Page:The Fate of Fenella (1892).djvu/98

 CHAPTER VIII.

Out, out, damned spot!—Shakspere.

It was during these hours that had "dropped one by one into the gulf of time" that the miserable count had been done to death by as fierce a murderer as had ever mutilated Nature's handiwork, albeit unconscious of his sanguinary deed. While mind and body had, so far as Lord Francis knew, been absorbed in sleep, both had been cruelly awake under a strange mesmeric or electro-biologic influence.

The wrong by which his soul was vexed had carried him out of himself, and brought him under the control of what unsophisticated people call sleep-walking, with suicidal or murderous impulse. Scientists have found in this hypnological condition new examples of unconscious evolution of the mind; but it is not our business to describe or investigate the various discoveries which, in the direction of hypnotic trance or mesmeric constraint, have of late occupied public attention; we have merely to record the facts that in this present history are stranger than fiction. 83