Books: Recalled to Life
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Grant Allen >> Recalled to Life
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12 Charles Aldarondo and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team.
RECALLED TO LIFE
BY GRANT ALLEN
CONTENTS.
I. UNA CALLINGHAM'S FIRST RECOLLECTION
II. BEGINNING LIFE AGAIN
III. AN UNEXPECTED VISITOR
IV. THE STORY OF THE PHOTOGRAPHS
V. I BECOME A WOMAN
VI. RE-LIVING MY LIFE
VII. THE GRANGE AT WOODBURY
VIII. A VISION OF DEAD YEARS
IX. HATEFUL SUSPICIONS
X. YET ANOTHER PHOTOGRAPH
XI. THE VISION RECURS
XII. THE MOORES OF TORQUAY
XIII. DR. IVOR OF BABBICOMBE
XIV. MY WELCOME TO CANADA
XV. A NEW ACQUAINTANCE
XVI. MY PLANS ALTER
XVII. A STRANGE RECOGNITION
XVIII. MURDER WILL OUT
XIX. THE REAL MURDERER
XX. THE STRANGER FROM THE SEA
XXI. THE PLOT UNRAVELS ITSELF
XXII. MY MEMORY RETURNS
XXIII. THE FATAL SHOT
XXIV. ALL'S WELL THAT ENDS WELL
CHAPTER I.
UNA CALLINGHAM'S FIRST RECOLLECTION
It may sound odd to say so, but the very earliest fact that
impressed itself on my memory was a scene that took place--so I was
told--when I was eighteen years old, in my father's house, The
Grange, at Woodbury.
My babyhood, my childhood, my girlhood, my school-days were all
utterly blotted out by that one strange shock of horror. My past
life became exactly as though it had never been. I forgot my own
name. I forgot my mother-tongue. I forgot everything I had ever done
or known or thought about. Except for the power to walk and stand
and perform simple actions of every-day use, I became a baby in arms
again, with a nurse to take care of me. The doctors told me, later,
I had fallen into what they were pleased to call "a Second State." I
was examined and reported upon as a Psychological Curiosity. But at
the time, I knew nothing of all this. A thunderbolt, as it were,
destroyed at one blow every relic, every trace of my previous
existence; and I began life all over again, with that terrible scene
of blood as my first birthday and practical starting point.
I remember it all even now with horrible distinctness. Each item in
it photographed itself vividly on my mind's eye. I saw it as in a
picture--just as clearly, just as visually. And the effect, now I
look back upon it with a maturer judgment, was precisely like a
photograph in another way too. It was wholly unrelated in time and
space: it stood alone by itself, lighted up by a single spark,
without rational connection before or after it. What led up to it
all, I hadn't the very faintest idea. I only knew the Event itself
took place; and I, like a statue, stood rooted in the midst of it.
And this was the Picture as, for many long months, it presented
itself incessantly to my startled brain, by day and by night, awake
or asleep, in colours more distinct than words can possibly paint
them.
I saw myself standing in a large, square room--a very handsome old
room, filled with bookshelves like a library. On one side stood a
table, and on the table a box. A flash of light rendered the whole
scene visible. But it wasn't light that came in through the window.
It was rather like lightning, so quick it was, and clear, and
short-lived, and terrible. Half-way to the door, I stood and looked
in horror at the sight revealed before my eyes by that sudden flash.
A man lay dead in a little pool of blood that gurgled by short jets
from a wound on his left breast. I didn't even know at the moment
the man was my father; though slowly, afterward, by the concurrent
testimony of others, I learnt to call him so. But his relationship
wasn't part of the Picture to me. There, he was only in my eyes a
man--a man well past middle age, with a long white beard, now
dabbled with the thick blood that kept gurgling so hatefully from
the red spot in his waistcoat. He lay on his back, half-curled round
toward one arm, exactly as he fell. And the revolver he had been
shot with lay on the ground not far from him.
But that wasn't all the Picture. The murderer was there as well as
the victim. Besides the table, and the box, and the wounded man, and
the pistol, I saw another figure behind, getting out of the window.
It was the figure of a man, I should say about twenty-five or
thirty: he had just raised himself to the ledge, and was poising to
leap; for the room, as I afterwards learned, though on the ground
floor, stood raised on a basement above the garden behind. I
couldn't see the man's face, or any part of him, indeed, except his
stooping back, and his feet, and his neck, and his elbows. But what
little I saw was printed indelibly on the very fibre of my nature. I
could have recognised that man anywhere if I saw him in the same
attitude. I could have sworn to him in any court of justice on the
strength of his back alone, so vividly did I picture it.
He was tall and thin, but he stooped like a hunchback.
There were other points worth notice in that strange mental
photograph. The man was well-dressed, and had the bearing of a
gentleman. Looking back upon the scene long after, when I had
learned once more what words and things meant, I could feel
instinctively this was no common burglar, no vulgar murderer.
Whatever might have been the man's object in shooting my father, I
was certain from the very first it was not mere robbery. But at the
time, I'm confident, I never reasoned about his motives or his
actions in any way. I merely took in the scene, as it were,
passively, in a great access of horror, which rendered me incapable
of sense or thought or speech or motion. I saw the table, the box,
the apparatus by its side, the murdered man on the floor, the pistol
lying pointed with its muzzle towards his body, the pool of blood
that soaked deep into the Turkey carpet beneath, the ledge of the
window, the young man's rounded back as he paused and hesitated. And
I also saw, like an instantaneous flash, one hand pushed behind him,
waving me off, I almost thought, with the gesture of one warning.
Why didn't I remember the murderer's face? That puzzled me long
after. I must have seen him before: I must surely have been there
when the crime was committed. I must have known at the moment
everything about it. But the blank that came over my memory, came
over it with the fatal shot. All that went before, was to me as
though it were not. I recollect vaguely, as the first point in my
life, that my eyes were shut hard, and darkness came over me. While
they were so shut, I heard an explosion. Next moment, I believe, I
opened them, and saw this Picture. No sensitive-plate could have
photographed it more instantaneously, as by an electric spark, than
did my retina that evening, as for months after I saw it all. In
another moment, I shut my lids again, and all was over. There was
darkness once more, and I was alone with my Horror.
In years then to come, I puzzled my head much as to the meaning of
the Picture. Gradually, step by step, I worked some of it out, with
the aid of my friends, and of the evidence tendered at the coroner's
inquest. But for the moment I knew nothing of all that. I was a
newborn baby again. Only with this important difference. They say
our minds at birth are like a sheet of white paper, ready to take
whatever impressions may fall upon them. Mine was like a sheet all
covered and obscured by one hateful picture. It was weeks, I fancy,
before I knew or was conscious of anything else but that. The
Picture and a great Horror divided my life between them.
Recollect, I didn't even remember the murdered man was my father. I
didn't recognise the room as one in our own old house at Woodbury. I
didn't know anything at all except what I tell you here. I saw the
corpse, the blood, the box on the table, the wires by the side, the
bottles and baths and plates of an amateur photographer's kit,
without knowing what they all meant. I saw even the books not as
books but as visible points of colour. It had something the effect
on me that it might have upon anyone else to be dropped suddenly on
the stage of a theatre at the very moment when a hideous crime was
being committed, and to believe it real, or rather, to know it by
some vague sense as hateful and actual.
Here my history began. I date from that Picture. My second babyhood
was passed in the shadow of the abiding Horror.
CHAPTER II.
BEGINNING LIFE AGAIN
Wha happened after is far more vague to me. Compared with the
vividness of that one initial Picture, the events of the next few
months have only the blurred indistinctness of all childish
memories. For I was a child once more, in all save stature, and had
to learn to remember things just like other children.
I will try to tell the whole tale over again exactly as it then
struck me.
After the Picture, I told you, I shut my eyes in alarm for a second.
When I opened them once more there was a noise, a very great noise,
and my recollection is that people had burst wildly into the room,
and were lifting the dead body, and bending over it in astonishment,
and speaking loud to me, and staring at me. I believe they broke the
door open, though that's rather inference than memory; I learnt it
afterwards. Soon some of them rushed to the open window and looked
out into the garden. Then, suddenly, a man gave a shout, and leaping
on to the sill, jumped down in pursuit, as I thought, of the
murderer. As time went on, more people flocked in; and some of them
looked at the body and the pool of blood; and some of them turned
round and spoke to me. But what they said or what they meant I
hadn't the slightest idea. The noise of the pistol-shot still rang
loud in my ears: the ineffable Horror still drowned all my senses.
After a while, another man came in, with an air of authority, and
felt my pulse and my brow, and lifted me on to a sofa. But I didn't
even remember there was such a thing as a doctor. I lay there for a
while, quite dazed; and the man, who was kindly-looking and
close-shaven and fatherly, gave me something in a glass: after which
he turned round and examined the body. He looked hard at the
revolver, too, and chalked its place on the ground. Then I saw no
more, for two women lifted me in their arms and took me up to bed;
and with that, the first scene of my childhood seemed to end
entirely.
I lay in bed for a day or two, during which time I was dimly aware
of much commotion going on here and there in the house; and the
doctor came night and morning, and tended me carefully. I suppose I
may call him the doctor now, though at the time I didn't call him
so--I knew him merely as a visible figure. I don't believe I THOUGHT
at all during those earliest days, or gave things names in any known
language. They rather passed before me dreamily in long procession,
like a vague panorama. When people spoke to me, it was like the
sound of a foreign tongue. I attached no more importance to anything
they said than to the cawing of the rooks in the trees by the
rectory.
At the end of five days, the doctor came once more, and watched me a
great deal, and spoke in a low voice with a woman in a white cap and
a clean white apron who waited on me daily. As soon as he was gone,
my nurse, as I learned afterwards to call her,--it's so hard not to
drop into the language of everyday life when one has to describe
things to other people,--my nurse got me up, with much ado and
solemnity, and dressed me in a new black frock, very dismal and
ugly, and put on me a black hat, with a dreary-looking veil; and
took me downstairs, with the aid of a man who wore a suit of blue
clothes and a queer kind of helmet. The man was of the sort I now
call a policeman. These pictures are far less definite in my mind
than the one that begins my second life; but still, in a vague kind
of way, I pretty well remember them.
On the ground floor, nurse made me walk; and I walked out to the
door, where a cab was in waiting, drawn slowly by a pair of horses.
People were looking on, on either side, between the door and the
cab--great crowds of people, peering eagerly forward; and two more
men in blue suits were holding them off by main force from surging
against me and incommoding me. I don't think they wanted to hurt me:
it was rather curiosity than anger I saw in their faces. But I was
afraid, and shrank back. They were eager to see me, however, and
pressed forward with loud cries, so that the men in blue suits had
hard work to prevent them.
I know now there were two reasons why they wanted to see me. I was
the murdered man's daughter, and I was a Psychological Phenomenon.
We drove away, through green lanes, in the cab, nurse and I; and in
spite of the Horror, which surrounded me always, and the Picture,
which recurred every time I shut my eyes to think, I enjoyed that
drive very much, with all the fresh vividness of childish pleasure.
Though I learnt later I was eighteen years old at least, I was in my
inner self just like a baby of ten months, going ta-ta. At the end
of the drive, we drew up sharp at a house, where some more men stood
about, with red bands on their caps, and took boxes from the cab and
put them into a van, while nurse and I got into a different
carriage, drawn quickly by a thing that went puff-puff, puff-puff. I
didn't know it was a railway, and yet in a way I did. I half forgot,
half remembered it. Things that I'd seen in my previous state seemed
to come back to me, in fact, as soon as I saw them; or at least to
be more familiar to me than things I'd never seen before. Especially
afterwards. But while things were remembered, persons, I found
by-and-by, were completely forgotten. Or rather, while I remembered
after a while generalities, such as houses and men, recognising them
in the abstract as a house, or a man, or a horse, or a baby, I
forgot entirely particulars, such as the names of people and the
places I had lived in. Words soon came back to me: names and facts
were lost: I knew the world as a whole, not my own old part in it.
Well, not to make my story too long in these early childish stages,
we went on the train, as it seemed to me, a long way across fields
to Aunt Emma's. I didn't know she was Aunt Emma then for, indeed, I
had never seen her before; but I remember arriving there at her
pretty little cottage, and seeing a sweet old lady--barely sixty, I
should say, but with smooth white hair,--who stood on the steps of
the house and cried like a child, and held out her hands to me, and
hugged me and kissed me. And it was there that I learned my first
word. A great many times over, she spoke about "Una." She said it so
often, I caught vaguely at the sound. And nurse, when she answered
her, said "Una" also. Then, when Aunt Emma called me, she always
said "Una." So it came to me dimly that Una meant ME. But I didn't
exactly recollect it had been my name before, though I learned in
due time afterwards that I'd always been called so. However, just at
first, I picked up the word as a child might pick it up; and when,
some months later, I began to talk easily, I spoke of myself always
in the third person as Una. I can remember with a smile now how I
went one day to Aunt Emma--I, a great girl of eighteen--and held up
my skirt, that I'd muddied in the street, and said to her, with
great gravity:
"Una naughty girl: Una got her frock wet. Aunt Emma going to scold
poor Una for being so naughty!"
Not that I often smiled, in those days; for, in spite of Aunt Emma's
kindness, my second girlhood, like my first, was a very unhappy one.
The Horror and the Picture pursued me too close. It was months and
months before I could get rid for a moment of that persistent
nightmare. And yet I had everything else on earth to make me happy.
Aunt Emma lived in a pretty east-coast town, with high bracken-clad
downs, and breezy common beyond; while in front stretched great
sands, where I loved to race about and to play cricket and tennis.
It was the loveliest town that ever you saw in your life, with a
broken chancel to the grand old church, and a lighthouse on a hill,
with delicious views to seaward. The doctor had sent me there (I
know now) as soon as I was well enough to move, in order to get me
away from the terrible associations of The Grange at Woodbury. As
long as I lived in the midst of scenes which would remind me of poor
father, he said, and of his tragical death, there was no hope of my
recovery. The only chance for me to regain what I had lost in that
moment of shock was complete change of air, of life, of
surroundings. Aunt Emma, for her part, was only too glad to take me
in: and as poor papa had died intestate, Aunt Emma was now, of
course, my legal guardian.
She was my mother's sister, I learned as time went on; and there had
been feud while he lived between her and my father. Why, I couldn't
imagine. She was the sweetest old soul I ever knew, indeed, and what
on earth he could have quarrelled with her about I never could
fathom. She tended me so carefully that as months went by, the
Horror began to decrease and my soul to become calm again. I grew
gradually able to remain in a room alone for a few minutes at a
time, and to sleep at night in a bed by myself, if only there was a
candle, and nurse was in another bed in the same room close by me.
Yet every now and again a fresh shivering fit came on. At such times
I would cover my head with the bedclothes and cower, and see the
Picture even so floating visibly in mid-air like a vision before me.
My second education must have been almost as much of a business as
my first had been, only rather less longsome. I had first to relearn
the English language, which came back to me by degrees, much
quicker, of course, than I had picked it up in my childhood. Then I
had to begin again with reading, writing, and arithmetic--all new
to me in a way, and all old in another. Whatever I learned and
whatever I read seemed novel while I learned it, but familiar the
moment I had thoroughly grasped it. To put it shortly, I could
remember nothing of myself, but I could recall many things, after a
time, as soon as they were told me clearly. The process was rather a
process of reminding than of teaching, properly so called. But it
took some years for me to recall things, even when I was reminded of
them.
I spent four years at Aunt Emma's, growing gradually to my own age
again. At the end of that time I was counted a girl of twenty-two,
much like any other. But I was older than my age; and the shadow of
the Horror pursued me incessantly.
All that time I knew, too, from what I heard said in the house that
my father's murderer had never been caught, and that nobody even
knew who he was, or anything definite about him. The police gave him
up as an uncaught criminal. He was still at large, and might always
be so. I knew this from vague hints and from vague hints alone; for
whenever I tried to ask, I was hushed up at once with an air of
authority.
"Una, dearest," Aunt Emma would say, in her quiet fashion, "you
mustn't talk about that night. I have Dr. Wade's strict orders that
nothing must be said to you about it, and above all nothing that
could in any way excite or arouse you."
So I was fain to keep my peace; for though Aunt Emma was kind, she
ruled me still in all things like a little girl, as I was when I
came to her.
CHAPTER III.
AN UNEXPECTED VISITOR
One morning, after I'd been four whole years at Aunt Emma's, I heard
a ring at the bell, and, looking over the stairs, saw a tall and
handsome man in a semi-military coat, who asked in a most audible
voice for Miss Callingham.
Maria, the housemaid, hesitated a moment.
"Miss Callingham's in, sir," she answered in a somewhat dubious
tone; "but I don't know whether I ought to let you see her or not.
My mistress is out; and I've strict orders that no strangers are to
call on Miss Callingham when her aunt's not here."
And she held the door ajar in her hand undecidedly.
The tall man smiled, and seemed to me to slip a coin quietly into
Maria's palm.
"So much the better," he answered, with unobtrusive persistence; "I
thought Miss Moore was out. That's just why I've come. I'm an officer
from Scotland Yard, and I want to see Miss Callingham--alone--most
particularly."
Maria drew herself up and paused.
My heart stood still within me at this chance of enlightenment. I
guessed what he meant; so I called over the stairs to her, in a
tremor of excitement:
"Show the gentleman into the drawing-room, Maria. I 'll come down to
him at once."
For I was dying to know the explanation of the Picture that haunted
me so persistently; and as nobody at home would ever tell me
anything worth knowing about it, I thought this was as good an
opportunity as I could get for making a beginning towards the
solution of the mystery.
Well, I ran into my own room as quick as quick could be, and set my
front hair straight, and slipped on a hat and jacket (for I was in
my morning dress), and then went down to the drawing-room to see the
Inspector.
He rose as I entered. He was a gentleman, I felt at once. His manner
was as deferential, as kind, and as considerate to my sensitiveness,
as anything it's possible for you to imagine in anyone.
"I'm sorry to have to trouble you, Miss Callingham," he said, with a
very gentle smile; "but I daresay you can understand yourself the
object of my visit. I could have wished to come in a more authorised
way; but I've been in correspondence with Miss Moore for some time
past as to the desirability of reopening the inquiry with regard to
your father's unfortunate death; and I thought the time might now
have arrived when it would be possible to put a few questions to you
personally upon that unhappy subject. Miss Moore objected to my
plan. She thought it would still perhaps be prejudicial to your
health--a point in which Dr. Wade, I must say, entirely agrees with
her. Nevertheless, in the interests of Justice, as the murderer is
still at large, I've ventured to ask you for this interview; because
what I read in the newspapers about the state of your health--."
I interrupted him, astonished.
"What you read in the newspapers about the state of my health!" I
repeated, thunderstruck. "Why, surely they don't put the state of MY
health in the newspapers!"
For I didn't know then I was a Psychological Phenomenon.
The Inspector smiled blandly, and pulling out his pocket-book,
selected a cutting from a pile that apparently all referred to me.
"You're mistaken," he said, briefly. "The newspapers, on the
contrary, have treated your case at great length. See, here's the
latest report. That's clipped from last Wednesday's Telegraph."
I remembered then that a paragraph of just that size had been
carefully cut out of Wednesday's paper before I was allowed by Aunt
Emma to read it. Aunt Emma always glanced over the paper first,
indeed, and often cut out such offending paragraphs. But I never
attached much importance to their absence before, because I thought
it was merely a little fussy result of auntie's good old English
sense of maidenly modesty. I supposed she merely meant to spare my
blushes. I knew girls were often prevented on particular days from
reading the papers.
But now I seized the paragraph he handed me, and read it with deep
interest. It was the very first time I had seen my own name in a
printed newspaper. I didn't know then how often it had figured
there.
The paragraph was headed, "THE WOODBURY MURDER," and it ran
something like this, as well as I can remember it:
"There are still hopes that the miscreant who shot Mr. Vivian
Callingham at The Grange, at Woodbury, some four years since, may be
tracked down and punished at last for his cowardly crime. It will be
fresh in everyone's memory, as one of the most romantic episodes in
that extraordinary tragedy, that at the precise moment of her
father's death, Miss Callingham, who was present in the room during
the attack, and who alone might have been a witness capable of
recognising or describing the wretched assailant, lost her reason on
the spot, owing to the appalling shock to her nervous system, and
remained for some months in an imbecile condition. Gradually, as we
have informed our readers from time to time, Miss Callingham's
intellect has become stronger and stronger; and though she is still
totally unable to remember spontaneously any events that occurred
before her father's death, it is hoped it may be possible, by
describing vividly certain trains of previous incidents, to recall
them in some small degree to her imperfect memory. Dr. Thornton, of
Welbeck Street, who has visited her from time to time on behalf of
the Treasury, in conjunction with Dr. Wade, her own medical
attendant, went down to Barton-on-the-Sea on Monday, and once more
examined Miss Callingham's intellect. Though the Doctor is
judiciously reticent as to the result of his visit, it is generally
believed at Barton that he thinks the young lady sufficiently
recovered to undergo a regular interrogatory; and in spite of the
fact that Dr. Wade is opposed to any such proceeding at present, as
prejudicial to the lady's health, it is not unlikely that the
Treasury may act upon their own medical official's opinion, and send
down an Inspector from Scotland Yard to make inquiries direct on the
subject from Miss Callingham in person."
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