TWICE TWO IS ONE.
The spring came, but brought little change in the condition of my uncle.
In the month of May, Dr. Southwell advised our taking him abroad. When we
proposed it to him, he passed his hand wearily over his forehead, as if
he felt something wrong there, and gave us no reply. We made our
preparations, and when the day arrived, he did not object to go.
We were an odd party: John and I, bachelor and spinster; my uncle, a
silent, moody man, who did whatever we asked him; and the still,
open-eyed Martha Moon, who, I sometimes think, understood more about it
all than any of us. I could talk a little French, John a good deal of
German. When we got to Paris, we found my uncle considerably at home
there. When he cared to speak, he spoke like a native, and was never at a
loss for word or phrase.
It was he, indeed, who took us to a quiet little hotel he knew; and when
we were comfortably settled in it, he began to take the lead in all our
plans. By degrees he assumed the care and guidance of the whole party;
and so well did he carry out what he had silently, perhaps almost
unconsciously undertaken, that we conceived the greatest hopes of the
result to himself. A mind might lie quiescent so long as it was
ministered to, and hedged from cares and duties, but wake up when
something was required of it! No one would have thought anything amiss
with my uncle, that heard him giving his orders for the day, or acting
cicerone to the little company--there for his sake, though he did not
know it. How often John and I looked at each other, and how glad were our
hearts! My uncle was fast coming to himself! It was like watching the
dead grow alive.
One day he proposed taking a carriage and a good pair of horses, and
driving to Versailles to see the palace. We agreed, and all went well. I
had not, in my wildest dreams, imagined a place so grand and beautiful.
We wandered about it for hours, and were just tired enough to begin
thinking with pleasure of the start homeward, when we found ourselves in
a very long, straight corridor. I was walking alone, a little ahead of
the rest; my uncle was coming along next, but a good way behind me; a few
paces behind my uncle, came John with Martha, to whom he was more
scrupulously attentive than to myself.
In front of me was a door, dividing the corridor in two, apparently
filled with plain plate-glass, to break the draught without obscuring the
effect of the great length of the corridor, which stretched away as far
on the other side as we had come on this. I paused and stood aside,
leaning against the wall to wait for my uncle, and gazing listlessly out
of a window opposite me. But as my uncle came nearer to open the door for
us, I happened to cast my eyes again upon it, and saw, as it seemed, my
uncle coming in the opposite direction; whence I concluded of course,
that I had made a mistake, and that what I had taken for a clear plate of
glass, was a mirror, reflecting the corridor behind me. I looked back at
my uncle with a little anxiety. My reader may remember that, when he came
to fetch me from Rising, the day after I was lost on the moor,
encountering a mirror at unawares, he started and nearly fell: from this
occurrence, and from the absence of mirrors about the house, I had
imagined in his life some painful story connected with a mirror.
Once again I saw him start, and then stand like stone. Almost immediately
a marvellous light overspread his countenance, and with a cry he bounded
forward. I looked again at the mirror, and there I saw the self-same
light-irradiated countenance coming straight, as was natural, to meet
that of which it was the reflection. Then all at once the solid
foundations of fact seemed to melt into vaporous dream, for as I saw the
two figures come together, the one in the mirror, the other in the world,
and was starting forward to prevent my uncle from shattering the mirror
and wounding himself, the figures fell into each other's arms, and I
heard two voices weeping and sobbing, as the substance and the shadow
embraced.
Two men had for a moment been deceived like myself: neither glass nor
mirror was there--only the frame from which a swing-door had been
removed. They walked each into the arms of the other, whom they had at
first each taken for himself.
They paused in their weeping, held each other at arm's-length, and gazed
as in mute appeal for yet better assurance; then, smiling like two suns
from opposing rain-clouds, fell again each on the other's neck, and wept
anew. Neither had killed the other! Neither had lost the other! The world
had been a graveyard; it was a paradise!
We stood aside in reverence. Martha Moon's eyes glowed, but she
manifested no surprise. John and I stared in utter bewilderment. The two
embraced each other, kissed and hugged and patted each other, wept and
murmured and laughed, then all at once, with one great sigh between them,
grew aware of witnesses. They were too happy to blush, yet indeed they
could not have blushed, so red were they with the fire of heaven's own
delight. Utterly unembarrassed they turned toward us--and then came a
fresh astonishment, an old and new joy together out of the treasure of
the divine house-holder: the uncle of the mirror, radiant with a joy such
as I had never before beheld upon human countenance, came straight to me,
cried; “Ah, little one!” took me in his arms, and embraced me with all
the old tenderness. Then I knew that my own old uncle was the same as
ever I had known him, the same as when I used to go to sleep in his arms.
The jubilation that followed, it is impossible for me to describe; and my
husband, who approves of all I have yet written, begs me not to attempt
an adumbration of it.
“It would be a pity,” he says, “to end a won race with a tumble down at
the post!”