CHAPTER VIII.
A VISION OF DEAD YEARS
The interview with Dr. Marten left me very much disquieted. But itwasn't the only disquieting thing that occurred at Woodbury. BeforeI left the place I happened to go one day into Jane's own littlesitting-room. Jane was anxious I should see it--she wanted me toknow all her house, she said, for the sake of old times: and for thesake of those old times that I couldn't remember, but when I knewshe'd been kind to me, I went in and looked at it.
There was nothing very peculiar about Jane's little sitting-room:just the ordinary English landlady's parlour. You know thetype:--square table in the middle; bright blue vases on themantelpiece; chromo-lithograph from the Illustrated London News onthe wall; rickety whatnot with glass-shaded wax-flowers in therecess by the window. But over in one corner I chanced to observe aframed photograph of early execution, which hung faded and dimthere. Perhaps it was because my father was such a scientificamateur; but photography, I found out in time, struck the key-noteof my history in every chapter. I didn't know why, but thisparticular picture attracted me strangely. It came from The Grange,Jane told me: she'd hunted it out in the attic over the frontbedroom after the house was shut up. It belonged to a lot of myfather's early attempts that were locked in a box there. "He'dalways been trying experiments and things," she said, "withphotography, poor gentleman."
Faded and dim as it was, the picture riveted my eyes at once by someunknown power of attraction. I gazed at it long and earnestly. Itrepresented a house of colonial aspect, square, wood-built, andverandah-girt, standing alone among strange trees whose very namesand aspects were then unfamiliar to me, but which I nowadays know tobe Australian eucalyptuses. On the steps of the verandah sat a ladyin deep mourning. A child played by her side, and a collie dog laycurled up still and sleepy in the foreground. The child, indeed,stirred no chord of any sort in my troubled brain; but my heart cameup into my mouth so at sight of the lady, that I said to myself allat once in my awe, "That must surely be my mother!"
The longer I looked at it, the more was I convinced I must havejudged aright. Not indeed that in any true sense I could say Iremembered her face or figure: I was so young when she died,according to everybody's account, that even if I'd remained in myFirst State I could hardly have retained any vivid recollection ofher. But both lady and house brought up in me once more to somevague degree that strange consciousness of familiarity I had noticedat The Grange: and what was odder still, the sense of wont seemedeven more marked in the Australian cottage than in the case of thehouse which all probability would have inclined one beforehand tothink I must have remembered better. If this was indeed my earliesthome, then I seemed to recollect it far more readily than my laterone.
I turned trembling to Jane, hardly daring to frame the question thatrose first to my lips.
"Is that--my mother?" I faltered out slowly.
But there Jane couldn't help me. She'd never seen the lady, shesaid.
"When first I come to The Grange, miss, you see, your mother'd beenburied a year; there was only you and Mr. Callingham in family. AndI never saw that photograph, neither, till I picked it out of thebox locked up in the attic. The little girl might be you, likeenough, when you look at it sideways; and yet again it mightn't. Butthe lady I don't know. I never saw your mother."
So I was fain to content myself with pure conjecture.
All day long, however, the new picture haunted me almost aspersistently as the old one.
That night I went to sleep fast, and slept for some hours heavily. Iwoke with a start. I had been dreaming very hard. And my dream waspeculiarly clear and lifelike. Never since the first night of my newlife--the night of the murder--had I dreamed such a dream, or seendead objects so vividly. It came out in clear colours, like theterrible Picture that had haunted me so long. And it affected mestrangely. It was a scene, rather than a dream--a scene, as at thetheatre; but a scene in which I realised and recognised everything.
I stood on the steps of a house--a white wooden house, with agreen-painted verandah--the very house I had seen that afternoon inthe faded photograph in Jane's little sitting-room. But I didn'tthink of it at first as the house in the old picture: I thought ofit as home--our own place--the cottage. The steps seemed to me veryhigh, as in childish recollection. A lady walked about on theverandah and called to me: a lady in a white gown, like the lady inthe photograph, only younger and prettier, and dressed much moredaintily. But I didn't think of her as that either: I called hermamma to myself: I looked up into her face, oh, ever so much aboveme: I must have been very small indeed when that picture firstoccurred to me. There was a gentleman, too, in a white linen coat,who pinched my mamma's ear, and talked softly and musically. But Ididn't think of him quite so: I knew he was my papa: I played abouthis knees, a little scampering child, and looked up in his face, andteased him and laughed at him. My papa looked down at me, and calledme a little kitten, and rolled me over on my back, and fondled meand laughed with me. There were trees growing all about, big treeswith long grey leaves: the same sort of trees as the ones in thephotograph. But I didn't remember that at first: in my dream, and inthe first few minutes of my waking thought, I knew them at once asthe big blue-gum-trees.
I awoke in the midst of it: and the picture persisted.
Then, with a sudden burst of intuition, the truth flashed upon meall at once. My dream was no mere dream, but a revelation in mysleep. It was my intellect working unconsciously and spontaneouslyin an automatic condition. For the very first time in my life, sincethe night of the murder, I had really REMEMBERED something thatoccurred before it.
This was a scene of my First State. In all probability it was myearliest true childish recollection.
I sat up in bed, appalled. I dared not call aloud or ring for Janeto come to me. But if I'd seen a ghost, it could hardly haveaffected me more profoundly than this ghost of my own dead life thusbrought suddenly back to me. Gazing away across some illimitablevista of dim years, I remembered this one scene as something thatonce occurred, long ago, to my very self, in my own experience. Thencame a vast gulf, an unbridged abyss: and after that, with avividness as of yesterday, the murder.
I held my ears and crouched low, sitting up in my bed in the dark.But the dream seemed to go on still: it remained with me distinctly.
The more I thought it over, the more certain it appeared as part ofmy own experience. Putting two and two together, I made sure in myown mind this was a genuine recollection of my life in Australia. Iwas born there, I knew: that I had learned from everybody. But Icould distinctly remember having LIVED there now. It came back to meas memory. The dream had reinstated it.
And it was the sight of the photograph that had produced the dream.This was curious, very. A weird idea came across me. Had I begun, inall past efforts to remember, at the wrong end? Instead of trying torecollect the circumstances that immediately preceded the murder,ought I to have set out by trying to reinstate my First Life,chapter by chapter and verse by verse, from childhood upward? OughtI to start by recalling as far as possible my very earliestrecollections in my previous existence, and then gradually work upthrough all my subsequent history to the date of the murder?
The more I thought of it, the more convinced was I that that was theright procedure.
It was certainly significant that this vague childish recollectionof something which might have happened when I was just about twoyears old should be the very first thing to recur to my my memory.Yet so appalled and alarmed was I by the weirdness of this suddenapparition, looming up, as it were, all by itself in the depths ofmy consciousness, that I hardly dared bring myself to think oftrying to recall any other scenes of that dead and past existence.The picture rose like an exhalation, hanging unrelated in mid-air, amere mental mirage: and it terrified me so much, that I shrankunutterably from the effort of calling up another of like sort tofollow it.