I descended into the valley; the armed men followed. The path, on that
side of the watercourse not reached by the flames, wound through meadows
still green, or amidst groves still unscathed. As a turning in the way
brought in front of my sight the place I had left behind, I beheld the
black litter creeping down the descent, with its curtains closed, and
the Veiled Woman walking by its side. But soon the funeral procession
was lost to my eyes, and the thoughts that it roused were erased. The
waves in man’s brain are like those of the sea, rushing on, rushing over
the wrecks of the vessels that rode on their surface, to sink, after
storm, in their deeps. One thought cast forth into the future now
mastered all in the past: “Was Lilian living still?” Absorbed in the
gloom of that thought, hurried on by the goad that my heart, in its
tortured impatience, gave to my footstep, I outstripped the slow stride
of the armed men, and, midway between the place I had left and the home
which I sped to, came, far in advance of my guards, into the thicket in
which the bushmen had started up in my path on the night that Lilian
had watched for my coming. The earth at my feet was rife with creeping
plants and many-coloured flowers, the sky overhead was half-hid by
motionless pines. Suddenly, whether crawling out from the herbage,
or dropping down from the trees, by my side stood the white-robed and
skeleton form,--Ayesha’s attendant, the Strangler.
I sprang from him shuddering, then halted and faced him. The hideous
creature crept towards me, cringing and fawning, making signs of
humble good-will and servile obeisance. Again I recoiled,--wrathfully,
loathingly; turned my face homeward, and fled on. I thought I had
baffled his chase, when, just at the mouth of the thicket, he dropped
from a bough in my path close behind me. Before I could turn, some
dark muffling substance fell between my sight and the sun, and I felt a
fierce strain at my throat. But the words of Ayesha had warned me; with
one rapid hand I seized the noose before it could tighten too closely,
with the other I tore the bandage away from my eyes, and, wheeling round
on the dastardly foe, struck him down with one spurn of my foot. His
hand, as he fell, relaxed its hold on the noose; I freed my throat from
the knot, and sprang from the copse into the broad sunlit plain. I saw
no more of the armed men or the Strangler. Panting and breathless, I
paused at last before the fence, fragrant with blossoms, that divided my
home from the solitude.
The windows of Lilian’s room were darkened; all within the house seemed
still.
Darkened and silenced Home! with the light and sounds of the jocund day
all around it. Was there yet hope in the Universe for me? All to which I
had trusted Hope had broken down! The anchors I had forged for her hold
in the beds of the ocean, her stay from the drifts of the storm, had
snapped like the reeds which pierce the side that leans on the barb of
their points, and confides in the strength of their stems. No hope in
the baffled resources of recognized knowledge! No hope in the daring
adventures of Mind into regions unknown; vain alike the calm lore of the
practised physician, and the magical arts of the fated Enchanter! I
had fled from the commonplace teachings of Nature, to explore in her
Shadow-land marvels at variance with reason. Made brave by the grandeur
of love, I had opposed without quailing the stride of the Demon, and by
hope, when fruition seemed nearest, had been trodden into dust by the
hoofs of the beast! And yet, all the while, I had scorned, as a dream
more wild than the word of a sorcerer, the hope that the old man and the
child, the wise and the ignorant, took from their souls as inborn.
Man and fiend had alike failed a mind, not ignoble, not skilless, not
abjectly craven; alike failed a heart not feeble and selfish, not dead
to the hero’s devotion, willing to shed every drop of its blood for
a something more dear than an animal’s life for itself! What
remained--what remained for man’s hope?--man’s mind and man’s heart thus
exhausting their all with no other result but despair! What remained
but the mystery of mysteries, so clear to the sunrise of childhood, the
sunset of age, only dimmed by the clouds which collect round the noon
of our manhood? Where yet was Hope found? In the soul; in its every-day
impulse to supplicate comfort and light, from the Giver of soul,
wherever the heart is afflicted, the mind is obscured.
Then the words of Ayesha rushed over me: “What mourner can be consoled,
if the Dead die forever?” Through every pulse of my frame throbbed that
dread question. All Nature around seemed to murmur it. And suddenly, as
by a flash from heaven, the grand truth in Faber’s grand reasoning shone
on me, and lighted up all, within and without. Man alone, of all earthly
creatures, asks, “Can the Dead die forever?” and the instinct that urges
the question is God’s answer to man! No instinct is given in vain.
And born with the instinct of soul is the instinct that leads the soul
from the seen to the unseen, from time to eternity, from the torrent
that foams towards the Ocean of Death, to the source of its stream, far
aloft from the Ocean.
“Know thyself,” said the Pythian of old. “That precept descended from
Heaven.” Know thyself! Is that maxim wise? If so, know thy soul. But
never yet did man come to the thorough conviction of soul but what
he acknowledged the sovereign necessity of prayer. In my awe, in my
rapture, all my thoughts seemed enlarged and illumined and exalted. I
prayed,--all my soul seemed one prayer. All my past, with its pride and
presumption and folly, grew distinct as the form of a penitent, kneeling
for pardon before setting forth on the pilgrimage vowed to a shrine.
And, sure now, in the deeps of a soul first revealed to myself, that the
Dead do not die forever, my human love soared beyond its brief trial of
terror and sorrow. Daring not to ask from Heaven’s wisdom that Lilian,
for my sake, might not yet pass away from the earth, I prayed that my
soul might be fitted to bear with submission whatever my Maker might
ordain. And if surviving her--without whom no beam from yon material sun
could ever warm into joy a morrow in human life--so to guide my steps
that they might rejoin her at last, and, in rejoining, regain forever!
How trivial now became the weird riddle that, a little while before, had
been clothed in so solemn an awe! What mattered it to the vast interests
involved in the clear recognition of Soul and Hereafter, whether or not
my bodily sense, for a moment, obscured the face of the Nature I should
one day behold as a spirit? Doubtless the sights and the sounds which
had haunted the last gloomy night, the calm reason of Faber would strip
of their magical seemings; the Eyes in the space and the Foot in the
circle might be those of no terrible Demons, but of the wild’s savage
children whom I had seen, halting, curious and mute, in the light of the
morning. The tremor of the ground (if not, as heretofore, explicable by
the illusory impression of my own treacherous senses) might be but the
natural effect of elements struggling yet under a soil unmistakably
charred by volcanoes. The luminous atoms dissolved in the caldron
might as little be fraught with a vital elixir as are the splendours of
naphtha or phosphor. As it was, the weird rite had no magic result. The
magician was not rent limb from limb by the fiends. By causes as natural
as ever extinguished life’s spark in the frail lamp of clay, he had died
out of sight--under the black veil.
What mattered henceforth to Faith, in its far grander questions and
answers, whether Reason, in Faber, or Fancy, in me, supplied the more
probable guess at a hieroglyph which, if construed aright, was but a
word of small mark in the mystical language of Nature? If all the arts
of enchantment recorded by Fable were attested by facts which Sages were
forced to acknowledge, Sages would sooner or later find some cause
for such portents--not supernatural. But what Sage, without cause
supernatural, both without and within him, can guess at the wonders he
views in the growth of a blade of grass, or the tints on an insect’s
wing? Whatever art Man can achieve in his progress through time, Man’s
reason, in time, can suffice to explain. But the wonders of God? These
belong to the Infinite; and these, O Immortal! will but develop new
wonder on wonder, though thy sight be a spirit’s, and thy leisure to
track and to solve an eternity.
As I raised my face from my clasped hands, my eyes fell full upon a
form standing in the open doorway. There, where on the night in which
Lilian’s long struggle for reason and life had begun, the Luminous
Shadow had been beheld in the doubtful light of a dying moon and a yet
hazy dawn; there, on the threshold, gathering round her bright locks
the aureole of the glorious sun, stood Amy, the blessed child! And as I
gazed, drawing nearer and nearer to the silenced house, and that Image
of Peace on its threshold, I felt that Hope met me at the door,--Hope in
the child’s steadfast eyes, Hope in the child’s welcoming smile!
“I was at watch for you,” whispered Amy. “All is well.”
“She lives still--she lives! Thank God! thank God!”
“She lives,--she will recover!” said another voice, as my head sunk on
Faber’s shoulder. “For some hours in the night her sleep was disturbed,
convulsed. I feared, then, the worst. Suddenly, just before the dawn,
she called out aloud, still in sleep,--
“‘The cold and dark shadow has passed away from me and from
Allen,--passed away from us both forever!’
“And from that moment the fever left her; the breathing became soft,
the pulse steady, and the colour stole gradually back to her cheek. The
crisis is past. Nature’s benign Disposer has permitted Nature to restore
your life’s gentle partner, heart to heart, mind to mind--”
“And soul to soul,” I cried, in my solemn joy. “Above as below, soul to
soul!” Then, at a sign from Faber, the child took me by the hand and led
me up the stairs into Lilian’s room.
Again those clear arms closed around me in wife-like and holy love, and
those true lips kissed away my tears,--even as now, at the distance of
years from that happy morn, while I write the last words of this Strange
Story, the same faithful arms close around me, the same tender lips kiss
away my tears.
THE END.
End of Project Gutenberg’s A Strange Story, Complete, by Edward
Bulwer-Lytton