Page:All the Year Round - Series 2 - Volume 1.djvu/140

 to determine its presence by the nicest tests, it was quite clear to me, from being able so readily to perceive the smell, that Mr. Volt had died of an enormous overdose of opium. As he had been a good chemist, it was hardly reasonable to suppose that he could have taken such a dose ignorantly, if in his senses. It remained, therefore, either that Mr. Volt must have committed suicide, sanely, or in a fit of insanity, or that the opium must have been intentionally administered to him by another person. When I reflected upon Mark's anxiety to prove that Mr. Volt was dead, and upon his interest in his death, and when I considered besides how singularly Mark was altered in his ways and modes of thought, as well as in his bodily appearance, for a moment I had suspicions of him. His account, however, was as follows: That, under the influence of the vapour, Mr. Volt had taken by mistake the same quantity of opium confection that he had meant to take of the green paste, while Mark, conscious of the mistake, yet being himself under the influence of "hatchis" at the time, was unable to recover himself soon enough to prevent the error, or to use remedial agents to save his friend's life. At the inquest Mark nevertheless suppressed all mention of the attempted experiment, and on his deposition that the deceased had been in the habit of consuming large quantities of narcotics, a verdict was returned to the effect that Mr. Volt came to his death through taking an overdose of opium in a fit of temporary insanity. The general opinion expressed by the rustic jury on dismissal, was this: "They always know'd old Volt were certain to pison hisself accidentally some day, and now he had been and gone and done it sure enough, and no mistake."

One afternoon, shortly after the funeral, to while away the time while Mark went to visit the same distant patient as before, I thought I would go over the tower and look into some of Mr. Volt's curious lumber. I obtained the key from Mrs. Stedburn, and letting myself in at the great heavy oak door, made my way to the laboratory. Nothing seemed to have been disturbed since Mr. Volt's decease. The place was in its wonted litter. Books, manuscripts, diagrams, instruments, bottles, retorts, crucibles, were lying about as of yore. Taking down a large manuscript tome from one of the shelves, and finding it to consist of some of Mr. Volt's dream-travels in Northern Asia, I blew off the dust, and having banged the covers together to beat out some of the pungent mildew from inside, began reading. I had finished the first chapter, when I heard my name called in a tone of entreaty.

"Tom!"

I looked round, but could see no one. Presently the call was repeated still more plaintively.

"Tom!"

There was no mistake about it, and it was Mark Stedburn's voice.

"Tom, I say!"

The voice seemed to come from the other side of the laboratory. I concluded that Mark was in the grounds calling from outside one of the windows.

"Where are you?" I halloed, going over to a window to look out.

"Here," said the voice, faintly, apparently from within the room. It seemed to come from one of the shelves close by me, but high up. I took the light ladder that belonged to the laboratory, and began to examine these shelves one after another: determined to see into this delusion, for I thought it nothing else. There were, on the shelves, books and bottles and papers—papers and bottles and books—in endless numbers, and all covered with dust. As I ran my eye along them, I observed one very small phial, less dusty than the rest, with a label on it in small characters, apparently written more recently than the labels on the other bottles, for the ink on this one was not discoloured by time as they were. I read thus:

The date was that of Mr. Volt's death. I was about to take the phial into my hands to examine it more closely, when a voice, that appeared to come from the inside of the bottle, said:

"Take me down very gently. Don't shake me, Tom, whatever you do. This is I!" It was Mark Stedburn's voice.

"You?"

"Yes, this is the pure Essence of Mind, which that rascal, old Volt, has distilled out of my body in a volatile spirit. Fool that I was to let him try, but I never believed he could do it. This is I, Tom—in a fluid state!"

I lifted him down carefully and placed him before me on the laboratory table. The bottle contained a thin colourless liquid, which I judged to be very subtle and highly rectified, because its surface was perfectly level, and not concave in the slightest degree—as would be the case with the strongest known spirit. In so confined an area, it would rise slightly at the sides of the glass, from attraction. This did not.

I took out the cork to try how he would smell.

"Don't, Tom, don't; it's so cold," he cried, piteously, "cork me, there's a dear friend, cork me quickly, or I shall evaporate, goodness knows where."

"Mark," I said severely, having complied with his request, "you are an impostor. You are a phantasm of the brain, or of the stomach. You either represent the ill effects of that bit of 'hatchis' I was foolish enough to take two months ago, or you are the ill-digested dinner I took to-day with you and your wife."

"I'm no impostor, Tom," he answered. "I'm an unfortunate reality. I'm persistent and coherent, and independent of your will. And I've been a most unfortunate reality without the ghost of an external idea ever since Volt served me this scurvy trick. You didn't dine with me to-day, Tom. I don't appreciate