How innocent was Lilian’s virgin blush when I knelt to her, and prayed
that she would forestall the date that had been fixed for our union, and
be my bride before the breath of the autumn had withered the pomp of
the woodland and silenced the song of the birds! Meanwhile, I was so
fearfully anxious that she should risk no danger of hearing, even
of surmising, the cruel slander against her--should meet no cold
contemptuous looks, above all, should be safe from the barbed talk of
Mrs. Poyntz--that I insisted on the necessity of immediate change of air
and scene. I proposed that we should all three depart, the next day, for
the banks of my own beloved and native Windermere. By that pure mountain
air, Lilian’s health would be soon re-established; in the church
hallowed to me by the graves of my fathers our vows should be plighted.
No calumny had ever cast a shadow over those graves. I felt as if my
bride would be safer in the neighbourhood of my mother’s tomb.
I carried my point: it was so arranged. Mrs. Ashleigh, however, was
reluctant to leave before she had seen her dear friend, Margaret Poyntz.
I had not the courage to tell her what she might expect to hear from
that dear friend, but, as delicately as I could, I informed her that I
had already seen the Queen of the Hill, and contradicted the gossip that
had reached her; but that as yet, like other absolute sovereigns, the
Queen of the Hill thought it politic to go with the popular stream,
reserving all check on its direction till the rush of its torrent might
slacken; and that it would be infinitely wiser in Mrs. Ashleigh to
postpone conversation with Mrs. Poyntz until Lilian’s return to L----
as my wife. Slander by that time would have wearied itself out, and Mrs.
Poyntz (assuming her friendship to Mrs. Ashleigh to be sincere) would
then be enabled to say with authority to her subjects, “Dr. Fenwick
alone knows the facts of the story, and his marriage with Miss Ashleigh
refutes all the gossip to her prejudice.”
I made that evening arrangements with a young and rising practitioner to
secure attendance on my patients during my absence. I passed the greater
part of the night in drawing up memoranda to guide my proxy in each
case, however humble the sufferer. This task finished, I chanced, in
searching for a small microscope, the wonders of which I thought
might interest and amuse Lilian, to open a drawer in which I kept the
manuscript of my cherished Physiological Work, and, in so doing, my eye
fell upon the wand which I had taken from Margrave. I had thrown it into
that drawer on my return home, after restoring Lilian to her mother’s
house, and, in the anxiety which had subsequently preyed upon my mind,
had almost forgotten the strange possession I had as strangely acquired.
There it now lay, the instrument of agencies over the mechanism of
nature which no doctrine admitted by my philosophy could accept, side by
side with the presumptuous work which had analyzed the springs by which
Nature is moved, and decided the principles by which reason metes out,
from the inch of its knowledge, the plan of the Infinite Unknown.
I took up the wand and examined it curiously. It was evidently the work
of an age far remote from our own, scored over with half-obliterated
characters in some Eastern tongue, perhaps no longer extant. I found
that it was hollow within. A more accurate observation showed, in
the centre of this hollow, an exceedingly fine thread-like wire, the
unattached end of which would slightly touch the palm when the wand was
taken into the hand. Was it possible that there might be a natural and
even a simple cause for the effects which this instrument produced?
Could it serve to collect, from that great focus of animal heat and
nervous energy which is placed in the palm of the human hand, some such
latent fluid as that which Reichenbach calls the “odic,” and which,
according to him, “rushes through and pervades universal Nature”? After
all, why not? For how many centuries lay unknown all the virtues of
the loadstone and the amber? It is but as yesterday that the forces of
vapour have become to men genii more powerful than those conjured up by
Aladdin; that light, at a touch, springs forth from invisible air; that
thought finds a messenger swifter than the wings of the fabled Afrite.
As, thus musing, my hand closed over the wand, I felt a wild thrill
through my frame. I recoiled; I was alarmed lest (according to the plain
common-sense theory of Julius Faber) I might be preparing my imagination
to form and to credit its own illusions. Hastily I laid down the wand.
But then it occurred to me that whatever its properties, it had so
served the purposes of the dread Fascinator from whom it had been
taken, that he might probably seek to repossess himself of it; he might
contrive to enter my house in my absence; more prudent to guard in my
own watchful keeping the incomprehensible instrument of incomprehensible
arts. I resolved, therefore, to take the wand with me, and placed it
in my travelling-trunk, with such effects as I selected for use in the
excursion that was to commence with the morrow. I now lay down to rest,
but I could not sleep. The recollections of the painful interview with
Mrs. Poyntz became vivid and haunting. It was clear that the sentiment
she had conceived for me was that of no simple friendship,--something
more or something less, but certainly something else; and this
conviction brought before me that proud hard face, disturbed by a
pang wrestled against but not subdued, and that clear metallic voice,
troubled by the quiver of an emotion which, perhaps, she had never
analyzed to herself. I did not need her own assurance to know that this
sentiment was not to be confounded with a love which she would have
despised as a weakness and repelled as a crime; it was an inclination
of the intellect, not a passion of the heart. But still it admitted a
jealousy little less keen than that which has love for its cause,--so
true it is that jealousy is never absent where self-love is always
present. Certainly, it was no susceptibility of sober friendship which
had made the stern arbitress of a coterie ascribe to her interest in
me her pitiless judgment of Lilian. Strangely enough, with the image of
this archetype of conventional usages and the trite social life, came
that of the mysterious Margrave, surrounded by all the attributes with
which superstition clothes the being of the shadowy border-land that
lies beyond the chart of our visual world itself. By what link were
creatures so dissimilar riveted together in the metaphysical chain of
association? Both had entered into the record of my life when my life
admitted its own first romance of love. Through the aid of this cynical
schemer I had been made known to Lilian. At her house I had heard the
dark story of that Louis Grayle, with whom, in mocking spite of my
reason, conjectures, which that very reason must depose itself before
it could resolve into distempered fancies, identified the enigmatical
Margrave. And now both she, the representative of the formal world most
opposed to visionary creeds, and he, who gathered round him all the
terrors which haunt the realm of fable, stood united against me,--foes
with whom the intellect I had so haughtily cultured knew not how to
cope. Whatever assault I might expect from either, I was unable
to assail again. Alike, then, in this, are the Slander and the
Phantom,--that which appalls us most in their power over us is our
impotence against them.
But up rose the sun, chasing the shadows from the earth, and brightening
insensibly the thoughts of man. After all, Margrave had been baffled
and defeated, whatever the arts he had practised and the secrets he
possessed. It was, at least, doubtful whether his evil machinations
would be renewed. He had seemed so incapable of long-sustained fixity
of purpose, that it was probable he was already in pursuit of some new
agent or victim; and as to this commonplace and conventional spectre,
the so-called World, if it is everywhere to him whom it awes, it is
nowhere to him who despises it. What was the good or bad word of a Mrs.
Poyntz to me? Ay, but to Lilian? There, indeed, I trembled; but still,
even in trembling, it was sweet to think that my home would be her
shelter,--my choice her vindication. Ah! how unutterably tender and
reverential Love becomes when it assumes the duties of the guardian, and
hallows its own heart into a sanctuary of refuge for the beloved!