Page:Episodes-before-thirty.djvu/43

Rh this was that curious deep sense of familiarity with these Eastern teachings, as with something I understood and in which I felt at home....

Cautiously, I put indirect questions to my father, who at once--the clumsy questions betraying me--detected Satan's subtle handiwork. He was grave and troubled. With affectionate solicitude he told me, finally, a story of naïve horror, intended to point the warning. A young man, who suffered from repeated epileptic fits, had tried every doctor and specialist in vain, when, as a last resort, he followed some friend's counsel of despair, and consulted a medium. The medium, having conferred with his familiar, handed the patient a little locket which he was to wear day and night about his neck, but never on any account to open. The spell that would save him from a repetition of his fits lay inside, but he must resist to the death the curiosity to read it. To the subsequent delight and amazement of everybody, the fits abruptly ceased; the man was cured; until one day, after years of obedience, curiosity overcame him; he opened the brief inscription, and fell down in a fit--dead. The wording, minutely written in red ink, ran as follows: "Let him alone till he drop into Hell!"

The warning, above all the story, acted as a stimulus instead of the reverse. Yet another strange door was set ajar; my eyes, big with wonder and questions, peered through. "Earth's Earliest Ages," by G. H. Pember, an evangelical, but an imaginative evangelical, was placed in my hands, accompanied by further solemn warnings. Pember, a writer of the prophetic school, had style, imagination, a sense of the marvellous, a touch of genuine drama too; he used suggestion admirably, his English was good, he had proportion, he knew where to stop. As a novelist of fantastic kind--an evangelical Wells, a "converted" Dunsany--he might have become a best-*seller. He had, moreover, a theme of high imaginative possibilities, based upon a sentence in Genesis (vi. 2)--"The Sons of God saw the Daughters of men that they were fair ... and took to themselves wives from among Rh