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The Eidolons Of Brooks Alford
by
“Good Heavens, Mrs. Yarrow!” he said, in a sort of whispered shout, while he mechanically closed the door behind him as if to keep the fact to himself. “What in the world are you doing here?”
Then she was not there. Nothing was there; not even a chair beside the window.
Alford dropped weakly into the only chair in the room, which stood next the door by the head of his bed, and abandoned himself a helpless prey to the logic of the events.
It was at this point, which I have been able to give in Wanhope’s exact words, that, in the ensuing pause, Rulledge asked, as if he thought some detail might be denied him: “And what was the logic of the events?”
Minver gave a fleering laugh. “Don’t be premature, Rulledge. If you have the logic now, you will spoil everything. You can’t have the moral until you’ve had the whole story. Go on, Wanhope. You’re so much more interesting than usual that I won’t ask how you got hold of all these compromising minutiae.”
“Of course,” Wanhope returned, “they’re not for the general ear. I go rather further, for the sake of the curious fact, than I should be warranted in doing if I did not know my audience so well.”
We joined in a murmur of gratification, and he went on to say that Alford’s first coherent thought was that he was dreaming one of those unwarranted dreams in which we make our acquaintance privy to all sorts of strange incidents. Then he knew that he was not dreaming, and that his eye had merely externated a mental vision, as in the case of the cannon-shot splash of which he had seen the phantom as soon as it was mentioned. He remembered afterwards asking himself in a sort of terror how far it was going to go with him; how far his thought was going to report itself objectively hereafter, and what were the reasonable implications of his abnormal experiences. He did not know just how long he sat by his bedside trying to think, only to have his conclusions whir away like a flock of startled birds when he approached them. He went to bed because he was exhausted rather than because he was sleepy, but he could not recall a moment of wakefulness after his head touched the pillow.
He woke surprisingly refreshed, but at the belated breakfast where he found Mrs. Yarrow still lingering he thought her looking not well. She confessed, listlessly, that she had not rested well. She was not sure, she said, whether the sea air agreed with her; she might try the mountains a little later. She was not inclined to talk, and that day he scarcely spoke with her except in commonplaces at the table. They had no return to the little mystery they had mocked together the day before.
More days passed, and Alford had no recurrence of his visions. His acquaintance with Mrs. Yarrow made no further advance; there was no one else in the hotel who interested him, and he bored himself. At the same time his recovery seemed retarded; he lost tone, and after a fortnight he ran up to talk himself over with his doctor in Boston. He rather thought he would mention his eidolons, and ask if they were at all related to the condition of his nerves. It was a keen disappointment, but it ought not to have been a surprise, for him to find that his doctor was off on his summer vacation. The caretaker who opened the door to Alford named a young physician in the same block of Marlborough Street who had his doctor’s practice for the summer, but Alford had not the heart to go to this alternate.
He started down to his hotel on a late afternoon train that would bring him to the station after dusk, and before he reached it the lamps had been lighted in his car. Alford sat in a sparsely peopled smoker, where he had found a place away from the crowd in the other coaches, and looked out of the window into the reflected interior of his car, which now and then thinned away and let him see the weeds and gravel of the railroad banks, with the bushes that topped them and the woods that backed them. The train at one point stopped rather suddenly and then went on, for no reason that he ever cared to inquire; but as it slowly moved forward again he was reminded of something he had seen one night in going to New York just before the train drew into Springfield. It had then made such another apparently reasonless stop; but before it resumed its course Alford saw from his window a group of trainmen, and his own Pullman conductor with his lantern on his arm, bending over the figure of a man defined in his dark clothing against the snow of the bank where he lay propped. His face was waxen white, and Alford noted how particularly black the mustache looked traversing the pallid visage. He never knew whether the man was killed or merely stunned; you learn nothing with certainty of such things on trains; but now, as he thought of the incident, its eidolon showed itself outside of his mind, and followed him in every detail, even to a snowy stretch of the embankment, until the increasing speed of the train seemed to sweep it back out of sight.