In making this confession public, I am aware that I am giving a
butterfly to be broken on a wheel. There is so much of delicacy in its
subject, that the mere resolve to handle it at all might seem to imply
a lack of the sensitiveness necessary to its understanding; and it is
certain that the more reverent the touch, the more irresistible will
figure its opportunity to the common scepticism which is bondslave to
its five senses. Moreover one cannot, in the reason of things, write
to publish for Aristarchus alone; but the gauntlet of Grub Street must
be run in any bid for truth and sincerity.
On the other hand, to withhold from evidence, in these days of what
one may call a zetetic psychology, anything which may appear
elucidatory, however exquisitely and rarely, of our spiritual
relationships, must be pronounced, I think, a sin against the Holy
Ghost.
All in all, therefore, I decide to give, with every passage to
personal identification safeguarded, the story of a possession, or
visitation, which is signified in the title to my narrative.
Tryphena was the sole orphaned representative of an obscure but gentle
family which had lived for generations in the east of England. The
spirit of the fens, of the long grey marshes, whose shores are the
neutral ground of two elements, slumbered in her eyes. Looking into
them, one seemed to see little beds of tiny green mosses luminous
under water, or stirred by the movement of microscopic life in their
midst. Secrets, one felt, were shadowed in their depths, too frail and
sweet for understanding. The pretty love-fancy of babies seen in the
eyes of maidens, was in hers to be interpreted into the very cosmic
dust of sea-urchins, sparkling like chrysoberyls. Her soul looked out
through them, as if they were the windows of a water-nursery.
She was always a child among children, in heart and knowledge most
innocent, until Jason came and stood in her field of vision. Then,
spirit of the neutral ground as she was, inclining to earth or water
with the sway of the tides, she came wondering and dripping, as it
were, to land, and took up her abode for final choice among the
daughters of the earth. She knew her woman’s estate, in fact, and the
irresistible attraction of all completed perfections to the light that
burns to destroy them.
Tryphena was not only an orphan, but an heiress. Her considerable
estate was administered by her guardian, Jason’s father, a widower,
who was possessed of this single adored child. The fruits of parental
infatuation had come early to ripen on the seedling. The boy was
self-willed and perverse, the more so as he was naturally of a
hot-hearted disposition. Violence and remorse would sway him in
alternate moods, and be made, each in its turn, a self-indulgence. He
took a delight in crossing his father’s wishes, and no less in atoning
for his gracelessness with moving demonstrations of affection.
Foremost of the old man’s most cherished projects was, very naturally,
a union between the two young people. He planned, manœuvred, spoke
for it with all his heart of love and eloquence. And, indeed, it
seemed at last as if his hopes were to be crowned. Jason, returning
from a lengthy voyage (for his enterprising spirit had early decided
for the sea, and he was a naval officer), saw, and was struck amazed
before, the transformed vision of his old child-playfellow. She was an
opened flower whom he had left a green bud—a thing so rare and
flawless that it seemed a sacrilege for earthly passions to converse
of her. Familiarity, however, and some sense of reciprocal attraction,
quickly dethroned that eucharist. Tryphena could blush, could thrill,
could solicit, in the sweet ways of innocent womanhood. She loved him
dearly, wholly, it was plain—had found the realization of all her old
formless dreams in this wondrous birth of a desire for one, in whose
new-impassioned eyes she had known herself reflected hitherto only for
the most patronized of small gossips. And, for her part, fearless as
nature, she made no secret of her love. She was absorbed in, a captive
to, Jason from that moment and for ever.
He responded. What man, however perverse, could have resisted, on
first appeal, the attraction of such beauty, the flower of a radiant
soul? The two were betrothed; the old man’s cup of happiness was
brimmed.
Then came clouds and a cold wind, chilling the garden of Hesperis.
Jason was always one of those who, possessing classic noses, will cut
them off, on easy provocation, to spite their faces. He was so proudly
independent, to himself, that he resented the least assumption of
proprietorship in him on the part of other people—even of those who
had the best claim to his love and submission. This pride was an
obsession. It stultified the real good in him, which was considerable.
Apart from it, he was a good, warm-tempered fellow, hasty but
affectionate. Under its dominion, he would have broken his own heart
on an imaginary grievance.
He found one, it is to be supposed, in the privileges assumed by love;
in its exacting claims upon him; perhaps in its little unreasoning
jealousies. He distorted these into an implied conceit of authority
over him on the part of an heiress who was condescending to his meaner
fortunes. The suggestion was quite base and without warrant; but pride
has no balance. No doubt, moreover, the rather childish
self-depreciations of the old man, his father, in his attitude towards
a match he had so fondly desired, helped to aggravate this feeling.
The upshot was that, when within a few months of the date which was to
make his union with Tryphena eternal, Jason broke away from a
restraint which his pride pictured to him as intolerable, and went on
a yachting expedition with a friend.
Then, at once, and with characteristic violence, came the reaction. He
wrote, impetuously, frenziedly, from a distant port, claiming himself
Tryphena’s, and Tryphena his, for ever and ever and ever. They were
man and wife before God. He had behaved like an insensate brute, and
he was at that moment starting to speed to her side, to beg her
forgiveness and the return of her love.
He had no need to play the suitor afresh. She had never doubted or
questioned their mutual bondage, and would have died a maid for his
sake. Something of sweet exultation only seemed to quicken and leap in
her body, that her faith in her dear love was vindicated.
But the joy came near to upset the reason of the old man, already
tottering to its dotage; and what followed destroyed it utterly.
The yacht, flying home, was lost at sea, and Jason was drowned.
I once saw Tryphena about this time. She lived with her near mindless
charge, lonely, in an old grey house upon the borders of a salt mere,
and had little but the unearthly cries of seabirds to answer to the
questions of her widowed heart. She worked, sweet in charity, among
the marsh folk, a beautiful unearthly presence; and was especially to
be found where infants and the troubles of child-bearing women called
for her help and sympathy. She was a wife herself, she would say
quaintly; and some day perhaps, by grace of the good spirits of the
sea, would be a mother. None thought to cross her statement, put with
so sweet a sanity; and, indeed, I have often noticed that the
neighbourhood of great waters breeds in souls a mysticism which is
remote from the very understanding of land-dwellers.