agination is a medicine, by all means let us use it.”
“Not so quick,” he answered. “You have clearly not counted with the dangers. The phenomenon of imagination which you propose to induce is only a form of hysteria. We know what that involves. It involves the danger of madness—incurable madness, not temporary madness such as the victim of drink suffers from. Thus you are trying to jump out of the frying pan into the fire. Even if it is possible to put Miss Clousedale into a real sleep of three days' duration—a thing I entirely disbelieve—you would only be reducing her by one form of hysteria—the quiescent form, the most dangerous form—to a condition which must imperil her life.”
“Do you mean," I said, “that she would never awake?”
“I mean,” he answered, “that she would never awake to the consciousness of reason, or else that she would only awake to die.”
“In short, you refuse to share our responsibility?”
“I am not so simple as to share it. What you say you are going to do amounts in effect, if you can do it, to the administration of chloroform. Now a patient may die under chloroform, but when this occurs our defense is obvious. But you are using unrecognized means, and there is no way by which you can show that, such as they are, you are using them properly. If Miss Clousedale should die in your hands, what is your position in the eye of the law?”
“She will not die.”
“But if, my friend, if, if?”
“If,” I answered, “you know so little of hypnotism as to speak of its dangers in the same breath with those of chloroform, it is clear that we have nothing to gain by your coőperation and nothing to lose by your withdrawal.”
The hard face became harder and the square brow more stern.
“So you ask me to withdraw—you who have no legal rights whatever—you ask me to step back in favor of God knows whom from God knows where, coming with God knows what tricks of the adventurer and the charlatan?”
“I ask you to remember,” I replied, “that your profession has always used just such language as yours about everything and everybody that has done any great work in the interests of humanity.”
He had risen and was making for the door.
“It is such men as you, and—and this person”—pointing with his hat to the hypnotist—“who are the disturbers of society, making with a little burning straw and dirty smoke the scarecrow superstitions which fill the world with weakness and melancholy and insanity. I leave you to your silly work, but I warn you that if you do what you say, and anything happens as the consequence, as sure as there is law in the land I will set it in motion to punish you.”
I bowed him out with cold politeness, and he went off in anger. The hypnotist had sat through both interviews with no better apprehension of their drift than observation of our faces had afforded him.
“Dr. La Mothe,” I said, in French, “the gentlemen wash their hands of us.”
He smiled. I had not surprised him.
VI.
Early the next morning we went up to Clousedale Hall. I was not surprised to find that both doctor and clergyman were there before us. They had come, however, to watch, not to resist, and were moving about in the breakfast room with grim and silent faces. Mrs. Hill was looking worn and wretched.
“You are none too soon,” she said in her low and nervous voice. Then she led the way up stairs.
It is impossible to describe the effect the sight of Lucy had upon me. She was sitting in a boudoir, which had a bed room opening out of it. The beautiful pale face was now flushed and heated, the big blue eyes were keen and restless, there was something feverish and electrical in her manner; and her glossy chestnut hair, almost as dull as tow, was partly draggling over her shoulders. When she saw me she tried to escape, but I intercepted her at the bed room door, and did what I could to overcome the torment of her humiliation. She fell upon my neck, buried her face in my breast, and burst into tears. As well as I was able for the sobs that choked me I tried to soothe and comfort her.
“You will soon be well again, dearest. Have no fear. I have brought a French specialist to see you, and you must do all that he asks and expects.”
Then the hypnotist entered, and close behind came the doctor and the minister.
Lucy held my hand during the first examination, and she seemed fairly quiet and tractable. But when an attempt was made to put her to sleep by causing her to fix her gaze for a few moments on some luminous object, she realized the intention instantly, and broke into a fit of hysteria. It
