And this healing influence,
distilled from the dark figure at his side, satisfied his first
imperative need, so that he almost forgot to realise how strange and
opportune it was that the man should be there at all. It somehow never occurred to him to ask his name, or to feel any undue
wonder that one passing tourist should take so much trouble on behalf
of another. He just walked by his side, listening to his quiet words,
and allowing himself to enjoy the very wonderful experience after his
recent ordeal, of being helped, strengthened, blessed. Only once,
remembering vaguely something of his reading of years ago, he turned to
the man beside him, after some more than usually remarkable words, and
heard himself, almost involuntarily it seemed, putting the question:
“Then are you a Rosicrucian, sir, perhaps?” But the stranger had
ignored the words, or possibly not heard them, for he continued with
his talk as though unconscious of any interruption, and Harris became
aware that another somewhat unusual picture had taken possession of his
mind, as they walked there side by side through the cool reaches of the
forest, and that he had found his imagination suddenly charged with the
childhood memory of Jacob wrestling with an angel,--wrestling all night
with a being of superior quality whose strength eventually became his
own. “It was your abrupt conversation with the priest at supper that first
put me upon the track of this remarkable occurrence,” he heard the
man’s quiet voice beside him in the darkness, “and it was from him
I learned after you left the story of the devil-worship that became
secretly established in the heart of this simple and devout little
community.”

“Devil-worship! Here----!” Harris stammered, aghast. “Yes--here;--conducted secretly for years by a group of Brothers before
unexplained disappearances in the neighbourhood led to its discovery. For where could they have found a safer place in the whole wide world
for their ghastly traffic and perverted powers than here, in the very
precincts--under cover of the very shadow of saintliness and holy
living?”

“Awful, awful!” whispered the silk merchant, “and when I tell you the
words they used to me----”

“I know it all,” the stranger said quietly. “I saw and heard
everything. My plan first was to wait till the end and then to take
steps for their destruction, but in the interest of your personal
safety,”--he spoke with the utmost gravity and conviction,--“in the
interest of the safety of your soul, I made my presence known when I
did, and before the conclusion had been reached----”

“My safety! The danger, then, was real. They were alive and----” Words
failed him. He stopped in the road and turned towards his companion,
the shining of whose eyes he could just make out in the gloom. “It was a concourse of the shells of violent men, spiritually-developed
but evil men, seeking after death--the death of the body--to prolong
their vile and unnatural existence. And had they accomplished their
object you, in turn, at the death of your body, would have passed into
their power and helped to swell their dreadful purposes.”

Harris made no reply. He was trying hard to concentrate his mind upon
the sweet and common things of life. He even thought of silk and St.
Paul’s Churchyard and the faces of his partners in business. “For you came all prepared to be caught,” he heard the other’s
voice like some one talking to him from a distance; “your deeply
introspective mood had already reconstructed the past so vividly, so
intensely, that you were _en rapport_ at once with any forces of those
days that chanced still to be lingering. And they swept you up all
unresistingly.”

Harris tightened his hold upon the stranger’s arm as he heard. At the
moment he had room for one emotion only. It did not seem to him odd
that this stranger should have such intimate knowledge of his mind. “It is, alas, chiefly the evil emotions that are able to leave their
photographs upon surrounding scenes and objects,” the other added, “and
who ever heard of a place haunted by a noble deed, or of beautiful and
lovely ghosts revisiting the glimpses of the moon? It is unfortunate. But the wicked passions of men’s hearts alone seem strong enough to
leave pictures that persist; the good are ever too lukewarm.”

The stranger sighed as he spoke. But Harris, exhausted and shaken as
he was to the very core, paced by his side, only half listening. He
moved as in a dream still. It was very wonderful to him, this walk
home under the stars in the early hours of the October morning, the
peaceful forest all about them, mist rising here and there over the
small clearings, and the sound of water from a hundred little invisible
streams filling in the pauses of the talk. In after life he always
looked back to it as something magical and impossible, something that
had seemed too beautiful, too curiously beautiful, to have been quite
true. And, though at the time he heard and understood but a quarter of
what the stranger said, it came back to him afterwards, staying with
him till the end of his days, and always with a curious, haunting sense
of unreality, as though he had enjoyed a wonderful dream of which he
could recall only faint and exquisite portions. But the horror of the earlier experience was effectually dispelled; and
when they reached the railway inn, somewhere about three o’clock in
the morning, Harris shook the stranger’s hand gratefully, effusively,
meeting the look of those rather wonderful eyes with a full heart, and
went up to his room, thinking in a hazy, dream-like way of the words
with which the stranger had brought their conversation to an end as
they left the confines of the forest--

“And if thought and emotion can persist in this way so long after
the brain that sent them forth has crumbled into dust, how vitally
important it must be to control their very birth in the heart, and
guard them with the keenest possible restraint.”

But Harris, the silk merchant, slept better than might have been
expected, and with a soundness that carried him half-way through the
day. And when he came downstairs and learned that the stranger had
already taken his departure, he realised with keen regret that he had
never once thought of asking his name. “Yes, he signed in the visitors’ book,” said the girl in reply to his
question. And he turned over the blotted pages and found there, the last entry,
in a very delicate and individual handwriting--

“_John Silence_, London.”




CASE V

THE CAMP OF THE DOG


I

Islands of all shapes and sizes troop northward from Stockholm by the
hundred, and the little steamer that threads their intricate mazes in
summer leaves the traveller in a somewhat bewildered state as regards
the points of the compass when it reaches the end of its journey at
Waxholm.