Title: The Lifted Veil
Author: Eliot, George, 1819-1880
Language: English
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Transcribed from the 1921 Oxford University Press edition by David Price,


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 physician
tells me, I may fairly hope that my life will not be protracted many
months.  Unless, then, I am cursed with an exceptional physical
constitution, as I am cursed with an exceptional mental character, I
shall not much longer groan under the wearisome burthen of this earthly
existence.  If it were to be otherwise--if I were to live on to the age
most men desire and provide for--I should for once have known whether the
miseries of delusive expectation can outweigh the miseries of true
provision.  For I foresee when I shall die, and everything that will
happen in my last moments.

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

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

Before that time comes, I wish to use my last hours of ease and strength
in telling the strange story of my experience.  I have never fully
unbosomed myself to any human being; I have never been encouraged to
trust much in the sympathy of my fellow-men.  But we have all a chance of
meeting with some pity, some tenderness, some charity, when we are dead:
it is the living only who cannot be forgiven--the living only from whom
men's indulgence and reverence are held off, like the rain by the hard
east wind.  While the heart beats, bruise it--it is your only
opportunity; while the eye can still turn towards you with moist, timid
entreaty, freeze it with an icy unanswering gaze; while the ear, that
delicate messenger to the inmost sanctuary of the soul, can still take in
the tones of kindness, put it off with hard civility, or sneering
compliment, or envious affectation of indifference; while the creative
brain can still throb with the sense of injustice, with the yearning for
brotherly recognition--make haste--oppress it with your ill-considered
judgements, your trivial comparisons, your careless misrepresentations.
The heart will by and by be still--"ubi saeva indignatio ulterius cor
lacerare 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.  Then
your charitable speeches may find vent; then you may remember and pity
the toil and the struggle and the failure; then you may give due honour
to the work achieved; then you may find extenuation for errors, and may
consent to bury them.

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

My childhood perhaps seems happier to me than it really was, by contrast
with all the after-years.  For then the curtain of the future was as
impenetrable to me as to other children: I had all their delight in the
present hour, their sweet indefinite hopes for the morrow; and I had a
tender mother: even now, after the dreary lapse of long years, a slight
trace of sensation accompanies the remembrance of her caress as she held
me 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, and
she kept me on her knee from morning till night.  That unequalled love
soon vanished out of my life, and even to my childish consciousness it
was as if that life had become more chill I rode my little white pony
with the groom by my side as before, but there were no loving eyes
looking 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 or
eight would have done, to whom the other pleasures of life remained as
before; for I was certainly a very sensitive child.  I remember still the
mingled trepidation and delicious excitement with which I was affected by
the tramping of the horses on the pavement in the echoing stables, by the
loud resonance of the groom's voices, by the booming bark of the dogs as
my father's carriage thundered under the archway of the courtyard, by the
din of the gong as it gave notice of luncheon and dinner.  The measured
tramp of soldiery which I sometimes heard--for my father's house lay near
a 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 for
me; though he was very careful in fulfilling what he regarded as a
parent's duties.  But he was already past the middle of life, and I was
not 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, intensely
orderly man, in root and stem a banker, but with a flourishing graft of
the active landholder, aspiring to county influence: one of those people
who are always like themselves from day to day, who are uninfluenced by
the weather, and neither know melancholy nor high spirits.  I held him in
great awe, and appeared more timid and sensitive in his presence than at
other times; a circumstance which, perhaps, helped to confirm him in the
intention to educate me on a different plan from the prescriptive one
with which he had complied in the case of my elder brother, already a
tall youth at Eton.  My brother was to be his representative and
successor; he must go to Eton and Oxford, for the sake of making
connexions, of course: my father was not a man to underrate the bearing
of Latin satirists or Greek dramatists on the attainment of an
aristocratic position.  But, intrinsically, he had slight esteem for
"those dead but sceptred spirits"; having qualified himself for forming
an independent opinion by reading Potter's _AEschylus_, and dipping into
Francis's _Horace_.  To this negative view he added a positive one,
derived from a recent connexion with mining speculations; namely, that a
scientific education was the really useful training for a younger son.
Moreover, it was clear that a shy, sensitive boy like me was not fit to
encounter the rough experience of a public school.  Mr. Letherall had
said so very decidedly.  Mr. Letherall was a large man in spectacles, who
one day took my small head between his large hands, and pressed it here
and there in an exploratory, auspicious manner--then placed each of his
great thumbs on my temples, and pushed me a little way from him, and
stared at me with glittering spectacles.  The contemplation appeared to
displease him, for he frowned sternly, and said to my father, drawing his
thumbs across my eyebrows--

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

I am not aware how much Mr. Letherall had to do with the system
afterwards adopted towards me, but it was presently clear that private
tutors, natural history, science, and the modern languages, were the
appliances by which the defects of my organization were to be remedied.  I
was very stupid about machines, so I was to be greatly occupied with
them; I had no memory for classification, so it was particularly
necessary that I should study systematic zoology and botany; I was hungry
for human deeds and humane motions, so I was to be plentifully crammed
with the mechanical powers, the elementary bodies, and the phenomena of
electricity and magnetism.  A better-constituted boy would certainly have
profited under my intelligent tutors, with their scientific apparatus;
and would, doubtless, have found the phenomena of electricity and
magnetism as fascinating as I was, every Thursday, assured they were.  As
it 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 classical
academy.  I read Plutarch, and Shakespeare, and Don Quixote by the sly,
and supplied myself in that way with wandering thoughts, while my tutor
was assuring me that "an improved man, as distinguished from an ignorant
one, was a man who knew the reason why water ran downhill."  I had no
desire to be this improved man; I was glad of the running water; I could
watch it and listen to it gurgling among the pebbles, and bathing the
bright 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 for
what was so very beautiful.

There is no need to dwell on this part of my life.  I have said enough to
indicate that my nature was of the sensitive, unpractical order, and that
it grew up in an uncongenial medium, which could never foster it into
happy, healthy development.  When I was sixteen I was sent to Geneva to
complete my course of education; and the change was a very happy one to
me, for the first sight of the Alps, with the setting sun on them, as we
descended the Jura, seemed to me like an entrance into heaven; and the
three years of my life there were spent in a perpetual sense of
exaltation, as if from a draught of delicious wine, at the presence of
Nature in all her awful loveliness.  You will think, perhaps, that I must
have been a poet, from this early sensibility to Nature.  But my lot was
not so happy as that.  A poet pours forth his song and _believes_ in the
listening ear and answering soul, to which his song will be floated
sooner or later.  But the poet's sensibility without his voice--the
poet's sensibility that finds no vent but in silent tears on the sunny
bank, when the noonday light sparkles on the water, or in an inward
shudder at the sound of harsh human tones, the sight of a cold human
eye--this dumb passion brings with it a fatal solitude of soul in the
society of one's fellow-men.  My least solitary moments were those in
which I pushed off in my boat, at evening, towards the centre of the
lake; it seemed to me that the sky, and the glowing mountain-tops, and
the wide blue water, surrounded me with a cherishing love such as no
human face had shed on me since my mother's love had vanished out of my
life.  I used to do as Jean Jacques did--lie down in my boat and let it
glide where it would, while I looked up at the departing glow leaving one
mountain-top after the other, as if the prophet's chariot of fire were
passing over them on its way to the home of light.  Then, when the white
summits were all sad and corpse-like, I had to push homeward, for I was
under careful surveillance, and was allowed no late wanderings.  This
disposition of mine was not favourable to the formation of intimate
friendships among the numerous youths of my own age who are always to be
found studying at Geneva.  Yet I made _one_ such friendship; and,
singularly enough, it was with a youth whose intellectual tendencies were
the very reverse of my own.  I shall call him Charles Meunier; his real
surname--an English one, for he was of English extraction--having since
become celebrated.  He was an orphan, who lived on a miserable pittance
while he pursued the medical studies for which he had a special genius.
Strange! that with my vague mind, susceptible and unobservant, hating
inquiry and given up to contemplation, I should have been drawn towards a
youth whose strongest passion was science.  But the bond was not an
intellectual one; it came from a source that can happily blend the stupid
with the brilliant, the dreamy with the practical: it came from community
of feeling.  Charles was poor and ugly, derided by Genevese _gamins_, and
not acceptable in drawing-rooms.  I saw that he was isolated, as I was,
though from a different cause, and, stimulated by a sympathetic
resentment, I made timid advances towards him.  It is enough to say that
there sprang up as much comradeship between us as our different habits
would allow; and in Charles's rare holidays we went up the Saleve
together, or took the boat to Vevay, while I listened dreamily to the
monologues in which he unfolded his bold conceptions of future experiment
and discovery.  I mingled them confusedly in my thought with glimpses of
blue water and delicate floating cloud, with the notes of birds and the
distant glitter of the glacier.  He knew quite well that my mind was half
absent, yet he liked to talk to me in this way; for don't we talk of our
hopes and our projects even to dogs and birds, when they love us?  I have
mentioned this one friendship because of its connexion with a strange and
terrible 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, which
is 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 came
the languid monotony of convalescence, the days gradually breaking into
variety and distinctness as my strength enabled me to take longer and
longer drives.  On one of these more vividly remembered days, my father
said to me, as he sat beside my sofa--

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

My father was called away before he had finished his sentence, and he
left my mind resting on the word _Prague_, with a strange sense that a
new and wondrous scene was breaking upon me: a city under the broad
sunshine, 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 of
night, or the rushing rain-cloud; scorching the dusty, weary, time-eaten
grandeur of a people doomed to live on in the stale repetition of
memories, like deposed and superannuated kings in their regal
gold-inwoven tatters.  The city looked so thirsty that the broad river
seemed to me a sheet of metal; and the blackened statues, as I passed
under their blank gaze, along the unending bridge, with their ancient
garments and their saintly crowns, seemed to me the real inhabitants and
owners of this place, while the busy, trivial men and women, hurrying to
and fro, were a swarm of ephemeral visitants infesting it for a day.  It
is such grim, stony beings as these, I thought, who are the fathers of
ancient faded children, in those tanned time-fretted dwellings that crowd
the steep before me; who pay their court in the worn and crumbling pomp
of the palace which stretches its monotonous length on the height; who
worship wearily in the stifling air of the churches, urged by no fear or
hope, but compelled by their doom to be ever old and undying, to live on
in the rigidity of habit, as they live on in perpetual midday, without
the repose of night or the new birth of morning.

A stunning clang of metal suddenly thrilled through me, and I became
conscious of the objects in my room again: one of the fire-irons had
fallen as Pierre opened the door to bring me my draught.  My heart was
palpitating 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 been
sleeping.  Was this a dream--this wonderfully distinct vision--minute in
its distinctness down to a patch of rainbow light on the pavement,
transmitted through a coloured lamp in the shape of a star--of a strange
city, quite unfamiliar to my imagination?  I had seen no picture of
Prague: it lay in my mind as a mere name, with vaguely-remembered
historical associations--ill-defined memories of imperial grandeur and
religious 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 from
being utterly disjointed and commonplace by the frequent terrors of
nightmare.  But I could not believe that I had been asleep, for I
remembered distinctly the gradual breaking-in of the vision upon me, like
the new images in a dissolving view, or the growing distinctness of the
landscape as the sun lifts up the veil of the morning mist.  And while I
was conscious of this incipient vision, I was also conscious that Pierre
came to tell my father Mr. Filmore was waiting for him, and that my
father hurried out of the room.  No, it was not a dream; was it--the
thought was full of tremulous exultation--was it the poet's nature in me,
hitherto only a troubled yearning sensibility, now manifesting itself
suddenly as spontaneous creation?  Surely it was in this way that Homer
saw the plain of Troy, that Dante saw the abodes of the departed, that
Milton saw the earthward flight of the Tempter.  Was it that my illness
had wrought some happy change in my organization--given a firmer tension
to my nerves--carried off some dull obstruction?  I had often read of
such effects--in works of fiction at least.  Nay; in genuine biographies
I had read of the subtilizing or exalting influence of some diseases on
the mental powers.  Did not Novalis feel his inspiration intensified
under the progress of consumption?

When my mind had dwelt for some time on this blissful idea, it seemed to
me that I might perhaps test it by an exertion of my will.  The vision
had begun when my father was speaking of our going to Prague.  I did not
for a moment believe it was really a representation of that city; I
believed--I hoped it was a picture that my newly liberated genius had
painted 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 the
same sort of result would follow.  I concentrated my thoughts on Venice;
I stimulated my imagination with poetic memories, and strove to feel
myself present in Venice, as I had felt myself present in Prague.  But in
vain.  I was only colouring the Canaletto engravings that hung in my old
bedroom at home; the picture was a shifting one, my mind wandering
uncertainly in search of more vivid images; I could see no accident of
form or shadow without conscious labour after the necessary conditions.
It was all prosaic effort, not rapt passivity, such as I had experienced
half an hour before.  I was discouraged; but I remembered that
inspiration was fitful.

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

My father accompanied me every day in a drive, and a gradually
lengthening walk as my powers of walking increased; and one evening he
had agreed to come and fetch me at twelve the next day, that we might go
together to select a musical box, and other purchases rigorously demanded
of a rich Englishman visiting Geneva.  He was one of the most punctual of
men and bankers, and I was always nervously anxious to be quite ready for
him at the appointed time.  But, to my surprise, at a quarter past twelve
he had not appeared.  I felt all the impatience of a convalescent who has
nothing particular to do, and who has just taken a tonic in the prospect
of immediate exercise that would carry off the stimulus.

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

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

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

Pierre left the room at once, with a soothing "Bien, Monsieur"; and I
felt the better for this scene of simple, waking prose.  Seeking to calm
myself still further, I went into my bedroom, adjoining the _salon_, and
opened a case of eau-de-Cologne; took out a bottle; went through the
process of taking out the cork very neatly, and then rubbed the reviving
spirit over my hands and forehead, and under my nostrils, drawing a new
delight from the scent because I had procured it by slow details of
labour, and by no strange sudden madness.  Already I had begun to taste
something of the horror that belongs to the lot of a human being whose
nature is not adjusted to simple human conditions.

Still enjoying the scent, I returned to the salon, but it was not
unoccupied, as it had been before I left it.  In front of the Chinese
folding-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 the
keen 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 lying
with my head low on the sofa, Pierre, and my father by my side.  As soon
as I was thoroughly revived, my father left the room, and presently
returned, saying--

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

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

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

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

Shortly after this last occurrence--I think the very next day--I began to
be aware of a phase in my abnormal sensibility, to which, from the
languid 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 the
mental process going forward in first one person, and then another, with
whom I happened to be in contact: the vagrant, frivolous ideas and
emotions of some uninteresting acquaintance--Mrs. Filmore, for
example--would force themselves on my consciousness like an importunate,
ill-played musical instrument, or the loud activity of an imprisoned
insect.  But this unpleasant sensibility was fitful, and left me moments
of 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 might
have believed this importunate insight to be merely a diseased activity
of the imagination, but that my prevision of incalculable words and
actions proved it to have a fixed relation to the mental process in other
minds.  But this superadded consciousness, wearying and annoying enough
when it urged on me the trivial experience of indifferent people, became
an intense pain and grief when it seemed to be opening to me the souls of
those who were in a close relation to me--when the rational talk, the
graceful attentions, the wittily-turned phrases, and the kindly deeds,
which used to make the web of their characters, were seen as if thrust
asunder by a microscopic vision, that showed all the intermediate
frivolities, all the suppressed egoism, all the struggling chaos of
puerilities, meanness, vague capricious memories, and indolent make-shift
thoughts, from which human words and deeds emerge like leaflets covering
a 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 thick
as weeds at Geneva, had often asked me to sit to them, and I had been the
model of a dying minstrel in a fancy picture.  But I thoroughly disliked
my own physique and nothing but the belief that it was a condition of
poetic genius would have reconciled me to it.  That brief hope was quite
fled, and I saw in my face now nothing but the stamp of a morbid
organization, framed for passive suffering--too feeble for the sublime
resistance of poetic production.  Alfred, from whom I had been almost
constantly separated, and who, in his present stage of character and
appearance, came before me as a perfect stranger, was bent on being
extremely friendly and brother-like to me.  He had the superficial
kindness of a good-humoured, self-satisfied nature, that fears no
rivalry, and has encountered no contrarieties.  I am not sure that my
disposition was good enough for me to have been quite free from envy
towards him, even if our desires had not clashed, and if I had been in
the healthy human condition which admits of generous confidence and
charitable construction.  There must always have been an antipathy
between our natures.  As it was, he became in a few weeks an object of
intense hatred to me; and when he entered the room, still more when he
spoke, it was as if a sensation of grating metal had set my teeth on
edge.  My diseased consciousness was more intensely and continually
occupied with his thoughts and emotions, than with those of any other
person who came in my way.  I was perpetually exasperated with the petty
promptings of his conceit and his love of patronage, with his
self-complacent belief in Bertha Grant's passion for him, with his half-
pitying contempt for me--seen not in the ordinary indications of
intonation and phrase and slight action, which an acute and suspicious
mind 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 of
it.  I have said nothing yet of the effect Bertha Grant produced in me on
a nearer acquaintance.  That effect was chiefly determined by the fact
that she made the only exception, among all the human beings about me, to
my unhappy gift of insight.  About Bertha I was always in a state of
uncertainty: I could watch the expression of her face, and speculate on
its meaning; I could ask for her opinion with the real interest of
ignorance; I could listen for her words and watch for her smile with hope
and fear: she had for me the fascination of an unravelled destiny.  I say
it was this fact that chiefly determined the strong effect she produced
on me: for, in the abstract, no womanly character could seem to have less
affinity for that of a shrinking, romantic, passionate youth than
Bertha's.  She was keen, sarcastic, unimaginative, prematurely cynical,
remaining critical and unmoved in the most impressive scenes, inclined to
dissect all my favourite poems, and especially contemptous towards the
German lyrics which were my pet literature at that time.  To this moment
I am unable to define my feeling towards her: it was not ordinary boyish
admiration, for she was the very opposite, even to the colour of her
hair, 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, even
at the moment of her strongest dominion over me, I should have declared
to be the highest element of character.  But there is no tyranny more
complete than that which a self-centred negative nature exercises over a
morbidly sensitive nature perpetually craving sympathy and support.  The
most independent people feel the effect of a man's silence in heightening
their value for his opinion--feel an additional triumph in conquering the
reverence of a critic habitually captious and satirical: no wonder, then,
that an enthusiastic self-distrusting youth should watch and wait before
the closed secret of a sarcastic woman's face, as if it were the shrine
of the doubtfully benignant deity who ruled his destiny.  For a young
enthusiast is unable to imagine the total negation in another mind of the
emotions 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 be
there in all the greater strength because he sees no outward sign of
them.  And this effect, as I have intimated, was heightened to its utmost
intensity in me, because Bertha was the only being who remained for me in
the mysterious seclusion of soul that renders such youthful delusion
possible.  Doubtless there was another sort of fascination at work--that
subtle physical attraction which delights in cheating our psychological
predictions, and in compelling the men who paint sylphs, to fall in love
with 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 her
smiles.  Looking back with my present wretched knowledge, I conclude that
her vanity and love of power were intensely gratified by the belief that
I had fainted on first seeing her purely from the strong impression her
person had produced on me.  The most prosaic woman likes to believe
herself the object of a violent, a poetic passion; and without a grain of
romance in her, Bertha had that spirit of intrigue which gave piquancy to
the idea that the brother of the man she meant to marry was dying with
love and jealousy for her sake.  That she meant to marry my brother, was
what at that time I did not believe; for though he was assiduous in his
attentions to her, and I knew well enough that both he and my father had
made up their minds to this result, there was not yet an understood
engagement--there had been no explicit declaration; and Bertha
habitually, while she flirted with my brother, and accepted his homage in
a way that implied to him a thorough recognition of its intention, made
me believe, by the subtlest looks and phrases--feminine nothings which
could never be quoted against her--that he was really the object of her
secret ridicule; that she thought him, as I did, a coxcomb, whom she
would have pleasure in disappointing.  Me she openly petted in my
brother's presence, as if I were too young and sickly ever to be thought
of as a lover; and that was the view he took of me.  But I believe she
must inwardly have delighted in the tremors into which she threw me by
the coaxing way in which she patted my curls, while she laughed at my
quotations.  Such caresses were always given in the presence of our
friends; for when we were alone together, she affected a much greater
distance towards me, and now and then took the opportunity, by words or
slight actions, to stimulate my foolish timid hope that she really
preferred me.  And why should she not follow her inclination?  I was not
in so advantageous a position as my brother, but I had fortune, I was not
a year younger than she was, and she was an heiress, who would soon be of
age to decide for herself.

The fluctuations of hope and fear, confined to this one channel, made
each day in her presence a delicious torment.  There was one deliberate
act of hers which especially helped to intoxicate me.  When we were at
Vienna her twentieth birthday occurred, and as she was very fond of
ornaments, we all took the opportunity of the splendid jewellers' shops
in that Teutonic Paris to purchase her a birthday present of jewellery.
Mine, naturally, was the least expensive; it was an opal ring--the opal
was my favourite stone, because it seems to blush and turn pale as if it
had a soul.  I told Bertha so when I gave it her, and said that it was an
emblem of the poetic nature, changing with the changing light of heaven
and of woman's eyes.  In the evening she appeared elegantly dressed, and
wearing conspicuously all the birthday presents except mine.  I looked
eagerly at her fingers, but saw no opal.  I had no opportunity of
noticing this to her during the evening; but the next day, when I found
her seated near the window alone, after breakfast, I said, "You scorn to
wear my poor opal.  I should have remembered that you despised poetic
natures, and should have given you coral, or turquoise, or some other
opaque unresponsive stone."  "Do I despise it?" she answered, taking hold
of a delicate gold chain which she always wore round her neck and drawing
out the end from her bosom with my ring hanging to it; "it hurts me a
little, I can tell you," she said, with her usual dubious smile, "to wear
it in that secret place; and since your poetical nature is so stupid as
to prefer a more public position, I shall not endure the pain any
longer."

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

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

I should mention that during these two months--which seemed a long life
to me from the novelty and intensity of the pleasures and pains I
underwent--my diseased anticipation in other people's consciousness
continued to torment me; now it was my father, and now my brother, now
Mrs. Filmore or her husband, and now our German courier, whose stream of
thought 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 their
uninterrupted course.  It was like a preternaturally heightened sense of
hearing, making audible to one a roar of sound where others find perfect
stillness.  The weariness and disgust of this involuntary intrusion into
other souls was counteracted only by my ignorance of Bertha, and my
growing passion for her; a passion enormously stimulated, if not
produced, by that ignorance.  She was my oasis of mystery in the dreary
desert of knowledge.  I had never allowed my diseased condition to betray
itself, or to drive me into any unusual speech or action, except once,
when, in a moment of peculiar bitterness against my brother, I had
forestalled some words which I knew he was going to utter--a clever
observation, which he had prepared beforehand.  He had occasionally a
slightly affected hesitation in his speech, and when he paused an instant
after the second word, my impatience and jealousy impelled me to continue
the 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 had
no sooner escaped my lips than I felt a shock of alarm lest such an
anticipation of words--very far from being words of course, easy to
divine--should have betrayed me as an exceptional being, a sort of quiet
energumen, whom every one, Bertha above all, would shudder at and avoid.
But I magnified, as usual, the impression any word or deed of mine could
produce on others; for no one gave any sign of having noticed my
interruption as more than a rudeness, to be forgiven me on the score of
my feeble nervous condition.

While this superadded consciousness of the actual was almost constant
with me, I had never had a recurrence of that distinct prevision which I
have described in relation to my first interview with Bertha; and I was
waiting with eager curiosity to know whether or not my vision of Prague
would prove to have been an instance of the same kind.  A few days after
the incident of the opal ring, we were paying one of our frequent visits
to the Lichtenberg Palace.  I could never look at many pictures in
succession; for pictures, when they are at all powerful, affect me so
strongly that one or two exhaust all my capability of contemplation.  This
morning I had been looking at Giorgione's picture of the cruel-eyed
woman, said to be a likeness of Lucrezia Borgia.  I had stood long alone
before it, fascinated by the terrible reality of that cunning, relentless
face, till I felt a strange poisoned sensation, as if I had long been
inhaling a fatal odour, and was just beginning to be conscious of its
effects.  Perhaps even then I should not have moved away, if the rest of
the party had not returned to this room, and announced that they were
going to the Belvedere Gallery to settle a bet which had arisen between
my 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 the
gallery, leaving me below; for I refused to come within sight of another
picture that day.  I made my way to the Grand Terrace, since it was
agreed that we should saunter in the gardens when the dispute had been
decided.  I had been sitting here a short space, vaguely conscious of
trim gardens, with a city and green hills in the distance, when, wishing
to avoid the proximity of the sentinel, I rose and walked down the broad
stone steps, intending to seat myself farther on in the gardens.  Just as
I reached the gravel-walk, I felt an arm slipped within mine, and a light
hand gently pressing my wrist.  In the same instant a strange
intoxicating numbness passed over me, like the continuance or climax of
the sensation I was still feeling from the gaze of Lucrezia Borgia.  The
gardens, the summer sky, the consciousness of Bertha's arm being within
mine, all vanished, and I seemed to be suddenly in darkness, out of which
there gradually broke a dim firelight, and I felt myself sitting in my
father's leather chair in the library at home.  I knew the fireplace--the
dogs for the wood-fire--the black marble chimney-piece with the white
marble medallion of the dying Cleopatra in the centre.  Intense and
hopeless misery was pressing on my soul; the light became stronger, for
Bertha was entering with a candle in her hand--Bertha, my wife--with
cruel eyes, with green jewels and green leaves on her white ball-dress;
every hateful thought within her present to me . . . "Madman, idiot! why
don't you kill yourself, then?"  It was a moment of hell.  I saw into her
pitiless soul--saw its barren worldliness, its scorching hate--and felt
it clothe me round like an air I was obliged to breathe.  She came with
her candle and stood over me with a bitter smile of contempt; I saw the
great emerald brooch on her bosom, a studded serpent with diamond eyes.  I
shuddered--I despised this woman with the barren soul and mean thoughts;
but I felt helpless before her, as if she clutched my bleeding heart, and
would clutch it till the last drop of life-blood ebbed away.  She was my
wife, and we hated each other.  Gradually the hearth, the dim library,
the candle-light disappeared--seemed to melt away into a background of
light, the green serpent with the diamond eyes remaining a dark image on
the retina.  Then I had a sense of my eyelids quivering, and the living
daylight broke in upon me; I saw gardens, and heard voices; I was seated
on 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 me
ill for several days, and prolonged our stay at Vienna.  I shuddered with
horror as the scene recurred to me; and it recurred constantly, with all
its minutiae, as if they had been burnt into my memory; and yet, such is
the madness of the human heart under the influence of its immediate
desires, I felt a wild hell-braving joy that Bertha was to be mine; for
the fulfilment of my former prevision concerning her first appearance
before me, left me little hope that this last hideous glimpse of the
future was the mere diseased play of my own mind, and had no relation to
external realities.  One thing alone I looked towards as a possible means
of casting doubt on my terrible conviction--the discovery that my vision
of 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 as
completely under her sway as before.  What if I saw into the heart of
Bertha, the matured woman--Bertha, my wife?  Bertha, the _girl_, was a
fascinating secret to me still: I trembled under her touch; I felt the
witchery of her presence; I yearned to be assured of her love.  The fear
of poison is feeble against the sense of thirst.  Nay, I was just as
jealous of my brother as before--just as much irritated by his small
patronizing ways; for my pride, my diseased sensibility, were there as
they had always been, and winced as inevitably under every offence as my
eye winced from an intruding mote.  The future, even when brought within
the compass of feeling by a vision that made me shudder, had still no
more than the force of an idea, compared with the force of present
emotion--of my love for Bertha, of my dislike and jealousy towards my
brother.

It is an old story, that men sell themselves to the tempter, and sign a
bond with their blood, because it is only to take effect at a distant
day; then rush on to snatch the cup their souls thirst after with an
impulse not the less savage because there is a dark shadow beside them
for evermore.  There is no short cut, no patent tram-road, to wisdom:
after all the centuries of invention, the soul's path lies through the
thorny wilderness which must be still trodden in solitude, with bleeding
feet, 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 my
brother's successful rival, for I was still too timid, in my ignorance of
Bertha's actual feeling, to venture on any step that would urge from her
an avowal of it.  I thought I should gain confidence even for this, if my
vision of Prague proved to have been veracious; and yet, the horror of
that certitude!  Behind the slim girl Bertha, whose words and looks I
watched for, whose touch was bliss, there stood continually that Bertha
with the fuller form, the harder eyes, the more rigid mouth--with the
barren, selfish soul laid bare; no longer a fascinating secret, but a
measured fact, urging itself perpetually on my unwilling sight.  Are you
unable to give me your sympathy--you who react this?  Are you unable to
imagine this double consciousness at work within me, flowing on like two
parallel streams which never mingle their waters and blend into a common
hue?  Yet you must have known something of the presentiments that spring
from an insight at war with passion; and my visions were only like
presentiments intensified to horror.  You have known the powerlessness of
ideas before the might of impulse; and my visions, when once they had
passed 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 foreseen
something more or something different--if instead of that hideous vision
which poisoned the passion it could not destroy, or if even along with it
I could have had a foreshadowing of that moment when I looked on my
brother's face for the last time, some softening influence would have
been shed over my feeling towards him: pride and hatred would surely have
been subdued into pity, and the record of those hidden sins would have
been shortened.  But this is one of the vain thoughts with which we men
flatter ourselves.  We try to believe that the egoism within us would
have easily been melted, and that it was only the narrowness of our
knowledge which hemmed in our generosity, our awe, our human piety, and
hindered them from submerging our hard indifference to the sensations and
emotions of our fellows.  Our tenderness and self-renunciation seem
strong when our egoism has had its day--when, after our mean striving for
a triumph that is to be another's loss, the triumph comes suddenly, and
we 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 it
seemed like a deferring of a terribly decisive moment, to be in the city
for 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 drive
out the next morning and take a general view of the place, as well as
visit some of its specially interesting spots, before the heat became
oppressive--for we were in August, and the season was hot and dry.  But
it happened that the ladies were rather late at their morning toilet, and
to my father's politely-repressed but perceptible annoyance, we were not
in the carriage till the morning was far advanced.  I thought with a
sense of relief, as we entered the Jews' quarter, where we were to visit
the old synagogue, that we should be kept in this flat, shut-up part of
the 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 through
which we had already passed.  That would give me another day's
suspense--suspense, the only form in which a fearful spirit knows the
solace of hope.  But, as I stood under the blackened, groined arches of
that old synagogue, made dimly visible by the seven thin candles in the
sacred 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 that
this strange building, with its shrunken lights, this surviving withered
remnant of medieval Judaism, was of a piece with my vision.  Those
darkened dusty Christian saints, with their loftier arches and their
larger candles, needed the consolatory scorn with which they might point
to a more shrivelled death-in-life than their own.

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



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?  I
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)





*** End of this LibraryBlog Digital Book "The Lifted Veil" ***

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