CHAPTER LXV.
The blow that had fallen on my hearth effectually, inevitably killed all
the slander that might have troubled me in joy. Before the awe of a great
calamity the small passions of a mean malignity slink abashed. I had
requested Mrs. Ashleigh not to mention the vile letter which Lilian had
received. I would not give a triumph to the unknown calumniator, nor
wring forth her vain remorse, by the pain of acknowledging an indignity to
my darling's honour; yet, somehow or other, the true cause of Lilian's
affliction had crept out,--perhaps through the talk of servants,--and the
public shock was universal. By one of those instincts of justice that lie
deep in human hearts, though in ordinary moments overlaid by many a
worldly layer, all felt (all mothers felt especially) that innocence alone
could have been so unprepared for reproach. The explanation I had
previously given, discredited then, was now accepted without a question.
Lilian's present state accounted for all that ill nature had before
misconstrued. Her good name was restored to its maiden whiteness, by the
fate that had severed the ties of the bride. The formal dwellers on the
Hill vied with the franker, warmer-hearted households of Low Town in the
nameless attentions by which sympathy and respect are rather delicately
indicated than noisily proclaimed. Could Lilian have then recovered and
been sensible of its repentant homage, how reverently that petty world
would have thronged around her! And, ah! could fortune and man's esteem
have atoned for the blight of hopes that had been planted and cherished on
ground beyond their reach, ambition and pride might have been well
contented with the largeness of the exchange that courted their
acceptance. Patients on patients crowded on me. Sympathy with my sorrow
seemed to create and endear a more trustful belief in my skill. But the
profession I had once so enthusiastically loved became to me wearisome,
insipid, distasteful; the kindness heaped on me gave no comfort,--it but
brought before me more vividly the conviction that it came too late to
avail me: it could not restore to me the mind, the love, the life of my
life, which lay dark and shattered in the brain of my guileless Lilian.
Secretly I felt a sullen resentment. I knew that to the crowd the
resentment was unjust. The world itself is but an appearance; who can
blame it if appearances guide its laws? But to those who had been
detached from the crowd by the professions of friendship,--those who, when
the slander was yet new, and might have been awed into silence had they
stood by my side,--to the pressure of their hands, now, I had no response.
Against Mrs. Poyntz, above all others, I bore a remembrance of unrelaxed,
unmitigable indignation. Her schemes for her daughter's marriage had
triumphed: Jane was Mrs. Ashleigh Sumner. Her mind was, perhaps, softened
now that the object which had sharpened its worldly faculties was
accomplished: but in vain, on first hearing of my affliction, had this
she-Machiavel owned a humane remorse, and, with all her keen comprehension
of each facility that circumstances gave to her will, availed herself of
the general compassion to strengthen the popular reaction in favour of
Lilian's assaulted honour; in vain had she written to me with a gentleness
of sympathy foreign to her habitual characteristics; in vain besought me
to call on her; in vain waylaid and accosted me with a humility that
almost implored forgiveness. I vouchsafed no reproach, but I could imply
no pardon. I put between her and my great sorrow the impenetrable wall of
my freezing silence.
One word of hers at the time that I had so pathetically besought her aid,
and the parrot-flock that repeated her very whisper in noisy shrillness
would have been as loud to defend as it had been to defame; that vile
letter might never have been written. Whoever its writer, it surely was
one of the babblers who took their malice itself from the jest or the nod
of their female despot; and the writer might have justified herself in
saying she did but coarsely proclaim what the oracle of worldly opinion,
and the early friend of Lilian's own mother, had authorized her to
believe.
By degrees, the bitterness at my heart diffused itself to the
circumference of the circle in which my life went its cheerless mechanical
round. That cordial brotherhood with his patients, which is the true
physician's happiest gift and humanest duty, forsook my breast. The
warning words of Mrs. Poyntz had come true. A patient that monopolized
my thought awaited me at my own hearth! My conscience became troubled; I
felt that my skill was lessened. I said to myself, "The physician who, on
entering the sick-room, feels, while there, something that distracts the
finest powers of his intellect from the sufferer's case is unfit for his
calling." A year had scarcely passed since my fatal wedding day, before I
had formed a resolution to quit L---- and abandon my profession; and my
resolution was confirmed, and my goal determined, by a letter I received
from Julius Faber.
I had written at length to him, not many days after the blow that had
fallen on me, stating all circumstances as calmly and clearly as my grief
would allow; for I held his skill at a higher estimate than that of any
living brother of my art, and I was not without hope in the efficacy of
his advice. The letter I now received from him had been begun, and
continued at some length, before my communication reached him; and this
earlier portion contained animated and cheerful descriptions of his
Australian life and home, which contrasted with the sorrowful tone of the
supplement written in reply to the tidings with which I had wrung his
friendly and tender heart. In this, the latter part of his letter, he
suggested that if time had wrought no material change for the better, it
might be advisable to try the effect of foreign travel. Scenes entirely
new might stimulate observation, and the observation of things external
withdraw the sense from that brooding over images delusively formed
within, which characterized the kind of mental alienation I had described.
"Let any intellect create for itself a visionary world, and all reasonings
built on it are fallacious: the visionary world vanishes in proportion as
we can arouse a predominant interest in the actual."
This grand authority, who owed half his consummate skill as a practitioner
to the scope of his knowledge as a philosopher, then proceeded to give me
a hope which I had not dared of myself to form. He said:--
"I distinguish the case you so minutely detail from that insanity which
is reason lost; here it seems rather to be reason held in suspense.
Where there is hereditary predisposition, where there is organic
change of structure in the brain,--nay, where there is that kind of
insanity which takes the epithet of moral, whereby the whole
character becomes so transformed that the prime element of sound
understanding, conscience itself, is either erased or warped into the
sanction of what in a healthful state it would most disapprove,--it is
only charlatans who promise effectual cure. But here I assume that
there is no hereditary taint; here I am convinced, from my own
observation, that the nobility of the organs, all fresh as yet in the
vigour of youth, would rather submit to death than to the permanent
overthrow of their equilibrium in reason; here, where you tell me the
character preserves all its moral attributes of gentleness and purity,
and but over-indulges its own early habit of estranged contemplation;
here, without deceiving you in false kindness, I give you the
guarantee of my experience when I bid you 'hope!' I am persuaded
that, sooner or later, the mind, thus for a time affected, will right
itself; because here, in the cause of the malady, we do but deal with
the nervous system. And that, once righted, and the mind once
disciplined in those practical duties which conjugal life
necessitates, the malady itself will never return; never be
transmitted to the children on whom your wife's restoration to health
may permit you to count hereafter. If the course of travel I
recommend and the prescriptions I conjoin with that course fail you,
let me know; and though I would fain close my days in this land, I
will come to you. I love you as my son. I will tend your wife as my
daughter."
Foreign travel! The idea smiled on me. Julius Faber's companionship,
sympathy, matchless skill! The very thought seemed as a raft to a
drowning mariner. I now read more attentively the earlier portions of
his letter. They described, in glowing colours, the wondrous country in
which he had fixed his home; the joyous elasticity of its atmosphere; the
freshness of its primitive, pastoral life; the strangeness of its scenery,
with a Flora and a Fauna which have no similitudes in the ransacked
quarters of the Old World. And the strong impulse seized me to transfer
to the solitudes of that blithesome and hardy Nature a spirit no longer at
home in the civilized haunts of men, and household gods that shrank from
all social eyes, and would fain have found a wilderness for the desolate
hearth, on which they had ceased to be sacred if unveiled. As if to give
practical excuse and reason for the idea that seized me, Julius Faber
mentioned, incidentally, that the house and property of a wealthy
speculator in his immediate neighbourhood were on sale at a price which
seemed to me alluringly trivial, and, according to his judgment, far below
the value they would soon reach in the hands of a more patient capitalist.
He wrote at the period of the agricultural panic in the colony which
preceded the discovery of its earliest gold-fields. But his geological
science had convinced him that strata within and around the property now
for sale were auriferous, and his intelligence enabled him to predict how
inevitably man would be attracted towards the gold, and how surely the
gold would fertilize the soil and enrich its owners. He described the
house thus to be sold--in case I might know of a purchaser. It had been
built at a cost unusual in those early times, and by one who clung to
English tastes amidst Australian wilds, so that in this purchase a settler
would escape the hardships he had then ordinarily to encounter; it was,
in short, a home to which a man more luxurious than I might bear a bride
with wants less simple than those which now sufficed for my darling
Lilian.
This communication dwelt on my mind through the avocations of the day on
which I received it, and in the evening I read all, except the supplement,
aloud to Mrs. Ashleigh in her daughter's presence. I desired to see if
Faber's descriptions of the country and its life, which in themselves were
extremely spirited and striking, would arouse Lilian's interest. At first
she did not seem to heed me while I read; but when I came to Faber's
loving account of little Amy, Lilian turned her eyes towards me, and
evidently listened with attention. He wrote how the child had already
become the most useful person in the simple household. How watchful the
quickness of the heart had made the service of the eye; all their
associations of comfort had grown round her active, noiseless movements;
it was she who bad contrived to monopolize the management, or supervision,
of all that added to Home the nameless, interior charm. Under her eyes
the rude furniture of the log-house grew inviting with English neatness;
she took charge of the dairy; she had made the garden gay with flowers
selected from the wild, and suggested the trellised walk, already covered
with hardy vine. She was their confidant in every plan of improvement,
their comforter in every anxious doubt, their nurse in every passing
ailment, her very smile a refreshment in the weariness of daily toil.
"How all that is best in womanhood," wrote the old man, with the
enthusiasm which no time had reft from his hearty, healthful genius,--"how
all that is best in womanhood is here opening fast into flower from the
bud of the infant's soul! The atmosphere seems to suit it,--the
child-woman in the child-world!"
I heard Lilian sigh; I looked towards her furtively; tears stood in her
softened eyes; her lip was quivering. Presently, she began to rub her
right hand over the left--over the wedding-ring--at first slowly; then
with quicker movement.
"It is not here," she said impatiently; "it is not here!"
"What is not here?" asked Mrs. Ashleigh, hanging over her.
Lilian leaned back her head on her mother's bosom, and answered faintly,--
"The stain! Some one said there was a stain on this hand. I do not see
it, do you?"
"There is no stain, never was," said I; "the hand is white as your own
innocence, or the lily from which you take your name."
"Hush! you do not know my name. I will whisper it. Soft!--my name is
Nightshade! Do you want to know where the lily is now, brother? I will
tell you. There, in that letter. You call her Amy,--she is the lily;
take her to your breast, hide her. Hist! what are those bells?
Marriage-bells. Do not let her hear them; for there is a cruel wind that
whispers the bells, and the bells ring out what it whispers, louder and
louder,
"'Stain on lily
Shame on lily,
Wither lily.'
"If she hears what the wind whispers to the bells, she will creep away
into the dark, and then she, too, will turn to Nightshade."
"Lilian, look up, awake! You have been in a long, long dream: it is
passing away. Lilian, my beloved, my blessed Lilian!"
Never till then had I heard from her even so vague an allusion to the
fatal calumny and its dreadful effect, and while her words now pierced my
heart, it beat, amongst its pangs, with a thrilling hope.
But, alas! the idea that had gleamed upon her had vanished already. She
murmured something about Circles of Fire, and a Veiled Woman in black
garments; became restless, agitated, and unconscious of our presence,
and finally sank into a heavy sleep.
That night (my room was next to hers with the intervening door open) I
heard her cry out. I hastened to her side. She was still asleep, but
there was an anxious labouring expression on her young face, and yet not
an expression wholly of pain--for her lips were parted with a smile,--that
glad yet troubled smile with which one who has been revolving some subject
of perplexity or fear greets a sudden thought that seems to solve the
riddle, or prompt the escape from danger; and as I softly took her hand
she returned my gentle pressure, and inclining towards me, said, still in
sleep,--
"Let us go."
"Whither?" I answered, under my breath, so as not to awake her; "is it to
see the child of whom I read, and the land that is blooming out of the
earth's childhood?"
"Out of the dark into the light; where the leaves do not change; where the
night is our day, and the winter our summer. Let us go! let us go!"
"We will go. Dream on undisturbed, my bride. Oh, that the dream could
tell you that my love has not changed in our sorrow, holier and deeper
than on the day in which our vows were exchanged! In you still all my
hopes fold their wings; where you are, there still I myself have my
dreamland!"
The sweet face grew bright as I spoke; all trouble left the smile; softly
she drew her hand from my clasp, and rested it for a moment on my bended
head, as if in blessing.
I rose; stole back to my own room, closing the door, lest the sob I could
not stifle should mar her sleep.
