THE LIFTED VEIL


   Give me no light, great Heaven, but such as turns
   To energy of human fellowship;
   No powers beyond the growing heritage
   That makes completer manhood.




CHAPTER I


The time of my end approaches. I have lately been subject to attacks of
_angina pectoris_; and in the ordinary course of things, my physician
tells me, I may fairly hope that my life will not be protracted
many months. Unless, then, I am cursed with an exceptional physical
constitution, as I am cursed with an exceptional mental character, I
shall not much longer groan under the wearisome burthen of this earthly
existence. If it were to be otherwise--if I were to live on to the age
most men desire and provide for--I should for once have known whether
the miseries of delusive expectation can outweigh the miseries of true
prevision. For I foresee when I shall die, and everything that will
happen in my last moments.

Just a month from this day, on September 20, 1850, I shall be sitting
in this chair, in this study, at ten o'clock at night, longing to die,
weary of incessant insight and foresight, without delusions and without
hope. Just as I am watching a tongue of blue flame rising in the fire,
and my lamp is burning low, the horrible contraction will begin at my
chest. I shall only have time to reach the bell, and pull it violently,
before the sense of suffocation will come. No one will answer my bell.
I know why. My two servants are lovers, and will have quarrelled. My
housekeeper will have rushed out of the house in a fury, two hours
before, hoping that Perry will believe she has gone to drown herself.
Perry is alarmed at last, and is gone out after her. The little
scullery-maid is asleep on a bench: she never answers the bell; it does
not wake her. The sense of suffocation increases: my lamp goes out with
a horrible stench: I make a great effort, and snatch at the bell again.
I long for life, and there is no help. I thirsted for the unknown:
the thirst is gone. O God, let me stay with the known, and be weary
of it: I am content. Agony of pain and suffocation--and all the while
the earth, the fields, the pebbly brook at the bottom of the rookery,
the fresh scent after the rain, the light of the morning through my
chamber-window, the warmth of the hearth after the frosty air--will
darkness close over them for ever?

Darkness--darkness--no pain--nothing but darkness: but I am passing
on and on through the darkness: my thought stays in the darkness, but
always with a sense of moving onward . . .

Before that time comes, I wish to use my last hours of ease and
strength in telling the strange story of my experience. I have never
fully unbosomed myself to any human being; I have never been encouraged
to trust much in the sympathy of my fellow-men. But we have all a
chance of meeting with some pity, some tenderness, some charity, when
we are dead: it is the living only who cannot be forgiven--the living
only from whom men's indulgence and reverence are held off, like the
rain by the hard east wind. While the heart beats, bruise it--it is
your only opportunity; while the eye can still turn towards you with
moist, timid entreaty, freeze it with an icy unanswering gaze; while
the ear, that delicate messenger to the inmost sanctuary of the soul,
can still take in the tones of kindness, put it off with hard civility,
or sneering compliment, or envious affectation of indifference; while
the creative brain can still throb with the sense of injustice,
with the yearning for brotherly recognition--make haste--oppress it
with your ill-considered judgements, your trivial comparisons, your
careless misrepresentations. The heart will by and by be still--"ubi
saeva indignatio ulterius cor lacerare nequit"; the eye will cease to
entreat; the ear will be deaf; the brain will have ceased from all
wants as well as from all work. Then your charitable speeches may find
vent; then you may remember and pity the toil and the struggle and the
failure; then you may give due honour to the work achieved; then you
may find extenuation for errors, and may consent to bury them.

That is a trivial schoolboy text; why do I dwell on it? It has little
reference to me, for I shall leave no works behind me for men to
honour. I have no near relatives who will make up, by weeping over my
grave, for the wounds they inflicted on me when I was among them. It is
only the story of my life that will perhaps win a little more sympathy
from strangers when I am dead, than I ever believed it would obtain
from my friends while I was living.

My childhood perhaps seems happier to me than it really was, by
contrast with all the after-years. For then the curtain of the future
was as impenetrable to me as to other children: I had all their delight
in the present hour, their sweet indefinite hopes for the morrow; and
I had a tender mother: even now, after the dreary lapse of long years,
a slight trace of sensation accompanies the remembrance of her caress
as she held me on her knee--her arms round my little body, her cheek
pressed on mine. I had a complaint of the eyes that made me blind for a
little while, and she kept me on her knee from morning till night. That
unequalled love soon vanished out of my life, and even to my childish
consciousness it was as if that life had become more chill. I rode my
little white pony with the groom by my side as before, but there were
no loving eyes looking at me as I mounted, no glad arms opened to me
when I came back. Perhaps I missed my mother's love more than most
children of seven or eight would have done, to whom the other pleasures
of life remained as before; for I was certainly a very sensitive child.
I remember still the mingled trepidation and delicious excitement with
which I was affected by the tramping of the horses on the pavement
in the echoing stables, by the loud resonance of the groom's voices,
by the booming bark of the dogs as my father's carriage thundered
under the archway of the courtyard, by the din of the gong as it gave
notice of luncheon and dinner. The measured tramp of soldiery which I
sometimes heard--for my father's house lay near a county town where
there were large barracks--made me sob and tremble; and yet when they
were gone past, I longed for them to come back again.

I fancy my father thought me an odd child, and had little fondness for
me; though he was very careful in fulfilling what he regarded as a
parent's duties. But he was already past the middle of life, and I was
not his only son. My mother had been his second wife, and he was five-
and-forty when he married her. He was a firm, unbending, intensely
orderly man, in root and stem a banker, but with a flourishing graft
of the active landholder, aspiring to county influence: one of those
people who are always like themselves from day to day, who are
uninfluenced by the weather, and neither know melancholy nor high
spirits. I held him in great awe, and appeared more timid and sensitive
in his presence than at other times; a circumstance which, perhaps,
helped to confirm him in the intention to educate me on a different
plan from the prescriptive one with which he had complied in the case
of my elder brother, already a tall youth at Eton. My brother was to
be his representative and successor; he must go to Eton and Oxford,
for the sake of making connexions, of course: my father was not a man
to underrate the bearing of Latin satirists or Greek dramatists on the
attainment of an aristocratic position. But, intrinsically, he had
slight esteem for "those dead but sceptred spirits"; having qualified
himself for forming an independent opinion by reading Potter's
_AEschylus_, and dipping into Francis's _Horace_. To this negative
view he added a positive one, derived from a recent connexion with
mining speculations; namely, that a scientific education was the really
useful training for a younger son. Moreover, it was clear that a shy,
sensitive boy like me was not fit to encounter the rough experience
of a public school. Mr. Letherall had said so very decidedly. Mr.
Letherall was a large man in spectacles, who one day took my small
head between his large hands, and pressed it here and there in an
exploratory, auspicious manner--then placed each of his great thumbs on
my temples, and pushed me a little way from him, and stared at me with
glittering spectacles. The contemplation appeared to displease him, for
he frowned sternly, and said to my father, drawing his thumbs across my
eyebrows--

"The deficiency is there, sir--there; and here," he added, touching the
upper sides of my head, "here is the excess. That must be brought out,
sir, and this must be laid to sleep."

I was in a state of tremor, partly at the vague idea that I was
the object of reprobation, partly in the agitation of my first
hatred--hatred of this big, spectacled man, who pulled my head about as
if he wanted to buy and cheapen it.

I am not aware how much Mr. Letherall had to do with the system
afterwards adopted towards me, but it was presently clear that private
tutors, natural history, science, and the modern languages, were the
appliances by which the defects of my organization were to be remedied.
I was very stupid about machines, so I was to be greatly occupied
with them; I had no memory for classification, so it was particularly
necessary that I should study systematic zoology and botany; I was
hungry for human deeds and humane motions, so I was to be plentifully
crammed with the mechanical powers, the elementary bodies, and the
phenomena of electricity and magnetism. A better-constituted boy
would certainly have profited under my intelligent tutors, with their
scientific apparatus; and would, doubtless, have found the phenomena
of electricity and magnetism as fascinating as I was, every Thursday,
assured they were. As it was, I could have paired off, for ignorance
of whatever was taught me, with the worst Latin scholar that was ever
turned out of a classical academy. I read Plutarch, and Shakespeare,
and Don Quixote by the sly, and supplied myself in that way with
wandering thoughts, while my tutor was assuring me that "an improved
man, as distinguished from an ignorant one, was a man who knew the
reason why water ran downhill." I had no desire to be this improved
man; I was glad of the running water; I could watch it and listen to it
gurgling among the pebbles, and bathing the bright green water-plants,
by the hour together. I did not want to know _why_ it ran; I had
perfect confidence that there were good reasons for what was so very
beautiful.

There is no need to dwell on this part of my life. I have said enough
to indicate that my nature was of the sensitive, unpractical order,
and that it grew up in an uncongenial medium, which could never foster
it into happy, healthy development. When I was sixteen I was sent to
Geneva to complete my course of education; and the change was a very
happy one to me, for the first sight of the Alps, with the setting
sun on them, as we descended the Jura, seemed to me like an entrance
into heaven; and the three years of my life there were spent in a
perpetual sense of exaltation, as if from a draught of delicious wine,
at the presence of Nature in all her awful loveliness. You will think,
perhaps, that I must have been a poet, from this early sensibility to
Nature. But my lot was not so happy as that. A poet pours forth his
song and _believes_ in the listening ear and answering soul, to which
his song will be floated sooner or later. But the poet's sensibility
without his voice--the poet's sensibility that finds no vent but in
silent tears on the sunny bank, when the noonday light sparkles on the
water, or in an inward shudder at the sound of harsh human tones, the
sight of a cold human eye--this dumb passion brings with it a fatal
solitude of soul in the society of one's fellow-men. My least solitary
moments were those in which I pushed off in my boat, at evening,
towards the centre of the lake; it seemed to me that the sky, and the
glowing mountain-tops, and the wide blue water, surrounded me with a
cherishing love such as no human face had shed on me since my mother's
love had vanished out of my life. I used to do as Jean Jacques did--lie
down in my boat and let it glide where it would, while I looked up at
the departing glow leaving one mountain-top after the other, as if the
prophet's chariot of fire were passing over them on its way to the home
of light. Then, when the white summits were all sad and corpse-like,
I had to push homeward, for I was under careful surveillance, and was
allowed no late wanderings. This disposition of mine was not favourable
to the formation of intimate friendships among the numerous youths of
my own age who are always to be found studying at Geneva. Yet I made
_one_ such friendship; and, singularly enough, it was with a youth
whose intellectual tendencies were the very reverse of my own. I shall
call him Charles Meunier; his real surname--an English one, for he
was of English extraction--having since become celebrated. He was an
orphan, who lived on a miserable pittance while he pursued the medical
studies for which he had a special genius. Strange! that with my vague
mind, susceptible and unobservant, hating inquiry and given up to
contemplation, I should have been drawn towards a youth whose strongest
passion was science. But the bond was not an intellectual one; it came
from a source that can happily blend the stupid with the brilliant, the
dreamy with the practical: it came from community of feeling. Charles
was poor and ugly, derided by Genevese _gamins_, and not acceptable
in drawing-rooms. I saw that he was isolated, as I was, though from a
different cause, and, stimulated by a sympathetic resentment, I made
timid advances towards him. It is enough to say that there sprang up
as much comradeship between us as our different habits would allow;
and in Charles's rare holidays we went up the Saleve together, or
took the boat to Vevay, while I listened dreamily to the monologues
in which he unfolded his bold conceptions of future experiment and
discovery. I mingled them confusedly in my thought with glimpses of
blue water and delicate floating cloud, with the notes of birds and
the distant glitter of the glacier. He knew quite well that my mind
was half absent, yet he liked to talk to me in this way; for don't we
talk of our hopes and our projects even to dogs and birds, when they
love us? I have mentioned this one friendship because of its connexion
with a strange and terrible scene which I shall have to narrate in my
subsequent life.

This happier life at Geneva was put an end to by a severe illness,
which is partly a blank to me, partly a time of dimly-remembered
suffering, with the presence of my father by my bed from time to time.
Then came the languid monotony of convalescence, the days gradually
breaking into variety and distinctness as my strength enabled me to
take longer and longer drives. On one of these more vividly remembered
days, my father said to me, as he sat beside my sofa--

"When you are quite well enough to travel, Latimer, I shall take you
home with me. The journey will amuse you and do you good, for I shall
go through the Tyrol and Austria, and you will see many new places. Our
neighbours, the Filmores, are come; Alfred will join us at Basle, and
we shall all go together to Vienna, and back by Prague" . . .

My father was called away before he had finished his sentence, and
he left my mind resting on the word _Prague_, with a strange sense
that a new and wondrous scene was breaking upon me: a city under the
broad sunshine, that seemed to me as if it were the summer sunshine
of a long-past century arrested in its course--unrefreshed for ages
by dews of night, or the rushing rain-cloud; scorching the dusty,
weary, time-eaten grandeur of a people doomed to live on in the stale
repetition of memories, like deposed and superannuated kings in their
regal gold-inwoven tatters. The city looked so thirsty that the broad
river seemed to me a sheet of metal; and the blackened statues, as I
passed under their blank gaze, along the unending bridge, with their
ancient garments and their saintly crowns, seemed to me the real
inhabitants and owners of this place, while the busy, trivial men
and women, hurrying to and fro, were a swarm of ephemeral visitants
infesting it for a day. It is such grim, stony beings as these, I
thought, who are the fathers of ancient faded children, in those tanned
time-fretted dwellings that crowd the steep before me; who pay their
court in the worn and crumbling pomp of the palace which stretches its
monotonous length on the height; who worship wearily in the stifling
air of the churches, urged by no fear or hope, but compelled by their
doom to be ever old and undying, to live on in the rigidity of habit,
as they live on in perpetual midday, without the repose of night or the
new birth of morning.

A stunning clang of metal suddenly thrilled through me, and I became
conscious of the objects in my room again: one of the fire-irons had
fallen as Pierre opened the door to bring me my draught. My heart was
palpitating violently, and I begged Pierre to leave my draught beside
me; I would take it presently.

As soon as I was alone again, I began to ask myself whether I had been
sleeping. Was this a dream--this wonderfully distinct vision--minute
in its distinctness down to a patch of rainbow light on the pavement,
transmitted through a coloured lamp in the shape of a star--of a
strange city, quite unfamiliar to my imagination? I had seen no picture
of Prague: it lay in my mind as a mere name, with vaguely-remembered
historical associations--ill-defined memories of imperial grandeur and
religious wars.

Nothing of this sort had ever occurred in my dreaming experience
before, for I had often been humiliated because my dreams were only
saved from being utterly disjointed and commonplace by the frequent
terrors of nightmare. But I could not believe that I had been asleep,
for I remembered distinctly the gradual breaking-in of the vision
upon me, like the new images in a dissolving view, or the growing
distinctness of the landscape as the sun lifts up the veil of the
morning mist. And while I was conscious of this incipient vision, I
was also conscious that Pierre came to tell my father Mr. Filmore was
waiting for him, and that my father hurried out of the room. No, it was
not a dream; was it--the thought was full of tremulous exultation--was
it the poet's nature in me, hitherto only a troubled yearning
sensibility, now manifesting itself suddenly as spontaneous creation?
Surely it was in this way that Homer saw the plain of Troy, that Dante
saw the abodes of the departed, that Milton saw the earthward flight of
the Tempter. Was it that my illness had wrought some happy change in
my organization--given a firmer tension to my nerves--carried off some
dull obstruction? I had often read of such effects--in works of fiction
at least. Nay; in genuine biographies I had read of the subtilizing
or exalting influence of some diseases on the mental powers. Did
not Novalis feel his inspiration intensified under the progress of
consumption?

When my mind had dwelt for some time on this blissful idea, it seemed
to me that I might perhaps test it by an exertion of my will. The
vision had begun when my father was speaking of our going to Prague.
I did not for a moment believe it was really a representation of that
city; I believed--I hoped it was a picture that my newly liberated
genius had painted in fiery haste, with the colours snatched from lazy
memory. Suppose I were to fix my mind on some other place--Venice, for
example, which was far more familiar to my imagination than Prague:
perhaps the same sort of result would follow. I concentrated my
thoughts on Venice; I stimulated my imagination with poetic memories,
and strove to feel myself present in Venice, as I had felt myself
present in Prague. But in vain. I was only colouring the Canaletto
engravings that hung in my old bedroom at home; the picture was a
shifting one, my mind wandering uncertainly in search of more vivid
images; I could see no accident of form or shadow without conscious
labour after the necessary conditions. It was all prosaic effort, not
rapt passivity, such as I had experienced half an hour before. I was
discouraged; but I remembered that inspiration was fitful.

For several days I was in a state of excited expectation, watching for
a recurrence of my new gift. I sent my thoughts ranging over my world
of knowledge, in the hope that they would find some object which would
send a reawakening vibration through my slumbering genius. But no; my
world remained as dim as ever, and that flash of strange light refused
to come again, though I watched for it with palpitating eagerness.

My father accompanied me every day in a drive, and a gradually
lengthening walk as my powers of walking increased; and one evening he
had agreed to come and fetch me at twelve the next day, that we might
go together to select a musical box, and other purchases rigorously
demanded of a rich Englishman visiting Geneva. He was one of the most
punctual of men and bankers, and I was always nervously anxious to be
quite ready for him at the appointed time. But, to my surprise, at a
quarter past twelve he had not appeared. I felt all the impatience of a
convalescent who has nothing particular to do, and who has just taken
a tonic in the prospect of immediate exercise that would carry off the
stimulus.

Unable to sit still and reserve my strength, I walked up and down the
room, looking out on the current of the Rhone, just where it leaves the
dark-blue lake; but thinking all the while of the possible causes that
could detain my father.

Suddenly I was conscious that my father was in the room, but not alone:
there were two persons with him. Strange! I had heard no footstep, I
had not seen the door open; but I saw my father, and at his right hand
our neighbour Mrs. Filmore, whom I remembered very well, though I had
not seen her for five years. She was a commonplace middle-aged woman,
in silk and cashmere; but the lady on the left of my father was not
more than twenty, a tall, slim, willowy figure, with luxuriant blond
hair, arranged in cunning braids and folds that looked almost too
massive for the slight figure and the small-featured, thin-lipped face
they crowned. But the face had not a girlish expression: the features
were sharp, the pale grey eyes at once acute, restless, and sarcastic.
They were fixed on me in half-smiling curiosity, and I felt a painful
sensation as if a sharp wind were cutting me. The pale-green dress,
and the green leaves that seemed to form a border about her pale blond
hair, made me think of a Water-Nixie--for my mind was full of German
lyrics, and this pale, fatal-eyed woman, with the green weeds, looked
like a birth from some cold sedgy stream, the daughter of an aged river.

"Well, Latimer, you thought me long," my father said . . .

But while the last word was in my ears, the whole group vanished, and
there was nothing between me and the Chinese printed folding-screen
that stood before the door. I was cold and trembling; I could only
totter forward and throw myself on the sofa. This strange new power had
manifested itself again . . . But _was_ it a power? Might it not rather
be a disease--a sort of intermittent delirium, concentrating my energy
of brain into moments of unhealthy activity, and leaving my saner hours
all the more barren? I felt a dizzy sense of unreality in what my eye
rested on; I grasped the bell convulsively, like one trying to free
himself from nightmare, and rang it twice. Pierre came with a look of
alarm in his face.

"Monsieur ne se trouve pas bien?" he said anxiously.

"I'm tired of waiting, Pierre," I said, as distinctly and emphatically
as I could, like a man determined to be sober in spite of wine; "I'm
afraid something has happened to my father--he's usually so punctual.
Run to the Hotel des Bergues and see if he is there."

Pierre left the room at once, with a soothing "Bien, Monsieur"; and I
felt the better for this scene of simple, waking prose. Seeking to calm
myself still further, I went into my bedroom, adjoining the _salon_,
and opened a case of eau-de-Cologne; took out a bottle; went through
the process of taking out the cork very neatly, and then rubbed the
reviving spirit over my hands and forehead, and under my nostrils,
drawing a new delight from the scent because I had procured it by slow
details of labour, and by no strange sudden madness. Already I had
begun to taste something of the horror that belongs to the lot of a
human being whose nature is not adjusted to simple human conditions.

Still enjoying the scent, I returned to the salon, but it was not
unoccupied, as it had been before I left it. In front of the Chinese
folding-screen there was my father, with Mrs. Filmore on his right
hand, and on his left--the slim, blond-haired girl, with the keen face
and the keen eyes fixed on me in half-smiling curiosity.

"Well, Latimer, you thought me long," my father said . . .

I heard no more, felt no more, till I became conscious that I was lying
with my head low on the sofa, Pierre, and my father by my side. As soon
as I was thoroughly revived, my father left the room, and presently
returned, saying--

"I've been to tell the ladies how you are, Latimer. They were waiting
in the next room. We shall put off our shopping expedition to-day."

Presently he said, "That young lady is Bertha Grant, Mrs. Filmore's
orphan niece. Filmore has adopted her, and she lives with them, so
you will have her for a neighbour when we go home--perhaps for a near
relation; for there is a tenderness between her and Alfred, I suspect,
and I should be gratified by the match, since Filmore means to provide
for her in every way as if she were his daughter. It had not occurred
to me that you knew nothing about her living with the Filmores."

He made no further allusion to the fact of my having fainted at the
moment of seeing her, and I would not for the world have told him the
reason: I shrank from the idea of disclosing to any one what might be
regarded as a pitiable peculiarity, most of all from betraying it to my
father, who would have suspected my sanity ever after.

I do not mean to dwell with particularity on the details of my
experience. I have described these two cases at length, because they
had definite, clearly traceable results in my after-lot.

Shortly after this last occurrence--I think the very next day--I began
to be aware of a phase in my abnormal sensibility, to which, from
the languid and slight nature of my intercourse with others since my
illness, I had not been alive before. This was the obtrusion on my
mind of the mental process going forward in first one person, and
then another, with whom I happened to be in contact: the vagrant,
frivolous ideas and emotions of some uninteresting acquaintance--Mrs.
Filmore, for example--would force themselves on my consciousness like
an importunate, ill-played musical instrument, or the loud activity
of an imprisoned insect. But this unpleasant sensibility was fitful,
and left me moments of rest, when the souls of my companions were once
more shut out from me, and I felt a relief such as silence brings to
wearied nerves. I might have believed this importunate insight to be
merely a diseased activity of the imagination, but that my prevision of
incalculable words and actions proved it to have a fixed relation to
the mental process in other minds. But this superadded consciousness,
wearying and annoying enough when it urged on me the trivial experience
of indifferent people, became an intense pain and grief when it seemed
to be opening to me the souls of those who were in a close relation to
me--when the rational talk, the graceful attentions, the wittily-turned
phrases, and the kindly deeds, which used to make the web of their
characters, were seen as if thrust asunder by a microscopic vision,
that showed all the intermediate frivolities, all the suppressed
egoism, all the struggling chaos of puerilities, meanness, vague
capricious memories, and indolent make-shift thoughts, from which human
words and deeds emerge like leaflets covering a fermenting heap.

At Basle we were joined by my brother Alfred, now a handsome,
self-confident man of six-and-twenty--a thorough contrast to my
fragile, nervous, ineffectual self. I believe I was held to have a sort
of half-womanish, half-ghostly beauty; for the portrait-painters,
who are thick as weeds at Geneva, had often asked me to sit to them,
and I had been the model of a dying minstrel in a fancy picture. But
I thoroughly disliked my own physique and nothing but the belief that
it was a condition of poetic genius would have reconciled me to it.
That brief hope was quite fled, and I saw in my face now nothing but
the stamp of a morbid organization, framed for passive suffering--too
feeble for the sublime resistance of poetic production. Alfred, from
whom I had been almost constantly separated, and who, in his present
stage of character and appearance, came before me as a perfect
stranger, was bent on being extremely friendly and brother-like to me.
He had the superficial kindness of a good-humoured, self-satisfied
nature, that fears no rivalry, and has encountered no contrarieties.
I am not sure that my disposition was good enough for me to have been
quite free from envy towards him, even if our desires had not clashed,
and if I had been in the healthy human condition which admits of
generous confidence and charitable construction. There must always have
been an antipathy between our natures. As it was, he became in a few
weeks an object of intense hatred to me; and when he entered the room,
still more when he spoke, it was as if a sensation of grating metal had
set my teeth on edge. My diseased consciousness was more intensely and
continually occupied with his thoughts and emotions, than with those of
any other person who came in my way. I was perpetually exasperated with
the petty promptings of his conceit and his love of patronage, with
his self-complacent belief in Bertha Grant's passion for him, with his
half-pitying contempt for me--seen not in the ordinary indications of
intonation and phrase and slight action, which an acute and suspicious
mind is on the watch for, but in all their naked skinless complication.

For we were rivals, and our desires clashed, though he was not aware
of it. I have said nothing yet of the effect Bertha Grant produced in
me on a nearer acquaintance. That effect was chiefly determined by
the fact that she made the only exception, among all the human beings
about me, to my unhappy gift of insight. About Bertha I was always
in a state of uncertainty: I could watch the expression of her face,
and speculate on its meaning; I could ask for her opinion with the
real interest of ignorance; I could listen for her words and watch
for her smile with hope and fear: she had for me the fascination of
an unravelled destiny. I say it was this fact that chiefly determined
the strong effect she produced on me: for, in the abstract, no womanly
character could seem to have less affinity for that of a shrinking,
romantic, passionate youth than Bertha's. She was keen, sarcastic,
unimaginative, prematurely cynical, remaining critical and unmoved
in the most impressive scenes, inclined to dissect all my favourite
poems, and especially contemptous towards the German lyrics which
were my pet literature at that time. To this moment I am unable to
define my feeling towards her: it was not ordinary boyish admiration,
for she was the very opposite, even to the colour of her hair, of the
ideal woman who still remained to me the type of loveliness; and she
was without that enthusiasm for the great and good, which, even at
the moment of her strongest dominion over me, I should have declared
to be the highest element of character. But there is no tyranny more
complete than that which a self-centred negative nature exercises over
a morbidly sensitive nature perpetually craving sympathy and support.
The most independent people feel the effect of a man's silence in
heightening their value for his opinion--feel an additional triumph in
conquering the reverence of a critic habitually captious and satirical:
no wonder, then, that an enthusiastic self-distrusting youth should
watch and wait before the closed secret of a sarcastic woman's face, as
if it were the shrine of the doubtfully benignant deity who ruled his
destiny. For a young enthusiast is unable to imagine the total negation
in another mind of the emotions which are stirring his own: they may
be feeble, latent, inactive, he thinks, but they are there--they may
be called forth; sometimes, in moments of happy hallucination, he
believes they may be there in all the greater strength because he sees
no outward sign of them. And this effect, as I have intimated, was
heightened to its utmost intensity in me, because Bertha was the only
being who remained for me in the mysterious seclusion of soul that
renders such youthful delusion possible. Doubtless there was another
sort of fascination at work--that subtle physical attraction which
delights in cheating our psychological predictions, and in compelling
the men who paint sylphs, to fall in love with some _bonne et brave
femme_, heavy-heeled and freckled.

Bertha's behaviour towards me was such as to encourage all my
illusions, to heighten my boyish passion, and make me more and more
dependent on her smiles. Looking back with my present wretched
knowledge, I conclude that her vanity and love of power were intensely
gratified by the belief that I had fainted on first seeing her purely
from the strong impression her person had produced on me. The most
prosaic woman likes to believe herself the object of a violent, a
poetic passion; and without a grain of romance in her, Bertha had that
spirit of intrigue which gave piquancy to the idea that the brother of
the man she meant to marry was dying with love and jealousy for her
sake. That she meant to marry my brother, was what at that time I did
not believe; for though he was assiduous in his attentions to her, and
I knew well enough that both he and my father had made up their minds
to this result, there was not yet an understood engagement--there had
been no explicit declaration; and Bertha habitually, while she flirted
with my brother, and accepted his homage in a way that implied to him a
thorough recognition of its intention, made me believe, by the subtlest
looks and phrases--feminine nothings which could never be quoted
against her--that he was really the object of her secret ridicule; that
she thought him, as I did, a coxcomb, whom she would have pleasure
in disappointing. Me she openly petted in my brother's presence, as
if I were too young and sickly ever to be thought of as a lover; and
that was the view he took of me. But I believe she must inwardly have
delighted in the tremors into which she threw me by the coaxing way in
which she patted my curls, while she laughed at my quotations. Such
caresses were always given in the presence of our friends; for when we
were alone together, she affected a much greater distance towards me,
and now and then took the opportunity, by words or slight actions, to
stimulate my foolish timid hope that she really preferred me. And why
should she not follow her inclination? I was not in so advantageous a
position as my brother, but I had fortune, I was not a year younger
than she was, and she was an heiress, who would soon be of age to
decide for herself.

The fluctuations of hope and fear, confined to this one channel, made
each day in her presence a delicious torment. There was one deliberate
act of hers which especially helped to intoxicate me. When we were at
Vienna her twentieth birthday occurred, and as she was very fond of
ornaments, we all took the opportunity of the splendid jewellers' shops
in that Teutonic Paris to purchase her a birthday present of jewellery.
Mine, naturally, was the least expensive; it was an opal ring--the opal
was my favourite stone, because it seems to blush and turn pale as if
it had a soul. I told Bertha so when I gave it her, and said that it
was an emblem of the poetic nature, changing with the changing light
of heaven and of woman's eyes. In the evening she appeared elegantly
dressed, and wearing conspicuously all the birthday presents except
mine. I looked eagerly at her fingers, but saw no opal. I had no
opportunity of noticing this to her during the evening; but the next
day, when I found her seated near the window alone, after breakfast,
I said, "You scorn to wear my poor opal. I should have remembered
that you despised poetic natures, and should have given you coral, or
turquoise, or some other opaque unresponsive stone." "Do I despise it?"
she answered, taking hold of a delicate gold chain which she always
wore round her neck and drawing out the end from her bosom with my ring
hanging to it; "it hurts me a little, I can tell you," she said, with
her usual dubious smile, "to wear it in that secret place; and since
your poetical nature is so stupid as to prefer a more public position,
I shall not endure the pain any longer."

She took off the ring from the chain and put it on her finger, smiling
still, while the blood rushed to my cheeks, and I could not trust
myself to say a word of entreaty that she would keep the ring where it
was before.

I was completely fooled by this, and for two days shut myself up in my
own room whenever Bertha was absent, that I might intoxicate myself
afresh with the thought of this scene and all it implied.

I should mention that during these two months--which seemed a long
life to me from the novelty and intensity of the pleasures and pains
I underwent--my diseased anticipation in other people's consciousness
continued to torment me; now it was my father, and now my brother,
now Mrs. Filmore or her husband, and now our German courier, whose
stream of thought rushed upon me like a ringing in the ears not to be
got rid of, though it allowed my own impulses and ideas to continue
their uninterrupted course. It was like a preternaturally heightened
sense of hearing, making audible to one a roar of sound where others
find perfect stillness. The weariness and disgust of this involuntary
intrusion into other souls was counteracted only by my ignorance
of Bertha, and my growing passion for her; a passion enormously
stimulated, if not produced, by that ignorance. She was my oasis of
mystery in the dreary desert of knowledge. I had never allowed my
diseased condition to betray itself, or to drive me into any unusual
speech or action, except once, when, in a moment of peculiar bitterness
against my brother, I had forestalled some words which I knew he was
going to utter--a clever observation, which he had prepared beforehand.
He had occasionally a slightly affected hesitation in his speech,
and when he paused an instant after the second word, my impatience
and jealousy impelled me to continue the speech for him, as if it
were something we had both learned by rote. He coloured and looked
astonished, as well as annoyed; and the words had no sooner escaped
my lips than I felt a shock of alarm lest such an anticipation of
words--very far from being words of course, easy to divine--should
have betrayed me as an exceptional being, a sort of quiet energumen,
whom every one, Bertha above all, would shudder at and avoid. But I
magnified, as usual, the impression any word or deed of mine could
produce on others; for no one gave any sign of having noticed my
interruption as more than a rudeness, to be forgiven me on the score of
my feeble nervous condition.

While this superadded consciousness of the actual was almost constant
with me, I had never had a recurrence of that distinct prevision which
I have described in relation to my first interview with Bertha; and I
was waiting with eager curiosity to know whether or not my vision of
Prague would prove to have been an instance of the same kind. A few
days after the incident of the opal ring, we were paying one of our
frequent visits to the Lichtenberg Palace. I could never look at many
pictures in succession; for pictures, when they are at all powerful,
affect me so strongly that one or two exhaust all my capability of
contemplation. This morning I had been looking at Giorgione's picture
of the cruel-eyed woman, said to be a likeness of Lucrezia Borgia. I
had stood long alone before it, fascinated by the terrible reality
of that cunning, relentless face, till I felt a strange poisoned
sensation, as if I had long been inhaling a fatal odour, and was just
beginning to be conscious of its effects. Perhaps even then I should
not have moved away, if the rest of the party had not returned to this
room, and announced that they were going to the Belvedere Gallery to
settle a bet which had arisen between my brother and Mr. Filmore about
a portrait. I followed them dreamily, and was hardly alive to what
occurred till they had all gone up to the gallery, leaving me below;
for I refused to come within sight of another picture that day. I made
my way to the Grand Terrace, since it was agreed that we should saunter
in the gardens when the dispute had been decided. I had been sitting
here a short space, vaguely conscious of trim gardens, with a city and
green hills in the distance, when, wishing to avoid the proximity of
the sentinel, I rose and walked down the broad stone steps, intending
to seat myself farther on in the gardens. Just as I reached the
gravel-walk, I felt an arm slipped within mine, and a light hand gently
pressing my wrist. In the same instant a strange intoxicating numbness
passed over me, like the continuance or climax of the sensation I was
still feeling from the gaze of Lucrezia Borgia. The gardens, the summer
sky, the consciousness of Bertha's arm being within mine, all vanished,
and I seemed to be suddenly in darkness, out of which there gradually
broke a dim firelight, and I felt myself sitting in my father's leather
chair in the library at home. I knew the fireplace--the dogs for
the wood-fire--the black marble chimney-piece with the white marble
medallion of the dying Cleopatra in the centre. Intense and hopeless
misery was pressing on my soul; the light became stronger, for Bertha
was entering with a candle in her hand--Bertha, my wife--with cruel
eyes, with green jewels and green leaves on her white ball-dress; every
hateful thought within her present to me . . . "Madman, idiot! why
don't you kill yourself, then?" It was a moment of hell. I saw into
her pitiless soul--saw its barren worldliness, its scorching hate--and
felt it clothe me round like an air I was obliged to breathe. She came
with her candle and stood over me with a bitter smile of contempt;
I saw the great emerald brooch on her bosom, a studded serpent with
diamond eyes. I shuddered--I despised this woman with the barren soul
and mean thoughts; but I felt helpless before her, as if she clutched
my bleeding heart, and would clutch it till the last drop of life-blood
ebbed away. She was my wife, and we hated each other. Gradually the
hearth, the dim library, the candle-light disappeared--seemed to melt
away into a background of light, the green serpent with the diamond
eyes remaining a dark image on the retina. Then I had a sense of my
eyelids quivering, and the living daylight broke in upon me; I saw
gardens, and heard voices; I was seated on the steps of the Belvedere
Terrace, and my friends were round me.

The tumult of mind into which I was thrown by this hideous vision made
me ill for several days, and prolonged our stay at Vienna. I shuddered
with horror as the scene recurred to me; and it recurred constantly,
with all its minutiae, as if they had been burnt into my memory; and
yet, such is the madness of the human heart under the influence of
its immediate desires, I felt a wild hell-braving joy that Bertha was
to be mine; for the fulfilment of my former prevision concerning her
first appearance before me, left me little hope that this last hideous
glimpse of the future was the mere diseased play of my own mind, and
had no relation to external realities. One thing alone I looked towards
as a possible means of casting doubt on my terrible conviction--the
discovery that my vision of Prague had been false--and Prague was the
next city on our route.

Meanwhile, I was no sooner in Bertha's society again than I was as
completely under her sway as before. What if I saw into the heart of
Bertha, the matured woman--Bertha, my wife? Bertha, the _girl_, was
a fascinating secret to me still: I trembled under her touch; I felt
the witchery of her presence; I yearned to be assured of her love.
The fear of poison is feeble against the sense of thirst. Nay, I was
just as jealous of my brother as before--just as much irritated by his
small patronizing ways; for my pride, my diseased sensibility, were
there as they had always been, and winced as inevitably under every
offence as my eye winced from an intruding mote. The future, even when
brought within the compass of feeling by a vision that made me shudder,
had still no more than the force of an idea, compared with the force
of present emotion--of my love for Bertha, of my dislike and jealousy
towards my brother.

It is an old story, that men sell themselves to the tempter, and sign a
bond with their blood, because it is only to take effect at a distant
day; then rush on to snatch the cup their souls thirst after with an
impulse not the less savage because there is a dark shadow beside them
for evermore. There is no short cut, no patent tram-road, to wisdom:
after all the centuries of invention, the soul's path lies through
the thorny wilderness which must be still trodden in solitude, with
bleeding feet, with sobs for help, as it was trodden by them of old
time.

My mind speculated eagerly on the means by which I should become my
brother's successful rival, for I was still too timid, in my ignorance
of Bertha's actual feeling, to venture on any step that would urge
from her an avowal of it. I thought I should gain confidence even for
this, if my vision of Prague proved to have been veracious; and yet,
the horror of that certitude! Behind the slim girl Bertha, whose words
and looks I watched for, whose touch was bliss, there stood continually
that Bertha with the fuller form, the harder eyes, the more rigid
mouth--with the barren, selfish soul laid bare; no longer a fascinating
secret, but a measured fact, urging itself perpetually on my unwilling
sight. Are you unable to give me your sympathy--you who read this? Are
you unable to imagine this double consciousness at work within me,
flowing on like two parallel streams which never mingle their waters
and blend into a common hue? Yet you must have known something of the
presentiments that spring from an insight at war with passion; and my
visions were only like presentiments intensified to horror. You have
known the powerlessness of ideas before the might of impulse; and my
visions, when once they had passed into memory, were mere ideas--pale
shadows that beckoned in vain, while my hand was grasped by the living
and the loved.

In after-days I thought with bitter regret that if I had foreseen
something more or something different--if instead of that hideous
vision which poisoned the passion it could not destroy, or if even
along with it I could have had a foreshadowing of that moment when I
looked on my brother's face for the last time, some softening influence
would have been shed over my feeling towards him: pride and hatred
would surely have been subdued into pity, and the record of those
hidden sins would have been shortened. But this is one of the vain
thoughts with which we men flatter ourselves. We try to believe that
the egoism within us would have easily been melted, and that it was
only the narrowness of our knowledge which hemmed in our generosity,
our awe, our human piety, and hindered them from submerging our hard
indifference to the sensations and emotions of our fellows. Our
tenderness and self-renunciation seem strong when our egoism has had
its day--when, after our mean striving for a triumph that is to be
another's loss, the triumph comes suddenly, and we shudder at it,
because it is held out by the chill hand of death.

Our arrival in Prague happened at night, and I was glad of this, for
it seemed like a deferring of a terribly decisive moment, to be in
the city for hours without seeing it. As we were not to remain long
in Prague, but to go on speedily to Dresden, it was proposed that we
should drive out the next morning and take a general view of the place,
as well as visit some of its specially interesting spots, before the
heat became oppressive--for we were in August, and the season was hot
and dry. But it happened that the ladies were rather late at their
morning toilet, and to my father's politely-repressed but perceptible
annoyance, we were not in the carriage till the morning was far
advanced. I thought with a sense of relief, as we entered the Jews'
quarter, where we were to visit the old synagogue, that we should be
kept in this flat, shut-up part of the city, until we should all be
too tired and too warm to go farther, and so we should return without
seeing more than the streets through which we had already passed. That
would give me another day's suspense--suspense, the only form in which
a fearful spirit knows the solace of hope. But, as I stood under the
blackened, groined arches of that old synagogue, made dimly visible by
the seven thin candles in the sacred lamp, while our Jewish cicerone
reached down the Book of the Law, and read to us in its ancient
tongue--I felt a shuddering impression that this strange building,
with its shrunken lights, this surviving withered remnant of medieval
Judaism, was of a piece with my vision. Those darkened dusty Christian
saints, with their loftier arches and their larger candles, needed the
consolatory scorn with which they might point to a more shrivelled
death-in-life than their own.

As I expected, when we left the Jews' quarter the elders of our party
wished to return to the hotel. But now, instead of rejoicing in this,
as I had done beforehand, I felt a sudden overpowering impulse to go
on at once to the bridge, and put an end to the suspense I had been
wishing to protract. I declared, with unusual decision, that I would
get out of the carriage and walk on alone; they might return without
me. My father, thinking this merely a sample of my usual "poetic
nonsense," objected that I should only do myself harm by walking in
the heat; but when I persisted, he said angrily that I might follow my
own absurd devices, but that Schmidt (our courier) must go with me. I
assented to this, and set off with Schmidt towards the bridge. I had no
sooner passed from under the archway of the grand old gate leading on
to the bridge, than a trembling seized me, and I turned cold under the
midday sun; yet I went on; I was in search of something--a small detail
which I remembered with special intensity as part of my vision. There
it was--the patch of rainbow light on the pavement transmitted through
a lamp in the shape of a star.




CHAPTER II


Before the autumn was at an end, and while the brown leaves still stood
thick on the beeches in our park, my brother and Bertha were engaged to
each other, and it was understood that their marriage was to take place
early in the next spring. In spite of the certainty I had felt from
that moment on the bridge at Prague, that Bertha would one day be my
wife, my constitutional timidity and distrust had continued to benumb
me, and the words in which I had sometimes premeditated a confession of
my love, had died away unuttered. The same conflict had gone on within
me as before--the longing for an assurance of love from Bertha's lips,
the dread lest a word of contempt and denial should fall upon me like a
corrosive acid. What was the conviction of a distant necessity to me?
I trembled under a present glance, I hungered after a present joy, I
was clogged and chilled by a present fear. And so the days passed on:
I witnessed Bertha's engagement and heard her marriage discussed as if
I were under a conscious nightmare--knowing it was a dream that would
vanish, but feeling stifled under the grasp of hard-clutching fingers.

When I was not in Bertha's presence--and I was with her very often,
for she continued to treat me with a playful patronage that wakened
no jealousy in my brother--I spent my time chiefly in wandering, in
strolling, or taking long rides while the daylight lasted, and then
shutting myself up with my unread books; for books had lost the power
of chaining my attention. My self-consciousness was heightened to that
pitch of intensity in which our own emotions take the form of a drama
which urges itself imperatively on our contemplation, and we begin to
weep, less under the sense of our suffering than at the thought of it.
I felt a sort of pitying anguish over the pathos of my own lot: the
lot of a being finely organized for pain, but with hardly any fibres
that responded to pleasure--to whom the idea of future evil robbed the
present of its joy, and for whom the idea of future good did not still
the uneasiness of a present yearning or a present dread. I went dumbly
through that stage of the poet's suffering, in which he feels the
delicious pang of utterance, and makes an image of his sorrows.

I was left entirely without remonstrance concerning this dreamy wayward
life: I knew my father's thought about me: "That lad will never be good
for anything in life: he may waste his years in an insignificant way on
the income that falls to him: I shall not trouble myself about a career
for him."

One mild morning in the beginning of November, it happened that I was
standing outside the portico patting lazy old Caesar, a Newfoundland
almost blind with age, the only dog that ever took any notice of
me--for the very dogs shunned me, and fawned on the happier people
about me--when the groom brought up my brother's horse which was to
carry him to the hunt, and my brother himself appeared at the door,
florid, broad-chested, and self-complacent, feeling what a good-natured
fellow he was not to behave insolently to us all on the strength of his
great advantages.

"Latimer, old boy," he said to me in a tone of compassionate
cordiality, "what a pity it is you don't have a run with the hounds now
and then! The finest thing in the world for low spirits!"

"Low spirits!" I thought bitterly, as he rode away; "that is the
sort of phrase with which coarse, narrow natures like yours think to
describe experience of which you can know no more than your horse
knows. It is to such as you that the good of this world falls: ready
dulness, healthy selfishness, good-tempered conceit--these are the keys
to happiness."

The quick thought came, that my selfishness was even stronger than
his--it was only a suffering selfishness instead of an enjoying one.
But then, again, my exasperating insight into Alfred's self-complacent
soul, his freedom from all the doubts and fears, the unsatisfied
yearnings, the exquisite tortures of sensitiveness, that had made the
web of my life, seemed to absolve me from all bonds towards him. This
man needed no pity, no love; those fine influences would have been as
little felt by him as the delicate white mist is felt by the rock it
caresses. There was no evil in store for _him_: if he was not to marry
Bertha, it would be because he had found a lot pleasanter to himself.

Mr. Filmore's house lay not more than half a mile beyond our own gates,
and whenever I knew my brother was gone in another direction, I went
there for the chance of finding Bertha at home. Later on in the day
I walked thither. By a rare accident she was alone, and we walked
out in the grounds together, for she seldom went on foot beyond the
trimly-swept gravel-walks. I remember what a beautiful sylph she looked
to me as the low November sun shone on her blond hair, and she tripped
along teasing me with her usual light banter, to which I listened half
fondly, half moodily; it was all the sign Bertha's mysterious inner
self ever made to me. To-day perhaps, the moodiness predominated, for
I had not yet shaken off the access of jealous hate which my brother
had raised in me by his parting patronage. Suddenly I interrupted and
startled her by saying, almost fiercely, "Bertha, how can you love
Alfred?"

She looked at me with surprise for a moment, but soon her light smile
came again, and she answered sarcastically, "Why do you suppose I love
him?"

"How can you ask that, Bertha?"

"What! your wisdom thinks I must love the man I'm going to marry? The
most unpleasant thing in the world. I should quarrel with him; I should
be jealous of him; our _menage_ would be conducted in a very ill-bred
manner. A little quiet contempt contributes greatly to the elegance of
life."

"Bertha, that is not your real feeling. Why do you delight in trying to
deceive me by inventing such cynical speeches?"

"I need never take the trouble of invention in order to deceive you,
my small Tasso"--(that was the mocking name she usually gave me). "The
easiest way to deceive a poet is to tell him the truth."

She was testing the validity of her epigram in a daring way, and for
a moment the shadow of my vision--the Bertha whose soul was no secret
to me--passed between me and the radiant girl, the playful sylph whose
feelings were a fascinating mystery. I suppose I must have shuddered,
or betrayed in some other way my momentary chill of horror.

"Tasso!" she said, seizing my wrist, and peeping round into my face,
"are you really beginning to discern what a heartless girl I am? Why,
you are not half the poet I thought you were; you are actually capable
of believing the truth about me."

The shadow passed from between us, and was no longer the object nearest
to me. The girl whose light fingers grasped me, whose elfish charming
face looked into mine--who, I thought, was betraying an interest in my
feelings that she would not have directly avowed,--this warm breathing
presence again possessed my senses and imagination like a returning
siren melody which had been overpowered for an instant by the roar of
threatening waves. It was a moment as delicious to me as the waking
up to a consciousness of youth after a dream of middle age. I forgot
everything but my passion, and said with swimming eyes--

"Bertha, shall you love me when we are first married? I wouldn't mind
if you really loved me only for a little while."

Her look of astonishment, as she loosed my hand and started away from
me, recalled me to a sense of my strange, my criminal indiscretion.

"Forgive me," I said, hurriedly, as soon as I could speak again; "I did
not know what I was saying."

"Ah, Tasso's mad fit has come on, I see," she answered quietly, for she
had recovered herself sooner than I had. "Let him go home and keep his
head cool. I must go in, for the sun is setting."

I left her--full of indignation against myself. I had let slip words
which, if she reflected on them, might rouse in her a suspicion of my
abnormal mental condition--a suspicion which of all things I dreaded.
And besides that, I was ashamed of the apparent baseness I had
committed in uttering them to my brother's betrothed wife. I wandered
home slowly, entering our park through a private gate instead of by
the lodges. As I approached the house, I saw a man dashing off at full
speed from the stable-yard across the park. Had any accident happened
at home? No; perhaps it was only one of my father's peremptory business
errands that required this headlong haste.

Nevertheless I quickened my pace without any distinct motive, and was
soon at the house. I will not dwell on the scene I found there. My
brother was dead--had been pitched from his horse, and killed on the
spot by a concussion of the brain.

I went up to the room where he lay, and where my father was seated
beside him with a look of rigid despair. I had shunned my father more
than any one since our return home, for the radical antipathy between
our natures made my insight into his inner self a constant affliction
to me. But now, as I went up to him, and stood beside him in sad
silence, I felt the presence of a new element that blended us as we had
never been blent before. My father had been one of the most successful
men in the money-getting world: he had had no sentimental sufferings,
no illness. The heaviest trouble that had befallen him was the death
of his first wife. But he married my mother soon after; and I remember
he seemed exactly the same, to my keen childish observation, the week
after her death as before. But now, at last, a sorrow had come--the
sorrow of old age, which suffers the more from the crushing of its
pride and its hopes, in proportion as the pride and hope are narrow and
prosaic. His son was to have been married soon--would probably have
stood for the borough at the next election. That son's existence was
the best motive that could be alleged for making new purchases of land
every year to round off the estate. It is a dreary thing to live on
doing the same things year after year, without knowing why we do them.
Perhaps the tragedy of disappointed youth and passion is less piteous
than the tragedy of disappointed age and worldliness.

As I saw into the desolation of my father's heart, I felt a movement of
deep pity towards him, which was the beginning of a new affection--an
affection that grew and strengthened in spite of the strange bitterness
with which he regarded me in the first month or two after my brother's
death. If it had not been for the softening influence of my compassion
for him--the first deep compassion I had ever felt--I should have been
stung by the perception that my father transferred the inheritance of
an eldest son to me with a mortified sense that fate had compelled him
to the unwelcome course of caring for me as an important being. It was
only in spite of himself that he began to think of me with anxious
regard. There is hardly any neglected child for whom death has made
vacant a more favoured place, who will not understand what I mean.

Gradually, however, my new deference to his wishes, the effect of that
patience which was born of my pity for him, won upon his affection,
and he began to please himself with the endeavour to make me fill any
brother's place as fully as my feebler personality would admit. I saw
that the prospect which by and by presented itself of my becoming
Bertha's husband was welcome to him, and he even contemplated in
my case what he had not intended in my brother's--that his son and
daughter-in-law should make one household with him. My softened
feelings towards my father made this the happiest time I had known
since childhood;--these last months in which I retained the delicious
illusion of loving Bertha, of longing and doubting and hoping that
she might love me. She behaved with a certain new consciousness and
distance towards me after my brother's death; and I too was under a
double constraint--that of delicacy towards my brother's memory and
of anxiety as to the impression my abrupt words had left on her mind.
But the additional screen this mutual reserve erected between us only
brought me more completely under her power: no matter how empty the
adytum, so that the veil be thick enough. So absolute is our soul's
need of something hidden and uncertain for the maintenance of that
doubt and hope and effort which are the breath of its life, that if
the whole future were laid bare to us beyond to-day, the interest of
all mankind would be bent on the hours that lie between; we should
pant after the uncertainties of our one morning and our one afternoon;
we should rush fiercely to the Exchange for our last possibility of
speculation, of success, of disappointment: we should have a glut of
political prophets foretelling a crisis or a no-crisis within the only
twenty-four hours left open to prophecy. Conceive the condition of the
human mind if all propositions whatsoever were self-evident except one,
which was to become self-evident at the close of a summer's day, but
in the meantime might be the subject of question, of hypothesis, of
debate. Art and philosophy, literature and science, would fasten like
bees on that one proposition which had the honey of probability in it,
and be the more eager because their enjoyment would end with sunset.
Our impulses, our spiritual activities, no more adjust themselves to
the idea of their future nullity, than the beating of our heart, or the
irritability of our muscles.

Bertha, the slim, fair-haired girl, whose present thoughts and emotions
were an enigma to me amidst the fatiguing obviousness of the other
minds around me, was as absorbing to me as a single unknown to-day--as
a single hypothetic proposition to remain problematic till sunset; and
all the cramped, hemmed-in belief and disbelief, trust and distrust, of
my nature, welled out in this one narrow channel.

And she made me believe that she loved me. Without ever quitting her
tone of _badinage_ and playful superiority, she intoxicated me with
the sense that I was necessary to her, that she was never at ease,
unless I was near her, submitting to her playful tyranny. It costs
a woman so little effort to beset us in this way! A half-repressed
word, a moment's unexpected silence, even an easy fit of petulance on
our account, will serve us as _hashish_ for a long while. Out of the
subtlest web of scarcely perceptible signs, she set me weaving the
fancy that she had always unconsciously loved me better than Alfred,
but that, with the ignorant fluttered sensibility of a young girl, she
had been imposed on by the charm that lay for her in the distinction
of being admired and chosen by a man who made so brilliant a figure in
the world as my brother. She satirized herself in a very graceful way
for her vanity and ambition. What was it to me that I had the light of
my wretched provision on the fact that now it was I who possessed at
least all but the personal part of my brother's advantages? Our sweet
illusions are half of them conscious illusions, like effects of colour
that we know to be made up of tinsel, broken glass, and rags.

We were married eighteen months after Alfred's death, one cold, clear
morning in April, when there came hail and sunshine both together; and
Bertha, in her white silk and pale-green leaves, and the pale hues of
her hair and face, looked like the spirit of the morning. My father was
happier than he had thought of being again: my marriage, he felt sure,
would complete the desirable modification of my character, and make me
practical and worldly enough to take my place in society among sane
men. For he delighted in Bertha's tact and acuteness, and felt sure
she would be mistress of me, and make me what she chose: I was only
twenty-one, and madly in love with her. Poor father! He kept that hope
a little while after our first year of marriage, and it was not quite
extinct when paralysis came and saved him from utter disappointment.

I shall hurry through the rest of my story, not dwelling so much as
I have hitherto done on my inward experience. When people are well
known to each other, they talk rather of what befalls them externally,
leaving their feelings and sentiments to be inferred.

We lived in a round of visits for some time after our return home,
giving splendid dinner-parties, and making a sensation in our
neighbourhood by the new lustre of our equipage, for my father had
reserved this display of his increased wealth for the period of his
son's marriage; and we gave our acquaintances liberal opportunity for
remarking that it was a pity I made so poor a figure as an heir and a
bridegroom. The nervous fatigue of this existence, the insincerities
and platitudes which I had to live through twice over--through my inner
and outward sense--would have been maddening to me, if I had not had
that sort of intoxicated callousness which came from the delights of a
first passion. A bride and bridegroom, surrounded by all the appliances
of wealth, hurried through the day by the whirl of society, filling
their solitary moments with hastily-snatched caresses, are prepared
for their future life together as the novice is prepared for the
cloister--by experiencing its utmost contrast.

Through all these crowded excited months, Bertha's inward self remained
shrouded from me, and I still read her thoughts only through the
language of her lips and demeanour: I had still the human interest of
wondering whether what I did and said pleased her, of longing to hear
a word of affection, of giving a delicious exaggeration of meaning to
her smile. But I was conscious of a growing difference in her manner
towards me; sometimes strong enough to be called haughty coldness,
cutting and chilling me as the hail had done that came across the
sunshine on our marriage morning; sometimes only perceptible in the
dexterous avoidance of a _tete-a-tete_ walk or dinner to which I had
been looking forward. I had been deeply pained by this--had even felt
a sort of crushing of the heart, from the sense that my brief day of
happiness was near its setting; but still I remained dependent on
Bertha, eager for the last rays of a bliss that would soon be gone for
ever, hoping and watching for some after-glow more beautiful from the
impending night.

I remember--how should I not remember?--the time when that dependence
and hope utterly left me, when the sadness I had felt in Bertha's
growing estrangement became a joy that I looked back upon with
longing as a man might look back on the last pains in a paralysed
limb. It was just after the close of my father's last illness, which
had necessarily withdrawn us from society and thrown us more on each
other. It was the evening of father's death. On that evening the veil
which had shrouded Bertha's soul from me--had made me find in her
alone among my fellow-beings the blessed possibility of mystery, and
doubt, and expectation--was first withdrawn. Perhaps it was the first
day since the beginning of my passion for her, in which that passion
was completely neutralized by the presence of an absorbing feeling of
another kind. I had been watching by my father's deathbed: I had been
witnessing the last fitful yearning glance his soul had cast back on
the spent inheritance of life--the last faint consciousness of love he
had gathered from the pressure of my hand. What are all our personal
loves when we have been sharing in that supreme agony? In the first
moments when we come away from the presence of death, every other
relation to the living is merged, to our feeling, in the great relation
of a common nature and a common destiny.

In that state of mind I joined Bertha in her private sitting-room. She
was seated in a leaning posture on a settee, with her back towards the
door; the great rich coils of her pale blond hair surmounting her small
neck, visible above the back of the settee. I remember, as I closed
the door behind me, a cold tremulousness seizing me, and a vague sense
of being hated and lonely--vague and strong, like a presentiment. I
know how I looked at that moment, for I saw myself in Bertha's thought
as she lifted her cutting grey eyes, and looked at me: a miserable
ghost-seer, surrounded by phantoms in the noonday, trembling under a
breeze when the leaves were still, without appetite for the common
objects of human desires, but pining after the moon-beams. We were
front to front with each other, and judged each other. The terrible
moment of complete illumination had come to me, and I saw that the
darkness had hidden no landscape from me, but only a blank prosaic
wall: from that evening forth, through the sickening years which
followed, I saw all round the narrow room of this woman's soul--saw
petty artifice and mere negation where I had delighted to believe in
coy sensibilities and in wit at war with latent feeling--saw the light
floating vanities of the girl defining themselves into the systematic
coquetry, the scheming selfishness, of the woman--saw repulsion and
antipathy harden into cruel hatred, giving pain only for the sake of
wreaking itself.

For Bertha too, after her kind, felt the bitterness of disillusion.
She had believed that my wild poet's passion for her would make me her
slave; and that, being her slave, I should execute her will in all
things. With the essential shallowness of a negative, unimaginative
nature, she was unable to conceive the fact that sensibilities were
anything else than weaknesses. She had thought my weaknesses would
put me in her power, and she found them unmanageable forces. Our
positions were reversed. Before marriage she had completely mastered
my imagination, for she was a secret to me; and I created the unknown
thought before which I trembled as if it were hers. But now that her
soul was laid open to me, now that I was compelled to share the privacy
of her motives, to follow all the petty devices that preceded her words
and acts, she found herself powerless with me, except to produce in me
the chill shudder of repulsion-- powerless, because I could be acted
on by no lever within her reach. I was dead to worldly ambitions, to
social vanities, to all the incentives within the compass of her narrow
imagination, and I lived under influences utterly invisible to her.

She was really pitiable to have such a husband, and so all the world
thought. A graceful, brilliant woman, like Bertha, who smiled on
morning callers, made a figure in ball-rooms, and was capable of that
light repartee which, from such a woman, is accepted as wit, was secure
of carrying off all sympathy from a husband who was sickly, abstracted,
and, as some suspected, crack-brained. Even the servants in our house
gave her the balance of their regard and pity. For there were no
audible quarrels between us; our alienation, our repulsion from each
other, lay within the silence of our own hearts; and if the mistress
went out a great deal, and seemed to dislike the master's society, was
it not natural, poor thing? The master was odd. I was kind and just to
my dependants, but I excited in them a shrinking, half-contemptuous
pity; for this class of men and women are but slightly determined in
their estimate of others by general considerations, or even experience,
of character. They judge of persons as they judge of coins, and value
those who pass current at a high rate.

After a time I interfered so little with Bertha's habits that it might
seem wonderful how her hatred towards me could grow so intense and
active as it did. But she had begun to suspect, by some involuntary
betrayal of mine, that there was an abnormal power of penetration in
me--that fitfully, at least, I was strangely cognizant of her thoughts
and intentions, and she began to be haunted by a terror of me, which
alternated every now and then with defiance. She meditated continually
how the incubus could be shaken off her life--how she could be freed
from this hateful bond to a being whom she at once despised as an
imbecile, and dreaded as an inquisitor. For a long while she lived in
the hope that my evident wretchedness would drive me to the commission
of suicide; but suicide was not in my nature. I was too completely
swayed by the sense that I was in the grasp of unknown forces, to
believe in my power of self-release. Towards my own destiny I had
become entirely passive; for my one ardent desire had spent itself, and
impulse no longer predominated over knowledge. For this reason I never
thought of taking any steps towards a complete separation, which would
have made our alienation evident to the world. Why should I rush for
help to a new course, when I was only suffering from the consequences
of a deed which had been the act of my intensest will? That would have
been the logic of one who had desires to gratify, and I had no desires.
But Bertha and I lived more and more aloof from each other. The rich
find it easy to live married and apart.

That course of our life which I have indicated in a few sentences
filled the space of years. So much misery--so slow and hideous a growth
of hatred and sin, may be compressed into a sentence! And men judge
of each other's lives through this summary medium. They epitomize the
experience of their fellow-mortal, and pronounce judgment on him in
neat syntax, and feel themselves wise and virtuous--conquerors over
the temptations they define in well-selected predicates. Seven years
of wretchedness glide glibly over the lips of the man who has never
counted them out in moments of chill disappointment, of head and heart
throbbings, of dread and vain wrestling, of remorse and despair. We
learn _words_ by rote, but not their meaning; _that_ must be paid for
with our life-blood, and printed in the subtle fibres of our nerves.

But I will hasten to finish my story. Brevity is justified at once to
those who readily understand, and to those who will never understand.

Some years after my father's death, I was sitting by the dim firelight
in my library one January evening--sitting in the leather chair that
used to be my father's--when Bertha appeared at the door, with a
candle in her hand, and advanced towards me. I knew the ball-dress she
had on--the white ball-dress, with the green jewels, shone upon by
the light of the wax candle which lit up the medallion of the dying
Cleopatra on the mantelpiece. Why did she come to me before going
out? I had not seen her in the library, which was my habitual place,
for months. Why did she stand before me with the candle in her hand,
with her cruel contemptuous eyes fixed on me, and the glittering
serpent, like a familiar demon, on her breast? For a moment I thought
this fulfilment of my vision at Vienna marked some dreadful crisis
in my fate, but I saw nothing in Bertha's mind, as she stood before
me, except scorn for the look of overwhelming misery with which I
sat before her . . . "Fool, idiot, why don't you kill yourself,
then?"--that was her thought. But at length her thoughts reverted to
her errand, and she spoke aloud. The apparently indifferent nature of
the errand seemed to make a ridiculous anticlimax to my prevision and
my agitation.

"I have had to hire a new maid. Fletcher is going to be married, and
she wants me to ask you to let her husband have the public-house and
farm at Molton. I wish him to have it. You must give the promise now,
because Fletcher is going to-morrow morning--and quickly, because I'm
in a hurry."

"Very well; you may promise her," I said, indifferently, and Bertha
swept out of the library again.

I always shrank from the sight of a new person, and all the more when
it was a person whose mental life was likely to weary my reluctant
insight with worldly ignorant trivialities. But I shrank especially
from the sight of this new maid, because her advent had been announced
to me at a moment to which I could not cease to attach some fatality:
I had a vague dread that I should find her mixed up with the dreary
drama of my life--that some new sickening vision would reveal her to
me as an evil genius. When at last I did unavoidably meet her, the
vague dread was changed into definite disgust. She was a tall, wiry,
dark-eyed woman, this Mrs. Archer, with a face handsome enough to
give her coarse hard nature the odious finish of bold, self-confident
coquetry. That was enough to make me avoid her, quite apart from the
contemptuous feeling with which she contemplated me. I seldom saw her;
but I perceived that she rapidly became a favourite with her mistress,
and, after the lapse of eight or nine months, I began to be aware that
there had arisen in Bertha's mind towards this woman a mingled feeling
of fear and dependence, and that this feeling was associated with
ill-defined images of candle-light scenes in her dressing-room, and the
locking-up of something in Bertha's cabinet. My interviews with my wife
had become so brief and so rarely solitary, that I had no opportunity
of perceiving these images in her mind with more definiteness. The
recollections of the past become contracted in the rapidity of thought
till they sometimes bear hardly a more distinct resemblance to the
external reality than the forms of an oriental alphabet to the objects
that suggested them.

Besides, for the last year or more a modification had been going
forward in my mental condition, and was growing more and more marked.
My insight into the minds of those around me was becoming dimmer
and more fitful, and the ideas that crowded my double consciousness
became less and less dependent on any personal contact. All that was
personal in me seemed to be suffering a gradual death, so that I was
losing the organ through which the personal agitations and projects
of others could affect me. But along with this relief from wearisome
insight, there was a new development of what I concluded--as I have
since found rightly--to be a prevision of external scenes. It was
as if the relation between me and my fellow-men was more and more
deadened, and my relation to what we call the inanimate was quickened
into new life. The more I lived apart from society, and in proportion
as my wretchedness subsided from the violent throb of agonized passion
into the dulness of habitual pain, the more frequent and vivid became
such visions as that I had had of Prague--of strange cities, of sandy
plains, of gigantic ruins, of midnight skies with strange bright
constellations, of mountain-passes, of grassy nooks flecked with the
afternoon sunshine through the boughs: I was in the midst of such
scenes, and in all of them one presence seemed to weigh on me in all
these mighty shapes--the presence of something unknown and pitiless.
For continual suffering had annihilated religious faith within me:
to the utterly miserable--the unloving and the unloved--there is no
religion possible, no worship but a worship of devils. And beyond all
these, and continually recurring, was the vision of my death--the
pangs, the suffocation, the last struggle, when life would be grasped
at in vain.

Things were in this state near the end of the seventh year. I had
become entirely free from insight, from my abnormal cognizance of any
other consciousness than my own, and instead of intruding involuntarily
into the world of other minds, was living continually in my own
solitary future. Bertha was aware that I was greatly changed. To my
surprise she had of late seemed to seek opportunities of remaining
in my society, and had cultivated that kind of distant yet familiar
talk which is customary between a husband and wife who live in polite
and irrevocable alienation. I bore this with languid submission, and
without feeling enough interest in her motives to be roused into keen
observation; yet I could not help perceiving something triumphant and
excited in her carriage and the expression of her face--something too
subtle to express itself in words or tones, but giving one the idea
that she lived in a state of expectation or hopeful suspense. My chief
feeling was satisfaction that her inner self was once more shut out
from me; and I almost revelled for the moment in the absent melancholy
that made me answer her at cross purposes, and betray utter ignorance
of what she had been saying. I remember well the look and the smile
with which she one day said, after a mistake of this kind on my part:
"I used to think you were a clairvoyant, and that was the reason why
you were so bitter against other clairvoyants, wanting to keep your
monopoly; but I see now you have become rather duller than the rest of
the world."

I said nothing in reply. It occurred to me that her recent obtrusion
of herself upon me might have been prompted by the wish to test my
power of detecting some of her secrets; but I let the thought drop
again at once: her motives and her deeds had no interest for me, and
whatever pleasures she might be seeking, I had no wish to baulk her.
There was still pity in my soul for every living thing, and Bertha was
living--was surrounded with possibilities of misery.

Just at this time there occurred an event which roused me somewhat from
my inertia, and gave me an interest in the passing moment that I had
thought impossible for me. It was a visit from Charles Meunier, who had
written me word that he was coming to England for relaxation from too
strenuous labour, and would like to see me. Meunier had now a European
reputation; but his letter to me expressed that keen remembrance of
an early regard, an early debt of sympathy, which is inseparable from
nobility of character: and I too felt as if his presence would be to me
like a transient resurrection into a happier pre-existence.

He came, and as far as possible, I renewed our old pleasure of making
_tete-a-tete_ excursions, though, instead of mountains and glacers
and the wide blue lake, we had to content ourselves with mere slopes
and ponds and artificial plantations. The years had changed us both,
but with what different result! Meunier was now a brilliant figure
in society, to whom elegant women pretended to listen, and whose
acquaintance was boasted of by noblemen ambitious of brains. He
repressed with the utmost delicacy all betrayal of the shock which
I am sure he must have received from our meeting, or of a desire to
penetrate into my condition and circumstances, and sought by the
utmost exertion of his charming social powers to make our reunion
agreeable. Bertha was much struck by the unexpected fascinations of a
visitor whom she had expected to find presentable only on the score of
his celebrity, and put forth all her coquetries and accomplishments.
Apparently she succeeded in attracting his admiration, for his
manner towards her was attentive and flattering. The effect of his
presence on me was so benignant, especially in those renewals of our
old _tete-a-tete_ wanderings, when he poured forth to me wonderful
narratives of his professional experience, that more than once, when
his talk turned on the psychological relations of disease, the thought
crossed my mind that, if his stay with me were long enough, I might
possibly bring myself to tell this man the secrets of my lot. Might
there not lie some remedy for me, too, in his science? Might there
not at least lie some comprehension and sympathy ready for me in his
large and susceptible mind? But the thought only flickered feebly now
and then, and died out before it could become a wish. The horror I had
of again breaking in on the privacy of another soul, made me, by an
irrational instinct, draw the shroud of concealment more closely around
my own, as we automatically perform the gesture we feel to be wanting
in another.

When Meunier's visit was approaching its conclusion, there happened
an event which caused some excitement in our household, owing to
the surprisingly strong effect it appeared to produce on Bertha--on
Bertha, the self-possessed, who usually seemed inaccessible to feminine
agitations, and did even her hate in a self-restrained hygienic manner.
This event was the sudden severe illness of her maid, Mrs. Archer.
I have reserved to this moment the mention of a circumstance which
had forced itself on my notice shortly before Meunier's arrival,
namely, that there had been some quarrel between Bertha and this
maid, apparently during a visit to a distant family, in which she had
accompanied her mistress. I had overheard Archer speaking in a tone of
bitter insolence, which I should have thought an adequate reason for
immediate dismissal. No dismissal followed; on the contrary, Bertha
seemed to be silently putting up with personal inconveniences from
the exhibitions of this woman's temper. I was the more astonished to
observe that her illness seemed a cause of strong solicitude to Bertha;
that she was at the bedside night and day, and would allow no one else
to officiate as head-nurse. It happened that our family doctor was
out on a holiday, an accident which made Meunier's presence in the
house doubly welcome, and he apparently entered into the case with an
interest which seemed so much stronger than the ordinary professional
feeling, that one day when he had fallen into a long fit of silence
after visiting her, I said to him--

"Is this a very peculiar case of disease, Meunier?"

"No," he answered, "it is an attack of peritonitis, which will be
fatal, but which does not differ physically from many other cases that
have come under my observation. But I'll tell you what I have on my
mind. I want to make an experiment on this woman, if you will give me
permission. It can do her no harm--will give her no pain--for I shall
not make it until life is extinct to all purposes of sensation. I want
to try the effect of transfusing blood into her arteries after the
heart has ceased to beat for some minutes. I have tried the experiment
again and again with animals that have died of this disease, with
astounding results, and I want to try it on a human subject. I have the
small tubes necessary, in a case I have with me, and the rest of the
apparatus could be prepared readily. I should use my own blood--take
it from my own arm. This woman won't live through the night, I'm
convinced, and I want you to promise me your assistance in making the
experiment. I can't do without another hand, but it would perhaps not
be well to call in a medical assistant from among your provincial
doctors. A disagreeable foolish version of the thing might get abroad."

"Have you spoken to my wife on the subject?" I said, "because she
appears to be peculiarly sensitive about this woman: she has been a
favourite maid."

"To tell you the truth," said Meunier, "I don't want her to know about
it. There are always insuperable difficulties with women in these
matters, and the effect on the supposed dead body may be startling. You
and I will sit up together, and be in readiness. When certain symptoms
appear I shall take you in, and at the right moment we must manage to
get every one else out of the room."

I need not give our farther conversation on the subject. He entered
very fully into the details, and overcame my repulsion from them, by
exciting in me a mingled awe and curiosity concerning the possible
results of his experiment.

We prepared everything, and he instructed me in my part as assistant.
He had not told Bertha of his absolute conviction that Archer would not
survive through the night, and endeavoured to persuade her to leave the
patient and take a night's rest. But she was obstinate, suspecting the
fact that death was at hand, and supposing that he wished merely to
save her nerves. She refused to leave the sick-room. Meunier and I sat
up together in the library, he making frequent visits to the sick-room,
and returning with the information that the case was taking precisely
the course he expected. Once he said to me, "Can you imagine any cause
of ill-feeling this woman has against her mistress, who is so devoted
to her?"

"I think there was some misunderstanding between them before her
illness. Why do you ask?"

"Because I have observed for the last five or six hours--since, I
fancy, she has lost all hope of recovery--there seems a strange
prompting in her to say something which pain and failing strength
forbid her to utter; and there is a look of hideous meaning in her
eyes, which she turns continually towards her mistress. In this disease
the mind often remains singularly clear to the last."

"I am not surprised at an indication of malevolent feeling in her,"
I said. "She is a woman who has always inspired me with distrust and
dislike, but she managed to insinuate herself into her mistress's
favour." He was silent after this, looking at the fire with an air of
absorption, till he went upstairs again. He stayed away longer than
usual, and on returning, said to me quietly, "Come now."

I followed him to the chamber where death was hovering. The dark
hangings of the large bed made a background that gave a strong relief
to Bertha's pale face as I entered. She started forward as she saw me
enter, and then looked at Meunier with an expression of angry inquiry;
but he lifted up his hand as if to impose silence, while he fixed his
glance on the dying woman and felt her pulse. The face was pinched
and ghastly, a cold perspiration was on the forehead, and the eyelids
were lowered so as to conceal the large dark eyes. After a minute or
two, Meunier walked round to the other side of the bed where Bertha
stood, and with his usual air of gentle politeness towards her begged
her to leave the patient under our care--everything should be done for
her--she was no longer in a state to be conscious of an affectionate
presence. Bertha was hesitating, apparently almost willing to believe
his assurance and to comply. She looked round at the ghastly dying
face, as if to read the confirmation of that assurance, when for a
moment the lowered eyelids were raised again, and it seemed as if the
eyes were looking towards Bertha, but blankly. A shudder passed through
Bertha's frame, and she returned to her station near the pillow,
tacitly implying that she would not leave the room.

The eyelids were lifted no more. Once I looked at Bertha as she watched
the face of the dying one. She wore a rich _peignoir_, and her blond
hair was half covered by a lace cap: in her attire she was, as always,
an elegant woman, fit to figure in a picture of modern aristocratic
life: but I asked myself how that face of hers could ever have seemed
to me the face of a woman born of woman, with memories of childhood,
capable of pain, needing to be fondled? The features at that moment
seemed so preternaturally sharp, the eyes were so hard and eager--she
looked like a cruel immortal, finding her spiritual feast in the
agonies of a dying race. For across those hard features there came
something like a flash when the last hour had been breathed out, and
we all felt that the dark veil had completely fallen. What secret was
there between Bertha and this woman? I turned my eyes from her with a
horrible dread lest my insight should return, and I should be obliged
to see what had been breeding about two unloving women's hearts. I felt
that Bertha had been watching for the moment of death as the sealing of
her secret: I thanked Heaven it could remain sealed for me.

Meunier said quietly, "She is gone." He then gave his arm to Bertha,
and she submitted to be led out of the room.

I suppose it was at her order that two female attendants came into
the room, and dismissed the younger one who had been present before.
When they entered, Meunier had already opened the artery in the long
thin neck that lay rigid on the pillow, and I dismissed them, ordering
them to remain at a distance till we rang: the doctor, I said, had an
operation to perform--he was not sure about the death. For the next
twenty minutes I forgot everything but Meunier and the experiment in
which he was so absorbed, that I think his senses would have been
closed against all sounds or sights which had no relation to it. It
was my task at first to keep up the artificial respiration in the body
after the transfusion had been effected, but presently Meunier relieved
me, and I could see the wondrous slow return of life; the breast began
to heave, the inspirations became stronger, the eyelids quivered,
and the soul seemed to have returned beneath them. The artificial
respiration was withdrawn: still the breathing continued, and there was
a movement of the lips.

Just then I heard the handle of the door moving: I suppose Bertha had
heard from the women that they had been dismissed: probably a vague
fear had arisen in her mind, for she entered with a look of alarm. She
came to the foot of the bed and gave a stifled cry.

The dead woman's eyes were wide open, and met hers in full
recognition-- the recognition of hate. With a sudden strong effort, the
hand that Bertha had thought for ever still was pointed towards her,
and the haggard face moved. The gasping eager voice said--

"You mean to poison your husband . . . the poison is in the black
cabinet . . . I got it for you . . . you laughed at me, and told lies
about me behind my back, to make me disgusting . . . because you were
jealous . . . are you sorry . . . now?"

The lips continued to murmur, but the sounds were no longer distinct.
Soon there was no sound--only a slight movement: the flame had leaped
out, and was being extinguished the faster. The wretched woman's
heart-strings had been set to hatred and vengeance; the spirit of
life had swept the chords for an instant, and was gone again for ever.
Great God! Is this what it is to live again . . . to wake up with our
unstilled thirst upon us, with our unuttered curses rising to our lips,
with our muscles ready to act out their half-committed sins?

Bertha stood pale at the foot of the bed, quivering and helpless,
despairing of devices, like a cunning animal whose hiding-places are
surrounded by swift-advancing flame. Even Meunier looked paralysed;
life for that moment ceased to be a scientific problem to him. As for
me, this scene seemed of one texture with the rest of my existence:
horror was my familiar, and this new revelation was only like an old
pain recurring with new circumstances.

       *       *       *       *       *

Since then Bertha and I have lived apart--she in her own neighbourhood,
the mistress of half our wealth, I as a wanderer in foreign countries,
until I came to this Devonshire nest to die. Bertha lives pitied and
admired; for what had I against that charming woman, whom every one but
myself could have been happy with? There had been no witness of the
scene in the dying room except Meunier, and while Meunier lived his
lips were sealed by a promise to me.

Once or twice, weary of wandering, I rested in a favourite spot, and my
heart went out towards the men and women and children whose faces were
becoming familiar to me; but I was driven away again in terror at the
approach of my old insight--driven away to live continually with the
one Unknown Presence revealed and yet hidden by the moving curtain of
the earth and sky. Till at last disease took hold of me and forced me
to rest here--forced me to live in dependence on my servants. And then
the curse of insight--of my double consciousness, came again, and has
never left me. I know all their narrow thoughts, their feeble regard,
their half-wearied pity.

       *       *       *       *       *

It is the 20th of September, 1850. I know these figures I have just
written, as if they were a long familiar inscription. I have seen them
on this page in my desk unnumbered times, when the scene of my dying
struggle has opened upon me . . .