In these lodgings, then, Madame R,** is again taken ill with a return, though in a greatly mitigated form, of the same symptoms from which she had previously suffered at Bognor. The attack, however, though less violent in its immediate effects, was succeeded at regular intervals of about a fortnight by others of a precisely similar character. And here we arrive at what is at once the most significant, the most extraordinary, and the most questionable of the evidence we have been able to collect.
It appears, then, that upon a night in August, a young man of the name of Aldridge, who, as a matter of special favour, had been taken into the house since the arrival of the Baron (VII.), saw Madame R** leave her bedroom, and, apparently in her sleep, walk down the stairs in the dark to the lower part of the house. The room in which the Baron slept was next to hers, and on the wall of that room, projected by the night-lamp burning on the table, the young man saw what seemed to be the shadow of a man watching Madame R** as she went by. He looked again and the shadow was gone--so rapidly that at first he could scarcely believe his eyes, and was only, after consideration, satisfied that it really had been there. He went down to the room, but the Baron was asleep. He told him what had happened to Madame R**, and he at once followed her. Young Aldridge watched him until he had descended the kitchen-stairs and returned, followed closely by the sleep-walker. He then went back to his room, to which the Baron shortly afterwards came to thank him for his warning, and to tell him that, in some freak of slumber, Madame R** _had visited the kitchen_.
So far the story is simple enough. There is nothing extraordinary in a sick woman of exciteable nerves taking a sudden fit of somnambulism, and walking down even into the kitchen of a house that was not her own. The Baron's conduct--in all respects but that of the watching shadow --was precisely that which, from a sensible and affectionate husband, might most naturally have been expected. Nor is it very difficult, even setting aside all idea of malice, to set down the shadow portion of the story to a mere freak of imagination on the part of the young man who, though "not drunk," was nevertheless on his own admission, "perhaps a little excited," and who had been "drinking a good deal of beer and shandy-gaff." But the evidence does not end here.