Chapter 4

“That shows me--pardon the apparent impertinence--that you have never really examined the soul question with any close attention. Do you suppose that D------ really likes being so noticeably different from other men? Depend upon it,’ he has noticed in himself what we have noticed in him. Depend upon it, he has tried to be ordinary, and found it impossible. His soul manages him as a strong nature manages a weak one, and his soul is a female, not a male. For souls have sexes, otherwise what would be the sense of talking about wedded souls? I have no doubt whatever of the truth of reincarnation on earth. Souls go on and on following out their object of development.”

“You believe that every soul is reincarnated?”

“A certain number of times.”

“That even in the animal world the soul of one animal passes into the body of another?”

“Wait a minute. Now we are coming to something that tends to prove my theory true. Animals have souls, as you imply. Who can know them intimately and doubt it for an instant? Souls as immortal--or as mortal--as ours. And their souls, too, pass on.”

“Into other animals?”

“Possibly. And eventually, in the process of development, into human beings.”

I laughed, perhaps a little rudely. “My dear Professor, I thought that old notion was quite exploded in these modern scientific days.”

“I found my beliefs upon my own minute observations,” he said rather frigidly. “I notice certain animals masquerading--to some extent--as human beings, and I draw my own conclusions. If they happen to fit in at all with the conclusions of Pythagoras--or anyone else, for that matter--well and good. If not, I am not much concerned. Surely you notice the animal--and not merely the animal, but definite animals--reproduced in man. There are men whose whole demeanour suggests the monkey. I have met women who in manner, appearance, and even character, were intensely like cats.”

I uttered a slight exclamation, which did not interrupt him.

“Now, I have made a minute study of cats. Of all animals they interest me the most. They have less apparent intensity, less uttered passion, than dogs, but in my opinion more character. Their subtlety is extraordinary, their sensitiveness wonderful. Will you understand me when I say that all dogs are men, all cats women? That remark expresses the difference between them.”

He paused a moment.

“Go on--go on,” I said, leaning forward, with my eyes fixed upon his keen, puckered face.

He seemed pleased with my suddenly-aroused interest..

“Cats are as subtle and as difficult to understand as the most complex woman, and almost as full of intuitions. If they have been well treated, there is often a certain gracious, condescending suavity in their demeanour at first, even towards a total stranger; but if that stranger is ill disposed toward them, they seem instinctively to read his soul, and they are in arms directly. Yet they dissemble their fears in a cold indifference and reserve. They do not take action: they merely abstain from action. They withdraw the soul that has peeped out, as they can withdraw their claws into the pads upon their feet. They do not show fight as a dog might, they do not become aggressive, nor do they whine and put their tails between their legs. They are simply on guard, watchful, mistrustful. Is not all this woman?”

“Possibly,” I answered, with a painful effort to assume indifference.

“A woman intuitively knows who is her friend and who is her enemy--so long, at least, as her heart is not engaged; then she runs wild, I allow. A woman---- But I need not pursue the parallel. Besides, perhaps it is scarcely to the point, for my object is not to bolster up an absurd contention that all women have the souls of cats. No; but I have met women so strangely like cats that their souls have, as I said before souls do, coloured their bodies in actions. They have had the very look of cats in their faces. They have moved like them. Their demeanour has been patently and strongly feline. Now, I see nothing ridiculous in the assumption that such women’s bodies may contain souls--in process of development, of course--that formerly were merely cat souls, but that are now gaining humanity gradually, are working their way upwards in the scale. After all, we are not so much above the animals, and in our lapses we often become merely animals. The soul retrogrades for the moment.”

He paused again and looked at me. I was biting my lips, and my glass of wine was untouched. He took my agitation as a compliment, I suppose, for he smiled and said:

“Are you in process of conversion?”

I half shook my head. Then I said, with an effort: “It is a curious and interesting idea, of course. But there is much to explain. Now, I should like to ask you this: Do you--do you believe that a soul, if it passes on as you think, carries its memory with it, its memory of former loves and--and hates? Say that a cat’s soul goes to a woman’s body, and that the cat has been--has been--well, tortured--possibly killed, by someone--say some man, long ago, would the woman, meeting that man, remember and shrink from him?”

“That is a very interesting and curious problem, and one which I do not pretend to have solved. I can, therefore, only suggest what might be, what seems to me reasonable.

“I do not believe that the woman would remember positively, but I think she might have an intuition about the man. Our intuitions are, perhaps, sometimes only the fragmentary recollections of our souls, of what formerly happened to them when in other bodies. Why, otherwise, should we sometimes conceive an ardent dislike of some stranger--charming to all appearance--of whom we know no evil, whom we have never heard of nor met before? Intuitions, so called, are often only tattered memories. And these intuitions might, I should fancy, be strengthened, given body, robustness, by associations--of place, for example. Cats become intensely attached to localities, to certain spots, a particular house or garden, a particular fireside, apart from the people who may be there. Possibly, if the man and the woman of whom you speak could be brought together in the very place where the torture arid death occurred, the dislike of the woman might deepen into positive hatred. It would, however, be always unreasoning hatred, I think, and even quite unaccountable to herself. Still----”

But here Lord Melchester rose from the table. The conversations broke into fragments. I felt that I was pale to the lips.

We passed into the drawing-room. The ladies were grouped together at one end, near the piano. Margot was among them. She was, as usual, dressed in white, and round the bottom of her gown there was an edging of snow-white fur. As we came in, she moved away from the piano to a sofa at some distance, and sank down upon it. Professor Black, who had entered the room at my side, seized my arm gently.

“Now, that lady,” he whispered in my ear--“I don’t know who she may be, but she is intensely cat-like. I observed it before dinner. Did you notice the way she moved just then--the soft, yielding, easy manner in which she sat down, falling at once, quite naturally, into a charming pose? And her china-blue eyes are----”

“She is my wife, Professor,” I interrupted harshly.

He looked decidedly taken aback.

“I beg your pardon; I had no idea. I did not enter the drawing-room to-night till after you arrived. I believed that lady was one of my fellow-guests in the house. Let me congratulate you. She is very beautiful.”

And then he mingled rather hastily in the group near the piano.

The man is mad, I know--mad as a hatter on one point, like so many clever men. He sees the animal in every person he meets just because his preposterous theory inclines him to do so. Having given in his adherence to it, he sees facts not as they are, but as he wishes them to be; but he shall not carry me with him. The theory is his, not mine. It does not hold water for a moment. I can laugh at it now, but that night I confess it did seize me for the time being. I could scarcely talk; I found myself watching Margot with a terrible intentness, and I found myself agreeing with the Professor to an extent that made me marvel at my own previous blindness.

There was something strangely feline about the girl I had married--the soft, white girl who was becoming terrible to me, dear though she still was and must always be. Her movements had the subtle, instinctive and certain grace of a cat’s. Her cushioned step, which had often struck me before, was like the step of a cat. And those china-blue eyes! A sudden cold seemed to pass over me as I understood why I had recognised them when I first met Margot. They were the eyes of the animal I had tortured, the animal I had killed. Yes, but that proved nothing, absolutely nothing. Many people had the eyes of animals--the soft eyes of dogs, the furtive, cruel eyes of tigers. I had known such people. I had even once had an affair with a girl who was always called the shot partridge, because her eyes were supposed to be like those of a dying bird. I tried to laugh to myself as I remembered this. But I felt cold, and my senses seemed benumbed as by a great horror. I sat like a stone, with my eyes fixed upon Margot, trying painfully to read into her all that the words of Professor Black had suggested to me--trying, but with the wish not to succeed. I was roused by Lady Melchester, who came toward me asking me to do something, I forget now what. I forced myself to be cheerful, to join in the conversation, to seem at my ease; but I felt like one oppressed with nightmare, and I could scarcely withdraw my eyes from the sofa where my wife was sitting. She was talking now to Professor Black, who had just been introduced to her; and I felt a sudden fury in my heart as I thought that he was perhaps dryly, coldly, studying her, little knowing what issues--far-reaching, it might be, in their consequences--hung upon the truth or falsehood of his strange theory. They were talking earnestly, and presently it occurred to me that he might be imbuing Margot with his pernicious doctrines, that he might be giving her a knowledge of her own soul which now she lacked. The idea was insupportable. I broke off abruptly the conversation in which I was taking part, and hurried over to them with an impulse which must have astonished anyone who took note of me. I sat down on a chair, drew it forward almost violently, and thrust myself in between them.

“What are you two talking about?” I said, roughly, with a suspicious glance at Margot.

The Professor looked at me in surprise.

“I was instructing your wife in some of the mysteries of salmon-fishing,” he said. “She tells me you have a salmon-river running through your grounds.”

I laughed uneasily.

“So you are a fisherman as well as a romantic theorist!” I said, rather rudely. “How I wish I were as versatile! Come, Margot, we must be going now. The carriage ought to be here.”

She rose quietly and bade the Professor good-night; but as she glanced up at me, in rising, I fancied I caught a new expression in her eyes. A ray of determination, of set purpose, mingled with the gloomy fire of their despair.

As soon as we were in the carriage I spoke, with a strained effort at ease and the haphazard tone which should mask furtive cross-examination.

“Professor Black is an interesting man,” I said.

“Do you think so?” she answered from her dark corner.

“Surely. His intellect is really alive. Yet, with all his scientific knowledge and his power of eliciting facts and elucidating them, he is but a feather headed man.” I paused, but she made no answer. “Do you not think so?”

“How can I tell?” she replied. “We only talked about fishing. He managed to make that topic a pleasant one.”

Her tone was frank. I felt relieved.

“He is exceedingly clever,” I said, heartily, and we relapsed into silence.

When we reached home, and Margot had removed her cloak, she came up to me and laid her hand on my arm.

So unaccustomed was her touch now that I was startled. She was looking at me with a curious, steady smile--an unwavering smile that chilled instead of warming me.

“Ronald,” she said, “there has been a breach between us. I have been the cause of it. I should like to--to heal it. Do you still love me as you did?”

I did not answer immediately; I could not. Her voice, schooled as it was, seemed somehow at issue with the words she uttered. There was a desperate, hard note in it that accorded with that enigmatic smile of the mouth.

It roused a cold suspicion within me that I was close to a masked battery. I shrank physically from the touch of her hand.

She waited with her eyes upon me. Our faces were lit tremblingly by the flames of the two candles we held.

At last I found a voice.

“Can you doubt it?” I asked.

She drew a step nearer.

“Then let us resume our old relations,” she said.

“Our old relations?”

“Yes.”

I shuddered as if a phantom stole by me. I was seized with horror.

“To-night? It is not possible!”

“Why?” she said, still with that steady smile of the mouth.

“Because--because I don’t know--I---- To-morrow it shall be as of old, Margot--to-morrow. I promise you.”

“Very well. Kiss me, dear.”

I forced myself to touch her lips with mine.

Which mouth was the colder?

Then, with that soft, stealthy step of hers, she vanished towards her room. I heard the door close gently.

I listened. The key was not turned in the lock.

This sudden abandonment by Margot of the fantastic precautions I had almost become accustomed to filled me with a nameless dread.

That night I fastened my door for the first time.

IV.

_Friday Night, November 6th_.

I fastened my door, and when I went to bed lay awake for hours listening. A horror was upon me then which has not left me since for a moment, which may never leave me. I shivered with cold that night, the cold born of sheer physical terror. I knew that I was shut up in the house with a soul bent on unreasoning vengeance, the soul of the animal which I had killed prisoned in the body of the woman I had married. I was sick with fear then. I am sick with fear now.

To-night I am so tired. My eyes are heavy and my head aches. No wonder. I have not slept for three nights. I have not dared to sleep.

This strange revolution in my wife’s conduct, this passionless change--for I felt instinctively that warm humanity had nothing to do with the transformation--took place three nights ago. These three last days Mar-got has been playing a part. With what object?

When I sat down to this gray record of two souls--at once dreary and fantastic as it would seem, perhaps, to many--I desired to reassure myself, to write myself into sweet reason, into peace.

I have tried to accomplish the impossible. I feel that the wildest theory may be the truest, after all--that on the borderland of what seems madness, actuality paces.

Every remembrance of my mind confirms the truth first suggested to me by Professor Black.

I know Margot’s object now.

The soul of the creature that I tortured, that I killed, has passed into the body of the woman whom I love; and that soul, which once slept in its new cage, is awake now, watching, plotting perhaps. Unconsciously to itself, it recognises me. It stares out upon me with eyes in which the dull terror deepens to hate; but it does not understand why it fears--why, in its fear, it hates. Intuition has taken the place of memory. The Change of environment has killed recollection, and has left instinct in its place.

Why did I ever sit down to write? The recalling of facts has set the seal upon my despair.

Instinct only woke in Margot when I brought her to the place the soul had known in the years when it looked out upon the world from the body of an animal.

That first day on the terrace instinct stirred in its sleep, opened its eyes, gazed forth upon me wonderingly, inquiringly.

Margot’s faint remembrance of the terrace walk, of the flower-pots, of the grass borders where the cat had often stretched itself in the sun, her eagerness to see the chamber of death, her stealthy visits to that chamber, her growing uneasiness, deepening to acute apprehension, and finally to a deadly malignity--all lead me irresistibly to one conclusion.

The animal’s soul within her no longer merely shrinks away in fear of me. It has grown sinister. It lies in ambush, full of a cold, a stealthy intention.

That curious, abrupt change in Margot’s demeanour from avoidance to invitation marked the subtle, inward development of feeling, the silent passage from sensation only towards action.

Formerly she feared me. Now I must fear her.

The soul, Crouching in its cage, shows its teeth. It is compassing my destruction.

The woman’s body twitches with desire to avenge the death of the animal’s.

I feel that it is only waiting the moment to spring; and the inherent love of life breeds in me a physical fear of it as of a subtle enemy. For even if the soul is brave, the body dreads to die, and seems at moments to possess a second soul, purely physical, that cries out childishly against pain, against death.

Then, too, there is a cowardice of the imagination that can shake the strongest heart, and this resurrection from the dead, from the murdered, appals my imagination. That what I thought I had long since slain should have companioned me so closely when I knew it not!

I am sick with fear, physical and mental.

Two days ago, when I unlocked my bedroom door in the morning, and saw the autumn sunlight streaming in through the leaded panes of the hall windows, and heard the river dancing merrily down the gully among the trees that will soon be quite bare and naked, I said to myself: “You have been mad. Your mind has been filled with horrible dreams, that have transformed you into a coward and your wife into a demon. Put them away from you.”

I looked across the gully. A clear, cold,-thin light shone upon the distant mountains. The cloud stacks lay piled above the Scawfell range. The sky was a sheet of faded turquoise. I opened the window for a moment. The air was dry and keen. How sweet it was to feel it on my face!

I went down to the breakfast-room. Mar-got was moving about it softly, awaiting me. In her white hands were letters. They dropped upon the table as she stole up to greet me. Her lips were set tightly together, but she lifted them to kiss me.

How close I came to my enemy as our mouths touched! Her lips were colder than the wind.

Now that I was with her, my momentary sensation of acute relief deserted me. The horror that oppressed me returned.

I could not eat--I could only make a pretence of doing so; and my hand trembled so excessively that I could scarcely raise my cup from the table.

She noticed this, and gently asked me if I was ill.

I shook my head.

When breakfast was over, she said in a low, level voice:

“Ronald, have you thought over what I said last night?”

“Last night?” I answered, with an effort.

“Yes, about the coldness between us. I think I have been unwell, unhappy, out of sorts. You know that--that women are more subject to moods than men, moods they cannot always account for even to themselves. I have hurt you lately, I know. I am sorry. I want you to forgive me, to--to”--she paused a moment, and I heard her draw in her breath sharply--“to take me back into your heart again.”

Every word, as she said it, sounded to me like a sinister threat, and the last sentence made my blood literally go cold in my veins.

I met her eyes. She did not withdraw hers; they looked into mine. They were the blue eyes of the cat which I had held upon my knees years ago. I had gazed into them as a boy, and watched the horror and the fear dawn in them with a malignant triumph.

“I have nothing to forgive,” I said in a broken, husky voice.

“You have much,” she answered firmly. “But do not--pray do not bear malice.”

“There is no malice in my heart--now,” I said; and the words seemed like a cowardly plea for mercy to the victim of the past.

She lifted one of her soft white hands to my breast.

“Then it shall all be as it was before? And to-night you will come back to me?”

I hesitated, looking down. But how could I refuse? What excuse could I make for denying the request? Then I repeated mechanically:

“To-night I will come back to you.”

A terrible, slight smile travelled over her face. She turned and left me.

I sat down immediately. I felt too unnerved to remain standing. I was giving way utterly to an imaginative horror that seemed to threaten my reason. In vain I tried to pull myself together. My body was in a cold sweat. All mastery of my nerves seemed gone.

I do not know how long I remained there, but I was aroused by the entrance of the butler. He glanced towards me in some obvious surprise, and this astonishment of a servant acted upon me almost like a scourge. I sprang up hastily.

“Tell the groom to saddle the mare,” I said. “I am going for a ride immediately.”

Air, action, were what I needed to drive this stupor away. I must get away from this house of tears. I must be alone. I must wrestle with myself, regain my courage, kill the coward in me.

I threw myself upon the mare, and rode out at a gallop towards the moors of Eskdale along the lonely country roads.

All day I rode, and all day I thought of that dark house, of that white creature awaiting my return, peering from the windows, perhaps, listening for my horse’s hoofs on the gravel, keeping still the long vigil of vengeance.

My imagination sickened, fainted, as my wearied horse stumbled along the shadowy roads. My terror was too great now to be physical. It was a terror purely of the spirit, and indescribable.

To sleep with that white thing that waited me! To lie in the dark by it! To know that it was there, close to me!

If it killed me, what matter? It was to live and to be near it, with it, that appalled me.

The lights of the house gleamed out through the trees. I heard the sound of the river.

I got off my horse and walked furtively into the hall, looking round me.

Margot glided up to me immediately, and took my whip and hat from me with her soft, velvety white hands. I shivered at her touch.

At dinner her blue eyes watched me.

I could not eat, but I drank more wine than usual.

When I turned to go down to the smoking-room, she said: “Don’t be very long, Ronald.”

I muttered I scarcely know what words in reply. It was close on midnight before I went to bed. When I entered her room, shielding the light of the candle with my hand, she was still awake.

Nestling against the pillows, she stretched herself curiously and smiled up at me.

“I thought you were never coming, dear,” she said.

I knew that I was very pale, but she did not remark it. I got into bed, but left the candle still burning.

Presently she said:

“Why don’t you put the candle out?”

I looked at her furtively. Her face seemed to me carved in stone, it was so rigid, so expressionless. She lay away from me at the extreme edge of the bed, sideways, with her hands toward me.

“Why don’t you?” she repeated, with her blue eyes on me.

“I don’t feel sleepy,” I answered slowly.

“You never will while there is a light in the room,” she said.

“You wish me to put it out?”

“Yes. How odd you are to-night, Ronald! Is anything the matter?”

“No,” I answered; and I blew the light out.

How ghastly the darkness was!

I believed she meant to smother me in my sleep. I knew it. I determined to keep awake.

It was horrible to think that, as we lay there, she could see me all the time as if it were daylight.

The night wore on. She was quite silent and motionless. I lay listening.

It must have been towards morning when I closed my eyes, not because I was sleepy, but because I was so tired of gazing at blackness.

Soon after I had done this there was a stealthy movement in the bed.

“Margot, are you awake?” I instantly cried out sharply.

The movement immediately ceased. There was no reply.