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 be 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 bad 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.