"We are just going to begin it," she replied. "We are talking about the sermon of last Sunday."
"Oh," rejoined the rector.
He turned to Malling.
"Did you come to hear me preach again?"
There was a note as of slight rea.s.surance in his voice.
"Mr. Chichester"s sermon," said Lady Sophia.
"Oh, I see," said the rector. He glanced hastily from one to the other of the three people in the room, like a man searching for sympathy or help.
"What were you saying about our friend Chichester"s sermon?" he asked, with a forced air of interest.
Lady Sophia distributed cups for tea.
"I was speaking of that part of it which dealt with the man who followed his double," said Malling.
"Ah?" said the rector.
He was holding his tea-cup. His hand trembled slightly at this moment, and the china rattled. He set the cup down on the small table before him.
"You said," observed Chichester--toward whom Lady Sophia immediately turned, with an almost rapt air--"that it suggested some curious speculations to your mind. I should very much like to know what they were."
"One was this. Suppose the man in the garden, who looked in upon his double, had not fled away. Suppose he had had the courage to remain, and, in hiding--for the sake of argument we may a.s.sume the situation to be possible--"
"Ah, indeed! And why not?" interrupted Chichester.
His voice, profoundly melancholy, fell like a weight upon those who heard him. And again Malling thought of him almost as some one set apart from his fellows by some mysterious knowledge, some heavy burthen of truth.
"--and in hiding had watched the life of his double. I sat up speculating what effect such an observation, terrible no doubt and grotesque, would be likely to have on the soul of the watching man. But there was another speculation with which I entertained my mind that night."
"Let us have it," said Chichester, leaning forward, and, with the gesture characteristic of him, dropping his hands down between his knees. "Let us have it."
"Suppose the man to remain and, in hiding, to watch the life of his double, what effect would such an observation be likely to have upon the double?"
Malling paused. The rector, with an almost violent movement of his big hand and arm, took his cup from the table and drank his tea.
"It didn"t occur to you, I suppose, when composing your sermon to follow that train of thought?" said Malling to Chichester.
"No," replied the curate, slowly, and like one thinking profoundly. "I was too engrossed with the feelings of the man. But, then, you thought of the double as a living man, with all the sensations of a man?"
"That was your fault," said Malling.
"His fault!" said Lady Sophia, with a sort of latent sharpness, and laying an emphasis on the second word.
"Certainly; for making the narrative so vital and human."
He addressed himself again to the curate.
"Did you not give to the double the attributes of a man? Did you not make his wife come to bid him good night, bend down to kiss him, waft him a characteristic farewell?"
"It is true. I did," said Chichester, still speaking like a man in deep thought.
"That was the most terrible part of all," said Lady Sophia. In her voice there was an accent almost of horror. "It sickened me to the soul,"
she continued--"the idea of a woman bidding a tender good night to an apparition."
"I took it as a man," said Malling.
They had all three, strangely, left the rector out of this discussion, and he seemed willing that it should be so. He now sat back in his chair listening to all that was being said, somewhat as he had listened to the sermon of Chichester, in a sort of ghastly silence.
"How could a man"s double be a man?" said Lady Sophia.
"We are in the region of a.s.sumption and of speculation," returned Malling, quietly, "a not uninteresting region either, I think. The other night for a whole hour, having a.s.sumed the double man, I speculated on his existence, spied upon by his other self. And you never did that?"
He looked at Chichester.
"When I was making my sermon I was engrossed by the thought of the watching man."
Malling"s idea had evidently laid a grip upon Chichester"s mind.
"Tell me what the double"s existence would be, according to you," he said. "Tell me."
"You imagined the lesson learnt by the man so terrible that he fled away into the night."
"Yes."
"Had he been strong enough to stay--"
"Strong enough!" interposed Chichester. "Better say, had he been obliged to stay."
"Very well. Given that compulsion, in my imagination the double must have learnt a lesson, too. If we can learn by contemplation, can we not, must we not, learn by being contemplated? Life is permeated by reciprocity. I can imagine another sermon growing out of yours of last Sunday."
"Yes, you are right--you are right," said Chichester.
"The double, then, in my imagination, would gradually become uneasy under this secret observation. You described him as, his wife gone, sitting down comfortably to write some account of the hidden doings of his life, as, the writing finished, the diary committed to the drawer and safely locked away, rising up to go to rest with a smile of self-satisfaction. It seemed to me that, given my circ.u.mstance of the persistent observation, a few nights later matters would have been very different within that room. The hypocrite is happy, if he is happy at all, when he is convinced that his hypocrisy is successful. Take away that certainty, and he would be invaded by anxiety. Set any one to watch him closely, he would certainly suffer, if he knew it."
"If he knew it! That is the point," said Chichester. "You put the man watching the double in hiding."
"There are influences not yet fully understood which can traverse s.p.a.ce, which can touch not as a hand touches, but as unmistakably. I imagined the soul of the double touched in this way, the waters troubled."
"Troubled! Troubled!"
It was Mr. Harding who had spoken, almost lamentably. His powerfully shaped head now drooped forward on his breast.
"I imagined," continued Malling, "a sort of gradual disintegration beginning, and proceeding, in the double--a disintegration of the soul, if such a thing can be conceived of."
His piercing eyes went from Chichester to Harding.