LIPPINCOTT'S

MONTHLY MAGAZINE.

261.

SEPTEMBER, 1889.

SOLARION.

ALI

I.

LL day there had been a warm rain, with fog, and sometimes low growls of thunder. But toward evening it cleared off, and you saw blue pools of sky in the west, with flat strips of gold cloud, calm and dreamy as if they were beaches of the Fortunate Isles.

A fresh wind sprang up, too, with woody perfumes on its unseen wings. As this delightful breeze blew in the face of Hugh Brookstayne, he smiled to himself for pure refreshment, and that sense of spiritual expansion which comes to a scholar who has been pent among books throughout a dull and rainy day, and finds that the weather, after all, is not the sluggard and churl he has grown to think it.

.

This nook which he had chanced on among the mighty Swiss Alps just suited him. Veils of vapor were hurrying away from noble green mountains on every side of him, as he trod the pale smooth road fringed with splendid pines. Some of the great peaks were not very far off, though you did not get a view of any snow-clad summit unless you made a certain little détour for the purpose. Hugh had chosen this especial spot because it had seemed to him the least sublime in a country of sublimities and exaltations. His pension was quiet, and not badly kept for one of so meagre a size. He was not at all a hater of his fellow-Americans, and yet it pleased him to have found lodgement where he met only a few stout, commonplace Teutons, with a light sprinkling of bourgeois French. By paying a trifle more than the regulation eight francs a day he had secured a commodious room, whose casements gave upon a sheer cliff over which drooped the white airy foam-scarf of an enchanting cascade.

All in all, he was highly pleased with his summer quarters. When he needed exercise, diversion, and change of scene, he could start off at a swinging pace for Lucerne and note the glorious panoramic

297

changes on either hand until at last he reached that happy vale which even throngs of the most prosaic tourists cannot make less lovely than it is. More than once he had smoked a cigarette and sipped beer on the piazza of the huge Schweitzerhoff, and told himself how fascinating was this gem of all Alpine towns, lying beside its peerless lake. He had strolled under the low interlaced chestnut boughs in the walk that fronts the great hotels, and had watched Pilatus, Titlis, and Scheideck, looming in their variant grandeurs of contour across the blue-green waters, or that steep, dark flank of the Rigi whose habitations always look to the gazer below as if toppling over the precipice near which they are so dizzily built. He had traversed more than once the roofed bridge across the fretful Reuss, with its faded mediæval pictures, or had sat and thrown crumbs of cake to the swans in the grottoed and fountained basin below Thorwaldsen's noble-sculptured Lion. This immortal carving, as it gleamed from the solid rock-wall of whose dumb blank it made an almost sentient part, would pierce him with suggestion. The whole place, however small might be its limit, struck him as no less lordly than monastic and consecrated. 'Never,' he would tell himself, was so superb a tomb raised to the illustrious dead. Art has here asked herself what she shall do that will be grandly commemorative of those loyal Swiss soldiers who died in defence of their king, and Nature has answered the question by saying to Art, "I will mate my powers with yours!" Together they have made this unique monument, overwhispered by these towering elegiac firs!'

But this afternoon Brookstayne did not go as far as Lucerne. He paused at the door-way of a small inn which he would now and then visit during his briefer strolls. The little room beyond was vacant, except for one man, seated off beside a rather remote window; the man's back was alone visible; he did not turn or move in any way at the sound made by Brookstayne's feet on the sanded floor. Soon a lank waiter came shambling in, to take the new guest's order. A sallow smile lit his fat blond face the moment he recognized the new-comer.

"Ach, mein Herr; 'habe die Ehre," he began, with his most cordial gutturals. "How can I serve you this evening?"

"By making to-morrow finer than to-day has been, my good Hans," replied Brookstayne, lazily seating himself.

Hans grinned. He thought this big-framed American gentleman, with the kindly hazel eyes and the short, dense auburn beard, a most winsome and gracious person. After Brookstayne had got his mug of beer and lighted his brier-wood pipe, he fell into a revery which the dreaminess of the hour no doubt induced. Outside, those golden glamours had not yet faded; they seemed to burn with even keener vividness as he watched them from the window at his elbow. But just beneath, glimpsed between monstrous buttresses and stanchions of mountain, was a bit of liquid, living emerald,-the divine lake itself! Brookstayne leaned forth upon the sill, breathing the moist, scented midsummer air. That radiant spot of water burned for him like a star of hope.

He was excessively ambitious. Now in his twenty-eighth year, he

had already achieved note if not plain fame as the author of two strikingly fresh and acute scientific works. During the winter he held a somewhat subordinate though responsible position in a Massachusetts college. He had sailed for Europe in the previous spring with not a few sharp misgivings about the size of his letter of credit and a great desire to talk with three or four eminent scientists in Paris and Berlin. He had accomplished the latter object, and had indeed done considerably more, since words of the most stimulating praise from these highpriests of knowledge now dwelt with him as vital souvenirs of his interviews. The chief study of his life related to questions of cerebral function, capacity, structure, and degeneration. It had long ago occurred to him that if we benighted mortals could learn really to grasp and define the meaning and the working of our own brains, we should reach grades of elevation hardly more than imagined to-day; for besides being a scientist Brookstayne was a philosopher, a psychologist, as well.

His new work was progressing in a way that cheered him to think of it. By September he would have got it half finished, and then, in the long winter evenings at his placid New England home, he could continue and end it with that mental security which comes from having made a momentous beginning. All through the present day he had been dealing with a knotty and problematic point on the subject of hallucination. He had had time to make some copious notes at the K. K. Hof bibliothek in Berlin and the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris, but even these had not proved fruitful of precisely the aid requisite.

'What that chapter now needs,' he mused, puffing at his pipe and watching the smoke from it waver somnolently out into the lucid yet dusky gloaming, 'is a personal, practical record of some experience with a fellow-creature beset by a mania which leaves him outwardly sane and yet has rooted itself into his daily life and thought. Some close study of that kind would make an admirable finis to my "hallucination chapter." Here he smiled to himself, and unconsciously drummed a ruminant treble with the finger-nails of one hand on the wooden table before him. 'There's that huge lunatic-asylum at home, not far from the college. Perhaps I could find my "specimen" there. I've a mind to search for him when I go back. It might not be a very pleasing task, but then my nerves are still good and strong.'

He did not know how soon and how drastically their strength was fated to be taxed. Only a little while after this, it chanced that he let his gaze wander toward the window at which was seated the one other occupant of the room. That personage had ceased to peer forth into the luring sunset glimmer, but had now half turned toward Brookstayne, though not showing the least sign of consciousness that the latter had begun to observe him. His head was drooped, and a soft revealing glow smote it, with something of the artificial effect so often seen in modern photography. Only the stranger's profile was visible, but how full of beauty and power that showed! Brookstayne, unlike most men of the ratiocinative turn, loved art, and it now occurred to him that a knack of swiftly sketching so rich a "subject" would have wrought high satisfaction. The gentleman himself must surely never have

become aware that his likeness was being covertly taken; he looked absorbed enough to refrain from shifting his posture if Pilatus, with fierce terrene clangors, had suddenly slipped into the lake.

The high, unusual light cast upon his facial outline made even one long upcurling eyelash evident. But above this gleamed a brow massive and scholarly, while below it was a nose arched in the faint yet definite purity that we call Greek; then came a moulding of mouth and chin virile, sensuous, poetic. He wore neither beard nor moustache, and his scant whitish hair, growing somewhat back from the temple and ceasing a little further upward, gave the whole silhouette a mature look which its lower lineaments failed to warrant. These appeared almost youthful, and in them, clothed as they were with unaltering pallor, Brookstayne seemed to detect the symmetry of perfect sculpture. 'A man with a past,' he began to muse. 'A man who must have suffered deeply, the drawn-down muscle at the corner of his mouth more than hints of that; who may have loved passionately, the firm yet ample curves of throat and chin suggest that. He has a brain of no mean force, too, for the brow is so generous. Not the face of a poet, in spite of his rapt and pensive mood while I watch him. Something like an austere challenge to imagination or fancy invests every feature. He might be a mathematician, or a drinker at the well of science, like my poor ardent self. But, whatever he is, he interests, attracts me... Yes, wonderfully I should like to know him.

I'

Brookstayne's meditations paused there. Abruptly the stranger had risen, and, with the air of one who has been roused to an unwelcome realization of some discomforting gazer, he now turned, making his full face apparent.

A thrill of horror shot through Brookstayne's nerves. It was not a full face at all. The other side of it, hitherto unseen, was almost entirely gone. Never was the spell cast by beauty more quickly and cruelly broken.

'Good God!' thought the man who had been silently admiring him. 'He is not a human being: he is a monster,-a creature whose face has only one side. How terrible!'

While Brookstayne sank backward in his chair, the man who had dealt him so sharp a shock passed slowly from the chamber and disappeared. He had a limping step, which denoted lameness in one limb, and bore a stout cane which he used as a palpable support.

Left alone, it was some little time before Brookstayne recovered from his dismay and consternation.

II.

At length, however, he regained composure, and softly laughed at his own weakness. But curiosity replaced bewilderment. Hans, the waiter at the inn, presently appeared, and a prompt series of questions followed.

Oh, yes, Hans knew the gentleman very well. He would often come in and sit like that when he thought there was nobody about.