The Moonstone - Page 317/404

He made that bitterly professional apology for his tears, speaking

quietly and unaffectedly, as he had spoken throughout. His tone and

manner, from beginning to end, showed him to be especially, almost

morbidly, anxious not to set himself up as an object of interest to me.

"You may well ask, why I have wearied you with all these details?"

he went on. "It is the only way I can see, Mr. Blake, of properly

introducing to you what I have to say next. Now you know exactly what

my position was, at the time of Mr. Candy's illness, you will the more

readily understand the sore need I had of lightening the burden on my

mind by giving it, at intervals, some sort of relief. I have had the

presumption to occupy my leisure, for some years past, in writing a

book, addressed to the members of my profession--a book on the intricate

and delicate subject of the brain and the nervous system. My work will

probably never be finished; and it will certainly never be published. It

has none the less been the friend of many lonely hours; and it helped

me to while away the anxious time--the time of waiting, and nothing

else--at Mr. Candy's bedside. I told you he was delirious, I think? And

I mentioned the time at which his delirium came on?"

"Yes."

"Well, I had reached a section of my book, at that time, which touched

on this same question of delirium. I won't trouble you at any length

with my theory on the subject--I will confine myself to telling you only

what it is your present interest to know. It has often occurred to me in

the course of my medical practice, to doubt whether we can justifiably

infer--in cases of delirium--that the loss of the faculty of speaking

connectedly, implies of necessity the loss of the faculty of thinking

connectedly as well. Poor Mr. Candy's illness gave me an opportunity

of putting this doubt to the test. I understand the art of writing

in shorthand; and I was able to take down the patient's 'wanderings',

exactly as they fell from his lips.--Do you see, Mr. Blake, what I am

coming to at last?"

I saw it clearly, and waited with breathless interest to hear more.

"At odds and ends of time," Ezra Jennings went on, "I reproduced my

shorthand notes, in the ordinary form of writing--leaving large spaces

between the broken phrases, and even the single words, as they had

fallen disconnectedly from Mr. Candy's lips. I then treated the result

thus obtained, on something like the principle which one adopts in

putting together a child's 'puzzle.' It is all confusion to begin with;

but it may be all brought into order and shape, if you can only find

the right way. Acting on this plan, I filled in each blank space on the

paper, with what the words or phrases on either side of it suggested

to me as the speaker's meaning; altering over and over again, until my

additions followed naturally on the spoken words which came before them,

and fitted naturally into the spoken words which came after them. The

result was, that I not only occupied in this way many vacant and anxious

hours, but that I arrived at something which was (as it seemed to me) a

confirmation of the theory that I held. In plainer words, after putting

the broken sentences together I found the superior faculty of thinking

going on, more or less connectedly, in my patient's mind, while the

inferior faculty of expression was in a state of almost complete

incapacity and confusion."