The Argosy, December 1905 — page 114: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

92 of being apprehended for murder when his old friend aroused to consciousness. For Leslie’s sake he spent every energy of his mind, every atom of knowledge he had gained of such cases in the schools, to bring her lover out of his stupor, and the shock of having Lloyd open his eyes in this awful and almost inexplicable condition seemed to his overwrought brain more frightful than would have been the result which he had expected. | He was saved, but only for the time being. It merely meant the prolonging of the agony of doubt and fear under which he had labored since morning. Surely poor Lloyd would not settle indefinitely into this changed person- ality. The patient could not be abandoned now. Unless Burress played an utterly brutal part, he could not leave Lloyd bound to that couch, and in the care only of two ignorant and weak women while other physicians were being sum- moned. No; all further thought of leaving Barrowsvale must be thrust from him. He must remain and see the matter through. Munhall should be sent for, and Professor Oglethorpe. ‘He’ could not go out into «the world to wander under an assumed name and to take up some other mode of exist- ence. His medical career, it seemed, was not to be closed so abruptly. Fate had bound him here, and here he must remain. There was no escape, and this in itself, he saw, constituted one of the modes of punishment to which his crime sentenced him. Betty knocked at the door after a time and told him that a boy was wait- ing for the telegrams. Burress pulled himself together with an effort and penned the two despatches. These sent away by the hand of Betty, who still sniveled and wiped her eyes, Burress turned his attention to plans for the future. And these were not plans dealing with his own safety. Seymour Lloyd’s condition, although compassing his own salvation, appealed to Burress as altogether terrible. Burress believed Lloyd utterly inca- pable of understanding any function of THE ARGOSY. his own body as well as lacking all acquaintance with the surroundings into which fate had thrust him. The open- voice was purely involuntary. Then, when Burress touched him, this newly born infant with a man’s strength and a madman’s desire to use it had grap- pled with him. As with a babe, Lloyd’s strongest impression was fear; with his preter- natural intelligence and powers of per- ception, his alarm at being thrust suddenly into this universe of ours was far greater than that of the new-born child. Unless skill higher than that of Ra- mon Burress be aoase to bear upon the case, he did not see how Lloyd was to be transformed into his old self. The situation of a man who had lost all knowledge of the world in which he had lived and worked for twenty-eight years, who had forgotten his fellow-men completely—who had even forgotten the woman whom he loved and wished to make his wife—such a situation ap- pealed to Burress’ mind as rising to the heights of human agony. Certain phrases of Nathaniel Haw- thorne’s, in his delineation of the char- acter of that wonderful man, Wakefield, came to the physician’s mind, for they seemed to bear more or less directly on the case in hand: Amid the seeming confusion of our mysterious world, individuals are so nicely adjusted to a system, and systems to one another and to a whole, that by stepping aside for a moment a man ex- poses himself to a fearful risk of losing his place forever. Like Wakefield, he may become the outcast of the universe. Seymour Lloyd had ,“ stepped aside.” That fall down the embankment above the wood-road had constituted the cause for a change in Lloyd’s individuality which was marvelous. He was truly “an outcast of the uni- verse *’—a man without a country, with- out a parentage, without friends. Bur- ress realized that Lloyd’s condition of mind at this very moment must be one of uncontrollable horror. If actual insanity did not result, it would be an interposition of divine providence. COmiclooolkX ing of his eyes at the sound of Leslie’s ~ (C@