CHAPTER II
Before the autumn was at an end, and while the brown leaves still
stood thick on the beeches in our park, my brother and Bertha were
engaged to each other, and it was understood that their marriage
was to take place early in the next spring. In spite of the
certainty I had felt from that moment on the bridge at Prague, that
Bertha would one day be my wife, my constitutional timidity and
distrust had continued to benumb me, and the words in which I had
sometimes premeditated a confession of my love, had died away
unuttered. The same conflict had gone on within me as before--the
longing for an assurance of love from Bertha's lips, the dread lest
a word of contempt and denial should fall upon me like a corrosive
acid. What was the conviction of a distant necessity to me? l
trembled under a present glance, I hungered after a present joy, I
was clogged and chilled by a present fear. And so the days passed
on: I witnessed Bertha's engagement and heard her marriage
discussed as if I were under a conscious nightmare--knowing it was
a dream that would vanish, but feeling stifled under the grasp of
hard-clutching fingers.
When I was not in Bertha's presence--and I was with her very often,
for she continued to treat me with a playful patronage that wakened
no jealousy in my brother--I spent my time chiefly in wandering, in
strolling, or taking long rides while the daylight lasted, and then
shutting myself up with my unread books; for books had lost the
power of chaining my attention. My self-consciousness was
heightened to that pitch of intensity in which our own emotions
take the form of a drama which urges itself imperatively on our
contemplation, and we begin to weep, less under the sense of our
suffering than at the thought of it. I felt a sort of pitying
anguish over the pathos of my own lot: the lot of a being finely
organized for pain, but with hardly any fibres that responded to
pleasure--to whom the idea of future evil robbed the present of its
joy, and for whom the idea of future good did not still the
uneasiness of a present yearning or a present dread. I went dumbly
through that stage of the poet's suffering, in which he feels the
delicious pang of utterance, and makes an image of his sorrows.
I was left entirely without remonstrance concerning this dreamy
wayward life: I knew my father's thought about me: "That lad will
never be good for anything in life: he may waste his years in an
insignificant way on the income that falls to him: I shall not
trouble myself about a career for him."
One mild morning in the beginning of November, it happened that I
was standing outside the portico patting lazy old Caesar, a
Newfoundland almost blind with age, the only dog that ever took any
notice of me--for the very dogs shunned me, and fawned on the
happier people about me--when the groom brought up my brother's
horse which was to carry him to the hunt, and my brother himself
appeared at the door, florid, broad-chested, and self-complacent,
feeling what a good-natured fellow he was not to behave insolently
to us all on the strength of his great advantages.
"Latimer, old boy," he said to me in a tone of compassionate
cordiality, "what a pity it is you don't have a run with the hounds
now and then! The finest thing in the world for low spirits!"
"Low spirits!" I thought bitterly, as he rode away; "that is the
sort of phrase with which coarse, narrow natures like yours think
to describe experience of which you can know no more than your
horse knows. It is to such as you that the good of this world
falls: ready dulness, healthy selfishness, good-tempered conceit--
these are the keys to happiness."
The quick thought came, that my selfishness was even stronger than
his--it was only a suffering selfishness instead of an enjoying
one. But then, again, my exasperating insight into Alfred's self-
complacent soul, his freedom from all the doubts and fears, the
unsatisfied yearnings, the exquisite tortures of sensitiveness,
that had made the web of my life, seemed to absolve me from all
bonds towards him. This man needed no pity, no love; those fine
influences would have been as little felt by him as the delicate
white mist is felt by the rock it caresses. There was no evil in
store for HIM: if he was not to marry Bertha, it would be because
he had found a lot pleasanter to himself.
Mr. Filmore's house lay not more than half a mile beyond our own
gates, and whenever I knew my brother was gone in another
direction, I went there for the chance of finding Bertha at home.
Later on in the day I walked thither. By a rare accident she was
alone, and we walked out in the grounds together, for she seldom
went on foot beyond the trimly-swept gravel-walks. I remember what
a beautiful sylph she looked to me as the low November sun shone on
her blond hair, and she tripped along teasing me with her usual
light banter, to which I listened half fondly, half moodily; it was
all the sign Bertha's mysterious inner self ever made to me. To-
day perhaps, the moodiness predominated, for I had not yet shaken
off the access of jealous hate which my brother had raised in me by
his parting patronage. Suddenly I interrupted and startled her by
saying, almost fiercely, "Bertha, how can you love Alfred?"
She looked at me with surprise for a moment, but soon her light
smile came again, and she answered sarcastically, "Why do you
suppose I love him?"
"How can you ask that, Bertha?"
"What! your wisdom thinks I must love the man I'm going to marry?
The most unpleasant thing in the world. I should quarrel with him;
I should be jealous of him; our menage would be conducted in a very
ill-bred manner. A little quiet contempt contributes greatly to
the elegance of life."
"Bertha, that is not your real feeling. Why do you delight in
trying to deceive me by inventing such cynical speeches?"
"I need never take the trouble of invention in order to deceive
you, my small Tasso"-- (that was the mocking name she usually gave
me). "The easiest way to deceive a poet is to tell him the truth."
She was testing the validity of her epigram in a daring way, and
for a moment the shadow of my vision--the Bertha whose soul was no
secret to me--passed between me and the radiant girl, the playful
sylph whose feelings were a fascinating mystery. I suppose I must
have shuddered, or betrayed in some other way my momentary chill of
horror.
"Tasso!" she said, seizing my wrist, and peeping round into my
face, "are you really beginning to discern what a heartless girl I
am? Why, you are not half the poet I thought you were; you are
actually capable of believing the truth about me."
The shadow passed from between us, and was no longer the object
nearest to me. The girl whose light fingers grasped me, whose
elfish charming face looked into mine--who, I thought, was
betraying an interest in my feelings that she would not have
directly avowed,--this warm breathing presence again possessed my
senses and imagination like a returning siren melody which had been
overpowered for an instant by the roar of threatening waves. It
was a moment as delicious to me as the waking up to a consciousness
of youth after a dream of middle age. I forgot everything but my
passion, and said with swimming eyes -
"Bertha, shall you love me when we are first married? I wouldn't
mind if you really loved me only for a little while."
Her look of astonishment, as she loosed my hand and started away
from me, recalled me to a sense of my strange, my criminal
indiscretion.
"Forgive me," I said, hurriedly, as soon as I could speak again; "I
did not know what I was saying."
"Ah, Tasso's mad fit has come on, I see," she answered quietly, for
she had recovered herself sooner than I had. "Let him go home and
keep his head cool. I must go in, for the sun is setting."
I left her--full of indignation against myself. I had let slip
words which, if she reflected on them, might rouse in her a
suspicion of my abnormal mental condition--a suspicion which of all
things I dreaded. And besides that, I was ashamed of the apparent
baseness I had committed in uttering them to my brother's betrothed
wife. I wandered home slowly, entering our park through a private
gate instead of by the lodges. As I approached the house, I saw a
man dashing off at full speed from the stable-yard across the park.
Had any accident happened at home? No; perhaps it was only one of
my father's peremptory business errands that required this headlong
haste.
Nevertheless I quickened my pace without any distinct motive, and
was soon at the house. I will not dwell on the scene I found
there. My brother was dead--had been pitched from his horse, and
killed on the spot by a concussion of the brain.
I went up to the room where he lay, and where my father was seated
beside him with a look of rigid despair. I had shunned my father
more than any one since our return home, for the radical antipathy
between our natures made my insight into his inner self a constant
affliction to me. But now, as I went up to him, and stood beside
him in sad silence, I felt the presence of a new element that
blended us as we had never been blent before. My father had been
one of the most successful men in the money-getting world: he had
had no sentimental sufferings, no illness. The heaviest trouble
that had befallen him was the death of his first wife. But he
married my mother soon after; and I remember he seemed exactly the
same, to my keen childish observation, the week after her death as
before. But now, at last, a sorrow had come--the sorrow of old
age, which suffers the more from the crushing of its pride and its
hopes, in proportion as the pride and hope are narrow and prosaic.
His son was to have been married soon--would probably have stood
for the borough at the next election. That son's existence was the
best motive that could be alleged for making new purchases of land
every year to round off the estate. It is a dreary thing onto live
on doing the same things year after year, without knowing why we do
them. Perhaps the tragedy of disappointed youth and passion is
less piteous than the tragedy of disappointed age and worldliness.
As I saw into the desolation of my father's heart, I felt a
movement of deep pity towards him, which was the beginning of a new
affection--an affection that grew and strengthened in spite of the
strange bitterness with which he regarded me in the first month or
two after my brother's death. If it had not been for the softening
influence of my compassion for him--the first deep compassion I had
ever felt--I should have been stung by the perception that my
father transferred the inheritance of an eldest son to me with a
mortified sense that fate had compelled him to the unwelcome course
of caring for me as an important being. It was only in spite of
himself that he began to think of me with anxious regard. There is
hardly any neglected child for whom death has made vacant a more
favoured place, who will not understand what I mean.
Gradually, however, my new deference to his wishes, the effect of
that patience which was born of my pity for him, won upon his
affection, and he began to please himself with the endeavour to
make me fill any brother's place as fully as my feebler personality
would admit. I saw that the prospect which by and by presented
itself of my becoming Bertha's husband was welcome to him, and he
even contemplated in my case what he had not intended in my
brother's--that his son and daughter-in-law should make one
household with him. My softened feelings towards my father made
this the happiest time I had known since childhood;--these last
months in which I retained the delicious illusion of loving Bertha,
of longing and doubting and hoping that she might love me. She
behaved with a certain new consciousness and distance towards me
after my brother's death; and I too was under a double constraint--
that of delicacy towards my brother's memory and of anxiety as to
the impression my abrupt words had left on her mind. But the
additional screen this mutual reserve erected between us only
brought me more completely under her power: no matter how empty
the adytum, so that the veil be thick enough. So absolute is our
soul's need of something hidden and uncertain for the maintenance
of that doubt and hope and effort which are the breath of its life,
that if the whole future were laid bare to us beyond to-day, the
interest of all mankind would be bent on the hours that lie
between; we should pant after the uncertainties of our one morning
and our one afternoon; we should rush fiercely to the Exchange for
our last possibility of speculation, of success, of disappointment:
we should have a glut of political prophets foretelling a crisis or
a no-crisis within the only twenty-four hours left open to
prophecy. Conceive the condition of the human mind if all
propositions whatsoever were self-evident except one, which was to
become self-evident at the close of a summer's day, but in the
meantime might be the subject of question, of hypothesis, of
debate. Art and philosophy, literature and science, would fasten
like bees on that one proposition which had the honey of
probability in it, and be the more eager because their enjoyment
would end with sunset. Our impulses, our spiritual activities, no
more adjust themselves to the idea of their future nullity, than
the beating of our heart, or the irritability of our muscles.
Bertha, the slim, fair-haired girl, whose present thoughts and
emotions were an enigma to me amidst the fatiguing obviousness of
the other minds around me, was as absorbing to me as a single
unknown to-day--as a single hypothetic proposition to remain
problematic till sunset; and all the cramped, hemmed-in belief and
disbelief, trust and distrust, of my nature, welled out in this one
narrow channel.
And she made me believe that she loved me. Without ever quitting
her tone of BADINAGE and playful superiority, she intoxicated me
with the sense that I was necessary to her, that she was never at
ease, unless I was near her, submitting to her playful tyranny. It
costs a woman so little effort to beset us in this way! A half-
repressed word, a moment's unexpected silence, even an easy fit of
petulance on our account, will serve us as hashish for a long
while. Out of the subtlest web of scarcely perceptible signs, she
set me weaving the fancy that she had always unconsciously loved me
better than Alfred, but that, with the ignorant fluttered
sensibility of a young girl, she had been imposed on by the charm
that lay for her in the distinction of being admired and chosen by
a man who made so brilliant a figure in the world as my brother.
She satirized herself in a very graceful way for her vanity and
ambition. What was it to me that I had the light of my wretched
provision on the fact that now it was I who possessed at least all
but the personal part of my brother's advantages? Our sweet
illusions are half of them conscious illusions, like effects of
colour that we know to be made up of tinsel, broken glass, and
rags.
We were married eighteen months after Alfred's death, one cold,
clear morning in April, when there came hail and sunshine both
together; and Bertha, in her white silk and pale-green leaves, and
the pale hues of her hair and face, looked like the spirit of the
morning. My father was happier than he had thought of being again:
my marriage, he felt sure, would complete the desirable
modification of my character, and make me practical and worldly
enough to take my place in society among sane men. For he
delighted in Bertha's tact and acuteness, and felt sure she would
be mistress of me, and make me what she chose: I was only twenty-
one, and madly in love with her. Poor father! He kept that hope a
little while after our first year of marriage, and it was not quite
extinct when paralysis came and saved him from utter
disappointment.
I shall hurry through the rest of my story, not dwelling so much as
I have hitherto done on my inward experience. When people are well
known to each other, they talk rather of what befalls them
externally, leaving their feelings and sentiments to be inferred.
We lived in a round of visits for some time after our return home,
giving splendid dinner-parties, and making a sensation in our
neighbourhood by the new lustre of our equipage, for my father had
reserved this display of his increased wealth for the period of his
son's marriage; and we gave our acquaintances liberal opportunity
for remarking that it was a pity I made so poor a figure as an heir
and a bridegroom. The nervous fatigue of this existence, the
insincerities and platitudes which I had to live through twice
over--through my inner and outward sense--would have been maddening
to me, if I had not had that sort of intoxicated callousness which
came from the delights of a first passion. A bride and bridegroom,
surrounded by all the appliances of wealth, hurried through the day
by the whirl of society, filling their solitary moments with
hastily-snatched caresses, are prepared for their future life
together as the novice is prepared for the cloister--by
experiencing its utmost contrast.
Through all these crowded excited months, Bertha's inward self
remained shrouded from me, and I still read her thoughts only
through the language of her lips and demeanour: I had still the
human interest of wondering whether what I did and said pleased
her, of longing to hear a word of affection, of giving a delicious
exaggeration of meaning to her smile. But I was conscious of a
growing difference in her manner towards me; sometimes strong
enough to be called haughty coldness, cutting and chilling me as
the hail had done that came across the sunshine on our marriage
morning; sometimes only perceptible in the dexterous avoidance of a
tete-a-tete walk or dinner to which I had been looking forward. I
had been deeply pained by this--had even felt a sort of crushing of
the heart, from the sense that my brief day of happiness was near
its setting; but still I remained dependent on Bertha, eager for
the last rays of a bliss that would soon be gone for ever, hoping
and watching for some after-glow more beautiful from the impending
night.
I remember--how should I not remember?--the time when that
dependence and hope utterly left me, when the sadness I had felt in
Bertha's growing estrangement became a joy that I looked back upon
with longing as a man might look back on the last pains in a
paralysed limb. It was just after the close of my father's last
illness, which had necessarily withdrawn us from society and thrown
us more on each other. It was the evening of father's death. On
that evening the veil which had shrouded Bertha's soul from me--had
made me find in her alone among my fellow-beings the blessed
possibility of mystery, and doubt, and expectation--was first
withdrawn. Perhaps it was the first day since the beginning of my
passion for her, in which that passion was completely neutralized
by the presence of an absorbing feeling of another kind. I had
been watching by my father's deathbed: I had been witnessing the
last fitful yearning glance his soul had cast back on the spent
inheritance of life--the last faint consciousness of love he had
gathered from the pressure of my hand. What are all our personal
loves when we have been sharing in that supreme agony? In the
first moments when we come away from the presence of death, every
other relation to the living is merged, to our feeling, in the
great relation of a common nature and a common destiny.
In that state of mind I joined Bertha in her private sitting-room.
She was seated in a leaning posture on a settee, with her back
towards the door; the great rich coils of her pale blond hair
surmounting her small neck, visible above the back of the settee.
I remember, as I closed the door behind me, a cold tremulousness
seizing me, and a vague sense of being hated and lonely--vague and
strong, like a presentiment. I know how I looked at that moment,
for I saw myself in Bertha's thought as she lifted her cutting grey
eyes, and looked at me: a miserable ghost-seer, surrounded by
phantoms in the noonday, trembling under a breeze when the leaves
were still, without appetite for the common objects of human
desires, but pining after the moon-beams. We were front to front
with each other, and judged each other. The terrible moment of
complete illumination had come to me, and I saw that the darkness
had hidden no landscape from me, but only a blank prosaic wall:
from that evening forth, through the sickening years which
followed, I saw all round the narrow room of this woman's soul--saw
petty artifice and mere negation where I had delighted to believe
in coy sensibilities and in wit at war with latent feeling--saw the
light floating vanities of the girl defining themselves into the
systematic coquetry, the scheming selfishness, of the woman--saw
repulsion and antipathy harden into cruel hatred, giving pain only
for the sake of wreaking itself.
For Bertha too, after her kind, felt the bitterness of disillusion.
She had believed that my wild poet's passion for her would make me
her slave; and that, being her slave, I should execute her will in
all things. With the essential shallowness of a negative,
unimaginative nature, she was unable to conceive the fact that
sensibilities were anything else than weaknesses. She had thought
my weaknesses would put me in her power, and she found them
unmanageable forces. Our positions were reversed. Before marriage
she had completely mastered my imagination, for she was a secret to
me; and I created the unknown thought before which I trembled as if
it were hers. But now that her soul was laid open to me, now that
I was compelled to share the privacy of her motives, to follow all
the petty devices that preceded her words and acts, she found
herself powerless with me, except to produce in me the chill
shudder of repulsion--powerless, because I could be acted on by no
lever within her reach. I was dead to worldly ambitions, to social
vanities, to all the incentives within the compass of her narrow
imagination, and I lived under influences utterly invisible to her.
She was really pitiable to have such a husband, and so all the
world thought. A graceful, brilliant woman, like Bertha, who
smiled on morning callers, made a figure in ball-rooms, and was
capable of that light repartee which, from such a woman, is
accepted as wit, was secure of carrying off all sympathy from a
husband who was sickly, abstracted, and, as some suspected, crack-
brained. Even the servants in our house gave her the balance of
their regard and pity. For there were no audible quarrels between
us; our alienation, our repulsion from each other, lay within the
silence of our own hearts; and if the mistress went out a great
deal, and seemed to dislike the master's society, was it not
natural, poor thing? The master was odd. I was kind and just to
my dependants, but I excited in them a shrinking, half-contemptuous
pity; for this class of men and women are but slightly determined
in their estimate of others by general considerations, or even
experience, of character. They judge of persons as they judge of
coins, and value those who pass current at a high rate.
After a time I interfered so little with Bertha's habits that it
might seem wonderful how her hatred towards me could grow so
intense and active as it did. But she had begun to suspect, by
some involuntary betrayal of mine, that there was an abnormal power
of penetration in me--that fitfully, at least, I was strangely
cognizant of her thoughts and intentions, and she began to be
haunted by a terror of me, which alternated every now and then with
defiance. She meditated continually how the incubus could be
shaken off her life--how she could be freed from this hateful bond
to a being whom she at once despised as an imbecile, and dreaded as
an inquisitor. For a long while she lived in the hope that my
evident wretchedness would drive me to the commission of suicide;
but suicide was not in my nature. I was too completely swayed by
the sense that I was in the grasp of unknown forces, to believe in
my power of self-release. Towards my own destiny I had become
entirely passive; for my one ardent desire had spent itself, and
impulse no longer predominated over knowledge. For this reason I
never thought of taking any steps towards a complete separation,
which would have made our alienation evident to the world. Why
should I rush for help to a new course, when I was only suffering
from the consequences of a deed which had been the act of my
intensest will? That would have been the logic of one who had
desires to gratify, and I had no desires. But Bertha and I lived
more and more aloof from each other. The rich find it easy to live
married and apart.
That course of our life which I have indicated in a few sentences
filled the space of years. So much misery--so slow and hideous a
growth of hatred and sin, may be compressed into a sentence! And
men judge of each other's lives through this summary medium. They
epitomize the experience of their fellow-mortal, and pronounce
judgment on him in neat syntax, and feel themselves wise and
virtuous--conquerors over the temptations they define in well-
selected predicates. Seven years of wretchedness glide glibly over
the lips of the man who has never counted them out in moments of
chill disappointment, of head and heart throbbings, of dread and
vain wrestling, of remorse and despair. We learn WORDS by rote,
but not their meaning; THAT must be paid for with our life-blood,
and printed in the subtle fibres of our nerves.
But I will hasten to finish my story. Brevity is justified at once
to those who readily understand, and to those who will never
understand.
Some years after my father's death, I was sitting by the dim
firelight in my library one January evening--sitting in the leather
chair that used to be my father's--when Bertha appeared at the
door, with a candle in her hand, and advanced towards me. I knew
the ball-dress she had on--the white ball-dress, with the green
jewels, shone upon by the light of the wax candle which lit up the
medallion of the dying Cleopatra on the mantelpiece. Why did she
come to me before going out? I had not seen her in the library,
which was my habitual place for months. Why did she stand before
me with the candle in her hand, with her cruel contemptuous eyes
fixed on me, and the glittering serpent, like a familiar demon, on
her breast? For a moment I thought this fulfilment of my vision at
Vienna marked some dreadful crisis in my fate, but I saw nothing in
Bertha's mind, as she stood before me, except scorn for the look of
overwhelming misery with which I sat before her . . . "Fool, idiot,
why don't you kill yourself, then?"--that was her thought. But at
length her thoughts reverted to her errand, and she spoke aloud.
The apparently indifferent nature of the errand seemed to make a
ridiculous anticlimax to my prevision and my agitation.
"I have had to hire a new maid. Fletcher is going to be married,
and she wants me to ask you to let her husband have the public-
house and farm at Molton. I wish him to have it. You must give
the promise now, because Fletcher is going to-morrow morning--and
quickly, because I'm in a hurry."
"Very well; you may promise her," I said, indifferently, and Bertha
swept out of the library again.
I always shrank from the sight of a new person, and all the more
when it was a person whose mental life was likely to weary my
reluctant insight with worldly ignorant trivialities. But I shrank
especially from the sight of this new maid, because her advent had
been announced to me at a moment to which I could not cease to
attach some fatality: I had a vague dread that I should find her
mixed up with the dreary drama of my life--that some new sickening
vision would reveal her to me as an evil genius. When at last I
did unavoidably meet her, the vague dread was changed into definite
disgust. She was a tall, wiry, dark-eyed woman, this Mrs. Archer,
with a face handsome enough to give her coarse hard nature the
odious finish of bold, self-confident coquetry. That was enough to
make me avoid her, quite apart from the contemptuous feeling with
which she contemplated me. I seldom saw her; but I perceived that
she rapidly became a favourite with her mistress, and, after the
lapse of eight or nine months, I began to be aware that there had
arisen in Bertha's mind towards this woman a mingled feeling of
fear and dependence, and that this feeling was associated with ill-
defined images of candle-light scenes in her dressing-room, and the
locking-up of something in Bertha's cabinet. My interviews with my
wife had become so brief and so rarely solitary, that I had no
opportunity of perceiving these images in her mind with more
definiteness. The recollections of the past become contracted in
the rapidity of thought till they sometimes bear hardly a more
distinct resemblance to the external reality than the forms of an
oriental alphabet to the objects that suggested them.
Besides, for the last year or more a modification had been going
forward in my mental condition, and was growing more and more
marked. My insight into the minds of those around me was becoming
dimmer and more fitful, and the ideas that crowded my double
consciousness became less and less dependent on any personal
contact. All that was personal in me seemed to be suffering a
gradual death, so that I was losing the organ through which the
personal agitations and projects of others could affect me. But
along with this relief from wearisome insight, there was a new
development of what I concluded--as I have since found rightly--to
be a provision of external scenes. It was as if the relation
between me and my fellow-men was more and more deadened, and my
relation to what we call the inanimate was quickened into new life.
The more I lived apart from society, and in proportion as my
wretchedness subsided from the violent throb of agonized passion
into the dulness of habitual pain, the more frequent and vivid
became such visions as that I had had of Prague--of strange cities,
of sandy plains, of gigantic ruins, of midnight skies with strange
bright constellations, of mountain-passes, of grassy nooks flecked
with the afternoon sunshine through the boughs: I was in the midst
of such scenes, and in all of them one presence seemed to weigh on
me in all these mighty shapes--the presence of something unknown
and pitiless. For continual suffering had annihilated religious
faith within me: to the utterly miserable--the unloving and the
unloved--there is no religion possible, no worship but a worship of
devils. And beyond all these, and continually recurring, was the
vision of my death--the pangs, the suffocation, the last struggle,
when life would be grasped at in vain.
Things were in this state near the end of the seventh year. I had
become entirely free from insight, from my abnormal cognizance of
any other consciousness than my own, and instead of intruding
involuntarily into the world of other minds, was living continually
in my own solitary future. Bertha was aware that I was greatly
changed. To my surprise she had of late seemed to seek
opportunities of remaining in my society, and had cultivated that
kind of distant yet familiar talk which is customary between a
husband and wife who live in polite and irrevocable alienation. I
bore this with languid submission, and without feeling enough
interest in her motives to be roused into keen observation; yet I
could not help perceiving something triumphant and excited in her
carriage and the expression of her face--something too subtle to
express itself in words or tones, but giving one the idea that she
lived in a state of expectation or hopeful suspense. My chief
feeling was satisfaction that her inner self was once more shut out
from me; and I almost revelled for the moment in the absent
melancholy that made me answer her at cross purposes, and betray
utter ignorance of what she had been saying. I remember well the
look and the smile with which she one day said, after a mistake of
this kind on my part: "I used to think you were a clairvoyant, and
that was the reason why you were so bitter against other
clairvoyants, wanting to keep your monopoly; but I see now you have
become rather duller than the rest of the world."
I said nothing in reply. It occurred to me that her recent
obtrusion of herself upon me might have been prompted by the wish
to test my power of detecting some of her secrets; but I let the
thought drop again at once: her motives and her deeds had no
interest for me, and whatever pleasures she might be seeking, I had
no wish to baulk her. There was still pity in my soul for every
living thing, and Bertha was living--was surrounded with
possibilities of misery.
Just at this time there occurred an event which roused me somewhat
from my inertia, and gave me an interest in the passing moment that
I had thought impossible for me. It was a visit from Charles
Meunier, who had written me word that he was coming to England for
relaxation from too strenuous labour, and would like too see me.
Meunier had now a European reputation; but his letter to me
expressed that keen remembrance of an early regard, an early debt
of sympathy, which is inseparable from nobility of character: and
I too felt as if his presence would be to me like a transient
resurrection into a happier pre-existence.
He came, and as far as possible, I renewed our old pleasure of
making tete-a-tete excursions, though, instead of mountains and
glacers and the wide blue lake, we had to content ourselves with
mere slopes and ponds and artificial plantations. The years had
changed us both, but with what different result! Meunier was now a
brilliant figure in society, to whom elegant women pretended to
listen, and whose acquaintance was boasted of by noblemen ambitious
of brains. He repressed with the utmost delicacy all betrayal of
the shock which I am sure he must have received from our meeting,
or of a desire to penetrate into my condition and circumstances,
and sought by the utmost exertion of his charming social powers to
make our reunion agreeable. Bertha was much struck by the
unexpected fascinations of a visitor whom she had expected to find
presentable only on the score of his celebrity, and put forth all
her coquetries and accomplishments. Apparently she succeeded in
attracting his admiration, for his manner towards her was attentive
and flattering. The effect of his presence on me was so benignant,
especially in those renewals of our old tete-a-tete wanderings,
when he poured forth to me wonderful narratives of his professional
experience, that more than once, when his talk turned on the
psychological relations of disease, the thought crossed my mind
that, if his stay with me were long enough, I might possibly bring
myself to tell this man the secrets of my lot. Might there not lie
some remedy for me, too, in his science? Might there not at least
lie some comprehension and sympathy ready for me in his large and
susceptible mind? But the thought only flickered feebly now and
then, and died out before it could become a wish. The horror I had
of again breaking in on the privacy of another soul, made me, by an
irrational instinct, draw the shroud of concealment more closely
around my own, as we automatically perform the gesture we feel to
be wanting in another.
When Meunier's visit was approaching its conclusion, there happened
an event which caused some excitement in our household, owing to
the surprisingly strong effect it appeared to produce on Bertha--on
Bertha, the self-possessed, who usually seemed inaccessible to
feminine agitations, and did even her hate in a self-restrained
hygienic manner. This event was the sudden severe illness of her
maid, Mrs. Archer. I have reserved to this moment the mention of a
circumstance which had forced itself on my notice shortly before
Meunier's arrival, namely, that there had been some quarrel between
Bertha and this maid, apparently during a visit to a distant
family, in which she had accompanied her mistress. I had overheard
Archer speaking in a tone of bitter insolence, which I should have
thought an adequate reason for immediate dismissal. No dismissal
followed; on the contrary, Bertha seemed to be silently putting up
with personal inconveniences from the exhibitions of this woman's
temper. I was the more astonished to observe that her illness
seemed a cause of strong solicitude to Bertha; that she was at the
bedside night and day, and would allow no one else to officiate as
head-nurse. It happened that our family doctor was out on a
holiday, an accident which made Meunier's presence in the house
doubly welcome, and he apparently entered into the case with an
interest which seemed so much stronger than the ordinary
professional feeling, that one day when he had fallen into a long
fit of silence after visiting her, I said to him -
"Is this a very peculiar case of disease, Meunier?"
"No," he answered, "it is an attack of peritonitis, which will be
fatal, but which does not differ physically from many other cases
that have come under my observation. But I'll tell you what I have
on my mind. I want to make an experiment on this woman, if you
will give me permission. It can do her no harm--will give her no
pain--for I shall not make it until life is extinct to all purposes
of sensation. I want to try the effect of transfusing blood into
her arteries after the heart has ceased to beat for some minutes.
I have tried the experiment again and again with animals that have
died of this disease, with astounding results, and I want to try it
on a human subject. I have the small tubes necessary, in a case I
have with me, and the rest of the apparatus could be prepared
readily. I should use my own blood--take it from my own arm. This
woman won't live through the night, I'm convinced, and I want you
to promise me your assistance in making the experiment. I can't do
without another hand, but it would perhaps not be well to call in a
medical assistant from among your provincial doctors. A
disagreeable foolish version of the thing might get abroad."
"Have you spoken to my wife on the subject?" I said, "because she
appears to be peculiarly sensitive about this woman: she has been
a favourite maid."
"To tell you the truth," said Meunier, "I don't want her to know
about it. There are always insuperable difficulties with women in
these matters, and the effect on the supposed dead body may be
startling. You and I will sit up together, and be in readiness.
When certain symptoms appear I shall take you in, and at the right
moment we must manage to get every one else out of the room."
I need not give our farther conversation on the subject. He
entered very fully into the details, and overcame my repulsion from
them, by exciting in me a mingled awe and curiosity concerning the
possible results of his experiment.
We prepared everything, and he instructed me in my part as
assistant. He had not told Bertha of his absolute conviction that
Archer would not survive through the night, and endeavoured to
persuade her to leave the patient and take a night's rest. But she
was obstinate, suspecting the fact that death was at hand, and
supposing that he wished merely to save her nerves. She refused to
leave the sick-room. Meunier and I sat up together in the library,
he making frequent visits to the sick-room, and returning with the
information that the case was taking precisely the course he
expected. Once he said to me, "Can you imagine any cause of ill-
feeling this woman has against her mistress, who is so devoted to
her?"
"I think there was some misunderstanding between them before her
illness. Why do you ask?"
"Because I have observed for the last five or six hours--since, I
fancy, she has lost all hope of recovery--there seems a strange
prompting in her to say something which pain and failing strength
forbid her to utter; and there is a look of hideous meaning in her
eyes, which she turns continually towards her mistress. In this
disease the mind often remains singularly clear to the last."
"I am not surprised at an indication of malevolent feeling in her,"
I said. "She is a woman who has always inspired me with distrust
and dislike, but she managed to insinuate herself into her
mistress's favour." He was silent after this, looking at the fire
with an air of absorption, till he went upstairs again. He stayed
away longer than usual, and on returning, said to me quietly, "Come
now."
I followed him to the chamber where death was hovering. The dark
hangings of the large bed made a background that gave a strong
relief to Bertha's pale face as I entered. She started forward as
she saw me enter, and then looked at Meunier with an expression of
angry inquiry; but he lifted up his hand as it to impose silence,
while he fixed his glance on the dying woman and felt her pulse.
The face was pinched and ghastly, a cold perspiration was on the
forehead, and the eyelids were lowered so as to conceal the large
dark eyes. After a minute or two, Meunier walked round to the
other side of the bed where Bertha stood, and with his usual air of
gentle politeness towards her begged her to leave the patient under
our care--everything should be done for her--she was no longer in a
state to be conscious of an affectionate presence. Bertha was
hesitating, apparently almost willing to believe his assurance and
to comply. She looked round at the ghastly dying face, as if to
read the confirmation of that assurance, when for a moment the
lowered eyelids were raised again, and it seemed as if the eyes
were looking towards Bertha, but blankly. A shudder passed through
Bertha's frame, and she returned to her station near the pillow,
tacitly implying that she would not leave the room.
The eyelids were lifted no more. Once I looked at Bertha as she
watched the face of the dying one. She wore a rich peignoir, and
her blond hair was half covered by a lace cap: in her attire she
was, as always, an elegant woman, fit to figure in a picture of
modern aristocratic life: but I asked myself how that face of hers
could ever have seemed to me the face of a woman born of woman,
with memories of childhood, capable of pain, needing to be fondled?
The features at that moment seemed so preternaturally sharp, the
eyes were so hard and eager--she looked like a cruel immortal,
finding her spiritual feast in the agonies of a dying race. For
across those hard features there came something like a flash when
the last hour had been breathed out, and we all felt that the dark
veil had completely fallen. What secret was there between Bertha
and this woman? I turned my eyes from her with a horrible dread
lest my insight should return, and I should be obliged to see what
had been breeding about two unloving women's hearts. I felt that
Bertha had been watching for the moment of death as the sealing of
her secret: I thanked Heaven it could remain sealed for me.
Meunier said quietly, "She is gone." He then gave his arm to
Bertha, and she submitted to be led out of the room.
I suppose it was at her order that two female attendants came into
the room, and dismissed the younger one who had been present
before. When they entered, Meunier had already opened the artery
in the long thin neck that lay rigid on the pillow, and I dismissed
them, ordering them to remain at a distance till we rang: the
doctor, I said, had an operation to perform--he was not sure about
the death. For the next twenty minutes I forgot everything but
Meunier and the experiment in which he was so absorbed, that I
think his senses would have been closed against all sounds or
sights which had no relation to it. It was my task at first to
keep up the artificial respiration in the body after the
transfusion had been effected, but presently Meunier relieved me,
and I could see the wondrous slow return of life; the breast began
to heave, the inspirations became stronger, the eyelids quivered,
and the soul seemed to have returned beneath them. The artificial
respiration was withdrawn: still the breathing continued, and
there was a movement of the lips.
Just then I heard the handle of the door moving: I suppose Bertha
had heard from the women that they had been dismissed: probably a
vague fear had arisen in her mind, for she entered with a look of
alarm. She came to the foot of the bed and gave a stifled cry.
The dead woman's eyes were wide open, and met hers in full
recognition--the recognition of hate. With a sudden strong effort,
the hand that Bertha had thought for ever still was pointed towards
her, and the haggard face moved. The gasping eager voice said--
"You mean to poison your husband . . . the poison is in the black
cabinet . . . I got it for you . . . you laughed at me, and told
lies about me behind my back, to make me disgusting . . . because
you were jealous . . . are you sorry . . . now?"
The lips continued to murmur, but the sounds were no longer
distinct. Soon there was no sound--only a slight movement: the
flame had leaped out, and was being extinguished the faster. The
wretched woman's heart-strings had been set to hatred and
vengeance; the spirit of life had swept the chords for an instant,
and was gone again for ever. Great God! Is this what it is to
live again . . . to wake up with our unstilled thirst upon us, with
our unuttered curses rising to our lips, with our muscles ready to
act out their half-committed sins?
Bertha stood pale at the foot of the bed, quivering and helpless,
despairing of devices, like a cunning animal whose hiding-places
are surrounded by swift-advancing flame. Even Meunier looked
paralysed; life for that moment ceased to be a scientific problem
to him. As for me, this scene seemed of one texture with the rest
of my existence: horror was my familiar, and this new revelation
was only like an old pain recurring with new circumstances.
* * *
Since then Bertha and I have lived apart--she in her own
neighbourhood, the mistress of half our wealth, I as a wanderer in
foreign countries, until I came to this Devonshire nest to die.
Bertha lives pitied and admired; for what had I against that
charming woman, whom every one but myself could have been happy
with? There had been no witness of the scene in the dying room
except Meunier, and while Meunier lived his lips were sealed by a
promise to me.
Once or twice, weary of wandering, I rested in a favourite spot,
and my heart went out towards the men and women and children whose
faces were becoming familiar to me; but I was driven away again in
terror at the approach of my old insight--driven away to live
continually with the one Unknown Presence revealed and yet hidden
by the moving curtain of the earth and sky. Till at last disease
took hold of me and forced me to rest here--forced me to live in
dependence on my servants. And then the curse of insight--of my
double consciousness, came again, and has never left me. I know
all their narrow thoughts, their feeble regard, their half-wearied
pity.
* * *
It is the 20th of September, 1850. I know these figures I have
just written, as if they were a long familiar inscription. I have
seen them on this pace in my desk unnumbered times, when the scene
of my dying struggle has opened upon me . . .
(1859)
