How innocent was Lilian's virgin blush when I knelt to her, and prayed
that she would forestall the date that had been fixed for our union, and
be my bride before the breath of the autumn had withered the pomp of
thewoodland and silenced the song of the birds! Meanwhile, I was so
fearfully anxious that she should risk no danger of hearing, even of
surmising, the cruel slander against her--should meet no cold contemptuous
looks, above all, should be safe from the barbed talk of Mrs. Poyntz--that
I insisted on the necessity of immediate change of air and scene. I
proposed that we should all three depart, the next day, for the banks of
my own beloved and native Windermere. By that pure mountain air, Lilian's
health would be soon re-established; in the church hallowed to me by the
graves of my fathers our vows should be plighted. No calumny had ever
cast a shadow over those graves. I felt as if my bride would be safer in
the neighbourhood of my mother's tomb.
I carried my point: it was so arranged. Mrs. Ashleigh, however, was
reluctant to leave before she had seen her dear friend, Margaret Poyntz.
I had not the courage to tell her what she might expect to hear from that
dear friend, but, as delicately as I could, I informed her that I had
already seen the Queen of the Hill, and contradicted the gossip that had
reached her; but that as yet, like other absolute sovereigns, the Queen of
the Hill thought it politic to go with the popular stream, reserving all
check on its direction till the rush of its torrent might slacken; and
that it would be infinitely wiser in Mrs. Ashleigh to postpone
conversation with Mrs. Poyntz until Lilian's return to L---- as my wife.
Slander by that time would have wearied itself out, and Mrs. Poyntz
(assuming her friendship to Mrs. Ashleigh to be sincere) would then be
enabled to say with authority to her subjects, "Dr. Fenwick alone knows
the facts of the story, and his marriage with Miss Ashleigh refutes all
the gossip to her prejudice."
I made that evening arrangements with a young and rising practitioner to
secure attendance on my patients during my absence. I passed the greater
part of the night in drawing up memoranda to guide my proxy in each case,
however humble the sufferer. This task finished, I chanced, in searching
for a small microscope, the wonders of which I thought might interest and
amuse Lilian, to open a drawer in which I kept the manuscript of my
cherished Physiological Work, and, in so doing, my eye fell upon the wand
which I had taken from Margrave. I had thrown it into that drawer on my
return home, after restoring Lilian to her mother's house, and, in the
anxiety which had subsequently preyed upon my mind, had almost forgotten
the strange possession I had as strangely acquired. There it now lay, the
instrument of agencies over the mechanism of nature which no doctrine
admitted by my philosophy could accept, side by side with the presumptuous
work which had analyzed the springs by which Nature is moved, and decided
the principles by which reason metes out, from the inch of its knowledge,
the plan of the Infinite Unknown.
I took up the wand and examined it curiously. It was evidently the work
of an age far remote from our own, scored over with half-obliterated
characters in some Eastern tongue, perhaps no longer extant. I found that
it was hollow within. A more accurate observation showed, in the centre
of this hollow, an exceedingly fine thread-like wire, the unattached end
of which would slightly touch the palm when the wand was taken into the
hand. Was it possible that there might be a natural and even a simple
cause for the effects which this instrument produced? Could it serve to
collect, from that great focus of animal heat and nervous energy which is
placed in the palm of the human hand, some such latent fluid as that which
Reichenbach calls the "odic," and which, according to him, "rushes through
and pervades universal Nature"? After all, why not? For how many
centuries lay unknown all the virtues of the loadstone and the amber? It
is but as yesterday that the forces of vapour have become to men genii
more powerful than those conjured up by Aladdin; that light, at a touch,
springs forth from invisible air; that thought finds a messenger swifter
than the wings of the fabled Afrite. As, thus musing, my hand closed over
the wand, I felt a wild thrill through my frame. I recoiled; I was
alarmed lest (according to the plain common-sense theory of Julius Faber)
I might be preparing my imagination to form and to credit its own
illusions. Hastily I laid down the wand. But then it occurred to me that
whatever its properties, it had so served the purposes of the dread
Fascinator from whom it had been taken, that he might probably seek to
repossess himself of it; he might contrive to enter my house in my
absence; more prudent to guard in my own watchful keeping the
incomprehensible instrument of incomprehensible arts. I resolved,
therefore, to take the wand with me, and placed it in my travelling-trunk,
with such effects as I selected for use in the excursion that was to
commence with the morrow. I now lay down to rest, but I could not sleep.
The recollections of the painful interview with Mrs. Poyntz became vivid
and haunting. It was clear that the sentiment she had conceived for me
was that of no simple friendship,--something more or something less, but
certainly something else; and this conviction brought before me that proud
hard face, disturbed by a pang wrestled against but not subdued, and that
clear metallic voice, troubled by the quiver of an emotion which, perhaps,
she had never analyzed to herself. I did not need her own assurance to
know that this sentiment was not to be confounded with a love which she
would have despised as a weakness and repelled as a crime; it was an
inclination of the intellect, not a passion of the heart. But still it
admitted a jealousy little less keen than that which has love for its
cause,--so true it is that jealousy is never absent where self-love is
always present. Certainly, it was no susceptibility of sober friendship
which had made the stern arbitress of a coterie ascribe to her interest
in me her pitiless judgment of Lilian. Strangely enough, with the image
of this archetype of conventional usages and the trite social life, came
that of the mysterious Margrave, surrounded by all the attributes with
which superstition clothes the being of the shadowy border-land that lies
beyond the chart of our visual world itself. By what link were creatures
so dissimilar riveted together in the metaphysical chain of association?
Both had entered into the record of my life when my life admitted its own
first romance of love. Through the aid of this cynical schemer I had been
made known to Lilian. At her house I had heard the dark story of that
Louis Grayle, with whom, in mocking spite of my reason, conjectures, which
that very reason must depose itself before it could resolve into
distempered fancies, identified the enigmatical Margrave. And now both
she, the representative of the formal world most opposed to visionary
creeds, and he, who gathered round him all the terrors which haunt the
realm of fable, stood united against me,--foes with whom the intellect I
had so haughtily cultured knew not how to cope. Whatever assault I might
expect from either, I was unable to assail again. Alike, then, in this,
are the Slander and the Phantom,--that which appalls us most in their
power over us is our impotence against them.
But up rose the sun, chasing the shadows from the earth, and brightening
insensibly the thoughts of man. After all, Margrave had been baffled and
defeated, whatever the arts he had practised and the secrets he possessed.
It was, at least, doubtful whether his evil machinations would be renewed.
He had seemed so incapable of long-sustained fixity of purpose, that it
was probable he was already in pursuit of some new agent or victim; and as
to this commonplace and conventional spectre, the so-called World, if it
is everywhere to him whom it awes, it is nowhere to him who despises it.
What was the good or bad word of a Mrs. Poyntz to me? Ay, but to Lilian?
There, indeed, I trembled; but still, even in trembling, it was sweet to
think that my home would be her shelter,--my choice her vindication. Ah!
how unutterably tender and reverential Love becomes when it assumes the
duties of the guardian, and hallows its own heart into a sanctuary of
refuge for the beloved!