Part 22

“A name was breathed distinctly, as in awed answer, from the obscurity at my side. _Héa-Nan!--Héa-Nan!_ The wistful smile on the beautiful face sweetened as in grateful recognition. The eyes softened in a tender fondness that had nevertheless a strange, remote dignity. Not now did she give herself up to the passionate abandonment of that moonlit garden. Love still yearned from her, but it was the eternal love of the soul that looks to the unimaginable realities beyond the body.

“Slowly, slowly, she approached until it seemed that the hands of her outstretched arms would brush my sleeve as they reached toward the man I felt recoil back into the darkness at my side. I looked up into the face of a living, breathing woman--saw the faint flush upon her Asiatic complexion--saw the dark eyes glowing, swimming in a bath of tears. Once more the lips moved silently--once more the answering name--_Héa-Nan!_--came in an emotionally exhaled whisper from the man who could draw back no farther.

“She smiled, a smile of radiant forgiveness, of understanding and--so it seemed--of pity, and then I saw her arms make a quick movement. From the shadow at my side she plucked something, held it aloft. The sacred jewel of the Buddha blazed in the mouth of the reddish-gold snake that seemed to curl alive about her arm. For one long moment, I looked up at her, her face glowing strangely in the glory of the recovered jewel, yet still a living, human woman with lips that parted as I watched--and then I found myself staring into a smother of smoke from which issued a ghastly mocking laughter.

“The red glow near the floor expired in one last flicker. There was a stab of flame, the simultaneous deafeningly violent detonation of a revolver fired close to my ear, a savage cry of furious menace, another gloating chuckle of laughter--and then darkness and silence.

“Brought suddenly to myself, I struggled to my feet in the choking fumes, and groped feverishly for the switch of the electric light. I found it and the lamp sprang into dull illumination of the smoke-filled cabin. The door was open. The conjurer had disappeared--I heard a splash in the river under the open ports and was left in no doubt that he was beyond our reach. Then, in sudden alarm at his silence, I turned to look for Captain Strong.

“He was stretched back unconscious upon the settee where we had sat together, his hand grasping the revolver which he had vainly fired with his last strength. He looked livid, pale as death, and for a moment I thought the native had murdered him. But I could find no mark on him, and presently he opened his eyes, began to murmur delirious phrases. I saw at a glance that he was very ill, with the illness that frightens you when you see it in a place like Saigon. With some difficulty, for he was a heavy man, I lifted him to his bunk and put him to bed. As I loosened the shirt from about his throat, I noticed, with a thrill of the uncanny which made me shudder, that round his neck was a circling line of blanched skin, and on his chest a similar, broader patch. But the amulet, whose long wearing had evidently caused these marks, had disappeared completely.

“Half an hour later I was being rowed in all haste to the black Messageries Maritimes boat and claiming the services of her doctor.

“It was hopeless from the first, and we both knew it. Captain Strong died before morning, raving native words in his delirium, and calling incessantly a native name--_Héa-Nan! Héa-Nan!_

“At dawn I looked up to see the yellow jack fluttering from the masthead precisely as, not twelve hours before, I had seen the vision of it from the quay.”

Captain Williamson stopped, glanced at his burnt-out cheroot, threw it away, and selected another one carefully from his case.

“Well, Professor, what do you make of that?” he asked, as he struck a match.

The professor assumed an air of wisdom superior to any mystery.

“Of course,” he said, “there is no doubt what happened. Captain Strong was probably infected with yellow fever coming up the river. Years before, he had instigated a native girl to rob that Buddhist temple on his behalf, and finding himself back at the place he was impelled--it is a common psychological phenomenon in criminals--to revisit the scene of his crime. The ex-priest saw him and recognized him, and, wishing to make quite sure whether he still possessed the sacred jewel, he hypnotized him by chaining his conscious attention on his little conjuring trick at the café, and then suggested to him the vision of the jewel by outlining it with his subject’s finger on the table. Captain Strong’s exclamation and his gesture would be sufficient that he still wore it.

“As for the scene in the saloon, it was hypnotism on a large scale, induced by the use of the drugs with which the atmosphere was filled. Captain Strong’s subconscious mind came to the top and lived once again through the episodes of the robbery and the death of his agent, seeing them, as is the habit of the subjective mind when released from the control of the objective surface consciousness, like actual present facts. The hallucination of the girl as a living presence in the cabin is, of course, explained by the silent suggestion of the priest acting on the already highly excited subconsciousness of the guilty man. Just as I can make a hypnotic patient believe that you are someone else and see you as someone else, so the conjurer himself, under cover of the vision he had suggested, approached the wearer of the sacred jewel and snatched it from his neck. The emotional crisis undergone by Captain Strong would, of course, hasten the onset of the yellow fever already in his body.”

“H’m,” objected Captain Williamson, “but that doesn’t explain why I should share these visions.”

The professor was nothing daunted.

“Of course,” he said, “you were in close propinquity to Captain Strong and were doubtless what is known as _en rapport_ with him. The vision of the yellow flag--the not uncommon hallucination of a death-symbol produced by the subconsciousness of a doomed person--was communicated to you when the captain gripped your shoulder----”

“Have a whisky-and-soda, Professor,” interrupted the planter, coarsely, “and don’t spoil a good story.”

+-------------------------------------------------+ |Transcriber’s note: | | | |Obvious typographic errors have been corrected. | | | +-------------------------------------------------+