If the effect of the nervous shock had stopped there, it would have been

a misfortune for my cousin and myself, but hardly a calamity. The world

is wide, and a cousin or two more or less can hardly be considered an

essential of existence. I often heard Laura's name mentioned, but never

by any one who was acquainted with all the circumstances, for it was

noticed that I changed color and caught at my breast as if I wanted to

grasp my heart in my hand whenever that fatal name was mentioned.

Alas! this was not all. While I was suffering from the effects of my

fall among the thorns I was attended by my old nurse, assisted by another

old woman, by a physician, and my father, who would take his share in

caring for me. It was thought best to keep--me perfectly quiet, and

strangers and friends were alike excluded from my nursery, with one

exception, that my old grandmother came in now and then. With her it

seems that I was somewhat timid and shy, following her with rather

anxious eyes, as if not quite certain whether or not she was dangerous.

But one day, when I was far advanced towards recovery, my father brought

in a young lady, a relative of his, who had expressed a great desire to

see me. She was, as I have been told, a very handsome girl, of about the

same age as my cousin Laura, but bearing no personal resemblance to her

in form, features, or complexion. She had no sooner entered the room

than the same sudden changes which had followed my cousin's visit began

to show themselves, and before she had reached my bedside I was in a

state of deadly collapse, as on the occasions already mentioned.

Some time passed before any recurrence of these terrifying seizures. A

little girl of five or six years old was allowed to come into the nursery

one day and bring me some flowers. I took them from her hand, but turned

away and shut my eyes. There was no seizure, but there was a certain

dread and aversion, nothing more than a feeling which it might be hoped

that time would overcome. Those around me were gradually finding out the

circumstances which brought on the deadly attack to which I was subject.

The daughter of one of our near neighbors was considered the prettiest

girl of the village where we were passing the summer. She was very

anxious to see me, and as I was now nearly well it was determined that

she should be permitted to pay me a short visit. I had always delighted

in seeing her and being caressed by her. I was sleeping when she entered

the nursery and came and took a seat at my side in perfect silence.

Presently I became restless, and a moment later I opened my eyes and saw

her stooping over me. My hand went to my left breast,--the color faded

from my cheeks,--I was again the cold marble image so like death that it

had well-nigh been mistaken for it.

Could it be possible that the fright which had chilled my blood had left

me with an unconquerable fear of woman at the period when she is most

attractive not only to adolescents, but to children of tender age, who

feel the fascination of her flowing locks, her bright eyes, her blooming

cheeks, and that mysterious magnetism of sex which draws all life into

its warm and potently vitalized atmosphere? So it did indeed seem. The

dangerous experiment could not be repeated indefinitely. It was not

intentionally tried again, but accident brought about more than one

renewal of it during the following years, until it became fully

recognized that I was the unhappy subject of a mortal dread of

woman,--not absolutely of the human female, for I had no fear of my old

nurse or of my grandmother, or of any old wrinkled face, and I had become

accustomed to the occasional meeting of a little girl or two, whom I

nevertheless regarded with a certain ill-defined feeling that there was

danger in their presence. I was sent to a boys' school very early, and

during the first ten or twelve years of my life I had rarely any occasion

to be reminded of my strange idiosyncrasy.

As I grew out of boyhood into youth, a change came over the feelings

which had so long held complete possession of me. This was what my

father and his advisers had always anticipated, and was the ground of

their confident hope in my return to natural conditions before I should

have grown to mature manhood.

How shall I describe the conflicts of those dreamy, bewildering, dreadful

years? Visions of loveliness haunted me sleeping and waking. Sometimes

a graceful girlish figure would so draw my eyes towards it that I lost

sight of all else, and was ready to forget all my fears and find myself

at her side, like other youths by the side of young maidens,--happy in

their cheerful companionship, while I,--I, under the curse of one

blighting moment, looked on, hopeless. Sometimes the glimpse of a fair

face or the tone of a sweet voice stirred within me all the instincts

that make the morning of life beautiful to adolescence. I reasoned with

myself:

Why should I not have outgrown that idle apprehension which had been the

nightmare of my earlier years? Why should not the rising tide of life

have drowned out the feeble growths that infested the shallows of

childhood? How many children there are who tremble at being left alone

in the dark, but who, a few years later, will smile at their foolish

terrors and brave all the ghosts of a haunted chamber! Why should I any

longer be the slave of a foolish fancy that has grown into a half insane

habit of mind? I was familiarly acquainted with all the stories of the

strange antipathies and invincible repugnances to which others, some of

them famous men, had been subject. I said to myself, Why should not I

overcome this dread of woman as Peter the Great fought down his dread of

wheels rolling over a bridge? Was I, alone of all mankind, to be doomed

to perpetual exclusion from the society which, as it seemed to me, was

all that rendered existence worth the trouble and fatigue of slavery to

the vulgar need of supplying the waste of the system and working at the

task of respiration like the daughters of Danaus,--toiling day and night

as the worn-out sailor labors at the pump of his sinking vessel?

Why did I not brave the risk of meeting squarely, and without regard to

any possible danger, some one of those fair maidens whose far-off smile,

whose graceful movements, at once attracted and agitated me? I can only

answer this question to the satisfaction of any really inquiring reader

by giving him the true interpretation of the singular phenomenon of which

I was the subject. For this I shall have to refer to a paper of which I

have made a copy, and which will be found included with this manuscript.

It is enough to say here, without entering into the explanation of the

fact, which will be found simple enough as seen by the light of modern

physiological science, that the "nervous disturbance" which the presence

of a woman in the flower of her age produced in my system was a sense of

impending death, sudden, overwhelming, unconquerable, appalling. It was

a reversed action of the nervous centres,--the opposite of that which

flushes the young lover's cheek and hurries his bounding pulses as he

comes into the presence of the object of his passion. No one who has

ever felt the sensation can have failed to recognize it as an imperative

summons, which commands instant and terrified submission.

It was at this period of my life that my father determined to try the

effect of travel and residence in different localities upon my bodily and

mental condition. I say bodily as well as mental, for I was too slender

for my height and subject to some nervous symptoms which were a cause of

anxiety. That the mind was largely concerned in these there was no

doubt, but the mutual interactions of mind and body are often too complex

to admit of satisfactory analysis. Each is in part cause and each also

in part effect.

We passed some years in Italy, chiefly in Rome, where I was placed in a

school conducted by priests, and where of course I met only those of my

own sex. There I had the opportunity of seeing the influences under

which certain young Catholics, destined for the priesthood, are led to

separate themselves from all communion with the sex associated in their

minds with the most subtle dangers to which the human soul can be

exposed. I became in some degree reconciled to the thought of exclusion

from the society of women by seeing around me so many who were

self-devoted to celibacy. The thought sometimes occurred to me whether I

should not find the best and the only natural solution of the problem of

existence, as submitted to myself, in taking upon me the vows which

settle the whole question and raise an impassable barrier between the

devotee and the object of his dangerous attraction.

How often I talked this whole matter over with the young priest who was

at once my special instructor and my favorite companion! But accustomed

as I had become to the forms of the Roman Church, and impressed as I was

with the purity and excellence of many of its young members with whom I

was acquainted, my early training rendered it impossible for me to accept

the credentials which it offered me as authoritative. My friend and

instructor had to set me down as a case of "invincible ignorance." This

was the loop-hole through which he crept out of the prison-house of his

creed, and was enabled to look upon me without the feeling of absolute

despair with which his sterner brethren would, I fear, have regarded me.

I have said that accident exposed me at times to the influence which I

had such reasons for dreading. Here is one example of such an

occurrence, which I relate as simply as possible, vividly as it is

impressed upon my memory. A young friend whose acquaintance I had made

in Rome asked me one day to come to his rooms and look at a cabinet of

gems and medals which he had collected. I had been but a short time in

his library when a vague sense of uneasiness came over me. My heart

became restless,--I could feel it stirring irregularly, as if it were

some frightened creature caged in my breast. There was nothing that I

could see to account for it. A door was partly open, but not so that I

could see into the next room. The feeling grew upon me of some influence

which was paralyzing my circulation. I begged my friend to open a

window. As he did so, the door swung in the draught, and I saw a

blooming young woman,--it was my friend's sister, who had been sitting

with a book in her hand, and who rose at the opening of the door.

Something had warned me of the presence of a woman, that occult and

potent aura of individuality, call it personal magnetism, spiritual

effluence, or reduce it to a simpler expression if you will; whatever it

was, it had warned me of the nearness of the dread attraction which

allured at a distance and revealed itself with all the terrors of the

Lorelei if approached too recklessly. A sign from her brother caused her

to withdraw at once, but not before I had felt the impression which

betrayed itself in my change of color, anxiety about the region of the

heart, and sudden failure as if about to fall in a deadly fainting-fit.

Does all this seem strange and incredible to the reader of my manuscript?

Nothing in the history of life is so strange or exceptional as it seems

to those who have not made a long study of its mysteries. I have never

known just such a case as my own, and yet there must have been such, and

if the whole history of mankind were unfolded I cannot doubt that there

have been many like it. Let my reader suspend his judgment until he has

read the paper I have referred to, which was drawn up by a Committee of

the Royal Academy of the Biological Sciences. In this paper the

mechanism of the series of nervous derangements to which I have been

subject since the fatal shock experienced in my infancy is explained in

language not hard to understand. It will be seen that such a change of

polarity in the nervous centres is only a permanent form and an extreme

degree of an emotional disturbance, which as a temporary and

comparatively unimportant personal accident is far from being

uncommon,--is so frequent, in fact, that every one must have known

instances of it, and not a few must have had more or less serious

experiences of it in their own private history.

It must not be supposed that my imagination dealt with me as I am now

dealing with the reader. I was full of strange fancies and wild

superstitions. One of my Catholic friends gave me a silver medal which

had been blessed by the Pope, and which I was to wear next my body. I

was told that this would turn black after a time, in virtue of a power

which it possessed of drawing out original sin, or certain portions of

it, together with the evil and morbid tendencies which had been engrafted

on the corrupt nature. I wore the medal faithfully, as directed, and

watched it carefully. It became tarnished and after a time darkened, but

it wrought no change in my unnatural condition.

There was an old gypsy who had the reputation of knowing more of futurity

than she had any right to know. The story was that she had foretold the

assassination of Count Rossi and the death of Cavour.

However that may have been, I was persuaded to let her try her black art

upon my future. I shall never forget the strange, wild look of the

wrinkled hag as she took my hand and studied its lines and fixed her

wicked old eyes on my young countenance. After this examination she

shook her head and muttered some words, which as nearly as I could get

them would be in English like these:

Fair lady cast a spell on thee,

Fair lady's hand shall set thee free.

Strange as it may seem, these words of a withered old creature, whose

palm had to be crossed with silver to bring forth her oracular response,

have always clung to my memory as if they were destined to fulfilment.

The extraordinary nature of the affliction to which I was subject

disposed me to believe the incredible with reference to all that relates

to it. I have never ceased to have the feeling that, sooner or later, I

should find myself freed from the blight laid upon me in my infancy. It

seems as if it would naturally come through the influence of some young

and fair woman, to whom that merciful errand should be assigned by the

Providence that governs our destiny. With strange hopes, with trembling

fears, with mingled belief and doubt, wherever I have found myself I have

sought with longing yet half-averted eyes for the "elect lady," as I have

learned to call her, who was to lift the curse from my ruined life.

Three times I have been led to the hope, if not the belief, that I had

found the object of my superstitious belief.--Singularly enough it was

always on the water that the phantom of my hope appeared before my

bewildered vision. Once it was an English girl who was a fellow

passenger with me in one of my ocean voyages. I need not say that she

was beautiful, for she was my dream realized. I heard her singing, I saw

her walking the deck on some of the fair days when sea-sickness was

forgotten. The passengers were a social company enough, but I had kept

myself apart, as was my wont. At last the attraction became too strong

to resist any longer. "I will venture into the charmed circle if it

kills me," I said to my father. I did venture, and it did not kill me,

or I should not be telling this story. But there was a repetition of the

old experiences. I need not relate the series of alarming consequences

of my venture. The English girl was very lovely, and I have no doubt has

made some one supremely happy before this, but she was not the "elect

lady" of the prophecy and of my dreams.

A second time I thought myself for a moment in the presence of the

destined deliverer who was to restore me to my natural place among my

fellow men and women. It was on the Tiber that I met the young maiden

who drew me once more into that inner circle which surrounded young

womanhood with deadly peril for me, if I dared to pass its limits. I was

floating with the stream in the little boat in which I passed many long

hours of reverie when I saw another small boat with a boy and a young

girl in it. The boy had been rowing, and one of his oars had slipped

from his grasp. He did not know how to paddle with a single oar, and was

hopelessly rowing round and round, his oar all the time floating farther

away from him. I could not refuse my assistance. I picked up the oar

and brought my skiff alongside of the boat. When I handed the oar to the

boy the young girl lifted her veil and thanked me in the exquisite music

of the language which

'Sounds as if it should be writ on satin.'

She was a type of Italian beauty,--a nocturne in flesh and blood, if I

may borrow a term certain artists are fond of; but it was her voice which

captivated me and for a moment made me believe that I was no longer shut

off from all relations with the social life of my race. An hour later I

was found lying insensible on the floor of my boat, white, cold, almost

pulseless. It cost much patient labor to bring me back to consciousness.

Had not such extreme efforts been made, it seems probable that I should

never have waked from a slumber which was hardly distinguishable from

that of death.

Why should I provoke a catastrophe which appears inevitable if I invite

it by exposing myself to its too well ascertained cause? The habit of

these deadly seizures has become a second nature. The strongest and the

ablest men have found it impossible to resist the impression produced by

the most insignificant object, by the most harmless sight or sound to

which they had a congenital or acquired antipathy. What prospect have I

of ever being rid of this long and deep-seated infirmity? I may well ask

myself these questions, but my answer is that I will never give up the

hope that time will yet bring its remedy. It may be that the wild

prediction which so haunts me shall find itself fulfilled. I have had of

late strange premonitions, to which if I were superstitious I could not

help giving heed. But I have seen too much of the faith that deals in

miracles to accept the supernatural in any shape,--assuredly when it

comes from an old witch-like creature who takes pay for her revelations

of the future. Be it so: though I am not superstitious, I have a right

to be imaginative, and my imagination will hold to those words of the old

zingara with an irresistible feeling that, sooner or later, they will

prove true.

Can it be possible that her prediction is not far from its realization?

I have had both waking and sleeping visions within these last months and

weeks which have taken possession of me and filled my life with new

thoughts, new hopes, new resolves.

Sometimes on the bosom of the lake by which I am dreaming away this

season of bloom and fragrance, sometimes in the fields or woods in a

distant glimpse, once in a nearer glance, which left me pale and

tremulous, yet was followed by a swift reaction, so that my cheeks

flushed and my pulse bounded, I have seen her who--how do I dare to tell

it so that my own eyes can read it?---I cannot help believing is to be my

deliverer, my saviour.

I have been warned in the most solemn and impressive language by the

experts most deeply read in the laws of life and the history of its

disturbing and destroying influences, that it would be at the imminent

risk of my existence if I should expose myself to the repetition of my

former experiences. I was reminded that unexplained sudden deaths were

of constant, of daily occurrence; that any emotion is liable to arrest

the movements of life: terror, joy, good news or bad news,--anything that

reaches the deeper nervous centres. I had already died once, as Sir

Charles Napier said of himself; yes, more than once, died and been

resuscitated. The next time, I might very probably fail to get my return

ticket after my visit to Hades. It was a rather grim stroke of humor,

but I understood its meaning full well, and felt the force of its menace.

After all, what had I to live for if the great primal instinct which

strives to make whole the half life of lonely manhood is defeated,

suppressed, crushed out of existence? Why not as well die in the attempt

to break up a wretched servitude to a perverted nervous movement as in

any other way? I am alone in the world,--alone save for my faithful

servant, through whom I seem to hold to the human race as it were by a

single filament. My father, who was my instructor, my companion, my

dearest and best friend through all my later youth and my earlier

manhood, died three years ago and left me my own master, with the means

of living as might best please my fancy. This season shall decide my

fate. One more experiment, and I shall find myself restored to my place

among my fellow-beings, or, as I devoutly hope, in a sphere where all our

mortal infirmities are past and forgotten.

I have told the story of a blighted life without reserve, so that there

shall not remain any mystery or any dark suspicion connected with my

memory if I should be taken away unexpectedly. It has cost me an effort

to do it, but now that my life is on record I feel more reconciled to my

lot, with all its possibilities, and among these possibilities is a gleam

of a better future. I have been told by my advisers, some of them wise,

deeply instructed, and kind-hearted men, that such a life-destiny should

be related by the subject of it for the instruction of others, and

especially for the light it throws on certain peculiarities of human

character often wrongly interpreted as due to moral perversion, when they

are in reality the results of misdirected or reversed actions in some of

the closely connected nervous centres.

For myself I can truly say that I have very little morbid sensibility

left with reference to the destiny which has been allotted to me. I have

passed through different stages of feeling with reference to it, as I

have developed from infancy to manhood. At first it was mere blind

instinct about which I had no thought, living like other infants the life

of impressions without language to connect them in series. In my boyhood

I began to be deeply conscious of the infirmity which separated me from

those around me. In youth began that conflict of emotions and impulses

with the antagonistic influence of which I have already spoken, a

conflict which has never ceased, but to which I have necessarily become

to a certain degree accustomed; and against the dangers of which I have

learned to guard myself habitually. That is the meaning of my isolation.

You, young man,--if at any time your eyes shall look upon my melancholy

record,--you at least will understand me. Does not your heart throb, in

the presence of budding or blooming womanhood, sometimes as if it "were

ready to crack" with its own excess of strain? What if instead of

throbbing it should falter, flutter, and stop as if never to beat again?

You, young woman, who with ready belief and tender sympathy will look

upon these pages, if they are ever spread before you, know what it is

when your breast heaves with uncontrollable emotion and the grip of the

bodice seems unendurable as the embrace of the iron virgin of the

Inquisition. Think what it would be if the grasp were tightened so that

no breath of air could enter your panting chest!

Does your heart beat in the same way, young man, when your honored

friend, a venerable matron of seventy years, greets you with her kindly

smile as it does in the presence of youthful loveliness? When a pretty

child brings you her doll and looks into your eyes with artless grace and

trustful simplicity, does your pulse quicken, do you tremble, does life

palpitate through your whole being, as when the maiden of seventeen meets

your enamored sight in the glow of her rosebud beauty? Wonder not, then,

if the period of mystic attraction for you should be that of agitation,

terror, danger, to one in whom the natural current of the instincts has

had its course changed as that of a stream is changed by a convulsion of

nature, so that the impression which is new life to you is death to him.

I am now twenty-five years old. I have reached the time of life which I

have dreamed, nay even ventured to hope, might be the limit of the

sentence which was pronounced upon me in my infancy. I can assign no

good reason for this anticipation. But in writing this paper I feel as

if I were preparing to begin a renewed existence. There is nothing for me

to be ashamed of in the story I have told. There is no man living who

would not have yielded to the sense of instantly impending death which

seized upon me under the conditions I have mentioned. Martyrs have gone

singing to their flaming shrouds, but never a man could hold his breath

long enough to kill himself; he must have rope or water, or some

mechanical help, or nature will make him draw in a breath of air, and

would make him do so though he knew the salvation of the human race would

be forfeited by that one gasp.

This paper may never reach the eye of any one afflicted in the same way

that I have been. It probably never will; but for all that, there are

many shy natures which will recognize tendencies in themselves in the

direction of my unhappy susceptibility. Others, to whom such weakness

seems inconceivable, will find their scepticism shaken, if not removed,

by the calm, judicial statement of the Report drawn up for the Royal

Academy. It will make little difference to me whether my story is

accepted unhesitatingly or looked upon as largely a product of the

imagination. I am but a bird of passage that lights on the boughs of

different nationalities. I belong to no flock; my home may be among the

palms of Syria, the olives of Italy, the oaks of England, the elms that

shadow the Hudson or the Connecticut; I build no nest; to-day I am here,

to-morrow on the wing.

If I quit my native land before the trees have dropped their leaves I

shall place this manuscript in the safe hands of one whom I feel sure

that I can trust; to do with it as he shall see fit. If it is only

curious and has no bearing on human welfare, he may think it well to let

it remain unread until I shall have passed away. If in his judgment it

throws any light on one of the deeper mysteries of our nature,--the

repulsions which play such a formidable part in social life, and which

must be recognized as the correlatives of the affinities that distribute

the individuals governed by them in the face of impediments which seem to

be impossibilities,--then it may be freely given to the world.

But if I am here when the leaves are all fallen, the programme of my life

will have changed, and this story of the dead past will be illuminated by

the light of a living present which will irradiate all its saddening

features. Who would not pray that my last gleam of light and hope may be

that of dawn and not of departing day?

The reader who finds it hard to accept the reality of a story so far from

the common range of experience is once more requested to suspend his

judgment until he has read the paper which will next be offered for his

consideration.

XIX.

THE REPORT OF THE BIOLOGICAL COMMITTEE.

Perhaps it is too much to expect a reader who wishes to be entertained,

excited, amused, and does not want to work his passage through pages

which he cannot understand without some effort of his own, to read the

paper which follows and Dr. Butts's reflections upon it. If he has no

curiosity in the direction of these chapters, he can afford to leave them

to such as relish a slight flavor of science. But if he does so leave

them he will very probably remain sceptical as to the truth of the story

to which they are meant to furnish him with a key.

Of course the case of Maurice Kirkwood is a remarkable and exceptional

one, and it is hardly probable that any reader's experience will furnish

him with its parallel. But let him look back over all his acquaintances,

if he has reached middle life, and see if he cannot recall more than one

who, for some reason or other, shunned the society of young women, as if

they had a deadly fear of their company. If he remembers any such, he

can understand the simple statements and natural reflections which are

laid before him.

One of the most singular facts connected with the history of Maurice

Kirkwood was the philosophical equanimity with which he submitted to the

fate which had fallen upon him. He did not choose to be pumped by the

Interviewer, who would show him up in the sensational columns of his

prying newspaper. He lived chiefly by himself, as the easiest mode of

avoiding those meetings to which he would be exposed in almost every

society into which he might venture. But he had learned to look upon

himself very much as he would upon an intimate not himself,--upon a

different personality. A young man will naturally enough be ashamed of

his shyness. It is something which others believe, and perhaps he

himself thinks, he might overcome. But in the case of Maurice Kirkwood

there was no room for doubt as to the reality and gravity of the long

enduring effects of his first convulsive terror. He had accepted the

fact as he would have accepted the calamity of losing his sight or his

hearing. When he was questioned by the experts to whom his case was

submitted, he told them all that he knew about it almost without a sign

of emotion. Nature was so peremptory with him,--saying in language that

had no double meaning: "If you violate the condition on which you hold my

gift of existence I slay you on the spot,"--that he became as decisive in

his obedience as she was in her command, and accepted his fate without

repining.

Yet it must not be thought for a moment,--it cannot be supposed,--that

he was insensible because he looked upon himself with the coolness of an

enforced philosophy. He bore his burden manfully, hard as it was to live

under it, for he lived, as we have seen, in hope. The thought of

throwing it off with his life, as too grievous to be borne, was familiar

to his lonely hours, but he rejected it as unworthy of his manhood. How

he had speculated and dreamed about it is plain enough from the paper the

reader may remember on Ocean, River, and Lake.

With these preliminary hints the paper promised is submitted to such as

may find any interest in them.

ACCOUNT OF A CASE OF GYNOPHOBIA.

WITH REMARKS.

Being the Substance of a Report to the Royal Academy of the Biological

Sciences by a Committee of that Institution.

"The singular nature of the case we are about to narrate and comment upon

will, we feel confident, arrest the attention of those who have learned

the great fact that Nature often throws the strongest light upon her laws

by the apparent exceptions and anomalies which from time to time are

observed. We have done with the lusus naturae of earlier generations.

We pay little attention to the stories of 'miracles,' except so far as we

receive them ready-made at the hands of the churches which still hold to

them. Not the less do we meet with strange and surprising facts, which a

century or two ago would have been handled by the clergy and the courts,

but today are calmly recorded and judged by the best light our knowledge

of the laws of life can throw upon them. It must be owned that there are

stories which we can hardly dispute, so clear and full is the evidence in

their support, which do, notwithstanding, tax our faith and sometimes

leave us sceptical in spite of all the testimony which supports them.

"In this category many will be disposed to place the case we commend to

the candid attention of the Academy. If one were told that a young man,

a gentleman by birth and training, well formed, in apparently perfect

health, of agreeable physiognomy and manners, could not endure the

presence of the most attractive young woman, but was seized with deadly

terror and sudden collapse of all the powers of life, if he came into her

immediate presence; if it were added that this same young man did not

shrink from the presence of an old withered crone; that he had a certain

timid liking for little maidens who had not yet outgrown the company of

their dolls, the listener would be apt to smile, if he did not laugh, at

the absurdity of the fable. Surely, he would say, this must be the

fiction of some fanciful brain, the whim of some romancer, the trick of

some playwright. It would make a capital farce, this idea, carried out.

A young man slighting the lovely heroine of the little comedy and making

love to her grandmother! This would, of course, be overstating the truth

of the story, but to such a misinterpretation the plain facts lend

themselves too easily. We will relate the leading circumstances of the

case, as they were told us with perfect simplicity and frankness by the

subject of an affection which, if classified, would come under the

general head of Antipathy, but to which, if we give it a name, we shall

have to apply the term Gynophobia, or Fear of Woman."

Here follows the account furnished to the writer of the paper, which is

in all essentials identical with that already laid before the reader.

"Such is the case offered to our consideration. Assuming its

truthfulness in all its particulars, it remains to see in the first place

whether or not it is as entirely exceptional and anomalous as it seems at

first sight, or whether it is only the last term of a series of cases

which in their less formidable aspect are well known to us in literature,

in the records of science, and even in our common experience.

"To most of those among us the explanations we are now about to give are

entirely superfluous. But there are some whose chief studies have been

in different directions, and who will not complain if certain facts are

mentioned which to the expert will seem rudimentary, and which hardly

require recapitulation to those who are familiarly acquainted with the

common text-books.

"The heart is the centre of every living movement in the higher animals,

and in man, furnishing in varying amount, or withholding to a greater or

less extent, the needful supplies to all parts of the system. If its

action is diminished to a certain degree, faintness is the immediate

consequence; if it is arrested, loss of consciousness; if its action is

not soon restored, death, of which fainting plants the white flag,

remains in possession of the system.

"How closely the heart is under the influence of the emotions we need not

go to science to learn, for all human experience and all literature are

overflowing with evidence that shows the extent of this relation.

Scripture is full of it; the heart in Hebrew poetry represents the entire

life, we might almost say. Not less forcible is the language of

Shakespeare, as for instance, in 'Measure for Measure:'

"'Why does my blood thus muster to my heart,

Making it both unable for itself

And dispossessing all my other parts

Of necessary fitness?'

"More especially is the heart associated in every literature with the

passion of love. A famous old story is that of Galen, who was called to

the case of a young lady long ailing, and wasting away from some cause

the physicians who had already seen her were unable to make out. The

shrewd old practitioner suspected that love was at the bottom of the

young lady's malady. Many relatives and friends of both sexes, all of

them ready with their sympathy, came to see her. The physician sat by her

bedside during one of these visits, and in an easy, natural way took her

hand and placed a finger on her pulse. It beat quietly enough until a

certain comely young gentleman entered the apartment, when it suddenly

rose infrequency, and at the same moment her hurried breathing, her

changing color, pale and flushed by turns, betrayed the profound

agitation his presence excited. This was enough for the sagacious Greek;

love was the disease, the cure of which by its like may be claimed as an

anticipation of homoeopathy. In the frontispiece to the fine old 'Junta'

edition of the works of Galen, you may find among the wood-cuts a

representation of the interesting scene, with the title Amantas

Dignotio,--the diagnosis, or recognition, of the lover.

"Love has many languages, but the heart talks through all of them. The

pallid or burning cheek tells of the failing or leaping fountain which

gives it color. The lovers at the 'Brookside' could hear each other's

hearts beating. When Genevieve, in Coleridge's poem, forgot herself, and

was beforehand with her suitor in her sudden embrace,

"'T was partly love and partly fear,

And partly 't was a bashful art,

That I might rather feel than see

The swelling of her heart'

"Always the heart, whether its hurried action is seen, or heard, or felt.

But it is not always in this way that the 'deceitful' organ treats the

lover.

"'Faint heart never won fair lady.'

"This saying was not meant, perhaps, to be taken literally, but it has

its literal truth. Many a lover has found his heart sink within

him,--lose all its force, and leave him weak as a child in his emotion at

the sight of the object of his affections. When Porphyro looked upon

Madeline at her prayers in the chapel, it was too much for him:

"'She seemed a splendid angel, newly drest,

Save wings, for heaven:--Porphyro grew faint,

She knelt, so pure a thing, so free from earthly taint.'

"And in Balzac's novel, 'Cesar Birotteau,' the hero of the story 'fainted

away for-joy at the moment when, under a linden-tree, at Sceaux,

Constance-Barbe-Josephine accepted him as her future husband.'

"One who faints is dead if he does not I come to,' and nothing is more

likely than that too susceptible lovers have actually gone off in this

way. Everything depends on how the heart behaves itself in these and

similar trying moments. The mechanism of its actions becomes an

interesting subject, therefore, to lovers of both sexes, and to all who

are capable of intense emotions.

"The heart is a great reservoir, which distributes food, drink, air, and

heat to every part of the system, in exchange for its waste material. It

knocks at the gate of every organ seventy or eighty times in a minute,

calling upon it to receive its supplies and unload its refuse. Between

it and the brain there is the closest relation. The emotions, which act

upon it as we have seen, govern it by a mechanism only of late years

thoroughly understood. This mechanism can be made plain enough to the

reader who is not afraid to believe that he can understand it.

"The brain, as all know, is the seat of ideas, emotions, volition. It is

the great central telegraphic station with which many lesser centres are

in close relation, from which they receive, and to which they transmit,

their messages. The heart has its own little brains, so to speak,--small

collections of nervous substance which govern its rhythmical motions

under ordinary conditions. But these lesser nervous centres are to a

large extent dominated by influences transmitted from certain groups of

nerve-cells in the brain and its immediate dependencies.

"There are two among the special groups of nerve-cells which produce

directly opposite effects. One of these has the power of accelerating

the action of the heart, while the other has the power of retarding or

arresting this action. One acts as the spur, the other as the bridle.

According as one or the other predominates, the action of the heart will

be stimulated or restrained. Among the great modern discoveries in

physiology is that of the existence of a distinct centre of inhibition,

as the restraining influence over the heart is called.

"The centre of inhibition plays a terrible part in the history of

cowardice and of unsuccessful love. No man can be brave without blood to

sustain his courage, any more than he can think, as the German

materialist says, not absurdly, without phosphorus. The fainting lover

must recover his circulation, or his lady will lend him her

smelling-salts and take a gallant with blood in his cheeks. Porphyro got

over his faintness before he ran away with Madeline, and Cesar Birotteau

was an accepted lover when he swooned with happiness: but many an officer

has been cashiered, and many a suitor has been rejected, because the

centre of inhibition has got the upper hand of the centre of stimulation.

"In the well-known cases of deadly antipathy which have been recorded,

the most frequent cause has been the disturbed and depressing influence

of the centre of inhibition. Fainting at the sight of blood is one of

the commonest examples of this influence. A single impression, in a very

early period of atmospheric existence,--perhaps, indirectly, before that

period, as was said to have happened in the case of James the First of

England,--may establish a communication between this centre and the heart

which will remain open ever afterwards. How does a footpath across a

field establish itself? Its curves are arbitrary, and what we call

accidental, but one after another follows it as if he were guided by a

chart on which it was laid down. So it is with this dangerous transit

between the centre of inhibition and the great organ of life. If once

the path is opened by the track of some profound impression, that same

impression, if repeated, or a similar one, is likely to find the old

footmarks and follow them. Habit only makes the path easier to traverse,

and thus the unreasoning terror of a child, of an infant, may perpetuate

itself in a timidity which shames the manhood of its subject.

"The case before us is an exceptional and most remarkable example of the

effect of inhibition on the heart.

"We will not say that we believe it to be unique in the history of the

human race; on the contrary, we do not doubt that there have been similar

cases, and that in some rare instances sudden death has been the

consequence of seizures like that of the subject of this Report. The case

most like it is that of Colone Townsend, which is too well known to

require any lengthened description in this paper. It is enough to recall

the main facts. He could by a voluntary effort suspend the action of his

heart for a considerable period, during which he lay like one dead,

pulseless, and without motion. After a time the circulation returned,

and he does not seem to have been the worse for his dangerous, or

seemingly dangerous, experiment. But in his case it was by an act of the

will that the heart's action was suspended. In the case before us it is

an involuntary impulse transmitted from the brain to the inhibiting

centre, which arrests the cardiac movements.

"What is like to be the further history of the case?

"The subject of this anomalous affliction is now more than twenty years

old. The chain of nervous actions has become firmly established. It

might have been hoped that the changes of adolescence would have effected

a transformation of the perverted instinct. On the contrary, the whole

force of this instinct throws itself on the centre of inhibition, instead

of quickening the heart-beats, and sending the rush of youthful blood

with fresh life through the entire system to the throbbing finger-tips.

"Is it probable that time and circumstances will alter a habit of nervous

interactions so long established? We are disposed to think that there is

a chance of its being broken up. And we are not afraid to say that we

suspect the old gypsy woman, whose prophecy took such hold of the

patient's imagination, has hit upon the way in which the 'spell,' as she

called it, is to be dissolved. She must, in all probability, have had a

hint of the 'antipatia' to which the youth before her was a victim, and

its cause, and if so, her guess as to the probable mode in which the

young man would obtain relief from his unfortunate condition was the one

which would naturally suggest itself.

"If once the nervous impression which falls on the centre of inhibition

can be made to change its course, so as to follow its natural channel, it

will probably keep to that channel ever afterwards. And this will, it is

most likely, be effected by some sudden, unexpected impression. If he

were drowning, and a young woman should rescue him, it is by no means

impossible that the change in the nervous current we have referred to

might be brought about as rapidly, as easily, as the reversal of the

poles in a magnet, which is effected in an instant. But he cannot be

expected to throw himself into the water just at the right moment when

the 'fair lady' of the gitana's prophecy is passing on the shore.

Accident may effect the cure which art seems incompetent to perform. It

would not be strange if in some future seizure he should never come back

to consciousness. But it is quite conceivable, on the other hand, that a

happier event may occur, that in a single moment the nervous polarity may

be reversed, the whole course of his life changed, and his past terrible

experiences be to him like a scarce-remembered dream.

"This is one, of those cases in which it is very hard to determine the

wisest course to be pursued. The question is not unlike that which

arises in certain cases of dislocation of the bones of the neck. Shall

the unfortunate sufferer go all his days with his face turned far round

to the right or the left, or shall an attempt be made to replace the

dislocated bones? an attempt which may succeed, or may cause instant

death. The patient must be consulted as to whether he will take the

chance. The practitioner may be unwilling to risk it, if the patient

consents. Each case must be judged on its own special grounds. We

cannot think that this young man is doomed to perpetual separation from

the society of womanhood during the period of its bloom and attraction.

But to provoke another seizure after his past experiences would be too

much like committing suicide. We fear that we must trust to the chapter

of accidents. The strange malady--for such it is--has become a second

nature, and may require as energetic a shock to displace it as it did to

bring it into existence. Time alone can solve this question, on which

depends the well-being and, it may be, the existence of a young man every

way fitted to be happy, and to give happiness, if restored to his true

nature."

XX.

DR. BUTTS REFLECTS.

Dr. Butts sat up late at night reading these papers and reflecting upon

them. He was profoundly impressed and tenderly affected by the entire

frankness, the absence of all attempt at concealment, which Maurice

showed in placing these papers at his disposal. He believed that his

patient would recover from this illness for which he had been taking care

of him. He thought deeply and earnestly of what he could do for him

after he should have regained his health and strength.

There were references, in Maurice's own account of himself, which the

doctor called to mind with great interest after reading his brief

autobiography. Some one person--some young woman, it must be--had

produced a singular impression upon him since those earlier perilous

experiences through which he had passed. The doctor could not help

thinking of that meeting with Euthymia of which she had spoken to him.

Maurice, as she said, turned pale,--he clapped his hand to his breast.

He might have done so if he had met her chambermaid, or any straggling

damsel of the village. But Euthymia was not a young woman to be looked

upon with indifference. She held herself like a queen, and walked like

one, not a stage queen, but one born and bred to self-reliance, and

command of herself as well as others. One could not pass her without

being struck with her noble bearing and spirited features. If she had

known how Maurice trembled as he looked upon her, in that conflict of

attraction and uncontrollable dread,--if she had known it! But what,

even then, could she have done? Nothing but get away from him as fast as

she could. As it was, it was a long time before his agitation subsided,

and his heart beat with its common force and frequency.

Dr. Butts was not a male gossip nor a matchmaking go-between. But he

could not help thinking what a pity it was that these two young persons

could not come together as other young people do in the pairing season,

and find out whether they cared for and were fitted for each other. He

did not pretend to settle this question in his own mind, but the thought

was a natural one. And here was a gulf between them as deep and wide as

that between Lazarus and Dives. Would it ever be bridged over? This

thought took possession of the doctor's mind, and he imagined all sorts

of ways of effecting some experimental approximation between Maurice and

Euthymia. From this delicate subject he glanced off to certain general

considerations suggested by the extraordinary history he had been

reading. He began by speculating as to the possibility of the personal

presence of an individual making itself perceived by some channel other

than any of the five senses. The study of the natural sciences teaches

those who are devoted to them that the most insignificant facts may lead

the way to the discovery of the most important, all-pervading laws of the

universe. From the kick of a frog's hind leg to the amazing triumphs

which began with that seemingly trivial incident is a long, a very long

stride if Madam Galvani had not been in delicate health, which was the

occasion of her having some frog-broth prepared for her, the world of

to-day might not be in possession of the electric telegraph and the light

which blazes like the sun at high noon. A common-looking occurrence, one

seemingly unimportant, which had hitherto passed unnoticed with the

ordinary course of things, was the means of introducing us to a new and

vast realm of closely related phenomena. It was like a key that we might

have picked up, looking so simple that it could hardly fit any lock but

one of like simplicity, but which should all at once throw back the bolts

of the one lock which had defied the most ingenious of our complex

implements and open our way into a hitherto unexplored territory.

It certainly was not through the eye alone that Maurice felt the

paralyzing influence. He could contemplate Euthymia from a distance, as

he did on the day of the boat-race, without any nervous disturbance. A

certain proximity was necessary for the influence to be felt, as in the

case of magnetism and electricity. An atmosphere of danger surrounded

every woman he approached during the period when her sex exercises its

most powerful attractions. How far did that atmosphere extend, and

through what channel did it act?

The key to the phenomena of this case, he believed, was to be found in a

fact as humble as that which gave birth to the science of galvanism and

its practical applications. The circumstances connected with the very

common antipathy to cats were as remarkable in many points of view as the

similar circumstances in the case of Maurice Kirkwood. The subjects of

that antipathy could not tell what it was which disturbed their nervous

system. All they knew was that a sense of uneasiness, restlessness,

oppression, came over them in the presence of one of these animals. He

remembered the fact already mentioned, that persons sensitive to this

impression can tell by their feelings if a cat is concealed in the

apartment in which they may happen to be. It may be through some

emanation. It may be through the medium of some electrical disturbance.

What if the nerve-thrills passing through the whole system of the animal

propagate themselves to a certain distance without any more regard to

intervening solids than is shown by magnetism? A sieve lets sand pass

through it; a filter arrests sand, but lets fluids pass, glass holds

fluids, but lets light through; wood shuts out light, but magnetic

attraction goes through it as sand went through the sieve. No good

reasons can be given why the presence of a cat should not betray itself

to certain organizations, at a distance, through the walls of a box in

which the animal is shut up. We need not disbelieve the stories which

allege such an occurrence as a fact and a not very infrequent one.

If the presence of a cat can produce its effects under these

circumstances, why should not that of a human being under similar

conditions, acting on certain constitutions, exercise its specific

influence? The doctor recalled a story told him by one of his friends, a

story which the friend himself heard from the lips of the distinguished

actor, the late Mr. Fechter. The actor maintained that Rachel had no

genius as an actress. It was all Samson's training and study, according

to him, which explained the secret of her wonderful effectiveness on the

stage. But magnetism, he said,--magnetism, she was full of. He declared

that he was made aware of her presence on the stage, when he could not

see her or know of her presence otherwise, by this magnetic emanation.

The doctor took the story for what it was worth. There might very

probably be exaggeration, perhaps high imaginative coloring about it, but

it was not a whit more unlikely than the cat-stories, accepted as

authentic. He continued this train of thought into further developments.

Into this series of reflections we will try to follow him.

What is the meaning of the halo with which artists have surrounded the

heads of their pictured saints, of the aureoles which wraps them like a

luminous cloud? Is it not a recognition of the fact that these holy

personages diffuse their personality in the form of a visible emanation,

which reminds us of Milton's definition of light:

"Bright effluence of bright essence increate"?

The common use of the term influence would seem to imply the existence of

its correlative, effluence. There is no good reason that I can see, the

doctor said to himself, why among the forces which work upon the nervous

centres there should not be one which acts at various distances from its

source. It may not be visible like the "glory" of the painters, it may

not be appreciable by any one of the five senses, and yet it may be felt

by the person reached by it as much as if it were a palpable

presence,--more powerfully, perhaps, from the mystery which belongs to

its mode of action.

Why should not Maurice have been rendered restless and anxious by the

unseen nearness of a young woman who was in the next room to him, just as

the persons who have the dread of cats are made conscious of their

presence through some unknown channel? Is it anything strange that the

larger and more powerful organism should diffuse a consciousness of its

presence to some distance as well as the slighter and feebler one? Is it

strange that this mysterious influence or effluence should belong

especially or exclusively to the period of complete womanhood in

distinction from that of immaturity or decadence? On the contrary, it

seems to be in accordance with all the analogies of nature,--analogies

too often cruel in the sentence they pass upon the human female.

Among the many curious thoughts which came up in the doctor's mind was

this, which made him smile as if it were a jest, but which he felt very

strongly had its serious side, and was involved with the happiness or

suffering of multitudes of youthful persons who die without telling their

secret:

How many young men have a mortal fear of woman, as woman, which they

never overcome, and in consequence of which the attraction which draws

man towards her, as strong in them as in others,--oftentimes, in virtue

of their peculiarly sensitive organizations, more potent in them than in

others of like age and conditions,--in consequence of which fear, this

attraction is completely neutralized, and all the possibilities of

doubled and indefinitely extended life depending upon it are left

unrealized! Think what numbers of young men in Catholic countries devote

themselves to lives of celibacy. Think how many young men lose all their

confidence in the presence of the young woman to whom they are most

attracted, and at last steal away from a companionship which it is

rapture to dream of and torture to endure, so does the presence of the

beloved object paralyze all the powers of expression. Sorcerers have in

all time and countries played on the hopes and terrors of lovers. Once

let loose a strong impulse on the centre of inhibition, and the warrior

who had faced bayonets and batteries becomes a coward whom the

well-dressed hero of the ball-room and leader of the German will put to

ignominious flight in five minutes of easy, audacious familiarity with

his lady-love.

Yes, the doctor went on with his reflections, I do not know that I have

seen the term Gynophobia before I opened this manuscript, but I have seen

the malady many times. Only one word has stood between many a pair of

young people and their lifelong happiness, and that word has got as far

as the lips, but the lips trembled and would not, could not, shape that

little word. All young women are not like Coleridge's Genevieve, who

knew how to help her lover out of his difficulty, and said yes before he

had asked for an answer. So the wave which was to have wafted them on to

the shore of Elysium has just failed of landing them, and back they have

been drawn into the desolate ocean to meet no more on earth.

Love is the master-key, he went on thinking, love is the master-key that

opens the gates of happiness, of hatred, of jealousy, and, most easily of

all, the gate of fear. How terrible is the one fact of beauty!--not only

the historic wonder of beauty, that "burnt the topless towers of Ilium"

for the smile of Helen, and fired the palaces of Babylon by the hand of

Thais, but the beauty which springs up in all times and places, and

carries a torch and wears a serpent for a wreath as truly as any of the

Eumenides. Paint Beauty with her foot upon a skull and a dragon coiled

around her.

The doctor smiled at his own imposing classical allusions and pictorial

imagery. Drifting along from thought to thought, he reflected on the

probable consequences of the general knowledge of Maurice Kirkwood's

story, if it came before the public.

What a piece of work it would make among the lively youths of the

village, to be sure! What scoffing, what ridicule, what embellishments,

what fables, would follow in the trail of the story! If the Interviewer

got hold of it, how "The People's Perennial and Household Inquisitor"

would blaze with capitals in its next issue! The young fellows' of the

place would be disposed to make fun of the whole matter. The young

girls-the doctor hardly dared to think what would happen when the story

got about among them. "The Sachem" of the solitary canoe, the bold

horseman, the handsome hermit,--handsome so far as the glimpses they had

got of him went,--must needs be an object of tender interest among them,

now that he was ailing, suffering, in danger of his life, away from

friends,--poor fellow! Little tokens of their regard had reached his

sick-chamber; bunches of flowers with dainty little notes, some of them

pinkish, some three-cornered, some of them with brief messages, others

"criss-crossed," were growing more frequent as it was understood that the

patient was likely to be convalescent before many days had passed. If it

should come to be understood that there was a deadly obstacle to their

coming into any personal relations with him, the doctor had his doubts

whether there were not those who would subject him to the risk; for there

were coquettes in the village,--strangers, visitors, let us hope,--who

would sacrifice anything or anybody to their vanity and love of conquest.

XXI

AN INTIMATE CONVERSATION.

The illness from which Maurice had suffered left him in a state of

profound prostration. The doctor, who remembered the extreme danger of

any overexertion in such cases, hardly allowed him to lift his head from

the pillow. But his mind was gradually recovering its balance, and he

was able to hold some conversation with those about him. His faithful

Paolo had grown so thin in waiting upon him and watching with him that

the village children had to take a second look at his face when they

passed him to make sure that it was indeed their old friend and no other.

But as his master advanced towards convalescence and the doctor assured

him that he was going in all probability to get well, Paolo's face began

to recover something of its old look and expression, and once more his

pockets filled themselves with comfits for his little circle of

worshipping three and four year old followers.

"How is Mr. Kirkwood?" was the question with which he was always greeted.

In the worst periods of the fever be rarely left his master. When he

did, and the question was put to him, he would shake his head sadly,

sometimes without a word, sometimes with tears and sobs and faltering

words,--more like a brokenhearted child than a stalwart man as he was,

such a man as soldiers are made of in the great Continental armies.

"He very bad,--he no eat nothing,--he--no say nothing,--he never be no

better," and all his Southern nature betrayed itself in a passionate

burst of lamentation. But now that he began to feel easy about his

master, his ready optimism declared itself no less transparently.

"He better every day now. He get well in few weeks, sure. You see him

on hoss in little while." The kind-hearted creature's life was bound up

in that of his "master," as he loved to call him, in sovereign disregard

of the comments of the natives, who held themselves too high for any such

recognition of another as their better. They could not understand how

he, so much their superior in bodily presence, in air and manner, could

speak of the man who employed him in any other way than as "Kirkwood,"

without even demeaning himself so far as to prefix a "Mr." to it. But

"my master" Maurice remained for Paolo in spite of the fact that all men

are born free and equal. And never was a servant more devoted to a

master than was Paolo to Maurice during the days of doubt and danger.

Since his improvement Maurice insisted upon his leaving his chamber and

getting out of the house, so as to breathe the fresh air of which he was

in so much need. It worried him to see his servant returning after too

short an absence. The attendant who had helped him in the care of the

patient was within call, and Paolo was almost driven out of the house by

the urgency of his master's command that he should take plenty of

exercise in the open air.

Notwithstanding the fact of Maurice's improved condition, although the

force of the disease had spent itself, the state of weakness to which he

had been reduced was a cause of some anxiety, and required great

precautions to be taken. He lay in bed, wasted, enfeebled to such a

degree that he had to be cared for very much as a child is tended.

Gradually his voice was coming back to him, so that he could hold some

conversation, as was before mentioned, with those about him. The doctor

waited for the right moment to make mention of the manuscript which

Maurice had submitted to him. Up to this time, although it had been

alluded to and the doctor had told him of the intense interest with which

he had read it, he had never ventured to make it the subject of any long

talk, such as would be liable to fatigue his patient. But now he thought

the time had come.

"I have been thinking," the doctor said, "of the singular seizures to

which you are liable, and as it is my business not merely to think about

such cases, but to do what I can to help any who may be capable of

receiving aid from my art, I wish to have some additional facts about

your history. And in the first place, will you allow me to ask what led

you to this particular place? It is so much less known to the public at

large than many other resorts that we naturally ask, What brings this or

that new visitor among us? We have no ill-tasting, natural spring of bad

water to be analyzed by the state chemist and proclaimed as a specific.

We have no great gambling-houses, no racecourse (except that fox boats on

the lake); we have no coaching-club, no great balls, few lions of any

kind, so we ask, What brings this or that stranger here? And I think I

may venture to ask you whether any, special motive brought you among us,

or whether it was accident that determined your coming to this place."

"Certainly, doctor," Maurice answered, "I will tell you with great

pleasure. Last year I passed on the border of a great river. The year

before I lived in a lonely cottage at the side of the ocean. I wanted

this year to be by a lake. You heard the paper read at the meeting of

your society, or at least you heard of it,--for such matters are always

talked over in a village like this. You can judge by that paper, or

could, if it were before you, of the frame of mind in which I came here.

I was tired of the sullen indifference of the ocean and the babbling

egotism of the river, always hurrying along on its own private business.

I wanted the dreamy stillness of a large, tranquil sheet of water that

had nothing in particular to do, and would leave me to myself and my

thoughts. I had read somewhere about the place, and the old Anchor

Tavern, with its paternal landlord and motherly landlady and

old-fashioned household, and that, though it was no longer open as a

tavern, I could find a resting-place there early in the season, at least

for a few days, while I looked about me for a quiet place in which I

might pass my summer. I have found this a pleasant residence. By being

up early and out late I have kept myself mainly in the solitude which has

become my enforced habit of life. The season has gone by too swiftly for

me since my dream has become a vision."

The doctor was sitting with his hand round Maurice's wrist, three fingers

on his pulse. As he spoke these last words he noticed that the pulse

fluttered a little,--beat irregularly a few times; intermitted; became

feeble and thready; while his cheek grew whiter than the pallid

bloodlessness of his long illness had left it.

"No more talk, now," he said. "You are too tired to be using your voice.

I will hear all the rest another time."

The doctor had interrupted Maurice at an interesting point. What did he

mean by saying that his dream had become a vision? This is what the

doctor was naturally curious, and professionally anxious, to know. But

his hand was still on his patient's pulse, which told him unmistakably

that the heart had taken the alarm and was losing its energy under the

depressing nervous influence. Presently, however, it recovered its

natural force and rhythm, and a faint flush came back to the pale cheek.

The doctor remembered the story of Galen, and the young maiden whose

complaint had puzzled the physicians.

The next day his patient was well enough to enter once more into

conversation.

"You said something about a dream of yours which had become a vision,"

said the doctor, with his fingers on his patient's wrist, as before. He

felt the artery leap, under his pressure, falter a little, stop, then

begin again, growing fuller in its beat. The heart had felt the pull of

the bridle, but the spur had roused it to swift reaction.

"You know the story of my past life, doctor," Maurice answered; "and, I

will tell you what is the vision which has taken the place of my dreams.

You remember the boat-race? I watched it from a distance, but I held a

powerful opera-glass in my hand, which brought the whole crew of the

young ladies' boat so close to me that I could see the features, the

figures, the movements, of every one of the rowers. I saw the little

coxswain fling her bouquet in the track of the other boat,--you remember

how the race was lost and won,--but I saw one face among those young

girls which drew me away from all the rest. It was that of the young lady

who pulled the bow oar, the captain of the boat's crew. I have since

learned her name, you know it well,--I need not name her. Since that day

I have had many distant glimpses of her; and once I met her so squarely

that the deadly sensation came over me, and I felt that in another moment

I should fall senseless at her feet. But she passed on her way and I on

mine, and the spasm which had clutched my heart gradually left it, and I

was as well as before. You know that young lady, doctor?"

"I do; and she is a very noble creature. You are not the first young man

who has been fascinated, almost at a glance, by Miss Euthymia Tower. And

she is well worth knowing more intimately."

The doctor gave him a full account of the young lady, of her early days,

her character, her accomplishments. To all this he listened devoutly,

and when the doctor left him he said to himself, "I will see her and

speak with her, if it costs me my life."

XXII

EUTHYMIA.

"The Wonder" of the Corinna Institute had never willingly made a show of

her gymnastic accomplishments. Her feats, which were so much admired,

were only her natural exercise. Gradually the dumb-bells others used

became too light for her, the ropes she climbed too short, the clubs she

exercised with seemed as if they were made of cork instead of being heavy

wood, and all the tests and meters of strength and agility had been

strained beyond the standards which the records of the school had marked

as their historic maxima. It was not her fault that she broke a

dynamometer one day; she apologized for it, but the teacher said he

wished he could have a dozen broken every year in the same way. The

consciousness of her bodily strength had made her very careful in her

movements. The pressure of her hand was never too hard for the tenderest

little maiden whose palm was against her own. So far from priding

herself on her special gifts, she was disposed to be ashamed of them.

There were times and places in which she could give full play to her

muscles without fear or reproach. She had her special costume for the

boat and for the woods. She would climb the rugged old hemlocks now and

then for the sake of a wide outlook, or to peep into the large nest where

a hawk, or it may be an eagle, was raising her little brood of

air-pirates.

There were those who spoke of her wanderings in lonely places as an

unsafe exposure. One sometimes met doubtful characters about the

neighborhood, and stories were--told of occurrences which might well

frighten a young girl, and make her cautious of trusting herself alone in

the wild solitudes which surrounded the little village.. Those who knew

Euthymia thought her quite equal to taking care of herself. Her very

look was enough to ensure the respect of any vagabond who might cross her

path, and if matters came to the worst she would prove as dangerous as a

panther.

But it was a pity to associate this class of thoughts with a noble

specimen of true womanhood. Health, beauty, strength, were fine

qualities, and in all these she was rich. She enjoyed all her natural

gifts, and thought little about them. Unwillingly, but over-persuaded by

some of her friends, she had allowed her arm and hand to be modelled.

The artists who saw the cast wondered if it would be possible to get the

bust of the maiden from whom it was taken. Nobody would have dared to

suggest such an idea to her except Lurida. For Lurida sex was a trifling

accident, to be disregarded not only in the interests of humanity, but

for the sake of art.

"It is a shame," she said to Euthymia, "that you will not let your

exquisitely moulded form be perpetuated in marble. You have no right to

withhold such a model from the contemplation of your fellow-creatures.

Think how rare it is to see a woman who truly represents the divine idea!

You belong to your race, and not to yourself,--at least, your beauty is a

gift not to be considered as a piece of private property. Look at the

so-called Venus of Milo. Do you suppose the noble woman who was the

original of that divinely chaste statue felt any scruple about allowing

the sculptor to reproduce her pure, unblemished perfections?"

Euthymia was always patient with her imaginative friend. She listened to

her eloquent discourse, but she could not help blushing, used as she was

to Lurida's audacities. "The Terror's" brain had run away with a large

share of the blood which ought to have gone to the nourishment of her

general system. She could not help admiring, almost worshipping, a

companion whose being was rich in the womanly developments with which

nature had so economically endowed herself. An impoverished organization

carries with it certain neutral qualities which make its subject appear,

in the presence of complete manhood and womanhood, like a deaf-mute among

speaking persons. The deep blush which crimsoned Euthymia's cheek at

Lurida's suggestion was in a strange contrast to her own undisturbed

expression. There was a range of sensibilities of which Lurida knew far

less than she did of those many and difficult studies which had absorbed

her vital forces. She was startled to see what an effect her proposal

had produced, for Euthymia was not only blushing, but there was a flame

in her eyes which she had hardly ever seen before.

"Is this only your own suggestion?" Euthymia said, "or has some one been

putting the idea into your head?" The truth was that she had happened to

meet the Interviewer at the Library, one day, and she was offended by the

long, searching stare with which that individual had honored her. It

occurred to her that he, or some such visitor to the place, might have

spoken of her to Lurida, or to some other person who had repeated what

was said to Lurida, as a good subject for the art of the sculptor, and

she felt all her maiden sensibilities offended by the proposition.

Lurida could not understand her excitement, but she was startled by it.

Natures which are complementary of each other are liable to these

accidental collisions of feeling. They get along very well together,

none the worse for their differences, until all at once the tender spot

of one or the other is carelessly handled in utter unconsciousness on the

part of the aggressor, and the exclamation, the outcry, or the explosion

explains the situation altogether too emphatically. Such scenes did not

frequently occur between the two friends, and this little flurry was soon

over; but it served to warn Lurida that Miss Euthymia Tower was not of

that class of self-conscious beauties who would be ready to dispute the

empire of the Venus of Milo on her own ground, in defences as scanty and

insufficient as those of the marble divinity.

Euthymia had had admirers enough, at a distance, while at school, and in

the long vacations, near enough to find out that she was anything but

easy to make love to. She fairly frightened more than one rash youth who

was disposed to be too sentimental in her company. They overdid

flattery, which she was used to and tolerated, but which cheapened the

admirer in her estimation, and now and then betrayed her into an

expression which made him aware of the fact, and was a discouragement to

aggressive amiability. The real difficulty was that not one of her

adorers had ever greatly interested her. It could not be that nature had

made her insensible. It must have been because the man who was made for

her had never yet shown himself. She was not easy to please, that was

certain; and she was one of those young women who will not accept as a

lover one who but half pleases them. She could not pick up the first

stick that fell in her way and take it to shape her ideal out of. Many

of the good people of the village doubted whether Euthymia would ever be

married.

"There 's nothing good enough for her in this village," said the old

landlord of what had been the Anchor Tavern.

"She must wait till a prince comes along," the old landlady said in

reply. "She'd make as pretty a queen as any of them that's born to it.

Wouldn't she be splendid with a gold crown on her head, and di'monds a

glitterin' all over her! D' you remember how handsome she looked in the

tableau, when the fair was held for the Dorcas Society? She had on an old

dress of her grandma's,--they don't make anything half so handsome

nowadays,--and she was just as pretty as a pictur'. But what's the use of

good looks if they scare away folks? The young fellows think that such a

handsome girl as that would cost ten times as much to keep as a plain

one. She must be dressed up like an empress,--so they seem to think. It

ain't so with Euthymy: she'd look like a great lady dressed anyhow, and

she has n't got any more notions than the homeliest girl that ever stood

before a glass to look at herself."

In the humbler walks of Arrowhead Village society, similar opinions were

entertained of Miss Euthymia. The fresh-water fisherman represented

pretty well the average estimate of the class to which he belonged. "I

tell ye," said he to another gentleman of leisure, whose chief occupation

was to watch the coming and going of the visitors to Arrowhead

Village,--"I tell ye that girl ain't a gon to put up with any o' them

slab-sided fellahs that you see hangin' raound to look at her every

Sunday when she comes aout o' meetin'. It's one o' them big gents from

Boston or New York that'll step up an' kerry her off."

In the mean time nothing could be further from the thoughts of Euthymia

than the prospect of an ambitious worldly alliance. The ideals of young

women cost them many and great disappointments, but they save them very

often from those lifelong companionships which accident is constantly

trying to force upon them, in spite of their obvious unfitness. The

higher the ideal, the less likely is the commonplace neighbor who has the

great advantage of easy access, or the boarding-house acquaintance who

can profit by those vacant hours when the least interesting of visitors

is better than absolute loneliness,--the less likely are these

undesirable personages to be endured, pitied, and, if not embraced,

accepted, for want of something better. Euthymia found so much pleasure

in the intellectual companionship of Lurida, and felt her own prudence

and reserve so necessary to that independent young lady, that she had

been contented, so far, with friendship, and thought of love only in an

abstract sort of way. Beneath her abstractions there was a capacity of

loving which might have been inferred from the expression of her

features, the light that shone in her eyes, the tones of her voice, all

of which were full of the language which belongs to susceptible natures.

How many women never say to themselves that they were born to love, until

all at once the discovery opens upon them, as the sense that he was born

a painter is said to have dawned suddenly upon Correggio!

Like all the rest of the village and its visitors, she could not help

thinking a good deal about the young man lying ill amongst strangers. She

was not one of those who had sent him the three-cornered notes or even a

bunch of flowers. She knew that he was receiving abounding tokens of

kindness and sympathy from different quarters, and a certain inward

feeling restrained her from joining in these demonstrations. If he had

been suffering from some deadly and contagious malady she would have

risked her life to help him, without a thought that there was any

wonderful heroism in such self-devotion. Her friend Lurida might have

been capable of the same sacrifice, but it would be after reasoning with

herself as to the obligations which her sense of human rights and duties

laid upon her, and fortifying her courage with the memory of noble deeds

recorded of women in ancient and modern history. With Euthymia the

primary human instincts took precedence of all reasoning or reflection

about them. All her sympathies were excited by the thought of this

forlorn stranger in his solitude, but she felt the impossibility of

giving any complete expression to them. She thought of Mungo Park in the

African desert, and she envied the poor negress who not only pitied him,

but had the blessed opportunity of helping and consoling him. How near

were these two human creatures, each needing the other! How near in

bodily presence, how far apart in their lives, with a barrier seemingly

impassable between them!

XXIII

THE MEETING OF MAURICE AND EUTHYMIA.

These autumnal fevers, which carry off a large number of our young people

every year, are treacherous and deceptive diseases. Not only are they

liable, as has been mentioned, to various accidental complications which

may prove suddenly fatal, but too often, after convalescence seems to be

established, relapses occur which are more serious than the disease had

appeared to be in its previous course. One morning Dr. Butts found

Maurice worse instead of better, as he had hoped and expected to find

him. Weak as he was, there was every reason to fear the issue of this

return of his threatening symptoms. There was not much to do besides

keeping up the little strength which still remained. It was all needed.

Does the reader of these pages ever think of the work a sick man as much

as a well one has to perform while he is lying on his back and taking

what we call his "rest"? More than a thousand times an hour, between a

hundred and fifty and two hundred thousand times a week, he has to lift

the bars of the cage in which his breathing organs are confined, to save

himself from asphyxia. Rest! There is no rest until the last long sigh

tells those who look upon the dying that the ceaseless daily task, to

rest from which is death, is at last finished. We are all galley-slaves,

pulling at the levers of respiration,--which, rising and falling like so

many oars, drive us across an unfathomable ocean from one unknown shore

to another. No! Never was a galley-slave so chained as we are to these

four and twenty oars, at which we must tug day and night all our life

long.

The doctor could not find any accidental cause to account for this

relapse. It presently occurred to him that there might be some local

source of infection which had brought on the complaint, and was still

keeping up the symptoms which were the ground of alarm. He determined to

remove Maurice to his own house, where he could be sure of pure air, and

where he himself could give more constant attention to his patient during

this critical period of his disease. It was a risk to take, but he could

be carried on a litter by careful men, and remain wholly passive during

the removal. Maurice signified his assent, as he could hardly help

doing,--for the doctor's suggestion took pretty nearly the form of a

command. He thought it a matter of life and death, and was gently urgent

for his patient's immediate change of residence. The doctor insisted on

having Maurice's books and other movable articles carried to his own

house, so that he should be surrounded by familiar sights, and not worry

himself about what might happen to objects which he valued, if they were

left behind him.

All these dispositions were quickly and quietly made, and everything was

ready for the transfer of the patient to the house of the hospitable

physician. Paolo was at the doctor's, superintending the arrangement of

Maurice's effects and making all ready for his master. The nurse in

attendance, a trustworthy man enough in the main, finding his patient in

a tranquil sleep, left his bedside for a little fresh air. While he was

at the door he heard a shouting which excited his curiosity, and he

followed the sound until he found himself at the border of the lake. It

was nothing very wonderful which had caused the shouting. A Newfoundland

dog had been showing off his accomplishments, and some of the idlers were

betting as to the time it would take him to bring back to his master the

various floating objects which had been thrown as far from the shore as

possible. He watched the dog a few minutes, when his attention was drawn

to a light wherry, pulled by one young lady and steered by another. It

was making for the shore, which it would soon reach. The attendant

remembered all at once, that he had left his charge, and just before the

boat came to land he turned and hurried back to the patient. Exactly how

long he had been absent he could not have said,--perhaps a quarter of an

hour, perhaps longer; the time appeared short to him, wearied with long

sitting and watching.

It had seemed, when he stole away from Maurice's bedside, that he was not

in the least needed. The patient was lying perfectly quiet, and to all

appearance wanted nothing more than letting alone. It was such a comfort

to look at something besides the worn features of a sick man, to hear

something besides his labored breathing and faint, half-whispered words,

that the temptation to indulge in these luxuries for a few minutes had

proved irresistible.

Unfortunately, Maurice's slumbers did not remain tranquil during the

absence of the nurse. He very soon fell into a dream, which began

quietly enough, but in the course of the sudden transitions which dreams

are in the habit of undergoing became successively anxious, distressing,

terrifying. His earlier and later experiences came up before him,

fragmentary, incoherent, chaotic even, but vivid as reality. He was at

the bottom of a coal-mine in one of those long, narrow galleries, or

rather worm-holes, in which human beings pass a large part of their

lives, like so many larvae boring their way into the beams and rafters of

some old building. How close the air was in the stifling passage through

which he was crawling! The scene changed, and he was climbing a slippery

sheet of ice with desperate effort, his foot on the floor of a shallow

niche, his hold an icicle ready to snap in an instant, an abyss below him

waiting for his foot to slip or the icicle to break. How thin the air

seemed, how desperately hard to breathe! He was thinking of Mont Blanc,

it may be, and the fearfully rarefied atmosphere which he remembered well

as one of the great trials in his mountain ascents. No, it was not Mont

Blanc,--it was not any one of the frozen Alpine summits; it was Hecla

that he was climbing.

The smoke of the burning mountain was wrapping itself around him; he was

choking with its dense fumes; he heard the flames roaring around him, he

felt the hot lava beneath his feet, he uttered a faint cry, and awoke.

The room was full of smoke. He was gasping for breath, strangling in the

smothering oven which his chamber had become.

The house was on fire!

He tried to call for help, but his voice failed him, and died away in a

whisper. He made a desperate effort, and rose so as to sit up in the bed

for an instant, but the effort was too much for him, and he sank back

upon his pillow, helpless. He felt that his hour had come, for he could

not live in this dreadful atmosphere, and he was left alone. He could

hear the crackle of fire as the flame crept along from one partition to

another. It was a cruel fate to be left to perish in that way,--the fate

that many a martyr had had to face,--to be first strangled and then

burned. Death had not the terror for him that it has for most young

persons. He was accustomed to thinking of it calmly, sometimes

wistfully, even to such a degree that the thought of self-destruction had

come upon him as a temptation. But here was death in an unexpected and

appalling shape. He did not know before how much he cared to live. All

his old recollections came before him as it were in one long, vivid

flash. The closed vista of memory opened to its far horizon-line, and

past and present were pictured in a single instant of clear vision. The

dread moment which had blighted his life returned in all its terror. He

felt the convulsive spring in the form of a faint, impotent spasm,--the

rush of air,--the thorns of the stinging and lacerating cradle into which

he was precipitated. One after another those paralyzing seizures which

had been like deadening blows on the naked heart seemed to repeat

themselves, as real as at the moment of their occurrence. The pictures

passed in succession with such rapidity that they appeared almost as if

simultaneous. The vision of the "inward eye" was so intensified in this

moment of peril that an instant was like an hour of common existence.

Those who have been very near drowning know well what this description

means. The development of a photograph may not explain it, but it

illustrates the curious and familiar fact of the revived recollections of

the drowning man's experience. The sensitive plate has taken one look at

a scene, and remembers it all,

Every little circumstance is there,--the hoof in air, the wing in flight,

the leaf as it falls, the wave as it breaks. All there, but invisible;

potentially present, but impalpable, inappreciable, as if not existing at

all. A wash is poured over it, and the whole scene comes out in all its

perfection of detail. In those supreme moments when death stares a man

suddenly in the face the rush of unwonted emotion floods the undeveloped

pictures of vanished years, stored away in the memory, the vast panorama

of a lifetime, and in one swift instant the past comes out as vividly as

if it were again the present. So it was at this moment with the sick

man, as he lay helpless and felt that he was left to die. For he saw no

hope of relief: the smoke was drifting in clouds into the room; the

flames were very near; if he was not reached and rescued immediately it

was all over with him.

His past life had flashed before him. Then all at once rose the thought

of his future,--of all its possibilities, of the vague hopes which he had

cherished of late that his mysterious doom would be lifted from him.

There was something, then, to be lived for, something! There was a new

life, it might be, in store for him, and such a new life! He thought of

all he was losing. Oh, could he but have lived to know the meaning of

love! And the passionate desire of life came over him,--not the dread of

death, but the longing for what the future might yet have of happiness

for him.

All this took place in the course of a very few moments. Dreams and

visions have little to do with measured time, and ten minutes, possibly

fifteen or twenty, were all that had passed since the beginning of those

nightmare terrors which were evidently suggested by the suffocating air

he was breathing.

What had happened? In the confusion of moving books and other articles

to the doctor's house, doors and windows had been forgotten. Among the

rest a window opening into the cellar, where some old furniture had been

left by a former occupant, had been left unclosed. One of the lazy

natives, who had lounged by the house smoking a bad cigar, had thrown the

burning stump in at this open window. He had no particular intention of

doing mischief, but he had that indifference to consequences which is the

next step above the inclination to crime. The burning stump happened to

fall among the straw of an old mattress which had been ripped open. The

smoker went his way without looking behind him, and it so chanced that no

other person passed the house for some time. Presently the straw was in

a blaze, and from this the fire extended to the furniture, to the

stairway leading up from the cellar, and was working its way along the

entry under the stairs leading up to the apartment where Maurice was

lying.

The blaze was fierce and swift, as it could not help being with such a

mass of combustibles,--loose straw from the mattress, dry old furniture,

and old warped floors which had been parching and shrinking for a score

or two of years. The whole house was, in the common language of the

newspaper reports, "a perfect tinder-box," and would probably be a heap

of ashes in half an hour. And there was this unfortunate deserted sick

man lying between life and death, beyond all help unless some unexpected

assistance should come to his rescue.

As the attendant drew near the house where Maurice was lying, he was

horror-struck to see dense volumes of smoke pouring out of the lower

windows. It was beginning to make its way through the upper windows,

also, and presently a tongue of fire shot out and streamed upward along

the side of the house. The man shrieked Fire! Fire! with all his might,

and rushed to the door of the building to make his way to Maurice's room

and save him. He penetrated but a short distance when, blinded and

choking with the smoke, he rushed headlong down the stairs with a cry of

despair that roused every man, woman, and child within reach of a human

voice. Out they came from their houses in every quarter of the village.

The shout of Fire! Fire! was the chief aid lent by many of the young and

old. Some caught up pails and buckets: the more thoughtful ones filling

them; the hastier snatching them up empty, trusting to find water nearer

the burning building.

Is the sick man moved?

This was the awful question first asked,--for in the little village all

knew that Maurice was about being transferred to the doctor's house. The

attendant, white as death, pointed to the chamber where he had left him,

and gasped out,

"He is there!"

A ladder! A ladder! was the general cry, and men and boys rushed off in

search of one. But a single minute was an age now, and there was no

ladder to be had without a delay of many minutes. The sick man was going

to be swallowed up in the flames before it could possibly arrive. Some

were going for a blanket or a coverlet, in the hope that the young man

might have strength enough to leap from the window and be safely caught

in it. The attendant shook his head, and said faintly,

"He cannot move from his bed."

One of the visitors at the village,--a millionaire, it was said,--a

kind-hearted man, spoke in hoarse, broken tones:

"A thousand dollars to the man that will bring him from his chamber!"

The fresh-water fisherman muttered, "I should like to save the man and to

see the money, but it ain't a thaousan' dollars, nor ten thaousan'

dollars, that'll pay a fellah for burnin' to death,--or even chokin' to

death, anyhaow."

The carpenter, who knew the framework of every house in the village,

recent or old, shook his head.

"The stairs have been shored up," he said, "and when the fists that holds

'em up goes, down they'll come. It ain't safe for no man to go over them

stairs. Hurry along your ladder,--that's your only chance."

All was wild confusion around the burning house. The ladder they had

gone for was missing from its case,--a neighbor had carried it off for

the workmen who were shingling his roof. It would never get there in

time. There was a fire-engine, but it was nearly half a mile from the

lakeside settlement. Some were throwing on water in an aimless, useless

way; one was sending a thin stream through a garden syringe: it seemed

like doing something, at least. But all hope of saving Maurice was fast

giving way, so rapid was the progress of the flames, so thick the cloud

of smoke that filled the house and poured from the windows. Nothing was

heard but confused cries, shrieks of women, all sorts of orders to do

this and that, no one knowing what was to be done. The ladder! The

ladder! Five minutes more and it will be too late!

In the mean time the alarm of fire had reached Paolo, and he had stopped

his work of arranging Maurice's books in the same way as that in which

they had stood in his apartment, and followed in the direction of the

sound, little thinking that his master was lying helpless in the burning

house. "Some chimney afire," he said to himself; but he would go and

take a look, at any rate.

Before Paolo had reached the scene of destruction and impending death,

two young women, in boating dresses of decidedly Bloomerish aspect, had

suddenly joined the throng. "The Wonder" and "The Terror" of their

school-days--Miss Euthymia rower and Miss Lurida Vincent had just come

from the shore, where they had left their wherry. A few hurried words

told them the fearful story. Maurice Kirkwood was lying in the chamber

to which every eye was turned, unable to move, doomed to a dreadful

death. All that could be hoped was that he would perish by suffocation

rather than by the flames, which would soon be upon him. The man who had

attended him had just tried to reach his chamber, but had reeled back out

of the door, almost strangled by the smoke. A thousand dollars had been

offered to any one who would rescue the sick man, but no one had dared to

make the attempt; for the stairs might fall at any moment, if the smoke

did not blind and smother the man who passed them before they fell.

The two young women looked each other in the face for one swift moment.

"How can he be reached?" asked Lurida. "Is there nobody that will

venture his life to save a brother like that?"

"I will venture mine," said Euthymia.

"No! no!" shrieked Lurida,--"not you! not you! It is a man's work, not

yours! You shall not go!" Poor Lurida had forgotten all her theories in

this supreme moment. But Euthymia was not to be held back. Taking a

handkerchief from her neck, she dipped it in a pail of water and bound it

about her head. Then she took several deep breaths of air, and filled

her lungs as full as they would hold. She knew she must not take a

single breath in the choking atmosphere if she could possibly help it,

and Euthymia was noted for her power of staying under water so long that

more than once those who saw her dive thought she would never come up

again. So rapid were her movements that they paralyzed the bystanders,

who would forcibly have prevented her from carrying out her purpose. Her

imperious determination was not to be resisted. And so Euthymia, a

willing martyr, if martyr she was to be, and not saviour, passed within

the veil that hid the sufferer.

Lurida turned deadly pale, and sank fainting to the ground. She was the

first, but not the only one, of her sex that fainted as Euthymia

disappeared in the smoke of the burning building. Even the rector grew

very white in the face,--so white that one of his vestry-men begged him

to sit down at once, and sprinkled a few drops of water on his forehead,

to his great disgust and manifest advantage. The old landlady was crying

and moaning, and her husband was wiping his eyes and shaking his head

sadly.

"She will nevar come out alive," he said solemnly.

"Nor dead, neither," added the carpenter. "Ther' won't be nothing left

of neither of 'em but ashes." And the carpenter hid his face in his

hands.

The fresh-water fisherman had pulled out a rag which he called a

"hangkercher,"--it had served to carry bait that morning,--and was making

use of its best corner to dry the tears which were running down his

cheeks. The whole village was proud of Euthymia, and with these more

quiet signs of grief were mingled loud lamentations, coming alike from

old and young.

All this was not so much like a succession of events as it was like a

tableau. The lookers-on were stunned with its suddenness, and before

they had time to recover their bewildered senses all was lost, or seemed

lost. They felt that they should never look again on either of those

young faces.

The rector, not unfeeling by nature, but inveterately professional by

habit, had already recovered enough to be thinking of a text for the

funeral sermon. The first that occurred to him was this,--vaguely, of

course, in the background of consciousness:

"Then Shadrach, Meshach, and Abed-nego came forth of the midst of the

fire."

The village undertaker was of naturally sober aspect and reflective

disposition. He had always been opposed to cremation, and here was a

funeral pile blazing before his eyes. He, too, had his human sympathies,

but in the distance his imagination pictured the final ceremony, and how

he himself should figure in a spectacle where the usual centre piece of

attraction would be wanting,--perhaps his own services uncalled for.

Blame him not, you whose garden-patch is not watered with the tears of

mourners. The string of self-interest answers with its chord to every

sound; it vibrates with the funeral-bell, it finds itself trembling to

the wail of the De Profundis. Not always,--not always; let us not be

cynical in our judgments, but common human nature, we may safely say, is

subject to those secondary vibrations under the most solemn and

soul-subduing influences.

It seems as if we were doing great wrong to the scene we are

contemplating in delaying it by the description of little circumstances

and individual thoughts and feelings. But linger as we may, we cannot

compress into a chapter--we could not crowd into a volume--all that

passed through the minds and stirred the emotions of the awe-struck

company which was gathered about the scene of danger and of terror. We

are dealing with an impossibility: consciousness is a surface; narrative

is a line.

Maurice had given himself up for lost. His breathing was becoming every

moment more difficult, and he felt that his strength could hold out but a

few minutes longer.

"Robert!" he called in faint accents. But the attendant was not there to

answer.

"Paolo! Paolo!" But the faithful servant, who would have given his life

for his master, had not yet reached the place where the crowd was

gathered.

"Oh, for a breath of air! Oh, for an arm to lift me from this bed! Too

late! Too late!" he gasped, with what might have seemed his dying

expiration.

"Not too late!" The soft voice reached his obscured consciousness as if

it had come down to him from heaven.

In a single instant he found himself rolled in a blanket and in the arms

of--a woman!

Out of the stifling chamber,--over the burning stairs,--close by the

tongues of fire that were lapping up all they could reach,--out into the

open air, he was borne swiftly and safely,--carried as easily as if he

had been a babe, in the strong arms of "The Wonder" of the gymnasium, the

captain of the Atalanta, who had little dreamed of the use she was to

make of her natural gifts and her school-girl accomplishments.

Such a cry as arose from the crowd of on-lookers! It was a sound that

none of them had ever heard before or could expect ever to hear again,

unless he should be one of the last boat-load rescued from a sinking

vessel. Then, those who had resisted the overflow of their emotion, who

had stood in white despair as they thought of these two young lives soon

to be wrapped in their burning shroud,--those stern men--the old

sea-captain, the hard-faced, moneymaking, cast-iron tradesmen of the city

counting-room--sobbed like hysteric women; it was like a convulsion that

overcame natures unused to those deeper emotions which many who are

capable of experiencing die without ever knowing.

This was the scene upon which the doctor and Paolo suddenly appeared at

the same moment.

As the fresh breeze passed over the face of the rescued patient, his eyes

opened wide, and his consciousness returned in almost supernatural

lucidity. Euthymia had sat down upon a bank, and was still supporting

him. His head was resting on her bosom. Through his awakening senses

stole the murmurs of the living cradle which rocked him with the wavelike

movements of respiration, the soft susurrus of the air that entered with

every breath, the double beat of the heart which throbbed close to his

ear. And every sense, and every instinct, and every reviving pulse told

him in language like a revelation from another world that a woman's arms

were around him, and that it was life, and not death, which her embrace

had brought him.

She would have disengaged him from her protecting hold, but the doctor

made her a peremptory sign, which he followed by a sharp command:--

"Do not move him a hair's breadth," he said. "Wait until the litter

comes. Any sudden movement might be dangerous. Has anybody a brandy

flask about him?"

One or two members of the local temperance society looked rather awkward,

but did not come forward.

The fresh-water fisherman was the first who spoke.

"I han't got no brandy," he said, "but there's a drop or two of old

Medford rum in this here that you're welcome to, if it'll be of any help.

I alliz kerry a little on 't in case o' gettin' wet 'n' chilled."

So saying he held forth a flat bottle with the word Sarsaparilla stamped

on the green glass, but which contained half a pint or more of the

specific on which he relied in those very frequent exposures which happen

to persons of his calling.

The doctor motioned back Paolo, who would have rushed at once to the aid

of Maurice, and who was not wanted at that moment. So poor Paolo, in an

agony of fear for his master, was kept as quiet as possible, and had to

content himself with asking all sorts of questions and repeating all the

prayers he could think of to Our Lady and to his holy namesake the

Apostle.

The doctor wiped the mouth of the fisherman's bottle very carefully.

"Take a few drops of this cordial," he said, as he held it to his

patient's lips. "Hold him just so, Euthymia, without stirring. I will

watch him, and say when he is ready to be moved. The litter is near by,

waiting." Dr. Butts watched Maurice's pulse and color. The "Old

Medford" knew its business. It had knocked over its tens of thousands;

it had its redeeming virtue, and helped to set up a poor fellow now and

then. It did this for Maurice very effectively. When he seemed somewhat

restored, the doctor had the litter brought to his side, and Euthymia

softly resigned her helpless burden, which Paolo and the attendant Robert

lifted with the aid of the doctor, who walked by the patient as he was

borne to the home where Mrs. Butts had made all ready for his reception.

As for poor Lurida, who had thought herself equal to the sanguinary

duties of the surgeon, she was left lying on the grass with an old woman

over her, working hard with fan and smelling-salts to bring her back from

her long fainting fit.

XXIV

THE INEVITABLE.

Why should not human nature be the same in Arrowhead Village as

elsewhere? It could not seem strange to the good people of that place

and their visitors that these two young persons, brought together under

circumstances that stirred up the deepest emotions of which the human

soul is capable, should become attached to each other. But the bond

between them was stronger than any knew, except the good doctor, who had

learned the great secret of Maurice's life. For the first time since his

infancy he had fully felt the charm which the immediate presence of

youthful womanhood carries with it. He could hardly believe the fact when

he found himself no longer the subject of the terrifying seizures of

which he had had many and threatening experiences.

It was the doctor's business to save his patient's life, if he could

possibly do it. Maurice had been reduced to the most perilous state of

debility by the relapse which had interrupted his convalescence. Only by

what seemed almost a miracle had he survived the exposure to suffocation

and the mental anguish through which he had passed. It was perfectly

clear to Dr. Butts that if Maurice could see the young woman to whom he

owed his life, and, as the doctor felt assured, the revolution in his

nervous system which would be the beginning of a new existence, it would

be of far more value as a restorative agency than any or all of the drugs

in the pharmacopoeia. He told this to Euthymia, and explained the matter

to her parents and friends. She must go with him on some of his visits.

Her mother should go with her, or her sister; but this was a case of life

and death, and no maidenly scruples must keep her from doing her duty.

The first of her visits to the sick, perhaps dying, man presented a scene

not unlike the picture before spoken of on the title-page of the old

edition of Galen. The doctor was perhaps the most agitated of the little

group. He went before the others, took his seat by the bedside, and held

the patient's wrist with his finger on the pulse. As Euthymia entered it

gave a single bound, fluttered for an instant as if with a faint memory

of its old habit, then throbbed full and strong, comparatively, as if

under the spur of some powerful stimulus. Euthymia's task was a delicate

one, but she knew how to disguise its difficulty.

"Here is a flower I have brought you, Mr. Kirkwood," she said, and handed

him a white chrysanthemum. He took it from her hand, and before she knew

it he took her hand into his own, and held it with a gentle constraint.

What could she do? Here was the young man whose life she had saved, at

least for the moment, and who was yet in danger from the disease which

had almost worn out his powers of resistance.

"Sit down by Mr. Kirkwood's side," said the doctor. "He wants to thank

you, if he has strength to do it, for saving him from the death which

seemed inevitable."

Not many words could Maurice command. He was weak enough for womanly

tears, but their fountains no longer flowed; it was with him as with the

dying, whose eyes may light up, but rarely shed a tear.

The river which has found a new channel widens and deepens--it; it lets

the old water-course fill up, and never returns to its forsaken bed. The

tyrannous habit was broken. The prophecy of the gitana had verified

itself, and the ill a fair woman had wrought a fairer woman bad conquered

and abolished.

The history of Maurice Kirkwood loses its exceptional character from the

time of his restoration to his natural conditions. His convalescence was

very slow and gradual, but no further accident interrupted its even

progress. The season was over, the summer visitors had left Arrowhead

Village; the chrysanthemums were going out of flower, the frosts had

come, and Maurice was still beneath the roof of the kind physician. The

relation between him and his preserver was so entirely apart from all

common acquaintances and friendships that no ordinary rules could apply

to it. Euthymia visited him often during the period of his extreme

prostration.

"You must come every day," the doctor said. "He gains with every visit

you make him; he pines if you miss him for a single day." So she came

and sat by him, the doctor or good Mrs. Butts keeping her company in his

presence. He grew stronger,--began to sit up in bed; and at last

Euthymia found him dressed as in health, and beginning to walk about the

room. She was startled. She had thought of herself as a kind of nurse,

but the young gentleman could hardly be said to need a nurse any longer.

She had scruples about making any further visits. She asked Lurida what

she thought about it.

"Think about it?" said Lurida. "Why should n't you go to see a brother

as well as a sister, I should like to know? If you are afraid to go to

see Maurice Kirkwood, I am not afraid, at any rate. If you would rather

have me go than go yourself, I will do it, and let people talk just as

much as they want to. Shall I go instead of you?"

Euthymia was not quite sure that this would be the best thing for the

patient. The doctor had told her he thought there were special reasons

for her own course in coming daily to see him. "I am afraid," she said,

"you are too bright to be safe for him in his weak state. Your mind is

such a stimulating one, you know. A dull sort of person like myself is

better for him just now. I will continue visiting him as long as the

doctor says it is important that I should; but you must defend me,

Lurida,--I know you can explain it all so that people will not blame me."

Euthymia knew full well what the effect of Lurida's penetrating

head-voice would be in a convalescent's chamber. She knew how that

active mind of hers would set the young man's thoughts at work, when what

he wanted was rest of every faculty. Were not these good and sufficient

reasons for her decision? What others could there be?

So Euthymia kept on with her visits, until she blushed to see that she

was continuing her charitable office for one who was beginning to look

too well to be called an invalid. It was a dangerous condition of

affairs, and the busy tongues of the village gossips were free in their

comments. Free, but kindly, for the story of the rescue had melted every

heart; and what could be more natural than that these two young people

whom God had brought together in the dread moment of peril should find it

hard to tear themselves asunder after the hour of danger was past? When

gratitude is a bankrupt, love only can pay his debts; and if Maurice gave

his heart to Euthymia, would not she receive it as payment in full?

The change which had taken place in the vital currents of Maurice

Kirkwood's system was as simple and solid a fact as the change in a

magnetic needle when the boreal becomes the austral pole, and the austral

the boreal. It was well, perhaps, that this change took place while he

was enfeebled by the wasting effects of long illness. For all the

long-defeated, disturbed, perverted instincts had found their natural

channel from the centre of consciousness to the organ which throbs in

response to every profound emotion. As his health gradually returned,

Euthymia could not help perceiving a flush in his cheek, a glitter in his

eyes, a something in the tone of his voice, which altogether were a

warning to the young maiden that the highway of friendly intercourse was

fast narrowing to a lane, at the head of which her woman's eye could read

plainly enough, "Dangerous passing."

"You look so much better to-day, Mr. Kirkwood," she said, "that I think I

had better not play Sister of Charity any longer. The next time we meet

I hope you will be strong enough to call on me."

She was frightened to see how pale he turned,--he was weaker than she

thought. There was a silence so profound and so long that Mrs. Butts

looked up from the stocking she was knitting. They had forgotten the

good woman's presence.

Presently Maurice spoke,--very faintly, but Mrs. Butts dropped a stitch

at the first word, and her knitting fell into her lap as she listened to

what followed.

"No! you must not leave me. You must never leave me. You saved my life.

But you have done more than that,--more than you know or can ever know.

To you I owe it that I am living; with you I live henceforth, if I am to

live at all. All I am, all I hope,--will you take this poor offering

from one who owes you everything, whose lips never touched those of woman

or breathed a word of love before you?"

What could Euthymia reply to this question, uttered with all the depth of

a passion which had never before found expression.

Not one syllable of answer did listening Mrs. Butts overhear. But she

told her husband afterwards that there was nothing in the tableaux they

had had in September to compare with what she then saw. It was indeed a

pleasing picture which those two young heads presented as Euthymia gave

her inarticulate but infinitely expressive answer to the question of

Maurice Kirkwood. The good-hearted woman thought it time to leave the

young people. Down went the stocking with the needles in it; out of her

lap tumbled the ball of worsted, rolling along the floor with its yarn

trailing after it, like some village matron who goes about circulating

from hearth to hearth, leaving all along her track the story of the new

engagement or of the arrival of the last "little stranger."

Not many suns had set before it was told all through Arrowhead Village

that Maurice Kirkwood was the accepted lover of Euthymia Tower.

POSTSCRIPT: AFTER-GLIMPSES.

MISS LURIDA VINCENT TO MRS. EUTHYMIA KIRKWOOD. ARROWHEAD VILLAGE, May 18.

MY DEAREST EUTHYMIA,--Who would have thought, when you broke your oar as

the Atalanta flashed by the Algonquin, last June, that before the roses

came again you would find yourself the wife of a fine scholar and grand

gentleman, and the head of a household such as that of which you are the

mistress? You must not forget your old Arrowhead Village friends. What

am I saying?---you forget them! No, dearest, I know your heart too well

for that! You are not one of those who lay aside their old friendships

as they do last years bonnet when they get a new one. You have told me

all about yourself and your happiness, and now you want me to tell you

about myself and what is going on in our little place.

And first about myself. I have given up the idea of becoming a doctor.

I have studied mathematics so much that I have grown fond of certainties,

of demonstrations, and medicine deals chiefly in probabilities. The

practice of the art is so mixed up with the deepest human interests that

it is hard to pursue it with that even poise of the intellect which is

demanded by science. I want knowledge pure and simple,--I do not fancy

having it mixed. Neither do I like the thought of passing my life in

going from one scene of suffering to another; I am not saintly enough for

such a daily martyrdom, nor callous enough to make it an easy occupation.

I fainted at the first operation I saw, and I have never wanted to see

another. I don't say that I wouldn't marry a physician, if the right one

asked me, but the young doctor is not forthcoming at present. Yes, I

think I might make a pretty good doctor's wife. I could teach him a good

deal about headaches and backaches and all sorts of nervous revolutions,

as the doctor says the French women call their tantrums. I don't know

but I should be willing to let him try his new medicines on me. If he

were a homeopath, I know I should; for if a billionth of a grain of sugar

won't begin to sweeten my tea or coffee, I don't feel afraid that a

billionth of a grain of anything would poison me,--no, not if it were

snake-venom; and if it were not disgusting, I would swallow a handful of

his lachesis globules, to please my husband. But if I ever become a

doctor's wife, my husband will not be one of that kind of practitioners,

you may be sure of that, nor an "eclectic," nor a "faith-cure man." On

the whole, I don't think I want to be married at all. I don't like the

male animal very well (except such noble specimens as your husband).

They are all tyrants,--almost all,--so far as our sex is concerned, and I

often think we could get on better without them.

However, the creatures are useful in the Society. They send us papers,

some of them well worth reading. You have told me so often that you

would like to know how the Society is getting on, and to read some of the

papers sent to it if they happened to be interesting, that I have laid

aside one or two manuscripts expressly for your perusal. You will get

them by and by.

I am delighted to know that you keep Paolo with you. Arrowhead Village

misses him dreadfully, I can tell you. That is the reason people become

so attached to these servants with Southern sunlight in their natures? I

suppose life is not long enough to cool their blood down to our Northern

standard. Then they are so child-like, whereas the native of these

latitudes is never young after he is ten or twelve years old. Mother

says,--you know mother's old-fashioned notions, and how shrewd and

sensible she is in spite of them,--mother says that when she was a girl

families used to import young men and young women from the country towns,

who called themselves "helps," not servants,--no, that was Scriptural;

"but they did n't know everything down in Judee," and it is not good

American language. She says that these people would live in the same

household until they were married, and the women often remain in the same

service until they died or were old and worn out, and then, what with the

money they had saved and the care and assistance they got from their

former employers, would pass a decent and comfortable old age, and be

buried in the family lot. Mother has made up her mind to the change, but

grandmother is bitter about it. She says there never was a country yet

where the population was made up of "ladies" and "gentlemen," and she

does n't believe there can be; nor that putting a spread eagle on a

copper makes a gold dollar of it. She is a pessimist after her own

fashion. She thinks all sentiment is dying out of our people. No

loyalty for the sovereign, the king-post of the political edifice, she

says; no deep attachment between employer and employed; no reverence of

the humbler members of a household for its heads; and to make sure of

continued corruption and misery, what she calls "universal suffrage"

emptying all the sewers into the great aqueduct we all must drink from.

"Universal suffrage!" I suppose we women don't belong to the universe!

Wait until we get a chance at the ballot-box, I tell grandma, and see if

we don't wash out the sewers before they reach the aqueduct! But my pen

has run away with men I was thinking of Paolo, and what a pleasant thing

it is to have one of those child-like, warm-hearted, attachable,

cheerful, contented, humble, faithful, companionable, but never presuming

grownup children of the South waiting on one, as if everything he could

do for one was a pleasure, and carrying a look of content in his face

which makes every one who meets him happier for a glimpse of his

features.

It does seem a shame that the charming relation of master and servant,

intelligent authority and cheerful obedience, mutual interest in each

other's welfare, thankful recognition of all the advantages which belong

to domestic service in the better class of families, should be almost

wholly confined to aliens and their immediate descendants. Why should

Hannah think herself so much better than Bridget? When they meet at the

polls together, as they will before long, they will begin to feel more of

an equality than is recognized at present. The native female turns her

nose up at the idea of "living out;" does she think herself so much

superior to the women of other nationalities? Our women will have to

come to it,--so grandmother says,--in another generation or two, and in a

hundred years, according to her prophecy, there will be a new set of old

"Miss Pollys" and "Miss Betseys" who have lived half a century in the

same families, respectful and respected, cherished, cared for in time of

need (citizens as well as servants, holding a ballot as well as a broom,

I tell her), and bringing back to us the lowly, underfoot virtues of

contentment and humility, which we do so need to carpet the barren and

hungry thoroughfare of our unstratified existence.

There, I have got a-going, and am forgetting all the news I have to tell

you. There is an engagement you will want to know all about. It came to

pass through our famous boat-race, which you and I remember, and shall

never forget as long as we live. It seems that the young fellow who

pulled the bow oar of that men's college boat which we had the pleasure

of beating got some glimpses of Georgina, our handsome stroke oar. I

believe he took it into his head that it was she who threw the bouquet

that won the race for us. He was, as you know, greatly mistaken, and

ought to have made love to me, only he did n't. Well, it seems he came

posting down to the Institute just before the vacation was over, and

there got a sight of Georgina. I wonder whether she told him she didn't

fling the bouquet! Anyhow, the acquaintance began in that way, and now

it seems that this young fellow, good-looking and a bright scholar, but

with a good many months more to pass in college, is her captive. It was

too bad. Just think of my bouquet's going to another girl's credit! No

matter, the old Atalanta story was paid off, at any rate.

You want to know all about dear Dr. Butts. They say he has just been

offered a Professorship in one of the great medical colleges. I asked

him about it, and he did not say that he had or had not. "But," said be,

"suppose that I had been offered such a place; do you think I ought to

accept it and leave Arrowhead Village? Let us talk it over," said he,

"just as if I had had such an offer." I told him he ought to stay.

There are plenty of men that can get into a Professor's chair, I said,

and talk like Solomons to a class of wondering pupils: but once get a

really good doctor in a place, a man who knows all about everybody,

whether they have this or that tendency, whether when they are sick they

have a way of dying or a way of getting well, what medicines agree with

them and what drugs they cannot take, whether they are of the sort that

think nothing is the matter with them until they are dead as smoked

herring, or of the sort that send for the minister if they get a

stomach-ache from eating too many cucumbers,--who knows all about all the

people within half a dozen miles (all the sensible ones, that is, who

employ a regular practitioner),--such a man as that, I say, is not to be

replaced like a missing piece out of a Springfield musket or a Waltham

watch. Don't go! said I. Stay here and save our precious lives, if you

can, or at least put us through in the proper way, so that we needn't be

ashamed of ourselves for dying, if we must die. Well, Dr. Butts is not

going to leave us. I hope you will have no unwelcome occasion for his

services,--you are never ill, you know,--but, anyhow, he is going to be

here, and no matter what happens he will be on hand.

The village news is not of a very exciting character. Item 1. A new

house is put up over the ashes of the one in which your husband lived

while he was here. It was planned by one of the autochthonous

inhabitants with the most ingenious combination of inconveniences that

the natural man could educe from his original perversity of intellect.

To get at any one room you must pass through every other. It is blind, or

nearly so, on the only side which has a good prospect, and commands a

fine view of the barn and pigsty through numerous windows. Item 2. We

have a small fire-engine near the new house which can be worked by a man

or two, and would be equal to the emergency of putting out a bunch of

fire-crackers. Item 3. We have a new ladder, in a bog, close to the new

fire-engine, so if the new house catches fire, like its predecessor, and

there should happen to, be a sick man on an upper floor, he can be got

out without running the risk of going up and down a burning staircase.

What a blessed thing it was that there was no fire-engine near by and no

ladder at hand on the day of the great rescue! If there had been, what a

change in your programme of life! You remember that "cup of tea spilt on

Mrs. Masham's apron," which we used to read of in one of Everett's

Orations, and all its wide-reaching consequences in the affairs of

Europe. I hunted up that cup of tea as diligently as ever a Boston

matron sought for the last leaves in her old caddy after the tea-chests

had been flung overboard at Griffin's wharf,--but no matter about that,

now. That is the way things come about in this world. I must write a

lecture on lucky mishaps, or, more elegantly, fortunate calamities. It

will be just the converse of that odd essay of Swift's we read together,

the awkward and stupid things done with the best intentions. Perhaps I

shall deliver the lecture in your city: you will come and hear it, and

bring him, won't you, dearest? Always, your loving

LURIDA.