CHAPTER LXIV.
Lilian's wondrous gentleness of nature did not desert her in the
suspension of her reason. She was habitually calm,--very silent; when she
spoke it was rarely on earthly things, on things familiar to her past,
things one could comprehend. Her thought seemed to have quitted the
earth, seeking refuge in some imaginary heaven. She spoke of wanderings
with her father as if he were living still; she did not seem to understand
the meaning we attach to the word "Death." She would sit for hours
murmuring to herself: when one sought to catch the words, they seemed in
converse with invisible spirits. We found it cruel to disturb her at
such times, for if left unmolested, her face was serene,--more serenely
beautiful than I had seen it even in our happiest hours; but when we
called her back to the wrecks of her real life, her eye became troubled,
restless, anxious, and she would sigh--oh, so heavily! At times, if we
did not seem to observe her, she would quietly resume her once favourite
accomplishments,--drawing, music. And in these her young excellence was
still apparent, only the drawings were strange and fantastic: they had a
resemblance to those with which the painter Blake, himself a visionary,
illustrated the Poems of the "Night Thoughts" and "The Grave,"--faces of
exquisite loveliness, forms of aerial grace, coming forth from the bells
of flowers, or floating upwards amidst the spray of fountains, their
outlines melting away in fountain or in flower. So with her music: her
mother could not recognize the airs she played, for a while so sweetly and
with so ineffable a pathos, that one could scarcely hear her without
weeping; and then would come, as if involuntarily, an abrupt discord, and,
starting, she would cease and look around, disquieted, aghast.
And still she did not recognize Mrs. Ashleigh nor myself as her mother,
her husband; but she had by degrees learned to distinguish us both from
others. To her mother she gave no name, seemed pleased to see her, but
not sensibly to miss her when away; me she called her brother: if longer
absent than usual, me she missed. When, after the toils of the day, I
came to join her, even if she spoke not, her sweet face brightened. When
she sang, she beckoned me to come near to her, and looked at me fixedly,
with eyes ever tender, often tearful; when she drew she would pause and
glance over her shoulder to see that I was watching her, and point to the
drawings with a smile of strange significance, as if they conveyed in some
covert allegory messages meant for me; so, at least, I interpreted her
smile, and taught myself to say, "Yes, Lilian, I understand!"
And more than once, when I had so answered, she rose, and kissed my
forehead. I thought my heart would have broken when I felt that
spirit-like melancholy kiss.
And yet how marvellously the human mind teaches itself to extract
consolations from its sorrows. The least wretched of my hours were those
that I had passed in that saddened room, seeking how to establish
fragments of intercourse, invent signs, by which each might interpret
each, between the intellect I had so laboriously cultured, so arrogantly
vaunted, and the fancies wandering through the dark, deprived of their
guide in reason. It was something even of joy to feel myself needed for
her guardianship, endeared and yearned for still by some unshattered
instinct of her heart; and when, parting from her for the night, I stole
the moment in which on her soft face seemed resting least of shadow, to
ask, in a trembling whisper, "Lilian, are the angels watching over you?"
and she would answer "Yes," sometimes in words, sometimes with a
mysterious happy smile--then--then I went to my lonely room, comforted
and thankful.
