But Strickland did not answer. He caught hold
of the back of a chair, and, without warning, went
into an amazing fit of hysterics. It is terrible
to see a strong man overtaken with hysteria. Then
it struck me that we had fought for Fleete’s
soul with the Silver Man in that room, and had disgraced
ourselves as Englishmen for ever, and I laughed and
gasped and gurgled just as shamefully as Strickland,
while Fleete thought that we had both gone mad.
We never told him what we had done.
Some years later, when Strickland had married and
was a church-going member of society for his wife’s
sake, we reviewed the incident dispassionately, and
Strickland suggested that I should put it before the
public.
I cannot myself see that this step is likely to clear
up the mystery; because, in the first place, no one
will believe a rather unpleasant story, and, in the
second, it is well known to every right-minded man
that the gods of the heathen are stone and brass, and
any attempt to deal with them otherwise is justly
condemned.
The doors were wide, the story saith,
Out of the night came the patient wraith,
He might not speak, and he could not stir
A hair of the Baron’s minniver—–
Speechless and strengthless, a shadow thin,
He roved the castle to seek his kin.
And oh,’twas a piteous thing to see
The dumb ghost follow his enemy!
The
Baron.
Imray achieved the impossible. Without warning,
for no conceivable motive, in his youth, at the threshold
of his career he chose to disappear from the world—–which
is to say, the little Indian station where he lived.
Upon a day he was alive, well, happy, and in great
evidence among the billiard-tables at his Club.
Upon a morning, he was not, and no manner of search
could make sure where he might be. He had stepped
out of his place; he had not appeared at his office
at the proper time, and his dogcart was not upon the
public roads. For these reasons, and because he
was hampering, in a microscopical degree, the administration
of the Indian Empire, that Empire paused for one microscopical
moment to make inquiry into the fate of Imray.
Ponds were dragged, wells were plumbed, telegrams
were despatched down the lines of railways and to the
nearest seaport town-twelve hundred miles away; but
Imray was not at the end of the drag-ropes nor the
telegraph wires. He was gone, and his place knew
him no more.
Then the work of the great Indian Empire swept forward,
because it could not be delayed, and Imray from being
a man became a mystery—such a thing as
men talk over at their tables in the Club for a month,
and then forget utterly. His guns, horses, and
carts were sold to the highest bidder. His superior
officer wrote an altogether absurd letter to his mother,
saying that Imray had unaccountably disappeared, and
his bungalow stood empty.
