"SURELY, Henry, you used to know this Mentieth Eliot, whose death I see in the papers," said my wife one morning, looking up from the Times across the breakfast table, where I was finishing my coffee and reading my letters.

       "I remember when we were first married you used to talk about him."

       Her words awoke a pang of remorse. At one time I had been tolerably intimate with Eliot; that he had dropped out of my life during the last ten years was due rather to the stress of circumstances than to any premeditated neglect on my part. But now with the irrevocableness of death came the conviction that it should have been the other way. I should have forced circumstances to bring us together, and not have lost sight of a friend who needed affection and companionship more than most men. Now it was too late. There they stood — those fatally convincing lines, from which there is no appeal:

       "On the 20th of May, at No. 205, Jermyn Street, suddenly, Mentieth Eliot, of Crosby Hall, Cumberland, in the 47th year of his age."

       Poor fellow! he had probably died as he had lived, alone. All that I could now do was to go round to the rooms in Jermyn Street, and make inquiries from his landlord. He could give me little satisfaction. Mr. Eliot, he said, had only been known to him during the past week, when he had arrived from the continent, and was spending a few days in London before going to his home in the north. He did not look strong, but his servant had said nothing of his master's being in ill-health till three mornings ago, when on going into his room he had found him breathing heavily, and before the doctor could arrive he was dead. "Heart-disease" the doctor had called it. His lawyer had come, and had made arrangements for having the body removed for interment at his family place, somewhere in the northern counties. He had seemed a quiet gentleman, had travelled a great deal, his servant told the landlord, and when he was not abroad, lived by himself in his large country-house.

       This was all that I could extract from the landlord.

"Alone he lived, and alone he died,   And when he was buried, nobody cried."

       These lines, read somewhere, and scarcely noticed at the time, flashed into my mind as the man was speaking, and with foolish iterance beat an accompaniment in my brain to whatever I did or thought that day. But in London life, impressions and experiences follow: each other so rapidly, that no feeling that does not partake of a poignant personal character can retain its freshness long; and it was of the inevitable nature of things that the memory of Mentieth Eliot's death should not remain long with me, when the thought of his living personality had scarcely touched my life at a single point for more than a decade. It was about a month later that one morning I received a large blue envelope, containing three separate rolls of manuscript, in a handwriting that had a strange look of familiarity, though memory did not immediately supply the connecting links of association. With the papers was a letter in a different hand. On reading it I found it was from poor Mentieth Eliot's lawyer and executor. It informed me that among his papers these manuscripts had been found, tied together, with directions that, after his death, they should be forwarded to me.

       As I unrolled the manuscripts, a letter in Eliot's writing fell out. It was short, and reading it stirred again the feelings of self-reproach and regret for neglected friendship, which I had experienced on hearing of his death. This was the letter:

       "DEAR LANGBY,
              "My thoughts turn to you this evening, as one of my few friends; also perhaps because you are indirectly connected with one of the experiences that left a deep mark on my life. That this mark should have been a lasting one, and one affecting my whole career and character, is an acknowledgment of the weakness that has ended in failure. A stronger character would have risen above the power of impressions, and not succumbed to their influence; but strength implies health and the perfect balance and adjustment of physical conditions, and these were denied me from the first. You may remember how you used to rate me for my morbidity and passion for self-dissection, when we first met and became friends at Bonn. Looking back on those days, I can only gratefully wonder at the patience and cheery good temper with which you always bore with me. It was your invincible hopefulness, your abounding spirits and vitality, that gave me the first impetus towards a healthier, happier manhood than had ever before seemed possible to me. And even now I feel, had circumstances thrown me more with you, my life might not seem the blank page that it is. But all this is not to the purpose. My reason for writing to-night is to tell you that I am leaving to you some papers, my apology for 'that long disease, my life.' Do with them what you will. All that I ask of you is to believe in them as an absolutely accurate transcript of the events as they appeared to me. You will see that the first and second papers were written almost immediately after the events described. The third was written an hour ago, and is, I feel sure, the testimony of a dying man. I have appended a short note to the first paper, not in explanation of what I must consider the Unaccountable, but as throwing some light on the conditions of my early life, all of which accentuated the morbid tendencies of my mind, and increased my hyper-sensitiveness to outward impressions. I would have liked to have seen you again, and to have shaken you by the hand. Now it is too late.

 
       "God forgive me," I muttered as I folded up the melancholy document. How had I fulfilled this trust? Fifteen years ago this man handed me out of his bounty a blank cheque; I might have drawn to any extent on his capital of affection and sympathy, and I flung it aside as if it had been a scrap of waste paper. It might have enriched me, and it has only impoverished him, and with a sigh and a feeling of curiosity dashed with sympathy, I took up the paper which had the note attached to it. I transcribe them in full, first the note and then the manuscript.

[Note dated May 20th, 1887.]

"205, Jermyn Street.      

       "I was born on the 20th of November, 1840. My father died the day before my birth. He had ridden out that morning with the hounds; coming home slowly after a long and exciting run his horse stumbled on a stone and came down. My father was killed on the spot. It was a lonely bit of road, and there was no one to bring the news to the house and to break it to my mother. She had gone down to the front door to meet my father, as was her invariable custom, on hearing the sound of his horse trotting up the approach. As the white horse turned the corner from which the avenue comes in a straight line to the door, she saw that it was riderless. The forelegs and pasterns were stained with blood, and the bridle hung down between its hoofs. My mother uttered a scream, and then did not stir, but stood as still as if she were turned to stone, gazing at the horse as it quickly trotted towards her. The old butler often described the scene to me, and the mute, horror-struck look on her face when, startled by her cry, he ran to the door: 'Ten minutes before, Mr. Mentieth, she was the brightest, happiest-looking lady as ever I clapped eyes on. I had taken her in her letters, and she looked up with such a smile as I opened the door, thinking it was the master. But when I saw her standing on the door steps, looking at that poor white beast coming along between the trees, as unconcernedly like as if nothing worse had happened that day than his broken knees, there was a skeered look in her eyes as has never left them since, and, for a smile, the last that ever I saw on her face, to call such, was the day before you were born, sir.'

       "I was born within twenty-four hours of my father's death, and I often think that if God in His mercy had seen fit to unite father, mother and child that night there would have been one sad and one useless life the less in the world. The old butler's words were the key to the sadness and gloom in which my childhood was passed. My mother did not love me, at least not actively, and I brought no pleasure or brightness into her life. I believe her nervous constitution had got a physical shock which stunted for ever the growth of healthy, natural feelings. I worshipped the sad, silent woman at a distance, but in her presence I was ill at ease and constrained, and could say not a word of the love and childish sympathy with which my heart swelled. These feelings, which in a healthier child would have found an outlet in attachment to servants and love of animals, with me turned inwards, and led to brooding and morbid self-depreciation. I became a prey to strange fancies, which to my indiscriminating, childish perceptions became realities of a terrifying nature. I need not here particularize what these fancies were, but they emphasized my nervous susceptibility and gave an unnatural bent to my imagination.

       "I may, however, specialize one peculiar taste as it may not have been without its influence on future events. From my earliest childhood till I was about fifteen or sixteen I had a nervous, exaggerated horror of horses and ponies. As a young child I believe I almost screamed myself into convulsions if the nurse took me round to the stables, and though that extremity of terror passed with babyhood, I could never be induced to ride or to drive myself, and always shrunk from being brought into close contact with horses. But there was one exception to the distrust and nervous shrinking which I felt to the whole species, and that, strangely enough, was the white horse which my father had been riding the day of his death. With the instinctive animosity of the illiterate classes to secondary causes the coachman had wanted to have him shot, but my mother had given orders that he was to be turned out into a field. Here, as a child, I would constantly come and look at the creature which had caused my father's death-first with awe and shrinking, later with a strange familiarity and sympathy, a sort of undefined sense of kinship between me and this pariah of the stables. I doubt if any one knew of my daily visits to the paddock as I always chose a moment when I could steal away by myself.

       "When I was twelve the trustees declared that the life I led at home was an unnatural one for a boy, and I was sent to school. Of those years nothing need be written at this distance of time. No cruelty was meant, and looking back I blame nobody, but I was misunderstood, I was bullied, I was miserable.

       "When I was sixteen my mother died suddenly of heart complaint. For a time I fell into low health and the doctors advised change of air and surroundings. It was decided that I should leave school and go abroad with a tutor. I hailed the change with satisfaction. The unconventionality and the outward brightness of foreign life attracted me, and in the music of Germany and the art of Italy I took the keenest emotional and intellectual pleasure.

       "After two years of foreign travel, I decided to attend a German University, before graduating at Oxford. At Bonn, where I went in the autumn of 1858, I first met you, Henry Langby. Your friendship and companionship at that time I shall always consider one of the chief gains of my life. You forced me into society, you sympathized with my tastes and pursuits, but at the same time constrained me by your larger, more robust manliness to recognize other points of view, and to see in my life possibilities of usefulness and of natural enjoyment.

       "One other cause helped to make life a different thing to me while I was at Bonn to what it had ever been before, the affection of little Rupert von Hochman. Do you remember how you used to laugh at what you called Rupert's 'humanizing influence' on me? There has only been one other human being to whom I owed as much as. I did to you and that child."

 
       Here the note ended abruptly, and I turned to the manuscript, wondering what its purport could be. It was written on foreign paper, of a kind we had used in our student days at Bonn, nearly thirty years ago. It bore the date Dec. 19th, 18 59, and the name, which had entirely passed from my memory till I saw it on the paper before me, of Mentieth Eliot's lodgings in Bonn. This was the manuscript:

 
       "This evening something occurred so strange and exceptional and so startling in its unexplained nature, that I wish to put down in writing a straightforward, accurate account of the event as it presents itself to my consciousness. Langby and I were returning from the other side of the Rhine, where we had been skating with a large party of friends, on a field flooded for the purpose. We had stayed later than the others, and were among the passengers in the last crossing of the ferry-boat. We were exhilarated by the exercise, and in high spirits. Instead of turning in as usual to my rooms, Langby proposed that I should go home and spend the evening with him, and together we started to walk down the Poppelsdorf Allee. It was intensely cold, and the air was thick and heavy with mixed fog and frost. All along the Allee the lamps flickered through the yellowish mist, with a dim wavering light, and the tall gaunt trees stood out black and solitary-looking, the eye being unable to penetrate the gloom further than to take in one at a time. We seemed to be the only people out at that hour, when I became aware of a voice a few yards ahead, raised in childish excitement. 'Truly, Anna,' it said, 'mother has promised that the Christkindchen shall bring me a pair of skates, and the day after Christmas I shall go with the English gentlemen to the meadow to skate.'

       "I recognized the voice of little Rupert von Hochman, and through the fog I could just see the child ahead of us with his nurse, and hear her anxious voice, 'Hurry, Master Rupert, or the Frau Grafin will be very angry at your being out so late. You should not have stayed so long in the shops.'

       "'Yes, Anna, I am coming; but I must first get some groschen out of my pocket for poor old Hans. I never pass him without giving him something, no more do the English gentlemen.'

       "The words came distinctly to us, and looking through the fog, I saw old Hans limping along between his crutches down the centre alley. Rupert ran towards the old man, and dropping a few small coins in his hand exclaimed:

       "'Now, Hans, you must guess what I have asked the Christkindchen to bring you. Mother says —–'

       "He was still talking when suddenly, like the grip of a cold hand laid on my heart, I felt a wave of overmastering depression sweep over me, and at the same moment I was startled by the thud of horses' hoofs advancing rapidly through the darkness. The next instant I saw a riderless white horse emerge out of the mist and advance at full speed towards the spot where the beggar stood, propped on his crutches. The horse's head was raised, and his tail stood out stiff, as he came at a wild gallop towards us. I tried to scream and to rush forward to pull Hans out of the way, but I could not stir a limb, and no sound or cry of warning came from my parched throat. Another second and Hans would have been trampled under foot, when with a sudden movement the horse glanced aside in its headlong career, and swerving from the place where the old cripple stood, knocked over the child and then passed rapidly out of sight into the fog and darkness. As it disappeared, the tension which had possessed my whole being suddenly relaxed, the cold, clammy feeling of terror that had overcome me gave way, and I found myself walking quietly beside Langby, who was nodding, 'Guten Abend' to Hans, and shouting in his cheery voice to Rupert, who was dancing ahead with his nurse:

       "'Hallo! youngster; what are you doing out at this hour?' and with a stride forward he had lifted the child on to his shoulder.

       "Great heavens! What did it all mean? Had the whole thing been an illusion of a diseased brain, a vision, a baseless fabrication of unmeaning fancy? But it had been so real, it had appealed so forcibly to two senses. I had first heard the tramp of the hoofs, and then flashing out of the darkness had seen the horse, as distinctly as I now saw Langby with the untouched child on his shoulder. And yet, in glaring contradiction to the reality of my impressions, there was the child sound in limb and unscathed in nerve; Langby, the nurse and Hans were all equally in the normal condition of a few minutes before, which must have been impossible had they witnessed that to which I could testify through the evidence of sight and of sound. Even in my deep thankfulness for Rupert's safety a horror passed over me, so ghastly was the experience. It seems by its unnatural character to separate me from my kind and to —–

       "Dec. 29th. I wrote this ten days ago. Since then I have been very ill: an attack connected with the heart, the doctor says, and complicated by fever. Langby has been with me constantly. He is very low about the von Hochmans. Rupert is at death's door from inflammation of the lungs, caught the day after he was in the Poppelsdorf Allee.

       "Dec. 30th. Langby came in late last night, awfully cut up about poor little Rupert von Hochman's death. He is waiting for the funeral and then returns to England. The doctor advises me to go to the Riviera and then to have a sea voyage. I am still weak and sleepless. I cannot shake off the feeling of a sort of guilty participation in Rupert's death, a sense of having been an accessory before the event, yet I know this is morbid and unreal. Of one thing I am determined — to no living soul shall I ever breathe a word of what I saw, or imagined I saw, on the evening of the 19th in the Poppelsdorf Allee."

 
II.

       AS I read Eliot's manuscript, many things came back to my memory which I had long forgotten. That afternoon on the ice — our meeting with little Rupert von Hochman — Eliot's great affection for the child — the shock and sorrow of the little fellow's death, and Eliot's sharp illness and subsequent depression — all for the moment seemed more real and nearer to me than the events of yesterday. Poor fellow! what a revelation of morbidity and diseased sensitiveness that paper contained, and yet what a power of reserve there was in the man, never to have uttered a word of what was weighing on his mind. It was part of the contradiction I had always recognized in him, the combination of weakness and strength. With quickened interest I turned to the second roll of paper, wondering what it would contain. Unlike the first, it had no note attached to it, but my own knowledge of Eliot's life subsequent to his leaving Bonn supplied me with the links necessary to the understanding of what followed. Though I was at Cambridge while Eliot was at Oxford, we often met, and one autumn we went a walking-tour in the Tyrol together. After he left Oxford he was a great deal abroad. In the autumn of 1867 I spent a few days with him at Crosby Hall. He was in better spirits than I had ever known him since the old Bonn days, and spoke with real interest and hopefulness about his future. Apparently he had made up his mind to give up the roving life which he had gradually adopted, and to settle down on his place. In a moment of expansion he even alluded to the possibility of one day representing the county.

       From certain things that he let drop in conversation, I could not help thinking that the idea of marriage was in Eliot's mind, but when I one day said something chaffing on the subject, he instantly shrivelled up into silence. His reticence had the quality of making one feel that frankness was a vulgar impertinence and breach of good taste, in the same way that his silence made one acutely conscious of the glaring triviality of most utterances. But, like many better-balanced minds, Eliot had his moments of inconsistency, and the last evening I was at Crosby he spoke to me at length, and with a curious, suppressed fervour, of the happiness that had come to him the previous winter in the friendship of a young girl he had first met at Rome. Her name, I think, was Ruth Norton, and I believe she was an American. He was about to meet her somewhere in the south of Scotland, and I remember I felt at the time that that visit would probably be the turning-point in his life, as indeed it proved. Far from settling down and marrying, the following winter Eliot took to travelling in good earnest, not among familiar European haunts, but in remote Eastern and Southern lands. He let his house on a long lease, and for years his friends lost sight of him. I, for one, never saw him again, though we made one abortive effort to meet seven years later. Remembering these things, I turned with a keen sense of curiosity to the second manuscript. It bore the date:

       "I have had a horrible experience, and cannot shake off its effects. It has brought back fears and feelings that I hoped had passed for ever, but I might have known that there was no happy future possible for me. And yet a few hours ago it seemed as if Ruth Norton held in her hands the key that would open out to me a new heaven and a new earth, and now that door has been closed for ever, and through my own unconscious, unwilling agency. I had made up my mind to speak to her this afternoon, to tell her all that her goodness and beauty meant to me, and to ask her to be my wife. I had followed her out on to the Heughs for that purpose. As I saw her go past the drawing-room window towards the cliffs, I did not like to join her at once, but an hour later I followed her, knowing her favourite spot, a dip in the Heughs, above the great Spindle-rock overlooking the Solway. It was a warm, bright afternoon; a perfect stillness was in the air, and a golden haze of sunshine on sea and land. Ruth had taken the path skirting the cliffs; I took the way across the fields to the Heughs. As I got out on to them, through the last field, I noticed that some horses and Highland cattle had come through a broken-down gate and were feeding on the close-cropped, springy grass. I remember particularly observing them, and thinking how picturesque the tawny and dun colouring of the cattle looked against the blue sky and green, undulating headlands. One feeling, however, was uppermost in my heart, and I did not linger, but hurried towards the highest Heugh, from whence, a hundred feet beneath me, I could see Ruth seated on the edge of a cliff, watching the tide heaving and swirling into the cave below. She was so close to the edge that I did not like to call out for fear of startling her, and was turning to go down by another way, when a sudden sound, as of horses' hoofs galloping over grass, arrested me. A white horse that had been feeding with the rest — or so I imagined — had separated itself from the herd and with flying mane and outstretched tail was coming straight towards me. In a moment an awful chill passed all over me, holding my limbs and muscles in a kind of icy spell. I could neither move nor scream. Onward the creature came in its mad race, but twenty yards from where I stood it swerved, and, suddenly turning aside, went, at the same wild pace, down the grassy path leading to the cliff where Ruth was sitting. Till it turned the corner it would be hidden from her sight, but then the appalling suddenness with which it would come upon her might, indeed must, cause her to lose her balance and fall over the precipice on to the rocks below. I gasped, but I only caught my breath; not a sound came from my lips; my eyes saw nothing but the one spot, the corner round which the horse must come; in my ears was only one sound, the galloping thud of its hoofs on the turf. Why did she not hear it and move from her dangerous position before it was too late? Great heavens! what was this hideous possession that kept my body in thrall while my brain with unnatural activity realized every feature of the situation? I lived a lifetime in those moments, when, sudden as it had come, the awful spell was broken by Ruth's voice calling from below, 'How did you get up there, Mr. Eliot? I never noticed you till this moment.'

       "With the sound of her words a glow of life and warmth returned to me, the strained sense of expectancy relaxed, my eyes turned to where she was sitting calm and smiling, and in my ears the sound of the terrible gallop died away. But in the moment of reaction from that awful, unnatural horror, another feeling started into life, the feeling I had had so strongly after Rupert von Hochman's death. The curse of my second sight had fallen on the woman I loved!

       "With a groan I turned away. Never could I speak to Ruth of what had been in my heart towards her-what will be in it till I die. I suppose I must have called out something incoherent in answer to her words. I did not join her, but came straight back to the house, scarcely knowing what I did. At dinner she asked me if I was ill, and in her gentle way she said I looked white, perhaps I had got a chill on the Heughs. To-morrow I am going away. I have made the coward's invariable excuse, of letters calling me home."

 
       Here the manuscript ended abruptly. Below it was pasted a cutting from the Times obituary column: "At Stronfaskit House, Wigtownshire, on the 29th October, of diphtheria, Ruth Eleanor, daughter of William Norton, of Philadelphia, aged 20." Below, in writing, were the initials, "M. E. — Miserrimus."

 
III.

       THE third paper, to which I eagerly turned, was written twenty years later and bore the date of the 19th May, 1887, the evening before Mentieth Eliot's death. Unlike the two previous manuscripts, it showed no trace of having been written under the pressure of strong nervous excitement. The tone was calm and natural, as of a man writing to a friend, describing an ordinary occurrence. Only towards the end something of the man's personality asserted itself, a note of dejection and self-pity was touched, and the dominant trait of constancy and loyalty made itself felt. Here is the paper:

       "This evening I was coming back to my rooms through the Park. It had been a close, sultry day, and feeling tired, and my club dinner being a movable feast, I sat down in the Row almost opposite the Albert Gate. It was close upon eight o'clock. Carriages taking people to dinner passed in and out of the gates, there were no riders out at that hour, and very few walkers on the side where I was. I was sitting thinking of nothing in particular, when my attention was attracted by two little girls, coming towards me with their nurse. Their voices were raised in eager argument, and as they came nearer I heard the younger of the two say in accents of conviction, 'But, Mary, to-day must be the 19th, because Monday is baby's birthday, and it is the 22nd, so you see it is the 19th.'

       "It seemed a matter of grave importance to her to fix the date of the day. Her little face was keen, and her eyes big with excitement, as still arguing the point they passed out of ear-shot.

       "The appearance of the younger child had roused me from the idle reverie into which I had fallen, and had sent my thoughts wandering among past scenes and times.

"'Die Kleine gleicht der Geliebten,    Besonders wann sie lacht,    Sie hat dieselben Augen,    Die mich so unglücklich gemacht.'

       "Before I could trace the train of association awakened by these words, shot suddenly, as they seemed, to the fore-front of my consciousness, out of some distant recess in my mind, I was startled by the sight of a riderless horse coming rapidly down the Row. 'Some one has been thrown,' I thought, and would have started forward, in obedience to the natural, though not very definite instinct, which prompts to action of some sort in all emergencies. But I could not move. A cold tremor passed over me, and a terrible rigidity held me in my place. Onward the horse came. He was white. Just in front of where he must pass in another moment, a man was crossing the Row. Unconscious of any danger he moved slowly, and I, paralyzed by this chill horror, could do nothing to warn him, though my eyes were fixed in a sort of spell-bound terror on the horse, now close upon him. Even in that awful moment I was aware of something strangely familiar in the man's walk and in the droop of his shoulders. He turned and slowly looked at me. Good God! I saw my own face. How I got back here, I don't quite know. I have a recollection of finding myself in a half-fainting condition on my chair in the Park, and of staggering across in a somnambulistic state to Albert Gate, where I got a cab, and drove straight here. Now that the sensation of physical depression and nervousness has passed off, I feel quite calm. Of course, I know what this omen portends. Well! I would not have it otherwise. I know now why those lines of Heine rang in my ears, and whose were the eyes that the child's eager look recalled, as she passed me in the Row. Strange, too, that those words, 'It is the 19th, were the ones to reach me. It was on the 19th of November that my father died; I had seen the white horse in the Poppelsdorf Allee on the 19th of December; on the 19th of October I had seen it on the Heughs above the Solway; on the 19th of May it has appeared to me again in Rotten Row. Once to the child who was dear to me, then to the woman I loved, and now to myself (I feel sure of it) it has meant death. By a fall from a white horse my father died. What is the connection between these events? Why have I been doomed to such foreknowledge? Is it something from without, or is it to be traced to the condition of my own brain? If I could answer these questions, would it have made any difference, then or now? In the solitude of approaching death, I ask myself, can any of us help the other? The Unseen is nearer us than we think; who knows at what moment it may change to the seen, the dear, the greatly longed-for? But all such speculation must be vain."

 
       "Yes," I muttered, as I put down the manuscript, "all speculation on these subjects is vain; but this is certain, I might have been of more help to this man than I was."

E. C. S.