CHAPTER XXXIV

AFTER TWENTY YEARS

’How I reached the open air I cannot tell you,—­I do not know.  I have a confused recollection of rushing through vaulted passages, through endless corridors, of trampling over people who tried to arrest my passage,—­and the rest is blank.

’When I again came to myself I was lying in the house of an American missionary named Clements.  I had been found, at early dawn, stark naked, in a Cairo street, and picked up for dead.  Judging from appearances I must have wandered for miles, all through the night.  Whence I had come, or whither I was going, none could tell,—­I could not tell myself.  For weeks I hovered between life and death.  The kindness of Mr and Mrs Clements was not to be measured by words.  I was brought to their house a penniless, helpless, battered stranger, and they gave me all they had to offer, without money and without price,—­with no expectation of an earthly reward.  Let no one pretend that there is no Christian charity under the sun.  The debt I owed that man and woman I was never able to repay.  Before I was properly myself again, and in a position to offer some adequate testimony of the gratitude I felt, Mrs Clements was dead, drowned during an excursion on the Nile’ and her husband had departed on a missionary expedition into Central Africa, from which he never returned.

’Although, in a measure, my physical health returned, for months after I had left the roof of my hospitable hosts, I was in a state of semi-imbecility.  I suffered from a species of aphasia.  For days together I was speechless, and could remember nothing,—­not even my own name.  And, when that stage had passed, and I began to move more freely among my fellows, for years I was but a wreck of my former self.  I was visited, at all hours of the day and night, by frightful—­I know not whether to call them visions, they were real enough to me, but since they were visible to no one but myself, perhaps that is the word which best describes them.  Their presence invariably plunged me into a state of abject terror, against which I was unable to even make a show of fighting.  To such an extent did they embitter my existence, that I voluntarily placed myself under the treatment of an expert in mental pathology.  For a considerable period of time I was under his constant supervision, but the visitations were as inexplicable to him as they were to me.

’By degrees, however, they became rarer and rarer, until at last I flattered myself that I had once more become as other men.  After an interval, to make sure, I devoted myself to politics.  Thenceforward I have lived, as they phrase it, in the public eye.  Private life, in any peculiar sense of the term, I have had none.’

Mr Lessingham ceased.  His tale was not uninteresting, and, to say the least of it, was curious.  But I still was at a loss to understand what it had to do with me, or what was the purport of his presence in my room.  Since he remained silent, as if the matter, so far as he was concerned, was at an end, I told him so.