THE LIFTED VEIL

The time of my end approaches. I have lately been subject to attacks

of angina pectoris; and in the ordinary course of things, my physician tells

me, I may fairly hope that my life will not be protracted many months.

Unless, then, I am cursed with an exceptional physical constitution, as I

am cursed with an exceptional mental character, I shall not much longer

groan under the wearisome burthen of this earthly existence. If it were to

be otherwise--if I were to live on to the age most men desire and provide

for--I should for once have known whether the miseries of delusive

expectation can outweigh the miseries of true provision. For I foresee

when I shall die, and everything that will happen in my last moments.

Just a month from this day, on September 20, 1850, I shall be sitting in

this chair, in this study, at ten o'clock at night, longing to die, weary of

incessant insight and foresight, without delusions and without hope. Just

as I am watching a tongue of blue flame rising in the fire, and my lamp is

burning low, the horrible contraction will begin at my chest. I shall only

have time to reach the bell, and pull it violently, before the sense of

suffocation will come. No one will answer my bell. I know why. My

two servants are lovers, and will have quarrelled. My housekeeper will

have rushed out of the house in a fury, two hours before, hoping that Perry

will believe she has gone to drown herself. Perry is alarmed at last, and

is gone out after her. The little scullery-maid is asleep on a bench: she

never answers the bell; it does not wake her. The sense of suffocation

increases: my lamp goes out with a horrible stench: I make a great effort,

and snatch at the bell again. I long for life, and there is no help. I

thirsted for the unknown: the thirst is gone. O God, let me stay with

the known, and be weary of it: I am content. Agony of pain and

suffocation--and all the while the earth, the fields, the pebbly brook at the

bottom of the rookery, the fresh scent after the rain, the light of the

morning through my chamber-window, the warmth of the hearth after the

frosty air--will darkness close over them for ever?

Darkness--darkness--no pain--nothing but darkness: but I am passing

on and on through the darkness: my thought stays in the darkness, but

always with a sense of moving onward . . .

Before that time comes, I wish to use my last hours of ease and

strength in telling the strange story of my experience. I have never fully

unbosomed myself to any human being; I have never been encouraged to

trust much in the sympathy of my fellow-men. But we have all a chance

of meeting with some pity, some tenderness, some charity, when we are

dead: it is the living only who cannot be forgiven--the living only from

whom men's indulgence and reverence are held off, like the rain by the

hard east wind. While the heart beats, bruise it--it is your only

opportunity; while the eye can still turn towards you with moist, timid

entreaty, freeze it with an icy unanswering gaze; while the ear, that

delicate messenger to the inmost sanctuary of the soul, can still take in the

tones of kindness, put it off with hard civility, or sneering compliment, or

envious affectation of indifference; while the creative brain can still throb

with the sense of injustice, with the yearning for brotherly recognition--

make haste--oppress it with your ill- considered judgements, your trivial

comparisons, your careless misrepresentations. The heart will by and by

be still--"ubi saeva indignatio ulterius cor lacerare nequit"; the eye will

cease to entreat; the ear will be deaf; the brain will have ceased from all

wants as well as from all work. Then your charitable speeches may find

vent; then you may remember and pity the toil and the struggle and the

failure; then you may give due honour to the work achieved; then you may

find extenuation for errors, and may consent to bury them.

That is a trivial schoolboy text; why do I dwell on it? It has little

reference to me, for I shall leave no works behind me for men to honour.

I have no near relatives who will make up, by weeping over my grave, for

the wounds they inflicted on me when I was among them. It is only the

story of my life that will perhaps win a little more sympathy from

strangers when I am dead, than I ever believed it would obtain from my

friends while I was living.

My childhood perhaps seems happier to me than it really was, by

contrast with all the after-years. For then the curtain of the future was as

impenetrable to me as to other children: I had all their delight in the

present hour, their sweet indefinite hopes for the morrow; and I had a

tender mother: even now, after the dreary lapse of long years, a slight

trace of sensation accompanies the remembrance of her caress as she held

me on her knee--her arms round my little body, her cheek pressed on mine.

I had a complaint of the eyes that made me blind for a little while, and she

kept me on her knee from morning till night. That unequalled love soon

vanished out of my life, and even to my childish consciousness it was as if

that life had become more chill I rode my little white pony with the groom

by my side as before, but there were no loving eyes looking at me as I

mounted, no glad arms opened to me when I came back. Perhaps I

missed my mother's love more than most children of seven or eight would

have done, to whom the other pleasures of life remained as before; for I

was certainly a very sensitive child. I remember still the mingled

trepidation and delicious excitement with which I was affected by the

tramping of the horses on the pavement in the echoing stables, by the loud

resonance of the groom's voices, by the booming bark of the dogs as my

father's carriage thundered under the archway of the courtyard, by the din

of the gong as it gave notice of luncheon and dinner. The measured tramp

of soldiery which I sometimes heard--for my father's house lay near a

county town where there were large barracks--made me sob and tremble;

and yet when they were gone past, I longed for them to come back again.

I fancy my father thought me an odd child, and had little fondness for

me; though he was very careful in fulfilling what he regarded as a parent's

duties. But he was already past the middle of life, and I was not his only

son. My mother had been his second wife, and he was five-and-forty

when he married her. He was a firm, unbending, intensely orderly man,

in root and stem a banker, but with a flourishing graft of the active

landholder, aspiring to county influence: one of those people who are

always like themselves from day to day, who are uninfluenced by the

weather, and neither know melancholy nor high spirits. I held him in

great awe, and appeared more timid and sensitive in his presence than at

other times; a circumstance which, perhaps, helped to confirm him in the

intention to educate me on a different plan from the prescriptive one with

which he had complied in the case of my elder brother, already a tall youth

at Eton. My brother was to be his representative and successor; he must

go to Eton and Oxford, for the sake of making connexions, of course:

my father was not a man to underrate the bearing of Latin satirists or

Greek dramatists on the attainment of an aristocratic position. But,

intrinsically, he had slight esteem for "those dead but sceptred spirits";

having qualified himself for forming an independent opinion by reading

Potter's AEschylus, and dipping into Francis's Horace. To this negative

view he added a positive one, derived from a recent connexion with

mining speculations; namely, that a scientific education was the really

useful training for a younger son. Moreover, it was clear that a shy,

sensitive boy like me was not fit to encounter the rough experience of a

public school. Mr. Letherall had said so very decidedly. Mr. Letherall

was a large man in spectacles, who one day took my small head between

his large hands, and pressed it here and there in an exploratory, auspicious

manner--then placed each of his great thumbs on my temples, and pushed

me a little way from him, and stared at me with glittering spectacles. The

contemplation appeared to displease him, for he frowned sternly, and said

to my father, drawing his thumbs across my eyebrows -

"The deficiency is there, sir--there; and here," he added, touching the

upper sides of my head, "here is the excess. That must be brought out, sir,

and this must be laid to sleep."

I was in a state of tremor, partly at the vague idea that I was the object

of reprobation, partly in the agitation of my first hatred-- hatred of this big,

spectacled man, who pulled my head about as if he wanted to buy and

cheapen it.

I am not aware how much Mr. Letherall had to do with the system

afterwards adopted towards me, but it was presently clear that private

tutors, natural history, science, and the modern languages, were the

appliances by which the defects of my organization were to be remedied.

I was very stupid about machines, so I was to be greatly occupied with

them; I had no memory for classification, so it was particularly necessary

that I should study systematic zoology and botany; I was hungry for

human deeds and humane motions, so I was to be plentifully crammed

with the mechanical powers, the elementary bodies, and the phenomena of

electricity and magnetism. A better-constituted boy would certainly have

profited under my intelligent tutors, with their scientific apparatus; and

would, doubtless, have found the phenomena of electricity and magnetism

as fascinating as I was, every Thursday, assured they were. As it was, I

could have paired off, for ignorance of whatever was taught me, with the

worst Latin scholar that was ever turned out of a classical academy. I

read Plutarch, and Shakespeare, and Don Quixote by the sly, and supplied

myself in that way with wandering thoughts, while my tutor was assuring

me that "an improved man, as distinguished from an ignorant one, was a

man who knew the reason why water ran downhill." I had no desire to

be this improved man; I was glad of the running water; I could watch it

and listen to it gurgling among the pebbles, and bathing the bright green

water-plants, by the hour together. I did not want to know WHY it ran; I

had perfect confidence that there were good reasons for what was so very

beautiful.

There is no need to dwell on this part of my life. I have said enough

to indicate that my nature was of the sensitive, unpractical order, and that

it grew up in an uncongenial medium, which could never foster it into

happy, healthy development. When I was sixteen I was sent to Geneva to

complete my course of education; and the change was a very happy one to

me, for the first sight of the Alps, with the setting sun on them, as we

descended the Jura, seemed to me like an entrance into heaven; and the

three years of my life there were spent in a perpetual sense of exaltation,

as if from a draught of delicious wine, at the presence of Nature in all her

awful loveliness. You will think, perhaps, that I must have been a poet,

from this early sensibility to Nature. But my lot was not so happy as that.

A poet pours forth his song and BELIEVES in the listening ear and

answering soul, to which his song will be floated sooner or later. But the

poet's sensibility without his voice--the poet's sensibility that finds no vent

but in silent tears on the sunny bank, when the noonday light sparkles on

the water, or in an inward shudder at the sound of harsh human tones, the

sight of a cold human eye--this dumb passion brings with it a fatal solitude

of soul in the society of one's fellow-men. My least solitary moments

were those in which I pushed off in my boat, at evening, towards the

centre of the lake; it seemed to me that the sky, and the glowing mountain-

tops, and the wide blue water, surrounded me with a cherishing love such

as no human face had shed on me since my mother's love had vanished out

of my life. I used to do as Jean Jacques did--lie down in my boat and let

it glide where it would, while I looked up at the departing glow leaving

one mountain-top after the other, as if the prophet's chariot of fire were

passing over them on its way to the home of light. Then, when the white

summits were all sad and corpse-like, I had to push homeward, for I was

under careful surveillance, and was allowed no late wanderings. This

disposition of mine was not favourable to the formation of intimate

friendships among the numerous youths of my own age who are always to

be found studying at Geneva. Yet I made ONE such friendship; and,

singularly enough, it was with a youth whose intellectual tendencies were

the very reverse of my own. I shall call him Charles Meunier; his real

surname--an English one, for he was of English extraction--having since

become celebrated. He was an orphan, who lived on a miserable pittance

while he pursued the medical studies for which he had a special genius.

Strange! that with my vague mind, susceptible and unobservant, hating

inquiry and given up to contemplation, I should have been drawn towards

a youth whose strongest passion was science. But the bond was not an

intellectual one; it came from a source that can happily blend the stupid

with the brilliant, the dreamy with the practical: it came from

community of feeling. Charles was poor and ugly, derided by Genevese

gamins, and not acceptable in drawing-rooms. I saw that he was isolated,

as I was, though from a different cause, and, stimulated by a sympathetic

resentment, I made timid advances towards him. It is enough to say that

there sprang up as much comradeship between us as our different habits

would allow; and in Charles's rare holidays we went up the Saleve

together, or took the boat to Vevay, while I listened dreamily to the

monologues in which he unfolded his bold conceptions of future

experiment and discovery. I mingled them confusedly in my thought

with glimpses of blue water and delicate floating cloud, with the notes of

birds and the distant glitter of the glacier. He knew quite well that my

mind was half absent, yet he liked to talk to me in this way; for don't we

talk of our hopes and our projects even to dogs and birds, when they love

us? I have mentioned this one friendship because of its connexion with a

strange and terrible scene which I shall have to narrate in my subsequent

life.

This happier life at Geneva was put an end to by a severe illness,

which is partly a blank to me, partly a time of dimly-remembered

suffering, with the presence of my father by my bed from time to time.

Then came the languid monotony of convalescence, the days gradually

breaking into variety and distinctness as my strength enabled me to take

longer and longer drives. On one of these more vividly remembered

days, my father said to me, as he sat beside my sofa -

"When you are quite well enough to travel, Latimer, I shall take you

home with me. The journey will amuse you and do you good, for I shall

go through the Tyrol and Austria, and you will see many new places.

Our neighbours, the Filmores, are come; Alfred will join us at Basle, and

we shall all go together to Vienna, and back by Prague" . . .

My father was called away before he had finished his sentence, and he

left my mind resting on the word PRAGUE, with a strange sense that a

new and wondrous scene was breaking upon me: a city under the broad

sunshine, that seemed to me as if it were the summer sunshine of a long-

past century arrested in its course--unrefreshed for ages by dews of night,

or the rushing rain-cloud; scorching the dusty, weary, time-eaten grandeur

of a people doomed to live on in the stale repetition of memories, like

deposed and superannuated kings in their regal gold-inwoven tatters.

The city looked so thirsty that the broad river seemed to me a sheet of

metal; and the blackened statues, as I passed under their blank gaze, along

the unending bridge, with their ancient garments and their saintly crowns,

seemed to me the real inhabitants and owners of this place, while the busy,

trivial men and women, hurrying to and fro, were a swarm of ephemeral

visitants infesting it for a day. It is such grim, stony beings as these, I

thought, who are the fathers of ancient faded children, in those tanned

time-fretted dwellings that crowd the steep before me; who pay their court

in the worn and crumbling pomp of the palace which stretches its

monotonous length on the height; who worship wearily in the stifling air

of the churches, urged by no fear or hope, but compelled by their doom to

be ever old and undying, to live on in the rigidity of habit, as they live on

in perpetual midday, without the repose of night or the new birth of

morning.

A stunning clang of metal suddenly thrilled through me, and I became

conscious of the objects in my room again: one of the fire- irons had

fallen as Pierre opened the door to bring me my draught. My heart was

palpitating violently, and I begged Pierre to leave my draught beside me; I

would take it presently.

As soon as I was alone again, I began to ask myself whether I had

been sleeping. Was this a dream--this wonderfully distinct vision- -

minute in its distinctness down to a patch of rainbow light on the

pavement, transmitted through a coloured lamp in the shape of a star--of a

strange city, quite unfamiliar to my imagination? I had seen no picture of

Prague: it lay in my mind as a mere name, with vaguely-remembered

historical associations--ill-defined memories of imperial grandeur and

religious wars.

Nothing of this sort had ever occurred in my dreaming experience

before, for I had often been humiliated because my dreams were only

saved from being utterly disjointed and commonplace by the frequent

terrors of nightmare. But I could not believe that I had been asleep, for I

remembered distinctly the gradual breaking-in of the vision upon me, like

the new images in a dissolving view, or the growing distinctness of the

landscape as the sun lifts up the veil of the morning mist. And while I

was conscious of this incipient vision, I was also conscious that Pierre

came to tell my father Mr. Filmore was waiting for him, and that my father

hurried out of the room. No, it was not a dream; was it--the thought was

full of tremulous exultation--was it the poet's nature in me, hitherto only a

troubled yearning sensibility, now manifesting itself suddenly as

spontaneous creation? Surely it was in this way that Homer saw the

plain of Troy, that Dante saw the abodes of the departed, that Milton saw

the earthward flight of the Tempter. Was it that my illness had wrought

some happy change in my organization--given a firmer tension to my

nerves--carried off some dull obstruction? I had often read of such

effects--in works of fiction at least. Nay; in genuine biographies I had

read of the subtilizing or exalting influence of some diseases on the mental

powers. Did not Novalis feel his inspiration intensified under the

progress of consumption?

When my mind had dwelt for some time on this blissful idea, it

seemed to me that I might perhaps test it by an exertion of my will. The

vision had begun when my father was speaking of our going to Prague. I

did not for a moment believe it was really a representation of that city; I

believed--I hoped it was a picture that my newly liberated genius had

painted in fiery haste, with the colours snatched from lazy memory.

Suppose I were to fix my mind on some other place--Venice, for example,

which was far more familiar to my imagination than Prague: perhaps the

same sort of result would follow. I concentrated my thoughts on Venice;

I stimulated my imagination with poetic memories, and strove to feel

myself present in Venice, as I had felt myself present in Prague. But in

vain. I was only colouring the Canaletto engravings that hung in my old

bedroom at home; the picture was a shifting one, my mind wandering

uncertainly in search of more vivid images; I could see no accident of

form or shadow without conscious labour after the necessary conditions.

It was all prosaic effort, not rapt passivity, such as I had experienced half

an hour before. I was discouraged; but I remembered that inspiration

was fitful.

For several days I was in a state of excited expectation, watching for a

recurrence of my new gift. I sent my thoughts ranging over my world of

knowledge, in the hope that they would find some object which would

send a reawakening vibration through my slumbering genius. But no; my

world remained as dim as ever, and that flash of strange light refused to

come again, though I watched for it with palpitating eagerness.

My father accompanied me every day in a drive, and a gradually

lengthening walk as my powers of walking increased; and one evening he

had agreed to come and fetch me at twelve the next day, that we might go

together to select a musical box, and other purchases rigorously demanded

of a rich Englishman visiting Geneva. He was one of the most punctual

of men and bankers, and I was always nervously anxious to be quite ready

for him at the appointed time. But, to my surprise, at a quarter past twelve

he had not appeared. I felt all the impatience of a convalescent who has

nothing particular to do, and who has just taken a tonic in the prospect of

immediate exercise that would carry off the stimulus.

Unable to sit still and reserve my strength, I walked up and down the

room, looking out on the current of the Rhone, just where it leaves the

dark-blue lake; but thinking all the while of the possible causes that could

detain my father.

Suddenly I was conscious that my father was in the room, but not

alone: there were two persons with him. Strange! I had heard no

footstep, I had not seen the door open; but I saw my father, and at his right

hand our neighbour Mrs. Filmore, whom I remembered very well, though

I had not seen her for five years. She was a commonplace middle-aged

woman, in silk and cashmere; but the lady on the left of my father was not

more than twenty, a tall, slim, willowy figure, with luxuriant blond hair,

arranged in cunning braids and folds that looked almost too massive for

the slight figure and the small-featured, thin-lipped face they crowned.

But the face had not a girlish expression: the features were sharp, the

pale grey eyes at once acute, restless, and sarcastic. They were fixed on

me in half-smiling curiosity, and I felt a painful sensation as if a sharp

wind were cutting me. The pale-green dress, and the green leaves that

seemed to form a border about her pale blond hair, made me think of a

Water-Nixie--for my mind was full of German lyrics, and this pale, fatal-

eyed woman, with the green weeds, looked like a birth from some cold

sedgy stream, the daughter of an aged river.

"Well, Latimer, you thought me long," my father said . . .

But while the last word was in my ears, the whole group vanished, and

there was nothing between me and the Chinese printed folding- screen that

stood before the door. I was cold and trembling; I could only totter

forward and throw myself on the sofa. This strange new power had

manifested itself again . . . But WAS it a power? Might it not rather be a

disease--a sort of intermittent delirium, concentrating my energy of brain

into moments of unhealthy activity, and leaving my saner hours all the

more barren? I felt a dizzy sense of unreality in what my eye rested on; I

grasped the bell convulsively, like one trying to free himself from

nightmare, and rang it twice. Pierre came with a look of alarm in his

face.

"Monsieur ne se trouve pas bien?" he said anxiously.

"I'm tired of waiting, Pierre," I said, as distinctly and emphatically as I

could, like a man determined to be sober in spite of wine; "I'm afraid

something has happened to my father--he's usually so punctual. Run to

the Hotel des Bergues and see if he is there."

Pierre left the room at once, with a soothing "Bien, Monsieur"; and I

felt the better for this scene of simple, waking prose. Seeking to calm

myself still further, I went into my bedroom, adjoining the salon, and

opened a case of eau-de-Cologne; took out a bottle; went through the

process of taking out the cork very neatly, and then rubbed the reviving

spirit over my hands and forehead, and under my nostrils, drawing a new

delight from the scent because I had procured it by slow details of labour,

and by no strange sudden madness. Already I had begun to taste

something of the horror that belongs to the lot of a human being whose

nature is not adjusted to simple human conditions.

Still enjoying the scent, I returned to the salon, but it was not

unoccupied, as it had been before I left it. In front of the Chinese

folding-screen there was my father, with Mrs. Filmore on his right hand,

and on his left--the slim, blond-haired girl, with the keen face and the keen

eyes fixed on me in half-smiling curiosity.

"Well, Latimer, you thought me long," my father said . . .

I heard no more, felt no more, till I became conscious that I was lying

with my head low on the sofa, Pierre, and my father by my side. As soon

as I was thoroughly revived, my father left the room, and presently

returned, saying -

"I've been to tell the ladies how you are, Latimer. They were waiting

in the next room. We shall put off our shopping expedition to-day."

Presently he said, "That young lady is Bertha Grant, Mrs. Filmore's

orphan niece. Filmore has adopted her, and she lives with them, so you

will have her for a neighbour when we go home--perhaps for a near

relation; for there is a tenderness between her and Alfred, I suspect, and I

should be gratified by the match, since Filmore means to provide for her in

every way as if she were his daughter. It had not occurred to me that you

knew nothing about her living with the Filmores."

He made no further allusion to the fact of my having fainted at the

moment of seeing her, and I would not for the world have told him the

reason: I shrank from the idea of disclosing to any one what might be

regarded as a pitiable peculiarity, most of all from betraying it to my father,

who would have suspected my sanity ever after.

I do not mean to dwell with particularity on the details of my

experience. I have described these two cases at length, because they had

definite, clearly traceable results in my after-lot.

Shortly after this last occurrence--I think the very next day--I began to

be aware of a phase in my abnormal sensibility, to which, from the languid

and slight nature of my intercourse with others since my illness, I had not

been alive before. This was the obtrusion on my mind of the mental

process going forward in first one person, and then another, with whom I

happened to be in contact: the vagrant, frivolous ideas and emotions of

some uninteresting acquaintance--Mrs. Filmore, for example--would force

themselves on my consciousness like an importunate, ill-played musical

instrument, or the loud activity of an imprisoned insect. But this

unpleasant sensibility was fitful, and left me moments of rest, when the

souls of my companions were once more shut out from me, and I felt a

relief such as silence brings to wearied nerves. I might have believed this

importunate insight to be merely a diseased activity of the imagination, but

that my prevision of incalculable words and actions proved it to have a

fixed relation to the mental process in other minds. But this superadded

consciousness, wearying and annoying enough when it urged on me the

trivial experience of indifferent people, became an intense pain and grief

when it seemed to be opening to me the souls of those who were in a close

relation to me--when the rational talk, the graceful attentions, the wittily-

turned phrases, and the kindly deeds, which used to make the web of their

characters, were seen as if thrust asunder by a microscopic vision, that

showed all the intermediate frivolities, all the suppressed egoism, all the

struggling chaos of puerilities, meanness, vague capricious memories, and

indolent make-shift thoughts, from which human words and deeds emerge

like leaflets covering a fermenting heap.

At Basle we were joined by my brother Alfred, now a handsome, self-

confident man of six-and-twenty--a thorough contrast to my fragile,

nervous, ineffectual self. I believe I was held to have a sort of half-

womanish, half-ghostly beauty; for the portrait-painters, who are thick as

weeds at Geneva, had often asked me to sit to them, and I had been the

model of a dying minstrel in a fancy picture. But I thoroughly disliked my

own physique and nothing but the belief that it was a condition of poetic

genius would have reconciled me to it. That brief hope was quite fled,

and I saw in my face now nothing but the stamp of a morbid organization,

framed for passive suffering--too feeble for the sublime resistance of

poetic production. Alfred, from whom I had been almost constantly

separated, and who, in his present stage of character and appearance, came

before me as a perfect stranger, was bent on being extremely friendly and

brother-like to me. He had the superficial kindness of a good-humoured,

self-satisfied nature, that fears no rivalry, and has encountered no

contrarieties. I am not sure that my disposition was good enough for me

to have been quite free from envy towards him, even if our desires had not

clashed, and if I had been in the healthy human condition which admits of

generous confidence and charitable construction. There must always

have been an antipathy between our natures. As it was, he became in a

few weeks an object of intense hatred to me; and when he entered the

room, still more when he spoke, it was as if a sensation of grating metal

had set my teeth on edge. My diseased consciousness was more

intensely and continually occupied with his thoughts and emotions, than

with those of any other person who came in my way. I was perpetually

exasperated with the petty promptings of his conceit and his love of

patronage, with his self-complacent belief in Bertha Grant's passion for

him, with his half-pitying contempt for me--seen not in the ordinary

indications of intonation and phrase and slight action, which an acute and

suspicious mind is on the watch for, but in all their naked skinless

complication.

For we were rivals, and our desires clashed, though he was not aware

of it. I have said nothing yet of the effect Bertha Grant produced in me

on a nearer acquaintance. That effect was chiefly determined by the fact

that she made the only exception, among all the human beings about me,

to my unhappy gift of insight. About Bertha I was always in a state of

uncertainty: I could watch the expression of her face, and speculate on

its meaning; I could ask for her opinion with the real interest of ignorance;

I could listen for her words and watch for her smile with hope and fear:

she had for me the fascination of an unravelled destiny. I say it was this

fact that chiefly determined the strong effect she produced on me: for, in

the abstract, no womanly character could seem to have less affinity for that

of a shrinking, romantic, passionate youth than Bertha's. She was keen,

sarcastic, unimaginative, prematurely cynical, remaining critical and

unmoved in the most impressive scenes, inclined to dissect all my

favourite poems, and especially contemptous towards the German lyrics

which were my pet literature at that time. To this moment I am unable to

define my feeling towards her: it was not ordinary boyish admiration, for

she was the very opposite, even to the colour of her hair, of the ideal

woman who still remained to me the type of loveliness; and she was

without that enthusiasm for the great and good, which, even at the moment

of her strongest dominion over me, I should have declared to be the

highest element of character. But there is no tyranny more complete than

that which a self-centred negative nature exercises over a morbidly

sensitive nature perpetually craving sympathy and support. The most

independent people feel the effect of a man's silence in heightening their

value for his opinion--feel an additional triumph in conquering the

reverence of a critic habitually captious and satirical: no wonder, then,

that an enthusiastic self-distrusting youth should watch and wait before the

closed secret of a sarcastic woman's face, as if it were the shrine of the

doubtfully benignant deity who ruled his destiny. For a young enthusiast is

unable to imagine the total negation in another mind of the emotions

which are stirring his own: they may be feeble, latent, inactive, he thinks,

but they are there--they may be called forth; sometimes, in moments of

happy hallucination, he believes they may be there in all the greater

strength because he sees no outward sign of them. And this effect, as I

have intimated, was heightened to its utmost intensity in me, because

Bertha was the only being who remained for me in the mysterious

seclusion of soul that renders such youthful delusion possible. Doubtless

there was another sort of fascination at work--that subtle physical

attraction which delights in cheating our psychological predictions, and in

compelling the men who paint sylphs, to fall in love with some bonne et

brave femme, heavy- heeled and freckled.

Bertha's behaviour towards me was such as to encourage all my

illusions, to heighten my boyish passion, and make me more and more

dependent on her smiles. Looking back with my present wretched

knowledge, I conclude that her vanity and love of power were intensely

gratified by the belief that I had fainted on first seeing her purely from the

strong impression her person had produced on me. The most prosaic

woman likes to believe herself the object of a violent, a poetic passion;

and without a grain of romance in her, Bertha had that spirit of intrigue

which gave piquancy to the idea that the brother of the man she meant to

marry was dying with love and jealousy for her sake. That she meant to

marry my brother, was what at that time I did not believe; for though he

was assiduous in his attentions to her, and I knew well enough that both he

and my father had made up their minds to this result, there was not yet an

understood engagement--there had been no explicit declaration; and

Bertha habitually, while she flirted with my brother, and accepted his

homage in a way that implied to him a thorough recognition of its

intention, made me believe, by the subtlest looks and phrases--feminine

nothings which could never be quoted against her--that he was really the

object of her secret ridicule; that she thought him, as I did, a coxcomb,

whom she would have pleasure in disappointing. Me she openly petted

in my brother's presence, as if I were too young and sickly ever to be

thought of as a lover; and that was the view he took of me. But I believe

she must inwardly have delighted in the tremors into which she threw me

by the coaxing way in which she patted my curls, while she laughed at my

quotations. Such caresses were always given in the presence of our

friends; for when we were alone together, she affected a much greater

distance towards me, and now and then took the opportunity, by words or

slight actions, to stimulate my foolish timid hope that she really preferred

me. And why should she not follow her inclination? I was not in so

advantageous a position as my brother, but I had fortune, I was not a year

younger than she was, and she was an heiress, who would soon be of age

to decide for herself.

The fluctuations of hope and fear, confined to this one channel, made

each day in her presence a delicious torment. There was one deliberate

act of hers which especially helped to intoxicate me. When we were at

Vienna her twentieth birthday occurred, and as she was very fond of

ornaments, we all took the opportunity of the splendid jewellers' shops in

that Teutonic Paris to purchase her a birthday present of jewellery. Mine,

naturally, was the least expensive; it was an opal ring--the opal was my

favourite stone, because it seems to blush and turn pale as if it had a soul.

I told Bertha so when I gave it her, and said that it was an emblem of the

poetic nature, changing with the changing light of heaven and of woman's

eyes. In the evening she appeared elegantly dressed, and wearing

conspicuously all the birthday presents except mine. I looked eagerly at

her fingers, but saw no opal. I had no opportunity of noticing this to her

during the evening; but the next day, when I found her seated near the

window alone, after breakfast, I said, "You scorn to wear my poor opal. I

should have remembered that you despised poetic natures, and should

have given you coral, or turquoise, or some other opaque unresponsive

stone." "Do I despise it?" she answered, taking hold of a delicate gold

chain which she always wore round her neck and drawing out the end

from her bosom with my ring hanging to it; "it hurts me a little, I can tell

you," she said, with her usual dubious smile, "to wear it in that secret

place; and since your poetical nature is so stupid as to prefer a more public

position, I shall not endure the pain any longer."

She took off the ring from the chain and put it on her finger, smiling

still, while the blood rushed to my cheeks, and I could not trust myself to

say a word of entreaty that she would keep the ring where it was before.

I was completely fooled by this, and for two days shut myself up in my

own room whenever Bertha was absent, that I might intoxicate myself

afresh with the thought of this scene and all it implied.

I should mention that during these two months--which seemed a long

life to me from the novelty and intensity of the pleasures and pains I

underwent--my diseased anticipation in other people's consciousness

continued to torment me; now it was my father, and now my brother, now

Mrs. Filmore or her husband, and now our German courier, whose stream

of thought rushed upon me like a ringing in the ears not to be got rid of,

though it allowed my own impulses and ideas to continue their

uninterrupted course. It was like a preternaturally heightened sense of

hearing, making audible to one a roar of sound where others find perfect

stillness. The weariness and disgust of this involuntary intrusion into

other souls was counteracted only by my ignorance of Bertha, and my

growing passion for her; a passion enormously stimulated, if not produced,

by that ignorance. She was my oasis of mystery in the dreary desert of

knowledge. I had never allowed my diseased condition to betray itself,

or to drive me into any unusual speech or action, except once, when, in a

moment of peculiar bitterness against my brother, I had forestalled some

words which I knew he was going to utter--a clever observation, which he

had prepared beforehand. He had occasionally a slightly affected

hesitation in his speech, and when he paused an instant after the second

word, my impatience and jealousy impelled me to continue the speech for

him, as if it were something we had both learned by rote. He coloured

and looked astonished, as well as annoyed; and the words had no sooner

escaped my lips than I felt a shock of alarm lest such an anticipation of

words--very far from being words of course, easy to divine--should have

betrayed me as an exceptional being, a sort of quiet energumen, whom

every one, Bertha above all, would shudder at and avoid. But I

magnified, as usual, the impression any word or deed of mine could

produce on others; for no one gave any sign of having noticed my

interruption as more than a rudeness, to be forgiven me on the score of my

feeble nervous condition.

While this superadded consciousness of the actual was almost constant

with me, I had never had a recurrence of that distinct prevision which I

have described in relation to my first interview with Bertha; and I was

waiting with eager curiosity to know whether or not my vision of Prague

would prove to have been an instance of the same kind. A few days after

the incident of the opal ring, we were paying one of our frequent visits to

the Lichtenberg Palace. I could never look at many pictures in succession;

for pictures, when they are at all powerful, affect me so strongly that one

or two exhaust all my capability of contemplation. This morning I had

been looking at Giorgione's picture of the cruel-eyed woman, said to be a

likeness of Lucrezia Borgia. I had stood long alone before it, fascinated

by the terrible reality of that cunning, relentless face, till I felt a strange

poisoned sensation, as if I had long been inhaling a fatal odour, and was

just beginning to be conscious of its effects. Perhaps even then I should

not have moved away, if the rest of the party had not returned to this room,

and announced that they were going to the Belvedere Gallery to settle a

bet which had arisen between my brother and Mr. Filmore about a portrait.

I followed them dreamily, and was hardly alive to what occurred till they

had all gone up to the gallery, leaving me below; for I refused to come

within sight of another picture that day. I made my way to the Grand

Terrace, since it was agreed that we should saunter in the gardens when

the dispute had been decided. I had been sitting here a short space,

vaguely conscious of trim gardens, with a city and green hills in the

distance, when, wishing to avoid the proximity of the sentinel, I rose and

walked down the broad stone steps, intending to seat myself farther on in

the gardens. Just as I reached the gravel-walk, I felt an arm slipped within

mine, and a light hand gently pressing my wrist. In the same instant a

strange intoxicating numbness passed over me, like the continuance or

climax of the sensation I was still feeling from the gaze of Lucrezia Borgia.

The gardens, the summer sky, the consciousness of Bertha's arm being

within mine, all vanished, and I seemed to be suddenly in darkness, out of

which there gradually broke a dim firelight, and I felt myself sitting in my

father's leather chair in the library at home. I knew the fireplace--the

dogs for the wood-fire--the black marble chimney-piece with the white

marble medallion of the dying Cleopatra in the centre. Intense and

hopeless misery was pressing on my soul; the light became stronger, for

Bertha was entering with a candle in her hand- -Bertha, my wife--with

cruel eyes, with green jewels and green leaves on her white ball-dress;

every hateful thought within her present to me . . . "Madman, idiot! why

don't you kill yourself, then?" It was a moment of hell. I saw into her

pitiless soul--saw its barren worldliness, its scorching hate--and felt it

clothe me round like an air I was obliged to breathe. She came with her

candle and stood over me with a bitter smile of contempt; I saw the great

emerald brooch on her bosom, a studded serpent with diamond eyes. I

shuddered--I despised this woman with the barren soul and mean thoughts;

but I felt helpless before her, as if she clutched my bleeding heart, and

would clutch it till the last drop of life- blood ebbed away. She was my

wife, and we hated each other. Gradually the hearth, the dim library, the

candle-light disappeared--seemed to melt away into a background of light,

the green serpent with the diamond eyes remaining a dark image on the

retina. Then I had a sense of my eyelids quivering, and the living

daylight broke in upon me; I saw gardens, and heard voices; I was seated

on the steps of the Belvedere Terrace, and my friends were round me.

The tumult of mind into which I was thrown by this hideous vision

made me ill for several days, and prolonged our stay at Vienna. I

shuddered with horror as the scene recurred to me; and it recurred

constantly, with all its minutiae, as if they had been burnt into my memory;

and yet, such is the madness of the human heart under the influence of its

immediate desires, I felt a wild hell-braving joy that Bertha was to be mine;

for the fulfilment of my former prevision concerning her first appearance

before me, left me little hope that this last hideous glimpse of the future

was the mere diseased play of my own mind, and had no relation to

external realities. One thing alone I looked towards as a possible means

of casting doubt on my terrible conviction--the discovery that my vision of

Prague had been false--and Prague was the next city on our route.

Meanwhile, I was no sooner in Bertha's society again than I was as

completely under her sway as before. What if I saw into the heart of

Bertha, the matured woman--Bertha, my wife? Bertha, the GIRL, was a

fascinating secret to me still: I trembled under her touch; I felt the

witchery of her presence; I yearned to be assured of her love. The fear of

poison is feeble against the sense of thirst. Nay, I was just as jealous of my

brother as before--just as much irritated by his small patronizing ways; for

my pride, my diseased sensibility, were there as they had always been, and

winced as inevitably under every offence as my eye winced from an

intruding mote. The future, even when brought within the compass of

feeling by a vision that made me shudder, had still no more than the force

of an idea, compared with the force of present emotion--of my love for

Bertha, of my dislike and jealousy towards my brother.

It is an old story, that men sell themselves to the tempter, and sign a

bond with their blood, because it is only to take effect at a distant day;

then rush on to snatch the cup their souls thirst after with an impulse not

the less savage because there is a dark shadow beside them for evermore.

There is no short cut, no patent tram-road, to wisdom: after all the

centuries of invention, the soul's path lies through the thorny wilderness

which must be still trodden in solitude, with bleeding feet, with sobs for

help, as it was trodden by them of old time.

My mind speculated eagerly on the means by which I should become

my brother's successful rival, for I was still too timid, in my ignorance of

Bertha's actual feeling, to venture on any step that would urge from her an

avowal of it. I thought I should gain confidence even for this, if my

vision of Prague proved to have been veracious; and yet, the horror of that

certitude! Behind the slim girl Bertha, whose words and looks I watched

for, whose touch was bliss, there stood continually that Bertha with the

fuller form, the harder eyes, the more rigid mouth--with the barren, selfish

soul laid bare; no longer a fascinating secret, but a measured fact, urging

itself perpetually on my unwilling sight. Are you unable to give me your

sympathy--you who react this? Are you unable to imagine this double

consciousness at work within me, flowing on like two parallel streams

which never mingle their waters and blend into a common hue? Yet you

must have known something of the presentiments that spring from an

insight at war with passion; and my visions were only like presentiments

intensified to horror. You have known the powerlessness of ideas before

the might of impulse; and my visions, when once they had passed into

memory, were mere ideas--pale shadows that beckoned in vain, while my

hand was grasped by the living and the loved.

In after-days I thought with bitter regret that if I had foreseen

something more or something different--if instead of that hideous vision

which poisoned the passion it could not destroy, or if even along with it I

could have had a foreshadowing of that moment when I looked on my

brother's face for the last time, some softening influence would have been

shed over my feeling towards him: pride and hatred would surely have

been subdued into pity, and the record of those hidden sins would have

been shortened. But this is one of the vain thoughts with which we men

flatter ourselves. We try to believe that the egoism within us would have

easily been melted, and that it was only the narrowness of our knowledge

which hemmed in our generosity, our awe, our human piety, and hindered

them from submerging our hard indifference to the sensations and

emotions of our fellows. Our tenderness and self-renunciation seem

strong when our egoism has had its day--when, after our mean striving for

a triumph that is to be another's loss, the triumph comes suddenly, and we

shudder at it, because it is held out by the chill hand of death.

Our arrival in Prague happened at night, and I was glad of this, for it

seemed like a deferring of a terribly decisive moment, to be in the city for

hours without seeing it. As we were not to remain long in Prague, but to

go on speedily to Dresden, it was proposed that we should drive out the

next morning and take a general view of the place, as well as visit some of

its specially interesting spots, before the heat became oppressive--for we

were in August, and the season was hot and dry. But it happened that the

ladies were rather late at their morning toilet, and to my father's politely-

repressed but perceptible annoyance, we were not in the carriage till the

morning was far advanced. I thought with a sense of relief, as we entered

the Jews' quarter, where we were to visit the old synagogue, that we

should be kept in this flat, shut-up part of the city, until we should all be

too tired and too warm to go farther, and so we should return without

seeing more than the streets through which we had already passed. That

would give me another day's suspense--suspense, the only form in which a

fearful spirit knows the solace of hope. But, as I stood under the

blackened, groined arches of that old synagogue, made dimly visible by

the seven thin candles in the sacred lamp, while our Jewish cicerone

reached down the Book of the Law, and read to us in its ancient tongue--I

felt a shuddering impression that this strange building, with its shrunken

lights, this surviving withered remnant of medieval Judaism, was of a

piece with my vision. Those darkened dusty Christian saints, with their

loftier arches and their larger candles, needed the consolatory scorn with

which they might point to a more shrivelled death-in-life than their own.

As I expected, when we left the Jews' quarter the elders of our party

wished to return to the hotel. But now, instead of rejoicing in this, as I

had done beforehand, I felt a sudden overpowering impulse to go on at

once to the bridge, and put an end to the suspense I had been wishing to

protract. I declared, with unusual decision, that I would get out of the

carriage and walk on alone; they might return without me. My father,

thinking this merely a sample of my usual "poetic nonsense," objected that

I should only do myself harm by walking in the heat; but when I persisted,

he said angrily that I might follow my own absurd devices, but that

Schmidt (our courier) must go with me. I assented to this, and set off

with Schmidt towards the bridge. I had no sooner passed from under the

archway of the grand old gate leading an to the bridge, than a trembling

seized me, and I turned cold under the mid-day sun; yet I went on; I was in

search of something--a small detail which I remembered with special

intensity as part of my vision. There it was--the patch of rainbow light on

the pavement transmitted through a lamp in the shape of a star.

Before the autumn was at an end, and while the brown leaves still

stood thick on the beeches in our park, my brother and Bertha were

engaged to each other, and it was understood that their marriage was to

take place early in the next spring. In spite of the certainty I had felt

from that moment on the bridge at Prague, that Bertha would one day be

my wife, my constitutional timidity and distrust had continued to benumb

me, and the words in which I had sometimes premeditated a confession of

my love, had died away unuttered. The same conflict had gone on within

me as before--the longing for an assurance of love from Bertha's lips, the

dread lest a word of contempt and denial should fall upon me like a

corrosive acid. What was the conviction of a distant necessity to me? l

trembled under a present glance, I hungered after a present joy, I was

clogged and chilled by a present fear. And so the days passed on: I

witnessed Bertha's engagement and heard her marriage discussed as if I

were under a conscious nightmare--knowing it was a dream that would

vanish, but feeling stifled under the grasp of hard-clutching fingers.

When I was not in Bertha's presence--and I was with her very often,

for she continued to treat me with a playful patronage that wakened no

jealousy in my brother--I spent my time chiefly in wandering, in strolling,

or taking long rides while the daylight lasted, and then shutting myself up

with my unread books; for books had lost the power of chaining my

attention. My self-consciousness was heightened to that pitch of

intensity in which our own emotions take the form of a drama which urges

itself imperatively on our contemplation, and we begin to weep, less under

the sense of our suffering than at the thought of it. I felt a sort of pitying

anguish over the pathos of my own lot: the lot of a being finely

organized for pain, but with hardly any fibres that responded to pleasure--

to whom the idea of future evil robbed the present of its joy, and for whom

the idea of future good did not still the uneasiness of a present yearning or

a present dread. I went dumbly through that stage of the poet's suffering,

in which he feels the delicious pang of utterance, and makes an image of

his sorrows.

I was left entirely without remonstrance concerning this dreamy

wayward life: I knew my father's thought about me: "That lad will

never be good for anything in life: he may waste his years in an

insignificant way on the income that falls to him: I shall not trouble

myself about a career for him."

One mild morning in the beginning of November, it happened that I

was standing outside the portico patting lazy old Caesar, a Newfoundland

almost blind with age, the only dog that ever took any notice of me--for

the very dogs shunned me, and fawned on the happier people about me--

when the groom brought up my brother's horse which was to carry him to

the hunt, and my brother himself appeared at the door, florid, broad-

chested, and self-complacent, feeling what a good-natured fellow he was

not to behave insolently to us all on the strength of his great advantages.

"Latimer, old boy," he said to me in a tone of compassionate cordiality,

"what a pity it is you don't have a run with the hounds now and then!

The finest thing in the world for low spirits!"

"Low spirits!" I thought bitterly, as he rode away; "that is the sort of

phrase with which coarse, narrow natures like yours think to describe

experience of which you can know no more than your horse knows. It is

to such as you that the good of this world falls: ready dulness, healthy

selfishness, good-tempered conceit-- these are the keys to happiness."

The quick thought came, that my selfishness was even stronger than

his--it was only a suffering selfishness instead of an enjoying one. But

then, again, my exasperating insight into Alfred's self- complacent soul,

his freedom from all the doubts and fears, the unsatisfied yearnings, the

exquisite tortures of sensitiveness, that had made the web of my life,

seemed to absolve me from all bonds towards him. This man needed no

pity, no love; those fine influences would have been as little felt by him as

the delicate white mist is felt by the rock it caresses. There was no evil

in store for HIM: if he was not to marry Bertha, it would be because he

had found a lot pleasanter to himself.

Mr. Filmore's house lay not more than half a mile beyond our own

gates, and whenever I knew my brother was gone in another direction, I

went there for the chance of finding Bertha at home. Later on in the day I

walked thither. By a rare accident she was alone, and we walked out in

the grounds together, for she seldom went on foot beyond the trimly-swept

gravel-walks. I remember what a beautiful sylph she looked to me as the

low November sun shone on her blond hair, and she tripped along teasing

me with her usual light banter, to which I listened half fondly, half

moodily; it was all the sign Bertha's mysterious inner self ever made to me.

To- day perhaps, the moodiness predominated, for I had not yet shaken off

the access of jealous hate which my brother had raised in me by his

parting patronage. Suddenly I interrupted and startled her by saying,

almost fiercely, "Bertha, how can you love Alfred?"

She looked at me with surprise for a moment, but soon her light smile

came again, and she answered sarcastically, "Why do you suppose I love

him?"

"How can you ask that, Bertha?"

"What! your wisdom thinks I must love the man I'm going to marry?

The most unpleasant thing in the world. I should quarrel with him; I

should be jealous of him; our menage would be conducted in a very ill-

bred manner. A little quiet contempt contributes greatly to the elegance

of life."

"Bertha, that is not your real feeling. Why do you delight in trying to

deceive me by inventing such cynical speeches?"

"I need never take the trouble of invention in order to deceive you, my

small Tasso"-- (that was the mocking name she usually gave me). "The

easiest way to deceive a poet is to tell him the truth."

She was testing the validity of her epigram in a daring way, and for a

moment the shadow of my vision--the Bertha whose soul was no secret to

me--passed between me and the radiant girl, the playful sylph whose

feelings were a fascinating mystery. I suppose I must have shuddered, or

betrayed in some other way my momentary chill of horror.

"Tasso!" she said, seizing my wrist, and peeping round into my face,

"are you really beginning to discern what a heartless girl I am? Why, you

are not half the poet I thought you were; you are actually capable of

believing the truth about me."

The shadow passed from between us, and was no longer the object

nearest to me. The girl whose light fingers grasped me, whose elfish

charming face looked into mine--who, I thought, was betraying an interest

in my feelings that she would not have directly avowed,--this warm

breathing presence again possessed my senses and imagination like a

returning siren melody which had been overpowered for an instant by the

roar of threatening waves. It was a moment as delicious to me as the

waking up to a consciousness of youth after a dream of middle age. I

forgot everything but my passion, and said with swimming eyes -

"Bertha, shall you love me when we are first married? I wouldn't

mind if you really loved me only for a little while."

Her look of astonishment, as she loosed my hand and started away

from me, recalled me to a sense of my strange, my criminal indiscretion.

"Forgive me," I said, hurriedly, as soon as I could speak again; "I did

not know what I was saying."

"Ah, Tasso's mad fit has come on, I see," she answered quietly, for she

had recovered herself sooner than I had. "Let him go home and keep his

head cool. I must go in, for the sun is setting."

I left her--full of indignation against myself. I had let slip words

which, if she reflected on them, might rouse in her a suspicion of my

abnormal mental condition--a suspicion which of all things I dreaded.

And besides that, I was ashamed of the apparent baseness I had committed

in uttering them to my brother's betrothed wife. I wandered home slowly,

entering our park through a private gate instead of by the lodges. As I

approached the house, I saw a man dashing off at full speed from the

stable-yard across the park. Had any accident happened at home? No;

perhaps it was only one of my father's peremptory business errands that

required this headlong haste.

Nevertheless I quickened my pace without any distinct motive, and

was soon at the house. I will not dwell on the scene I found there. My

brother was dead--had been pitched from his horse, and killed on the spot

by a concussion of the brain.

I went up to the room where he lay, and where my father was seated

beside him with a look of rigid despair. I had shunned my father more

than any one since our return home, for the radical antipathy between our

natures made my insight into his inner self a constant affliction to me.

But now, as I went up to him, and stood beside him in sad silence, I felt

the presence of a new element that blended us as we had never been blent

before. My father had been one of the most successful men in the

money-getting world: he had had no sentimental sufferings, no illness.

The heaviest trouble that had befallen him was the death of his first wife.

But he married my mother soon after; and I remember he seemed exactly

the same, to my keen childish observation, the week after her death as

before. But now, at last, a sorrow had come--the sorrow of old age,

which suffers the more from the crushing of its pride and its hopes, in

proportion as the pride and hope are narrow and prosaic. His son was to

have been married soon--would probably have stood for the borough at the

next election. That son's existence was the best motive that could be

alleged for making new purchases of land every year to round off the

estate. It is a dreary thing onto live on doing the same things year after

year, without knowing why we do them. Perhaps the tragedy of

disappointed youth and passion is less piteous than the tragedy of

disappointed age and worldliness.

As I saw into the desolation of my father's heart, I felt a movement of

deep pity towards him, which was the beginning of a new affection--an

affection that grew and strengthened in spite of the strange bitterness with

which he regarded me in the first month or two after my brother's death.

If it had not been for the softening influence of my compassion for him--

the first deep compassion I had ever felt--I should have been stung by the

perception that my father transferred the inheritance of an eldest son to me

with a mortified sense that fate had compelled him to the unwelcome

course of caring for me as an important being. It was only in spite of

himself that he began to think of me with anxious regard. There is hardly

any neglected child for whom death has made vacant a more favoured

place, who will not understand what I mean.

Gradually, however, my new deference to his wishes, the effect of that

patience which was born of my pity for him, won upon his affection, and

he began to please himself with the endeavour to make me fill any

brother's place as fully as my feebler personality would admit. I saw that

the prospect which by and by presented itself of my becoming Bertha's

husband was welcome to him, and he even contemplated in my case what

he had not intended in my brother's--that his son and daughter-in-law

should make one household with him. My softened feelings towards my

father made this the happiest time I had known since childhood;--these last

months in which I retained the delicious illusion of loving Bertha, of

longing and doubting and hoping that she might love me. She behaved

with a certain new consciousness and distance towards me after my

brother's death; and I too was under a double constraint-- that of delicacy

towards my brother's memory and of anxiety as to the impression my

abrupt words had left on her mind. But the additional screen this mutual

reserve erected between us only brought me more completely under her

power: no matter how empty the adytum, so that the veil be thick

enough. So absolute is our soul's need of something hidden and

uncertain for the maintenance of that doubt and hope and effort which are

the breath of its life, that if the whole future were laid bare to us beyond

to-day, the interest of all mankind would be bent on the hours that lie

between; we should pant after the uncertainties of our one morning and

our one afternoon; we should rush fiercely to the Exchange for our last

possibility of speculation, of success, of disappointment: we should have a

glut of political prophets foretelling a crisis or a no-crisis within the only

twenty-four hours left open to prophecy. Conceive the condition of the

human mind if all propositions whatsoever were self-evident except one,

which was to become self-evident at the close of a summer's day, but in

the meantime might be the subject of question, of hypothesis, of debate.

Art and philosophy, literature and science, would fasten like bees on that

one proposition which had the honey of probability in it, and be the more

eager because their enjoyment would end with sunset. Our impulses, our

spiritual activities, no more adjust themselves to the idea of their future

nullity, than the beating of our heart, or the irritability of our muscles.

Bertha, the slim, fair-haired girl, whose present thoughts and emotions

were an enigma to me amidst the fatiguing obviousness of the other minds

around me, was as absorbing to me as a single unknown to-day--as a

single hypothetic proposition to remain problematic till sunset; and all the

cramped, hemmed-in belief and disbelief, trust and distrust, of my nature,

welled out in this one narrow channel.

And she made me believe that she loved me. Without ever quitting

her tone of BADINAGE and playful superiority, she intoxicated me with

the sense that I was necessary to her, that she was never at ease, unless I

was near her, submitting to her playful tyranny. It costs a woman so little

effort to beset us in this way! A half- repressed word, a moment's

unexpected silence, even an easy fit of petulance on our account, will

serve us as hashish for a long while. Out of the subtlest web of scarcely

perceptible signs, she set me weaving the fancy that she had always

unconsciously loved me better than Alfred, but that, with the ignorant

fluttered sensibility of a young girl, she had been imposed on by the charm

that lay for her in the distinction of being admired and chosen by a man

who made so brilliant a figure in the world as my brother. She satirized

herself in a very graceful way for her vanity and ambition. What was it

to me that I had the light of my wretched provision on the fact that now it

was I who possessed at least all but the personal part of my brother's

advantages? Our sweet illusions are half of them conscious illusions,

like effects of colour that we know to be made up of tinsel, broken glass,

and rags.

We were married eighteen months after Alfred's death, one cold, clear

morning in April, when there came hail and sunshine both together; and

Bertha, in her white silk and pale-green leaves, and the pale hues of her

hair and face, looked like the spirit of the morning. My father was

happier than he had thought of being again: my marriage, he felt sure,

would complete the desirable modification of my character, and make me

practical and worldly enough to take my place in society among sane men.

For he delighted in Bertha's tact and acuteness, and felt sure she would be

mistress of me, and make me what she chose: I was only twenty- one,

and madly in love with her. Poor father! He kept that hope a little

while after our first year of marriage, and it was not quite extinct when

paralysis came and saved him from utter disappointment.

I shall hurry through the rest of my story, not dwelling so much as I

have hitherto done on my inward experience. When people are well

known to each other, they talk rather of what befalls them externally,

leaving their feelings and sentiments to be inferred.

We lived in a round of visits for some time after our return home,

giving splendid dinner-parties, and making a sensation in our

neighbourhood by the new lustre of our equipage, for my father had

reserved this display of his increased wealth for the period of his son's

marriage; and we gave our acquaintances liberal opportunity for

remarking that it was a pity I made so poor a figure as an heir and a

bridegroom. The nervous fatigue of this existence, the insincerities and

platitudes which I had to live through twice over--through my inner and

outward sense--would have been maddening to me, if I had not had that

sort of intoxicated callousness which came from the delights of a first

passion. A bride and bridegroom, surrounded by all the appliances of

wealth, hurried through the day by the whirl of society, filling their

solitary moments with hastily-snatched caresses, are prepared for their

future life together as the novice is prepared for the cloister--by

experiencing its utmost contrast.

Through all these crowded excited months, Bertha's inward self

remained shrouded from me, and I still read her thoughts only through the

language of her lips and demeanour: I had still the human interest of

wondering whether what I did and said pleased her, of longing to hear a

word of affection, of giving a delicious exaggeration of meaning to her

smile. But I was conscious of a growing difference in her manner

towards me; sometimes strong enough to be called haughty coldness,

cutting and chilling me as the hail had done that came across the sunshine

on our marriage morning; sometimes only perceptible in the dexterous

avoidance of a tete-a-tete walk or dinner to which I had been looking

forward. I had been deeply pained by this--had even felt a sort of

crushing of the heart, from the sense that my brief day of happiness was

near its setting; but still I remained dependent on Bertha, eager for the last

rays of a bliss that would soon be gone for ever, hoping and watching for

some after-glow more beautiful from the impending night.

I remember--how should I not remember?--the time when that

dependence and hope utterly left me, when the sadness I had felt in

Bertha's growing estrangement became a joy that I looked back upon with

longing as a man might look back on the last pains in a paralysed limb.

It was just after the close of my father's last illness, which had necessarily

withdrawn us from society and thrown us more on each other. It was the

evening of father's death. On that evening the veil which had shrouded

Bertha's soul from me--had made me find in her alone among my fellow-

beings the blessed possibility of mystery, and doubt, and expectation--was

first withdrawn. Perhaps it was the first day since the beginning of my

passion for her, in which that passion was completely neutralized by the

presence of an absorbing feeling of another kind. I had been watching by

my father's deathbed: I had been witnessing the last fitful yearning

glance his soul had cast back on the spent inheritance of life--the last faint

consciousness of love he had gathered from the pressure of my hand.

What are all our personal loves when we have been sharing in that

supreme agony? In the first moments when we come away from the

presence of death, every other relation to the living is merged, to our

feeling, in the great relation of a common nature and a common destiny.

In that state of mind I joined Bertha in her private sitting-room. She

was seated in a leaning posture on a settee, with her back towards the door;

the great rich coils of her pale blond hair surmounting her small neck,

visible above the back of the settee. I remember, as I closed the door

behind me, a cold tremulousness seizing me, and a vague sense of being

hated and lonely--vague and strong, like a presentiment. I know how I

looked at that moment, for I saw myself in Bertha's thought as she lifted

her cutting grey eyes, and looked at me: a miserable ghost-seer,

surrounded by phantoms in the noonday, trembling under a breeze when

the leaves were still, without appetite for the common objects of human

desires, but pining after the moon-beams. We were front to front with

each other, and judged each other. The terrible moment of complete

illumination had come to me, and I saw that the darkness had hidden no

landscape from me, but only a blank prosaic wall: from that evening forth,

through the sickening years which followed, I saw all round the narrow

room of this woman's soul--saw petty artifice and mere negation where I

had delighted to believe in coy sensibilities and in wit at war with latent

feeling--saw the light floating vanities of the girl defining themselves into

the systematic coquetry, the scheming selfishness, of the woman--saw

repulsion and antipathy harden into cruel hatred, giving pain only for the

sake of wreaking itself.

For Bertha too, after her kind, felt the bitterness of disillusion. She had

believed that my wild poet's passion for her would make me her slave; and

that, being her slave, I should execute her will in all things. With the

essential shallowness of a negative, unimaginative nature, she was unable

to conceive the fact that sensibilities were anything else than weaknesses.

She had thought my weaknesses would put me in her power, and she

found them unmanageable forces. Our positions were reversed. Before

marriage she had completely mastered my imagination, for she was a

secret to me; and I created the unknown thought before which I trembled

as if it were hers. But now that her soul was laid open to me, now that I

was compelled to share the privacy of her motives, to follow all the petty

devices that preceded her words and acts, she found herself powerless with

me, except to produce in me the chill shudder of repulsion--powerless,

because I could be acted on by no lever within her reach. I was dead to

worldly ambitions, to social vanities, to all the incentives within the

compass of her narrow imagination, and I lived under influences utterly

invisible to her.

She was really pitiable to have such a husband, and so all the world

thought. A graceful, brilliant woman, like Bertha, who smiled on

morning callers, made a figure in ball-rooms, and was capable of that light

repartee which, from such a woman, is accepted as wit, was secure of

carrying off all sympathy from a husband who was sickly, abstracted, and,

as some suspected, crack- brained. Even the servants in our house gave

her the balance of their regard and pity. For there were no audible

quarrels between us; our alienation, our repulsion from each other, lay

within the silence of our own hearts; and if the mistress went out a great

deal, and seemed to dislike the master's society, was it not natural, poor

thing? The master was odd. I was kind and just to my dependants, but I

excited in them a shrinking, half-contemptuous pity; for this class of men

and women are but slightly determined in their estimate of others by

general considerations, or even experience, of character. They judge of

persons as they judge of coins, and value those who pass current at a high

rate.

After a time I interfered so little with Bertha's habits that it might seem

wonderful how her hatred towards me could grow so intense and active as

it did. But she had begun to suspect, by some involuntary betrayal of

mine, that there was an abnormal power of penetration in me--that fitfully,

at least, I was strangely cognizant of her thoughts and intentions, and she

began to be haunted by a terror of me, which alternated every now and

then with defiance. She meditated continually how the incubus could be

shaken off her life--how she could be freed from this hateful bond to a

being whom she at once despised as an imbecile, and dreaded as an

inquisitor. For a long while she lived in the hope that my evident

wretchedness would drive me to the commission of suicide; but suicide

was not in my nature. I was too completely swayed by the sense that I

was in the grasp of unknown forces, to believe in my power of self-release.

Towards my own destiny I had become entirely passive; for my one ardent

desire had spent itself, and impulse no longer predominated over

knowledge. For this reason I never thought of taking any steps towards a

complete separation, which would have made our alienation evident to the

world. Why should I rush for help to a new course, when I was only

suffering from the consequences of a deed which had been the act of my

intensest will? That would have been the logic of one who had desires to

gratify, and I had no desires. But Bertha and I lived more and more aloof

from each other. The rich find it easy to live married and apart.

That course of our life which I have indicated in a few sentences filled

the space of years. So much misery--so slow and hideous a growth of

hatred and sin, may be compressed into a sentence! And men judge of

each other's lives through this summary medium. They epitomize the

experience of their fellow-mortal, and pronounce judgment on him in neat

syntax, and feel themselves wise and virtuous--conquerors over the

temptations they define in well- selected predicates. Seven years of

wretchedness glide glibly over the lips of the man who has never counted

them out in moments of chill disappointment, of head and heart throbbings,

of dread and vain wrestling, of remorse and despair. We learn WORDS

by rote, but not their meaning; THAT must be paid for with our life-blood,

and printed in the subtle fibres of our nerves.

But I will hasten to finish my story. Brevity is justified at once to

those who readily understand, and to those who will never understand.

Some years after my father's death, I was sitting by the dim firelight in

my library one January evening--sitting in the leather chair that used to be

my father's--when Bertha appeared at the door, with a candle in her hand,

and advanced towards me. I knew the ball-dress she had on--the white

ball-dress, with the green jewels, shone upon by the light of the wax

candle which lit up the medallion of the dying Cleopatra on the

mantelpiece. Why did she come to me before going out? I had not seen

her in the library, which was my habitual place for months. Why did she

stand before me with the candle in her hand, with her cruel contemptuous

eyes fixed on me, and the glittering serpent, like a familiar demon, on her

breast? For a moment I thought this fulfilment of my vision at Vienna

marked some dreadful crisis in my fate, but I saw nothing in Bertha's mind,

as she stood before me, except scorn for the look of overwhelming misery

with which I sat before her . . . "Fool, idiot, why don't you kill yourself,

then?"--that was her thought. But at length her thoughts reverted to her

errand, and she spoke aloud. The apparently indifferent nature of the

errand seemed to make a ridiculous anticlimax to my prevision and my

agitation.

"I have had to hire a new maid. Fletcher is going to be married, and

she wants me to ask you to let her husband have the public- house and

farm at Molton. I wish him to have it. You must give the promise now,

because Fletcher is going to-morrow morning--and quickly, because I'm in

a hurry."

"Very well; you may promise her," I said, indifferently, and Bertha

swept out of the library again.

I always shrank from the sight of a new person, and all the more when

it was a person whose mental life was likely to weary my reluctant insight

with worldly ignorant trivialities. But I shrank especially from the sight

of this new maid, because her advent had been announced to me at a

moment to which I could not cease to attach some fatality: I had a vague

dread that I should find her mixed up with the dreary drama of my life--

that some new sickening vision would reveal her to me as an evil genius.

When at last I did unavoidably meet her, the vague dread was changed

into definite disgust. She was a tall, wiry, dark-eyed woman, this Mrs.

Archer, with a face handsome enough to give her coarse hard nature the

odious finish of bold, self-confident coquetry. That was enough to make

me avoid her, quite apart from the contemptuous feeling with which she

contemplated me. I seldom saw her; but I perceived that she rapidly

became a favourite with her mistress, and, after the lapse of eight or nine

months, I began to be aware that there had arisen in Bertha's mind towards

this woman a mingled feeling of fear and dependence, and that this feeling

was associated with ill- defined images of candle-light scenes in her

dressing-room, and the locking-up of something in Bertha's cabinet. My

interviews with my wife had become so brief and so rarely solitary, that I

had no opportunity of perceiving these images in her mind with more

definiteness. The recollections of the past become contracted in the

rapidity of thought till they sometimes bear hardly a more distinct

resemblance to the external reality than the forms of an oriental alphabet

to the objects that suggested them.

Besides, for the last year or more a modification had been going

forward in my mental condition, and was growing more and more marked.

My insight into the minds of those around me was becoming dimmer and

more fitful, and the ideas that crowded my double consciousness became

less and less dependent on any personal contact. All that was personal in

me seemed to be suffering a gradual death, so that I was losing the organ

through which the personal agitations and projects of others could affect

me. But along with this relief from wearisome insight, there was a new

development of what I concluded--as I have since found rightly--to be a

provision of external scenes. It was as if the relation between me and my

fellow-men was more and more deadened, and my relation to what we call

the inanimate was quickened into new life. The more I lived apart from

society, and in proportion as my wretchedness subsided from the violent

throb of agonized passion into the dulness of habitual pain, the more

frequent and vivid became such visions as that I had had of Prague--of

strange cities, of sandy plains, of gigantic ruins, of midnight skies with

strange bright constellations, of mountain-passes, of grassy nooks flecked

with the afternoon sunshine through the boughs: I was in the midst of

such scenes, and in all of them one presence seemed to weigh on me in all

these mighty shapes--the presence of something unknown and pitiless.

For continual suffering had annihilated religious faith within me: to the

utterly miserable--the unloving and the unloved--there is no religion

possible, no worship but a worship of devils. And beyond all these, and

continually recurring, was the vision of my death--the pangs, the

suffocation, the last struggle, when life would be grasped at in vain.

Things were in this state near the end of the seventh year. I had

become entirely free from insight, from my abnormal cognizance of any

other consciousness than my own, and instead of intruding involuntarily

into the world of other minds, was living continually in my own solitary

future. Bertha was aware that I was greatly changed. To my surprise

she had of late seemed to seek opportunities of remaining in my society,

and had cultivated that kind of distant yet familiar talk which is customary

between a husband and wife who live in polite and irrevocable alienation.

I bore this with languid submission, and without feeling enough interest in

her motives to be roused into keen observation; yet I could not help

perceiving something triumphant and excited in her carriage and the

expression of her face--something too subtle to express itself in words or

tones, but giving one the idea that she lived in a state of expectation or

hopeful suspense. My chief feeling was satisfaction that her inner self

was once more shut out from me; and I almost revelled for the moment in

the absent melancholy that made me answer her at cross purposes, and

betray utter ignorance of what she had been saying. I remember well the

look and the smile with which she one day said, after a mistake of this

kind on my part: "I used to think you were a clairvoyant, and that was

the reason why you were so bitter against other clairvoyants, wanting to

keep your monopoly; but I see now you have become rather duller than

the rest of the world."

I said nothing in reply. It occurred to me that her recent obtrusion of

herself upon me might have been prompted by the wish to test my power

of detecting some of her secrets; but I let the thought drop again at once:

her motives and her deeds had no interest for me, and whatever pleasures

she might be seeking, I had no wish to baulk her. There was still pity in

my soul for every living thing, and Bertha was living--was surrounded

with possibilities of misery.

Just at this time there occurred an event which roused me somewhat

from my inertia, and gave me an interest in the passing moment that I had

thought impossible for me. It was a visit from Charles Meunier, who had

written me word that he was coming to England for relaxation from too

strenuous labour, and would like too see me. Meunier had now a European

reputation; but his letter to me expressed that keen remembrance of an

early regard, an early debt of sympathy, which is inseparable from nobility

of character: and I too felt as if his presence would be to me like a

transient resurrection into a happier pre-existence.

He came, and as far as possible, I renewed our old pleasure of making

tete-a-tete excursions, though, instead of mountains and glacers and the

wide blue lake, we had to content ourselves with mere slopes and ponds

and artificial plantations. The years had changed us both, but with what

different result! Meunier was now a brilliant figure in society, to whom

elegant women pretended to listen, and whose acquaintance was boasted

of by noblemen ambitious of brains. He repressed with the utmost

delicacy all betrayal of the shock which I am sure he must have received

from our meeting, or of a desire to penetrate into my condition and

circumstances, and sought by the utmost exertion of his charming social

powers to make our reunion agreeable. Bertha was much struck by the

unexpected fascinations of a visitor whom she had expected to find

presentable only on the score of his celebrity, and put forth all her

coquetries and accomplishments. Apparently she succeeded in attracting

his admiration, for his manner towards her was attentive and flattering.

The effect of his presence on me was so benignant, especially in those

renewals of our old tete-a-tete wanderings, when he poured forth to me

wonderful narratives of his professional experience, that more than once,

when his talk turned on the psychological relations of disease, the thought

crossed my mind that, if his stay with me were long enough, I might

possibly bring myself to tell this man the secrets of my lot. Might there

not lie some remedy for me, too, in his science? Might there not at least

lie some comprehension and sympathy ready for me in his large and

susceptible mind? But the thought only flickered feebly now and then,

and died out before it could become a wish. The horror I had of again

breaking in on the privacy of another soul, made me, by an irrational

instinct, draw the shroud of concealment more closely around my own, as

we automatically perform the gesture we feel to be wanting in another.

When Meunier's visit was approaching its conclusion, there happened

an event which caused some excitement in our household, owing to the

surprisingly strong effect it appeared to produce on Bertha--on Bertha, the

self-possessed, who usually seemed inaccessible to feminine agitations,

and did even her hate in a self-restrained hygienic manner. This event

was the sudden severe illness of her maid, Mrs. Archer. I have reserved

to this moment the mention of a circumstance which had forced itself on

my notice shortly before Meunier's arrival, namely, that there had been

some quarrel between Bertha and this maid, apparently during a visit to a

distant family, in which she had accompanied her mistress. I had

overheard Archer speaking in a tone of bitter insolence, which I should

have thought an adequate reason for immediate dismissal. No dismissal

followed; on the contrary, Bertha seemed to be silently putting up with

personal inconveniences from the exhibitions of this woman's temper. I

was the more astonished to observe that her illness seemed a cause of

strong solicitude to Bertha; that she was at the bedside night and day, and

would allow no one else to officiate as head-nurse. It happened that our

family doctor was out on a holiday, an accident which made Meunier's

presence in the house doubly welcome, and he apparently entered into the

case with an interest which seemed so much stronger than the ordinary

professional feeling, that one day when he had fallen into a long fit of

silence after visiting her, I said to him -

"Is this a very peculiar case of disease, Meunier?"

"No," he answered, "it is an attack of peritonitis, which will be fatal,

but which does not differ physically from many other cases that have

come under my observation. But I'll tell you what I have on my mind.

I want to make an experiment on this woman, if you will give me

permission. It can do her no harm--will give her no pain--for I shall not

make it until life is extinct to all purposes of sensation. I want to try the

effect of transfusing blood into her arteries after the heart has ceased to

beat for some minutes. I have tried the experiment again and again with

animals that have died of this disease, with astounding results, and I want

to try it on a human subject. I have the small tubes necessary, in a case I

have with me, and the rest of the apparatus could be prepared readily. I

should use my own blood--take it from my own arm. This woman won't

live through the night, I'm convinced, and I want you to promise me your

assistance in making the experiment. I can't do without another hand, but

it would perhaps not be well to call in a medical assistant from among

your provincial doctors. A disagreeable foolish version of the thing

might get abroad."

"Have you spoken to my wife on the subject?" I said, "because she

appears to be peculiarly sensitive about this woman: she has been a

favourite maid."

"To tell you the truth," said Meunier, "I don't want her to know about it.

There are always insuperable difficulties with women in these matters, and

the effect on the supposed dead body may be startling. You and I will sit

up together, and be in readiness. When certain symptoms appear I shall

take you in, and at the right moment we must manage to get every one else

out of the room."

I need not give our farther conversation on the subject. He entered

very fully into the details, and overcame my repulsion from them, by

exciting in me a mingled awe and curiosity concerning the possible results

of his experiment.

We prepared everything, and he instructed me in my part as assistant.

He had not told Bertha of his absolute conviction that Archer would not

survive through the night, and endeavoured to persuade her to leave the

patient and take a night's rest. But she was obstinate, suspecting the fact

that death was at hand, and supposing that he wished merely to save her

nerves. She refused to leave the sick-room. Meunier and I sat up

together in the library, he making frequent visits to the sick-room, and

returning with the information that the case was taking precisely the

course he expected. Once he said to me, "Can you imagine any cause of

ill- feeling this woman has against her mistress, who is so devoted to her?"

"I think there was some misunderstanding between them before her

illness. Why do you ask?"

"Because I have observed for the last five or six hours--since, I fancy,

she has lost all hope of recovery--there seems a strange prompting in her

to say something which pain and failing strength forbid her to utter; and

there is a look of hideous meaning in her eyes, which she turns continually

towards her mistress. In this disease the mind often remains singularly

clear to the last."

"I am not surprised at an indication of malevolent feeling in her," I

said. "She is a woman who has always inspired me with distrust and

dislike, but she managed to insinuate herself into her mistress's favour."

He was silent after this, looking at the fire with an air of absorption, till he

went upstairs again. He stayed away longer than usual, and on returning,

said to me quietly, "Come now."

I followed him to the chamber where death was hovering. The dark

hangings of the large bed made a background that gave a strong relief to

Bertha's pale face as I entered. She started forward as she saw me enter,

and then looked at Meunier with an expression of angry inquiry; but he

lifted up his hand as it to impose silence, while he fixed his glance on the

dying woman and felt her pulse. The face was pinched and ghastly, a cold

perspiration was on the forehead, and the eyelids were lowered so as to

conceal the large dark eyes. After a minute or two, Meunier walked

round to the other side of the bed where Bertha stood, and with his usual

air of gentle politeness towards her begged her to leave the patient under

our care--everything should be done for her--she was no longer in a state

to be conscious of an affectionate presence. Bertha was hesitating,

apparently almost willing to believe his assurance and to comply. She

looked round at the ghastly dying face, as if to read the confirmation of

that assurance, when for a moment the lowered eyelids were raised again,

and it seemed as if the eyes were looking towards Bertha, but blankly. A

shudder passed through Bertha's frame, and she returned to her station

near the pillow, tacitly implying that she would not leave the room.

The eyelids were lifted no more. Once I looked at Bertha as she

watched the face of the dying one. She wore a rich peignoir, and her

blond hair was half covered by a lace cap: in her attire she was, as

always, an elegant woman, fit to figure in a picture of modern aristocratic

life: but I asked myself how that face of hers could ever have seemed to

me the face of a woman born of woman, with memories of childhood,

capable of pain, needing to be fondled? The features at that moment

seemed so preternaturally sharp, the eyes were so hard and eager--she

looked like a cruel immortal, finding her spiritual feast in the agonies of a

dying race. For across those hard features there came something like a

flash when the last hour had been breathed out, and we all felt that the

dark veil had completely fallen. What secret was there between Bertha

and this woman? I turned my eyes from her with a horrible dread lest my

insight should return, and I should be obliged to see what had been

breeding about two unloving women's hearts. I felt that Bertha had been

watching for the moment of death as the sealing of her secret: I thanked

Heaven it could remain sealed for me.

Meunier said quietly, "She is gone." He then gave his arm to Bertha,

and she submitted to be led out of the room.

I suppose it was at her order that two female attendants came into the

room, and dismissed the younger one who had been present before.

When they entered, Meunier had already opened the artery in the long thin

neck that lay rigid on the pillow, and I dismissed them, ordering them to

remain at a distance till we rang: the doctor, I said, had an operation to

perform--he was not sure about the death. For the next twenty minutes I

forgot everything but Meunier and the experiment in which he was so

absorbed, that I think his senses would have been closed against all sounds

or sights which had no relation to it. It was my task at first to keep up the

artificial respiration in the body after the transfusion had been effected, but

presently Meunier relieved me, and I could see the wondrous slow return

of life; the breast began to heave, the inspirations became stronger, the

eyelids quivered, and the soul seemed to have returned beneath them.

The artificial respiration was withdrawn: still the breathing continued,

and there was a movement of the lips.

Just then I heard the handle of the door moving: I suppose Bertha

had heard from the women that they had been dismissed: probably a

vague fear had arisen in her mind, for she entered with a look of alarm.

She came to the foot of the bed and gave a stifled cry.

The dead woman's eyes were wide open, and met hers in full

recognition--the recognition of hate. With a sudden strong effort, the

hand that Bertha had thought for ever still was pointed towards her, and

the haggard face moved. The gasping eager voice said--

"You mean to poison your husband . . . the poison is in the black

cabinet . . . I got it for you . . . you laughed at me, and told lies about me

behind my back, to make me disgusting . . . because you were jealous . . .

are you sorry . . . now?"

The lips continued to murmur, but the sounds were no longer distinct.

Soon there was no sound--only a slight movement: the flame had leaped

out, and was being extinguished the faster. The wretched woman's heart-

strings had been set to hatred and vengeance; the spirit of life had swept

the chords for an instant, and was gone again for ever. Great God! Is

this what it is to live again . . . to wake up with our unstilled thirst upon us,

with our unuttered curses rising to our lips, with our muscles ready to act

out their half-committed sins?

Bertha stood pale at the foot of the bed, quivering and helpless,

despairing of devices, like a cunning animal whose hiding-places are

surrounded by swift-advancing flame. Even Meunier looked paralysed;

life for that moment ceased to be a scientific problem to him. As for me,

this scene seemed of one texture with the rest of my existence: horror

was my familiar, and this new revelation was only like an old pain

recurring with new circumstances.

* * *

Since then Bertha and I have lived apart--she in her own

neighbourhood, the mistress of half our wealth, I as a wanderer in foreign

countries, until I came to this Devonshire nest to die. Bertha lives pitied

and admired; for what had I against that charming woman, whom every

one but myself could have been happy with? There had been no witness

of the scene in the dying room except Meunier, and while Meunier lived

his lips were sealed by a promise to me.

Once or twice, weary of wandering, I rested in a favourite spot, and

my heart went out towards the men and women and children whose faces

were becoming familiar to me; but I was driven away again in terror at the

approach of my old insight--driven away to live continually with the one

Unknown Presence revealed and yet hidden by the moving curtain of the

earth and sky. Till at last disease took hold of me and forced me to rest

here--forced me to live in dependence on my servants. And then the

curse of insight--of my double consciousness, came again, and has never

left me. I know all their narrow thoughts, their feeble regard, their half-

wearied pity.

* * *

It is the 20th of September, 1850. I know these figures I have just

written, as if they were a long familiar inscription. I have seen them on

this pace in my desk unnumbered times, when the scene of my dying

struggle has opened upon me . . .

(1859)