CHAPTER XXVII.
LEOPOLD'S STORY CONCLUDED.
He knew from her letters that they were going to give a ball, at
which as many as pleased should be welcome in fancy dresses, and
masked if they chose. The night before it he had a dream, under the
influence of his familiar no doubt, which made him so miserable and
jealous that he longed to see her as a wounded man longs for water,
and the thought arose of going down to the ball, not exactly in
disguise, for he had no mind to act a part, but masked so that he
should not be recognised as uninvited, and should have an
opportunity of watching Emmeline, concerning whose engagement with a
young cavalry officer there had lately been reports, which, however,
before his dream, had caused him less uneasiness than many such
preceding. The same moment the thought was a resolve.
I must mention that no one whatever knew the degree of his intimacy
with Emmeline, or that he had any ground for considering her engaged
to him. Secrecy added much to the zest of Emmeline's pleasures.
Everyone knew that he was a devoted admirer--but therein to be
classed with a host.
For concealment, he contented himself with a large travelling-cloak,
a tall felt hat, and a black silk mask.
He entered the grounds with an arrival of guests, and knowing the
place perfectly, contrived to see something of her behaviour, while
he watched for an opportunity of speaking to her alone,--a quest of
unlikely success. Hour after hour he watched, and all the time never
spoke or was spoken to.
Those who are acquainted with the mode of operation of the drug to
which I have referred, are aware that a man may be fully under its
influences without betraying to the ordinary observer that he is in
a condition differing from that of other men. But, in the living
dream wherein he walks, his feeling of time and of space is so
enlarged, or perhaps, I rather think, so subdivided to the
consciousness, that everything about him seems infinite both in
duration and extent; the action of a second has in it a
multitudinous gradation of progress, and a line of space is marked
out into millionths, of every one of which the consciousness takes
note. At the same time his senses are open to every impression from
things around him, only they appear to him in a strangely exalted
metamorphosis, the reflex of his own mental exaltation either in
bliss or torture, while the fancies of a man mingle with the facts
thus introduced and modify and are in turn modified by them; whereby
out of the chaos arises the mountain of an Earthly Paradise, whose
roots are in the depths of hell; and whether the man be with the
divine air and the clear rivers and the thousand-hued flowers on the
top, or down in the ice-lake with the tears frozen to hard lumps in
the hollows of his eyes so that he can no more have even the poor
consolation of weeping, is but the turning of a hair, so far at
least as his will has to do with it. The least intrusion of anything
painful, of any jar that cannot be wrought into the general harmony
of the vision, will suddenly alter its character, and from the
seventh heaven of speechless bliss the man may fall plumb down into
gulfs of horrible and torturing, it may be loathsome imaginings.
Now Leopold had taken a dose of the drug on his journey, and it was
later than usual, probably because of the motion, ere it began to
take effect. He had indeed ceased to look for any result from it,
when all at once, as he stood amongst the laburnums and lilacs of a
rather late spring, something seemed to burst in his brain, and that
moment he was Endymion waiting for Diana in her interlunar grove,
while the music of the spheres made the blossoms of a stately yet
flowering forest, tremble all with conscious delight.
Emboldened by his new condition, he drew nigh the house. They were
then passing from the ball to the supper-room, and he found the
tumult so distasteful to his mood of still ecstasy that he would not
have entered had he not remembered that he had in his pocket a note
ready if needful to slip into her hand, containing only the words,
"Meet me for one long minute at the circle,"--a spot well known to
both: he threw his cloak Spanish fashion over his left shoulder,
slouched his hat, and entering stood in a shadowy spot she must pass
in going to or from the supper-room. There he waited, with the note
hid in his hand--a long time, yet not a weary one, such visions of
loveliness passed before his entranced gaze. At length SHE also
passed--lovely as the Diana whose dress she had copied--not quite so
perfectly as she had abjured her manners. She leaned trustingly on
the arm of some one, but Leopold never even looked at him. He slid
the note into her hand, which hung ungloved as inviting confidences.
With an instinct quickened and sharpened tenfold by much practice,
her fingers instantly closed upon it, but, not a muscle belonging to
any other part of her betrayed the intrusion of a foreign body: I do
not believe her heart gave one beat the more to the next minute. She
passed graceful on, her swan's-neck shining; and Leopold hastened
out to one of the windows of the ball-room, there to feast his eyes
upon her loveliness. But when he caught sight of her whirling in the
waltz with the officer of dragoons whose name he had heard coupled
with hers, and saw her flash on him the light and power of eyes
which were to him the windows of all the heaven he knew, as they
swam together in the joy of the rhythm, of the motion, of the music,
suddenly the whole frame of the dream wherein he wandered, trembled,
shook, fell down into the dreary vaults that underlie all the airy
castles that have other foundation than the will of the eternal
Builder. With the suddenness of the dark that follows the lightning,
the music changed to a dissonant clash of multitudinous cymbals, the
resounding clang of brazen doors, and the hundred-toned screams of
souls in torture. The same moment, from halls of infinite scope,
where the very air was a soft tumult of veiled melodies ever and
anon twisted into inextricable knots of harmony--under whose skyey
domes he swept upborne by chords of sound throbbing up against great
wings mighty as thought yet in their motions as easy and subtle, he
found himself lying on the floor of a huge vault, whose black slabs
were worn into many hollows by the bare feet of the damned as they
went and came between the chambers of their torture opening off upon
every side, whence issued all kinds of sickening cries, and mingled
with the music to which, with whips of steel, hellish executioners
urged the dance whose every motion was an agony. His soul fainted
within him, and the vision changed. When he came to himself, he lay
on the little plot of grass amongst the lilacs and laburnums where
he had asked Emmeline to meet him. Fevered with jealousy and the
horrible drug, his mouth was parched like an old purse, and he found
himself chewing at the grass to ease its burning and drought. But
presently the evil thing resumed its sway and fancies usurped over
facts. He thought he was lying in an Indian jungle, close by the
cave of a beautiful tigress, which crouched within, waiting the
first sting of reviving hunger to devour him. He could hear her
breathing as she slept, but he was fascinated, paralyzed, and could
not escape, knowing that, even if with mighty effort he succeeded in
moving a finger, the motion would suffice to wake her, and she would
spring upon him and tear him to pieces. Years upon years passed
thus, and he still lay on the grass in the jungle, and still the
beautiful tigress slept. But however far apart the knots upon the
string of time may lie, they must pass: an angel in white stood over
him, his fears vanished, the waving of her wings cooled him, and she
was the angel whom he had loved and loved from all eternity, in whom
was his ever-and-only rest. She lifted him to his feet, gave him her
hand, they walked away, and the tigress was asleep for ever. For
miles and miles, as it seemed to his exaltation, they wandered away
into the woods, to wander in them for ever, the same violet blue,
flashing with roseate stars, for ever looking in through the
tree-tops, and the great leafy branches hushing, ever hushing them,
as with the voices of child-watching mothers, into peace, whose
depth is bliss.
"Have you nothing to say now I am come?" said the angel.
"I have said all. I am at rest," answered the mortal.
"I am going to be married to Captain Hodges," said the angel.
And with the word, the forests of heaven vanished, and the halls of
Eblis did not take their place:--a worse hell was there--the cold
reality of an earth abjured, and a worthless maiden walking by his
side. He stood and turned to her. The shock had mastered the drug.
They were only in the little wooded hollow, a hundred yards from the
house. The blood throbbed in his head as from the piston of an
engine. A horrid sound of dance-music was in his ears. Emmeline, his
own, stood in her white dress, looking up in his face, with the
words just parted from her lips, "I am going to be married to
Captain Hodges." The next moment she threw her arms round his neck,
pulled his face to hers, and kissed him, and clung to him.
"Poor Leopold!" she said, and looked in his face with her electric
battery at full power; "does it make him miserable, then?--But you
know it could not have gone on like this between you and me for
ever! It was very dear while it lasted, but it must come to an end."
Was there a glimmer of real pity and sadness in those wondrous eyes?
She laughed--was it a laugh of despair or of exultation?--and hid
her face on his bosom. And what was it that awoke in Leopold? Had
the drug resumed its power over him? Was it rage at her mockery, or
infinite compassion for her despair? Would he slay a demon, or
ransom a spirit from hateful bonds? Would he save a woman from
disgrace and misery to come? or punish her for the vilest falsehood?
Who can tell? for Leopold himself never could. Whatever the feeling
was, its own violence erased it from his memory, and left him with a
knife in his hand, and Emmeline lying motionless at his feet. It was
a knife the Scotch highlanders call a skean-dhu, sharp-pointed as a
needle, sharp-edged as a razor, and with one blow of it he had cleft
her heart, and she never cried or laughed any more in that body
whose charms she had degraded to the vile servitude of her vanity.
The next thing he remembered was standing on the edge of the shaft
of a deserted coalpit, ready to cast himself down. Whence came the
change of resolve, he could not tell, but he threw in his cloak and
mask, and fled. The one thought in his miserable brain was his
sister. Having murdered one woman, he was fleeing to another for
refuge. Helen would save him.
How he had found his way to his haven, he had not an idea. Searching
the newspapers, Helen heard that a week had elapsed between the
"mysterious murder of a young lady in Yorkshire" and the night on
which he came to her window.
