CASE II:  ANCIENT SORCERIES

I

There are, it would appear, certain wholly unremarkable persons, with none of the characteristics that invite adventure, who yet once or twice in the course of their smooth lives undergo an experience so strange that the world catches its breath—­and looks the other way!  And it was cases of this kind, perhaps, more than any other, that fell into the wide-spread net of John Silence, the psychic doctor, and, appealing to his deep humanity, to his patience, and to his great qualities of spiritual sympathy, led often to the revelation of problems of the strangest complexity, and of the profoundest possible human interest.

Matters that seemed almost too curious and fantastic for belief he loved to trace to their hidden sources.  To unravel a tangle in the very soul of things—­and to release a suffering human soul in the process—­was with him a veritable passion.  And the knots he untied were, indeed, after passing strange.

The world, of course, asks for some plausible basis to which it can attach credence—­something it can, at least, pretend to explain.  The adventurous type it can understand:  such people carry about with them an adequate explanation of their exciting lives, and their characters obviously drive them into the circumstances which produce the adventures.  It expects nothing else from them, and is satisfied.  But dull, ordinary folk have no right to out-of-the-way experiences, and the world having been led to expect otherwise, is disappointed with them, not to say shocked.  Its complacent judgment has been rudely disturbed.

“Such a thing happened to that man!” it cries—­“a commonplace person like that!  It is too absurd!  There must be something wrong!”

Yet there could be no question that something did actually happen to little Arthur Vezin, something of the curious nature he described to Dr. Silence.  Outwardly or inwardly, it happened beyond a doubt, and in spite of the jeers of his few friends who heard the tale, and observed wisely that “such a thing might perhaps have come to Iszard, that crack-brained Iszard, or to that odd fish Minski, but it could never have happened to commonplace little Vezin, who was fore-ordained to live and die according to scale.”

But, whatever his method of death was, Vezin certainly did not “live according to scale” so far as this particular event in his otherwise uneventful life was concerned; and to hear him recount it, and watch his pale delicate features change, and hear his voice grow softer and more hushed as he proceeded, was to know the conviction that his halting words perhaps failed sometimes to convey.  He lived the thing over again each time he told it.  His whole personality became muffled in the recital.  It subdued him more than ever, so that the tale became a lengthy apology for an experience that he deprecated.