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We were quite agreed as to that. To a poor curate with even one of the best of hard-working wives and daily heartrending appeals from a swarm of suffering poor, fifty pounds just before Christmas, was, indeed, a windfall in these hard times. The cause of our surprise is easily stated. Ethelwolf Fice, a friend of my student days, had been virtually lost to me for several years. The last that I had heard of him was that he had married, under what were commonly believed to be very singular circumstances, that the lady herself was very rich and many years his senior, and that only a short time before this letter, or rather budget, reached us, something, we hardly knew what, of a very tragic, and, some said, a very scandalous character, had occurred at the house of my friend. There now came to us the Bank of England note, a packet of MS., and the subjoined singular letter:
I did say "yes" and subsequently arranged a very confused mass of papers, old letters and memoranda, into the form of the following biographies to which this brief explanation must serve as a Prologue. CHAPTER I.A MYSTERIOUS CHILDHOOD.
My mother was widowed when I was about ten years old, and so intense and in the issue, unreasoning was her grief at the sudden death of my father, that she lived, with me and one ancient, eccentric servant, in an old-fashioned half timber-built house at Hampstead in a state of almost monastic seclusion. I was what is called by some persons a very good child, merely because I preferred sitting about in odd corners or under tables with books and pictures, to anything else that offered itself in the narrow and painfully monotonous range of our ordinary daily life, and I remember once thinking how much I must have resembled some of the Thibetian sages who remain cross-legged and with eyes fixed in utter abstraction on the ground, until at last they became absorbed in a lazy kind of contemplative ecstasy. My mother — peace be with her now — had peculiar, and even extraordinary ideas as to education, and for one thing declared that she would never send me to school for fear I should get to care for others more than for herself! Speaking, indeed, from after knowledge, I believe that she was one of that numerous body of men and women in this world of ours, who are absolutely mad on some one particular head, but otherwise so perfectly sane that, in a legal sense, it is quite impossible to pronounce them to be the lunatics they are. Well, my mother feeling, I suppose, that some apology for a school was necessary, entrusted me as an irregular self-willed kind of day scholar (when I chose) to a local clergyman, who was instructed to train me (as I afterwards discovered) for nothing in particular, unless a sort of refined idleness can be justly considered as an educational bourne. We lived all this time in a very strange manner, and virtually were without friends, as my mother had mortally offended all her relatives, having, among other causes of offence, insinuated that she, and she alone, had a proper idea of what real mourning meant, which was a perpetual course of sackcloth and ashes, and of very lugubrious devotional readings, as far as she was concerned, and for one thing, the hanging up for over a year of black blinds and black window curtains, which she said was the very least that was due to the memory of my father, who had been, if I am rightly informed, a particularly jovial man, who seems to have been attracted to my mother much on the same principle that induced Mark Tapley to court all kinds of trouble for the purpose of repressing a too abundant flow of spirits, and for the express purpose of proving that all the kind friends, who said that a woman like my mother would never do for him, were utterly foolish and absurd. Among our neighbours, however, we, or rather I, made friends with an old gentleman whose garden was next to ours, and who took great and flattering notice of me, as old gentlemen of leisure will sometimes do in the case of children, who are always most popular with the old. Now it happened that I was, and had long been, a great and, for a child, an extraordinary reader. We possessed a very large library, as it happened that two or three large collections made by members of his family had been bequeathed to my father, and as my mother's great aim was rather to keep me under the same roof with herself than to devote very much of her attention to my training, she was content to let me have the run of this ocean of books, finding that, to use her own phrase, it kept me out of mischief, and particularly, that it prevented me from being much with others, some of whom she insanely dreaded I might learn to love better than herself! I remember during one period of some months, when from some cause I had ceased to attend my clerical tutor, that a very passion for reading came upon me. I rose early in the morning and read on until at last exhausted nature drove me to bed. For me at this period the home affections, as others understood them, scarcely existed — the sentiments, the softer and sweeter moralities of life were without my personal experience, but, nevertheless, I had the capacity and the longing for their enjoyment in full force. At this period Poetry, History, Fiction, and even Philosophy, yielded up to me some of their richest stores. Frequently I became so absorbed that a piece or two of bread was all I cared to take by way of dinner, and, indeed, unless I could not possibly help it, I strove hard, and generally successfully, not to be re-called to what was to me a blank and narrow world. As you, my friend, know well, with me, the annals of Bibliography record not a few instances of men who have passed entire lives among books, becoming, so to speak, "walking libraries" themselves, and under other conditions it is quite likely that I might have fallen into that, to my better reason, miserable state; but I was drawn out of myself by our neighbour, who, discovering that I had a preternatural memory for all I read (which was the case then), and that I had an immense fund of anecdote — I knew the Percy Collection very nearly by heart — soon got in the way of asking me in to tea with him and his only daughter in a very pretty creeper-covered summer-house embosomed among sweet lilacs and golden laburnums. There I was regaled with cakes and fruit, and set to "spout" all kinds of literary miscellanea, to the great delight of our neighbour, who used often to declare that he had never read a book through in all his life, but that he had never enjoyed a play half so much as he did to set me pouring forth the results of my amazing reading, which — as was naturally the case with a boy, — had lain up to then almost exclusively among the most popular and most generally interesting books that I could lay hold of. Such, then, was my life; Mr. Dade, my clerical tutor — at irregular periods — Mr. Spink, our amiable neighbour and his daughter Matilda, constituted at this period the principal elements of my human world outside my mother, whose mourning widowhood had now assumed quite a conventual severity. Things went or drifted on thus with but little variety, until, quite suddenly, Mr. Spink died, leaving his only daughter, Matilda, the house they lived in, and, as I heard, a very large amount of property unclogged by any condition whatever; and very soon after, there came that double catastrophe which at last woke me out of my stagnant, day-dreaming, unnatural life. My mother was one dreadful morning found dead in her bed, and it was then discovered that the lease of the house we lived in was nearly out, and that almost all our property was gone! Incredible as it may seem, the fact was that my mother had been for years living on the principal of the provision my father had made for his wife and child, and when outstanding debts were satisfied, there was positively nothing left! It was Matilda who told me how things really were; it was she who extricated my affairs from the fearful confusion in which my mother's death left them; and it was she, finally, who gave me an asylum in her house until, as she phrased it, "something could be done." CHAPTER II.A STEP TOWARDS FATALITY.
The sudden and astounding disclosure of the utter ruin that had overtaken our fortunes entirely blighted all my hopes in regard to this my first attachment, and I soon understood that Florence — yes, that was her name, it is nothing to me now — was entirely lost to me. Troubles sharpen the minds of the young as nothing else in the world can, and it was not long before I perceived that Matilda, although many years older than I, was by no means in her feelings towards me the elder sister I had always supposed her to be. I must hasten on my narrative here, and it will suffice to say that as the immediate result of this startling discovery, I left her precipitately, and not knowing where else to go in what was to me an inexpressible trouble, applied to Mr. Dade, my old tutor. He gave me a very cool reception, and I contemplated leaving him too, and descending on the world, — London, I suppose it was to be — with a few shillings only in my pocket, when suddenly his whole manner changed, and he declared, in a most effusive manner, that he felt towards me as a father, having no child of his own, that he would educate me for the Church, and send me to college! It was not in human nature to reject such practical benevolence as this, and yet even then, inexperienced as I was in the ways of men, I found that even the warmest and sincerest gratitude was of little avail in compelling a sincere regard for the man himself, notwithstanding the incontrovertible fact that he had evinced towards me such true and disinterested kindness. Richard Dade (I hate to call him the "Reverend," you will know why later on) was a square-faced, square-bodied, bulky man, with elephantine legs, and very large flat feet. Hair dry as dust, entirely without any curl or wave, and the color of hay with all the goodness washed out, overhung keen piercing gray eyes, an Oliver Cromwell nose, and a coarse, thick-lipped mouth. His ordinary tone of voice was pitched in a key so high that people to whom he addressed himself were apt to turn in order to ascertain whether he was not speaking to somebody else a considerable distance off. Once a week or so, Mr. Dade required me to visit the most obscure bookstalls for the purpose of buying up old sermons at a few pence per volume. He had then one room full, and another fast filling with these, for the greater parts, utterly unreadable works. "You see, Ethelwolf," he explained, "they are my dictionaries, as it were. Nobody in these days is really original, and I infuse an eloquent spirit of my own into the musty body of our neglected Divinity. I expect from you two sermons a week, and mind that you mix the extracts well up and produce a good smooth compound of the whole." Admiring this plan little, and approving of it still less, it was soon apparent to me that Mr. Dade could not have fulfilled his ministerial functions without resorting to some such method. Almost hourly I discovered in him some special unfitness for his holy office, but the frequent blunt and perfectly unembarrassed confessions he made, seemingly with a covert sense of keen enjoyment of his own shortcomings, rendered him almost respectable, when, had he attempted a vulgar hypocrisy, he must have become an object of the most utter contempt. So true is it that it is always very difficult to think ill of any person who is perfectly frank towards you. I well remember the first time I accompanied him on a visiting round among the very poor of the parish. I recollect particularly entering the room of two feeble old women long past work, but not without that commendable pride as it seems to me, that must still find some transparent means for making a show of concealing the worst ugliness of slow starvation, from strangers, at all events. Mr. Dade, after reading sundry texts, declaring that Heaven belongs to the Poor, and is their certain heritage, to make up for all the privations on earth — a debtor and creditor form of Orthodox Theology in which he was a great proficient, — catechised them a good deal, and finally kneeled down and prayed in a very powerful manner for the salvation of their souls. These fervent and vigorous ejaculations were not at all to my taste, and I thought of the picture that wise old Chaucer painted so well of the true Christian Priest, and there rose to the tip of my tongue the well-known and suggestive line, "First he wrought, and afterwards he taught." Mr. Dade, after accepting the blessings of the poor old creatures, rather clumsily invoked on his head, coolly walked off; a proceeding I mutely rebuked by leaving half-a-crown behind. He had noticed the act, and in the street, observed: "You'll soon get sick of that kind of thing." "Some sicknesses are better far than some forms of health," was my sententious reply. We came just then to the butcher's where Mr. Dade dealt, and he tried (as I inwardly expressed it) to fill the whole shop with his bulky person as he did in a manner with his important pompous voice. Having ascertained that sweetbreads were five shillings each, he ordered two, and was quite good-humoured for the rest of our walk. But what of Mr. Dade's relatives, friends, acquaintances, and general society? The first, — to employ his own ambitious language, — were severed from him by five counties and a spitzbergen of coldness, the rest were included among such persons as I met at the Vicarage. Half a dozen silly women made him flattering morning calls; to them a surgeon, a wine merchant, an ex-cinnamon planter from Ceylon, a third-rate landscape painter, and a rich builder must be added. This goodly company came to dinner once a week, and as several of them regularly asked Mr. Dade back to their own houses, he could afford to entertain them well. But he was now winning a real celebrity as an eloquent preacher, and I heard, with secret pleasure, the compliments paid him on festive occasions. Do not imagine that at these times there was any lack of religious form. Grace was duly said, and at ten o'clock at night, the servants entered, when all knelt, while Mr. Dade prayed full five minutes, after previously reading aloud one of the most interesting of the Old Testament narratives. But the conversation before and after this family worship, always produced in me that feeling with which reverent minds recoil from the profane jests that rendered the famous miracle plays acceptable to a depraved populace. As Mr. Dade never wrote one word of his sermons now, the self possession with which he received all tributes to the greatness of his intellectual powers, and the gusto with which he retailed them to me was marvellous. "I shouldn't wonder," he remarked once, "if you composed a decent sermon yourself in time." And he often observed: "What could you do if I didn't give you the heads, eh?" He did, indeed, generally furnish such a sketch of his sermons as — "Get a good verse out of Ezekiel; stick in a vivid picture of something very sublime; let a few sentences run into natural blank verse, and wind up with anything you can think of in the shooting star way." Still, I must confess that he directed my theological studies wisely, and made encouraging references to my prospective ordination whenever I evinced a more than usual degree of impatience or disgust at his often unreasonable demands. And during all this time I remained in my innermost self very wretched indeed, — a conventional and perfectly common-place expression that, you say, — but it is not really so to me, and even at this distance of time, those plain words, like half-a-dozen of the roughest boards when forming a coffin, become pathetic. CHAPTER III.MY FIRST SERMON.
Well, you know that considerable success attended my short career at college. Ah, you do not know how I felt in those days! I was full of a deep but suppressed exultation, I had succeeded, so I fondly fancied and so vanity whispered, in marking out a way of my own at last, besides, as I secretly argued, if Dade were not a really good man, how much more remarkable was it he should have been attracted by my personal qualities in such a manner as to constrain him to advance my interests? Surely — I do not shrink now from even this confession — I said to myself in those triumphant days of academic triumph, I must be something more than the common clay of the commonplace and conventional multitude I see swarming around, and to have thus impressed a man like my adoptive father is, indeed, an achievement. Egotism had at this period taken a thorough hold of my whole nature, and I was, although I did not guess such a thing could be, saturated with a sublime spirit of self-conceit. I was at this period entirely given up to a strange and most unhealthy species of self-laudation and nothing better represented, perhaps, my own psychological state than the significant lines in the New Timon of the late Lord Lytton:
Alas! I had not learned what an appalling experience has since taught me, that there is no worse canker of the inner life than selfishness and self-sufficiency. At last the time for the greatest triumph that had yet been mine arrived. I preached my first sermon. I have never forgotten that particular discourse, because when I look back at the proud spirit of self-sufficiency in which it was conceived, and when I think of the splendid things I said that Christians could and should do, and reflect on what I was soon to be and on all I was soon to know, I feel humiliated to the dust. And yet making full allowance for all my vain-glorious boastfulness and for my utter ignorance of my own weakness, there remain of that particular utterance of mine some shreds of truth and some gleams of light that may serve me even now. So true is it that much as men of forty years and more, may sneer, a boy's enthusiasm, be he ever so egotistical and morbid, if only it be enthusiasm is something not to be reproduced in later life, unless by one in a million. My initial attempt drew forth some comment; but what I remember best of all, is the remark made by Dade himself, who gravely observed: "Ah, Ethelwolf, they all say your style is modelled on mine, quite a reflex in fact, but, my boy, beware of imitation!" CHAPTER IV.STRUCK DOWN.
You, my friend, knew this well — and the years have not altered me in this particular. One evening I was wandering about — sometimes in, and sometimes just outside, the woods — and pursuing, in the fast fading twilight, a very tortuous kind of sylvan alley, when I was suddenly blinded and, indeed, half smothered by a shower of leaves and dust flung right into my face and I received, at the same time, such a terrible blow between the right knee and ankle that I fell like a log and, just as I raised my arm, that too, was struck such a crushing blow on the elbow that I became immediately unconscious with the shock and excruciating pain. I remember no more, until I found myself in a bed, strange and yet familiar, slowly recovering from the effects of delirium, and fancying myself surrounded by singing flowers — at least, I dimly saw many beautiful flowers about me, and strains of wild music vibrated in my ears. A scented rain fell refreshingly cool upon my still fevered face, and a voice from behind the bed-curtains, said: "Do you still imagine yourself a narcissus bulb, and are you coming into blossom to reward my tender care? The tone, familiar and yet strange, was puzzling; was it really her voice, changed by suffering till it resembled one whose last words of bitterness and anger had driven me forth to enter alone the wastes of life? The arm that should have solved this doubt, by pulling back the screening curtain, lay powerless, and feeling too weak to turn, I uttered the name that once would, I fondly believed, rule my heart's destiny. "Florence!" "I deserve better thanks than the utterance of that name." "Matilda!" "Ay, you know me now! Last week I was your pleasant breathing lily. I suppose you'll gather that flower of consolation to throw it away. Flowers are bad in sick rooms." "How came I here? "Three weeks ago, I found you lying in the wood, wounded and senseless, and have nursed you since." "Why didn't you send me home to Mr. Dade's?" Some words burst from her lips, in an unintelligible cry of passion, and set my temples throbbing so painfully, that I murmured, in the invalid's unreflecting egotism: "You have made my head ache dreadfully." "Forgive me," she answered, meekly; adding, "try and sleep." I heard her cross the room, and immediately the plaintive melody of my fever-dreams sounded again mysterious and soothing. "Whence is it?" "From an Æolian harp; I thought you liked it," and she stopped abruptly, and I murmured: "Let me see your face." "Ethelwolf! I cannot bear this question and answer," she cried, with all her late impetuosity. "For more than four years, I have gazed on your face unseen, heard your words unremembered. We had been as fire and water, and might not meet in peace. I could not — Ethelwolf — I cannot, be your friend. A presentiment that you were in peril, a sudden and irresistible yearning towards the spot where once we walked together, sent me at evening to the wood — and there I found and rescued you. But I am sick at heart and tortured in mind. Be my physician. Obedience, devotion — sympathy with your benevolence — means to make it widely useful — all this is the fee I offer. You fled from me in the fiery moment of my despair — but you cannot fly now in the hour of my supplication. My affection is as a strong tree — it has flourished in the clay of coldness; it has thriven beneath the frown of neglect. Were it the rose or the lily of woman's common love, pride had woven its every fibre into a cord to strangle me, ere I had spoken thus!" Gratitude for the life preserved, and pity at this piteous revelation of a self-wounded nature, won from me all I had to give — compassion. In my utter helplessness it was evidently useless, and might be dangerous to wrestle with that passionate spirit, now it had cast out each principle of self-restraint, and broken down barriers strong to most as death. "Matilda," I said, simply; "if it be within my power to comfort you, ask and receive, but I can never love again. May I look at you, now?" She advanced so slowly that her head rose inch by inch, above the white swell of the counterpane. When the pale forehead, the eager, pleading eyes — sunk in dark ringed hollows — were visible, I said, inwardly: "How she has suffered!" But, when the firm set mouth, the resolute chin, came also into view, the pathos of her other features, hardened and almost disappeared in their determined expression — as softness would leave a rose, could you watch its petals petrify into a piece of sculpture. It was thus for an instant only, she smiled and said: "You have made me happy, and must sleep." She turned, and gradually set behind my horizon of bed-clothes. Nothing can better illustrate the completeness of my prostration, than the simple fact that after her departure I vainly strove to think on all that had just happened till the futile attempt sent me off into a sound sleep. That momentous events the intellect may be too feeble to understand at the time of their occurrence, will yet weigh down the spirit and grieve the heart, as much as if one's reason had already realized them, I firmly believe from my own experience. For the next few days all around passed shadow-like, and the least endeavour to think produced too great an agony to be persisted in. I had a strange perception, an aching sense of some strong will subduing me to itself, and destroying that independence I had striven so hard to win. When perfect consciousness returned, the first object that met my eyes was Matilda's head rising rock-like, above the wave line of the counterpane. A surge of returning memory broke the painless calm — so sweet to the invalid — into which I woke, and recollecting at once her late passion and my promise, I said: "Matilda!" The rock revolved into a smiling face, and answered: "You will soon be well now, and shall have all your book-dust blown away by sea breezes." "I am too poor for such luxuries."
Grasping the massive pillar of the bedstead, and
actually moving it several inches, as though
"Is it that you abhor me — is it that you take an unmanly delight in making me degrade myself, as woman, by confessing that without you my life is a blank? You only can give it the beauty of form, and that deterrent to despair — variety — without you it is a ghastly blank — do you wish," she added, with a scream, "that it should become a shroud?" "Matilda, this is raving. It cannot produce an effect on the reasonable." "It cannot?" she interrupted, with an icy sharpness of tone that made me shudder, and continuing with an intense earnestness of utterance that was impressive: "Did you — will you ever break your word?" " No." "I believe that. Ethelwolf, the five years we have been separated — the five years you have forgotten me in, must be forgotten still. Henceforth, I have no secrets from you — my husband!" I made a futile effort to rise, on which she commented with a smile, resuming: "You possess great abilities, are a man now, and have some world-experience. But, oh! how ignorant you are of the human heart! How unconscious that feeling alone may be stronger than law, reason, and death. Make me your wife, and I shall be changed, preserved from horror in this — from doom in the next world — for I have yet a heart. Convince me that you are inflexible in hating me — once do that — and it must harden into a stone that will crush us both. I wrestle, as I have wrestled long, with your abhorrence to overthrow — to kill it — I am not mad — if you died under my hand, no jury would acquit me as insane!" The syllabic distinctness, the terrible force of her words was less awful than the agonized determination of her looks. "I never hated you, Matilda." "Promise," she interrupted, sternly, "that the first day you can cross this threshold, you will make me your wife — promise for your earthly — for my eternal good!" "I promise, but for your sake only." She gazed at me some minutes in silence, and then slowly disappeared. Utterly exhausted by this terrible interview, I lay awhile half stupid. In phantasy, I read on the ceiling some old words of Matilda's, never remembered before: "When men are love-crossed," she said, "they make brides of business. It is quite different with women who never love intellectually. The first resemble trees that, when cut down, lose indeed their freshness and beauty, but have a continued and useful existence as timber; the last are flowers, and can be nothing else. No man," she added, ever broke his heart for love, unless it was greatly more capacious than his intellect. When a man does die broken-hearted, it is always for something concerning his mind too." Such remarks may be mere platitudes, but they are full of significance now, as having been hers. From a similar cause most are anxious to know the familiar habits of famous men and women, and those who influence, our lives are to us what the statesman and the general are to the world at large. Then — as we sometimes discover, in what seemed a shapeless mass of clouds, the most symmetrical outlines — in the dark facts environing me, I saw a moral meaning, which, if only fancied on my part, was none the less a comfort then. That I should be struck down by an unknown hand, and found by Matilda, when my helplessness offered her terrible affection an opportunity nothing else could give, appeared so far removed from the dominion of chance, and bordering so closely on design, that if not providential, it was certainly inexplicable. After all, I reflected, as the cause, though innocently so — of her misery, I ought not to hesitate about alleviating it, if possible. Alone in the world, what can I do better than tenderly "minister to a mind diseased?" Presently I fell asleep, soothed by the spiritual music of these nine words, more precious, perhaps, than all that the nine muses ever whispered to Heathen bard —
When I again woke, Matilda sat beside the bed, no trace of her late agitation appearing in the serenity of her pleasant features. Yesterday she wore a Gorgon face of stone, now it existed still, I instinctively felt, but it existed under the softening mask of rose-leaves, that a chance breath, at any moment, might disperse. CHAPTER V.I MARRY.
When I spoke after a pause, she frequently started, and to me at that time she was like a pitch dark room full of fragile articles, where one would fear to move lest involuntary mischief resulted. And things remained thus until the day when Mr. Dade made Matilda wife. In entering married life, I entered a Castle of Indolence. Matilda, to my surprise, considering the passion she could now exhibit, was fond of petty detail, and began at once to prescribe the exact manner in which I should spend each day. This was at first amusing, then irksome, and at last intolerable. "I shall allow you two pounds a week for private charities, and a clear Monday to bestow them in. Every other day you must be mine alone." But I thought it proper to earn the money expended thus, and suggested a paid curacy. "You're a fool!" was her rough reply; "it suits me to spend my money thus; take it, and be thankful." If I reasoned against such arbitrary rules, she made jests, and often good ones, of every word I uttered, or plied me with endearments. Constant supplies of new books, engravings and maps, with all the periodicals of the day, loaded our library shelves and table, and would alone have employed my entire time in a manner most delightful to my intellectual tastes and quiet habits. That I had no desire for society was natural enough. An almost exclusive commune with those great masters who Rule our spirits from their urns, rendered me too apt to say of most people's talk — "How would it look printed?" The almost invariable answer, "Rubbish," made me foolishly resolve to remain a solitary scholar. Guided by an originally good taste, I had so stored my memory with the flowers and gems of thought that I could never take the grass and stones of common life just as they were. I was always finding, and wondering others did not find as well, psalms in the former, and sermons in the latter. But Matilda had many peculiarities, of which a few must be particularized. She appeared to hate solitude. While I was deep in the most abstruse work she perched on my chair behind, read over my shoulder, and, sometimes, in a sensible mood, even shared my literary pleasures and opinions. More frequently, however, she made game of both, and, as it appeared, stimulated by my irritation to extravagantly high spirits, pelted me with expensive books, to their damage, and, occasionally, to my hurt. She seemed at such times under a dread necessity of exhausting thus some powerful and secret passion that would express itself while leaving her to choose what that expression should be. But this is an after thought of mine. If she woke in the night, and this was often the case, she always roused me too, and insisted on discussing some recondite question, or required me to entertain her with ludicrous tales. Very cautious was I in my phraseology. Any chance remark that only ingenuity itself could construe or contort into a hint that first was in the least superior to second love, was sure to cause an angry scene. Alas! how little did I know! One day, I remember, in an idle mood I turned off a few lines to conciliate this dangerous temper, and never had poet such a reward as Matilda gave me in her ringing declamation after I had myself read them. Alas! those lines, never to be forgotten by me, were then but a piece of sentimental trifling. Since, however, with how earnest a meaning, with how dread a realism, have they been fraught!
CHAPTER VI.I CANNOT LOVE HER.
Between my wife and Mr. Dade there was a sympathetic something incomprehensible to me. Much of his general conversation had, I fancied, a particular meaning she alone understood. He talked, too, of making investments for her in this and that bank, or mine and of other matters relating to Mammon in a tone most galling to any husband whose wife, like mine, kept him completely ignorant of her pecuniary affairs. To Matilda, Mr. Dade was agreeable and free, but, reversing altogether our former familiar relations, to me reserved and only ordinarily polite. Our Sundays were especially miserable. My wife absolutely refused to accompany me to church. Whenever I spoke of religion, she grew sleepy, temporarily ill, or found some domestic employment to call her away. There was already cause enough for regretting a marriage that had been brought about by passion on one side and pity on the other. In no presumptuous spirit I began to regard her as my particular cross, and still hoping to change her nature, strove to endure its present vagaries patiently. But the patience I showed towards my wife, made me daily less forbearing to others. Who is without that weakness of human nature which calculates slily how far the practice of any extraordinary virtue furnishes immunity for failings — and, alas! sometimes vices. "It is most improper," I warmly urged, "to entrust your business matters to Dade, either I or a solicitor —–" "Did you marry me for my money? A reproachful look was my only answer, but as I turned to leave the room, my wife flung herself at my feet, crying: "Forgive me! If you knew how I revered — how I adored you, Ethelwolf, you would not be an everlasting frost to my flowering affection. Your coldness towards me is piling a glacier of ruin above us both. Oh! that I dared trust to your heart — that I might throw myself and all my miseries upon your bosom. Oh! my husband, if you would but love me!" Raising her tenderly from the floor, I said: "You should conquer your temper, Matilda, it makes you miserable within yourself and most unjust to me. Because I think as your husband, because I always remember you are my wife, I cannot bear that another should possess your confidence, and usurp my prerogative." But I paused, awed by her aspect. She stood motionless with a face ghastly white, lips compressed into a hard, bloodless line, and eyes fixed on mine with intense eagerness. This very quiet made me watch her as the seaman watches the pale cloud of the squall which will presently burst in fury above him. An instinct whispered that even now her moral being was writhing in the coil of some serpent passion, and I said bitterly: "Matilda! Matilda! Prosperity seems to bring you what a tropical climate qualifies its advantages with — plagues and storms. Where ordinary women are vexed, you appear tortured; a great writer calls temper 'a sinew of the soul,' and says that those entirely without it are morally maimed, but in you, Matilda, it may easily become sin." "It may," she answered very softly, and stole from the room. For the first time I fully recognised that most terrible of all foes to the gentler virtues — the stubborn perversity of a strong wilful nature. The most subtle sophism of a subtle intellect can be vanquished by a child — and truth; but where the passions are the only counsels, angels plead in vain. "I cannot love her!" Again I reflected in anguish on all the visionary good my influence was to have worked in her character. I had, indeed, the influence, but it resembled that of the wind over the desert sand, which blows it thither and thither, though it cannot fertilise one grain into a fruitful atom. The very simile increased my sorrow, for it contrasted too strongly with that peaceful, pure, inner life that woman's should always be. A life guarded from evil by its spotlessness, as the daisy's golden heart is from night's shadow by its white fringe, and quiet in its course, as that of the same little flower, when its lot is cast among untrodden grass. Distracted by my wife's general behaviour, I began to feel perfectly vindictive towards Mr. Dade. My reflective, and now, perhaps, unsocial disposition, induced me to lay many ingenious plans for luring him on to take some outrageous liberty that might enable me to render his discomfiture signal and his shame complete. But who succeeds in forcing a general conversation to that particular crisis which only will permit the premeditated pun — or what young lady ever satisfied Vanity's appetite by fishing for a compliment? Something unforeseen always spoiled the opportunity as soon as made. Pertinaciously anxious to make "an occasion" of my first rebuke to Dade, the constant failure of every little scheme for bringing our dangerous relations to an issue, produced a series of constant irritations that at last accumulated into hatred towards my wife's friend, which then I had certainly no reason to justify. The following morning at breakfast, determined to try the efficacy of mild expostulation, I said: "Matty, this idle life is killing the best part of me. Either let me resume my proper avocation — employ myself in your affairs, or let us cultivate a little society. It is no more right for married than for single people to live alone. You and I are passing into the blank of an aimless, unsympathetic and selfish existence — just like plants kept in the dark. And Dade, the only human being admitted to our table, is the one ugly knot that splits what might be the even grain of our intercourse." "Well, Ethelwolf, to answer you in your own way, look at that delicate creeper there, twining in and out of my wire stand. Nothing but patience itself could unwind those tendrils without tearing them into pieces; so it is with many of our relations in life. We are bound by threads as frail and as tender, often to one more inflexible by far than that iron frame. Abrupt disunion is frequently as ruinous to us, as your heavy man's hand would be to those trembling filaments." Never had she spoken so sadly or so gently before on this most painful subject. With a species of remorse at reflecting how deeply, perhaps, I had wronged her in thought, I answered: "Ignorant of what connection you may have with this man, I cannot, of course, really advise you in the matter. But, if, as I suppose, his power is of a pecuniary nature over you, rest assured that it were wiser to sacrifice half your property even, than to give any friend influence over the whole, as I suspect Dade has. He made a hard bargain with me years ago, and I think no worse of him than that his slothfulness alone prevents his selfishness from being vicious. My dear wife, I almost wish we were ruined, that I might cease to be the nominal husband I am." Just then Martha brought her mistress a letter, and I resumed the perusal of an interesting book, for it was my habit never to take any notice of my wife's correspondence. The exclamation "This is barbarous!" made me look up, and I saw her thrusting the missive into the fire. But her back was turned on me, and immediately after, she rushed from the room. While wondering what had happened, I perceived her fly past the window tying her bonnet strings as she ran, her shawl awry and her whole appearance denoting extreme agitation. The next moment a fragment of singed paper, upon the hearth, caught my eye. It was a portion of the very letter that had been stuffed between the bars of the grate. Seizing it eagerly, it proved to be the centre of a sheet blank on one side, and burnt entirely round its margin. With as much perplexity as astonishment, I deciphered the following words and parts of words, arranged thus, and in the handwriting of Dade:
I have read that fine romance My late indignation at Dade's free and easy conduct towards me, was now swallowed up in real concern for Matilda. It is my duty, I thought, to come between her and any of those mean, despicable wretches who with a secret for their stock-in-trade, eke out a precarious and torturing security to their deluded victim at a price to make a Judas ashamed. "When she returns," I said, "I'll win her to confide in me, for it were easier to pardon the most dreadful errors of the past, than suffer this shocking state of things to continue. If she obstinately refuses, I'll worry old Dade into blurting out the mystery, and when he thinks we are alienated for ever, kick him out of the house before her eyes." This resolution brought a feeling of content with it. But my wife had never won from me affection, and where it is thus, a husband finds it easy to reason coolly and determine generously upon such trying occasions as this. The remains of the mysterious letter I prudently secured in a place sacred from Matilda's intrusion, where Florence's portrait also lay, which, had she known of its existence, would certainly have shared the fate of a somewhat similar memorial my father had, I am told, vainly endeavoured to preserve. About noon my wife returned, and I was much struck with the neatness of her attire, remembering in what deshabille she had hurried from Hampstead. She seemed smiling at some air-born invisible object, and, for the first time since we had known each other, I could not fix her eyes with mine. But what surprised me most was the strange circumstance that on my approach, she shrank back with the exact manner of an invalid shrinking from a dangerous draught. As I drew nearer, she continued to recede, the action appearing involuntary, and said softly: "I am sorry I left you so abruptly this morning. My immediate presence was required in the City on pecuniary business. You'll forgive me — won't you?" I started, words so gracious had rarely before fallen to my portion — and still vainly endeavouring to fix her eye, I replied: "I do; but, Matilda, it is evident that there is some mystery between you and Dade." "Ethelwolf, have patience for one week. If you interfere with that man now, I tell you thousands will be irrevocably lost. At the end of a week I can get most of our property out of his hands, then speak your fullest mind to him as — as my man of business. The mystery is money — nothing, nothing more." She uttered these words constrainedly, moving in a purposeless manner the sideboard ornaments, and keeping her face averted from mine. "I am agitated of course, I have told you why," she said. "I saved several thousands this morning and," here her words fell on my ears with a syllabic and equal distinctness, a chill but emotionless monotony, "it is still necessary that Richard Dade give me some papers to-night in order that I may regain entire control over my property. That he will never do unless we continue friendly with him. Therefore, at dinner to-day, you must for once overcome your aversion and treat the man agreeably." "If he holds papers —–" "Unlawfully, seize them you were going to say. We cannot do that. Be ruled by me. Have patience — and — and there will soon be no mystery." "Well, this time I submit. But if mild measures won't clear you of the fellow, I shall take the thing up myself whether you will or no." "There was no other way," exclaimed Matilda, and she left the room. I was so puzzled to discover the meaning of that last sentence, that I at length determined it had none, a comfortable conclusion that would suit many of the acts of some great men far better than the philosophical essays composed about them. CHAPTER VII.WAS IT MURDER?
My wife soon appeared, and with strange interest, I watched her behaviour towards our guest. One circumstance, seemingly trivial then, but rendered by after events deeply significant, I particularly remember; it was that in shaking Dade's hand Matilda covered hers with her handkerchief in such a manner that there was no actual contact between them. Most people have heard of various remarkable human antipathies to things that in general are liked, admired, and sought after. Lady Heneage, maid of honour to Queen Elizabeth, always swooned at the mere sight of that beautiful flower, — the rose. A Count of Darmstadt had such peculiar susceptibilities that plain olive oil acted upon him like chloroform. Deslandes, in a letter published in the Mercure de France for the year 1727, mentions an artillery officer who fell ill whenever a cork was cut in his presence. Peter of Apono, a celebrated physician of Bologna, fainted at the sight or smell of cheese. Tycho Brahe could not endure the idea of a hare or fox. In Aquitaine there was a family who could not smell apples without immediately bleeding at the nose. Some day, perhaps, I may be enumerated among these by the collectors of such anomalous facts, for I positively loathe salmon, although able to bear its presence without exhibiting any of the alarming symptoms above mentioned. On seeing, therefore, that fish upon the table, I drew back my chair, contented to make a study of Dade's gloating eyes. "There's a sole coming for you," observed Matilda, apologetically. The pleasures of the table have always been about as familiar to me as the Pleasures of the Imagination to most ploughmen. While I ate a morsel of sole, Dade consumed a prodigious block of boiled salmon and parsley and butter, with quite a Johnsonian greediness. My wife ate very little; her plate was dry, and she complained of headache. Presently Dade spluttered out a blundering attempt at a witticism by speaking of my "psychological dish," and then suddenly remarked:
"There's something odd in this green
"The parsley is of our own growing; take a little vinegar," my wife replied, very quietly. He did so, and scarcely a word more passed till dessert came. Shortly after, Matilda withdrew, first giving Dade a peculiar look, which was duly acknowledged by a careless nod. "You two are the queerest couple I ever married," he observed, directly we were alone. His tone, particularly a long drawl on the adjective, offended me, and I pushed the decanter forward with a stare by way of answer. "You see, Ethelwolf, I know what you don't, — the world. You're nettled because I manage Mrs. Fice's affairs, — a deal more bother than benefit, — but when a rich woman marries a poor youth there's always something wrong in the £ s. d. way. Now, I took this post of private solicitor, my dear boy, that I might be your faithful steward, and I affirm, Sir, that your pockets wouldn't have been half so well lined as they are if I hadn't spoken up like a trump for you to the gray mare." "Are you referring to Mrs. Fice? Have the goodness, Mr. Dade, to mention Mrs. Fice with proper respect. If my wife has entrusted any of her affairs to you, she has selected a very indiscreet and untrustworthy person. You are, in my opinion, extremely censurable for trying to promote dissension where it is your duty to create peace." Mr. Dade looked bewildered. His face had become inflamed, and his hand so tremulous that more wine went on the table than into his glass. Altogether he sat such a complete picture of a bloated, inebriated glutton that my feelings towards him were divided between disgust and pity. Removing the decanters from his immediate reach, I said: "You have drunk too much wine, Sir, and are not fit to enter a lady's presence." "Presents?" he ejaculated, with a thickening utterance, making impotent attempts to fill his glass from an empty bottle, "bother her presents! I'll suck my orange dry! Yes, that I will." And with many repetitions, he leered at me helpless in intoxication. This produced in me more surprise than annoyance, since he had frequently taken twice as much wine in my presence as now, without appearing at all overcome by it. As I rose to open the window, the room being unpleasantly hot, my wife burst in greatly excited and holding out an open letter. Heedless of the contemptuous gesture with which I tried to draw her attention to Dade's condition, she said, hurriedly, — "Read that." I complied, in bewilderment, and read as follows:
"Now," cried Matilda, "I wanted to surprise you some fine morning by taking a terribly long walk in the country, and when I had tired you to death, just to step through the drawing-room window of Broom Hill House, sink on the nearest sofa, and laugh at your consternation. But Dade has negociated so ill, that the owner of the property — an eccentric, obstinate fellow — sends this letter. Stupid Martha mislaid it yesterday, so unless someone sees Quick to-night, we must lose a place I have set my heart on having." Astonishment at this unexpected news must have made me look ludicrous, for Matilda smiled, and continued: "The house is near the village of Sutton. Make haste to the 'Spaniards,' get a fly, and drive to Cheam; that's where Quick lives. Take Broom Hill on any terms, sleep at an inn, and return to-morrow. Here's a paper of particulars. I shall see by the way you manage this how much I've lost or gained through not making you my man of business before." "Why can't I return to-night?" My wife stamped with an angry impatience the occasion seemed little to warrant, and exclaimed: "I won't have any husband coming home after I'm soundly asleep. Besides, I want you to see Broom Hill to-morrow morning, and then you can tell me how you like it. Come, here's all you want; make haste." In spite of my attempts to direct her notice to Dade's helplessness, she fairly drove me out of the house. After proceeding about a hundred yards, on glancing back, I saw her conspicuous in her white dress, still standing at the garden gate, and eagerly waving me on with extended arms. There was soon ample time for reflecting over her strange conduct, as I rolled along a country road bordered with trees, while through the openings fell bands of moonlight so dazzling and tremulous that we often appeared to be fording shallow streams of water. I carried out my mission with but little difficulty. The house that Matilda had apparently set her heart on taking, stood under the shelter of a hill covered with broom, which was at this period a blaze of living gold. The grounds comprised an extensive orchard, a miniature park, and a beautiful flower garden. One feature of the new domain struck me as strange at the time, though I little dreamed what an awful catastrophe an old architectural arrangement was at last to bring about, after serving for more than a century the most homely uses. It was that some of the domestic offices formed a separate block, perfectly independent of the main building, and screened from its back windows very slightly by a dozen old apple trees, past bearing, and half dead. CHAPTER VIII.ANOTHER STEP TOWARDS FATALITY.
Be this as it may be, between the fresh fragrance of a fine morning and satisfaction that Matilda was beginning at last to treat me as a husband should be treated, I returned to Hampstead greatly exhilarated. A white-headed, portly man stood alone in the dining-room, and bowing on my entrance, said: "Mr. Fice, I presume?" "Quite correct." Then, in that measured, emotionless tone that some professional men get into a way of employing upon even the supreme mysteries of life and death, he continued: "I understand that you were called away yesterday by important business, and are, therefore, ignorant of what has happened during your absence." "What?" I asked, in alarm, observing the disordered dessert that still littered the table. "I am grieved to say that your friend, Mr. Dade, lies dead upstairs, through the frightful carelessness of the woman called in to assist your servant. She gathered from the garden and chopped up by mistake for parsley that fatal plant, Aconitum napellus, vulgarly called 'Monkshood.' Fortunately, Mrs. Fice ate so little of the deadly sauce that her present illness is altogether slight." A faintness came over me and I sank into a seat, for the moment utterly prostrate. An awful suspicion shot through my brain like an arrow of red hot steel, as I remembered that though my wife's plate remained dry while she ate a few morsels of salmon, it was not so when Martha cleared the table. The surgeon, regarding my emotion as a matter of course, again assured me that Mrs. Fice's illness was only shattered nerves. But scarcely understanding what he said, I walked upstairs, and had my hand on our bed-room door, when my wife's voice arrested it there. She was praying. Directly the mind, as mine was then, is stationary round one horrible idea, any little circumstance, if it be like this, unusual, affects it with a power as great as adventitious. Just as a daisy dropped unexpectedly on a coffin-lid lies there a most suggestive thing, while flung upon a bed of flowers it is utterly insignificant. "She prays," I whispered, and the dread suspicion left me, as it seemed, for ever. What moralists we are, — how keenly perceptive to explain a Cæsar's secret motives, or elucidate a Cromwell's ruling passion! But how unable the wisest of us are to pierce beneath the surface-life of those who happen to be exposed to some subtle temptation, — some irregular desire, — which we have never experienced. I had yet to learn that self-deception
An inquest followed; the verdict was "Accidental Poisoning." The charwoman we employed received a severe lecture from the coroner, and various exaggerated reports of "a whole family nearly destroyed through mistaking Monkshood for parsley" appeared in the papers. "I am so thankful," my wife observed, "that this dreadful thing happened before we got to know anybody, and just at the time, too, when we are leaving Hampstead." All my late animosity towards Dade was literally buried with him, and these common-place words, jarred on my ears, while the selfishness they expressed, pained me. * * * * * * Broom Hill delighted me greatly. The landscapes around generally consisted of undulating fields fringed with trees, thickening in the blue distances, to apparent woods, which often tempted the rambler to extend his walk with the idea of entering their illusory depths. Now, too, in the first flush of her new possession, my wife relapsed for a time into the gentle manner of those happy days when first I knew her. CHAPTER IX.THE DRIVE.
"I seem to have waited a month. Jump in, your things are packed, the horses fresh, and we've lamps for the night-ride." "What new whim is this?" "A drive to Wales; there's a smell of death in the house. Jump up!" She had done so already. I sprang on the step to expostulate, when she settled the question by giving the impatient horses such a cut with the whip that we went off at a gallop. Never shall I forget that journey. My wife appeared to have lost the capacity of resting within herself. She dwelt upon nothing. The pleasure of rolling along the high road, with no business except recreation, soon reconciled me to this fresh freak, but the unwillingness of my wife to contemplate anything — I use the last word advisedly — was as surprising as it was certainly provoking. She would gaze on a ruined castle, fine landscape, or gorgeous sunset for one moment with apparent enjoyment, the next she wanted to hurry on, while I had not even entered into that abstracted state from all except the immediate beauties in view, without which there is no true delight in a picturesque tour. She now fell into a petulant habit of making loud remarks on almost every one whom we encountered on the road. Hourly she became a greater puzzle. I recalled with real anguish the difference between her present self and what she was in the quiet days of our first acquaintance. And I recalled, too, the gentle demeanour, the sensible, sometimes wise, speech that had illumined then her pale, plain face with an intellectual light that more than compensated, in my eyes at least, for its want of beauty. All this I set against her later follies and present extravagance. How dreadful to find such moral contrasts in a friend, but how much more so in a wife! The knowledge of my absolute poverty was now most galling. The law, indeed, gave me the control of my wife's property, but my nature revolted at the idea of arming myself against her vagaries with legal authority. I frequently debated whether the benevolent uses to which every sovereign Matilda squandered, might be turned, would justify the complete assumption of my marital rights. But the answer of my conscience was invariably — no. I have always been an absolute foe to all forms of mere expediency to which such frightful sacrifices are demanded by, and unhappily conceded to, the world. I would not do a wrong thing that right in my estimate might arise thence. Alas! would that I had ever been thus just. How often did I feel within me at this dreadful period of my life the very spirit which doubtless prompted the significant lines of Praed — himself a striking instance of splendid promise followed by meagre performances:
CHAPTER X.THE PANELLED CHAMBER.
The windows of one of the sitting-rooms at Broom Hill looked towards the isolated domestic offices, and were imperfectly screened from them by an irregular row of decaying trees. The room in question, the most ancient in the house, which had originally comprised one wing only of the present structure, I greatly disliked. Its enormous and grotesquely carved chimney-piece and panelled walls had a heavy, gloomy look, too like my ordinary frame of mind for me to view them with satisfaction. One very dreary evening, towards the end of autumn, I shut myself up with a pile of new engravings just arrived from London. In our morning ramble my wife had enraged me greatly, by provoking a tramp to insult her, thus compelling my interference to give the fellow a thrashing. More than this, she had lately taken to read a sporting journal and now employed at seasons the language affected in that species of literature. Recollect, that when she behaved like this she was visited, every few minutes, by fits of loud laughter, as causeless as they were distasteful to me. I was not, therefore, pleased, when, bursting noisily into the room, Matilda fiercely dug her finger nails into the stern features of Brutus condemning his son to death. The print was completely spoiled. Vexed with myself, as much as with her, I turned over a few more prints, but without looking round until the door shut softly. Then a strange disquiet — almost a feeling of remorse — visited my mind. Conscience accused me of ingratitude. The very pleasures my wife had disturbed me in were purchased with her money for my gratification. Ought I not to bear with even her whims? Full of such ideas, I sought Matilda, but for some time vainly. Our drawing room was being newly papered, and, except the room I had driven her from, the panelled chamber was the only apartment I left unsearched. An unaccountable repugnance towards it, actually led me to explore the garden and examine the summer-houses, before looking where something whispered from the first, Matilda was. It had grown quite dark when I turned thither. The door of the panelled chamber was locked. A gentle tap on the panel proved my wife's presence within, for she cried: "Have you come to beg my pardon?" Now, in reality, it was for that I had sought her over the house. But we seldom like to find our better impulses anticipated; that hateful thing, pride, rose up in my breast, and I asked: "Pray, what for?" There was no answer. After listening, to no purpose, some five minutes, I called out harshly: "How long am I to wait here?" "Till I choose to let you in," replied my wife, in the same disagreeable tone, and I walked away, half angry, and half ashamed. The domestic offices being isolated, the house seemed very desolate when we had no visitors; that evening I was miserable and solitary, and took tea alone. The maid said her mistress would not be disturbed. I was too sensitively fearful lest the servants should know more than they knew already of my connubial difficulties to appear surprised at this. Unable to find solace in a book, I paced the room impatiently, and exclaimed: "It is this idle life that makes me so wretched. Would I were some hard-worked curate." I opened my desk and dashed off a letter to the Bishop of London, asking for employment. Dreading the consequences of Matilda's wild objections to all settled occupations for me, I resolved, if possible, to secure some appointment before informing her of my healthy determination. I hurried off to the village, posted the letter, and returned so self-satisfied that I no longer felt solitary. About twenty minutes after a sound thrilled my ears that made my very blood run cold with a ghastly terror. It was neither word, nor groan, nor shriek, but all three blended into an utterance of supreme agony that impressed upon the hearer something of the horrible fear of which it was the awful voice. But, when somewhat recovered from the dreadful shock it gave, I rushed impetuously along the dark passage, I thought, with a start of mysterious terror, that the voice was not in any degree like that of my wife, although it certainly came from the panelled chamber, where she was supposed to be. I strove to force an entrance. The tough oak resisted my utmost efforts. All was still. Possessed with a horrid apprehension, I hurried back to my room, but soon returning to the panelled chamber, I found the door open and the room untenanted! An extinguished candle stood on the centre table, and a chair faced the centre of the three windows. All the blinds were up. Else there was nothing unusual, except that on the white chair cushion appeared a large spot of blood. My immediate thought was to find my wife. Returning to the room so recently quitted, I started to behold Matilda, smooth and unruffled, calmly surveying herself in the looking-glass. I say calmly; it seemed so to me, but my reading lamp had been turned down to a mere point of flame, and I may have been deceived. "There was a dreadful cry," I said, advancing, "I thought something shocking had happened. Are you hurt — there's a blood-stain —–" I was struck dumb. With a swift, though silent, motion she turned the lamp on full, and looking not at, but beyond me, her eyes burning luridly in a countenance of stone, she thrust a knitting needle through her left hand with an unconcern my flesh crept to witness. I drew nearer, in a kind of piteous horror. For the first time she evinced some sensibility of my presence, and said, in an inexpressibly mournful tone: "It does not touch the soul — pain won't visit me now; we quarrelled long ago." "Matilda!" I cried, passionately, "do you take an insane delight in sporting with my feelings — in answering one mystery with another. Have I not been obedient even to your whims — do I not share with you a mode of life opposed to my nature - contrary to my conscience? What must I suppose from your demeanour — your acts — your words — Madness?" In the fierce agitation consequent upon this outpouring of my long restrained discontent, I paced the room with furious strides. At the word "madness," my back was turned towards my wife but, in a voice of the profoundest grief, she interjected: "No! No! I do not deserve such mercy." This melted me. I wished to examine her injured hand. She thrust me off violently, and sat down on the floor in a corner of the room, her elbows resting on her knees and her chin supported by her clasped hands. To my remonstrances she merely answered: "I shall stay here. I want to think — go away — that will do me good." In vain I tried to reason her out of this foolish conduct. Her eyes, dilated and piercingly bright, seemed searching the apartment for some missing object, and every now and then, they suddenly fixed, as though that object were found, making me involuntarily look round, with the idea that something strange was just behind my back. Persuasion failing to alter my wife's present attitude, I reluctantly left her, remaining true to that inward vow to let her always act as she pleased. Hourly, however, I returned with a noiseless step and just peeped in through the half open door. On the third visit the lamp was out, and I ventured to rekindle it. She shook her head and motioned me away. Was this madness? I asked myself a thousand times that miserable night. But I knew not what to think. In my solitary chamber a single idea lived picture-like before me — the idea of her horrible vigil, crouched in that dark corner, and given up to some strange soul-torture. Perhaps my behaviour may be deemed passive to an unfeeling degree. Yet my compassion for Matilda's unknown sufferings had increased continually. But, every time that I beheld her huddled up and motionless in a grave-like shadow, I felt repelled, as though the warmth of my growing tenderness had been a flame, while a cold wind blew from that ghastly corner and prevented its further advance. A repulsion, too, like this weird fancy struck my heart with icy breath. At daybreak she stole softly forth into the grounds. I quietly followed, carefully keeping out of her view. She glided shadow-like along the lawn, and, after every few steps knelt down over the daisies with a movement of the mouth, as if she intended kissing them. But as often as her lips approached the little flowers, she started, shuddered, and recoiled. Was this the unmeaning act of a wandering mind, or had it a graver significance? It became too painful to watch my wife any longer; I retired to the library and, overpowered by fatigue, fell fast asleep, and did not wake till our usual breakfast hour. To see Matilda seated behind the steaming urn, preserving her ordinary demeanour, was almost as surprising as to find a whole tea-cup in the ruins of a fallen house. A moral revolution was certainly taking place in Matilda's character, but whatever ravages it had made beneath, the surface, as yet, was perfect; what if that were broken up? was the question I asked myself as, according to custom, she tasted my coffee to ascertain if it was sufficiently sweet. Although originating nothing herself, she talked rationally, carefully avoiding, however, any allusion to the preceding night. Had it not been for a bandage round her left hand, I might have imagined its fearful memory was only that of an awful dream. As the day advanced her manner resumed its usual tone. She even grew, for the first time since our marriage, a little like the innocent, pale girl, whose devotion to a fond father had once awakened my sympathies and claimed my esteem. We took the customary walk and dined. A stranger would have thought me the more constrained of the two. Suddenly Matilda rose, and saying: "I shall pass the evening alone, and must not be disturbed," left me. A little later, I was drawn by a kind of painful instinct to the panelled chamber. The door was locked. The scratching of a rapid pen was distinctly audible. She was writing then. Stealing back, I sat in the library some time, wondering whether that horrible cry — whose echo still rang in my ears, would be repeated to-night. As time wore on, while profound silence reigned throughout the house, my wife's present behaviour filled me with a mysterious alarm. I wandered fretfully from room to room, often approaching the door of the panelled chamber, with a vague intention of knocking, which was invariably dissipated by the ceaseless scratch of an impatient pen. At last I dozed in my easy chair. It was then about nine o'clock. The timepiece struck eleven as I woke with a cold shiver, and a strange feeling that something had just brushed across my knees. I walked at once to the panelled chamber. All was dead silence. I tapped first gently, and then noisily, there was no response. I spoke, called, and finally shouted — my wife would not answer. I recollected her wounded hand, and a horrid dread possessed me when, for the first time. A bit of folded paper, sticking out from the bottom of the door, attracted my notice. Snatching it up, these words were visible:
I staggered against the wall and stared at the cruel paper stupidly. This crowning mystery seemed more than my brain could bear. I felt the bewildering horror a man would, perhaps, experience could every thread of the carpet beneath his feet suddenly become a hissing snake. The secrets of my wife seemed on the point of being mine also, and it was awful to think what their nature might be. Had she only married in order to make me share some dreadful mystery belonging to her alone? Should I break open the panelled chamber, or await the promised key? I catechised the servants, except Martha who, deaf and nearly blind, had grown a mere automaton, whom none but Matilda could move. They knew nothing. I waited until about one o'clock in the morning; the house-bell rang loudly. I went myself. A man stood at the carriage gates, as far as the darkness allowed him to be visible, he appeared a common labourer. "What do you want?" I asked. Without answering, he threw a small parcel at my feet, and ran off at the top of his speed. The parcel contained nothing but the key wrapped up in brown paper. I am by no means deficient in personal courage, yet my heart palpitated fearfully; as with a lamp in one hand, and the key in the other, I stood before the door of the panelled chamber. Never yet had such a feeling of intense loneliness afflicted me. I went in, and my first hasty glance discovered nothing that at all corresponded with my nervous apprehensions. The blinds were up, with the strange exception of that belonging to the centre window; it looked ghostly contrasted with the two neighbouring black blanks, for the sky was unpierced by moon or star. The furniture, too, appeared in perfect order. What was there here to account for Matilda's conduct? Surely nothing. She must be mentally deranged then. Well, I could reconcile myself to that, and I approached the table almost calm. A white heap — like a spectral face — stared at me. It was a packet done up in blank paper. During some moments my eyes regarded it as if it had really been an expressionless countenance I was trying to understand. At last I drew forth a number of closely written sheets. My hands trembled so as to tear the first page slightly, on which appeared the following words:
I glanced at the chair; it was, doubtless, the one in which she sat while writing. Pray for her? I was doing that already. Presently, with a kind of awe, I turned to the second page. CHAPTER XI.THE STORY OF A WOMAN'S WILL.
"One very stormy night my father brought a strange gentleman into the bar parlor, who sat before the fire in his shirt sleeves, while his coat was drying on a chair. "'Hi! little girl, come here!' "I looked at the stranger crossly, extremely vexed at being called 'Little Girl.' Unhappily his benevolent face proved irresistibly alluring, and I obeyed. "'Let us see,' he said, catching tight hold of me, 'what kind of head the little maid has got.' "And he tumbled my hair till I was ready to cry being a ceremonious little creature then, but curiosity kept me quiet. "'Why bless my soul! here's Firmness and Concentrativeness. Never felt such a head before. I say, landlord, she gets her own way pretty much, eh?' "'Rather,' said my father laughing. "'Well, I tell you what, landlord, if this little chit becomes a woman, she'll do whatever she chooses to do and get whatever she sets her mind on having in everybody's and everything's spite. But it's too wonderful a head to live,' the stranger added with a sigh as he let me go. "My father soon forgot all the 'phrensylogical man' as he called him, said, but I never did. Each word was indelibly engraved upon my heart, and the whole became the secret creed of my life — the cherished prophecy it was to verify. I know little of phrenology and am not at all qualified to pass an opinion on it as a militant science; but it is certain that ever after the stranger's words were uttered over my head, I had invincible faith in my ability to accomplish whatever I really set my mind on doing. This faith, born from a chance observation of a stranger, grew with my growth, and has accompanied every step of mine in the path of life, like the evil angel it must surely be. "Oh! how cautious people should be of what they utter before children — especially children who never play! I hid the mischievous saying in my heart, and believed in its truth until it grew the very religion of my life. Many acts of mere folly — of petty spite I perpetrated only to convince myself more fully that I could do what I would. "Awfully as it seems now, was success granted for a time, to this vain exercise of my fatal firmness. "My brother — you know he died at sea — offended me mortally by some boyish trick. "'You shall be turned out of doors!' I cried in rage. Unhappily he first mocked and then dared me to accomplish the threat. Reprobate that I had grown, this confirmed my purpose, and by means he never even guessed at, his father was incensed against him, and the poor fellow ran off to sea in despair. "I repented that early. "The moral darkness in which I now lived had but one light — and that a false one — my will. "I know not whether metaphysicians admit a distinction between mind and heart, or whether they assign the motions commonly attributed to the latter, to the former only. But while my thoughts were defiant and evil, my feelings were humble and innocent. Perhaps these feelings constituted conscience. "For me there was then nothing higher than the actual sky — the bird's home — and nothing deeper than the churchyard grave. What heights above — what abysses below have opened upon me since! "You know that those who listen to any regular and recurring sounds often hear in them a fancied repetition of their own thoughts. When I sat in church wicked things entered my head, and the organ always thundered them back in my ears, so that I went no longer. "My mother died early, my father was alike incapable of expressing or inspiring real affection, and no one loved me. "My sole business in life was to watch, feed and amuse an old man. Whenever I read a book, or mentioned in his presence anything of which he was ignorant, his anger was hot, for in doing so, I in a manner removed myself from his reach. Before you discovered the way to interest him, he was content to sport at fishing for my fingers with his handkerchief, ay, and that during a whole afternoon. "I was mentally ill, — not mad, - and I knew it. The few with whom we were connected by blood or friendship, could not have understood my sufferings, much less have found a remedy for them. "As the body has many ailments which, though painful, are not dangerous or even obstacles to its ordinary exercises, so has the mind. But unfortunately when mental disease falls short of positive insanity, it seldom finds either cure or balm. There are but too many cases of this kind where the patient cannot minister to himself. I read books universally acknowledged as 'good.' Alas! how long will the saying remain true that moral treatises designed to convince the depraved of the enormity of sin, convince only - the pure. Thus the Heavens remained to me as low as the sky — the grave just as deep as it was dug. I read of refined, elevated and benevolent people, that was all. My sphere in life had selfishness for its gravitation, and profit for its centrifugal motion. Men never dream of entering business without some qualifications for it, capital — experience — determination to 'get on.' They anticipate retirement into a private state, frequently by many years, without making the least intellectual preparation for its enjoyment. "This was my father's mistake. I saw it well, and thus learned there was something better worth living for than the sum of our existence — a nicely ordered house, a bountiful table and fine clothes. "Religion I had none. It may, indeed, be the spontaneous growth of some minds, but mine was of a different order from these. "I lived without love or reverence, the mistress of a lonely luxury, the discontented nurse of a fretful, old man whose sole occupation was 'gone.' "Your face was the first light that pierced this moral darkness. "Remember I have now thrown off all the disguises that once concealed my soul from you, and I speak only of the things which were. "I saw you. We met. For the first time I began to believe in a higher life, since you appeared to possess it. Many things in you astonished me, but nothing so much as your purity of mind. It was that which drew me towards you. My intellect was stronger than yours then, and it seemed strange that I could not control you to my will. You represented to my suffering and diseased mind - health. Whenever we talked together, I felt lifted a little out of the slough of selfishness and sensuality constituting my life. My thoughts, indeed, were often superior to yours — but the superiority was that of a cankered rose over a fresh daisy. If your mind was only a grassy plain, heavenly winds blew across it — if mine was a statelier grove, the blight of sin blotted all its beauty. In you I beheld the guide to the firmer ground, your words had the power to blow away the pall that rested upon me. Already a star or two appeared. "Will not the sailor, exhausted by long swimming, strive desperately to reach the empty boat as it drifts slowly past him? Or what must be his feelings to see one attempting to enter it, who, he knows, will, should he succeed, row away and leave him to sink? "My situation soon resembled this. Must I add that in you I saw the vessel which might preserve me from the black tempest of despair in which the godless life must close at last. In your presence I felt pure, my tortured mind grew serene at your voice, and I fancied that in your eyes were two stars, whose light I desired, faith and its consequent luminary - hope. I thought, too, (such is the sophristy of selfishness,) that if you were my life-companion, I could direct your dormant energies to noble ends. You were to become the saint that I might be sanctified. But between us lay an awful gulf - the difference in our ages. How could it be filled or even bridged that our hands might join? Sometimes I rose in the dead night, after you had spent the evening with us, and pacing the room furiously, filled it with my complaints. If there was another life and that eternal, I frequently argued to myself, what did the matter of a few years signify? In the other world the difference of age could not exist. Was it not, after all, a paltry consideration? "Did I not always accomplish whatever I willed, and should I fail now, when to do so was to fall back into misery and despair? I had never loved as a girl; my love was, therefore, strange as well as strong, and mingled, as it was, with aspirations high almost to holiness, what wonder that its impulses grew into the governing laws of my moral life? What struggles a man will make against the assassin's knife? It is the instinct of self-preservation. I struggled, however, to preserve, not my body, but my soul from death. Can you imagine the pangs I experienced when watching you walking in your garden under the lime trees with her you loved? I cannot describe them. Much of my conduct so enigmatical once, must now be only too intelligible, and I need dwell no longer on a subject painful to us both. At length your mother died and your fortune was gone. I felt an awful joy, and said inwardly: My perseverance will be rewarded; verily my will is above all things. "I swooped through the cloud of your grief, (I grant that it was great,) like an eagle on its prey. You were necessary to me I reasoned, for I could not stand alone in the new world you had shown my longing eyes. Must I not be as necessary to you? My heart at last, had put forth all its love tendrils, they must cling around you or perish; and if they perished, I could no more live than a delicate plant stripped of every leaf. "I carried you to the house, that then for the first time became 'home,' as I fondly dreamed, in triumph. A few days undeceived me. You were still the friend; nothing more. The delights of our morning rambles, the placid pleasure from merely knowing you were under one roof with me, were miserably mingled with agonies you inflicted upon my suffering heart, when uttering rhapsodies for the weak creature who held your affection so cheaply. I knew what I would dare and endure for him I loved, and loved in vain. But blessed as she, I had been true against the world itself, and that though its rage were what we read of in the dread Revelation. Yes; you returned my vast, virgin affection with friendship, and I had given you all a woman can give. Worse than the gnawing pains of my lacerated pride, worse than the fierce torments of my baffled will, was the consciousness that the peace for which I panted could never be mine — the purity I desired — the vesture of my spirit — until you surrendered your dream for my reality of love. For how could the gentle flowers of goodness ever grow in my bosom, while it was thus ploughed by disappointed passions? I did long after virtue, but my nature could only be subdued to it by you. That night when I partly revealed myself to you, was one of dreadful anguish. Had you but heard the cries I poured out to the night, you surely must have taken pity on my woe. I felt as if you had given me up — not to the mere grave — I could have accepted Death from your hand and found it sweet — but to that most horrible of living tombs — the inward darkness of a soul that having never known divine, is abandoned at length by human love. Although you might pass out of my physical sight, I could not let you go from my providing care and tender watchfulness. "It was I who prompted Dade to give you a home - ostensibly in return for your intellectual labours in his services, but in reality because he had become in this my hireling. "This revelation will vex, perhaps, wound you, but it is due to truth and me. How often have you spoken with natural pride of those six years of fancied independence! "Whenever laying a contented head on your pillow, you reflected that it was bought by your own exertions, I, far away in body but close in spirit, was racking my brain for fresh means to advance your fortunes, and still preserve for you that fond delusion that all you were resulted from your own merits alone. "All this was to have been secret from you for ever. "Did you sometimes think about me in those old days?
"You may now guess something of the "Mine was a passion that could not remain stationary and as it would not recede, it advanced. My sufferings daily increased. I lived in the dry desert of disappointment, and ever saw beyond a pleasant land of innocence and love, that was not yours — that could not be mine - but that might be the heritage of both. Though your sorrows could never equal mine, I knew you were unhappy; out of two woes might come one supreme felicity, as two bitters make one sweet.
"My sole business now was to watch you unseen. I
often entered your vacant room, and sometimes dewed
your pillow with my tears. For many days I determined on seeing you openly. An instinct, alas! how
true a one, whispered it would only drive you into some
desperate course to escape the persecution of my love.
While my heart thus softened the will to subdue you
to myself hardened "I must presently write that which will lay me before you in the dust of my own iniquity. Another hand than mine guides the pen, or I could not do it. "Your great anecdotal knowledge had taught me many curious things. Accustomed to hear how trifles have suggested and frequently determined the deeds of great men, I often read romance and history in the faint hope that they might furnish or hint some remedy for my despairing state. Perhaps you smile here. I have laughed in your face when my heart felt as if the worm which dieth not, was gnawing at its core. In DeFoe's History of the Great Plague, is an account of a girl who stricken with the pestilence and abandoned by all her family, was nursed and cured by her lover whose remarkable exemption from the disease was surely a mark of the divine approbation of his heroic devotion. I read this and reflected how I would nurse you in such an hour, when all ordinary ties of kindred and friendship are broken, and terror assumes the place of love. "Strange, indeed, is that sequence of thoughts which finally results in one as different from the originating thought, as the first link in the chain of animated nature from the last. "A reverie on the plague made me wish for something to bring you helpless to my feet. This longing ran, like a vein, through my most wretched meditations, circulating a vague hope that kept off the lethargy of actual despair. It set me dreaming too. In night-visions I rescued you from a thousand dangers — and nursed you through a thousand horrid forms of disease; and they were happy visions for the guerdon you always gave was love. "But nothing of an unsubstantial nature could long satisfy my soul. "I knew that could I climb to the height of your love, I should learn to know God too — that could I creep into a corner of your heart, I should find myself in heaven.
"These dream-ideas and waking cravings produced
at length, the crisis of my life. Sleep, appetite and the
very capability of receiving gratification from a beautiful object, or a refreshing fragrance left me. Sometimes,
(as you lately saw though from a far more
awful cause,) I burned and cut myself in the vain hope
that physical anguish might assuage the gnawing
agony at my heart. I do not think that many of the
old ascetics suffered much from their flagellations and
other external torture. You told a story once of Saint
Bernard who frequently drank oil in mistake for water,
when abstracted in the contemplation of his sins. I
can believe that now. It was plain that if I remained
inactive much longer my passions would obtain
"I had exhausted all woman's natural power against you vainly, and now resolved to employ man's — force. Have pity. I know how you will look presently on the lines I am compelled to write, but, oh! read all. On your reading all, hangs my only hope for life in this - for mercy in the next world. Bear with me yet. It is not necessary, believe me, that you should smile even in thought, to make my shame complete, my punishment full to the fulness of justice. "I began to fear that I might kill you and then myself to try — I am not permitted to hide this impious thought — whether in another state of existence you would be more amenable to my will, or — as a shadow in my mind whispered - to find eternal rest. My first step in crime was taken under a conviction that it was a necessity and that necessity a virtue. "If I wounded you only and became your nurse, gliding about your couch and gently ministering to all your wants, perhaps you might love me a little! Yet the mere thought of what I must do made me shrink with horror, as a surgeon might, condemned by a tyrant's caprice to amputate the limbs of his infant. Still, through stooping to be your nurse, it was possible I might rise to be your wife. And that possibility nerved my arm already with more than man's strength. "Mine may be a strange, but it was, and is, a mighty love. The storm of these emotions swept over my purpose, and when it subsided that purpose held. Year by year I had sunk deeper in sin, year by year the vapour of my baffled passion rolled up a thicker pall between me and the sun of true religion that now could only shine upon my head to blast it. The want of your love was destroying the soul, its possession could save. In the still night, when the stars send their mute but pathetic appeal to the sceptic, I would cry with all the strength of my spirit: "'Give me thy love, Ethelwolf, and thy God shall be my God! Take me but once into thy pure bosom and I shall be pure.' "I dared not turn to Heaven alone; but if I belonged to thee thou wouldst hold over me the spotless shield of thy goodness. For months I tried, indeed, to walk uprightly and alone. Unknown I went amongst the poor to comfort and relieve them. I kneeled each Sabbath to thy solemn invitation, 'Let us pray.' It was all in vain. No peace followed, and reason reeled within me. I was lost. One hope of salvation remained, and it soon swayed triumphant over the tides of my tortured heart. "My mind once made up, passion for a time gave way to reason, and I thought coolly on the best means of effecting the great purpose. None who saw me then would have dreamed I was aught but the serious, mild woman you formerly supposed me to be. "A will powerful as mine, is sure to have a servant - ingenuity. Necessity is called the Mother of Invention — Will is the Father. "Often and often had I followed you in your solitary rambles unseen and unsuspected. At last I nerved myself for a supreme effort, and — and — you know how you were struck down senseless and sorely wounded. It was not hate but love — love unspeakable — that prompted that deed. It was well known that I indulged in night strolls, and the people at Hampstead thought it more providential than singular, that you should be discovered by me in the wood senseless and grievously hurt. "For a time my rapture was extreme. "The doctor deemed your recovery certain. I regarded you as the fondest mother regards her first-born. How could you remain so insensible to my caresses, — so deaf to the melodies of love I breathed over your saintly face? 'No need for lamp or candle to watch by,' I remember saying, 'for there is a piece of Heaven in the room!' "But my soul was soon cast down from the proud heights of its triumphant will. The next day fever faced me. You lay at the point of death, and I had brought you there! Dade had already received an account of my having found you in Caen Wood. Old Martha's deafness made me reckless of my exclamations after the doctor's departure, and it was a vast relief to address you, although only delirium could reply. "On the third evening, while I kneeled by your bedside alone, Martha heard a ring too faint to catch my distracted attention. "In an agony of remorse I exclaimed: "If he dies, it was I who struck him down, and I shall be accountable for his holy blood.' "A hand, hard and heavy, clutched my shoulder, and pressed me to the floor. I did not scream, but looked round and up into the gloating eyes of Dade himself. "'You are a wonderful woman,' he said, in a low tone, withdrawing his terrible convicting hand; an awful substance, to be followed by a far more awful shadow.
"I met his "'You are a rich woman, too.' "There was a dead pause. I rose. He spoke of indifferent subjects, and hurried off. What a night I passed between apprehensions for you and conjectures as to the extent of Dade's suspicions. If you died, earth and heaven died too for me, and, if you lived, I was in the power of a man whom I had always inwardly designated by that woman's phrase of abhorrence — Beast. My doubts were soon at an end. The next day I received a letter from Dade requesting the 'loan of a hundred pounds for as many years,' and signed Earwitness. "Of course, I complied, and he left me for a time in peace. You began to recover. The crisis came, and my will conquered. The price of the victory was slavery to a being as base as you were noble. "The happiness achieved was nothing to the misery it brought with its results. I had to set a guard over myself, and watch you, not as a wife, but as a spy. My secret was another's, and I could not begin with you a pure and useful life, while one stood near who could, whenever he chose, deliver me back to the guilty past. "Crimes are often accompanied by dreams of good, as always by avenging realities of evil. Before betraying my secret I intended to become the woman of your heart's ideal, and after years of active virtue, should have bowed my head confessing all. "You would have forgiven me then, would you not? "An inherent brutality exists in some men. It existed in Dade. I begged him not to write to me at all, lest some letter alluding to the secret fell into your hands. "Oh, that's your look out; you'll take precious good care of that. After what you've already done, nothing can be difficult to you.' "Perhaps, indeed, he spoke thus roughly to make me feel more completely in his power. He knew not how his hand was shutting me out from the peace of a recovered innocence, — how he was making me abhor him as the sneering devil who kept me from being purified by the angel-virtue I had wedded. He should have feared. "A nature like mine has as vast a capacity for hatred as for love. Dade had cause to tremble from the first exercise of his cruel power. "One reason why I insisted so imperiously on always having you near me, was because Dade came in your absence. While you were absent, he would thrust his hateful presence upon me, and even proceed to the insolent length of demanding a particular account of your late demeanour, and an abstract of your conversation. He made himself my man of business, dictating the terms on which I might enjoy my own property, or rather what portion of it he allowed me to retain. Aware of your delicate scruples upon this subject, — the fine instincts of an honourable mind, — he delighted to chuckle over that constantly recurring item in our accounts, which he called 'Master Fice's Pocket Money.' "Sometimes he said: "I don't mind your being personally lavish, but no philanthropic rubbish! The boy you've married would spend a fortune in an alley. Thank your stars that he's a fool, and don't spend what's his in law as its mine by luck!' And he would end with a coarse, insulting laugh. "I was never really alone with you. His shadow was ever on the wall, his loathed lineaments were always shaping themselves to my fancy in the fire, the pattern of the paper, and often in the air itself. Frequently these fancies concentrated together, until in a paroxysm of horror, I fled to your arms, or attempted to drown my despair in that wild conduct which was so inexplicable, and, alas! so painful to you. "When you remonstrated with me on the useless, selfish life I was compelling both of us to lead, your words — and yet they were gentle — fell a shower of fire upon my guilty head. "Could I unite with you in the practice of true piety while cowering under the threats of a brutish tyrant? One, too, who said perpetually: "'Only whiten yourself with a part of his sanctity, and my finger-touch shall bring the Hell-smear out on your cheek; I'll make your husband loathe you.' "Thus I was still lost because unable to participate in the holiness of your inner life. "Such suffering might have tamed many down to that resignation of heart which I have read brings peace. But it produced a directly opposite effect in me. "You began to resent Dade's intolerable interference in my affairs, to revolt at the evident contempt with which he regarded you. How bitter, how hard it was, my husband, to oppose your just wishes, — to refuse your temperate requests! "Sometimes I dreamed of flight to another land. But, without telling you all, that could not be, and wherever we had gone, the master of my secret would have been with us. "Still, in living under one roof with you, I lay on the steps of a holy temple, and though unworthy to enter, echoes of heavenly music reached me. This sweet privilege came from your respect towards me only; then what might not be expected from your love, could I once win it? "For I knew you loved me not. That knowledge was embittered by the reflection that I was forbidden to employ myself in ways that might, nay, must have won your affection as their sweet reward. Love saves; hate destroys. I saw 'a scene' approaching between you and Dade, and I implored him to finish with me at once, and candidly say what he valued the secret at. He met my meek entreaties with jests, and answered my agonized looks with smiles. "'You are my living bank,' was one of his cruel replies; 'beware of dishonouring my cheques. How can I tell what silence may be worth to-morrow? Go, and enjoy yourself, I shan't betray you to-day.' "I saw in his eye that he derived not only profit from the dreadful secret, but sport. My mental sufferings had actually become the wretch's amusement. Many a time, when dining with us, he dared to touch on the secret in language only understood between ourselves, returning my nods of remonstrance with a laugh or a leer. "Was it wonderful that to my mind — diseased with dread — he soon seemed scarcely human? His sacred office made his character appear blacker, till I abhorred him as an incarnate Blasphemy. His exactions became weekly more exorbitant. He said that he should occupy some months, at least, in the delightful business of deciding what should be the final price of his secrecy. Often, at these terrible interviews, I have suddenly rung his servant, or mine, into the room, to restrain myself from clutching the monster's throat. "And all the while you actually fancied yourself under the greatest obligations to him, believing that gratitude for the benefits he had formerly conferred on you, ought to smother the disgust that his conduct then created in your delicate mind! "It was hard to endure all this, and retain reason; it was impossible to have a heart towards a man like Dade. One by one he had torn its chords of feeling, forgetting that when torn they could serve for a net to ensure his destruction. You anticipate what is coming now, and I tremble to think how you will look presently. "One morning at breakfast time I received a letter, which, you may remember, threw me into extreme agitation. That letter I burned, but not before it had burned itself into my dark memory. It was from my moral torturer, and ran thus:
"'If you do not agree to transfer in the course of the
week the sum of six thousand pounds to be invested in
my name, I must no longer withhold, as a clergyman,
from your deluded husband the true character and subtle
manœuvres of the woman who resorted to even a criminal
act in pursuance of her own selfish ends.' "Distracted by this blow, I rushed from home, and was soon in Dade's presence, and asked: "'Is that your price?' "Oh! dear, no. It's a sort of preliminary fee for my gracious promise to make my mind up on that pecuniary point soon.' "'What do you mean to leave me?' I demanded, in despair, that ought to have warned him to be most cautious in replying. "The response was prompt as brief: "'Your secret, to be sure.' "When I left him he was a doomed man. "Why could he not see the menace in my angry eyes? Why did he thus court destruction? "This man — such is the awful logic of crime — stood between me and a life of active virtue. 'Nothing,' I actually argued, 'could make me worse than I had grown, and Dade lived a wall that prevented the sunshine of your goodness from waking within my hardening nature religion's rose.' "Remember, this was what I thought then, not, alas! what I know now. "As before, when fixed in purpose, I began inventing, saying, sternly, to myself, 'There shall be no passing weakness, no involuntary confession now.' "I had become most miserably wise in sin, but Dade himself was unconsciously his own executioner. For at parting that fatal morning, he blurted out, with his customary coarseness: "'I dine with you to-day. Mind you get me two or three pounds of salmon, and plenty of parsley and butter; and cook it well, too.' "Your intense dislike to salmon flashed across my mind, and, wonderfully does one idea produce another. I thought of some Monkshood in our garden which flourished near the parsley bed. After the stupid charwoman had gathered the parsley for the sauce, I managed to mix with it the tenderest shoots of the fatal plant, and she chopped up all together, quite unsuspicious of the deadly adulteration. When this was accomplished, I experienced an indescribable horror. Within me all was a black blank. I had an aching sense of something lost. There was no faltering in resolution, but reflection's voice was silent, and my moral being suffered a dead pause. Instead of continuing active over the dread resolve, I remained passive beneath it. I did not so much contain the death-thought against my Foe, as it contained me! "But my hate for Dade increased, and seemed luminous around me, and as motes stir in the sunbeams, his acts of cruelty floated before my uncertain gaze in the appearance of the most repulsive forms of reptile life. "I pause, perhaps, amid many unnecessary details, as the wretch, condemned to die, will linger at the scaffold's edge on a hundred vain pretexts. "What I write is true, however, — true as the over-powering Presence —– Hush! I am not to speak of that yet, or my one remaining hope may utterly perish. "Dade came. "In a few hours he must cease to live, and this ghastly foreknowledge gave me a fearful species of 'second sight.' He appeared enveloped already in visionary grave-clothes. "I dreaded, — such are the terrors tormenting the guilty, — the existence of some perception — not known yet to the world — which would make a man shrink from the actual touch of one bent on his destruction. As I wrapped my handkerchief about my hand, the hatred at my heart intensified towards him — the author of apprehensions so base. The old darkness surrounded me, and instead of the star or two I had seen through the telescope of your faith, it was only pierced by one red spot, — revenge. "Cursed are those who turn the very warnings intended to drive them from sin into encouragements to hold it still more fast. "But I must return to things more terrible than even these thoughts, — facts that have become rocks of punishment to which my soul is bound by burning chains.
"The day was hot. Undetected, I put brandy into
Dade's ale. His coarse taste could not discover a trick
which was far from disagreeable to one like him. You
were despatched on the house business, and then, half
"Directly you left, a bottle of the strongest spirit was given him in intentional error for water, and — and — you know the rest. "I retired to my own room. "They told me he was dead. "Turning Martha out, I locked the door, and, as it afterwards appeared, unlocked it in my agitation. "The whole day I had been trying to imagine what my feelings would be when this happened. "The anticipation was to the reality as the vexation of being drenched in a storm to the torture of the Inquisition's dropping water. Yet the anticipation had been agonizing. It is impossible to detail my immediate thoughts. Countless tongues within cried — 'Murderess!' "I surveyed my face in the glass, and read that word in every lineament, and my twitching fingers wrote it in the air. The crime absorbed me into its awful self. I had killed my enemy that he might be transfigured in my conscience! "My hand seized, as it seemed, by some superhuman and invisible force, grasped a pencil, and traced spasmodically on a loose piece of paper the condemning word. Why, presently I should run down stairs screaming 'Murder!' "That idea became a demon-possession that I fought with vainly, until reason reeled, and the wild exclamation burst from my dry lips: "'I must kill this too, although I die myself!' "Thus suicide entered my head, without my knowing that it was suicide. As the burnt child rushes to water, I rushed into this second crime. "Our four-post bedstead was lofty. I placed an ottoman upon it between the pillars at the foot, and attached a long scarf to the centre of the cross-pole above. The end formed a noose with a slip-knot, and encircled my throat. I tied a loop in a handkerchief, and, slipping my wrists through it behind my back, twisted one around the other till it was impossible to release them by pulling. "All seemed finished. I had but to jerk the ottoman from under my feet, and I should presently be strangled. "I paused, as nature seemed to pause within me. The frenzy of the past hour yielded to a fearful content. "A little bodily suffering, and what was that to me? Then sleep, perhaps. My will revived in all its old might. I would count forty, the number of years I had lived, and then give the fatal thrust with my foot. "Calmly I counted, one, two, three, proceeding neither faster nor slower than at first, and on to thirty, thirty-one —– A cry escaped me. I had not moved a limb, and yet the ottoman was slowly slipping off! "It must appear strange that this should bring back the love of life, but it did. Every hair of my head, every fibre of my body quivered with an indignant protest against death. I strove to free my hands, and twisting my wrists the wrong way, only drew the bandage tighter!
"The ottoman "This time it did not stop. "My hair was agitated with terror. Each vein had become an artery, and each artery a river of burning blood. Another strain at the twisted bandage, and the ottoman balancing on the very edge of the bed! The next moment it slipped off, and banged down upon the floor. But my hands had slipped, too, from the almost fatal loop, and throwing them up, I grasped the cross-pole just as the silken scarf was tightening at my throat! "I released myself altogether in two or three minutes, and staggered to the window for air. "My watch lay on the dressing-table. I regarded it at first mechanically, and then, with a thrill of awe, remembered what the hour was when I began my horrible preparations for self-destruction. The death-wrestle had lasted more than half-an-hour. "Sinking on my knees, I wept, and sought to pray. "It was then that you opened the door, looked silently in, and went away. The spell was broken. My heart just softening with a sense of gratitude towards its Maker, hardened again. I felt able to face you now. "Surely, judging from my own experiences, the very body rejoices when some great peril is passed that threatened to deliver it to the worm; and the blood flows rejoicingly, too, when Death's congealing shadow retires from the returning Light of Life. "Were you not mine at last? Had I not triumphed over my foe? Could I not now realize my long formed plans for a life of virtue? "Alas! No. My secret was not safe because I had become its only keeper. I had, indeed, destroyed my enemy, but it was by an irrevocable act that rendered me my own! "I examined myself inwardly, and found there the grave of my victim. "It was useless to shun the scene of my crime; where-ever I went, its hideous idea went also. "Oh! that I had answered my foe by confessing all to you! This reflection stung me with a fiery sting. "How I drank in your daily conversation. How I dwelt on portions of it during my wakeful nights, and tried to find there encouragement to lay my burden at your feet! It was part of my deserved punishment never to find any. I have asked your opinion on historical crimes in order to apply it to my own despairing state. You never dewed my burning soul with Mercy, but pierced it with the sword of Truth, or shrouded it with a good man's abhorrence of evil. You would not have tortured me thus knowingly. "I turned to frivolous pleasure as to a kind of spiritual laudanum. For weeks I drowned all thought-life in excitement, yet when my conduct was wildest, the whispers of conscience were loudest. I have seized my companion, or a piece of furniture, as representatives of that inner accusing power, and put forth all my physical strength till the one screamed in pain and terror, and the other was broken. "I never enjoyed anything except looking silently into your face, and that only as long as my mind could be restrained from thinking. Sometimes I was on the point of throwing myself at your feet, and crying — 'Lead me, my husband, henceforth in the life — path that you love.' "Hope said: "'Do this, and be saved.' "But I could not. Conscience gave no choice between confessing all and living on in sin. I, who once deemed the grave extinction of Being, was withheld from present peace and future happiness by a bodiless voice, — an inward feeling. My crime had taken possession of me. Too late I remembered that sentence, so often on your lips: "'The Service of God alone is Perfect Freedom.' "I knew this supreme truth perfectly now, and it smote me like a sword, because I knew it hopelessly. "In this desperate mood I made the journey surprising to you who could not see in it the aimless starts of a wounded spirit surrounded by the immortal host of its own condemning thoughts. Yet my remorse was not extreme to repentance, and another sting was added to it by the cruel memory of your words on Judas. "Too convincingly you had shown that the deepest remorse might not exercise the least purifying influence upon the nature it tortured. "Away from you I could not live, yet the light of your presence only revealed how black my sins had grown, how hopeless the bottomless gulf into which they were weighing me down. "Now I hasten to what must decide my future, not for time only, but for eternity. "You remember I interrupted you in the examination of some new prints. Ever conscious of my crime, I expressed it in remarks upon them. You know your answer. It drove me away to suffer alone. I shut myself in the panelled chamber. My desk was on the table, and some business letters required attention. Occupation of this commonplace character was a great relief. "Suddenly your step sounded without. I locked the door. You had pushed me from your room, recollect, and a little made me angry now, because in anger, as in all other kinds of excitement, there was a momentary nepenthe for me. This caused the question, — 'Are you come to ask my pardon?' "What a bitter mockery was that. "You went. "It was then dark. The window-blinds were all up. I rose to pull them down before lighting the lamp. "The three casements stared at me most forbiddingly, like three ghostly eyes of the murky night without. A strange repugnance to advance towards them caused me to light the lamp first. The wick was badly trimmed, and gave some trouble. While my fingers were busy about it, my mind was revolving the subject of darkness. I reflected what a mystery it was; how suggestive the philological fact that so many words relative to evil were its synonyms. Was it dreaded by all children through ignorance only, or an instinct of its really being in some way noxious to humanity? Did not all descriptions of Bliss hereafter even exclude the idea of shadow? Some verses 'On Darkness,' that I once read in a periodical, came to my memory with a startling distinctness, for I had never tried to learn them, and yet several lines that had lain forgotten till now, in some gloomy corner of my mind, rose upon my lips:
"At that last word the lamp burned up brightly, nay, as it seemed, encouragingly, and taking my scissors, I cut the blank half off a business letter, meditatively. "A surge of wind swept round the house, and drew my attention to the rattling casements. "It was then that I uttered the cry which alarmed the house. A cry in which I myself did not recognise my own voice. "The moment after I stood petrified. "Ethelwolf, I saw, striking at the middle pane of the centre window, a hand, gigantic, black, and threatening. "But it sounded not upon the glass. "Have you learned to recognise the vast difference that there is between the hands of one and those of another? "I have. "It was the hand of Dade. "Frozen with fear, I heard your furious blows upon the door. My blood curdled, my limbs trembled violently, a cloud of glittering ice-points floated around me. In another moment I should have fainted. But desperately I pierced myself with the scissors, and strength returned. I still gazed at the centre window. The frightful appearance had vanished. Yielding to a sudden impulse, I rushed by the table, extinguished the lamp with the wind of my dress, opened the door, and fled blindly into the room you had just quitted. Here I surveyed myself in the glass, half expecting to find that my face was as distorted as my reason. The conviction that what I had just seen was no vision of a diseased imagination, pressed upon me a dreadful irresistible certainty. "That, and that only, was real to my reeling mind. I peered about the room to discover it. So intensified was the expectation of seeing it immediately, that I felt disembodied, and was but dimly conscious of your presence, when, pricking myself with the needle, I found that physical pain could not counteract the great horror that lay so heavily upon me. "The hand seemed ready to issue from every shadow, from every dark corner. In life it had clutched my body, now, perhaps, it would close on my soul. "Yes, it was his hand, increased to an appalling size, and with all its characteristics preserved, each in its due proportion. How could I ever forget that hand, which had crushed my heart into the stone it was? "You know how that night passed. "Daylight seemed to bring me some relief. I sought the garden. But the cool air did not allay my consuming fever of mind; the peace of the surrounding flowers could not be mine. "I stooped over the daisies wishing to kiss their innocent faces, and each, as my lips approached it, became a ghastly death's head, all the more horrible for its minuteness. "Neither Heaven nor Hell can be so much places as states of individual feeling. Have I not carried the last in my passion-wasted bosom? "How that day went I know not. I only wished for night to learn the worst. It came. Nerved to endure, I shut myself in the panelled chamber, lighted the lamp, fixed my dry eyes upon the centre window, and waited. "For a time all remained unchanged. A faint hope that the visitation might not be repeated shed a sickly light over my dark despair. "The moon was just struggling through the funereal sky, when the wind again rose, and it came. Yes, the same gigantic hand. But oh! how great my horror to perceive those awful fingers move along the dumb glass like one in the act of writing! "I had no voice to cry, and could only speak mentally. In the dread fascination of the moment, I advanced four steps and stopped, for the terrible fingers had stopped too. My tongue, parched and stiff, clove to the roof of my mouth. In vain I strove to articulate the words: "'What art thou?' "Again the wind swept round the trees with a painful moaning, and again the hideous fingers began noiselessly to write upon the glass. "Inspired by a ghastly curiosity, I commenced tracing the outline of their awful movements. Then it was that my eyes glowed into red hot balls and set my brain on fire, for after the semi-circular sweep of a C, came an O, appalling as the eternity it symbolizes, and I read the word, 'CONFESS.' "The next moment nothing was visible but that dread, black hand; it seemed to have entered — it appeared to fill the room — and its fingers of darkness were clutching at my very soul! "I tried to shriek, and only whispered; to struggle, and found no strength. I thought within myself — 'I am dead!' "The wind surged loudly among the trees, and liberating the ghostly moon from a veil of clouds, seemed also to free me from the grasp of the frightful shadow. "The hand, gigantic still, although no longer super-human, was without the window, tracing the word of irresistible command. Mechanically I walked backward, — backward to the table, — for a horrible fear whispered that if I turned, it would immediately enter and seize me again. My desk was open. I sat down, still facing the fatal casement. The hideous fingers rested on the glass. I took up a pen. "Ethelwolf! Ethelwolf!' I exclaimed, in the extremity of my great agony, 'am I to pierce your heart with this, — must it be?' "Once more the night wind moaned, as though it suffered too, and the hand began to write with a threatening rapidity. So it is all written now, and my heart, touched by those terrible fingers, has told me what to do, for it has one hope. "I constitute you my judge. "Do you remember at Hampstead, beyond the Heath, a sloping meadow where we used to gather sorrel? "Three chestnut trees of unequal size grow together there, like 'an aborescent family,' as you called them. "I shall be beneath them the day after to-morrow at sunset. I have my watch, and will wait half-an-hour. If you condemn me, I do not desire to live, and cannot be saved. I have sinned; it was to obtain your love. But if, now all is revealed, you can endure the touch of one like me and teach my lips to pray, my hands to feed the hungry, and clothe the naked, I may be still preserved from perdition. "Where you walked, I might crawl; where you blessed, I might say 'Amen'; when you entered the light of Heaven, Heaven might mercifully say: "'She is flesh of his flesh, and bone of his bone.' "You must decide, Ethelwolf, between Charity and Justice. Remain passive, resign me to my merited doom, and in a few hours you will be both rich and free. We shall not meet hereafter then. Is it not written that the Righteous are to be judged before the Lost? "Years of spiritual agony have added to my guilt, but while my sufferings are unchanged, the possible remedy for them remains what it has always been — your love. It is hard to lose all for that; is it not? Remember, I know your truth, as I trust your honour. If you come, it must be that I may begin a life of good works. Man's justice could not save me, and I will never surrender to it. God's justice is grinding me into powder now, and without your support I cannot attain to His Mercy. "Ask your heart if I do not love you as none have loved you yet? "Do not dream to save me in any but this way of mine. No efforts of yours would discover me before the appointed hour. Then, if you come not alone in charity and faith, you will force me to die at your feet. "But if you, for whom only I have lived, condemn me, come not at all, and I will never, should such power be mine, visit you with one reproach. I ask, then, but one favour, place this line upon my grave — "'She loved with all she has for ever lost.' "I have drawn down the blind of the fatal window. "To-morrow, I believe, the hand will come. It did twice. My life is in your hands. "Remember, I am still your wife, even greater in her love, than in her guilt." CHAPTER XII.THE CALAMITY.
I owed all to the woman who had shed the honey-dew of her love on me in secret — who had watched every one of my life-steps from the invisible tower of her hope. The independence I once appeared to have earned, was a dream. Many and loud were the accusations of conscience. My habitual severity of demeanour and speech was, in some degree, accountable for the crime that had now precipitated the catastrophe of my wife's unhappy life. Had I not sinned for the sake of a sentiment? What selfishness equalled mine? I had married to secure peace, ease and leisure for poetic visions of a regretted past, and foolish repinings over a present prosperity I had, indeed, done nothing to deserve. Through the dark storm of a troubled conscience one thought, however, shed a calming light. I would save my wife yet. The vision of the hand occurred to me now, and I determined to wait till the next night ere I faced the horror, if the horror came. I am not superstitious in the vulgar sense of that misused word, but I am no materialist. Extensive reading made me perfectly familiar with every one of those well attested and yet inexplicable incidents of a supernatural kind, which are only repelled by the smooth surface of the sceptic's mind to sink unseen into the core of his heart. Is it strange then that one of my serious temperament, stricken by the heaviest blow that could fall on a man like me, alone in that lonely house, and awaiting an awful morrow, should feel utterly depressed? Ancient and modern instances of the mysterious and unaccountable swarmed into my throbbing brain. Do all I could, the idea that here at least was a visitation of the supernatural order would not be dismissed. Half forgotten fragments of an old essay I once had written on the subject of witchcraft came into my mind with regard, indeed, to apparitions which may be taken as including sounds as well as sights, it is indisputable that in all times and among all peoples a belief has prevailed that the spirit or real entities of the departed do sometimes present themselves to the living. This belief weakens in intensity as people become more instructed in physical laws, but with whom has it entirely disappeared? Suppose science could demonstrate the absolute impossibility of a disembodied spirit ever revisiting the glimpses of the moon, the belief that this might be would still remain in many minds and that would surely be a phenomenon possessing a deep and an awful interest of its own, near allied as we always find it to the secret workings of conscience in some form or other, or to the unsearchable depths, the unfathomable fountains of friendship or love.
That some, perhaps, many of the recorded historic
apparitions are M. Nicolai stoutly attributed these dreadful visitations to a bad digestion, and thence by an inference at once illogical and absurd, Dr. Ferrier and others, have drawn the dogmatic conclusion that all apparitions must necessarily be the product of a diseased condition of mind or body or both. Yet what can we think of the strange tale of the daughter of Sir Charles Lee who, during the year 1652, saw one night the apparition of her deceased brother and was warned by him that she would die at noon on the succeeding day. In the morning the young lady who had been and then appeared quite well, told her aunt what had happened during the night, and that lady, although discrediting the story as a wild distempered dream, sent for a doctor who, after a careful examination, declared that he found nothing whatever amiss with the victim, as it then seemed, of an illusion. Nevertheless, exactly as the apparition had predicted, at the stroke of noon that day the young lady suddenly expired while quietly seated in an arm chair, and thus gave a terrible evidence as to the correctness of her statement as to the apparition of the previous night. This story is authenticated by the testimony of the Bishop of Gloucester of that day. Then again do we not all know that Isaac Walton declared that Dr. Donne, the famous poetic divine, having been forced to leave his wife in London on the eve of her confinement, went to Paris, and after two days saw her walk silently into his room with a dead infant hanging over her shoulder! It appeared afterwards that at the very time of the apparition Mrs. Donne was delivered of a dead child. Instances of such apparitions and monitions might easily be multiplied to a very great extent. They form indeed, the substratum of what is lightly called the superstition of many races and these are indeed, in a majority of instances, admitted so far as their superficial details go, by all men of science. Scepticism, however, steps in with its dogmatic veto directly any endeavour is made to establish the supernatural character of any of the appearances or visitations. Just in the same way, indeed, infidel writers admit the main facts of the mere history of the Founder and Author of Christianity, while stoutly denying their spiritual significance or that the miracles actually wrought were miracles in a purely supernatural sense. For my own part it has long seemed that a prevailing intellectual weakness — rather let me add — vice of the times — is a desire or greed for complete and even technical explanations of everything in the least degree phenomenal, or in any way removed from the commonplace experiences of every day life. To some possibly the supernatural (which is distinctly of the unseen world) is but another form of the superstitious, and whatever transcends the logical compass of the human reason, is rashly and profanely pronounced to be quite unworthy of any really serious consideration. And yet, in the teeth of all this, is it not well known that some, indeed, many phenomena of which science takes full cognisance, are in themselves inscrutable mysteries. In truth when sceptical critics proclaim their cold indifference to all that is not matter of actual fact, we may retort with a better reply than that of the sneering Pilate and ask: What is matter-of-fact? Now, as is well known, among the northern people of Europe, notably among those descended from the old Norsemen, a great variety of "superstitions" prevail even to this day. For the curious in such things there is an ample literature. Of course ingenious Positivists and other unbelieving gentlemen of that godless school, will chime in with Mr. Buckle's specious and plausible theory that the dwellers in the highlands are naturally superstitious in their early unlettered days because of the strange freaks of nature in mountainous regions where fantastic crags, deep and awful glens, singular effects of sunshine and vapour and all the weird phenomena of cloudland generally, combine to create the disjecta membra of a thousand phantasies to captivate and eventually enchain the human mind. It is forgotten, however, perhaps conveniently so, that even all this could not make even "untutored savages" superstitious, unless they had already in them the capacity to receive the terrible impressions which are solely due, we are assured, to physical causes. How that capacity comes, and what is the true sign and what the cause of that state of mind that induces them to grow "superstitious" as it is called with a covert sneer at religion in all its vital forms, neither the Buckle nor all the Positivists — from the days of Confucius the real prototype of Comte — until now, can explain. They certainly do present and very nearly explicate on rational grounds one side only of the problem, i.e., the physical. The spiritual, i.e., the human, they leave untouched although it is only through the joint action of the two that the supernatural can in any degree be made manifest to us in this life. As a partial and at all events suggestive explanation of some of the difficulties that beset us when considering the more perplexing cases of apparitions the following has always struck me as worthy of some consideration. Taking the popular view of the populousness of the world to which we are at present restricted, we may safely say that during a single century several thousand millions of human beings are born. Now we know that of all these no twins exist in a perfect physical mental and moral sense. All these host of human creatures are differentiated, one from the other and each one from the rest! In music the whole European age produces but one Handel, and, to cite the most extraordinary case of all, let us bear in mind the stupendous fact that out of hundreds of thousands of millions of men there has been as yet but one Shakespeare. Well, then, if it happens as we know it does historically, that here and there a human being is born endowed with certain powers of the mind quite transcending those of all other men, why is it any way unreasonable to assume that in some instances, too, human beings may be born possessing faculties for observing phenomena that are completely hidden from others — faculties in a word for piercing through the veil of our common mortality and entering in thought and spiritual perception on regions far beyond the fixed dividing lines of life and death as we understand them. Mark that whatever science says (bearing reluctant testimony to the supernatural,) no two particles of any substance in our physical world are in actual contact. There are interstices in the composition of the diamond! Well then it may surely happen that some persons may be born with such a special percipience as to perceive the real absence of continuity in all physical substances, or to see the chemical composition of the atmospheric air, or to discern the myriads of to ordinary human vision, colorless and invisible organisms that permeate its every part. Such a being, replies science, has never been, and adds science, never will be born. Yet, if we place ourselves successively behind each distinct advance of human knowledge and from the stand-point of ignorance of the future, predict what the future is to be, the self-sufferent scientists of the day reply, Vetamus! Surely it is not unreasonable to explain in part at least the difficulty presented by the fact that supernatural phenomena are so very limited in their human expressions, by assuming that for reasons unknown to man, only a few comparatively among all the men and women born into this world are endowed with the awful capacity for perceiving and appreciating visitations and manifestaions from the other side of that dreadful veil behind which
Daylight brought me a little relief, and the sunshine — for the morning proved fine — some solace. Take a gloomy mind — an afflicted heart into nature's presence — one will be lightened, the other soothed. I found the sun would set the next day at twenty minutes after five. The servants, aware of something wrong with their mistress, kept together in the isolated kitchen. I was quite alone in the house, and the mere idea of the hideous shadow-hand cast over me something of its own awful darkness. Evening closed drearily in. I tried to read the Bible. My excited fancy would turn to those tremendous portions of scripture that relate to death and judgment, and I started up determined to face the horror before my nerves were entirely unstrung. In the heat of this resolution I rushed to the panelled chamber, set my lamp upon the table and anxiously looked around. There was nothing to create surprise much less alarm. The two unblinded casements revealed funereal strips of a cold, dark almost starless sky. Deliberately approaching the fatal window, I raised the blind, and saw — with stiffening hair — the apparition of a gigantic hand advanced within a few inches of the casement. For one moment I was paralyzed by positive terror — the next I threw up the sash and desperately thrust my arms without. I grasped but air. There was no vestige of the hideous fingers. Through the confused outlines of the screening trees gleamed lights from the kitchen. I turned a little and noticed that the flame of my lamp reflected itself on the other side of the adjoining window. The mystery of the spectral hand was solved. I summoned one of the servants and ordered her to extinguish all the candles in the kitchen, light them up in five minutes, and after a similar interval repeat the process. She left the room. I approached the window, closed it, and again perceived the black, gigantic hand. This time I had sufficient nerve to regard it calmly. Looked at steadily, it did not appear nearly so appalling, and presently the lights from the kitchen disappeared, and with them disappeared the phantom hand. Still I watched, and with the re-lighting of the distant candles back it came. The rest was clear. Those horrible fingers were simply the shadows of some crooked branches of the withered and decaying fruit trees between the dwelling-house and its domestic offices. Whenever there were lights in one particular part of the principal kitchen, the fantastic shadows were thrown upon the centre window of the panelled chamber. On a windy night the movements of the contorted boughs would make their weird-like shadows seem to enter the room itself. The effect such a phenomenon must have on one unable to understand that accident makes many looking-glasses without quicksilver, may well be imagined. How wonderful are little things in the hand of God! At dawn I was walking uneasily about the grounds. The wind was boisterous, and its mournful sough among the decaying foliage sounded to me ominous. Equally cheerless was the cold, stone-coloured sky, diversified by mountainous looking clouds that promised a continuance of stormy weather. "And she," I thought, while the withered leaves smote thickly on my face, "is wandering, perhaps, in some spot desolate as these forbidding heavens, avoiding man, and fearing God." My impatience to be doing, was only surpassed by my apprehensions for the result of the meeting with my wife that night. It would be dangerous to anticipate the appointed time. I knew the power of Matilda's character too well to attempt thwarting her will in anything now. It seemed prudent to subdue an excitement ill suited to the coming trial, by walking to London first. I reached London, and had turned northwards before I became aware of the unusually crowded state of the streets. After some futile efforts to avoid the momentarily thickening throngs, I asked the occasion of the popular gathering, and, to my consternation, was answered by the question: "'Haven't you come to see the sight?' I had neglected the newspapers lately, and was, therefore, ignorant that the City was receiving Royalty. The flags on the churches, the gay crests of cavalry soldiers dotted along the lines of black hats, and the dreadful crushes of struggling people at every corner, filled me with a kind of horror. The hour for the procession to pass was near. The waves of the human sea had settled into stationary compactness, and were unwilling to move. My superior stature enabled me to perceive with new dismay, that the neighbouring side streets were choked with agitated mobs striving to pour tributary streams of excited sightseers into the phalanx in which I was so unfortunately fixed. "When would the crowd disperse?" was my next anxious inquiry. They would remain till the pageant returned from the Mansion House. That would not be before five in the afternoon!" "I will get out of this," I muttered, setting my teeth, and backing from the foremost press. At first I made great progress, but was presently forced among a dozen of the lowest ruffians, and found myself involved in more fights than I had fingers. By sheer strength, I cleared my way at last, minus hat and watch, soiled with dirt, smeared with blood, and altogether in a deplorable plight. I bought a hat, and seeing a fast mare in an empty cart, persuaded the driver to carry me as far as Hampstead Heath for a sovereign. We went at a gallop, and hope visited my heart. Near Primrose Hill the wind blew a strong gale, driving the cloud-scud above us at a tremendous rate. We gained the high road that divides the Heath. I leaped down, and ran across the uneven and bush encumbered ground. The wind shifted, and blew dead against me. I was compelled to advance in a ziz-zag direction, or in nautical language, to make short tacks. At length the meadow with the three trees appeared. I was late. In the dread agony of the moment I shouted. The cruel wind bore back my ineffectual voice to me. There was hot blood beating hammer-like in both my temples, but I drew near the isolated trees, and something moved beneath them. "My wife! I am here!" burst from my parched lips. The form advanced a step; it was hers. Just then swept over that high ground, a surge of wind that for an instant I could not stem. A long, extended bough was torn from the tallest tree, and fell, — fell on something moving towards me, — while a shriek of acute anguish answered my repeated cry — "My wife! I am here!" Nearly half the tree had fallen, burying her completely beneath its decayed foliage, whose autumnal tint was an ominous red. A fragment of her shawl fluttered in the wind like a signal of distress, but the only sound audible was the awful creaking of the lower branches as their own weight ground them into the yielding earth. Thus it appeared to me as I frantically strove to lift the splintering mass. I raised it a little, and saw the motionless form of my wife, pressed face downwards, among the broken twigs and dead leaves. It was then that a terrible though brief struggle began. Staggering beneath my load, I found it equally impossible to heave it to the right or the left. A horrible fear appalled me. I might be compelled to let the beam-like branch fall again on my wife. The number of its slender boughs had alone prevented her from being utterly crushed under its great weight. Most of these were broken now, or hanging loose from the parent stem. Fiercely I fought with the dull inert pile, — fought in hope, for a feeble moaning came. * * * * * This, my friend, is the story of our two wasted, wretched lives. We had been united only to be divorced by Death — not, I trust, eternally. Henceforth I wander forth alone among the distant Heathen, to labour and to hope that my expiation may intercede for the woman I learned to love too late!  | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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