Chapter 1

UNA CALLINGHAM'S FIRST RECOLLECTION

It may sound odd to say so, but the very earliest fact that
impressed itself on my memory was a scene that took place--so I was
told--when I was eighteen years old, in my father's house, The
Grange, at Woodbury.

My babyhood, my childhood, my girlhood, my school-days were all
utterly blotted out by that one strange shock of horror. My past
life became exactly as though it had never been. I forgot my own
name. I forgot my mother-tongue. I forgot everything I had ever done
or known or thought about. Except for the power to walk and stand
and perform simple actions of every-day use, I became a baby in arms
again, with a nurse to take care of me. The doctors told me, later,
I had fallen into what they were pleased to call "a Second State." I
was examined and reported upon as a Psychological Curiosity. But at
the time, I knew nothing of all this. A thunderbolt, as it were,
destroyed at one blow every relic, every trace of my previous
existence; and I began life all over again, with that terrible scene
of blood as my first birthday and practical starting point.

I remember it all even now with horrible distinctness. Each item in
it photographed itself vividly on my mind's eye. I saw it as in a
picture--just as clearly, just as visually. And the effect, now I
look back upon it with a maturer judgment, was precisely like a
photograph in another way too. It was wholly unrelated in time and
space: it stood alone by itself, lighted up by a single spark,
without rational connection before or after it. What led up to it
all, I hadn't the very faintest idea. I only knew the Event itself
took place; and I, like a statue, stood rooted in the midst of it.

And this was the Picture as, for many long months, it presented
itself incessantly to my startled brain, by day and by night, awake
or asleep, in colours more distinct than words can possibly paint
them.

I saw myself standing in a large, square room--a very handsome old
room, filled with bookshelves like a library. On one side stood a
table, and on the table a box. A flash of light rendered the whole
scene visible. But it wasn't light that came in through the window.
It was rather like lightning, so quick it was, and clear, and
short-lived, and terrible. Half-way to the door, I stood and looked
in horror at the sight revealed before my eyes by that sudden flash.
A man lay dead in a little pool of blood that gurgled by short jets
from a wound on his left breast. I didn't even know at the moment
the man was my father; though slowly, afterward, by the concurrent
testimony of others, I learnt to call him so. But his relationship
wasn't part of the Picture to me. There, he was only in my eyes a