Lilian’s wondrous gentleness of nature did not desert her in the
suspension of her reason. She was habitually calm,--very silent; when
she spoke it was rarely on earthly things, on things familiar to her
past, things one could comprehend. Her thought seemed to have quitted
the earth, seeking refuge in some imaginary heaven. She spoke of
wanderings with her father as if he were living still; she did not seem
to understand the meaning we attach to the word “Death.” She would sit
for hours murmuring to herself: when one sought to catch the words, they
seemed in converse with invisible spirits. We found it cruel to disturb
her at such times, for if left unmolested, her face was serene,--more
serenely beautiful than I had seen it even in our happiest hours; but
when we called her back to the wrecks of her real life, her eye became
troubled, restless, anxious, and she would sigh--oh, so heavily! At
times, if we did not seem to observe her, she would quietly resume her
once favourite accomplishments,--drawing, music. And in these her
young excellence was still apparent, only the drawings were strange and
fantastic: they had a resemblance to those with which the painter Blake,
himself a visionary, illustrated the Poems of the “Night Thoughts” and
“The Grave,”--faces of exquisite loveliness, forms of aerial grace,
coming forth from the bells of flowers, or floating upwards amidst
the spray of fountains, their outlines melting away in fountain or in
flower. So with her music: her mother could not recognize the airs she
played, for a while so sweetly and with so ineffable a pathos, that
one could scarcely hear her without weeping; and then would come, as
if involuntarily, an abrupt discord, and, starting, she would cease and
look around, disquieted, aghast.
And still she did not recognize Mrs. Ashleigh nor myself as her mother,
her husband; but she had by degrees learned to distinguish us both from
others. To her mother she gave no name, seemed pleased to see her, but
not sensibly to miss her when away; me she called her brother: if longer
absent than usual, me she missed. When, after the toils of the day, I
came to join her, even if she spoke not, her sweet face brightened. When
she sang, she beckoned me to come near to her, and looked at me fixedly,
with eyes ever tender, often tearful; when she drew she would pause and
glance over her shoulder to see that I was watching her, and point to
the drawings with a smile of strange significance, as if they conveyed
in some covert allegory messages meant for me; so, at least, I
interpreted her smile, and taught myself to say, “Yes, Lilian, I
understand!”
And more than once, when I had so answered, she rose, and kissed
my forehead. I thought my heart would have broken when I felt that
spirit-like melancholy kiss.
And yet how marvellously the human mind teaches itself to extract
consolations from its sorrows. The least wretched of my hours were
those that I had passed in that saddened room, seeking how to establish
fragments of intercourse, invent signs, by which each might interpret
each, between the intellect I had so laboriously cultured, so arrogantly
vaunted, and the fancies wandering through the dark, deprived of their
guide in reason. It was something even of joy to feel myself needed for
her guardianship, endeared and yearned for still by some unshattered
instinct of her heart; and when, parting from her for the night, I stole
the moment in which on her soft face seemed resting least of shadow, to
ask, in a trembling whisper, “Lilian, are the angels watching over
you?” and she would answer “Yes,” sometimes in words, sometimes with a
mysterious happy smile--then--then I went to my lonely room, comforted
and thankful.