"Get me some fresh candles--long ones; longer than these--as long as
you possibly can," Esther says that same evening, on going to bed, to
the housemaid whom she finds putting coals on her fire.
"I think, 'm, that you will find these will last for to-night," the
woman answers, looking at the very respectable dimensions of the unlit
candles on Esther's queer old-fashioned toilet-table.
"No--no, they won't!" she answers, nervously; "it is better to be on
the safe side."
"Would you like a night-light, miss?"
"Oh no, no! they make the corners of the room blacker than ever, and
they cast such odd shadows. I'm _so_ afraid of the dark," she ends,
shuddering.
"I'm afraid you don't sleep well, 'm?"
"Not very. By-the-by" (with a sudden inspiration), "have you got
anything that you could give me to make me sleep--any opiate of any
kind?"
"I've got a little laudanum, ma'am, that Mrs. Franklin give me last
week when I had a bad face."
"Fetch it me," she cries, eagerly; "that is, if you don't want it
yourself. It is very foolish of me," she says, looking rather ashamed,
"but I cannot sleep for fright."
The servant goes, and presently returns with a small dark blue bottle.
"About how much ought one to take, I wonder?" Esther says, holding it
up between herself and the firelight.
"If you have never been used to take it before, I should think two or
three drops would be _hample_, 'm; I hope, 'm" (with a little anxiety
in her florid plebeian face), "as you'll be careful not to take a
_h_overdose, or you might chance never to wake up again: I knew a young
person as took it by mistake for 'black dose'--it was the fault of the
chemist's young man--and in an hour she was a corpse; they said as she
had took enough to kill ten men."
"It is no wonder that she was a corpse, then," Miss Craven answers,
with a slight smile. "I should not think" (scrutinising the little
bottle inquisitively), "that there was enough here to kill one woman,
let alone ten men. Yes, I'll be careful; thanks, very much. Good
night!" (with her pretty courteous smile).
The housemaid being gone, Esther bolts the door--a weakly defensive
measure against one class of assailants, the crape-masked burglars;
though, as she is aware, utterly impotent against the other and worse
class--the intangible, unkeep-outable _revenants_; the rustlers along
the passage, the rattlers of the lock. She then seats herself at the
dressing-table, flings down her arms among her brushes and combs, and
sinks her head upon them, in closest proximity to the candles, whose
little spires of flame the wind, thrusting its thin body in between
window and frame, drives right against the tumbled plenty of her hair.
In this attitude she remains a long time; forgetting even to search
under the bed, up the chimney, behind the screen, or in the huge
japanned chest, upon which a disconnected but interesting landscape of
cocks, pagodas, and junks picks itself out, in tarnished yellow, from
the dull black ground.
It is impossible for the most comprehensive mind or body to contain any
two distinct, even though not necessarily opposite feelings, in their
fullest force, at the same time. If one is famished with hunger, one
cannot be consumed by thirst; if one is consumed by thirst, one cannot
be famished with hunger. If one is in despair at being forgotten by
one's lover, one is indifferent as to the onset of any number of ghosts
and murderers; if one is paralyzed by fear of ghosts and murderers, one
is tolerably indifferent as to one's lover's lapse of memory. For the
first time since his death, Jack is not the leading thought in Esther's
mind. Poor dead! How can they be so unreasonable as to expect to be
anyone's leading thought? Even we noisy, voiceful, visible living are
obliged to keep crying out, "I am here--remember me," in order not to
sink into oblivion amongst our neighbours and kinsfolk.
"Wilt thou remember me when I am gone,
Further each day from thy vision withdrawn--
Thou in the sunset, and I in the dawn?"
Pretty, tender, touching lines; but I think that the answer to them, if
given truly, would hardly content the asker: "I will remember thee for
a very little while; even till I see some one younger and prettier than
thou wert, and then I will forget thee!"
Miss Craven starts up, after awhile, and begins to walk up and
down, over the creaky, up-and-downy boards, and to speak vehemently
and out loud to the rats, who, numerous and cheerful as usual, are
scrabbling, pattering, squeaking under the floor, behind the wainscot,
in the japan-chest. "At all events," she says, with a sort of savage
satisfaction, "there is one comfort: he'll be miserable--he'll curse
the day when he ties himself to that lump of blancmange. Blancmange!
white meat! that exactly expresses her; she looks as if she would
be good to eat--soft, luscious, ripe. Unfortunately, a man does not
contemplate _eating_ his wife!"
But even this little angry gleam of comfort has but a short life. Soon,
too soon, it occurs to her that men do not look at a woman with women's
eyes. Men, being three parts animal themselves, condone any offence to
a woman the animal part of whom is perfect and beautiful. How else is
it that beauty--mere blank beauty, although destitute of any accessory
charms--can always command its price in the market, and that price a
high one? In marrying Constance, St. John will have no disappointments
to undergo, no discoveries to make. He has known her all her life; has
seen her change from a handsome stupid child into a handsomer stupider
girl, and bloom, lastly, into a handsomest, stupidest woman. Constance
has no antecedents; she is a woman without a history. That also is in
her favour. A man likes to write his name on a sheet of white paper
better than on one upon which many other men have written theirs.
Perfectly virtuous, perfectly healthy, perfectly beautiful, young,
rich, not ill-tempered, not fast, not shrew-tongued--surely she is a
prize worth any man's drawing. If, in addition to her long list of
qualifications, she possessed also Desdemona's heart and Imogen's mind,
it would be too hard upon the rest of womankind:
"Why should one woman have all goodly things?"
Want of sympathy with the companion of her life makes a woman
embittered, reckless--sends her often trespassing on her neighbours'
preserves, in the endeavour to find there that congeniality of spirit
which is not to be met with in her own. Want of sympathy with the
companion of _his_ life sends a man oftener to his club; makes him
much pleasanter to other women when he goes into society; makes him
sulky and sleepy when he dines at home--that is all. Doubtless St.
John will be indifferent to his bride at first; he will dislocate his
jaw with yawning during their wedding-tour, but she will bear him
children; "selon les us et coutumes Anglaises, elle aura beaucoup
d'enfants;" he will like her for that. Year by year they will come
here to Blessington, probably. Year by year she (Esther) will see the
blossom of a fuller contentment on his wide brow, the quiet of a deeper
rest in his restless eyes. And she herself will be here always, for
one cannot throw away one's daily bread. Year by year they will find
her with ever thinner hair, sharper shoulders, drabber cheeks; and he,
looking upon her with the forgiveness of complete indifference, will
say to himself, "She is bad, and she is ugly; I was well rid of her!"
Than to be so forgiven, how much rather would she have been struck down
dead by his hand, lifted in righteous anger and vengeance, on that
moonlit September night, beside the glassy rush-brimmed mere at Felton!
A sudden rage at her own fatuity fills her, when she looks back on that
idiotic hope that had upsprung in her mind, that his object in coming
to Blessington was to pardon her, and take her back to himself. Do men
ever pardon a sin against themselves?
"...............Worse than despair,
Worse than the bitterness of death, is hope.
It is the only ill which can find place
Upon the giddy, sharp, and narrow hour
Tottering beneath us. Plead with the swift frost,
That it should spare the eldest flower of spring;
Plead with awakening earthquake, o'er whose couch
Even now a city stands, strong, fair and free,
Now stench and blackness yawns like death. Oh! plead
With famine and wind-walking pestilence,
Blind lightning, or the deep sea; not with man--
Cruel, cold formal man--righteous in words,
In deeds a Cain."
She sits down before her looking-glass, and stares desperately, with
inner eyes, at the blank ruin of her life; with outer eyes at the ruin
mirrored in her sunken, altered face, that the old looking-glass,
blurred with rust stains, makes look more sunken and altered still.
Involuntarily she lifts her thumb and forefinger, and lays them in the
hollows of her cheek, as if seeking for the red carnations that used
to flower so fairly there. She has noticed before the decay of her
beauty--noticed it with apathy, as who should say, "Everything else is
gone, why should not this go too?" But now she observes it with a sick
pang, as at the parting with a friend; she would give ten years of her
life to reach it back again. "It was only for my beauty he liked me,"
she says, still speaking aloud; "it was only for my beauty that anybody
could like me; there is nothing else to like in me. I never was clever,
or said witty things, or sang, or played: I was only pretty. Now that
that is gone, everything is gone!"
As one shipwrecked, floating about on a plank among the weltering waves
of some great plunging, grey-green sea, strains his eyes along the
horizon to see some sail-speck, some misty palm-island, that looks
as though it were hung midway in air; so she strains her mental eyes
to catch sight of some friendly ship that may take her off from this
rock of her despair. This world is full of pairs, but some oversight
has left a good many odd ones also; Esther is an odd one. Her road
has come to a blank wall, and there stopped. Is there no ladder
that can overclimb this wall?--no gap in all the thickness of its
brick-and-mortar?--no outlet?
She rises and stands by the fire; her eyes down-dropped on the
blue-and-white Dutch tiles--on the hobs, and queer brass-inlaid
dogs: involuntarily she raises them, and they rest upon the little
laudanum-bottle on the chimneypiece. Quick as lightning, an answer to
her thought-question seems flashed across her mind. There is a ladder
that can overclimb _any_ wall; there is a gap that can give egress
through the stoutest masonries; there is an outlet from the deepest
dungeon; and this ladder, this gap, this outlet, men call _Death_. Over
the sea of her memory the housemaid's words float back: "I hope you'll
be careful not to take an overdose, 'm, or you might chance never to
wake again!" They had been spoken in careful warning; to her they
seemed words of persuasive promise. Never to wake again! Never to say
again in the evening, "Would God it were morning!" and in the morning,
"Would God it were evening!"
To Esther, the great sting of death had always laid in his pain--in his
gasping breath, twitched features, writhen unfleshed limbs; but this
death that comes in sleep can be no bitterer than a mother that lifts
her little slumbering child out of his small bed (he not knowing),
and bears him away softly. The idea of self-slaughter, when first
suggested, has always something terrific, especially to us, who from
our birth have been taught to look upon it as a crime hardly second
to murder; to us, to whom Cato's great heroism and Lucretia's chaste
martyrdom seem as sins. Some vague idea that suicide is forbidden in
the Scriptures runs through Esther's mind. She sits down at the table,
and, drawing a Bible towards her, searches long among the partial,
temporary, and local prohibitions and commands of the Books of the
Law, and still longer among the universal, all-applying prohibitions
and commands of Gospel and Epistle. Whether it be that she search ill,
or that there is nought therein written on the subject she seeks, she
knows not; only she finds nothing; and, closing the book, she leans her
pale cheek on her closed white hand. Her brain feels strangely calm,
and she even forgets the darkness of the night, musing on a deeper
darkness.
What is this death, that we write in such great black letters?
After all, what is it that we know about him, for or against? Is it
fair to condemn him unheard, unknown? Why should we give him any
embodiment?--why should we personify him at all? He is but an ending:
what is there in the end of anything more terrifying than in its
beginning, or its middle? Death is but the end of life, as birth is its
beginning, and as some unnoticed moment in its course is its middle.
Why are the waters in which we set our feet at the last more coldly
awful than those out of which we stepped at the first? Both--both,
are they not portions of the great sea of Eternity that floweth ever
round Time's little island? A clock is wound up for a certain number
of hours; when that number of hours has elapsed, it stops. Our more
complicated machinery is wound up to go for a certain number of years,
months, days; when that number of years, months, and days is elapsed,
we stop--that is all. What is this life, about the taking or keeping of
which we make such a clamour, as if it were some great, costly, goodly
thing?
"It is but a watch or a vision
Between a sleep and a sleep."
It is cowardly, disloyal, say they, for a soldier to desert the post
at which he has been set. Ay, but the galley-slave, chained to an oar,
if he can but break his chain and be gone, may flee away, and none
blame him. A prisoner that is not on parole, what shall hinder him from
escaping? If he can but burst his bars, and draw his strong bolts, may
he not out and away into the free air? If, before our birth, in that
unknown pre-existence of ours at which backward-reaching memory catches
not, we, standing looking into life, had said, "Oh, Master, give me of
this life! I know not what it is, but I would fain taste it; and if
Thou givest it to me, I swear to Thee to keep and guard it carefully,
as long as I may----." But have we ever so asked for it? Has it not
been thrust upon us, undesiring, unconsulted, as a gift that is neither
of beauty nor of price? Who can chide us, if, laying it down meekly at
the everlasting feet, we say, "Oh, Great Builder! take back that house
in which, a reluctant tenant, Thou hast placed me. Resume Thy gift; it
is a burden too heavy for me! Lay it, I pray Thee, on shoulders that
mayhap may bear it stoutlier!"
She lifts the bottle, having uncorked it, to her lips and tastes. It
has a deathly, sickly flavour, not enticing. Hesitating, she holds it
in her hand, half-frightened, half-allured; while her heart beats loud
and hard. "It is the key to all my doubts," she says within herself,
looking steadfastly at it; "it is the answer to all my questions. If
I do but drink this little draught, I shall have all knowledge; I
shall never wonder again! I shall know where Jack is; I shall be with
him! But shall I?" Ay, that's the rub! Even in this small world, to
be alive at the same time with another person is not necessarily, or
even probably, to be _with_ him. Wide continents, high mountains,
deep rivers often sever those that are closest of kin; and in the
world of the dead, which, being so much more populous, must be so much
the greater, is it not likely that still wider continents, higher
mountains, deeper rivers, may part two that would fain be together?
What if, before her time, she incur the abasement of death, the
dishonour of corruption, and yet attain not the object for whose sake
she is willing desperately to lay her comely head in the dust?
She changes her attitude, puts down the bottle, and again stoops her
small flower-face on her bent fingers--her thoughts varying their
channel a little: "If I go, I shall leave no gap behind me, any
more than a teacupful of water taken out of a great pool leaves a
gap behind. If it is disgraceful to go willingly out of the world,
instead of being dragged unwillingly out of it, my disgrace is my
own. I involve no one else in it; there is no one of my name left to
be ashamed of me. I leave no work undone in the world. Hundreds of
others can carry air-cushions, and read to a deaf old man far more
patiently than I have done. My fifty pounds a year will go to put
daily bread into some other poor woman's mouth, to whom it may perhaps
taste sweeter than it has done to me." Her head sinks forward again on
her outstretched arms.... "It is awful to go out into the dark all by
oneself," she thinks, with a pang of intense self-pity, as she feels
the warm, gentle life throbbing in her round, tender limbs: "and I,
that hate the dark so----, is it very wicked of me to think of this
thing? People will say so, but I will not hear them. Where shall I be
to-morrow at even?"
"You will be at Blessington, and feeling a good deal ashamed of your
absurd paroxysm of cowardly despair," answers plain common sense,
who, in the shape of an untold multitude of rats, begins rushing and
gnawing, hundred-toothed, scampering hundred-footed behind the walls.
Esther lifts her foolish prone head, and listens. "Skurry--skurry!"
go the rats; "Crack!" go the beams; "Thud!" goes some unexplained
bulk, in the dining-room underneath! As the tide, at flood, creeps up
and over the sands, so the child's old fear creeps up and over her
new mad scheme of suicide. "Rustle--rustle!" come the ghostly dresses
along the China gallery; "Click, rattle--rattle, click!" goes the
door-lock. Down goes the laudanum bottle on the table, and Esther,
springing to her feet, begins to unfasten, with fingers rendered
nervous by extreme haste, her dress and the belt round her slim waist.
"Crack--crack--crack!" goes something close to the bed-head; "Bang!"
goes a distant door. There is no wind; what or who can have executed
that bang? The fire, which has been burning hollow for some time,
collapses, and falls in suddenly with a clear, loud noise. In one leap
Miss Craven is in bed and beneath the sheltering bed-clothes.
All very well pensively to contemplate, in half-earnest, the conveying
oneself out of a world that has been a most harsh step-mother to one,
but by no means well to have one's graceful farewells to existence
broken in upon by a nation tailed and whiskered--by the spirits of old
reprobates in flowered dressing-gowns, and of ladies, who nightly carry
their patched and powdered heads like parcels under their arms.
Good night, wicked woman! May the rats career all night over your small
face, as a punishment for your great idiocy!