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Page 79
I say that I had risen in order to announce my presence, but I
could not do so while the voice was sounding. I could only remain
half lying, half sitting, paralysed, astounded, listening to those
yearning distant musical words. And he--he was so absorbed that
even if I had spoken he might not have heard me. But with the
silence of the voice came my half articulated apologies and
explanations. He sprang across the room, switched on the electric
light, and in its white glare I saw him, his eyes gleaming
with anger, his face twisted with passion, as the hapless
charwoman may have seen him weeks before.
"Mr. Colmore!" he cried. "You here! What is the meaning of
this, sir?"
With halting words I explained it all, my neuralgia, the
narcotic, my luckless sleep and singular awakening. As he listened
the glow of anger faded from his face, and the sad, impassive mask
closed once more over his features.
"My secret is yours, Mr. Colmore," said he. "I have only
myself to blame for relaxing my precautions. Half confidences are
worse than no confidences, and so you may know all since you know
so much. The story may go where you will when I have passed away,
but until then I rely upon your sense of honour that no human soul
shall hear it from your lips. I am proud still--God help me!--or,
at least, I am proud enough to resent that pity which this story
would draw upon me. I have smiled at envy, and disregarded hatred,
but pity is more than I can tolerate.
"You have heard the source from which the voice comes--that
voice which has, as I understand, excited so much curiosity in my
household. I am aware of the rumours to which it has given rise.
These speculations, whether scandalous or superstitious, are such
as I can disregard and forgive. What I should never forgive would
be a disloyal spying and eavesdropping in order to satisfy an
illicit curiosity. But of that, Mr. Colmore, I acquit you.
"When I was a young man, sir, many years younger than you are
now, I was launched upon town without a friend or adviser, and with
a purse which brought only too many false friends and false
advisers to my side. I drank deeply of the wine of life--if there
is a man living who has drunk more deeply he is not a man whom I
envy. My purse suffered, my character suffered, my constitution
suffered, stimulants became a necessity to me, I was a creature
from whom my memory recoils. And it was at that time, the time of
my blackest degradation, that God sent into my life the gentlest,
sweetest spirit that ever descended as a ministering angel from
above. She loved me, broken as I was, loved me, and spent her life
in making a man once more of that which had degraded itself to the
level of the beasts.
"But a fell disease struck her, and she withered away before
my eyes. In the hour of her agony it was never of herself, of
her own sufferings and her own death that she thought. It was all
of me. The one pang which her fate brought to her was the fear
that when her influence was removed I should revert to that which
I had been. It was in vain that I made oath to her that no drop of
wine would ever cross my lips. She knew only too well the hold
that the devil had upon me--she who had striven so to loosen it--
and it haunted her night and day the thought that my soul might
again be within his grip.
"It was from some friend's gossip of the sick room that she
heard of this invention--this phonograph--and with the quick
insight of a loving woman she saw how she might use it for her
ends. She sent me to London to procure the best which money could
buy. With her dying breath she gasped into it the words which have
held me straight ever since. Lonely and broken, what else have I
in all the world to uphold me? But it is enough. Please God, I
shall face her without shame when He is pleased to reunite us!
That is my secret, Mr. Colmore, and whilst I live I leave it in
your keeping."
The Black Doctor
Bishop's Crossing is a small village lying ten miles in a south-
westerly direction from Liverpool. Here in the early seventies
there settled a doctor named Aloysius Lana. Nothing was known
locally either of his antecedents or of the reasons which had
prompted him to come to this Lancashire hamlet. Two facts only
were certain about him; the one that he had gained his medical
qualification with some distinction at Glasgow; the other that he
came undoubtedly of a tropical race, and was so dark that he
might almost have had a strain of the Indian in his composition.
His predominant features were, however, European, and he
possessed a stately courtesy and carriage which suggested a
Spanish extraction. A swarthy skin, raven-black hair, and dark,
sparkling eyes under a pair of heavily-tufted brows made a
strange contrast to the flaxen or chestnut rustics of England,
and the newcomer was soon known as "The Black Doctor of Bishop's
Crossing." At first it was a term of ridicule and reproach; as
the years went on it became a title of honour which was familiar
to the whole countryside, and extended far beyond the narrow
confines of the village.
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