ISOLATION.
After writing to Mr Osborne to acquaint him with the terrible event,
the first thing I did was to go to Clara. I will not attempt to
describe what followed. The moment she saw me, her face revealed, as in
a mirror, the fact legible on my own, and I had scarcely opened my
mouth when she cried ‘He is dead!’ and fell fainting on the floor. Her
aunt came, and we succeeded in recovering her a little. But she lay
still as death on the couch where we had laid her, and the motion of
her eyes hither and thither, as if following the movements of some one
about the room, was the only sign of life in her. We spoke to her, but
evidently she heard nothing; and at last, leaving her when the doctor
arrived, I waited for her aunt in another room, and told her what had
happened.
Some days after, Clara sent for me, and I had to tell her the whole
story. Then, with agony in every word she uttered, she managed to
inform me that, when she went in after I had left her at the door that
night, she found waiting her a note from Charley; and this she now gave
me to read. It contained a request to meet him that evening at the very
place which I had appointed. It was their customary rendezvous when she
was in town. In all probability he was there when we were, and heard
and saw--heard too little and saw too much, and concluded that both
Clara and I were false to him. The frightful perturbation which a
conviction such as that must cause in a mind like his could be nothing
short of madness. For, ever tortured by a sense of his own impotence,
of the gulf to all appearance eternally fixed between his actions and
his aspirations, and unable to lay hold of the Essential, the Causing
Goodness, he had clung, with the despair of a perishing man, to the dim
reflex of good he saw in her and me. If his faith in that was indeed
destroyed, the last barrier must have given way, and the sea of madness
ever breaking against it must have broken in and overwhelmed him. But
oh, my friend! surely long ere now thou knowest that we were not false;
surely the hour will yet dawn when I shall again hold thee to my heart;
yea, surely, even if still thou countest me guilty, thou hast already
found for me endless excuse and forgiveness.
I can hardly doubt, however, that he inherited a strain of madness from
his father, a madness which that father had developed by forcing upon
him the false forms of a true religion.
It is not then strange that I should have thought and speculated much
about madness.--What does its frequent impulse to suicide indicate? May
it not be its main instinct to destroy itself as an evil thing? May not
the impulse arise from some unconscious conviction that there is for it
no remedy but the shuffling off of this mortal coil--nature herself
dimly urging through the fumes of the madness to the one blow which
lets in the light and air? Doubtless, if in the mind so sadly unhinged,
the sense of a holy presence could be developed--the sense of a love
that loves through all vagaries--of a hiding-place from forms of evil
the most fantastic--of a fatherly care that not merely holds its insane
child in its arms, but enters into the chaos of his imagination, and
sees every wildest horror with which it swarms; if, I say, the
conviction of such a love dawned on the disordered mind, the man would
live in spite of his imaginary foes, for he would pray against them as
sure of being heard as St Paul when he prayed concerning the thorn from
which he was not delivered, but against which he was sustained. And who
can tell how often this may be the fact--how often the lunatic also
lives by faith? Are not the forms of madness most frequently those of
love and religion? Certainly, if there be a God, he does not forget his
frenzied offspring; certainly he is more tender over them than any
mother over her idiot darling; certainly he sees in them what the eye
of brother or sister cannot see. But some of them, at least, have not
enough of such support to be able to go on living; and, for my part, I
confess I rejoice as often as I hear that one has succeeded in breaking
his prison bars. When the crystal shrine has grown dim, and the fair
forms of nature are in their entrance contorted hideously; when the
sunlight itself is as blue lightning, and the wind in the summer trees
is as ‘a terrible sound of stones cast down, or a rebounding echo from
the hollow mountains;’ when the body is no longer a mediator between
the soul and the world, but the prison-house of a lying gaoler and
torturer--how can I but rejoice to hear that the tormented captive has
at length forced his way out into freedom?
When I look behind me, I can see but little through the surging lurid
smoke of that awful time. The first sense of relief came when I saw the
body of Charley laid in the holy earth. For the earth _is_ the
Lord’s--and none the less holy that the voice of the priest may have
left it without his consecration. Surely if ever the Lord laughs in
derision, as the Psalmist says, it must be when the voice of a man
would in _his_ name exclude his fellows from their birthright. O Lord,
gather thou the outcasts of thy Israel, whom the priests and the rulers
of thy people have cast out to perish.
I remember for the most part only a dull agony, interchanging with
apathy. For days and days I could not rest, but walked hither and
thither, careless whither. When at length I would lie down weary and
fall asleep, suddenly I would start up, hearing the voice of Charley
crying for help, and rush in the middle of the Winter night into the
wretched streets there to wander till daybreak. But I was not utterly
miserable. In my most wretched dreams I never dreamed of Mary, and
through all my waking distress I never forgot her. I was sure in my
very soul that she did me no injustice. I had laid open the deepest in
me to her honest gaze, and she had read it, and could not but know me.
Neither did what had occurred quench my growing faith. I had never been
able to hope much for Charley in this world; for something was out of
joint with him, and only in the region of the unknown was I able to
look for the setting right of it. Nor had many weeks passed before I
was fully aware of relief when I remembered that he was dead. And
whenever the thought arose that God might have given him a fairer
chance in this world, I was able to reflect that apparently God does
not care for this world save as a part of the whole; and on that whole
I had yet to discover that he could have given him a fairer chance.