The blow that had fallen on my hearth effectually, inevitably killed
all the slander that might have troubled me in joy. Before the awe of a
great calamity the small passions of a mean malignity slink abashed. I
had requested Mrs. Ashleigh not to mention the vile letter which Lilian
had received. I would not give a triumph to the unknown calumniator, nor
wring forth her vain remorse, by the pain of acknowledging an indignity
to my darling’s honour; yet, somehow or other, the true cause of
Lilian’s affliction had crept out,--perhaps through the talk of
servants,--and the public shock was universal. By one of those instincts
of justice that lie deep in human hearts, though in ordinary moments
overlaid by many a worldly layer, all felt (all mothers felt especially)
that innocence alone could have been so unprepared for reproach. The
explanation I had previously given, discredited then, was now accepted
without a question. Lilian’s present state accounted for all that ill
nature had before misconstrued. Her good name was restored to its maiden
whiteness, by the fate that had severed the ties of the bride. The
formal dwellers on the Hill vied with the franker, warmer-hearted
households of Low Town in the nameless attentions by which sympathy and
respect are rather delicately indicated than noisily proclaimed. Could
Lilian have then recovered and been sensible of its repentant homage,
how reverently that petty world would have thronged around her! And, ah!
could fortune and man’s esteem have atoned for the blight of hopes that
had been planted and cherished on ground beyond their reach, ambition
and pride might have been well contented with the largeness of the
exchange that courted their acceptance. Patients on patients crowded on
me. Sympathy with my sorrow seemed to create and endear a more trustful
belief in my skill. But the profession I had once so enthusiastically
loved became to me wearisome, insipid, distasteful; the kindness heaped
on me gave no comfort,--it but brought before me more vividly the
conviction that it came too late to avail me: it could not restore to me
the mind, the love, the life of my life, which lay dark and shattered in
the brain of my guileless Lilian. Secretly I felt a sullen resentment.
I knew that to the crowd the resentment was unjust. The world itself is
but an appearance; who can blame it if appearances guide its laws? But
to those who had been detached from the crowd by the professions of
friendship,--those who, when the slander was yet new, and might have
been awed into silence had they stood by my side,--to the pressure of
their hands, now, I had no response.
Against Mrs. Poyntz, above all others, I bore a remembrance of
unrelaxed, unmitigable indignation. Her schemes for her daughter’s
marriage had triumphed: Jane was Mrs. Ashleigh Sumner. Her mind was,
perhaps, softened now that the object which had sharpened its worldly
faculties was accomplished: but in vain, on first hearing of my
affliction, had this she-Machiavel owned a humane remorse, and, with all
her keen comprehension of each facility that circumstances gave to
her will, availed herself of the general compassion to strengthen the
popular reaction in favour of Lilian’s assaulted honour; in vain had
she written to me with a gentleness of sympathy foreign to her habitual
characteristics; in vain besought me to call on her; in vain waylaid
and accosted me with a humility that almost implored forgiveness. I
vouchsafed no reproach, but I could imply no pardon. I put between her
and my great sorrow the impenetrable wall of my freezing silence.
One word of hers at the time that I had so pathetically besought her
aid, and the parrot-flock that repeated her very whisper in noisy
shrillness would have been as loud to defend as it had been to defame;
that vile letter might never have been written. Whoever its writer, it
surely was one of the babblers who took their malice itself from the
jest or the nod of their female despot; and the writer might have
justified herself in saying she did but coarsely proclaim what the
oracle of worldly opinion, and the early friend of Lilian’s own mother,
had authorized her to believe.
By degrees, the bitterness at my heart diffused itself to the
circumference of the circle in which my life went its cheerless
mechanical round. That cordial brotherhood with his patients, which is
the true physician’s happiest gift and humanest duty, forsook my
breast. The warning words of Mrs. Poyntz had come true. A patient that
monopolized my thought awaited me at my own hearth! My conscience became
troubled; I felt that my skill was lessened. I said to myself, “The
physician who, on entering the sick-room, feels, while there, something
that distracts the finest powers of his intellect from the sufferer’s
case is unfit for his calling.” A year had scarcely passed since my
fatal wedding day, before I had formed a resolution to quit L---- and
abandon my profession; and my resolution was confirmed, and my goal
determined, by a letter I received from Julius Faber.
I had written at length to him, not many days after the blow that had
fallen on me, stating all circumstances as calmly and clearly as my
grief would allow; for I held his skill at a higher estimate than that
of any living brother of my art, and I was not without hope in the
efficacy of his advice. The letter I now received from him had been
begun, and continued at some length, before my communication reached
him; and this earlier portion contained animated and cheerful
descriptions of his Australian life and home, which contrasted with the
sorrowful tone of the supplement written in reply to the tidings with
which I had wrung his friendly and tender heart. In this, the latter
part of his letter, he suggested that if time had wrought no material
change for the better, it might be advisable to try the effect of
foreign travel. Scenes entirely new might stimulate observation, and
the observation of things external withdraw the sense from that brooding
over images delusively formed within, which characterized the kind of
mental alienation I had described. “Let any intellect create for itself
a visionary world, and all reasonings built on it are fallacious: the
visionary world vanishes in proportion as we can arouse a predominant
interest in the actual.”
This grand authority, who owed half his consummate skill as a
practitioner to the scope of his knowledge as a philosopher, then
proceeded to give me a hope which I had not dared of myself to form. He
said:--
“I distinguish the case you so minutely detail from that insanity which
is reason lost; here it seems rather to be reason held in suspense.
Where there is hereditary predisposition, where there is organic
change of structure in the brain,--nay, where there is that kind of
insanity which takes the epithet of moral, whereby the whole
character becomes so transformed that the prime element of sound
understanding, conscience itself, is either erased or warped into the
sanction of what in a healthful state it would most disapprove,--it is
only charlatans who promise effectual cure. But here I assume that
there is no hereditary taint; here I am convinced, from my own
observation, that the nobility of the organs, all fresh as yet in the
vigour of youth, would rather submit to death than to the permanent
overthrow of their equilibrium in reason; here, where you tell me the
character preserves all its moral attributes of gentleness and purity,
and but over-indulges its own early habit of estranged contemplation;
here, without deceiving you in false kindness, I give you the
guarantee of my experience when I bid you ‘hope!’ I am persuaded
that, sooner or later, the mind, thus for a time affected, will right
itself; because here, in the cause of the malady, we do but deal with
the nervous system. And that, once righted, and the mind once
disciplined in those practical duties which conjugal life
necessitates, the malady itself will never return; never be
transmitted to the children on whom your wife’s restoration to health
may permit you to count hereafter. If the course of travel I
recommend and the prescriptions I conjoin with that course fail you,
let me know; and though I would fain close my days in this land, I
will come to you. I love you as my son. I will tend your wife as my
daughter.”
Foreign travel! The idea smiled on me. Julius Faber’s companionship,
sympathy, matchless skill! The very thought seemed as a raft to a
drowning mariner. I now read more attentively the earlier portions of
his letter. They described, in glowing colours, the wondrous country in
which he had fixed his home; the joyous elasticity of its atmosphere;
the freshness of its primitive, pastoral life; the strangeness of its
scenery, with a Flora and a Fauna which have no similitudes in the
ransacked quarters of the Old World. And the strong impulse seized me to
transfer to the solitudes of that blithesome and hardy Nature a spirit
no longer at home in the civilized haunts of men, and household gods
that shrank from all social eyes, and would fain have found a wilderness
for the desolate hearth, on which they had ceased to be sacred if
unveiled. As if to give practical excuse and reason for the idea that
seized me, Julius Faber mentioned, incidentally, that the house and
property of a wealthy speculator in his immediate neighbourhood were on
sale at a price which seemed to me alluringly trivial, and, according to
his judgment, far below the value they would soon reach in the hands of
a more patient capitalist. He wrote at the period of the agricultural
panic in the colony which preceded the discovery of its earliest
gold-fields. But his geological science had convinced him that strata
within and around the property now for sale were auriferous, and
his intelligence enabled him to predict how inevitably man would be
attracted towards the gold, and how surely the gold would fertilize the
soil and enrich its owners. He described the house thus to be sold--in
case I might know of a purchaser. It had been built at a cost unusual
in those early times, and by one who clung to English tastes amidst
Australian wilds, so that in this purchase a settler would escape the
hardships he had then ordinarily to encounter; it was, in short, a home
to which a man more luxurious than I might bear a bride with wants less
simple than those which now sufficed for my darling Lilian.
This communication dwelt on my mind through the avocations of the day
on which I received it, and in the evening I read all, except the
supplement, aloud to Mrs. Ashleigh in her daughter’s presence. I desired
to see if Faber’s descriptions of the country and its life, which in
themselves were extremely spirited and striking, would arouse Lilian’s
interest. At first she did not seem to heed me while I read; but when
I came to Faber’s loving account of little Amy, Lilian turned her eyes
towards me, and evidently listened with attention. He wrote how the
child had already become the most useful person in the simple household.
How watchful the quickness of the heart had made the service of the eye;
all their associations of comfort had grown round her active, noiseless
movements; it was she who had contrived to monopolize the management,
or supervision, of all that added to Home the nameless, interior charm.
Under her eyes the rude furniture of the log-house grew inviting with
English neatness; she took charge of the dairy; she had made the garden
gay with flowers selected from the wild, and suggested the trellised
walk, already covered with hardy vine. She was their confidant in every
plan of improvement, their comforter in every anxious doubt, their nurse
in every passing ailment, her very smile a refreshment in the weariness
of daily toil. “How all that is best in womanhood,” wrote the old man,
with the enthusiasm which no time had reft from his hearty, healthful
genius,--“how all that is best in womanhood is here opening fast into
flower from the bud of the infant’s soul! The atmosphere seems to suit
it,--the child-woman in the child-world!”
I heard Lilian sigh; I looked towards her furtively; tears stood in her
softened eyes; her lip was quivering. Presently, she began to rub her
right hand over the left--over the wedding-ring--at first slowly; then
with quicker movement.
“It is not here,” she said impatiently; “it is not here!”
“What is not here?” asked Mrs. Ashleigh, hanging over her.
Lilian leaned back her head on her mother’s bosom, and answered
faintly,--
“The stain! Some one said there was a stain on this hand. I do not see
it, do you?”
“There is no stain, never was,” said I; “the hand is white as your own
innocence, or the lily from which you take your name.”
“Hush! you do not know my name. I will whisper it. Soft!--my name is
Nightshade! Do you want to know where the lily is now, brother? I will
tell you. There, in that letter. You call her Amy,--she is the
lily; take her to your breast, hide her. Hist! what are those bells?
Marriage-bells. Do not let her hear them; for there is a cruel wind that
whispers the bells, and the bells ring out what it whispers, louder and
louder,
“‘Stain on lily Shame on lily, Wither lily.’
“If she hears what the wind whispers to the bells, she will creep away
into the dark, and then she, too, will turn to Nightshade.”
“Lilian, look up, awake! You have been in a long, long dream: it is
passing away. Lilian, my beloved, my blessed Lilian!”
Never till then had I heard from her even so vague an allusion to the
fatal calumny and its dreadful effect, and while her words now pierced
my heart, it beat, amongst its pangs, with a thrilling hope.
But, alas! the idea that had gleamed upon her had vanished already. She
murmured something about Circles of Fire, and a Veiled Woman in black
garments; became restless, agitated, and unconscious of our presence,
and finally sank into a heavy sleep.
That night (my room was next to hers with the intervening door open)
I heard her cry out. I hastened to her side. She was still asleep, but
there was an anxious labouring expression on her young face, and yet
not an expression wholly of pain--for her lips were parted with a
smile,--that glad yet troubled smile with which one who has been
revolving some subject of perplexity or fear greets a sudden thought
that seems to solve the riddle, or prompt the escape from danger; and
as I softly took her hand she returned my gentle pressure, and inclining
towards me, said, still in sleep,--
“Let us go.”
“Whither?” I answered, under my breath, so as not to awake her; “is it
to see the child of whom I read, and the land that is blooming out of
the earth’s childhood?”
“Out of the dark into the light; where the leaves do not change; where
the night is our day, and the winter our summer. Let us go! let us go!”
“We will go. Dream on undisturbed, my bride. Oh, that the dream could
tell you that my love has not changed in our sorrow, holier and deeper
than on the day in which our vows were exchanged! In you still all my
hopes fold their wings; where you are, there still I myself have my
dreamland!”
The sweet face grew bright as I spoke; all trouble left the smile;
softly she drew her hand from my clasp, and rested it for a moment on my
bended head, as if in blessing.
I rose; stole back to my own room, closing the door, lest the sob I
could not stifle should mar her sleep.