On reaching the house, a formal man-servant, with indifferent face,
transferred me to the guidance of a hired nurse, who led me up the
stairs, and, before I was well aware of it, into the room in which Dr.
Lloyd had died. Widely different, indeed, the aspect of the walls, the
character of the furniture! The dingy paperhangings were replaced by
airy muslins, showing a rose-coloured ground through their fanciful
openwork; luxurious fauteuils, gilded wardrobes, full-length mirrors, a
toilet-table tricked out with lace and ribbons; and glittering with an
array of silver gewgaws and jewelled trinkets,--all transformed the sick
chamber of the simple man of science to a boudoir of death for the vain
coquette. But the room itself, in its high lattice and heavy ceiling,
was the same--as the coffin itself has the same confines, whether it be
rich in velvets and bright with blazoning, or rude as a pauper’s shell.
And the bed, with its silken coverlet, and its pillows edged with the
thread-work of Louvain, stood in the same sharp angle as that over which
had flickered the frowning smoke-reek above the dying, resentful foe.
As I approached, a man, who was seated beside the sufferer, turned round
his face, and gave me a silent kindly nod of recognition. He was Mr.
C----, one of the clergy of the town, the one with whom I had the most
frequently come into contact wherever the physician resigns to the
priest the language that bids man hope. Mr. C-----, as a preacher,
was renowned for his touching eloquence; as a pastor, revered for his
benignant piety; as friend and neighbour, beloved for a sweetness of
nature which seemed to regulate all the movements of a mind eminently
masculine by the beat of a heart tender as the gentlest woman’s.
This good man; then whispering something to the sufferer which I did
not overhear, stole towards me, took me by the hand, and said, also in
a whisper, “Be merciful as Christians are.” He led me to the bedside,
there left me, went out, and closed the door.
“Do you think I am really dying, Dr. Fenwick?” said a feeble voice. “I
fear Dr. Jones has misunderstood my case. I wish I had called you in at
the first, but--but I could not--I could not! Will you feel my pulse?
Don’t you think you could do me good?”
I had no need to feel the pulse in that skeleton wrist; the aspect of
the face sufficed to tell me that death was drawing near.
Mechanically, however, I went through the hackneyed formulae of
professional questions. This vain ceremony done, as gently and
delicately as I could, I implied the expediency of concluding, if not
yet settled, those affairs which relate to this world.
“This duty,” I said, “in relieving the mind from care for others to whom
we owe the forethought of affection, often relieves the body also
of many a gnawing pain, and sometimes, to the surprise of the most
experienced physician, prolongs life itself.”
“Ah,” said the old maid, peevishly, “I understand! But it is not my will
that troubles me. I should not be left to a nurse from a hospital if my
relations did not know that my annuity dies with me; and I forestalled
it in furnishing this house, Dr. Fenwick, and all these pretty things
will be sold to pay those horrid tradesmen!--very hard!--so hard!--just
as I got things about me in the way I always said I would have them if
I could ever afford it! I always said I would have my bedroom hung
with muslin, like dear Lady L----‘s; and the drawing-room in
geranium-coloured silk: so pretty. You have not seen it: you would not
know the house, Dr. Fenwick. And just when all is finished, to be taken
away and thrust into the grave. It is so cruel!” And she began to weep.
Her emotion brought on a violent paroxysm, which, when she recovered
from it, had produced one of those startling changes of mind that are
sometimes witnessed before death,--changes whereby the whole character
of a life seems to undergo solemn transformation. The hard will becomes
gentle, the proud meek, the frivolous earnest. That awful moment when
the things of earth pass away like dissolving scenes, leaving death
visible on the background by the glare that shoots up in the last
flicker of life’s lamp.
And when she lifted her haggard face from my shoulder, and heard my
pitying, soothing voice, it was not the grief of a trifler at the loss
of fondled toys that spoke in the fallen lines of her lip, in the woe of
her pleading eyes.
“So this is death,” she said. “I feel it hurrying on. I must speak.
I promised Mr. C---- that I would. Forgive me, can you--can you? That
letter--that letter to Lilian Ashleigh, I wrote it! Oh, do not look
at me so terribly; I never thought it could do such evil! And am I not
punished enough? I truly believed when I wrote that Miss Ashleigh was
deceiving you, and once I was silly enough to fancy that you might have
liked me. But I had another motive; I had been so poor all my life--I
had become rich unexpectedly; I set my heart on this house--I had always
fancied it--and I thought if I could prevent Miss Ashleigh marrying you,
and scare her and her mother from coming back to L----, I could get the
house. And I did get it. What for?--to die. I had not been here a
week before I got the hurt that is killing me--a fall down the
stairs,--coming out of this very room; the stairs had been polished. If
I had stayed in my old lodging, it would not have happened. Oh, say you
forgive me! Say, say it, even if you do not feel you can! Say it!” And
the miserable woman grasped me by the arm as Dr. Lloyd had grasped me.
I shaded my averted face with my hands; my heart heaved with the agony
of my suppressed passion. A wrong, however deep, only to myself, I could
have pardoned without effort; such a wrong to Lilian,--no! I could not
say “I forgive.”
The dying wretch was perhaps more appalled by my silence than she would
have been by my reproach. Her voice grew shrill in her despair.
“You will not pardon me! I shall die with your curse on my head! Mercy!
mercy! That good man, Mr. C----, assured me you would be merciful. Have
you never wronged another? Has the Evil One never tempted you?”
Then I spoke in broken accents: “Me! Oh, had it been I whom you
defamed--but a young creature so harmless, so unoffending, and for so
miserable a motive!”
“But I tell you, I swear to you, I never dreamed I could cause such
sorrow; and that young man, that Margrave, put it into my head!”
“Margrave! He had left L---- long before that letter was written!”
“But he came back for a day just before I wrote: it was the very day.
I met him in the lane yonder. He asked after you,--after Miss Ashleigh;
and when he spoke he laughed, and I said, ‘Miss Ashleigh had been ill,
and was gone away;’ and he laughed again. And I thought he knew more
than he would tell me, so I asked him if he supposed Mrs. Ashleigh would
come back, and said how much I should like to take this house if she did
not; and again he laughed, and said, ‘Birds never stay in the nest after
the young ones are hurt,’ and went away singing. When I got home, his
laugh and his song haunted me. I thought I saw him still in my room,
prompting me to write, and I sat down and wrote. Oh, pardon, pardon me!
I have been a foolish poor creature, but never meant to do such harm.
The Evil One tempted me! There he is, near me now! I see him yonder!
there, at the doorway. He comes to claim me! As you hope for mercy
yourself, free me from him! Forgive me!”
I made an effort over myself. In naming Margrave as her tempter, the
woman had suggested an excuse, echoed from that innermost cell of my
mind, which I recoiled from gazing into, for there I should behold his
image. Inexpiable though the injury she had wrought against me and mine,
still the woman was human--fellow-creature-like myself;--but he?
I took the pale hand that still pressed my arm, and said, with firm
voice,--
“Be comforted. In the name of Lilian, my wife, I forgive you for her and
for me as freely and as fully as we are enjoined by Him, against whose
precepts the best of us daily sin, to forgive--we children of wrath--to
forgive one another!”
“Heaven bless you!--oh, bless you!” she murmured, sinking back upon her
pillow.
“Ah!” thought I, “what if the pardon I grant for a wrong far deeper than
I inflicted on him whose imprecation smote me in this chamber, should
indeed be received as atonement, and this blessing on the lips of the
dying annul the dark curse that the dead has left on my path through the
Valley of the Shadow!”
I left my patient sleeping quietly,--the sleep that precedes the last.
As I went down the stairs into the hall, I saw Mrs. Poyntz standing at
the threshold, speaking to the man-servant and the nurse.
I would have passed her with a formal bow, but she stopped me.
“I came to inquire after poor Miss Brabazon,” said she.
“You can tell me more than the servants can: is there no hope?”
“Let the nurse go up and watch beside her. She may pass away in the
sleep into which she has fallen.”
“Allen Fenwick, I must speak with you--nay, but for a few minutes. I
hear that you leave L---- to-morrow. It is scarcely among the chances
of life that we should meet again.” While thus saying, she drew me along
the lawn down the path that led towards her own home. “I wish,” said
she, earnestly, “that you could part with a kindlier feeling towards me;
but I can scarcely expect it. Could I put myself in your place, and be
moved by your feelings, I know that I should be implacable; but I--”
“But you, madam, are The World! and the World governs itself, and
dictates to others, by laws which seem harsh to those who ask from its
favour the services which the World cannot tender, for the World admits
favourites, but ignores friends. You did but act to me as the World ever
acts to those who mistake its favour for its friendship.”
“It is true,” said Mrs. Poyntz, with blunt candour; and we continued to
walk on silently. At length she said abruptly, “But do you not rashly
deprive yourself of your only consolation in sorrow? When the heart
suffers, does your skill admit any remedy like occupation to the mind?
Yet you abandon that occupation to which your mind is most accustomed;
you desert your career; you turn aside, in the midst of the race, from
the fame which awaits at the goal; you go back from civilization itself,
and dream that all your intellectual cravings can find content in the
life of a herdsman, amidst the monotony of a wild! No, you will repent,
for you are untrue to your mind!”
“I am sick of the word ‘mind’!” said I, bitterly. And therewith I
relapsed into musing.
The enigmas which had foiled my intelligence in the unravelled Sibyl
Book of Nature were mysteries strange to every man’s normal practice
of thought, even if reducible to the fraudulent impressions of outward
sense; for illusions in a brain otherwise healthy suggest problems in
our human organization which the colleges that record them rather guess
at than solve. But the blow which had shattered my life had been dealt
by the hand of a fool. Here, there were no mystic enchantments. Motives
the most commonplace and paltry, suggested to a brain as trivial and
shallow as ever made the frivolity of woman a theme for the satire of
poets, had sufficed, in devastating the field of my affections, to blast
the uses for which I had cultured my mind; and had my intellect been as
great as heaven ever gave to man, it would have been as vain a shield as
mine against the shaft that had lodged in my heart. While I had, indeed,
been preparing my reason and my fortitude to meet such perils, weird and
marvellous, as those by which tales round the winter fireside scare the
credulous child, a contrivance--so vulgar and hackneyed that not a day
passes but what some hearth is vexed by an anonymous libel--had
wrought a calamity more dread than aught which my dark guess into the
Shadow-Land unpierced by Philosophy could trace to the prompting of
malignant witchcraft. So, ever this truth runs through all legends of
ghost and demon--through the uniform records of what wonder accredits
and science rejects as the supernatural--lo! the dread machinery whose
wheels roll through Hades! What need such awful engines for such mean
results? The first blockhead we meet in our walk to our grocer’s can
tell us more than the ghost tells us; the poorest envy we ever aroused
hurts us more than the demon. How true an interpreter is Genius to Hell
as to Earth! The Fiend comes to Faust, the tired seeker of knowledge;
Heaven and Hell stake their cause in the Mortal’s temptation. And what
does the Fiend to astonish the Mortal? Turn wine into fire, turn love
into crime. We need no Mephistopheles to accomplish these marvels every
day!
Thus silently thinking, I walked by the side of the world-wise woman;
and when she next spoke, I looked up, and saw that we were at the Monks’
Well, where I had first seen Lilian gazing into heaven!
Mrs. Poyntz had, as we walked, placed her hand on my arm; and, turning
abruptly from the path into the glade, I found myself standing by her
side in the scene where a new sense of being had first disclosed to my
sight the hues with which Love, the passionate beautifier, turns into
purple and gold the gray of the common air. Thus, when romance has ended
in sorrow, and the Beautiful fades from the landscape, the trite and
positive forms of life, banished for a time, reappear, and deepen our
mournful remembrance of the glories they replace. And the Woman of the
World, finding how little I was induced to respond to her when she
had talked of myself, began to speak, in her habitual clear, ringing
accents, of her own social schemes and devices,--
“I shall miss you when you are gone, Allen Fenwick; for though, during
the last year or so, all actual intercourse between us has ceased,
yet my interest in you gave some occupation to my thoughts when I sat
alone,--having lost my main object of ambition in settling my daughter,
and having no longer any one in the house with whom I could talk of the
future, or for whom I could form a project. It is so wearisome to count
the changes which pass within us, that we take interest in the changes
that pass without. Poyntz still has his weather-glass; I have no longer
my Jane.”
“I cannot linger with you on this spot,” said I, impatiently turning
back into the path; she followed, treading over fallen leaves. And
unheeding my interruption, she thus continued her hard talk,--
“But I am not sick of my mind, as you seem to be of yours; I am only
somewhat tired of the little cage in which, since it has been alone, it
ruffles its plumes against the flimsy wires that confine it from wider
space. I shall take up my home for a time with the new-married couple:
they want me. Ashleigh Sumner has come into parliament. He means to
attend regularly and work hard, but he does not like Jane to go into
the world by herself, and he wishes her to go into the world, because he
wants a wife to display his wealth for the improvement of his position.
In Ashleigh Sumner’s house I shall have ample scope for my energies,
such as they are. I have a curiosity to see the few that perch on the
wheels of the State and say, ‘It is we who move the wheels!’ It will
amuse me to learn if I can maintain in a capital the authority I
have won in a country town; if not, I can but return to my small
principality. Wherever I live I must sway, not serve. If I succeed--as I
ought, for in Jane’s beauty and Ashleigh’s fortune I have materials
for the woof of ambition, wanting which here, I fall asleep over my
knitting--if I succeed, there will be enough to occupy the rest of my
life. Ashleigh Sumner must be a power; the power will be represented and
enjoyed by my child, and created and maintained by me! Allen Fenwick,
do as I do. Be world with the world, and it will only be in moments of
spleen and chagrin that you will sigh to think that the heart may be
void when the mind is full. Confess you envy me while you listen.”
“Not so; all that to you seems so great appears to me so small! Nature
alone is always grand, in her terrors as well as her charms. The World
for you, Nature for me. Farewell!”
“Nature!” said Mrs. Poyntz, compassionately. “Poor Allen Fenwick! Nature
indeed,--intellectual suicide! Nay, shake hands, then, if for the last
time.”
So we shook hands and parted, where the wicket-gate and the stone stairs
separated my blighted fairy-land from the common thoroughfare.