LILITH
By George MacDonald
I took a walk on Spaulding’s Farm the other afternoon. I saw the setting
sun lighting up the opposite side of a stately pine wood. Its golden
rays straggled into the aisles of the wood as into some noble hall. I
was impressed as if some ancient and altogether admirable and shining
family had settled there in that part of the land called Concord,
unknown to me,--to whom the sun was servant,--who had not gone into
society in the village,--who had not been called on. I saw their
park, their pleasure-ground, beyond through the wood, in Spaulding’s
cranberry-meadow. The pines furnished them with gables as they grew.
Their house was not obvious to vision; their trees grew through it. I
do not know whether I heard the sounds of a suppressed hilarity or not.
They seemed to recline on the sunbeams. They have sons and daughters.
They are quite well. The farmer’s cart-path, which leads directly
through their hall, does not in the least put them out,--as the muddy
bottom of a pool is sometimes seen through the reflected skies.
They never heard of Spaulding, and do not know that he is their
neighbor,--notwithstanding I heard him whistle as he drove his team
through the house. Nothing can equal the serenity of their lives. Their
coat of arms is simply a lichen. I saw it painted on the pines and oaks.
Their attics were in the tops of the trees. They are of no politics.
There was no noise of labor. I did not perceive that they were weaving
or spinning. Yet I did detect, when the wind lulled and hearing was done
away, the finest imaginable sweet musical hum,--as of a distant hive in
May, which perchance was the sound of their thinking. They had no idle
thoughts, and no one without could see their work, for their industry
was not as in knots and excrescences embayed.
But I find it difficult to remember them. They fade irrevocably out
of my mind even now while I speak and endeavor to recall them, and
recollect myself. It is only after a long and serious effort to
recollect my best thoughts that I become again aware of their
cohabitancy. If it were not for such families as this, I think I should
move out of Concord.
Thoreau: “WALKING.”
CHAPTER I. THE LIBRARY
I had just finished my studies at Oxford, and was taking a brief holiday
from work before assuming definitely the management of the estate. My
father died when I was yet a child; my mother followed him within a
year; and I was nearly as much alone in the world as a man might find
himself.
I had made little acquaintance with the history of my ancestors. Almost
the only thing I knew concerning them was, that a notable number of them
had been given to study. I had myself so far inherited the tendency as
to devote a good deal of my time, though, I confess, after a somewhat
desultory fashion, to the physical sciences. It was chiefly the wonder
they woke that drew me. I was constantly seeing, and on the outlook to
see, strange analogies, not only between the facts of different sciences
of the same order, or between physical and metaphysical facts, but
between physical hypotheses and suggestions glimmering out of the
metaphysical dreams into which I was in the habit of falling. I was at
the same time much given to a premature indulgence of the impulse to
turn hypothesis into theory. Of my mental peculiarities there is no
occasion to say more.
The house as well as the family was of some antiquity, but no
description of it is necessary to the understanding of my narrative.
It contained a fine library, whose growth began before the invention
of printing, and had continued to my own time, greatly influenced, of
course, by changes of taste and pursuit. Nothing surely can more impress
upon a man the transitory nature of possession than his succeeding to
an ancient property! Like a moving panorama mine has passed from before
many eyes, and is now slowly flitting from before my own.
The library, although duly considered in many alterations of the house
and additions to it, had nevertheless, like an encroaching state,
absorbed one room after another until it occupied the greater part of
the ground floor. Its chief room was large, and the walls of it were
covered with books almost to the ceiling; the rooms into which it
overflowed were of various sizes and shapes, and communicated in modes
as various--by doors, by open arches, by short passages, by steps up and
steps down.
In the great room I mainly spent my time, reading books of science,
old as well as new; for the history of the human mind in relation to
supposed knowledge was what most of all interested me. Ptolemy, Dante,
the two Bacons, and Boyle were even more to me than Darwin or Maxwell,
as so much nearer the vanished van breaking into the dark of ignorance.
In the evening of a gloomy day of August I was sitting in my usual
place, my back to one of the windows, reading. It had rained the greater
part of the morning and afternoon, but just as the sun was setting, the
clouds parted in front of him, and he shone into the room. I rose and
looked out of the window. In the centre of the great lawn the feathering
top of the fountain column was filled with his red glory. I turned to
resume my seat, when my eye was caught by the same glory on the one
picture in the room--a portrait, in a sort of niche or little shrine
sunk for it in the expanse of book-filled shelves. I knew it as the
likeness of one of my ancestors, but had never even wondered why it hung
there alone, and not in the gallery, or one of the great rooms, among
the other family portraits. The direct sunlight brought out the painting
wonderfully; for the first time I seemed to see it, and for the first
time it seemed to respond to my look. With my eyes full of the light
reflected from it, something, I cannot tell what, made me turn and cast
a glance to the farther end of the room, when I saw, or seemed to see,
a tall figure reaching up a hand to a bookshelf. The next instant, my
vision apparently rectified by the comparative dusk, I saw no one,
and concluded that my optic nerves had been momentarily affected from
within.
I resumed my reading, and would doubtless have forgotten the vague,
evanescent impression, had it not been that, having occasion a moment
after to consult a certain volume, I found but a gap in the row where it
ought to have stood, and the same instant remembered that just there I
had seen, or fancied I saw, the old man in search of a book. I looked
all about the spot but in vain. The next morning, however, there it
was, just where I had thought to find it! I knew of no one in the house
likely to be interested in such a book.
Three days after, another and yet odder thing took place.
In one of the walls was the low, narrow door of a closet, containing
some of the oldest and rarest of the books. It was a very thick door,
with a projecting frame, and it had been the fancy of some ancestor to
cross it with shallow shelves, filled with book-backs only. The harmless
trick may be excused by the fact that the titles on the sham backs
were either humorously original, or those of books lost beyond hope of
recovery. I had a great liking for the masked door.
To complete the illusion of it, some inventive workman apparently had
shoved in, on the top of one of the rows, a part of a volume thin enough
to lie between it and the bottom of the next shelf: he had cut away
diagonally a considerable portion, and fixed the remnant with one of
its open corners projecting beyond the book-backs. The binding of the
mutilated volume was limp vellum, and one could open the corner far
enough to see that it was manuscript upon parchment.
Happening, as I sat reading, to raise my eyes from the page, my glance
fell upon this door, and at once I saw that the book described, if
book it may be called, was gone. Angrier than any worth I knew in it
justified, I rang the bell, and the butler appeared. When I asked him if
he knew what had befallen it, he turned pale, and assured me he did not.
I could less easily doubt his word than my own eyes, for he had been all
his life in the family, and a more faithful servant never lived. He left
on me the impression, nevertheless, that he could have said something
more.
In the afternoon I was again reading in the library, and coming to a
point which demanded reflection, I lowered the book and let my eyes go
wandering. The same moment I saw the back of a slender old man, in a
long, dark coat, shiny as from much wear, in the act of disappearing
through the masked door into the closet beyond. I darted across the
room, found the door shut, pulled it open, looked into the closet,
which had no other issue, and, seeing nobody, concluded, not without
uneasiness, that I had had a recurrence of my former illusion, and sat
down again to my reading.
Naturally, however, I could not help feeling a little nervous, and
presently glancing up to assure myself that I was indeed alone,
started again to my feet, and ran to the masked door--for there was
the mutilated volume in its place! I laid hold of it and pulled: it was
firmly fixed as usual!
I was now utterly bewildered. I rang the bell; the butler came; I told
him all I had seen, and he told me all he knew.
He had hoped, he said, that the old gentleman was going to be forgotten;
it was well no one but myself had seen him. He had heard a good deal
about him when first he served in the house, but by degrees he had
ceased to be mentioned, and he had been very careful not to allude to
him.
“The place was haunted by an old gentleman, was it?” I said.
He answered that at one time everybody believed it, but the fact that I
had never heard of it seemed to imply that the thing had come to an end
and was forgotten.
I questioned him as to what he had seen of the old gentleman.
He had never seen him, he said, although he had been in the house from
the day my father was eight years old. My grandfather would never hear
a word on the matter, declaring that whoever alluded to it should be
dismissed without a moment’s warning: it was nothing but a pretext of
the maids, he said, for running into the arms of the men! but old Sir
Ralph believed in nothing he could not see or lay hold of. Not one of
the maids ever said she had seen the apparition, but a footman had left
the place because of it.
An ancient woman in the village had told him a legend concerning a Mr.
Raven, long time librarian to “that Sir Upward whose portrait hangs
there among the books.” Sir Upward was a great reader, she said--not
of such books only as were wholesome for men to read, but of strange,
forbidden, and evil books; and in so doing, Mr. Raven, who was probably
the devil himself, encouraged him. Suddenly they both disappeared, and
Sir Upward was never after seen or heard of, but Mr. Raven continued to
show himself at uncertain intervals in the library. There were some who
believed he was not dead; but both he and the old woman held it easier
to believe that a dead man might revisit the world he had left, than
that one who went on living for hundreds of years should be a man at
all.
He had never heard that Mr. Raven meddled with anything in the house,
but he might perhaps consider himself privileged in regard to the books.
How the old woman had learned so much about him he could not tell; but
the description she gave of him corresponded exactly with the figure I
had just seen.
“I hope it was but a friendly call on the part of the old gentleman!” he
concluded, with a troubled smile.
I told him I had no objection to any number of visits from Mr. Raven,
but it would be well he should keep to his resolution of saying nothing
about him to the servants. Then I asked him if he had ever seen the
mutilated volume out of its place; he answered that he never had, and
had always thought it a fixture. With that he went to it, and gave it a
pull: it seemed immovable.