“That is not the whole story. In the middle of the night, as I learned
later, the patient, awakening from a long stupor after a week of
delirium, had asked—it was her last utterance—that her bed be moved to
the opposite side of the room. Those in attendance had thought the
request a vagary of her delirium, but had complied. And there the poor
passing soul had exerted its failing will to restore a broken
connection—a golden thread of sentiment between its innocence and a
monstrous baseness owning a blind, brutal allegiance to the Law of Self.
“What reparation could I make? Are there masses that can be said for the
repose of souls that are abroad such nights as this—spirits ‘blown about
by the viewless winds’—coming in the storm and darkness with signs and
portents, hints of memory and presages of doom?
“This is the third visitation. On the first occasion I was too skeptical
to do more than verify by natural methods the character of the incident;
on the second, I responded to the signal after it had been several times
repeated, but without result. To-night’s recurrence completes the ‘fatal
triad’ expounded by Parapelius Necromantius. There is no more to tell.”
When Dampier had finished his story I could think of nothing relevant
that I cared to say, and to question him would have been a hideous
impertinence. I rose and bade him good night in a way to convey to him a
sense of my sympathy, which he silently acknowledged by a pressure of the
hand. That night, alone with his sorrow and remorse, he passed into the
Unknown.
A PSYCHOLOGICAL SHIPWRECK
IN the summer of 1874 I was in Liverpool, whither I had gone on business
for the mercantile house of Bronson & Jarrett, New York. I am William
Jarrett; my partner was Zenas Bronson. The firm failed last year, and
unable to endure the fall from affluence to poverty he died.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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