Some homesick traveller in a foreign land, where he is known of none
and can neither speak nor understand the language of the country; taken
ill, let us say, at a remote inn, his strength and credit gone, and he,
in pain and fever, hears, one blessed day, the voice of an old friend
in the court below. Such a man may think he has--but I doubt if he
have--some crude conception of the state of feeling in which I found
myself, when recognized in this touching manner by my old patient.
My emotion was so great that I could not conceal it; and she, in her
own quick and delicate way, perceiving this almost before I did myself,
made as if she saw it not, and lightly adding:
"Hurry, Doctor! I will go before you. Let us lose no time!" led me at
once out of the hospital and rapidly away.
In an incredibly, almost confusingly short space of time, we reached
her house; this was done by some method of locomotion not hitherto
experienced by me, and which I should, at that time, have found it
difficult to describe, unless by saying that she thought us where we
wished to be. Perhaps it would be more exact to say, _She felt us_.
It was as if the great power of the mother's love in her had become a
new bodily faculty by which she was able, with extraordinary disregard
of the laws of distance, to move herself and to draw another to the
suffering child. I should say that I perceived at once, in the
presence of this sweet woman, that there were possibilities and
privileges in the state immediately succeeding death, which had been
utterly denied to me, and were still unknown to me. It was easy to see
that her personal experience in the new condition differed as much from
mine as our lives had differed in the time preceding death. She had
been a patient, unworldly, and devout sufferer; a chronic invalid, who
bore her lot divinely. Her soul had been as full of trust and
gentleness, of the forgetting of self and the service of others, of the
scorn of pain, and of what she called trust in Heaven, as any woman's
soul could be.
I had never seen the moment when I could withhold my respect from the
devout nature of Mrs. Faith, any more than I could from her manner of
enduring suffering; or, I might add, if I could expect the remark to be
properly understood,--from her strong and intelligent trust in me.
Physicians know what sturdy qualities it takes to make a good patient.
Perhaps they are, to some extent, the same which go to make a good
believer; but in this direction I am less informed.
During our passage from the hospital to the house, Mrs. Faith had not
spoken to me; her whole being seemed, as nearly as I could understand
it, to be absorbed in the process of getting there. It struck me that
she was still unpractised in the use of a new and remarkable faculty,
which required strict attention from her, like any other as yet
unlearned art.
"_You_ are not turned out of your own home it seems!" I exclaimed
impulsively, as we entered the house together.
"Oh, no, _no_!" she cried. "Who is? Who could be? Why, Doctor, are
_you_?"
"Death is a terrible respecter of persons," I answered drearily. I
could not further explain myself at that moment.
"I have been away from Charley a good while," she anxiously replied;
"it is the first time I have left him since I died. But I had to find
you, Doctor. Charley should not die--I can't have Charley die--for his
poor father's sake. But I feel quite safe about him now I have got
you."
She said these words in her old bright, trustful way. The thought of
my helplessness to justify such trust smote me sorely; but I said
nothing then to undeceive her,--how could I?--and we made haste
together to the bedside of the injured child.
I saw at a glance that the child was in a bad case. Halt was there,
and Dr. Gazell; they were consulting gloomily. The father, haggard
with his first bereavement, seemed to have accepted the second as a
foregone conclusion; he sat with his face in his hands, beside the
little fellow's bed. The boy called for his mother at intervals. A
nurse hung about weeping. It was a dismal scene; there was not a spark
of hope, or energy, or fight in the whole room. I cried out
immoderately that it was enough to kill the well, and protested against
the management of the case with the ardent conviction to which my old
patient was so used, and in which she believed more thoroughly than I
did myself. "They are giving the wrong remedy," I hotly said. "This
surgical fever could be controlled,--the boy need not die. But he
will! You may as well make up your mind to it, Mrs. Faith. Gazell
doesn't understand the little fellow's constitution, and Halt doesn't
understand anything."
Now it was that, as I had expected, the mother turned upon me with all
a mother's hopeless and heart-breaking want of logic. Surely, I, and
only I, could save the boy. Why, I had always taken care of Charley!
Was it possible that I could stand by and see Charley _die_? _She_
should not have died herself if I had been there. She depended upon me
to find some way--there must be a way. She never thought I was the
kind of a man to be so changed by--by what had happened.
I used to be so full of hope and vigour, and so inventive in a
sick-room. It was not reasonable! It was not right! It was not
possible that, just because I was a spirit, I could not control the
minds or bodies of those live men who were so inferior to me. Why, she
thought I could control _any_body. She thought I could conquer
_any_thing.
"I don't understand it, Doctor," she said, with something like
reproach. "You don't seem to be able to do as much--you don't even
know as much as _I_ do, now. And you know what a sick and helpless
little woman I've always been,--how ignorant, beside you! I thought
you were so wise, so strong, so great. Where has it all gone to,
Doctor? What has become of your wisdom and your power? Can't you help
me? Can't you"--
"I can do nothing," I interrupted her,--"nothing. I am shorn of it
all. It has all gone from me, like the strength of Samson. Spare me,
and torment me not.... I cannot heal your child. I am not like you.
I was not prepared for--this condition of things. I did not expect to
die. I never thought of becoming a spirit. I find myself
extraordinarily embarrassed by it. It is the most unnatural state I
ever was in."
"Why, I find it as natural as life," she said, more gently. She had
now moved to the bedside, and taken the little fellow in her arms.
"You are not as I," I replied morosely. "We differed--and we differ.
Truly, I believe that if there is anything to be done for your boy, it
rests with you, and not with me."
Halt and Gazell were now consulting in an undertone, touching the
selection of a certain remedy; no one noticed them, and they droned on.
The mother crooned over the child, and caressed him, and breathed upon
his sunken little face, and poured her soul out over him in precious
floods and wastes of tenderness as mothers do.
"Live, my little son!" she whispered. "Live, live!"
But I, meanwhile, was watching the two physicians miserably. "There!"
I said, "they have dropped the phial on the floor. See, that is the
one they ought to have. It rolled away. They don't mean to take it.
They will give him the wrong thing. Oh, how can they?"
But now the mother, when she heard me speak, swiftly and gently removed
her arms from beneath the boy, and, advancing to the hesitating men,
stood silently between them, and laid a hand upon the arm of each.
While she stood there she had a rapt, high look of such sort that I
could in no wise have addressed her.
"Are you _sure_, Dr. Gazell?" asked Halt.
"I _think_ so," said Gazell.
He stooped, after a moment's hesitation, and picked up the phial from
the floor, read its label; laid it down, looked at the child, and
hesitated again.
The mother at this juncture sunk upon her knees and bowed her shining
face. I thought she seemed to be at prayer. I too bowed my head; but
it was for reverence at the sight of her. It was long since I had
prayed. I did not find it natural to do so. A strange discontent,
something almost like an inclination to prayer, came upon me. But that
was all. I would rather have had the power to turn those two men out
of the room, and pour the saving remedy upon my little patient's
burning tongue with my own flesh-and-blood fingers, and a hearty
objurgation on the professional blunder which I had come in time to
rectify.
"Dr. Halt," said Dr. Gazell, slowly, "with your approval I think I will
change my mind. On the whole, the indications point to--this. I trust
it is the appropriate remedy."
He removed the cork from the phial as he spoke, and, rising, passed
quickly to the bedside of the child.
The mother had now arisen from her knees, and followed him, and got her
arms about the boy again, and set her soul to brooding over him in the
way that loving women have. I was of no further service to her, and I
had vanished from her thought, which had no more room at that moment
for anything except the child than the arms with which she clasped him.
It amazed me--I was going to say it appalled me--that no person in the
room should seem to have consciousness of her presence. She was like
an invisible star. How incredible that love like that, and the power
of it, could be dependent upon the paltry senses of what are called
live people for so much as the proofs of its existence.
"It is not scientific," I caught myself saying, as I turned away,
"there is a flaw in the logic somewhere. There seems to be a snapped
link between two sets of facts. There is no deficiency of data; the
difficulty lies wholly in collating them."
How, indeed, should I--how did I but a few days since--myself regard
such "data" as presumed to indicate the continuance of human life
beyond the point of physical decay!
"After all," I thought, as I wandered from the house in which I felt
myself forgotten and superfluous, and pursued my lonely way, I knew not
whither and I knew not why,--"after all, there is another life. I
really did not think it."
It seemed now to have been an extraordinary narrowness of intellect in
me that I had not at least attached more weight to the universal human
hypothesis. I did not precisely wonder from a personal point of view
that I had not definitely believed it; but I wondered that I had not
given the possibility the sort of attention which a view of so much
dignity deserved. It really annoyed me that I had made that kind of
mistake.
We, at least, were alive,--my old patient and I. Whether others, or
how many, or of what sort, I could not tell; I had yet seen no other
spirit. What was the life-force in this new condition of things?
Where was the central cell? What _made_ us go on living? Habit? Or
selection? Thought? Emotion? Vigour? If the last, what species of
vigour? What was that in the individual which gave it strength to
stay? Whence came the reproductive power which was able to carry on
the species under such terrible antagonism as the fact of death? If in
the body, where was the common element between that attenuated invalid
and my robust organization? If in the soul, between the suffering
saint and the joyous man of the world, where again was our common moral
protoplasm?
Nothing occurred to me at the time, at least, as offering any spiritual
likeness between myself and Mrs. Faith, but the fact that we were both
people of strong affections which had been highly cultivated. Might
not a woman _love_ herself into continued existence who felt for any
creature what she did for that child?
And I--God knew, if there were a God, how it was with me. If I had
never done anything, if I had never been anything, if I had never felt
anything else in all my life, that was fit to _last_, I had loved one
woman, and her only, and had thought high thoughts for her, and felt
great emotions for her, and forgotten self for her sake, and thought it
sweet to suffer for her, and been a better man for love of her. And I
had loved her,--oh, I had so loved her, that I knew in my soul ten
thousand deaths could not murder that living love.
And I had spoken to her--I had said to her--like any low and brutal
fellow, any common wife-tormentor--I had gone from her dear presence to
this mute life wherein there was neither speech nor language; where
neither earth, nor heaven, nor my love, nor my remorse, nor all my
anguish, nor my shame, could give my sealed lips the power to say,
Forgive.
Now, while I was cast thus abroad upon the night,--for it was
night,--sorely shaken and groaning in spirit, taking no care where my
homeless feet should lead me, I lifted my eyes suddenly, and looked
straight on before me, and behold! shining afar, fair and sweet and
clear, I saw and recognized the lights of my own home.
I was still at some distance from the spot, and, beside myself with
joy, I started to run unto it. With the swift motions which spirits
make, and which I was beginning now to master in a clumsy manner and
low degree, I came, compassing the space between myself and all I loved
or longed for, and so brought myself tumultuously into the street where
the house stood; there, at a stone's throw from it, I felt myself
suddenly stifled with my haste, or from some cause, and, pausing (as we
used to say) to gather breath, I found that I was stricken back, and
fettered to the ground.
There was no wind. The night was perfectly still. Not a leaf quivered
on the topmost branch of the linden which tapped our chamber-window.
Yet a Power like a mighty rushing blast gainsaid me and smote me where
I was.
Not a step, though I writhed for it, not a breath nearer, though my
heart should break for it, could I take or make to reach her. This was
my doom. Within clasp of her dear arms, within sight of her sweet
face,--for there! while I stood struggling, I saw a woman's shadow rise
and stir upon the dimly lighted wall,--thus to be denied and bidden
back from her seemed to me more than heart could bear.
While I stood, quite unmanned by what had happened, incredulous of my
punishment, and yearning to her through the little distance, and
stretching out my hands toward her, and brokenly babbling her dear
name, she moved, and I saw her quite distinctly, even as I had seen her
that last time. She stood midway between the unlighted parlour and the
lighted library beyond. The drop-light with the scarlet shade blazed
behind her.
I noticed that to-night, as on that other night, the baby was not with
her; and I wondered why. She stood alone. She moved up and down the
room; she had a weary step. Her dress, I saw, was black, dead black.
Her white hands, clasped before her, shone with startling brilliancy
upon the sombre stuff she wore. Her lovely head was bent a little, and
she seemed to be gazing at me whom she could not see. Then I cried
with such a cry, it seemed as if the very living must needs hear:--
"Helen! Helen! _Helen_!"
But she stood quite still; leaning her pale face toward me, like some
listening creature that was stricken deaf.
The sight was more sorrowful than I could brave; for the first time
since I had died I succumbed into something like a swoon, and lost my
miserable consciousness in the street before her door.