_THE SQUIRE OF DAMES_
Mr. Edward Challoner had set up lodgings in the suburb of Putney, where
he enjoyed a parlour and bedroom and the sincere esteem of the people of
the house. To this remote home he found himself, at a very early hour in
the morning of the next day, condemned to set forth on foot. He was a
young man of a portly habit; no lover of the exercises of the body;
bland, sedentary, patient of delay, a prop of omnibuses. In happier days
he would have chartered a cab; but these luxuries were now denied him;
and with what courage he could muster he addressed himself to walk.
It was then the height of the season and the summer; the weather was
serene and cloudless; and as he paced under the blinded houses and along
the vacant streets, the chill of the dawn had fled, and some of the
warmth and all the brightness of the July day already shone upon the
city. He walked at first in a profound abstraction, bitterly reviewing
and repenting his performances at whist; but as he advanced into the
labyrinth of the south-west, his ear was gradually mastered by the
silence. Street after street looked down upon his solitary figure, house
after house echoed upon his passage with a ghostly jar, shop after shop
displayed its shuttered front and its commercial legend; and meanwhile he
steered his course, under day’s effulgent dome and through this
encampment of diurnal sleepers, lonely as a ship.
‘Here,’ he reflected, ‘if I were like my scatter-brained companion, here
were indeed the scene where I might look for an adventure. Here, in
broad day, the streets are secret as in the blackest night of January,
and in the midst of some four million sleepers, solitary as the woods of
Yucatan. If I but raise my voice I could summon up the number of an
army, and yet the grave is not more silent than this city of sleep.’
He was still following these quaint and serious musings when he came into
a street of more mingled ingredients than was common in the quarter.
Here, on the one hand, framed in walls and the green tops of trees, were
several of those discreet, _bijou_ residences on which propriety is apt
to look askance. Here, too, were many of the brick-fronted barracks of
the poor; a plaster cow, perhaps, serving as ensign to a dairy, or a
ticket announcing the business of the mangler. Before one such house,
that stood a little separate among walled gardens, a cat was playing with
a straw, and Challoner paused a moment, looking on this sleek and
solitary creature, who seemed an emblem of the neighbouring peace. With
the cessation of the sound of his own steps the silence fell dead; the
house stood smokeless: the blinds down, the whole machinery of life
arrested; and it seemed to Challoner that he should hear the breathing of
the sleepers.
As he so stood, he was startled by a dull and jarring detonation from
within. This was followed by a monstrous hissing and simmering as from a
kettle of the bigness of St. Paul’s; and at the same time from every
chink of door and window spirted an ill-smelling vapour. The cat
disappeared with a cry. Within the lodging-house feet pounded on the
stairs; the door flew back, emitting clouds of smoke; and two men and an
elegantly dressed young lady tumbled forth into the street and fled
without a word. The hissing had already ceased, the smoke was melting in
the air, the whole event had come and gone as in a dream, and still
Challoner was rooted to the spot. At last his reason and his fear awoke
together, and with the most unwonted energy he fell to running.
Little by little this first dash relaxed, and presently he had resumed
his sober gait and begun to piece together, out of the confused report of
his senses, some theory of the occurrence. But the occasion of the
sounds and stench that had so suddenly assailed him, and the strange
conjunction of fugitives whom he had seen to issue from the house, were
mysteries beyond his plummet. With an obscure awe he considered them in
his mind, continuing, meanwhile, to thread the web of streets, and once
more alone in morning sunshine.
In his first retreat he had entirely wandered; and now, steering vaguely
west, it was his luck to light upon an unpretending street, which
presently widened so as to admit a strip of gardens in the midst. Here
was quite a stir of birds; even at that hour, the shadow of the leaves
was grateful; instead of the burnt atmosphere of cities, there was
something brisk and rural in the air; and Challoner paced forward, his
eyes upon the pavement and his mind running upon distant scenes, till he
was recalled, upon a sudden, by a wall that blocked his further progress.
This street, whose name I have forgotten, is no thoroughfare.
He was not the first who had wandered there that morning; for as he
raised his eyes with an agreeable deliberation, they alighted on the
figure of a girl, in whom he was struck to recognise the third of the
incongruous fugitives. She had run there, seemingly, blindfold; the wall
had checked her career: and being entirely wearied, she had sunk upon the
ground beside the garden railings, soiling her dress among the summer
dust. Each saw the other in the same instant of time; and she, with one
wild look, sprang to her feet and began to hurry from the scene.
Challoner was doubly startled to meet once more the heroine of his
adventure, and to observe the fear with which she shunned him. Pity and
alarm, in nearly equal forces, contested the possession of his mind; and
yet, in spite of both, he saw himself condemned to follow in the lady’s
wake. He did so gingerly, as fearing to increase her terrors; but, tread
as lightly as he might, his footfalls eloquently echoed in the empty
street. Their sound appeared to strike in her some strong emotion; for
scarce had he begun to follow ere she paused. A second time she
addressed herself to flight; and a second time she paused. Then she
turned about, and with doubtful steps and the most attractive appearance
of timidity, drew near to the young man. He on his side continued to
advance with similar signals of distress and bashfulness. At length,
when they were but some steps apart, he saw her eyes brim over, and she
reached out both her hands in eloquent appeal.
‘Are you an English gentleman?’ she cried.
The unhappy Challoner regarded her with consternation. He was the spirit
of fine courtesy, and would have blushed to fail in his devoirs to any
lady; but, in the other scale, he was a man averse from amorous
adventures. He looked east and west; but the houses that looked down
upon this interview remained inexorably shut; and he saw himself, though
in the full glare of the day’s eye, cut off from any human intervention.
His looks returned at last upon the suppliant. He remarked with
irritation that she was charming both in face and figure, elegantly
dressed and gloved; a lady undeniable; the picture of distress and
innocence; weeping and lost in the city of diurnal sleep.
‘Madam,’ he said, ‘I protest you have no cause to fear intrusion; and if
I have appeared to follow you, the fault is in this street, which has
deceived us both.’ An unmistakable relief appeared upon the lady’s face.
‘I might have guessed it!’ she exclaimed. ‘Thank you a thousand times!
But at this hour, in this appalling silence, and among all these staring
windows, I am lost in terrors—oh, lost in them!’ she cried, her face
blanching at the words. ‘I beg you to lend me your arm,’ she added with
the loveliest, suppliant inflection. ‘I dare not go alone; my nerve is
gone—I had a shock, oh, what a shock! I beg of you to be my escort.’
‘My dear madam,’ responded Challoner heavily, ‘my arm is at your
service.’
‘She took it and clung to it for a moment, struggling with her sobs; and
the next, with feverish hurry, began to lead him in the direction of the
city. One thing was plain, among so much that was obscure: it was plain
her fears were genuine. Still, as she went, she spied around as if for
dangers; and now she would shiver like a person in a chill, and now
clutch his arm in hers. To Challoner her terror was at once repugnant
and infectious; it gained and mastered, while it still offended him; and
he wailed in spirit and longed for release.
‘Madam,’ he said at last, ‘I am, of course, charmed to be of use to any
lady; but I confess I was bound in a direction opposite to that you
follow, and a word of explanation—’
‘Hush!’ she sobbed, ‘not here—not here!’
The blood of Challoner ran cold. He might have thought the lady mad; but
his memory was charged with more perilous stuff; and in view of the
detonation, the smoke and the flight of the ill-assorted trio, his mind
was lost among mysteries. So they continued to thread the maze of
streets in silence, with the speed of a guilty flight, and both thrilling
with incommunicable terrors. In time, however, and above all by their
quick pace of walking, the pair began to rise to firmer spirits; the lady
ceased to peer about the corners; and Challoner, emboldened by the
resonant tread and distant figure of a constable, returned to the charge
with more of spirit and directness.
‘I thought,’ said he, in the tone of conversation, ‘that I had
indistinctly perceived you leaving a villa in the company of two
gentlemen.’
‘Oh!’ she said, ‘you need not fear to wound me by the truth. You saw me
flee from a common lodging-house, and my companions were not gentlemen.
In such a case, the best of compliments is to be frank.’
‘I thought,’ resumed Challoner, encouraged as much as he was surprised by
the spirit of her reply, ‘to have perceived, besides, a certain odour. A
noise, too—I do not know to what I should compare it—’
‘Silence!’ she cried. ‘You do not know the danger you invoke. Wait,
only wait; and as soon as we have left those streets, and got beyond the
reach of listeners, all shall be explained. Meanwhile, avoid the topic.
What a sight is this sleeping city!’ she exclaimed; and then, with a most
thrilling voice, ‘“Dear God,” she quoted, “the very houses seem asleep,
and all that mighty heart is lying still.”’
‘I perceive, madam,’ said he, ‘you are a reader.’
‘I am more than that,’ she answered, with a sigh. ‘I am a girl condemned
to thoughts beyond her age; and so untoward is my fate, that this walk
upon the arm of a stranger is like an interlude of peace.’
They had come by this time to the neighbourhood of the Victoria Station
and here, at a street corner, the young lady paused, withdrew her arm
from Challoner’s, and looked up and down as though in pain or indecision.
Then, with a lovely change of countenance, and laying her gloved hand
upon his arm—
‘What you already think of me,’ she said, ‘I tremble to conceive; yet I
must here condemn myself still further. Here I must leave you, and here
I beseech you to wait for my return. Do not attempt to follow me or spy
upon my actions. Suspend yet awhile your judgment of a girl as innocent
as your own sister; and do not, above all, desert me. Stranger as you
are, I have none else to look to. You see me in sorrow and great fear;
you are a gentleman, courteous and kind: and when I beg for a few
minutes’ patience, I make sure beforehand you will not deny me.’
Challoner grudgingly promised; and the young lady, with a grateful
eye-shot, vanished round the corner. But the force of her appeal had
been a little blunted; for the young man was not only destitute of
sisters, but of any female relative nearer than a great-aunt in Wales.
Now he was alone, besides, the spell that he had hitherto obeyed began to
weaken; he considered his behaviour with a sneer; and plucking up the
spirit of revolt, he started in pursuit. The reader, if he has ever
plied the fascinating trade of the noctambulist, will not be unaware
that, in the neighbourhood of the great railway centres, certain early
taverns inaugurate the business of the day. It was into one of these
that Challoner, coming round the corner of the block, beheld his charming
companion disappear. To say he was surprised were inexact, for he had
long since left that sentiment behind him. Acute disgust and
disappointment seized upon his soul; and with silent oaths, he damned
this commonplace enchantress. She had scarce been gone a second, ere the
swing-doors reopened, and she appeared again in company with a young man
of mean and slouching attire. For some five or six exchanges they
conversed together with an animated air; then the fellow shouldered again
into the tap; and the young lady, with something swifter than a walk,
retraced her steps towards Challoner. He saw her coming, a miracle of
grace; her ankle, as she hurried, flashing from her dress; her movements
eloquent of speed and youth; and though he still entertained some
thoughts of flight, they grew miserably fainter as the distance lessened.
Against mere beauty he was proof: it was her unmistakable gentility that
now robbed him of the courage of his cowardice. With a proved
adventuress he had acted strictly on his right; with one who, in spite of
all, he could not quite deny to be a lady, he found himself disarmed. At
the very corner from whence he had spied upon her interview, she came
upon him, still transfixed, and—‘Ah!’ she cried, with a bright flush of
colour. ‘Ah! Ungenerous!’
The sharpness of the attack somewhat restored the Squire of Dames to the
possession of himself.
‘Madam,’ he returned, with a fair show of stoutness, ‘I do not think that
hitherto you can complain of any lack of generosity; I have suffered
myself to be led over a considerable portion of the metropolis; and if I
now request you to discharge me of my office of protector, you have
friends at hand who will be glad of the succession.’
She stood a moment dumb.
‘It is well,’ she said. ‘Go! go, and may God help me! You have seen
me—me, an innocent girl! fleeing from a dire catastrophe and haunted by
sinister men; and neither pity, curiosity, nor honour move you to await
my explanation or to help in my distress. Go!’ she repeated. ‘I am lost
indeed.’ And with a passionate gesture she turned and fled along the
street.
Challoner observed her retreat and disappear, an almost intolerable sense
of guilt contending with the profound sense that he was being gulled.
She was no sooner gone than the first of these feelings took the upper
hand; he felt, if he had done her less than justice, that his conduct was
a perfect model of the ungracious; the cultured tone of her voice, her
choice of language, and the elegant decorum of her movements, cried out
aloud against a harsh construction; and between penitence and curiosity
he began slowly to follow in her wake. At the corner he had her once
more full in view. Her speed was failing like a stricken bird’s. Even
as he looked, she threw her arm out gropingly, and fell and leaned
against the wall. At the spectacle, Challoner’s fortitude gave way. In
a few strides he overtook her and, for the first time removing his hat,
assured her in the most moving terms of his entire respect and firm
desire to help her. He spoke at first unheeded; but gradually it
appeared that she began to comprehend his words; she moved a little, and
drew herself upright; and finally, as with a sudden movement of
forgiveness, turned on the young man a countenance in which reproach and
gratitude were mingled. ‘Ah, madam,’ he cried, ‘use me as you will!’
And once more, but now with a great air of deference, he offered her the
conduct of his arm. She took it with a sigh that struck him to the
heart; and they began once more to trace the deserted streets. But now
her steps, as though exhausted by emotion, began to linger on the way;
she leaned the more heavily upon his arm; and he, like the parent bird,
stooped fondly above his drooping convoy. Her physical distress was not
accompanied by any failing of her spirits; and hearing her strike so soon
into a playful and charming vein of talk, Challoner could not
sufficiently admire the elasticity of his companion’s nature. ‘Let me
forget,’ she had said, ‘for one half hour, let me forget;’ and sure
enough, with the very word, her sorrows appeared to be forgotten. Before
every house she paused, invented a name for the proprietor, and sketched
his character: here lived the old general whom she was to marry on the
fifth of the next month, there was the mansion of the rich widow who had
set her heart on Challoner; and though she still hung wearily on the
young man’s arm, her laughter sounded low and pleasant in his ears.
‘Ah,’ she sighed, by way of commentary, ‘in such a life as mine I must
seize tight hold of any happiness that I can find.’
When they arrived, in this leisurely manner, at the head of Grosvenor
Place, the gates of the park were opening and the bedraggled company of
night-walkers were being at last admitted into that paradise of lawns.
Challoner and his companion followed the movement, and walked for awhile
in silence in that tatterdemalion crowd; but as one after another, weary
with the night’s patrolling of the city pavement, sank upon the benches
or wandered into separate paths, the vast extent of the park had soon
utterly swallowed up the last of these intruders; and the pair proceeded
on their way alone in the grateful quiet of the morning.
Presently they came in sight of a bench, standing very open on a mound of
turf. The young lady looked about her with relief.
‘Here,’ she said, ‘here at last we are secure from listeners. Here,
then, you shall learn and judge my history. I could not bear that we
should part, and that you should still suppose your kindness squandered
upon one who was unworthy.’
Thereupon she sat down upon the bench, and motioning Challoner to take a
place immediately beside her, began in the following words, and with the
greatest appearance of enjoyment, to narrate the story of her life.
_STORY OF THE DESTROYING ANGEL_
My father was a native of England, son of a cadet of a great, ancient,
but untitled family; and by some event, fault or misfortune, he was
driven to flee from the land of his birth and to lay aside the name of
his ancestors. He sought the States; and instead of lingering in
effeminate cities, pushed at once into the far West with an exploring
party of frontiersmen. He was no ordinary traveller; for he was not only
brave and impetuous by character, but learned in many sciences, and above
all in botany, which he particularly loved. Thus it fell that, before
many months, Fremont himself, the nominal leader of the troop, courted
and bowed to his opinion.
They had pushed, as I have said, into the still unknown regions of the
West. For some time they followed the track of Mormon caravans, guiding
themselves in that vast and melancholy desert by the skeletons of men and
animals. Then they inclined their route a little to the north, and,
losing even these dire memorials, came into a country of forbidding
stillness.
I have often heard my father dwell upon the features of that ride: rock,
cliff, and barren moor alternated; the streams were very far between; and
neither beast nor bird disturbed the solitude. On the fortieth day they
had already run so short of food that it was judged advisable to call a
halt and scatter upon all sides to hunt. A great fire was built, that
its smoke might serve to rally them; and each man of the party mounted
and struck off at a venture into the surrounding desert.
My father rode for many hours with a steep range of cliffs upon the one
hand, very black and horrible; and upon the other an unwatered vale
dotted with boulders like the site of some subverted city. At length he
found the slot of a great animal, and from the claw-marks and the hair
among the brush, judged that he was on the track of a cinnamon bear of
most unusual size. He quickened the pace of his steed, and still
following the quarry, came at last to the division of two watersheds. On
the far side the country was exceeding intricate and difficult, heaped
with boulders, and dotted here and there with a few pines, which seemed
to indicate the neighbourhood of water. Here, then, he picketed his
horse, and relying on his trusty rifle, advanced alone into that
wilderness.
Presently, in the great silence that reigned, he was aware of the sound
of running water to his right; and leaning in that direction, was
rewarded by a scene of natural wonder and human pathos strangely
intermixed. The stream ran at the bottom of a narrow and winding
passage, whose wall-like sides of rock were sometimes for miles together
unscalable by man. The water, when the stream was swelled with rains,
must have filled it from side to side; the sun’s rays only plumbed it in
the hour of noon; the wind, in that narrow and damp funnel, blew
tempestuously. And yet, in the bottom of this den, immediately below my
father’s eyes as he leaned over the margin of the cliff, a party of some
half a hundred men, women, and children lay scattered uneasily among the
rocks. They lay some upon their backs, some prone, and not one stirring;
their upturned faces seemed all of an extraordinary paleness and
emaciation; and from time to time, above the washing of the stream, a
faint sound of moaning mounted to my father’s ears.
While he thus looked, an old man got staggering to his feet, unwound his
blanket, and laid it, with great gentleness, on a young girl who sat hard
by propped against a rock. The girl did not seem to be conscious of the
act; and the old man, after having looked upon her with the most engaging
pity, returned to his former bed and lay down again uncovered on the
turf. But the scene had not passed without observation even in that
starving camp. From the very outskirts of the party, a man with a white
beard and seemingly of venerable years, rose upon his knees, and came
crawling stealthily among the sleepers towards the girl; and judge of my
father’s indignation, when he beheld this cowardly miscreant strip from
her both the coverings and return with them to his original position.
Here he lay down for a while below his spoils, and, as my father
imagined, feigned to be asleep; but presently he had raised himself again
upon one elbow, looked with sharp scrutiny at his companions, and then
swiftly carried his hand into his bosom and thence to his mouth. By the
movement of his jaws he must be eating; in that camp of famine he had
reserved a store of nourishment; and while his companions lay in the
stupor of approaching death, secretly restored his powers.
My father was so incensed at what he saw that he raised his rifle; and
but for an accident, he has often declared, he would have shot the fellow
dead upon the spot. How different would then have been my history! But
it was not to be: even as he raised the barrel, his eye lighted on the
bear, as it crawled along a ledge some way below him; and ceding to the
hunters instinct, it was at the brute, not at the man, that he discharged
his piece. The bear leaped and fell into a pool of the river; the canyon
re-echoed the report; and in a moment the camp was afoot. With cries
that were scarce human, stumbling, falling and throwing each other down,
these starving people rushed upon the quarry; and before my father,
climbing down by the ledge, had time to reach the level of the stream,
many were already satisfying their hunger on the raw flesh, and a fire
was being built by the more dainty.
His arrival was for some time unremarked. He stood in the midst of these
tottering and clay-faced marionettes; he was surrounded by their cries;
but their whole soul was fixed on the dead carcass; even those who were
too weak to move, lay, half-turned over, with their eyes riveted upon the
bear; and my father, seeing himself stand as though invisible in the
thick of this dreary hubbub, was seized with a desire to weep. A touch
upon the arm restrained him. Turning about, he found himself face to
face with the old man he had so nearly killed; and yet, at the second
glance, recognised him for no old man at all, but one in the full
strength of his years, and of a strong, speaking, and intellectual
countenance stigmatised by weariness and famine. He beckoned my father
near the cliff, and there, in the most private whisper, begged for
brandy. My father looked at him with scorn: ‘You remind me,’ he said,
‘of a neglected duty. Here is my flask; it contains enough, I trust, to
revive the women of your party; and I will begin with her whom I saw you
robbing of her blankets.’ And with that, not heeding his appeals, my
father turned his back upon the egoist.
The girl still lay reclined against the rock; she lay too far sunk in the
first stage of death to have observed the bustle round her couch; but
when my father had raised her head, put the flask to her lips, and forced
or aided her to swallow some drops of the restorative, she opened her
languid eyes and smiled upon him faintly. Never was there a smile of a
more touching sweetness; never were eyes more deeply violet, more
honestly eloquent of the soul! I speak with knowledge, for these were
the same eyes that smiled upon me in the cradle. From her who was to be
his wife, my father, still jealously watched and followed by the man with
the grey beard, carried his attentions to all the women of the party, and
gave the last drainings of his flask to those among the men who seemed in
the most need.
‘Is there none left? not a drop for me?’ said the man with the beard.
‘Not one drop,’ replied my father; ‘and if you find yourself in want, let
me counsel you to put your hand into the pocket of your coat.’
‘Ah!’ cried the other, ‘you misjudge me. You think me one who clings to
life for selfish and commonplace considerations. But let me tell you,
that were all this caravan to perish, the world would but be lightened of
a weight. These are but human insects, pullulating, thick as May-flies,
in the slums of European cities, whom I myself have plucked from
degradation and misery, from the dung-heap and gin-palace door. And you
compare their lives with mine!’
‘You are then a Mormon missionary?’ asked my father.
‘Oh!’ cried the man, with a strange smile, ‘a Mormon missionary if you
will! I value not the title. Were I no more than that, I could have
died without a murmur. But with my life as a physician is bound up the
knowledge of great secrets and the future of man. This it was, when we
missed the caravan, tried for a short cut and wandered to this desolate
ravine, that ate into my soul, and, in five days, has changed my beard
from ebony to silver.’
‘And you are a physician,’ mused my father, looking on his face, ‘bound
by oath to succour man in his distresses.’
‘Sir,’ returned the Mormon, ‘my name is Grierson: you will hear that name
again; and you will then understand that my duty was not to this caravan
of paupers, but to mankind at large.’
My father turned to the remainder of the party, who were now sufficiently
revived to hear; told them that he would set off at once to bring help
from his own party; ‘and,’ he added, ‘if you be again reduced to such
extremities, look round you, and you will see the earth strewn with
assistance. Here, for instance, growing on the under side of fissures in
this cliff, you will perceive a yellow moss. Trust me, it is both edible
and excellent.’
‘Ha!’ said Doctor Grierson, ‘you know botany!’
‘Not I alone,’ returned my father, lowering his voice; ‘for see where
these have been scraped away. Am I right? Was that your secret store?’
My father’s comrades, he found, when he returned to the signal-fire, had
made a good day’s hunting. They were thus the more easily persuaded to
extend assistance to the Mormon caravan; and the next day beheld both
parties on the march for the frontiers of Utah. The distance to be
traversed was not great; but the nature of the country, and the
difficulty of procuring food, extended the time to nearly three weeks;
and my father had thus ample leisure to know and appreciate the girl whom
he had succoured. I will call my mother Lucy. Her family name I am not
at liberty to mention; it is one you would know well. By what series of
undeserved calamities this innocent flower of maidenhood, lovely, refined
by education, ennobled by the finest taste, was thus cast among the
horrors of a Mormon caravan, I must not stay to tell you. Let it
suffice, that even in these untoward circumstances, she found a heart
worthy of her own. The ardour of attachment which united my father and
mother was perhaps partly due to the strange manner of their meeting; it
knew, at least, no bounds either divine or human; my father, for her
sake, determined to renounce his ambitions and abjure his faith; and a
week had not yet passed upon the march before he had resigned from his
party, accepted the Mormon doctrine, and received the promise of my
mother’s hand on the arrival of the party at Salt Lake.
The marriage took place, and I was its only offspring. My father
prospered exceedingly in his affairs, remained faithful to my mother; and
though you may wonder to hear it, I believe there were few happier homes
in any country than that in which I saw the light and grew to girlhood.
We were, indeed, and in spite of all our wealth, avoided as heretics and
half-believers by the more precise and pious of the faithful: Young
himself, that formidable tyrant, was known to look askance upon my
father’s riches; but of this I had no guess. I dwelt, indeed, under the
Mormon system, with perfect innocence and faith. Some of our friends had
many wives; but such was the custom; and why should it surprise me more
than marriage itself? From time to time one of our rich acquaintances
would disappear, his family be broken up, his wives and houses shared
among the elders of the Church, and his memory only recalled with bated
breath and dreadful headshakings. When I had been very still, and my
presence perhaps was forgotten, some such topic would arise among my
elders by the evening fire; I would see them draw the closer together and
look behind them with scared eyes; and I might gather from their
whisperings how some one, rich, honoured, healthy, and in the prime of
his days, some one, perhaps, who had taken me on his knees a week before,
had in one hour been spirited from home and family, and vanished like an
image from a mirror, leaving not a print behind. It was terrible,
indeed; but so was death, the universal law. And even if the talk should
wax still bolder, full of ominous silences and nods, and I should hear
named in a whisper the Destroying Angels, how was a child to understand
these mysteries? I heard of a Destroying Angel as some more happy child
might hear in England of a bishop or a rural dean, with vague respect and
without the wish for further information. Life anywhere, in society as
in nature, rests upon dread foundations; I beheld safe roads, a garden
blooming in the desert, pious people crowding to worship; I was aware of
my parents’ tenderness and all the harmless luxuries of my existence; and
why should I pry beneath this honest seeming surface for the mysteries on
which it stood?
We dwelt originally in the city; but at an early date we moved to a
beautiful house in a green dingle, musical with splashing water, and
surrounded on almost every side by twenty miles of poisonous and rocky
desert. The city was thirty miles away; there was but one road, which
went no further than my father’s door; the rest were bridle-tracks
impassable in winter; and we thus dwelt in a solitude inconceivable to
the European. Our only neighbour was Dr. Grierson. To my young eyes,
after the hair-oiled, chin-bearded elders of the city, and the
ill-favoured and mentally stunted women of their harems, there was
something agreeable in the correct manner, the fine bearing, the thin
white hair and beard, and the piercing looks of the old doctor. Yet,
though he was almost our only visitor, I never wholly overcame a sense of
fear in his presence; and this disquietude was rather fed by the awful
solitude in which he lived and the obscurity that hung about his
occupations. His house was but a mile or two from ours, but very
differently placed. It stood overlooking the road on the summit of a
steep slope, and planted close against a range of overhanging bluffs.
Nature, you would say, had here desired to imitate the works of man; for
the slope was even, like the glacis of a fort, and the cliffs of a
constant height, like the ramparts of a city. Not even spring could
change one feature of that desolate scene; and the windows looked down
across a plain, snowy with alkali, to ranges of cold stone sierras on the
north. Twice or thrice I remember passing within view of this forbidding
residence; and seeing it always shuttered, smokeless, and deserted, I
remarked to my parents that some day it would certainly be robbed.
‘Ah, no,’ said my father, ‘never robbed;’ and I observed a strange
conviction in his tone.
At last, and not long before the blow fell on my unhappy family, I
chanced to see the doctor’s house in a new light. My father was ill; my
mother confined to his bedside; and I was suffered to go, under the
charge of our driver, to the lonely house some twenty miles away, where
our packages were left for us. The horse cast a shoe; night overtook us
halfway home; and it was well on for three in the morning when the driver
and I, alone in a light waggon, came to that part of the road which ran
below the doctor’s house. The moon swam clear; the cliffs and mountains
in this strong light lay utterly deserted; but the house, from its
station on the top of the long slope and close under the bluff, not only
shone abroad from every window like a place of festival, but from the
great chimney at the west end poured forth a coil of smoke so thick and
so voluminous, that it hung for miles along the windless night air, and
its shadow lay far abroad in the moonlight upon the glittering alkali.
As we continued to draw near, besides, a regular and panting throb began
to divide the silence. First it seemed to me like the beating of a
heart; and next it put into my mind the thought of some giant, smothered
under mountains and still, with incalculable effort, fetching breath. I
had heard of the railway, though I had not seen it, and I turned to ask
the driver if this resembled it. But some look in his eye, some pallor,
whether of fear or moonlight on his face, caused the words to die upon my
lips. We continued, therefore, to advance in silence, till we were close
below the lighted house; when suddenly, without one premonitory rustle,
there burst forth a report of such a bigness that it shook the earth and
set the echoes of the mountains thundering from cliff to cliff. A pillar
of amber flame leaped from the chimney-top and fell in multitudes of
sparks; and at the same time the lights in the windows turned for one
instant ruby red and then expired. The driver had checked his horse
instinctively, and the echoes were still rumbling farther off among the
mountains, when there broke from the now darkened interior a series of
yells—whether of man or woman it was impossible to guess—the door flew
open, and there ran forth into the moonlight, at the top of the long
slope, a figure clad in white, which began to dance and leap and throw
itself down, and roll as if in agony, before the house. I could no more
restrain my cries; the driver laid his lash about the horse’s flank, and
we fled up the rough track at the peril of our lives; and did not draw
rein till, turning the corner of the mountain, we beheld my father’s
ranch and deep, green groves and gardens, sleeping in the tranquil light.
This was the one adventure of my life, until my father had climbed to the
very topmost point of material prosperity, and I myself had reached the
age of seventeen. I was still innocent and merry like a child; tended my
garden or ran upon the hills in glad simplicity; gave not a thought to
coquetry or to material cares; and if my eye rested on my own image in a
mirror or some sylvan spring, it was to seek and recognise the features
of my parents. But the fears which had long pressed on others were now
to be laid on my youth. I had thrown myself, one sultry, cloudy
afternoon, on a divan; the windows stood open on the verandah, where my
mother sat with her embroidery; and when my father joined her from the
garden, their conversation, clearly audible to me, was of so startling a
nature that it held me enthralled where I lay.
‘The blow has come,’ my father said, after a long pause.