A PRESENCE YET NOT A PRESENCE.
The twilight had fallen while he wrote, and the wind had risen. It was
now blowing a gale. When he could no longer see, he rose to light his
lamp, and looked out of the window. All was dusk around him. Above and
below was nothing to be distinguished from the mass; nothing and
something seemed in it to share an equal uncertainty. He heard the
wind, but could not see the clouds that swept before it, for all was
cloud overhead, and no change of light or feature showed the shifting
of the measureless bulk. Gray stormy space was the whole idea of the
creation. He was gazing into a void--was it not rather a condition of
things inappreciable by his senses? A strange feeling came over him as
of looking from a window in the wall of the visible into the region
unknown, to man shapeless quite, therefore terrible, wherein wander the
things all that have not yet sound or form or sensible embodiment, so
as to manifest themselves to eyes or ears or hands of mortals. As he
gazed, the huge shapeless hulks of the ships of chaos, dimly awful
suggestions of animals uncreate, yet vaguer motions of what was not,
came heaving up, to vanish, even from the fancy, as they approached his
window. Earth lay far below, invisible; only through the night came the
moaning of the sea, as the wind drove it, in still enlarging waves,
upon the flat shore, a level of doubtful grass and sand, three miles
away. It seemed to his heart as if the moaning were the voice of the
darkness, lamenting, like a repentant Satan or Judas, that it was not
the light, could not hold the light, might not become as the light, but
must that moment cease when the light began to enter it. Darkness and
moaning was all that the earth contained! Would the souls of the
mariners shipwrecked this night go forth into the ceaseless turmoil? or
would they, leaving behind them the sense for storms, as for all things
soft and sweet as well, enter only a vast silence, where was nothing to
be aware of but each solitary self? Thoughts and theories many passed
through Donal’s mind as he sought to land the conceivable from the
wandering bosom of the limitless; and he was just arriving at the
conclusion, that, as all things seen must be after the fashion of the
unseen whence they come, as the very genius of embodiment is likeness,
therefore the soul of man must of course have natural relations with
matter; but, on the other hand, as the spirit must be the home and
origin of all this moulding, assimilating, modelling energy, and the
spirit only that is in harmonious oneness with its origin can fully
exercise the deputed creative power, it can be only in proportion to
the eternal life in them, that spirits are able to draw to themselves
matter and clothe themselves in it, so entering into full relation with
the world of storms and sunsets;--he was, I say, just arriving at this
hazarded conclusion, when he started out of his reverie, and was
suddenly all ear to listen.--Again!--Yes! it was the same sound that
had sent him that first night wandering through the house in fruitless
quest! It came in two or three fitful chords that melted into each
other like the colours in the lining of a shell, then ceased. He went
to the door, opened it, and listened. A cold wind came rushing up the
stair. He heard nothing. He stepped out on the stair, shut his door,
and listened. It came again--a strange unearthly musical cry! If ever
disembodied sound went wandering in the wind, just such a sound must it
be! Knowing little of music save in the forms of tone and vowel-change
and rhythm and rime, he felt as if he could have listened for ever to
the wild wandering sweetness of its lamentation. Almost immediately it
ceased--then once more came again, apparently from far off, dying away
on the distant tops of the billowy air, out of whose wandering bosom it
had first issued. It was as the wailing of a summer-wind caught and
swept along in a tempest from the frozen north.
The moment he ceased to expect it any more, he began to think whether
it must not have come from the house. He stole down the stair--to do
what, he did not know. He could not go following an airy nothing all
over the castle: of a great part of it he as yet knew nothing! His
constructive mind had yearned after a complete idea of the building,
for it was almost a passion with him to fit the outsides and insides of
things together; but there were suites of rooms into which, except the
earl and lady Arctura were to leave home, he could not hope to enter.
It was little more than mechanically therefore that he went vaguely
after the sound; and ere he was half-way down the stair, he recognized
the hopelessness of the pursuit. He went on, however, to the
schoolroom, where tea was waiting him.
He had returned to his room, and was sitting again at work, now reading
and meditating, when, in one of the lulls of the storm, he became aware
of another sound--one most unusual to his ears, for he never required
any attendance in his room--that of steps coming up the stair--heavy
steps, not as of one on some ordinary errand. He waited listening. The
steps came nearer and nearer, and stopped at his door. A hand fumbled
about upon it, found the latch, lifted it, and entered. To Donal’s
wonder--and dismay as well, it was the earl. His dismay arose from his
appearance: he was deadly pale, and his eyes more like those of a
corpse than a man among his living fellows. Donal started to his feet.
The apparition turned its head towards him; but in its look was no atom
of recognition, no acknowledgment or even perception of his presence;
the sound of his rising had had merely a half-mechanical influence upon
its brain. It turned away immediately, and went on to the window. There
it stood, much as Donal had stood a little while before--looking out,
but with the attitude of one listening rather than one trying to see.
There was indeed nothing but the blackness to be seen--and nothing to
be heard but the roaring of the wind, with the roaring of the great
billows rolled along in it. As it stood, the time to Donal seemed long:
it was but about five minutes. Was the man out of his mind, or only a
sleep-walker? How could he be asleep so early in the night?
As Donal stood doubting and wondering, once more came the musical cry
out of the darkness--and immediately from the earl a response--a soft,
low murmur, by degrees becoming audible, in the tone of one meditating
aloud, but in a restrained ecstacy. From his words he seemed still to be
hearkening to the sounds aerial, though to Donal at least they came no
more.
“Yet once again,” he murmured, “once again ere I forsake the flesh, are
my ears blest with that voice! It is the song of the eternal woman! For
me she sings!--Sing on, siren; my soul is a listening universe, and
therein nought but thy voice!”
He paused, and began afresh:--
“It is the wind in the tree of life! Its leaves rustle in words of love.
Under its shadow I shall lie, with her I loved--and killed! Ere that day
come, she will have forgiven and forgotten, and all will be well!
“Hark the notes! Clear as a flute! Full and stringent as a violin! They
are colours! They are flowers! They are alive! I can see them as they
grow, as they blow! Those are primroses! Those are pimpernels! Those
high, intense, burning tones--so soft, yet so certain--what are they?
Jasmine?--No, that flower is not a note! It is a chord!--and what a
chord! I mean, what a flower! I never saw that flower before--never on
_this_ earth! It must be a flower of the paradise whence comes the
music! It is! It is! Do I not remember the night when I sailed in the
great ship over the ocean of the stars, and scented the airs of heaven,
and saw the pearly gates gleaming across myriads of wavering
miles!--saw, plain as I see them now, the flowers on the fields within!
Ah, me! the dragon that guards the golden apples! See his crest--his
crest and his emerald eyes! He comes floating up through the murky lake!
It is Geryon!--come to bear me to the gyre below!”
He turned, and with a somewhat quickened step left the room, hastily
shutting the door behind him, as if to keep back the creature of his
vision.
Strong-hearted and strong-brained, Donal had yet stood absorbed as if
he too were out of the body, and knew nothing more of this earth. There
is something more terrible in a presence that is not a presence than in
a vision of the bodiless; that is, a present ghost is not so terrible
as an absent one, a present but deserted body. He stood a moment
helpless, then pulled himself together and tried to think. What should
he do? What _could_ he do? What was required of him? Was anything
required of him? Had he any right to do anything? Could anything be
done that would not both be and cause a wrong? His first impulse was to
follow: a man in such a condition was surely not to be left to go
whither he would among the heights and depths of the castle, where he
might break his neck any moment! Interference no doubt was dangerous,
but he would follow him at least a little way! He heard the steps going
down the stair, and made haste after them. But ere they could have
reached the bottom, the sound of them ceased; and Donal knew the earl
must have left the stair at a point from which he could not follow him.