The Silver Mirror

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
The Silver Mirror by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. This is
a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain.
For more information and to find out how you can volunteer,
please visit LibriVox dot org. The Silver Mirror by Sir
Arthur Conan Doyle, January three. This affair of White and

(00:24):
Weutherspoon's accounts proves to be a gigantic task. There are
twenty thick ledgers to be examined and checked. Who would
be a junior partner? However, it is the first big
bit of business which has been left entirely in my hands.
I must justify it. But it has to be finished
so that the lawyers may have the result in time
for the trial. Johnson says this morning that I should

(00:47):
have to get the last figure out before the twentieth
of the month. Good Lord, well have at it, and
the human brain and nerve can stand the strain. I'll
win out the other side. It means office work from
ten to five and in a second sitting from about
eight to one in the morning. There's drama in Accountain's
life when I find myself in the still early hours

(01:08):
while all the world sleeps hunting through column after column
for those missing figures which will turn a respected alderman
into a felon. I understand that it is not such
a prosaic profession. After all, on Monday I came on
the first trace of defalcation. No heavy game hunter ever
got a finer thrill when he first caught sight of

(01:28):
the trail of his quarry. But I look at the
twenty ledgers and think of the jungle through which I
have to follow him before I get my kill. Hard work,
but rare sport too. In a way, I saw the
fat fellow once at a city dinner, his red face
glowing above a white napkin. He looked at the little
pale man at the end of the table. He would
have been pale too if he could have seen the

(01:48):
task that would be mine. January sixth, What a perfect
nonsense it is for doctors to prescribe rest, and rest
is out of the question. Asses. They might as well
shout to a man who has a pack of wolves
at his heels that what he wants is absolute quiet.
My figures must be out by a certain date. Unless
they are so, I shall lose the chance of my lifetime.

(02:09):
So how on earth am I to rest? I'll take
a week or so after the trial. Perhaps I was
a fool to go to the doctor at all. But
I get nervous and highly strung when I sit alone
at my work at night. It's not a pain, only
a sort of fullness of the head, with an occasional
mist over the eyes. I thought, perhaps some bromide or
chloral or something of the kind might do me good.

(02:30):
But stop work. It's absurd to ask such a thing.
It's like a long distance race. You feel queer at first,
and your heart thumps and your lungs pant. But if
you have only the pluck to keep on, you get
your second wind. I'll stick to my work and wait
for my second wind. If it never comes, all the same,
I'll stick to my work. Two ledgers are done, and

(02:50):
I am well on the third. The rascal has covered
his tracks well, but I picked them up. For all
that January nine, I had not meant to go to
the doctor again, and yet I I have had to,
straining my nerves, risking a complete breakdown, even in dangering
my sanity. That's a nice sentence to have fired off
at one. Well, I'll stand the strain, and I'll take
the risk. But so long as I can sit in

(03:11):
my chair and move a pin, i'll follow the old
sinner's slot. By the way, I may as well sit
down here the queer experience which drove me this second
time to the doctor. I'll keep an exact record of
my symptoms and sensations because they are interesting in themselves,
a curious psychophysiological study, said the doctor, and also because
I am perfectly certain that when I am through with them,

(03:32):
they will all seem blurred and unreal, like some queer
dream betwixt sleeping and waking. So now, while they are fresh,
I will just make a note of them, if only
as a change of thought after the endless figures. There's
an old silver framed mirror in my room. It was
given me by a friend who had taste for antiguities,
and he, as I happen to know, picked it up

(03:52):
at a sail and had no notion where it came from.
It's a large thing, three feet across and two feet high,
and it leans at the back of a side table
on my left as I right. The frame is flat,
about three inches across and very old, far too old
for hall marks. Or other methods of determining its age.
The glass part projects with a beveled edge and has
the magnificent reflecting power which is only, as it seems

(04:15):
to me to be found in very old mirrors. There
is a feeling of perspective when you look into it,
such as no modern glass can ever give. The mirror
is so situated that as I sit at the table,
I can usually see nothing in it but the reflection
of the red window curtains. But a queer thing happened
last night. I had been working for some hours very

(04:35):
much against the grain, with continual bouts of that mistiness
of which I have complained again and again, I had
to stop and clear my eyes. Well. On one of
these occasions I chanced to look at the mirror. It
had the oddest appearance. The red curtains, which should have
been reflected in it, were no longer there, But the
glass seemed to be clouded and steamy. Not on the surface,

(04:56):
which glittered like steel, but deep down and the very
grain of it, this opacity, when I stared heart at it,
appeared to slowly rotate this way and that, until it
was a thick white cloud swirling in heavy wreaths. So
real and solid was it, and so reasonable was I
that I remember turning with the idea that the curtains
were on fire. But everything was deadly still in the room,

(05:18):
no sound save the ticking of the clock, no movement
save the slow gyration of that strange wooly cloud deep
in the heart of the old mirror. Then as I looked,
the mist or smoke or cloud or whatever one they call,
it seemed to coalesce and solidify at two points quite
close together. And I was aware, with a thrill of
interest rather than of fear, that these were two eyes

(05:40):
looking out into the room, a vague outline of a head.
I could see a woman spy the hair, but this
was very shadowy. Only the eyes were quite distinct. Such
eyes dark, luminous, filled with some passion of the motion,
fury or horror, I could not say which. Never have
I seen such eyes which were so full of intense,

(06:00):
vivid life. They were not fixed upon me, but stared
out into the room. Then, as I sat erect, passed
my hand over my brow and made a strong conscious
effort to pull myself together, the dim head faded into
the general opacity the mirror slowly cleared, and there were
the red curtains. Once again. A skeptic would say, no

(06:20):
doubt that I had dropped asleep over my figures, and
that my experience was a dream. As a matter of fact,
I was never more vividly awake in my life. I
was able to argue about it even as I looked
at it, and to tell myself that it was a
subjective impression, a chimera of a nerve's begotten by worry
and insomnia. But why this particular shape, and who is

(06:41):
the woman? And what is the dreadful emotion which I
read in those wonderful brown eyes? They come between me
and my work. For the first time, I have done
less than the daily tally which I had marked out.
Perhaps that is why I have no abnormal sensations. To
night tomorrow I must wake up. Come what may January
LA All well, in good progress with my work. I

(07:03):
wind the net coil after coil round that bulky body.
But the last smile may remain with him if my
own nerves break over it. The mirror would seen be
a sort of barometer which marks my brain pressure each night.
I have observed that it had clouded before I reached
the end of my task. Doctor Sinclair, who is it
seems a bit of a psychologist, was so interested in

(07:24):
my account that he came round this evening to have
a look at the mirror. I had observed that something
was scribbled in crabbed old characters upon the metal work
at the back. He examined this with a lens, but
could make nothing of it. Sank x Pal was his
first reading of it, but that did not bring us
any further. He advised me to put it away into
another room. But after all, whatever I may see in

(07:46):
it is, by his own account, only a symptom. It
is in the cause of the danger lies the twenty ledgers.
Not the silver mirror should be packed away, if I
could only do it. I am at the eighth now,
so I progress January third. Perhaps it would have been wiser,
After all, if I had packed away the mirror. I
had an extraordinary experience with it last night, And yet

(08:08):
I find it so interesting, so fascinating, that even now
I will keep it in its place. What on earth
is the meaning of it all? I suppose. It was
about one in the morning, and I was closing my
book's preparatory to staggering off the bed. When I saw
her there in front of me, the stage of mistiness
and development must have passed unobserved, and there she was,

(08:28):
in all her beauty and passion and distress, as clear
cut as if she were really in the flesh before me.
The figure was small, but very distinct, so much so
that every feature and even every detail of dress is
stamped in my memory. She is seated on the extreme
left of the mirror. A sort of shadowy figure crouches
down beside her. I can dimly discern that it is

(08:51):
a man, and then behind them is a cloud in
which I see figures, figures which move. It is not
a mere picture upon which I It is a scene
in life, an actual episode. She crouches and quivers, the
man beside her cowers down. The vague figures make abrupt
movements and gestures. All my fears were swallowed up in

(09:12):
my interest. It was maddening to see so much and
not to see more. But I can at least describe
the woman to the smallest point. She is very beautiful
and quite young, not more than five and twenty, I
should judge. Her hair is of a very rich brown,
with a warm chestnut shade, fining into gold at the edges.
A little flat pointed cap comes to an angle in front,

(09:33):
and is made of lace edge with pearls. The forehead
is high, too high perhaps for a perfect beauty, but
one would not have it otherwise, as it gives a
touch of power and strength to what would have otherwise
been a softly feminine face. The brows are most delicately
curved over heavy eyelids, and then come those wonderful eyes,
so large, so dark, so full of overmastering emotion of rage,

(09:56):
of horror, contending with a pride of self control which
holds her from sheer frenzy. The cheeks are pale, the
lips white with agony, the chin and throat most exquisitely rounded.
The figure sits and leans forward in a chair, straining
and rigid, cataleptic with horror. The dress is black velvet,
A jewel gleams like a flame in the breast, and

(10:17):
a golden crucivix smolders, and the shadow of a fold.
This is the lady whose image still lives in the
old silver mirror. What dire deed could it be which
has left its impressed there so that now in another age.
If the spirit of a man be but attuned to it,
he may be conscious of its presence. One other detail,
down on the left side of the skirt of the

(10:38):
black dress, was what I thought at first was a
shapely bunch of white ribbon. Then as I looked more intently,
or as the vision defined itself more clearly, I perceived
what it was. It was the hand of a man,
clinched and nodded in agony, which held on with a
convulsive grasp to the fold of the dress. The rest
of the crouching figure was a mere, vague outline, but

(10:59):
that strenuous hand shone clear in the dark background, with
a sinister suggestion of tragedy and its frantic clutch. The
man is frightened, horribly frightened that I can clearly discern
what has terrified him. So why does he grip the
woman's dress. The answer lies amongst those moving figures in
the background. They have brought danger both to him and

(11:20):
to her. The interests of the thing fascinated me. I
thought no more of its relation to my own nerves.
But I stared and stared, as if in the theater.
But I could get no further. The mist thinned. There
were tumultuous movements in which all the figures were vaguely concerned.
Than the mirror was clear once more. The doctor says,
I must drop work for a day, and I can

(11:41):
afford to do so, for I have made good progress lately.
It is quite evident that the visions depend entirely upon
my own nervous state. For I sat in front of
the mirror for an hour to night with no result.
Whatever my soothing days chase them away. I wonder whether
I shall ever penetrate what they all mean. I examined
the mirror this evening under a good light, and besides

(12:01):
the mysterious inscription sank ex Pal, I was able to
discern some signs or heraldic marks, very faintly visible upon
the silver. They must be very ancient, as they are
almost obliterated. So far as I could make out, there
were three spearheads, two above and one below. I will
show them to the doctor when he calls tomorrow, January fourteen.

(12:23):
Feel perfectly well again, and I intend that nothing else
shall stop me until my task is finished. The doctor
was shown the marks on the mirror and agreed that
they were armorial bearings. He is deeply interested in all
that I have told him, and cross questioned me closely
on the details. It amuses me to notice how he
is torn in two by conflicting desires, the one that
his patient should lose his symptoms, the other that the medium,

(12:45):
for so he regards me, should solve this mystery of
the past. He advised continued rest, but did not oppose
me too violently when I declared that such a thing
was out of the question until the ten remaining ledgers
have been checked. January seventeen. For three nights, I have
had no experiences. My day of rest is borne fruit.
Only a quarter of my task is left. But I

(13:06):
must make a forted march. For the lawyers are clamoring
for their material. I will give them enough, and to
spare I have him fast on the hundred counts. When
they realize what a slippery, cunning rascally is, I should
gain some credit from the case. False trading accounts, false
balance sheets, dividends drawn from capital losses written down as prophets,
suppression of working expenses, manipulation of petty cash. It is

(13:28):
a fine record. January eighteenth. Headaches, nervous twitches, mistiness, fullness,
of the temples. All the premonitions of trouble, and the
trouble came sure enough. And yet my real sorrow is
not so much that the vision should come, as that
it should cease before all is revealed. But I saw
more to night. The crouching man was as visible as

(13:50):
a lady whose gown he clutched. He is a swarthy
little fellow with a black pointed beard. He has a
loose scown of damask trimmed with fur. The prevailing tints
of his dress are red. What a fright the fellow
is in, To be sure, he cowers and shivers and
glares back over his shoulder. There is a small knife
in his other hand, but he is far too tremulous

(14:12):
and cowed to use it. Dimly, now I begin to
see the figures in the background, fierce faces, bearded and
dark shaped themselves. Out of the mist, there is one
terrible creature, a skeleton of a man, with hollow cheeks
and eyes sunk in his head. He also has a
knife in his hand. On the right of the woman
stands a tall man, very young, with flaxen hair, his

(14:33):
face sullen and dour. The beautiful woman looks up at
them in appeal. So does the man on the ground.
This youth seems to be the arbiter of their fate.
The crouching man draws closer and hides himself from the
woman's skirts. The tall youth bends and tries to drag
her away from him. So much I saw last night
before the mere cleared shall I never know what it

(14:53):
leads to and whence it comes. It is not a
mere imagination, of that, I am very sure somewhat some
time this scene has been acted, and this old mirrors
reflected it. But when where January twenty My work draws
to a close, and it is time. I feel tenseness
within my brain, a sense of intolerable strain, which warns

(15:16):
me that something must give. I have worked myself to
the limit, but tonight should be the last night. With
a supreme effort, I should finish the final ledger and
complete the case before I rise from my chair. I
will do it. I will. February seventh, I did, My God,
what an experience. I hardly know if I am strong

(15:37):
enough yet to set it down. Help me explain in
the first instance, that I am writing this in doctor
Sinclair's private hospital. Some three weeks after the last entry
in my diary, on the night of January twentieth, my
nervous system finally gave way, and I remember nothing afterwards
until I found myself three days ago, and this home
of rest, and I can rest with a good conscience.

(15:57):
My work was done before I went under. My figure
are all in the solicitor's hands. The hunt is over.
And now I must describe that last night I had
sworn to finish my work, and so intently did I
stick to it, though my head was bursting, that I
would never look up until the last calm had been added.
And yet it was fine self restraint. For all the
time I knew that wonderful things were happening in the mirror.

(16:19):
Every nerve in my body told me so. If I
looked up, there was an end of my work. So
I did not look up until I was all finished. Then,
when at last, with throbbing temples, I threw down my
pen and raised my eyes, what a sight there was.
The mirror and its silver frame was like a stage
brilliantly lit, in which a drama was in progress. There

(16:39):
was no mist Now the oppression of my own nerves
had brought this amazing clarity, Every feature, every movement, was
as clear cut as in life. To think that I,
a tired accountant, the most prosaic of mankind, with the
account books of a swindling bankrupt before me, should be
chosen of all the human race to look upon the scene.
It was the same scene, in the same figures, but

(17:01):
the drama had advanced stage. The tall young man was
holding the woman in his arms. She strained away from
him and looked up at him with loathing in her face.
They had torn the crouching man away from his hold
upon the skirt of her dress. A dozen of them
were round him, savage men, bearded men. They hacked at
them with knives, all seemed to strike him together. Their

(17:21):
arms rose and fell. The blood did not flow from him,
it squirted. His red dress was dabbled in it. He
threw himself this way and that, purple upon crimson, like
an over ripe plum. Still they hacked, and still a
jets shot from him. It was horrible, horrible. They dragged
him kicking to the door. The woman looked over her

(17:41):
shoulder at him, and her mouth gaped. I heard nothing,
but I knew that she was screaming. And then whether
it was this nerve racking vision before me, or whether
my task finished. All the overwork of the past weeks
came in one crushing weight upon me. The room danced
round me, the floor seemed to sink away beneath my feet,
and I remembered no more. In the early morning, my

(18:02):
landlady found me stretched senseless before the silver mirror. But
I knew nothing myself until three days ago. I woke
up in deep peace of the doctor's nursing home February nine.
Only to day have I told Doctor Sinclair my full experience.
He had not allowed me to speak of such matters before.
He listened with an absorbed interest. You don't identify this

(18:23):
with any well known scene in history, he asked, with
suspicion in his eyes. I assured him that I knew
nothing of history. Have you no idea whence that mirror came?
And to whom it once belonged? He continued, Have you,
I asked for? He spoke with meaning. It's incredible, said he,
And yet how else can one explain it? The scenes
which you described before suggested it, but now it has

(18:45):
gone beyond all range of coincidence. I will bring you
some notes in the evening. Later he has just left me.
Let me set down his words as closely as I
can recall them. He began by laying several musty volumes
upon my bed, as you can consult at your leisure,
said he, I have some notes here which you can confirm.

(19:05):
There is no doubt that what you have seen is
the murder of Rizzio by the Scottish nobles in the
presence of Mary, which occurred in March fifteen sixty six.
Your description of the woman is accurate. The high forehead
and heavy eyelids, combined with great beauty, could hardly apply
two women. The tall young man was her husband, Darnley.
Rizzio says the chronicle was dressed in a loose dressing

(19:26):
gown of furred damask, with a hose of russet velvet.
With one hand he clutched Mary's gown. With the other
he held a dagger. Your fierce, hollow eyed man was Rufin,
who was new risen from a bed of sickness. Every
detail is exact. But why to me, I asked, in bewilderment,
Why of all the human race to me? Because you

(19:46):
were in the fit mental state to receive the impression
because you chanced to own the mirror which gave the
impression the mere you think then that it was Mary's mere,
that it stood in the room where this deed was done,
and convinced that it was Mary's mir she had been
Queen of France, her personal property would be stamped with
the royal arms. What you took to be three spearheads

(20:07):
were really the lilies of France, and the inscription sank
ex pal who can expand it into Saint de Crisius Pallatium.
Some one has made a note upon the mirror as
to whence it came from. It was the Palace of
the Holy Cross, holy Rood, I cried, exactly your mirror
came from holy Rood. You have had one very singular

(20:29):
experience and have escaped. I trust that you will never
put yourself in the way of having such another. End
of the Silver Mirror by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle