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 on
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 to 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.