That interview is over! Again I am banished from Lilian’s room; the
agitation, the joy of that meeting has overstrained her enfeebled
nerves. Convulsive tremblings of the whole frame, accompanied with
vehement sobs, succeeded our brief interchange of sweet and bitter
thoughts. Faber, in tearing me from her side, imperiously and sternly
warned me that the sole chance yet left of preserving her life was in
the merciful suspense of the emotions that my presence excited. He
and Amy resumed their place in her chamber. Even her mother shared my
sentence of banishment. So Mrs. Ashleigh and I sat facing each other in
the room below; over me a leaden stupor had fallen, and I heard, as a
voice from afar or in a dream, the mother’s murmured wailings,
“She will die! she will die! Her eyes have the same heavenly look as my
Gilbert’s on the day on which his closed forever. Her very words are his
last words,--‘Forgive me all my faults to you.’ She will die! she will
die!”
Hours thus passed away. At length Faber entered the room; he spoke first
to Mrs. Ashleigh,--meaningless soothings, familiar to the lips of all
who pass from the chamber of the dying to the presence of mourners, and
know that it is a falsehood to say “hope,” and a mockery as yet, to say,
“endure.”
But he led her away to her own room, docile as a wearied child led to
sleep, stayed with her some time, and then returned to me, pressing me
to his breast father-like.
“No hope! no hope!” said I, recoiling from his embrace. “You are silent.
Speak! speak! Let me know the worst.”
“I have a hope, yet I scarcely dare to bid you share it; for it grows
rather out of my heart as man than my experience as physician. I cannot
think that her soul would be now so reconciled to earth, so fondly, so
earnestly, cling to this mortal life, if it were about to be summoned
away. You know how commonly even the sufferers who have dreaded death
the most become calmly resigned to its coming, when death visibly
reveals itself out from the shadows in which its shape has been guessed
and not seen. As it is a bad sign for life when the patient has lost all
will to live on, so there is hope while the patient, yet young and with
no perceptible breach in the great centres of life (however violently
their forts may be stormed), has still intense faith in recovery,
perhaps drawn (who can say?) from the whispers conveyed from above to
the soul.
“I cannot bring myself to think that all the uses for which a reason,
always so lovely even in its errors, has been restored, are yet
fulfilled. It seems to me as if your union, as yet so imperfect, has
still for its end that holy life on earth by which two mortal beings
strengthen each other for a sphere of existence to which this is the
spiritual ladder. Through yourself I have hope yet for her. Gifted with
powers that rank you high in the manifold orders of man,--thoughtful,
laborious, and brave; with a heart that makes intellect vibrate to every
fine touch of humanity; in error itself, conscientious; in delusion,
still eager for truth; in anger, forgiving; in wrong, seeking how to
repair; and, best of all, strong in a love which the mean would have
shrunk to defend from the fangs of the slanderer,--a love, raising
passion itself out of the realm of the senses, made sublime by the
sorrows that tried its devotion,--with all these noble proofs in
yourself of a being not meant to end here, your life has stopped short
in its uses, your mind itself has been drifted, a bark without rudder
or pilot, over seas without shore, under skies without stars. And
wherefore? Because the mind you so haughtily vaunted has refused its
companion and teacher in Soul.
“And therefore, through you, I hope that she will be spared yet to live
on; she, in whom soul has been led dimly astray, by unheeding the checks
and the definite goals which the mind is ordained to prescribe to its
wanderings while here; the mind taking thoughts from the actual and
visible world, and the soul but vague glimpses and hints from the
instinct of its ultimate heritage. Each of you two seems to me as yet
incomplete, and your destinies yet uncompleted. Through the bonds of
the heart, through the trials of time, ye have both to consummate your
marriage. I do not--believe me--I do not say this in the fanciful wisdom
of allegory and type, save that, wherever deeply examined, allegory and
type run through all the most commonplace phases of outward and material
life. I hope, then, that she may yet be spared to you; hope it, not from
my skill as physician, but my inward belief as a Christian. To perfect
your own being and end, ‘Ye will need one another!’”
I started--the very words that Lilian had heard in her vision!
“But,” resumed Faber, “how can I presume to trace the numberless links
of effect up to the First Cause, far off--oh; far off--out of the scope
of my reason. I leave that to philosophers, who would laugh my meek hope
to scorn. Possibly, probably, where I, whose calling has been but to
save flesh from the worm, deem that the life of your Lilian is needed
yet, to develop and train your own convictions of soul, Heaven in its
wisdom may see that her death would instruct you far more than her life.
I have said, Be prepared for either,--wisdom through joy, or wisdom
through grief. Enough that, looking only through the mechanism by which
this moral world is impelled and improved, you know that cruelty is
impossible to wisdom. Even a man, or man’s law, is never wise but when
merciful. But mercy has general conditions; and that which is mercy to
the myriads may seem hard to the one, and that which seems hard to the
one in the pang of a moment may be mercy when viewed by the eye that
looks on through eternity.”
And from all this discourse--of which I now, at calm distance of time,
recall every word--my human, loving heart bore away for the moment but
this sentence, “Ye will need one another;” so that I cried out,
“Life, life, life! Is there no hope for her life? Have you no hope as
physician? I am a physician, too; I will see her. I will judge. I will
not be banished from my post.”
“Judge, then, as physician, and let the responsibility rest with you. At
this moment, all convulsion, all struggle, has ceased; the frame is
at rest. Look on her, and perhaps only the physician’s eye could
distinguish her state from death. It is not sleep, it is not trance, it
is not the dooming coma from which there is no awaking. Shall I call it
by the name received in our schools? Is it the catalepsy in which life
is suspended, but consciousness acute? She is motionless, rigid; it
is but with a strain of my own sense that I know that the breath still
breathes, and the heart still beats. But I am convinced that though she
can neither speak, nor stir, nor give sign, she is fully, sensitively
conscious of all that passes around her. She is like those who have seen
the very coffin carried into their chamber, and been unable to cry
out, ‘Do not bury me alive!’ Judge then for yourself, with this intense
consciousness and this impotence to evince it, what might be the effect
of your presence,--first an agony of despair, and then the complete
extinction of life!”
“I have known but one such case,--a mother whose heart was wrapped up in
a suffering infant. She had lain for two days and two nights, still, as
if in her shroud. All save myself said, ‘Life is gone.’ I said, ‘Life
still is there.’ They brought in the infant, to try what effect its
presence would produce; then her lips moved, and the hands crossed upon
her bosom trembled.”
“And the result?” exclaimed Faber, eagerly. “If the result of your
experience sanction your presence, come; the sight of the babe rekindled
life?”
“No; extinguished its last spark! I will not enter Lilian’s room. I will
go away,--away from the house itself. That acute consciousness! I know
it well! She may even hear me move in the room below, hear me speak at
this moment. Go back to her, go back! But if hers be the state which I
have known in another, which may be yet more familiar to persons of far
ampler experience than mine, there is no immediate danger of death. The
state will last through to-day, through to-night, perhaps for days to
come. Is it so?”
“I believe that for at least twelve hours there will be no change in her
state. I believe also that if she recover from it, calm and refreshed,
as from a sleep, the danger of death will have passed away.”
“And for twelve hours my presence would be hurtful?”
“Rather say fatal, if my diagnosis be right.”
I wrung my friend’s hand, and we parted.
Oh, to lose her now!--now that her love and her reason had both
returned, each more vivid than before! Futile, indeed, might be
Margrave’s boasted secret; but at least in that secret was hope. In
recognized science I saw only despair.
And at that thought all dread of this mysterious visitor vanished,--all
anxiety to question more of his attributes or his history. His life
itself became to me dear and precious. What if it should fail me in the
steps of the process, whatever that was, by which the life of my Lilian
might be saved!
The shades of evening were now closing in. I remembered that I had left
Margrave without even food for many hours. I stole round to the back of
the house, filled a basket with elements more generous than those of
the former day; extracted fresh drugs from my stores, and, thus laden,
hurried back to the hut. I found Margrave in the room below, seated on
his mysterious coffer, leaning his face on his hand. When I entered, he
looked up, and said,--
“You have neglected me. My strength is waning. Give me more of the
cordial, for we have work before us to-night, and I need support.”
He took for granted my assent to his wild experiment; and he was right.
I administered the cordial. I placed food before him, and this time
he did not eat with repugnance. I poured out wine, and he drank it
sparingly, but with ready compliance, saying, “In perfect health, I
looked upon wine as poison; now it is like a foretaste of the glorious
elixir.”
After he had thus recruited himself, he seemed to acquire an energy
that startlingly contrasted his languor the day before; the effort of
breathing was scarcely perceptible; the colour came back to his cheeks;
his bended frame rose elastic and erect.
“If I understood you rightly,” said I, “the experiment you ask me to aid
can be accomplished in a single night?”
“In a single night,--this night.”
“Command me. Why not begin at once? What apparatus or chemical agencies
do you need?”
“Ah!” said Margrave, “formerly, how I was misled! Formerly, how my
conjectures blundered! I thought, when I asked you to give a month to
the experiment I wish to make, that I should need the subtlest skill of
the chemist. I then believed, with Van Helmont, that the principle of
life is a gas, and that the secret was but in the mode by which the gas
might be rightly administered. But now all that I need is contained
in this coffer, save one very simple material,--fuel sufficient for a
steady fire for six hours. I see even that is at hand, piled up in your
outhouse. And now for the substance itself,--to that you must guide me.”
“Explain.”
“Near this very spot is there not gold--in mines yet undiscovered?--and
gold of the purest metal?”
“There is. What then? Do you, with the alchemists, blend in one
discovery gold and life?”
“No. But it is only where the chemistry of earth or of man produces
gold, that the substance from which the great pabulum of life is
extracted by ferment can be found. Possibly, in the attempts at that
transmutation of metals, which I think your own great chemist, Sir
Humphry Davy, allowed might be possible, but held not to be worth the
cost of the process,--possibly, in those attempts, some scanty grains
of this substance were found by the alchemists, in the crucible, with
grains of the metal as niggardly yielded by pitiful mimicry of Nature’s
stupendous laboratory; and from such grains enough of the essence might,
perhaps, have been drawn forth, to add a few years of existence to some
feeble graybeard,--granting, what rests on no proofs, that some of the
alchemists reached an age rarely given to man. But it is not in the
miserly crucible, it is in the matrix of Nature herself, that we must
seek in prolific abundance Nature’s grand principle,--life. As the
loadstone is rife with the magnetic virtue, as amber contains the
electric, so in this substance, to which we yet want a name, is found
the bright life-giving fluid. In the old goldmines of Asia and Europe
the substance exists, but can rarely be met with. The soil for its
nutriment may there be well-nigh exhausted. It is here, where Nature
herself is all vital with youth, that the nutriment of youth must be
sought. Near this spot is gold; guide me to it.”
“You cannot come with me. The place which I know as auriferous is some
miles distant, the way rugged. You can not walk to it. It is true I have
horses, but--”
“Do you think I have come this distance and not foreseen and forestalled
all that I want for my object? Trouble your self not with conjectures
how I can arrive at the place. I have provided the means to arrive at
and leave it. My litter and its bearers are in reach of my call. Give me
your arm to the rising ground, fifty yards from your door.”
I obeyed mechanically, stifling all surprise. I had made my resolve, and
admitted no thought that could shake it. When we reached the summit of
the grassy hillock, which sloped from the road that led to the seaport,
Margrave, after pausing to recover breath, lifted up his voice, in a
key, not loud, but shrill and slow and prolonged, half cry and half
chant, like the nighthawk’s. Through the air--so limpid and still,
bringing near far objects, far sounds--the voice pierced its way,
artfully pausing, till wave after wave of the atmosphere bore and
transmitted it on.
In a few minutes the call seemed re-echoed, so exactly, so cheerily,
that for the moment I thought that the note was the mimicry of the shy
mocking Lyre-Bird, which mimics so merrily all that it hears in its
coverts, from the whir of the locust to the howl of the wild dog.
“What king,” said the mystical charmer, and as he spoke he carelessly
rested his hand on my shoulder, so that I trembled to feel that this
dread son of Nature, Godless and soulless, who had been--and, my heart
whispered, who still could be--my bane and mind-darkener, leaned upon
me for support, as the spoilt younger-born on his brother,--“what king,”
said this cynical mocker, with his beautiful boyish face,--“what king in
your civilized Europe has the sway of a chief of the East? What link is
so strong between mortal and mortal, as that between lord and slave?
I transport yon poor fools from the land of their birth; they preserve
here their old habits,--obedience and awe. They would wait till they
starved in the solitude,--wait to hearken and answer my call. And I, who
thus rule them, or charm them--I use and despise them. They know that,
and yet serve me! Between you and me, my philosopher, there is but one
thing worth living for,--life for oneself.”
Is it age, is it youth, that thus shocks all my sense, in my solemn
completeness of man? Perhaps, in great capitals, young men of pleasure
will answer, “It is youth; and we think what he says!” Young friends, I
do not believe you.