The Juggler and the Soul

Chapter I

O wedding guest ! this soul hath been Alone on a wide, wide sea ; So lonely 'twas that God Himself Scarce seemed there to be.' The experiment was over. I stood breathless, appalled, exhilarated, yet the very force of my triumph caused me to tremble ; and, even while the pride of the creator in his own work swelled my veins, I shrank instinctively before the terrific power, and full significance of my discovery. It needed only to be carried a step further, and then — what then ? Was it to the benefit of mankind ? Was my secret one that could be placed alike in the hands of human or lawless men with impunity? A sudden sense of the impiety, the sacrilege of the deed I had committed, smote me violently. I looked up, half expecting a thunderbolt to strike to earth one who had wrested from nature a prerogative that had hitherto been accounted divine, for I had said to the living, 'Ye shall die!' and to the dead, 'Lo! ye shall be alive again ! ' and, at will, I had shifted the vital spark, and the dead was the living, and the living was the dead, before my eyes.

Slowly my gaze travelled from one to the other of the two bodies lying before me, and thence to a gigantic deaf and dumb negro, who for years had assisted me in my experiments. His eyes flashed joy, his tall form towered in exultation, and, by signs, he conveyed to me his supreme satisfaction in the astounding result achieved. The third person present was one of those beings, who unite perfect manual dexterity to an almost complete absence of mind ; who have no instincts save those of the brute, and who are incapable of being impressed, or even of compre hending, if a miracle be enacted before their eyes. I made him a gesture of dismissal, and he put on his coat stolidly, and departed without a single backward glance at the group by the table, yet the whole world might have held its breath to gaze.

As the deaf-mute approached, and waited for me to speak, I became aware that my mind, So without effort of mine, was made up. I signed to him, and, as his eyes followed the movements of my hands, incredulity, mortification and some thing very like scorn succeeded each other upon his face, though all of these expressions gave way to one of poignant despair, and the most cruel disappointment, as I ceased. He answered in the same way, urging me not to bury in my breast perhaps the most brilliant discovery ever vouchsafed to a physiologist, but my decision was unalterable. I would not place this two-edged sword in the hands of those who might wield it in the service of the devil, the risks of evil were too stupendous, the certainty of good too doubtful, to be worth the awful responsibility. The day's work should be as if it had never been, and from my lips no man living should hear its record spoken. ' You will keep inviolate all that you have seen and heard to-day,' I signed. ' More than this, you will forget it.' He looked at me sullenly, and I knew that not the minutest detail of the operation he had witnessed, and aided in, had escaped him, but that all was engraved as with a stylet on the pages of his memory. **> The Juggler and the Soul ' Not even Mr Arthur?' he inquired. 'No.' He reminded me that there had been a third witness present. ' He understands nothing — he remembers nothing,' I said ; ' and as for these ' — I gazed downwards — ' you will dispose of that ; but this ' — and I gave him certain minute instructions that I knew would be carried out to the letter.

On the threshold of the room I paused and looked back, but not at the living, but at the innocent dead. I gazed, with a pang of self-upbraiding and regret.

Chapter II

' Sense of past youth, and manhood come in vain, And genius given, and knowledge won in vain.' Late that night I took lamp in hand, and, crossing the hall, came to a door that was of polished wood on the one side, of green baize on the other, giving ingress to a narrow, white washed passage that led to the laboratory and dissecting-room in which I spent half my life. I turned the key and went in. All was grey, gruesome, melancholy, and everything at that moment seemed to remind me of the failures I had encountered within those four walls, while of my few successes there was no trace. I thought of Arthur, and his friend Mr Jasper, both keen and ardent students in the pursuit after truth, and both, probably, destined to the same disappointment as even now, in the moment of my greatest discovery, oppressed me.

I went to the end of the desolate room, and unbolted the door <•$ The Juggler and the Soul that gave on a narrow alley, which terminated in a second door, opening on a silent back street of warehouses, and through which strange burdens were often brought, and afterwards as secretly borne away. Through the darkness I saw Silence approaching, his teeth grinning malevolently out of his black face ; and as he came nearer, I observed something alert and unusual in his carriage ; there was more of the man, and less of the tool and humble instrument of science than I had hitherto perceived in him, though before my stern gaze he lowered his eyes, and walked more humbly. I was satisfied, however, with the thorough completeness of the arrangements I had left to him ; and when, as I passed out, he asked me if Mr Arthur were expected soon, I answered, ' To-morrow,' the extravagant joy he displayed almost effaced from my mind the impression he had just given me. ' Mr Jasper accompanies him,' I added, not waiting for the look of hatred that I knew would cross the deaf-mute's face, and yet, so far as I knew, he had no more reason than had I for his repugnance to Arthur's friend.

Were we both jealous of the influence Mr Jasper had so easily acquired over the bright, careless lad ? That he had not led Arthur into mischief, though half-a-dozen years his senior, and probably a lifetime ahead in know ledge of the world, I knew, and the ardour for study that he seemed to have breathed into him, was distinctly to the benefit of the younger man. They had met accidentally in a Paris hospital, and the identity of their pursuits had at once brought them together, and thenceforth held them shoulder to shoulder in that eager search after the unknown which devours some of the finer, ay, and the baser sort of man, in his youth, when his soul is not utterly quenched within him. Mr Jasper had been born and bred in India. So much he told me, but no more ; and of his relations, if he had any, he never spoke, and as I never heard him allude to money, being ap parently neither troubled by the lack nor the burden of it, I concluded him to be affluent.

And yet — and yet I seldom took Mr Jasper's hand — so long, so taper, so superlatively silken to the touch that it slipped through my fingers like the folds of a woman's satin gown — without *°S The Juggler and the Soul feeling an inward recoil from him that my reason refused to ratify. He was an opium eater, true, but within bounds, aud no signs of the degradation of the accursed habit had as yet begun to show upon him. His mind was remarkably serene and clear, the equi poise of his faculties perfect, and his flawless health showed itself in a palpable joy in the mere fact of living that gave a peculiar charm and vitality to his companionship. Yet, to my mind, beneath all the refinement of manner, a cruel and sensual nature lurked. It never showed itself to me, but I believed it to be there, and it was partly because he had become to me a fascinating study that I did not oppose his constant stay at my house.

But Arthur's path and his must diverge, and widely, before long. The one would in time put on the harness of the working surgeon, the other would continue the experimentalist, and the seeker, prosecuting his studies, possibly far on into middle life, unless domestic affection or some stronger attraction drew him out of the orbit in which he travelled. Sometimes I found him watching me as in tently as I watched him, perhaps applying my lesson of life to himself, and seeing in me the suture of himself, with all illusions and vaulting ambitions burned out, and the dull consciousness that, having learned but little, I had missed the real and tangible happiness that the accident of easy circumstances might have placed within my grasp. For I had not lived my life in any sense of the word. Passive enjoyment had been mine — that which comes from cultured ease, gracious surroundings, the absence of intrusion, or irk some companionship, of worry, of anxieties for the faults and troubles of those I loved ; and in my absolute independence of the world and fortune, I believed myself to hold the choicest blessing that can be bestowed on man.

I had never succeeded, so envy and hatred passed me by, and calumny was silent. My friends were few, and I could do without them ; but I had one real heart-interest in life, and that was centred in the young cousin who had come to my house — a soft, curly-headed rogue of six — and who had grown up before my eyes into the stalwart young fellow who was now taking his last fling in Paris before settling down to serious work. -*? The Juggler and the Soul But to-night, with the wild thrill of joy and mastery in my discovery gone from my veins, only the chill sense of a vie manquee swept over me as I reviewed my past, and looked askance at my future — too late ! And that is surely one of the bitterest thoughts that can come to us, when the greying shadows of middle age are creeping upon us, when the power of enjoyment is leaving, or has quite left to us, look back and say, ' I have vegetated, or stagnated, or endured, or suffered my life ; but I have not lived it, not even as a bird does, and all the sources of enjoyment, of keen virile joy in me, have been dammed up at their fountain heads, instead of overflowing and keeping as a blooming garden that which has by degrees become an arid, desolate waste. Not to have loved, not to have suffered : such an one has never truly lived — nor had I.

Chapter III

' Nature had made him for some other planet, And pressed his soul into a human shape By accident or malice.' ARTHUR came back from his travels rather broader and browner than he went. Mr Jasper was neither more intellectual, nor delightful, nor handsome than he always was, yet he managed to make Arthur appear at a disadvantage, as usual. At dinner their talk was entirely of all that they had seen or done during the past three months, and as I listened to them, I more than ever recognised how distinctly the leading spirit in all they had undertaken was Jasper, and I wondered if, when his influence were removed, Arthur would be consumed by the same ardour in the pursuit of science that now animated him. But I soon found that though they had seen £©, The Juggler and the Soul and learned something at the different great hospitals they had visited, they had discovered nothing, and that no word of a recent American experiment that had led to my own discovery had reached their ears. ' We mean to be awfully busy, sir,' said Arthur at dessert, throwing back his bright head in his old boyish way ; ' for if we haven't seen much, we've got the ideas for some per fectly new experiments.' ' But I forbid you experimenting on your selves,' I interrupted, remembering certain in cidents that had just stopped short of absolute danger, ' and Silence has orders to let me know if you attempt any.' Mr Jasper and Arthur exchanged glances, whether of disappointment or offence I could not be certain. ' It has always puzzled me, Mr Jasper,' I said, ' that with your intense love for Arthur's profession, you do not enter it' ' I am like you, sir,' he said, and laughed.

I love the work, but I hate the mechanism of the business ; and I mean to return to my own country some day.' As my glance fell on him, Arthur's face The Juggler and the Soul So clouded. He turned pale, and looked positively cold, like a child who, bold with its mother's arm around it, trembles with fear when it stands alone. ' If you go,' he said hotly, ' then I shall go too.' But he had the grace to blush at words that sounded like madness, and soon the two went off cheerfully to bed, as they meant to begin their labours early on the morrow. And for some days I hardly saw them, so closely they kept to the laboratory, with Silence in attendance, and his a man who merits a few words of de scription. He was a gross, vacuous, round-faced creature, who ate, who drank, who understood Silence's signs, and obeyed them, but whose brain, if he had one, had probably become decrepit from want of use.

He had formerly been in charge of the dead-house at one of the hospitals, until his imbecility brought about his discharge, and seen beside the Titanic form of Silence, his appearance was simply grotesque, and earned him the name of Falstaff. But this did not trouble him, and he showed as slavish an *°S The Juggler and the Soul obedience to his superior as Silence, in his turn, displayed to Arthur, his idol. Sometimes, and always when I thought my self least expected, I entered the laboratory, half fearing that Silence had let escape him the secret he burned to impart. Fear of me alone restrained him, and I knew that it I died, suddenly he would run riot in the knowledge that he was the sole owner of my discovery, and I hated to think of the appalling and probably misused power that would be placed in his hands.

But one morning I received a letter that put all such things for a while out of my thoughts, and engrossed my whole attention. It ran thus : — ' Bombay, October \2ll1, 18S5. ' My dear Saul, — I send you my daughter by the steamer that follows this mail. Of course you are married, and as you are not the man to fall in love with a fool, I know that Ninga will be in safe hands. If she doesn't behave, send her to a first-rate school, and provide her with pocket-money. I have ar ranged for a thousand a year to be paid to you B The Juggler and the Soul So for her expenses. And now, if you haven't flung this letter away in a rage before you have got so far, here are my reasons for the coolest liberty one old friend can take with another. I am dying ; but dying with me is such a long and dreary business that I don't know when it may be over, and I have a horror of people sitting round watching me, and angrily thinking me a dawdle, so I am breaking up my home, and shall die among strangers.

To death itself I am indifferent — it merely robs me of sensa tion, and, as Epicurus teaches, so long as we are, death is not ; and when death is, we are not. Life has no more evil for him who has made up his mind that it is no evil not to live. For me life stopped when my wife's breath ceased, and the child who robbed her of that breath, I have always hated. If you want to be cured of your old friendship for me, think of me as Ninga's father, or get her to limn my portrait as I appear to her, and you will shut the slide of memory upon me, and cry shame upon the blindness of your youth. And yet, little as I value her love, I am not indifferent to her future. Unluckily for her, she will inherit a large fortune at my death ; and also, unluckily *§ The Juggler and the Soul for her, though she is intensely feminine, she inherits a strong will, and whatever she takes it into her head to do, whether right or wrong, she will do it.

If she decides on marrying the wrong man you wont stop her ; but it is precisely because I believe you will keep her out of the way of the wrong man, that I ask you to undertake her. I know how strictly you have always abstained from the wine of life — well, if you have missed the lees, you have also missed the pleasure, but you have acquired a Spartan control of yourself that must enable you easily to dominate those with whom you come in contact. And so I put Ninga into your hands, more because she is Mary's child — because I want her to be done by as Mary would have done — than because she is the daughter of your old friend. And now, good bye. I hope that my next communication to you will be through my lawyers, who will send you my ' last instructions,' etc ; but I may drag on indefinitely.

We have societies for the pre vention of cruelty to women and children, and to animals, but why is not one started to relieve tortured human beings of life when that life is doomed to be snuffed out slowly by progressive stages of agony ? Farewell, and God bless you ! — Your old friend, JONATHAN.' Jonathan.' The letter fell from my hands, and the astonishment, akin to indignation, with which I had read the opening lines, faded, as eye to eye, and hand to hand, we seemed to stand — Jonathan and I — with the eager look of friend ship that is beautiful in the eyes of young men when they look upon one another. I felt once more the pang of parting when our paths in life diverged. I remembered the gradually grow ing coldness of our letters when the vivid memory of each other was dimmed by years, and, with a throb of shame, I remembered how it had been I who had at last suffered our corre spondence to lapse, and even to forget the very existence of the man who at that time had called forth the warmest affection of my life.

His child ! She should be welcome here for his sake — but why should he conclude that I was married ? Might there not be one wise man in a multitude of fools ? And what place was there in a bachelor's house for a girl — possibly a spoilt one ? And then I forgot the girl in thinking of her father. All that day he *>$ The Juggler and the Soul was in my mind, and haunted me in young man's guise at night, so that I rose up, restless and sad, with a half-formed plan that I would establish his child here with my housekeeper, then depart myself to be with the lonely man when he died. But Arthur was here, and so, for that matter, was Mr Jasper, and I knew, on deliberation, that I must remain at my post. Meanwhile — for she might arrive almost any day now — I saw my housekeeper, Mrs Shakel, about the necessary quarters to be prepared for her, and the good old woman was astounded, and would have expressed herself shocked had she dared, while in the corner of her eye I read plainly a foreboding and doubt that in some vital way clearly affected herself, and also me.

She coughed as she inquired the young lady's age, and when I could not tell her, she coughed the more, then ventured to stigmatize the name ' Ninga ' as heathenish, and asked me what it meant ; but this I could not answer, for I did not know. I bade her precede me upstairs, and she threw open the doors of the drawing-rooms — rarely used — and of two other rooms on the same floor. These were unoccupied, as my room and those of the young men were above, and the servants were at the top of the house, and the entire floor could be Ninga's. One often forms new impressions of old things when consciously looking at them with the eyes of a stranger, and as I glanced around curiously that day, was satisfied, for space and air, light and sweetness were everywhere. It was more like a country than a town house ; and Mrs Shakel was responsible for the palms and sweet-smelling plants that made old en gravings seem more lovely, and the pottery that held them more serviceable and grateful to the eye, while my mother had been a woman whose taste was far in advance of her time, so that in the drawing-rooms I now entered, there was not a note of colour that required alteration.

The hangings were of tawny pink — pale yellow or orange, I should think, by candle light — and the brocade hung in lustrous, heavy folds beside the windows and over the doors ; it also scattered itself over the low chairs and couches yet over all there was an unused look and I fell to wondering if Ninga were a womanly *>$ The Tuggler and the Soul woman, or a woman's rights woman, and specu lated a little as to what tone she would give to her surroundings. Mrs Shakel attributed my abstracted air to dissatisfaction, and mentioned lace curtains, silk cushions, etc., as if they meant structural alterations. ' And lots of flowers,' I said ; yet, with a cynical thought to myself of how all men credit women with a passionate love for flowers and children— a downright fallacy, as many women hate both, greatly preferring diamonds. ' Of course, sir,' said Mrs Shakel ; and then I left her to find Arthur.

As I shut the swing-door behind me, the contrast between the luxury I had left behind, and the gruesome realities of life, or, rather, death, that I was approaching, struck me forcibly. Jonathan's daughter must not pass that door, I resolved ; and yet, if she were curious, after the manner of her kind, she would probably never rest until she had, and made herself miserable. As I went in, the group of figures about the table, the light, a hundred little details, reminded me of the last experiment here upon which I had been engaged, and, in the the weary disappointment of the three faces turned upon me, I seemed to recall the more vividly, the ex ultant joy that had flashed from Silence's eyes to mine in the delirium of success. When they were at liberty, I told Arthur that I was the owner of a new ward, who would arrive almost immediately. ' A ward, sir ? ' said Arthur, preoccupied and dashed by his failure. ' That will be a nuisance to you, won't it ? ' ' That depends on herself,' I said.

Arthur stared, and his mouth took the form of whistling. ' Is it a young lady? ' ' Yes.' he said The two young men then at me, and smiled. looked at each other, ' I beg your pardon, sir,' said Arthur, ' but you look rather — rather young to be a guardian, you know. And, of course, you will have to take her about, and all that. You won't expect us to do it, for Jasper and I hate girls ! ' I wondered what Silence would say. His one object of idolatry on earth was Arthur, and his jealousy of everyone who approached him, knew no bounds. ' But perhaps you will both like this one,' I said, looking from one to the other; and then it struck me that I had never heard either of them discuss women, or seen them in the company of any, and that the extent of their susceptibility to, or hard - heartedness towards, the fair sex, was quite unknown to me. 'Shall you get a duenna, sir?' said Arthur, with something irritating in his eye that re minded me of Mrs Shakel.

I laughed out. The young men joined in, ar.d I went away with a sardonic thought that perhaps Miss Ninga might some day read one or both of these conceited young men, who did not like girls, a lesson.

Chapter IV

' What if her guardian spirit 'twere ? What if she knew her mother near ? But this she knows, in joys and woes, That saints will aid if men will call, For the blue sky bends over all' The ship was due. As I drove to meet it, I began to think, for the first time, not of my friend's daughter, but of the girl hersell. She should be a creature of fog and shadow, of mist and cold, if she would be in mood with the day, and the colour of her surround ings ; and I wished for different weather as I left the city behind me, and found myself driving through strange places, and the very strangest people that I had ever seen. When . we neared the docks, the curious sense of silence, the long, barren distances, the pallid electric light, waving from afar its signal, all wove a species of charm around me, in **?

The Juggler and the Soul which I seemed to glide forward noiselessly, and lose all sense of boundaries in illimitable space. I roused myself with a start to find that the carriage door was open, that we were outside an inn, and my coachman was leaning down to ask me if he should put up the horses, as the ship was not expected in for two hours ; it was even possible that the fog would prevent her getting in at all that night. I was presently shown to a great, dreary upper room, ready laid for halfa - hundred feasters, not one of whom, thought I, will ever come. There was no fire, and the faint light from a distant pair of candles served but to accentuate the gloom, and added still further to the feeling of unreality that had possessed me since I left the city behind me. As alternately I paced the salon, or looked out at the strange chasms, and ghostly gleams of water that the electric signal from time to time revealed, a sudden feeling of impending misfortune overwhelmed me.

I felt as one bent upon a hopeless errand, as a man may who goes knowingly to meet his own dishonour, or some bodily harm ; as one who feels elements of crime and danger violently sweeping over his soul and mingling with the peaceful current of his life, yet is powerless to stand aside from the engulfing flood. Pshaw ! I was upset by the weather, made nervous by want of sleep, and some anxiety about my new charge ; though even that was ridiculous, for what had I to fear from a laughing, apple - cheeked girl, whom I could suit easily with a lover or a school, according to her deserts ? No ; the peril could not come from her. That I had been in some danger lately of sinning grievously, I knew, and a spiritual warning not to use the fearful knowledge I had acquired would not have surprised me ; but I had re ceived none.

My own judgment had settled the question, owning no interposition from with out, no cowardly qualms from within. Twice before in my life had I felt such an influence as this, and each time it had come to warn me of a hidden danger, and I had hearkened, and been saved. And what was the message spoken to me now? For whether breathed into the air, or out of the earth, or conveyed like fire through the blood in my veins, I heard the og The Juggler and the Soul words, ' Go back ! go back ! Let the ship and my daughter be ! ' Then seemed I to step out bodily from my every-day self and habit, and become the wild Cumberland lad who had been a dreamer of dreams, a seer of visions, and who had imbibed superstition with his mother's milk. Once more, with elastic step, I trod the moor, and gazed at the fell, that, rugged and beautiful in the moon light, rose beside me ; then saw, coming slowly to meet me, a black figure showing against the blue arch of the sky, and seeming to move midway between heaven and earth.

In spirit I rushed to meet it, as in the flesh I had done a thousand times ; but it seemed to recede as I advanced, yet not so swiftly but that I gained upon it, and, crying out 'Jonathan!' would have seized its arm. But what was this ? Moor, fell and sky had vanished, I was standing in the tawdry inn-room, and yonder — oh, my God, how did he enter here? — stood my old friend, with pale palms outstretched as though he would worn me back. I had conjured him up, and he hsd done my bidding; yet I had no power to stretch out my hand in greeting, or call him by name, I could only strive to read the message in his eyes, to make out the shape of the muffled, crouching thing behind him, that he seemed to be trying to shelter, and hide from my gaze. And then, though how conveyed to me I know not, I knew that he had come to warn me against undertaking the trust he had himself imposed upon me; that he bade me flee at once from the ship and his daughter, and place myself far beyond the reach of any influence connected with himself and her.