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 physiciantells me, I may fairly hope that my life will not be protracted manymonths. Unless, then, I am cursed with an exceptional physicalconstitution, as I am cursed with an exceptional mental character, Ishall not much longer groan under the wearisome burthen of this earthlyexistence. If it were to be otherwise--if I were to live on to the agemost men desire and provide for--I should for once have known whether themiseries of delusive expectation can outweigh the miseries of trueprovision. For I foresee when I shall die, and everything that willhappen in my last moments. 

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

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

Before that time comes, I wish to use my last hours of ease and strengthin telling the strange story of my experience. I have never fullyunbosomed myself to any human being; I have never been encouraged totrust much in the sympathy of my fellow-men. But we have all a chance ofmeeting with some pity, some tenderness, some charity, when we are dead:it is the living only who cannot be forgiven--the living only from whommen's indulgence and reverence are held off, like the rain by the hardeast wind. While the heart beats, bruise it--it is your onlyopportunity; while the eye can still turn towards you with moist, timidentreaty, freeze it with an icy unanswering gaze; while the ear, thatdelicate messenger to the inmost sanctuary of the soul, can still take inthe tones of kindness, put it off with hard civility, or sneeringcompliment, or envious affectation of indifference; while the creativebrain can still throb with the sense of injustice, with the yearning forbrotherly recognition--make haste--oppress it with your ill-consideredjudgements, your trivial comparisons, your careless misrepresentations. The heart will by and by be still--"ubi saeva indignatio ulterius corlacerare 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. Thenyour charitable speeches may find vent; then you may remember and pitythe toil and the struggle and the failure; then you may give due honourto the work achieved; then you may find extenuation for errors, and mayconsent to bury them. 

That is a trivial schoolboy text; why do I dwell on it? It has littlereference 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, forthe wounds they inflicted on me when I was among them. It is only thestory of my life that will perhaps win a little more sympathy fromstrangers when I am dead, than I ever believed it would obtain from myfriends while I was living. 

My childhood perhaps seems happier to me than it really was, by contrastwith all the after-years. For then the curtain of the future was asimpenetrable to me as to other children: I had all their delight in thepresent hour, their sweet indefinite hopes for the morrow; and I had atender mother: even now, after the dreary lapse of long years, a slighttrace of sensation accompanies the remembrance of her caress as she heldme 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, andshe kept me on her knee from morning till night. That unequalled lovesoon vanished out of my life, and even to my childish consciousness itwas as if that life had become more chill I rode my little white ponywith the groom by my side as before, but there were no loving eyeslooking 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 oreight would have done, to whom the other pleasures of life remained asbefore; for I was certainly a very sensitive child. I remember still themingled trepidation and delicious excitement with which I was affected bythe tramping of the horses on the pavement in the echoing stables, by theloud resonance of the groom's voices, by the booming bark of the dogs asmy father's carriage thundered under the archway of the courtyard, by thedin of the gong as it gave notice of luncheon and dinner. The measuredtramp of soldiery which I sometimes heard--for my father's house lay neara 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 forme; though he was very careful in fulfilling what he regarded as aparent's duties. But he was already past the middle of life, and I wasnot 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, intenselyorderly man, in root and stem a banker, but with a flourishing graft ofthe active landholder, aspiring to county influence: one of those peoplewho are always like themselves from day to day, who are uninfluenced bythe weather, and neither know melancholy nor high spirits. I held him ingreat awe, and appeared more timid and sensitive in his presence than atother times; a circumstance which, perhaps, helped to confirm him in theintention to educate me on a different plan from the prescriptive onewith which he had complied in the case of my elder brother, already atall youth at Eton. My brother was to be his representative andsuccessor; he must go to Eton and Oxford, for the sake of makingconnexions, of course: my father was not a man to underrate the bearingof Latin satirists or Greek dramatists on the attainment of anaristocratic position. But, intrinsically, he had slight esteem for"those dead but sceptred spirits"; having qualified himself for formingan independent opinion by reading Potter's _AEschylus_, and dipping intoFrancis's _Horace_. To this negative view he added a positive one, derived from a recent connexion with mining speculations; namely, that ascientific education was the really useful training for a younger son. Moreover, it was clear that a shy, sensitive boy like me was not fit toencounter the rough experience of a public school. Mr. Letherall hadsaid so very decidedly. Mr. Letherall was a large man in spectacles, whoone day took my small head between his large hands, and pressed it hereand there in an exploratory, auspicious manner--then placed each of hisgreat thumbs on my temples, and pushed me a little way from him, andstared at me with glittering spectacles. The contemplation appeared todisplease him, for he frowned sternly, and said to my father, drawing histhumbs across my eyebrows--

"The deficiency is there, sir--there; and here, " he added, touching theupper 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 theobject of reprobation, partly in the agitation of my first hatred--hatredof this big, spectacled man, who pulled my head about as if he wanted tobuy and cheapen it. 

I am not aware how much Mr. Letherall had to do with the systemafterwards adopted towards me, but it was presently clear that privatetutors, natural history, science, and the modern languages, were theappliances by which the defects of my organization were to be remedied. Iwas very stupid about machines, so I was to be greatly occupied withthem; I had no memory for classification, so it was particularlynecessary that I should study systematic zoology and botany; I was hungryfor human deeds and humane motions, so I was to be plentifully crammedwith the mechanical powers, the elementary bodies, and the phenomena ofelectricity and magnetism. A better-constituted boy would certainly haveprofited under my intelligent tutors, with their scientific apparatus;and would, doubtless, have found the phenomena of electricity andmagnetism as fascinating as I was, every Thursday, assured they were. Asit 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 classicalacademy. I read Plutarch, and Shakespeare, and Don Quixote by the sly, and supplied myself in that way with wandering thoughts, while my tutorwas assuring me that "an improved man, as distinguished from an ignorantone, was a man who knew the reason why water ran downhill. " I had nodesire to be this improved man; I was glad of the running water; I couldwatch it and listen to it gurgling among the pebbles, and bathing thebright 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 forwhat was so very beautiful. 

There is no need to dwell on this part of my life. I have said enough toindicate that my nature was of the sensitive, unpractical order, and thatit grew up in an uncongenial medium, which could never foster it intohappy, healthy development. When I was sixteen I was sent to Geneva tocomplete my course of education; and the change was a very happy one tome, for the first sight of the Alps, with the setting sun on them, as wedescended the Jura, seemed to me like an entrance into heaven; and thethree years of my life there were spent in a perpetual sense ofexaltation, as if from a draught of delicious wine, at the presence ofNature in all her awful loveliness. You will think, perhaps, that I musthave been a poet, from this early sensibility to Nature. But my lot wasnot so happy as that. A poet pours forth his song and _believes_ in thelistening ear and answering soul, to which his song will be floatedsooner or later. But the poet's sensibility without his voice--thepoet's sensibility that finds no vent but in silent tears on the sunnybank, when the noonday light sparkles on the water, or in an inwardshudder at the sound of harsh human tones, the sight of a cold humaneye--this dumb passion brings with it a fatal solitude of soul in thesociety of one's fellow-men. My least solitary moments were those inwhich I pushed off in my boat, at evening, towards the centre of thelake; it seemed to me that the sky, and the glowing mountain-tops, andthe wide blue water, surrounded me with a cherishing love such as nohuman face had shed on me since my mother's love had vanished out of mylife. I used to do as Jean Jacques did--lie down in my boat and let itglide where it would, while I looked up at the departing glow leaving onemountain-top after the other, as if the prophet's chariot of fire werepassing over them on its way to the home of light. Then, when the whitesummits were all sad and corpse-like, I had to push homeward, for I wasunder careful surveillance, and was allowed no late wanderings. Thisdisposition of mine was not favourable to the formation of intimatefriendships among the numerous youths of my own age who are always to befound studying at Geneva. Yet I made _one_ such friendship; and, singularly enough, it was with a youth whose intellectual tendencies werethe very reverse of my own. I shall call him Charles Meunier; his realsurname--an English one, for he was of English extraction--having sincebecome celebrated. He was an orphan, who lived on a miserable pittancewhile he pursued the medical studies for which he had a special genius. Strange! that with my vague mind, susceptible and unobservant, hatinginquiry and given up to contemplation, I should have been drawn towards ayouth whose strongest passion was science. But the bond was not anintellectual one; it came from a source that can happily blend the stupidwith the brilliant, the dreamy with the practical: it came from communityof feeling. Charles was poor and ugly, derided by Genevese _gamins_, andnot acceptable in drawing-rooms. I saw that he was isolated, as I was, though from a different cause, and, stimulated by a sympatheticresentment, I made timid advances towards him. It is enough to say thatthere sprang up as much comradeship between us as our different habitswould allow; and in Charles's rare holidays we went up the Salevetogether, or took the boat to Vevay, while I listened dreamily to themonologues in which he unfolded his bold conceptions of future experimentand discovery. I mingled them confusedly in my thought with glimpses ofblue water and delicate floating cloud, with the notes of birds and thedistant glitter of the glacier. He knew quite well that my mind was halfabsent, yet he liked to talk to me in this way; for don't we talk of ourhopes and our projects even to dogs and birds, when they love us? I havementioned this one friendship because of its connexion with a strange andterrible 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, whichis 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 camethe languid monotony of convalescence, the days gradually breaking intovariety and distinctness as my strength enabled me to take longer andlonger drives. On one of these more vividly remembered days, my fathersaid to me, as he sat beside my sofa--

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

My father was called away before he had finished his sentence, and heleft my mind resting on the word _Prague_, with a strange sense that anew and wondrous scene was breaking upon me: a city under the broadsunshine, 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 ofnight, or the rushing rain-cloud; scorching the dusty, weary, time-eatengrandeur of a people doomed to live on in the stale repetition ofmemories, like deposed and superannuated kings in their regalgold-inwoven tatters. The city looked so thirsty that the broad riverseemed to me a sheet of metal; and the blackened statues, as I passedunder their blank gaze, along the unending bridge, with their ancientgarments and their saintly crowns, seemed to me the real inhabitants andowners of this place, while the busy, trivial men and women, hurrying toand fro, were a swarm of ephemeral visitants infesting it for a day. Itis such grim, stony beings as these, I thought, who are the fathers ofancient faded children, in those tanned time-fretted dwellings that crowdthe steep before me; who pay their court in the worn and crumbling pompof the palace which stretches its monotonous length on the height; whoworship wearily in the stifling air of the churches, urged by no fear orhope, but compelled by their doom to be ever old and undying, to live onin the rigidity of habit, as they live on in perpetual midday, withoutthe repose of night or the new birth of morning. 

A stunning clang of metal suddenly thrilled through me, and I becameconscious of the objects in my room again: one of the fire-irons hadfallen as Pierre opened the door to bring me my draught. My heart waspalpitating 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 beensleeping. Was this a dream--this wonderfully distinct vision--minute inits distinctness down to a patch of rainbow light on the pavement, transmitted through a coloured lamp in the shape of a star--of a strangecity, quite unfamiliar to my imagination? I had seen no picture ofPrague: it lay in my mind as a mere name, with vaguely-rememberedhistorical associations--ill-defined memories of imperial grandeur andreligious 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 frombeing utterly disjointed and commonplace by the frequent terrors ofnightmare. But I could not believe that I had been asleep, for Iremembered distinctly the gradual breaking-in of the vision upon me, likethe new images in a dissolving view, or the growing distinctness of thelandscape as the sun lifts up the veil of the morning mist. And while Iwas conscious of this incipient vision, I was also conscious that Pierrecame to tell my father Mr. Filmore was waiting for him, and that myfather hurried out of the room. No, it was not a dream; was it--thethought was full of tremulous exultation--was it the poet's nature in me, hitherto only a troubled yearning sensibility, now manifesting itselfsuddenly as spontaneous creation? Surely it was in this way that Homersaw the plain of Troy, that Dante saw the abodes of the departed, thatMilton saw the earthward flight of the Tempter. Was it that my illnesshad wrought some happy change in my organization--given a firmer tensionto my nerves--carried off some dull obstruction? I had often read ofsuch effects--in works of fiction at least. Nay; in genuine biographiesI had read of the subtilizing or exalting influence of some diseases onthe mental powers. Did not Novalis feel his inspiration intensifiedunder the progress of consumption?

When my mind had dwelt for some time on this blissful idea, it seemed tome that I might perhaps test it by an exertion of my will. The visionhad begun when my father was speaking of our going to Prague. I did notfor a moment believe it was really a representation of that city; Ibelieved--I hoped it was a picture that my newly liberated genius hadpainted 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 thesame sort of result would follow. I concentrated my thoughts on Venice;I stimulated my imagination with poetic memories, and strove to feelmyself present in Venice, as I had felt myself present in Prague. But invain. I was only colouring the Canaletto engravings that hung in my oldbedroom at home; the picture was a shifting one, my mind wanderinguncertainly in search of more vivid images; I could see no accident ofform or shadow without conscious labour after the necessary conditions. It was all prosaic effort, not rapt passivity, such as I had experiencedhalf an hour before. I was discouraged; but I remembered thatinspiration was fitful. 

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

My father accompanied me every day in a drive, and a graduallylengthening walk as my powers of walking increased; and one evening hehad agreed to come and fetch me at twelve the next day, that we might gotogether to select a musical box, and other purchases rigorously demandedof a rich Englishman visiting Geneva. He was one of the most punctual ofmen and bankers, and I was always nervously anxious to be quite ready forhim at the appointed time. But, to my surprise, at a quarter past twelvehe had not appeared. I felt all the impatience of a convalescent who hasnothing particular to do, and who has just taken a tonic in the prospectof immediate exercise that would carry off the stimulus. 

Unable to sit still and reserve my strength, I walked up and down theroom, looking out on the current of the Rhone, just where it leaves thedark-blue lake; but thinking all the while of the possible causes thatcould 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, Ihad not seen the door open; but I saw my father, and at his right handour neighbour Mrs. Filmore, whom I remembered very well, though I had notseen her for five years. She was a commonplace middle-aged woman, insilk and cashmere; but the lady on the left of my father was not morethan twenty, a tall, slim, willowy figure, with luxuriant blond hair, arranged in cunning braids and folds that looked almost too massive forthe slight figure and the small-featured, thin-lipped face they crowned. But the face had not a girlish expression: the features were sharp, thepale grey eyes at once acute, restless, and sarcastic. They were fixedon me in half-smiling curiosity, and I felt a painful sensation as if asharp wind were cutting me. The pale-green dress, and the green leavesthat seemed to form a border about her pale blond hair, made me think ofa 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 somecold 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, andthere was nothing between me and the Chinese printed folding-screen thatstood before the door. I was cold and trembling; I could only totterforward and throw myself on the sofa. This strange new power hadmanifested itself again . . . But _was_ it a power? Might it not ratherbe a disease--a sort of intermittent delirium, concentrating my energy ofbrain into moments of unhealthy activity, and leaving my saner hours allthe more barren? I felt a dizzy sense of unreality in what my eye restedon; I grasped the bell convulsively, like one trying to free himself fromnightmare, and rang it twice. Pierre came with a look of alarm in hisface. 

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

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

Pierre left the room at once, with a soothing "Bien, Monsieur"; and Ifelt the better for this scene of simple, waking prose. Seeking to calmmyself still further, I went into my bedroom, adjoining the _salon_, andopened a case of eau-de-Cologne; took out a bottle; went through theprocess of taking out the cork very neatly, and then rubbed the revivingspirit over my hands and forehead, and under my nostrils, drawing a newdelight from the scent because I had procured it by slow details oflabour, and by no strange sudden madness. Already I had begun to tastesomething of the horror that belongs to the lot of a human being whosenature is not adjusted to simple human conditions. 

Still enjoying the scent, I returned to the salon, but it was notunoccupied, as it had been before I left it. In front of the Chinesefolding-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 thekeen 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 lyingwith my head low on the sofa, Pierre, and my father by my side. As soonas I was thoroughly revived, my father left the room, and presentlyreturned, saying--

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

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

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

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

Shortly after this last occurrence--I think the very next day--I began tobe aware of a phase in my abnormal sensibility, to which, from thelanguid 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 themental process going forward in first one person, and then another, withwhom I happened to be in contact: the vagrant, frivolous ideas andemotions of some uninteresting acquaintance--Mrs. Filmore, forexample--would force themselves on my consciousness like an importunate, ill-played musical instrument, or the loud activity of an imprisonedinsect. But this unpleasant sensibility was fitful, and left me momentsof 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 mighthave believed this importunate insight to be merely a diseased activityof the imagination, but that my prevision of incalculable words andactions proved it to have a fixed relation to the mental process in otherminds. But this superadded consciousness, wearying and annoying enoughwhen it urged on me the trivial experience of indifferent people, becamean intense pain and grief when it seemed to be opening to me the souls ofthose who were in a close relation to me--when the rational talk, thegraceful attentions, the wittily-turned phrases, and the kindly deeds, which used to make the web of their characters, were seen as if thrustasunder by a microscopic vision, that showed all the intermediatefrivolities, all the suppressed egoism, all the struggling chaos ofpuerilities, meanness, vague capricious memories, and indolent make-shiftthoughts, from which human words and deeds emerge like leaflets coveringa 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 thickas weeds at Geneva, had often asked me to sit to them, and I had been themodel of a dying minstrel in a fancy picture. But I thoroughly dislikedmy own physique and nothing but the belief that it was a condition ofpoetic genius would have reconciled me to it. That brief hope was quitefled, and I saw in my face now nothing but the stamp of a morbidorganization, framed for passive suffering--too feeble for the sublimeresistance of poetic production. Alfred, from whom I had been almostconstantly separated, and who, in his present stage of character andappearance, came before me as a perfect stranger, was bent on beingextremely friendly and brother-like to me. He had the superficialkindness of a good-humoured, self-satisfied nature, that fears norivalry, and has encountered no contrarieties. I am not sure that mydisposition was good enough for me to have been quite free from envytowards him, even if our desires had not clashed, and if I had been inthe healthy human condition which admits of generous confidence andcharitable construction. There must always have been an antipathybetween our natures. As it was, he became in a few weeks an object ofintense hatred to me; and when he entered the room, still more when hespoke, it was as if a sensation of grating metal had set my teeth onedge. My diseased consciousness was more intensely and continuallyoccupied with his thoughts and emotions, than with those of any otherperson who came in my way. I was perpetually exasperated with the pettypromptings of his conceit and his love of patronage, with hisself-complacent belief in Bertha Grant's passion for him, with his half-pitying contempt for me--seen not in the ordinary indications ofintonation and phrase and slight action, which an acute and suspiciousmind 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 ofit. I have said nothing yet of the effect Bertha Grant produced in me ona nearer acquaintance. That effect was chiefly determined by the factthat she made the only exception, among all the human beings about me, tomy unhappy gift of insight. About Bertha I was always in a state ofuncertainty: I could watch the expression of her face, and speculate onits meaning; I could ask for her opinion with the real interest ofignorance; I could listen for her words and watch for her smile with hopeand fear: she had for me the fascination of an unravelled destiny. I sayit was this fact that chiefly determined the strong effect she producedon me: for, in the abstract, no womanly character could seem to have lessaffinity for that of a shrinking, romantic, passionate youth thanBertha's. She was keen, sarcastic, unimaginative, prematurely cynical, remaining critical and unmoved in the most impressive scenes, inclined todissect all my favourite poems, and especially contemptous towards theGerman lyrics which were my pet literature at that time. To this momentI am unable to define my feeling towards her: it was not ordinary boyishadmiration, for she was the very opposite, even to the colour of herhair, 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, evenat the moment of her strongest dominion over me, I should have declaredto be the highest element of character. But there is no tyranny morecomplete than that which a self-centred negative nature exercises over amorbidly sensitive nature perpetually craving sympathy and support. Themost independent people feel the effect of a man's silence in heighteningtheir value for his opinion--feel an additional triumph in conquering thereverence of a critic habitually captious and satirical: no wonder, then, that an enthusiastic self-distrusting youth should watch and wait beforethe closed secret of a sarcastic woman's face, as if it were the shrineof the doubtfully benignant deity who ruled his destiny. For a youngenthusiast is unable to imagine the total negation in another mind of theemotions 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 bethere in all the greater strength because he sees no outward sign ofthem. And this effect, as I have intimated, was heightened to its utmostintensity in me, because Bertha was the only being who remained for me inthe mysterious seclusion of soul that renders such youthful delusionpossible. Doubtless there was another sort of fascination at work--thatsubtle physical attraction which delights in cheating our psychologicalpredictions, and in compelling the men who paint sylphs, to fall in lovewith 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 hersmiles. Looking back with my present wretched knowledge, I conclude thather vanity and love of power were intensely gratified by the belief thatI had fainted on first seeing her purely from the strong impression herperson had produced on me. The most prosaic woman likes to believeherself the object of a violent, a poetic passion; and without a grain ofromance in her, Bertha had that spirit of intrigue which gave piquancy tothe idea that the brother of the man she meant to marry was dying withlove and jealousy for her sake. That she meant to marry my brother, waswhat at that time I did not believe; for though he was assiduous in hisattentions to her, and I knew well enough that both he and my father hadmade up their minds to this result, there was not yet an understoodengagement--there had been no explicit declaration; and Berthahabitually, while she flirted with my brother, and accepted his homage ina way that implied to him a thorough recognition of its intention, mademe believe, by the subtlest looks and phrases--feminine nothings whichcould never be quoted against her--that he was really the object of hersecret ridicule; that she thought him, as I did, a coxcomb, whom shewould have pleasure in disappointing. Me she openly petted in mybrother's presence, as if I were too young and sickly ever to be thoughtof as a lover; and that was the view he took of me. But I believe shemust inwardly have delighted in the tremors into which she threw me bythe coaxing way in which she patted my curls, while she laughed at myquotations. Such caresses were always given in the presence of ourfriends; for when we were alone together, she affected a much greaterdistance towards me, and now and then took the opportunity, by words orslight actions, to stimulate my foolish timid hope that she reallypreferred me. And why should she not follow her inclination? I was notin so advantageous a position as my brother, but I had fortune, I was nota year younger than she was, and she was an heiress, who would soon be ofage to decide for herself. 

The fluctuations of hope and fear, confined to this one channel, madeeach day in her presence a delicious torment. There was one deliberateact of hers which especially helped to intoxicate me. When we were atVienna her twentieth birthday occurred, and as she was very fond ofornaments, we all took the opportunity of the splendid jewellers' shopsin that Teutonic Paris to purchase her a birthday present of jewellery. Mine, naturally, was the least expensive; it was an opal ring--the opalwas my favourite stone, because it seems to blush and turn pale as if ithad a soul. I told Bertha so when I gave it her, and said that it was anemblem of the poetic nature, changing with the changing light of heavenand of woman's eyes. In the evening she appeared elegantly dressed, andwearing conspicuously all the birthday presents except mine. I lookedeagerly at her fingers, but saw no opal. I had no opportunity ofnoticing this to her during the evening; but the next day, when I foundher seated near the window alone, after breakfast, I said, "You scorn towear my poor opal. I should have remembered that you despised poeticnatures, and should have given you coral, or turquoise, or some otheropaque unresponsive stone. " "Do I despise it?" she answered, taking holdof a delicate gold chain which she always wore round her neck and drawingout the end from her bosom with my ring hanging to it; "it hurts me alittle, I can tell you, " she said, with her usual dubious smile, "to wearit in that secret place; and since your poetical nature is so stupid asto prefer a more public position, I shall not endure the pain anylonger. "

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

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

I should mention that during these two months--which seemed a long lifeto me from the novelty and intensity of the pleasures and pains Iunderwent--my diseased anticipation in other people's consciousnesscontinued to torment me; now it was my father, and now my brother, nowMrs. Filmore or her husband, and now our German courier, whose stream ofthought 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 theiruninterrupted course. It was like a preternaturally heightened sense ofhearing, making audible to one a roar of sound where others find perfectstillness. The weariness and disgust of this involuntary intrusion intoother souls was counteracted only by my ignorance of Bertha, and mygrowing passion for her; a passion enormously stimulated, if notproduced, by that ignorance. She was my oasis of mystery in the drearydesert of knowledge. I had never allowed my diseased condition to betrayitself, or to drive me into any unusual speech or action, except once, when, in a moment of peculiar bitterness against my brother, I hadforestalled some words which I knew he was going to utter--a cleverobservation, which he had prepared beforehand. He had occasionally aslightly affected hesitation in his speech, and when he paused an instantafter the second word, my impatience and jealousy impelled me to continuethe 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 hadno sooner escaped my lips than I felt a shock of alarm lest such ananticipation of words--very far from being words of course, easy todivine--should have betrayed me as an exceptional being, a sort of quietenergumen, whom every one, Bertha above all, would shudder at and avoid. But I magnified, as usual, the impression any word or deed of mine couldproduce on others; for no one gave any sign of having noticed myinterruption as more than a rudeness, to be forgiven me on the score ofmy feeble nervous condition. 

While this superadded consciousness of the actual was almost constantwith me, I had never had a recurrence of that distinct prevision which Ihave described in relation to my first interview with Bertha; and I waswaiting with eager curiosity to know whether or not my vision of Praguewould prove to have been an instance of the same kind. A few days afterthe incident of the opal ring, we were paying one of our frequent visitsto the Lichtenberg Palace. I could never look at many pictures insuccession; for pictures, when they are at all powerful, affect me sostrongly that one or two exhaust all my capability of contemplation. Thismorning I had been looking at Giorgione's picture of the cruel-eyedwoman, said to be a likeness of Lucrezia Borgia. I had stood long alonebefore it, fascinated by the terrible reality of that cunning, relentlessface, till I felt a strange poisoned sensation, as if I had long beeninhaling a fatal odour, and was just beginning to be conscious of itseffects. Perhaps even then I should not have moved away, if the rest ofthe party had not returned to this room, and announced that they weregoing to the Belvedere Gallery to settle a bet which had arisen betweenmy 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 thegallery, leaving me below; for I refused to come within sight of anotherpicture that day. I made my way to the Grand Terrace, since it wasagreed that we should saunter in the gardens when the dispute had beendecided. I had been sitting here a short space, vaguely conscious oftrim gardens, with a city and green hills in the distance, when, wishingto avoid the proximity of the sentinel, I rose and walked down the broadstone steps, intending to seat myself farther on in the gardens. Just asI reached the gravel-walk, I felt an arm slipped within mine, and a lighthand gently pressing my wrist. In the same instant a strangeintoxicating numbness passed over me, like the continuance or climax ofthe sensation I was still feeling from the gaze of Lucrezia Borgia. Thegardens, the summer sky, the consciousness of Bertha's arm being withinmine, all vanished, and I seemed to be suddenly in darkness, out of whichthere gradually broke a dim firelight, and I felt myself sitting in myfather's leather chair in the library at home. I knew the fireplace--thedogs for the wood-fire--the black marble chimney-piece with the whitemarble medallion of the dying Cleopatra in the centre. Intense andhopeless misery was pressing on my soul; the light became stronger, forBertha was entering with a candle in her hand--Bertha, my wife--withcruel eyes, with green jewels and green leaves on her white ball-dress;every hateful thought within her present to me . . . "Madman, idiot! whydon't you kill yourself, then?" It was a moment of hell. I saw into herpitiless soul--saw its barren worldliness, its scorching hate--and feltit clothe me round like an air I was obliged to breathe. She came withher candle and stood over me with a bitter smile of contempt; I saw thegreat emerald brooch on her bosom, a studded serpent with diamond eyes. Ishuddered--I despised this woman with the barren soul and mean thoughts;but I felt helpless before her, as if she clutched my bleeding heart, andwould clutch it till the last drop of life-blood ebbed away. She was mywife, and we hated each other. Gradually the hearth, the dim library, the candle-light disappeared--seemed to melt away into a background oflight, the green serpent with the diamond eyes remaining a dark image onthe retina. Then I had a sense of my eyelids quivering, and the livingdaylight broke in upon me; I saw gardens, and heard voices; I was seatedon 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 meill for several days, and prolonged our stay at Vienna. I shuddered withhorror as the scene recurred to me; and it recurred constantly, with allits minutiae, as if they had been burnt into my memory; and yet, such isthe madness of the human heart under the influence of its immediatedesires, I felt a wild hell-braving joy that Bertha was to be mine; forthe fulfilment of my former prevision concerning her first appearancebefore me, left me little hope that this last hideous glimpse of thefuture was the mere diseased play of my own mind, and had no relation toexternal realities. One thing alone I looked towards as a possible meansof casting doubt on my terrible conviction--the discovery that my visionof 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 ascompletely under her sway as before. What if I saw into the heart ofBertha, the matured woman--Bertha, my wife? Bertha, the _girl_, was afascinating secret to me still: I trembled under her touch; I felt thewitchery of her presence; I yearned to be assured of her love. The fearof poison is feeble against the sense of thirst. Nay, I was just asjealous of my brother as before--just as much irritated by his smallpatronizing ways; for my pride, my diseased sensibility, were there asthey had always been, and winced as inevitably under every offence as myeye winced from an intruding mote. The future, even when brought withinthe compass of feeling by a vision that made me shudder, had still nomore than the force of an idea, compared with the force of presentemotion--of my love for Bertha, of my dislike and jealousy towards mybrother. 

It is an old story, that men sell themselves to the tempter, and sign abond with their blood, because it is only to take effect at a distantday; then rush on to snatch the cup their souls thirst after with animpulse not the less savage because there is a dark shadow beside themfor evermore. There is no short cut, no patent tram-road, to wisdom:after all the centuries of invention, the soul's path lies through thethorny wilderness which must be still trodden in solitude, with bleedingfeet, 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 mybrother's successful rival, for I was still too timid, in my ignorance ofBertha's actual feeling, to venture on any step that would urge from heran avowal of it. I thought I should gain confidence even for this, if myvision of Prague proved to have been veracious; and yet, the horror ofthat certitude! Behind the slim girl Bertha, whose words and looks Iwatched for, whose touch was bliss, there stood continually that Berthawith the fuller form, the harder eyes, the more rigid mouth--with thebarren, selfish soul laid bare; no longer a fascinating secret, but ameasured fact, urging itself perpetually on my unwilling sight. Are youunable to give me your sympathy--you who react this? Are you unable toimagine this double consciousness at work within me, flowing on like twoparallel streams which never mingle their waters and blend into a commonhue? Yet you must have known something of the presentiments that springfrom an insight at war with passion; and my visions were only likepresentiments intensified to horror. You have known the powerlessness ofideas before the might of impulse; and my visions, when once they hadpassed 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 foreseensomething more or something different--if instead of that hideous visionwhich poisoned the passion it could not destroy, or if even along with itI could have had a foreshadowing of that moment when I looked on mybrother's face for the last time, some softening influence would havebeen shed over my feeling towards him: pride and hatred would surely havebeen subdued into pity, and the record of those hidden sins would havebeen shortened. But this is one of the vain thoughts with which we menflatter ourselves. We try to believe that the egoism within us wouldhave easily been melted, and that it was only the narrowness of ourknowledge which hemmed in our generosity, our awe, our human piety, andhindered them from submerging our hard indifference to the sensations andemotions of our fellows. Our tenderness and self-renunciation seemstrong when our egoism has had its day--when, after our mean striving fora triumph that is to be another's loss, the triumph comes suddenly, andwe 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 itseemed like a deferring of a terribly decisive moment, to be in the cityfor 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 driveout the next morning and take a general view of the place, as well asvisit some of its specially interesting spots, before the heat becameoppressive--for we were in August, and the season was hot and dry. Butit happened that the ladies were rather late at their morning toilet, andto my father's politely-repressed but perceptible annoyance, we were notin the carriage till the morning was far advanced. I thought with asense of relief, as we entered the Jews' quarter, where we were to visitthe old synagogue, that we should be kept in this flat, shut-up part ofthe 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 throughwhich we had already passed. That would give me another day'ssuspense--suspense, the only form in which a fearful spirit knows thesolace of hope. But, as I stood under the blackened, groined arches ofthat old synagogue, made dimly visible by the seven thin candles in thesacred 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 thatthis strange building, with its shrunken lights, this surviving witheredremnant of medieval Judaism, was of a piece with my vision. Thosedarkened dusty Christian saints, with their loftier arches and theirlarger candles, needed the consolatory scorn with which they might pointto a more shrivelled death-in-life than their own. 

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

CHAPTER II

Before the autumn was at an end, and while the brown leaves still stoodthick on the beeches in our park, my brother and Bertha were engaged toeach other, and it was understood that their marriage was to take placeearly in the next spring. In spite of the certainty I had felt from thatmoment on the bridge at Prague, that Bertha would one day be my wife, myconstitutional timidity and distrust had continued to benumb me, and thewords in which I had sometimes premeditated a confession of my love, haddied away unuttered. The same conflict had gone on within me asbefore--the longing for an assurance of love from Bertha's lips, thedread lest a word of contempt and denial should fall upon me like acorrosive acid. What was the conviction of a distant necessity to me? Itrembled under a present glance, I hungered after a present joy, I wasclogged and chilled by a present fear. And so the days passed on: Iwitnessed Bertha's engagement and heard her marriage discussed as if Iwere under a conscious nightmare--knowing it was a dream that wouldvanish, 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, forshe continued to treat me with a playful patronage that wakened nojealousy in my brother--I spent my time chiefly in wandering, instrolling, or taking long rides while the daylight lasted, and thenshutting myself up with my unread books; for books had lost the power ofchaining my attention. My self-consciousness was heightened to thatpitch of intensity in which our own emotions take the form of a dramawhich urges itself imperatively on our contemplation, and we begin toweep, less under the sense of our suffering than at the thought of it. Ifelt a sort of pitying anguish over the pathos of my own lot: the lot ofa being finely organized for pain, but with hardly any fibres thatresponded to pleasure--to whom the idea of future evil robbed the presentof its joy, and for whom the idea of future good did not still theuneasiness of a present yearning or a present dread. I went dumblythrough that stage of the poet's suffering, in which he feels thedelicious pang of utterance, and makes an image of his sorrows. 

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

One mild morning in the beginning of November, it happened that I wasstanding outside the portico patting lazy old Caesar, a Newfoundlandalmost blind with age, the only dog that ever took any notice of me--forthe very dogs shunned me, and fawned on the happier people about me--whenthe groom brought up my brother's horse which was to carry him to thehunt, and my brother himself appeared at the door, florid, broad-chested, and self-complacent, feeling what a good-natured fellow he was not tobehave 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! Thefinest thing in the world for low spirits!"

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

The quick thought came, that my selfishness was even stronger than his--itwas only a suffering selfishness instead of an enjoying one. But then, again, my exasperating insight into Alfred's self-complacent soul, hisfreedom from all the doubts and fears, the unsatisfied yearnings, theexquisite tortures of sensitiveness, that had made the web of my life, seemed to absolve me from all bonds towards him. This man needed nopity, no love; those fine influences would have been as little felt byhim as the delicate white mist is felt by the rock it caresses. Therewas no evil in store for _him_: if he was not to marry Bertha, it wouldbe 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 wentthere for the chance of finding Bertha at home. Later on in the day Iwalked thither. By a rare accident she was alone, and we walked out inthe grounds together, for she seldom went on foot beyond the trimly-sweptgravel-walks. I remember what a beautiful sylph she looked to me as thelow November sun shone on her blond hair, and she tripped along teasingme with her usual light banter, to which I listened half fondly, halfmoodily; it was all the sign Bertha's mysterious inner self ever made tome. To-day perhaps, the moodiness predominated, for I had not yet shakenoff the access of jealous hate which my brother had raised in me by hisparting 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 smilecame again, and she answered sarcastically, "Why do you suppose I lovehim?"

"How can you ask that, Bertha?"

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

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

"I need never take the trouble of invention in order to deceive you, mysmall Tasso"--(that was the mocking name she usually gave me). "Theeasiest 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 amoment the shadow of my vision--the Bertha whose soul was no secret tome--passed between me and the radiant girl, the playful sylph whosefeelings were a fascinating mystery. I suppose I must have shuddered, orbetrayed in some other way my momentary chill of horror. 

"Tasso!" she said, seizing my wrist, and peeping round into my face, "areyou really beginning to discern what a heartless girl I am? Why, you arenot half the poet I thought you were; you are actually capable ofbelieving the truth about me. "

The shadow passed from between us, and was no longer the object nearestto me. The girl whose light fingers grasped me, whose elfish charmingface looked into mine--who, I thought, was betraying an interest in myfeelings that she would not have directly avowed, --this warm breathingpresence again possessed my senses and imagination like a returning sirenmelody which had been overpowered for an instant by the roar ofthreatening waves. It was a moment as delicious to me as the waking upto a consciousness of youth after a dream of middle age. I forgoteverything but my passion, and said with swimming eyes--

"Bertha, shall you love me when we are first married? I wouldn't mind ifyou 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 didnot know what I was saying. "

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

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

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

I went up to the room where he lay, and where my father was seated besidehim with a look of rigid despair. I had shunned my father more than anyone since our return home, for the radical antipathy between our naturesmade my insight into his inner self a constant affliction to me. Butnow, as I went up to him, and stood beside him in sad silence, I felt thepresence of a new element that blended us as we had never been blentbefore. My father had been one of the most successful men in the money-getting world: he had had no sentimental sufferings, no illness. Theheaviest 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 thesame, to my keen childish observation, the week after her death asbefore. 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, inproportion as the pride and hope are narrow and prosaic. His son was tohave been married soon--would probably have stood for the borough at thenext election. That son's existence was the best motive that could bealleged for making new purchases of land every year to round off theestate. It is a dreary thing onto live on doing the same things yearafter year, without knowing why we do them. Perhaps the tragedy ofdisappointed youth and passion is less piteous than the tragedy ofdisappointed age and worldliness. 

As I saw into the desolation of my father's heart, I felt a movement ofdeep pity towards him, which was the beginning of a new affection--anaffection that grew and strengthened in spite of the strange bitternesswith which he regarded me in the first month or two after my brother'sdeath. If it had not been for the softening influence of my compassionfor him--the first deep compassion I had ever felt--I should have beenstung by the perception that my father transferred the inheritance of aneldest son to me with a mortified sense that fate had compelled him tothe unwelcome course of caring for me as an important being. It was onlyin 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 morefavoured place, who will not understand what I mean. 

Gradually, however, my new deference to his wishes, the effect of thatpatience which was born of my pity for him, won upon his affection, andhe began to please himself with the endeavour to make me fill anybrother's place as fully as my feebler personality would admit. I sawthat the prospect which by and by presented itself of my becomingBertha's husband was welcome to him, and he even contemplated in my casewhat 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 myfather made this the happiest time I had known since childhood;--theselast months in which I retained the delicious illusion of loving Bertha, of longing and doubting and hoping that she might love me. She behavedwith a certain new consciousness and distance towards me after mybrother's death; and I too was under a double constraint--that ofdelicacy towards my brother's memory and of anxiety as to the impressionmy abrupt words had left on her mind. But the additional screen thismutual reserve erected between us only brought me more completely underher power: no matter how empty the adytum, so that the veil be thickenough. So absolute is our soul's need of something hidden and uncertainfor the maintenance of that doubt and hope and effort which are thebreath of its life, that if the whole future were laid bare to us beyondto-day, the interest of all mankind would be bent on the hours that liebetween; we should pant after the uncertainties of our one morning andour one afternoon; we should rush fiercely to the Exchange for our lastpossibility of speculation, of success, of disappointment: we should havea glut of political prophets foretelling a crisis or a no-crisis withinthe only twenty-four hours left open to prophecy. Conceive the conditionof the human mind if all propositions whatsoever were self-evident exceptone, which was to become self-evident at the close of a summer's day, butin the meantime might be the subject of question, of hypothesis, ofdebate. Art and philosophy, literature and science, would fasten likebees on that one proposition which had the honey of probability in it, and be the more eager because their enjoyment would end with sunset. Ourimpulses, our spiritual activities, no more adjust themselves to the ideaof their future nullity, than the beating of our heart, or theirritability of our muscles. 

Bertha, the slim, fair-haired girl, whose present thoughts and emotionswere an enigma to me amidst the fatiguing obviousness of the other mindsaround me, was as absorbing to me as a single unknown to-day--as a singlehypothetic proposition to remain problematic till sunset; and all thecramped, hemmed-in belief and disbelief, trust and distrust, of mynature, welled out in this one narrow channel. 

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

We were married eighteen months after Alfred's death, one cold, clearmorning in April, when there came hail and sunshine both together; andBertha, in her white silk and pale-green leaves, and the pale hues of herhair and face, looked like the spirit of the morning. My father washappier than he had thought of being again: my marriage, he felt sure, would complete the desirable modification of my character, and make mepractical 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 wouldbe mistress of me, and make me what she chose: I was only twenty-one, andmadly in love with her. Poor father! He kept that hope a little whileafter our first year of marriage, and it was not quite extinct whenparalysis came and saved him from utter disappointment. 

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

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

Through all these crowded excited months, Bertha's inward self remainedshrouded from me, and I still read her thoughts only through the languageof her lips and demeanour: I had still the human interest of wonderingwhether what I did and said pleased her, of longing to hear a word ofaffection, 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 andchilling me as the hail had done that came across the sunshine on ourmarriage morning; sometimes only perceptible in the dexterous avoidanceof a _tete-a-tete_ walk or dinner to which I had been looking forward. Ihad been deeply pained by this--had even felt a sort of crushing of theheart, from the sense that my brief day of happiness was near itssetting; but still I remained dependent on Bertha, eager for the lastrays of a bliss that would soon be gone for ever, hoping and watching forsome after-glow more beautiful from the impending night. 

I remember--how should I not remember?--the time when that dependence andhope utterly left me, when the sadness I had felt in Bertha's growingestrangement became a joy that I looked back upon with longing as a manmight look back on the last pains in a paralysed limb. It was just afterthe close of my father's last illness, which had necessarily withdrawn usfrom society and thrown us more on each other. It was the evening offather's death. On that evening the veil which had shrouded Bertha'ssoul from me--had made me find in her alone among my fellow-beings theblessed possibility of mystery, and doubt, and expectation--was firstwithdrawn. Perhaps it was the first day since the beginning of mypassion for her, in which that passion was completely neutralized by thepresence of an absorbing feeling of another kind. I had been watching bymy father's deathbed: I had been witnessing the last fitful yearningglance his soul had cast back on the spent inheritance of life--the lastfaint 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 supremeagony? In the first moments when we come away from the presence ofdeath, every other relation to the living is merged, to our feeling, inthe great relation of a common nature and a common destiny. 

In that state of mind I joined Bertha in her private sitting-room. Shewas seated in a leaning posture on a settee, with her back towards thedoor; the great rich coils of her pale blond hair surmounting her smallneck, visible above the back of the settee. I remember, as I closed thedoor behind me, a cold tremulousness seizing me, and a vague sense ofbeing hated and lonely--vague and strong, like a presentiment. I knowhow I looked at that moment, for I saw myself in Bertha's thought as shelifted her cutting grey eyes, and looked at me: a miserable ghost-seer, surrounded by phantoms in the noonday, trembling under a breeze when theleaves were still, without appetite for the common objects of humandesires, but pining after the moon-beams. We were front to front witheach other, and judged each other. The terrible moment of completeillumination had come to me, and I saw that the darkness had hidden nolandscape from me, but only a blank prosaic wall: from that eveningforth, through the sickening years which followed, I saw all round thenarrow room of this woman's soul--saw petty artifice and mere negationwhere I had delighted to believe in coy sensibilities and in wit at warwith latent feeling--saw the light floating vanities of the girl definingthemselves into the systematic coquetry, the scheming selfishness, of thewoman--saw repulsion and antipathy harden into cruel hatred, giving painonly for the sake of wreaking itself. 

For Bertha too, after her kind, felt the bitterness of disillusion. Shehad 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. Withthe essential shallowness of a negative, unimaginative nature, she wasunable to conceive the fact that sensibilities were anything else thanweaknesses. She had thought my weaknesses would put me in her power, andshe found them unmanageable forces. Our positions were reversed. Beforemarriage she had completely mastered my imagination, for she was a secretto me; and I created the unknown thought before which I trembled as if itwere hers. But now that her soul was laid open to me, now that I wascompelled to share the privacy of her motives, to follow all the pettydevices that preceded her words and acts, she found herself powerlesswith me, except to produce in me the chill shudder of repulsion--powerless, because I could be acted on by no lever within herreach. I was dead to worldly ambitions, to social vanities, to all theincentives within the compass of her narrow imagination, and I livedunder influences utterly invisible to her. 

She was really pitiable to have such a husband, and so all the worldthought. A graceful, brilliant woman, like Bertha, who smiled on morningcallers, made a figure in ball-rooms, and was capable of that lightrepartee which, from such a woman, is accepted as wit, was secure ofcarrying off all sympathy from a husband who was sickly, abstracted, and, as some suspected, crack-brained. Even the servants in our house gaveher the balance of their regard and pity. For there were no audiblequarrels between us; our alienation, our repulsion from each other, laywithin the silence of our own hearts; and if the mistress went out agreat deal, and seemed to dislike the master's society, was it notnatural, poor thing? The master was odd. I was kind and just to mydependants, but I excited in them a shrinking, half-contemptuous pity;for this class of men and women are but slightly determined in theirestimate of others by general considerations, or even experience, ofcharacter. They judge of persons as they judge of coins, and value thosewho pass current at a high rate. 

After a time I interfered so little with Bertha's habits that it mightseem wonderful how her hatred towards me could grow so intense and activeas it did. But she had begun to suspect, by some involuntary betrayal ofmine, that there was an abnormal power of penetration in me--thatfitfully, at least, I was strangely cognizant of her thoughts andintentions, and she began to be haunted by a terror of me, whichalternated every now and then with defiance. She meditated continuallyhow the incubus could be shaken off her life--how she could be freed fromthis 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 hopethat my evident wretchedness would drive me to the commission of suicide;but suicide was not in my nature. I was too completely swayed by thesense that I was in the grasp of unknown forces, to believe in my powerof self-release. Towards my own destiny I had become entirely passive;for my one ardent desire had spent itself, and impulse no longerpredominated over knowledge. For this reason I never thought of takingany steps towards a complete separation, which would have made ouralienation evident to the world. Why should I rush for help to a newcourse, when I was only suffering from the consequences of a deed whichhad been the act of my intensest will? That would have been the logic ofone who had desires to gratify, and I had no desires. But Bertha and Ilived more and more aloof from each other. The rich find it easy to livemarried and apart. 

That course of our life which I have indicated in a few sentences filledthe space of years. So much misery--so slow and hideous a growth ofhatred and sin, may be compressed into a sentence! And men judge of eachother's lives through this summary medium. They epitomize the experienceof their fellow-mortal, and pronounce judgment on him in neat syntax, andfeel themselves wise and virtuous--conquerors over the temptations theydefine in well-selected predicates. Seven years of wretchedness glideglibly over the lips of the man who has never counted them out in momentsof chill disappointment, of head and heart throbbings, of dread and vainwrestling, of remorse and despair. We learn _words_ by rote, but nottheir meaning; _that_ must be paid for with our life-blood, and printedin the subtle fibres of our nerves. 

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

Some years after my father's death, I was sitting by the dim firelight inmy library one January evening--sitting in the leather chair that used tobe my father's--when Bertha appeared at the door, with a candle in herhand, and advanced towards me. I knew the ball-dress she had on--thewhite ball-dress, with the green jewels, shone upon by the light of thewax candle which lit up the medallion of the dying Cleopatra on themantelpiece. Why did she come to me before going out? I had not seenher in the library, which was my habitual place for months. Why did shestand before me with the candle in her hand, with her cruel contemptuouseyes fixed on me, and the glittering serpent, like a familiar demon, onher breast? For a moment I thought this fulfilment of my vision atVienna marked some dreadful crisis in my fate, but I saw nothing inBertha's mind, as she stood before me, except scorn for the look ofoverwhelming misery with which I sat before her . . . "Fool, idiot, whydon't you kill yourself, then?"--that was her thought. But at length herthoughts reverted to her errand, and she spoke aloud. The apparentlyindifferent nature of the errand seemed to make a ridiculous anticlimaxto my prevision and my agitation. 

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

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

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

Besides, for the last year or more a modification had been going forwardin my mental condition, and was growing more and more marked. My insightinto the minds of those around me was becoming dimmer and more fitful, and the ideas that crowded my double consciousness became less and lessdependent on any personal contact. All that was personal in me seemed tobe suffering a gradual death, so that I was losing the organ throughwhich the personal agitations and projects of others could affect me. Butalong with this relief from wearisome insight, there was a newdevelopment of what I concluded--as I have since found rightly--to be aprovision of external scenes. It was as if the relation between me andmy fellow-men was more and more deadened, and my relation to what we callthe inanimate was quickened into new life. The more I lived apart fromsociety, and in proportion as my wretchedness subsided from the violentthrob of agonized passion into the dulness of habitual pain, the morefrequent and vivid became such visions as that I had had of Prague--ofstrange cities, of sandy plains, of gigantic ruins, of midnight skieswith strange bright constellations, of mountain-passes, of grassy nooksflecked with the afternoon sunshine through the boughs: I was in themidst of such scenes, and in all of them one presence seemed to weigh onme in all these mighty shapes--the presence of something unknown andpitiless. For continual suffering had annihilated religious faith withinme: to the utterly miserable--the unloving and the unloved--there is noreligion possible, no worship but a worship of devils. And beyond allthese, and continually recurring, was the vision of my death--the pangs, the suffocation, the last struggle, when life would be grasped at invain. 

Things were in this state near the end of the seventh year. I had becomeentirely free from insight, from my abnormal cognizance of any otherconsciousness than my own, and instead of intruding involuntarily intothe world of other minds, was living continually in my own solitaryfuture. Bertha was aware that I was greatly changed. To my surprise shehad of late seemed to seek opportunities of remaining in my society, andhad cultivated that kind of distant yet familiar talk which is customarybetween a husband and wife who live in polite and irrevocable alienation. I bore this with languid submission, and without feeling enough interestin her motives to be roused into keen observation; yet I could not helpperceiving something triumphant and excited in her carriage and theexpression of her face--something too subtle to express itself in wordsor tones, but giving one the idea that she lived in a state ofexpectation or hopeful suspense. My chief feeling was satisfaction thather inner self was once more shut out from me; and I almost revelled forthe moment in the absent melancholy that made me answer her at crosspurposes, and betray utter ignorance of what she had been saying. Iremember well the look and the smile with which she one day said, after amistake 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 otherclairvoyants, wanting to keep your monopoly; but I see now you havebecome rather duller than the rest of the world. "

I said nothing in reply. It occurred to me that her recent obtrusion ofherself upon me might have been prompted by the wish to test my power ofdetecting 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 pleasuresshe might be seeking, I had no wish to baulk her. There was still pityin my soul for every living thing, and Bertha was living--was surroundedwith possibilities of misery. 

Just at this time there occurred an event which roused me somewhat frommy inertia, and gave me an interest in the passing moment that I hadthought impossible for me. It was a visit from Charles Meunier, who hadwritten me word that he was coming to England for relaxation from toostrenuous labour, and would like too see me. Meunier had now a Europeanreputation; but his letter to me expressed that keen remembrance of anearly regard, an early debt of sympathy, which is inseparable fromnobility of character: and I too felt as if his presence would be to melike 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 andthe wide blue lake, we had to content ourselves with mere slopes andponds and artificial plantations. The years had changed us both, butwith what different result! Meunier was now a brilliant figure insociety, to whom elegant women pretended to listen, and whoseacquaintance was boasted of by noblemen ambitious of brains. Herepressed with the utmost delicacy all betrayal of the shock which I amsure he must have received from our meeting, or of a desire to penetrateinto my condition and circumstances, and sought by the utmost exertion ofhis charming social powers to make our reunion agreeable. Bertha wasmuch struck by the unexpected fascinations of a visitor whom she hadexpected to find presentable only on the score of his celebrity, and putforth all her coquetries and accomplishments. Apparently she succeededin attracting his admiration, for his manner towards her was attentiveand flattering. The effect of his presence on me was so benignant, especially in those renewals of our old _tete-a-tete_ wanderings, when hepoured forth to me wonderful narratives of his professional experience, that more than once, when his talk turned on the psychological relationsof disease, the thought crossed my mind that, if his stay with me werelong enough, I might possibly bring myself to tell this man the secretsof 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 mein his large and susceptible mind? But the thought only flickered feeblynow and then, and died out before it could become a wish. The horror Ihad of again breaking in on the privacy of another soul, made me, by anirrational instinct, draw the shroud of concealment more closely aroundmy own, as we automatically perform the gesture we feel to be wanting inanother. 

When Meunier's visit was approaching its conclusion, there happened anevent which caused some excitement in our household, owing to thesurprisingly strong effect it appeared to produce on Bertha--on Bertha, the self-possessed, who usually seemed inaccessible to feminineagitations, and did even her hate in a self-restrained hygienic manner. This event was the sudden severe illness of her maid, Mrs. Archer. Ihave reserved to this moment the mention of a circumstance which hadforced itself on my notice shortly before Meunier's arrival, namely, thatthere had been some quarrel between Bertha and this maid, apparentlyduring a visit to a distant family, in which she had accompanied hermistress. 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 silentlyputting up with personal inconveniences from the exhibitions of thiswoman's temper. I was the more astonished to observe that her illnessseemed a cause of strong solicitude to Bertha; that she was at thebedside 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, anaccident which made Meunier's presence in the house doubly welcome, andhe apparently entered into the case with an interest which seemed so muchstronger than the ordinary professional feeling, that one day when he hadfallen 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 comeunder my observation. But I'll tell you what I have on my mind. I wantto make an experiment on this woman, if you will give me permission. Itcan do her no harm--will give her no pain--for I shall not make it untillife is extinct to all purposes of sensation. I want to try the effectof transfusing blood into her arteries after the heart has ceased to beatfor some minutes. I have tried the experiment again and again withanimals that have died of this disease, with astounding results, and Iwant to try it on a human subject. I have the small tubes necessary, ina case I have with me, and the rest of the apparatus could be preparedreadily. I should use my own blood--take it from my own arm. This womanwon't live through the night, I'm convinced, and I want you to promise meyour assistance in making the experiment. I can't do without anotherhand, but it would perhaps not be well to call in a medical assistantfrom among your provincial doctors. A disagreeable foolish version ofthe thing might get abroad. "

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

"To tell you the truth, " said Meunier, "I don't want her to know aboutit. There are always insuperable difficulties with women in thesematters, and the effect on the supposed dead body may be startling. Youand I will sit up together, and be in readiness. When certain symptomsappear I shall take you in, and at the right moment we must manage to getevery one else out of the room. "

I need not give our farther conversation on the subject. He entered veryfully into the details, and overcame my repulsion from them, by excitingin me a mingled awe and curiosity concerning the possible results of hisexperiment. 

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

"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 herto say something which pain and failing strength forbid her to utter; andthere is a look of hideous meaning in her eyes, which she turnscontinually towards her mistress. In this disease the mind often remainssingularly clear to the last. "

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

I followed him to the chamber where death was hovering. The darkhangings of the large bed made a background that gave a strong relief toBertha's pale face as I entered. She started forward as she saw meenter, and then looked at Meunier with an expression of angry inquiry;but he lifted up his hand as it to impose silence, while he fixed hisglance on the dying woman and felt her pulse. The face was pinched andghastly, a cold perspiration was on the forehead, and the eyelids werelowered 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, andwith his usual air of gentle politeness towards her begged her to leavethe patient under our care--everything should be done for her--she was nolonger in a state to be conscious of an affectionate presence. Berthawas hesitating, apparently almost willing to believe his assurance and tocomply. She looked round at the ghastly dying face, as if to read theconfirmation of that assurance, when for a moment the lowered eyelidswere raised again, and it seemed as if the eyes were looking towardsBertha, but blankly. A shudder passed through Bertha's frame, and shereturned to her station near the pillow, tacitly implying that she wouldnot leave the room. 

The eyelids were lifted no more. Once I looked at Bertha as she watchedthe face of the dying one. She wore a rich _peignoir_, and her blondhair was half covered by a lace cap: in her attire she was, as always, anelegant 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 theface of a woman born of woman, with memories of childhood, capable ofpain, needing to be fondled? The features at that moment seemed sopreternaturally sharp, the eyes were so hard and eager--she looked like acruel immortal, finding her spiritual feast in the agonies of a dyingrace. For across those hard features there came something like a flashwhen the last hour had been breathed out, and we all felt that the darkveil had completely fallen. What secret was there between Bertha andthis woman? I turned my eyes from her with a horrible dread lest myinsight should return, and I should be obliged to see what had beenbreeding about two unloving women's hearts. I felt that Bertha had beenwatching for the moment of death as the sealing of her secret: I thankedHeaven it could remain sealed for me. 

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

I suppose it was at her order that two female attendants came into theroom, and dismissed the younger one who had been present before. Whenthey entered, Meunier had already opened the artery in the long thin neckthat lay rigid on the pillow, and I dismissed them, ordering them toremain at a distance till we rang: the doctor, I said, had an operationto perform--he was not sure about the death. For the next twenty minutesI forgot everything but Meunier and the experiment in which he was soabsorbed, that I think his senses would have been closed against allsounds or sights which had no relation to it. It was my task at first tokeep up the artificial respiration in the body after the transfusion hadbeen effected, but presently Meunier relieved me, and I could see thewondrous slow return of life; the breast began to heave, the inspirationsbecame stronger, the eyelids quivered, and the soul seemed to havereturned beneath them. The artificial respiration was withdrawn: stillthe breathing continued, and there was a movement of the lips. 

Just then I heard the handle of the door moving: I suppose Bertha hadheard from the women that they had been dismissed: probably a vague fearhad arisen in her mind, for she entered with a look of alarm. She cameto 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 thatBertha had thought for ever still was pointed towards her, and thehaggard 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 mebehind 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 leapedout, and was being extinguished the faster. The wretched woman's heart-strings had been set to hatred and vengeance; the spirit of life hadswept 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 unstilledthirst upon us, with our unuttered curses rising to our lips, with ourmuscles 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 aresurrounded by swift-advancing flame. Even Meunier looked paralysed; lifefor 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: horrorwas my familiar, and this new revelation was only like an old painrecurring 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 andadmired; for what had I against that charming woman, whom every one butmyself could have been happy with? There had been no witness of thescene in the dying room except Meunier, and while Meunier lived his lipswere sealed by a promise to me. 

Once or twice, weary of wandering, I rested in a favourite spot, and myheart went out towards the men and women and children whose faces werebecoming familiar to me; but I was driven away again in terror at theapproach of my old insight--driven away to live continually with the oneUnknown Presence revealed and yet hidden by the moving curtain of theearth and sky. Till at last disease took hold of me and forced me torest here--forced me to live in dependence on my servants. And then thecurse of insight--of my double consciousness, came again, and has neverleft me. I know all their narrow thoughts, their feeble regard, theirhalf-wearied pity. 

* * * * *

It is the 20th of September, 1850. I know these figures I have justwritten, as if they were a long familiar inscription. I have seen themon this pace in my desk unnumbered times, when the scene of my dyingstruggle has opened upon me . . . 

(1859)