; I could do nothing but silently pat my old companion on his shoulder.

“Where is he now?” said I.

“Gone like a shadow through the window, doctor, and down to the shore, the minute he heard you pounding,” says Shan. “He held me down on the floor with one hand, and with the other he banged my poor head ... cruel, cruel. I shouldn’t mind if it was done in a rage, but smiling as cool as a cucumber, as if anybody’s head was a block of wood he was playing with.”

“Well,” I said bitterly, “all your own fault, Shan Healy; you’re too faithful and good.” And I left him there and went up.

Well, I dined by myself, my fellow keeping culpably aloof perhaps; and during the rest of the evening I saw or heard nothing of him till, near ten in the night, I heard some long way off the bursting of one of his bombs. A gale was then raging, and it had grown coldish, with that wet chill which marks this part. So I went to seek a little sleep, but at about three in the morning rose and went softly to stand outside the observatory door, to see if I could detect a sound of his through the row of the storm; and as I so stood, to my surprise, he called to me, praying me to enter. I did so, to find him sitting at a window, looking out at all the dark strife of the winds and waters, and at the bethundered bluff down there below: whereat, without the least mention of Shan Healy, my man began to blab about the moon, which just then struggled through into a channel between two cloud-bogs, saying that our globe, as it seemed to him, might have been made a more suitable place for living beings, if provided with two moons instead of one. Being grum and out of sorts at the moment, I told him not to trouble his small head about that, that things were well as they were, and I quoted dogmatically to him that “God made two great lights, the greater light to rule the day, and the lesser light to rule the night.” At this my chap turns up at me a gaze of the greatest astonishment, asking if I did really think that some purpose of providing a lamp to the night had anything to do with the birth and being of the moon. I said yes, I did think so; on which he anew turns at me a certain searching look of astonishment, and murmurs something about not daring to question the truth of my words, but that as a lamp the moon undoubtedly appeared to be a failure, since she did not shine most nights; sometimes shone for a short hour only; sometimes shone uselessly during the day, but left the night orbless—a rather mad sort of lamp—whereas _two_ moons with such and such parallaxes, of such and such masses.... “Well, never you mind that,” said I shortly to him, for I thought that I’d better be mum as to the moon. But he was moon-struck that night, and after saying that just as she then was, near her full, but not quite, she reminded him of “The Idiot’s” face when he had gum-boil and swollen-jaw some years ago—for he’s as simple as a baby in some respects, mind you, and many things said by the boy that you might think said in fun, are, in fact, quite grave statements, devoid of any grain of humour on his part; for though he smiles ever, he hardly ever laughs, so that one’s cheeks are apt to puff out on a sudden with laughter at his words, as at the artless freaks of a child’s remarks. Anyhow, after likening the moon to Shan’s gum-boil face, my boy goes on now to wonder for the thousandth time how it is that his “Man” never managed to range so high into space as the moon, for I had soon found myself compelled to confess to him that man had never yet landed on the satellite, nor did all the reasons which I could adduce for this fact, such as the absence of an atmosphere on the moon, and so on, ever suffice to abate his wonder that the moon should remain unvisited: for little did the man dream that even the north and south poles of our own planet remain even now all unknown, let alone the moon!

Well, sir, he was thus droning to himself as to the moon, and specifying the modes by which her surface appeared to him attainable, when in a foolish heat of tenderness I, standing behind him, let my hand fall on the flesh of his neck, inside the broad flap of his shirt-collar, and I allowed myself to murmur the word “Boy,” about to say, “Boy, I am fond of you,” or some such futility, when my fellow gave me such a gaze of Arctic-cold astonishment—for sheet-lightning and the strangled moonshine both beshone the darkness of the room, so that one could see anon—such a gaze, that I was glad to slip away to conceal the wet in my poor eyes, and I went to sleep.