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A Strange Story — Complete

by Baron Edward Bulwer Lytton Lytton · English · Gutenberg #7701 · 1,063,922 chars · public domain (US)

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Title: A Strange Story — Complete

Author: Baron Edward Bulwer Lytton Lytton


        
Release date: November 26, 2004 [eBook #7701]
                Most recently updated: August 28, 2016

Language: English

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Produced by Andrew Heath and David Widger








A STRANGE STORY


By Edward Bulwer Lytton

 (Lord Lytton)





PREFACE.

Of the many illustrious thinkers whom the schools of France have
contributed to the intellectual philosophy of our age, Victor Cousin,
the most accomplished, assigns to Maine de Biran the rank of the most
original.

In the successive developments of his own mind, Maine de Biran may,
indeed, be said to represent the change that has been silently at
work throughout the general mind of Europe since the close of the
last century. He begins his career of philosopher with blind faith in
Condillac and Materialism. As an intellect severely conscientious in the
pursuit of truth expands amidst the perplexities it revolves, phenomena
which cannot be accounted for by Condillac’s sensuous theories open
to his eye. To the first rudimentary life of man, the animal life,
“characterized by impressions, appetites, movements, organic in their
origin and ruled by the Law of Necessity,” (1) he is compelled to add,
“the second, or human life, from which Free-will and Self-consciousness
emerge.” He thus arrives at the union of mind and matter; but still a
something is wanted,--some key to the marvels which neither of these
conditions of vital being suffices to explain. And at last the grand
self-completing Thinker attains to the Third Life of Man in Man’s Soul.


   “There are not,” says this philosopher, towards the close of his last
    and loftiest work,--“there are not only two principles opposed to
    each other in Man,--there are three.  For there are in him three
    lives and three orders of faculties.  Though all should be in accord
    and in harmony between the sensitive and the active faculties
    which constitute Man, there would still be a nature superior, a
    third life which would not be satisfied; which would make felt
    (ferait sentir) the truth that there is another happiness, another
    wisdom, another perfection, at once above the greatest human
    happiness, above the highest wisdom, or intellectual and moral
    perfection of which the human being is susceptible.” (2)

Now, as Philosophy and Romance both take their origin in the Principle
of Wonder, so in the “Strange Story” submitted to the Public it will be
seen that Romance, through the freest exercise of its wildest vagaries,
conducts its bewildered hero towards the same goal to which Philosophy
leads its luminous Student, through far grander portents of Nature, far
higher visions of Supernatural Power, than Fable can yield to Fancy.
That goal is defined in these noble words:--


   “The relations (rapports) which exist between the elements and the
    products of the three lives of Man are the subjects of meditation,
    the fairest and finest, but also the most difficult.  The Stoic
    Philosophy shows us all which can be most elevated in active life;
    but it makes abstraction of the animal nature, and absolutely fails
    to recognize all which belongs to the life of the spirit.
    Its practical morality is beyond the forces of humanity.  Christianity
    alone embraces the whole Man.  It dissimulates none of the sides of
    his nature, and avails itself of his miseries and his weakness in
    order to conduct him to his end in showing him all the want that he
    has of a succor more exalted.” (3)

In the passages thus quoted, I imply one of the objects for which this
tale has been written; and I cite them, with a wish to acknowledge one
of those priceless obligations which writings the lightest and most
fantastic often incur to reasoners the most serious and profound.

But I here construct a romance which should have, as a romance, some
interest for the general reader. I do not elaborate a treatise submitted
to the logic of sages. And it is only when “in fairy fiction drest” that
Romance gives admission to “truths severe.”

I venture to assume that none will question my privilege to avail
myself of the marvellous agencies which have ever been at the legitimate
command of the fabulist.

To the highest form of romantic narrative, the Epic, critics, indeed,
have declared that a supernatural machinery is indispensable. That the
Drama has availed itself of the same license as the Epic, it would be
unnecessary to say to the countrymen of Shakspeare, or to the generation
that is yet studying the enigmas of Goethe’s “Faust.” Prose Romance has
immemorially asserted, no less than the Epic or the Drama, its heritage
in the Realm of the Marvellous. The interest which attaches to the
supernatural is sought in the earliest Prose Romance which modern times
take from the ancient, and which, perhaps, had its origin in the lost
Novels of Miletus; (4) and the right to invoke such interest has, ever
since, been maintained by Romance through all varieties of form
and fancy,--from the majestic epopee of “Telemaque” to the graceful
fantasies of “Undine,” or the mighty mockeries of “Gulliver’s Travels”
 down to such comparatively commonplace elements of wonder as yet
preserve from oblivion “The Castle of Otranto” and “The Old English
Baron.”

Now, to my mind, the true reason why a supernatural agency is
indispensable to the conception of the Epic, is that the Epic is the
highest and the completest form in which Art can express either Man or
Nature, and that without some gleams of the supernatural, Man is not man
nor Nature, nature.

It is said, by a writer to whom an eminent philosophical critic justly
applies the epithets of “pious and profound:” (5)


   “Is it unreasonable to confess that we believe in God, not by reason
    of the Nature which conceals Him, but by reason of the Supernatural
    in Man which alone reveals and proves Him to exist?...  Man reveals
    God: for Man, by his intelligence, rises above Nature; and in virtue
    of this intelligence is conscious of himself as a power not only
    independent of, but opposed to, Nature, and capable of resisting,
    conquering, and controlling her.”(6)

If the meaning involved in the argument, of which I have here made but
scanty extracts, be carefully studied, I think that we shall find
deeper reasons than the critics who dictated canons of taste to the last
century discovered,--why the supernatural is indispensable to the Epic,
and why it is allowable to all works of imagination, in which Art looks
on Nature with Man’s inner sense of a something beyond and above her.

But the Writer who, whether in verse or prose, would avail himself of
such sources of pity or terror as flow from the Marvellous, can only
attain his object in proportion as the wonders he narrates are of a kind
to excite the curiosity of the age he addresses.

In the brains of our time, the faculty of Causation is very markedly
developed. People nowadays do not delight in the Marvellous according to
the old childlike spirit. They say in one breath, “Very extraordinary!”
 and in the next breath ask, “How do you account for it?” If the Author
of this work has presumed to borrow from science some elements of
interest for Romance, he ventures to hope that no thoughtful reader--and
certainly no true son of science--will be disposed to reproach him. In
fact, such illustrations from the masters of Thought were essential to
the completion of the purpose which pervades the work.

That purpose, I trust, will develop itself in proportion as the story
approaches the close; and whatever may appear violent or melodramatic
in the catastrophe, will, perhaps, be found, by a reader capable of
perceiving the various symbolical meanings conveyed in the story,
essential to the end in which those meanings converge, and towards which
the incidents that give them the character and interest of of fiction,
have been planned and directed from the commencement.

Of course, according to the most obvious principles of art, the narrator
of a fiction must be as thoroughly in earnest as if he were the narrator
of facts. One could not tell the most extravagant fairy-tale so as to
rouse and sustain the attention of the most infantine listener, if the
tale were told as if the taleteller did not believe in it. But when the
reader lays down this “Strange Story,” perhaps he will detect, through
all the haze of romance, the outlines of these images suggested to his
reason: Firstly, the image of sensuous, soulless Nature, such as
the Materialist had conceived it; secondly, the image of Intellect,
obstinately separating all its inquiries from the belief in the
spiritual essence and destiny of man, and incurring all kinds of
perplexity and resorting to all kinds of visionary speculation before it
settles at last into the simple faith which unites the philosopher and
the infant; and thirdly, the image of the erring but pure-thoughted
visionary, seeking over-much on this earth to separate soul from mind,
till innocence itself is led astray by a phantom, and reason is lost in
the space between earth and the stars. Whether in these pictures there
be any truth worth the implying, every reader must judge for himself;
and if he doubt or deny that there be any such truth, still, in the
process of thought which the doubt or denial enforces, he may chance on
a truth which it pleases himself to discover.


   “Most of the Fables of AEsop,”--thus says Montaigne in his
    charming essay “Of Books”(7)--“have several senses and meanings, of
    which the Mythologists choose some one that tallies with the fable.
    But for the most part ‘t is only what presents itself at the first
    view, and is superficial; there being others more lively, essential,
    and internal, into which they had not been able to penetrate;
    and”--adds Montaigne--“the case is the very same with me.”

(1) OEuvres inedites de Maine de Biran, vol. i. See introduction.

(2) OEuvres inedites de Maine de Biran, vol. iii. p. 546
(Anthropologie).

(3) OEuvres inedites de Maine de Biran, vol. iii. p. 524.

(4) “The Golden Ass” of Apuleius.

(5) Sir William Hamilton: Lectures on Metaphysics, p. 40.

(6) Jacobi: Von der Gottlichen Dingen; Werke, p. 424-426.

(7) Translation, 1776, Yol. ii. p. 103.







CHAPTER I.

In the year 18-- I settled as a physician at one of the wealthiest of
our great English towns, which I will designate by the initial L----.
I was yet young, but I had acquired some reputation by a professional
work, which is, I believe, still amongst the received authorities on the
subject of which it treats. I had studied at Edinburgh and at Paris, and
had borne away from both those illustrious schools of medicine whatever
guarantees for future distinction the praise of professors may concede
to the ambition of students. On becoming a member of the College of
Physicians, I made a tour of the principal cities of Europe, taking
letters of introduction to eminent medical men, and gathering from many
theories and modes of treatment hints to enlarge the foundations of
unprejudiced and comprehensive practice. I had resolved to fix my
ultimate residence in London. But before this preparatory tour was
completed, my resolve was changed by one of those unexpected events
which determine the fate man in vain would work out for himself. In
passing through the Tyro, on my way into the north of Italy, I found in
a small inn, remote from medical attendance, an English traveller seized
with acute inflammation of the lungs, and in a state of imminent danger.
I devoted myself to him night and day; and, perhaps more through careful
nursing than active remedies, I had the happiness to effect his complete
recovery. The traveller proved to be Julius Faber, a physician of great
distinction, contented to reside, where he was born, in the provincial
city of L----, but whose reputation as a profound and original
pathologist was widely spread, and whose writings had formed no
unimportant part of my special studies. It was during a short holiday
excursion, from which he was about to return with renovated vigour, that
he had been thus stricken down. The patient so accidentally met with
became the founder of my professional fortunes. He conceived a warm
attachment for me,--perhaps the more affectionate because he was a
childless bachelor, and the nephew who would succeed to his wealth
evinced no desire to succeed to the toils by which the wealth had been
acquired. Thus, having an heir for the one, he had long looked about for
an heir to the other, and now resolved on finding that heir in me.
So when we parted Dr. Faber made me promise to correspond with him
regularly, and it was not long before he disclosed by letter the
plans he had formed in my favour. He said that he was growing old;
his practice was beyond his strength; he needed a partner; he was not
disposed to put up to sale the health of patients whom he had learned to
regard as his children: money was no object to him, but it was an object
close at his heart that the humanity he had served, and the reputation
he had acquired, should suffer no loss in his choice of a successor. In
fine, he proposed that I should at once come to L---- as his partner,
with the view of succeeding to his entire practice at the end of two
years, when it was his intention to retire.

The opening into fortune thus afforded to me was one that rarely
presents itself to a young man entering upon an overcrowded profession;
and to an aspirant less allured by the desire of fortune than the hope
of distinction, the fame of the physician who thus generously offered
to me the inestimable benefits of his long experience and his cordial
introduction was in itself an assurance that a metropolitan practice is
not essential to a national renown.

I went, then, to L----, and before the two years of my partnership had
expired, my success justified my kind friend’s selection, and far more
than realized my own expectations. I was fortunate in effecting
some notable cures in the earliest cases submitted to me, and it is
everything in the career of a physician when good luck wins betimes for
him that confidence which patients rarely accord except to lengthened
experience. To the rapid facility with which my way was made, some
circumstances apart from professional skill probably contributed. I was
saved from the suspicion of a medical adventurer by the accidents of
birth and fortune. I belonged to an ancient family (a branch of the once
powerful border-clan of the Fenwicks) that had for many generations held
a fair estate in the neighbourhood of Windermere. As an only son I had
succeeded to that estate on attaining my majority, and had sold it to
pay off the debts which had been made by my father, who had the costly
tastes of an antiquary and collector. The residue on the sale insured me
a modest independence apart from the profits of a profession; and as I
had not been legally bound to defray my father’s debts, so I obtained
that character for disinterestedness and integrity which always in
England tends to propitiate the public to the successes achieved by
industry or talent. Perhaps, too, any professional ability I might
possess was the more readily conceded, because I had cultivated with
assiduity the sciences and the scholarship which are collaterally
connected with the study of medicine. Thus, in a word, I established
a social position which came in aid of my professional repute, and
silenced much of that envy which usually embitters and sometimes impedes
success.

Dr. Faber retired at the end of the two years agreed upon. He went
abroad; and being, though advanced in years, of a frame still robust,
and habits of mind still inquiring and eager, he commenced a lengthened
course of foreign travel, during which our correspondence, at first
frequent, gradually languished, and finally died away.

I succeeded at once to the larger part of the practice which the labours
of thirty years had secured to my predecessor. My chief rival was a
Dr. Lloyd, a benevolent, fervid man, not without genius, if genius be
present where judgment is absent; not without science, if that may be
science which fails in precision,--one of those clever desultory men
who, in adopting a profession, do not give up to it the whole force and
heat of their minds. Men of that kind habitually accept a mechanical
routine, because in the exercise of their ostensible calling their
imaginative faculties are drawn away to pursuits more alluring.
Therefore, in their proper vocation they are seldom bold or
inventive,--out of it they are sometimes both to excess. And when they
do take up a novelty in their own profession they cherish it with an
obstinate tenacity, and an extravagant passion, unknown to those quiet
philosophers who take up novelties every day, examine them with the
sobriety of practised eyes, to lay down altogether, modify in part, or
accept in whole, according as inductive experiment supports or destroys
conjecture.

Dr. Lloyd had been esteemed a learned naturalist long before he was
admitted to be a tolerable physician. Amidst the privations of his
youth he had contrived to form, and with each succeeding year he had
perseveringly increased, a zoological collection of creatures, not
alive, but, happily for the beholder, stuffed or embalmed. From what I
have said, it will be truly inferred that Dr. Lloyd’s early career as
a physician had not been brilliant; but of late years he had gradually
rather aged than worked himself into that professional authority and
station which time confers on a thoroughly respectable man whom no one
is disposed to envy, and all are disposed to like.

Now in L---- there were two distinct social circles,--that of the
wealthy merchants and traders, and that of a few privileged families
inhabiting a part of the town aloof from the marts of commerce, and
called the Abbey Hill. These superb Areopagites exercised over the wives
and daughters of the inferior citizens to whom all of L----, except the
Abbey Hill, owed its prosperity, the same kind of mysterious influence
which the fine ladies of May Fair and Belgravia are reported to hold
over the female denizens of Bloomsbury and Marylebone.

Abbey Hill was not opulent; but it was powerful by a concentration
of its resources in all matters of patronage. Abbey Hill had its own
milliner and its own draper, its own confectioner, butcher, baker, and
tea-dealer; and the patronage of Abbey Hill was like the patronage
of royalty,--less lucrative in itself than as a solemn certificate of
general merit. The shops on which Abbey Hill conferred its custom
were certainly not the cheapest, possibly not the best; but they were
undeniably the most imposing. The proprietors were decorously pompous,
the shopmen superciliously polite. They could not be more so if they had
belonged to the State, and been paid by a public which they benefited
and despised. The ladies of Low Town (as the city subjacent to the Hill
had been styled from a date remote in the feudal ages) entered those
shops with a certain awe, and left them with a certain pride. There they
had learned what the Hill approved; there they had bought what the Hill
had purchased. It is much in this life to be quite sure that we are in
the right, whatever that conviction may cost us. Abbey Hill had been
in the habit of appointing, amongst other objects of patronage, its own
physician. But that habit had fallen into disuse during the latter years
of my predecessor’s practice. His superiority over all other medical
men in the town had become so incontestable, that, though he was
emphatically the doctor of Low Town, the head of its hospitals and
infirmaries, and by birth related to its principal traders, still as
Abbey Hill was occasionally subject to the physical infirmities of
meaner mortals, so on those occasions it deemed it best not to push
the point of honour to the wanton sacrifice of life. Since Low Town
possessed one of the most famous physicians in England, Abbey Hill
magnanimously resolved not to crush him by a rival. Abbey Hill let him
feel its pulse.

When my predecessor retired, I had presumptuously expected that the Hill
would have continued to suspend its normal right to a special physician,
and shown to me the same generous favour it had shown to him, who had
declared me worthy to succeed to his honours. I had the more excuse for
this presumption because the Hill had already allowed me to visit a fair
proportion of its invalids, had said some very gracious things to me
about the great respectability of the Fenwick family, and sent me some
invitations to dinner, and a great many invitations to tea.

But my self-conceit received a notable check. Abbey Hill declared that
the time had come to reassert its dormant privilege; it must have a
doctor of its own choosing,--a doctor who might, indeed, be permitted
to visit Low Town from motives of humanity or gain, but who must
emphatically assert his special allegiance to Abbey Hill by fixing
his home on that venerable promontory. Miss Brabazon, a spinster of
uncertain age but undoubted pedigree, with small fortune but high nose,
which she would pleasantly observe was a proof of her descent from
Humphrey Duke of Gloucester (with whom, indeed, I have no doubt, in
spite of chronology, that she very often dined), was commissioned to
inquire of me diplomatically, and without committing Abbey Hill too much
by the overture, whether I would take a large and antiquated mansion, in
which abbots were said to have lived many centuries ago, and which was
still popularly styled Abbots’ House, situated on the verge of the Hill,
as in that case the “Hill” would think of me.

“It is a large house for a single man, I allow,” said Miss Brabazon,
candidly; and then added, with a sidelong glance of alarming sweetness,
“but when Dr. Fenwick has taken his true position (so old a family!)
amongst us, he need not long remain single, unless he prefer it.”

I replied, with more asperity than the occasion called for, that I had
no thought of changing my residence at present, and if the Hill wanted
me, the Hill must send for me.

Two days afterwards Dr. Lloyd took Abbots’ House, and in less than a
week was proclaimed medical adviser to the Hill. The election had been
decided by the fiat of a great lady, who reigned supreme on the sacred
eminence, under the name and title of Mrs. Colonel Poyntz.

“Dr. Fenwick,” said this lady, “is a clever young man and a gentleman,
but he gives himself airs,--the Hill does not allow any airs but its
own. Besides, he is a new comer: resistance to new comers, and, indeed,
to all things new, except caps and novels, is one of the bonds that keep
old established societies together. Accordingly, it is by my advice that
Dr. Lloyd has taken Abbots’ House; the rent would be too high for his
means if the Hill did not feel bound in honour to justify the trust he
has placed in its patronage. I told him that all my friends, when they
were in want of a doctor, would send for him; those who are my friends
will do so. What the Hill does, plenty of common people down there will
do also,--so that question is settled!” And it was settled.

Dr. Lloyd, thus taken by the hand, soon extended the range of his visits
beyond the Hill, which was not precisely a mountain of gold to doctors,
and shared with myself, though in a comparatively small degree, the much
more lucrative practice of Low Town.

I had no cause to grudge his success, nor did I. But to my theories of
medicine his diagnosis was shallow, and his prescriptions obsolete. When
we were summoned to a joint consultation, our views as to the proper
course of treatment seldom agreed. Doubtless he thought I ought to have
deferred to his seniority in years; but I held the doctrine which youth
deems a truth and age a paradox,--namely, that in science the young men
are the practical elders, inasmuch as they are schooled in the latest
experiences science has gathered up, while their seniors are cramped by
the dogmas they were schooled to believe when the world was some decades
the younger.

Meanwhile my reputation continued rapidly to advance; it became more
than local; my advice was sought even by patients from the metropolis.
That ambition, which, conceived in early youth, had decided my career
and sweetened all its labours,--the ambition to take a rank and leave
a name as one of the great pathologists to whom humanity accords a
grateful, if calm, renown,--saw before it a level field and a certain
goal.

I know not whether a success far beyond that usually attained at the age
I had reached served to increase, but it seemed to myself to justify,
the main characteristic of my moral organization,--intellectual pride.

Though mild and gentle to the sufferers under my care, as a necessary
element of professional duty, I was intolerant of contradiction from
those who belonged to my calling, or even from those who, in general
opinion, opposed my favourite theories. I had espoused a school of
medical philosophy severely rigid in its inductive logic. My creed was
that of stern materialism. I had a contempt for the understanding of men
who accepted with credulity what they could not explain by reason. My
favourite phrase was “common-sense.” At the same time I had no prejudice
against bold discovery, and discovery necessitates conjecture, but
I dismissed as idle all conjecture that could not be brought to a
practical test.

As in medicine I had been the pupil of Broussais, so in metaphysics I
was the disciple of Condillac. I believed with that philosopher that
“all our knowledge we owe to Nature; that in the beginning we can
only instruct ourselves through her lessons; and that the whole art of
reasoning consists in continuing as she has compelled us to commence.”
 Keeping natural philosophy apart from the doctrines of revelation, I
never assailed the last; but I contended that by the first no accurate
reasoner could arrive at the existence of the soul as a third principle
of being equally distinct from mind and body. That by a miracle man
might live again, was a question of faith and not of understanding. I
left faith to religion, and banished it from philosophy. How define with
a precision to satisfy the logic of philosophy what was to live again?
The body? We know that the body rests in its grave till by the process
of decomposition its elemental parts enter into other forms of
matter. The mind? But the mind was as clearly the result of the bodily
organization as the music of the harpsichord is the result of the
instrumental mechanism. The mind shared the decrepitude of the body in
extreme old age, and in the full vigour of youth a sudden injury to the
brain might forever destroy the intellect of a Plato or a Shakspeare.
But the third principle,--the soul,--the something lodged within the
body, which yet was to survive it? Where was that soul hidden out of
the ken of the anatomist? When philosophers attempted to define it, were
they not compelled to confound its nature and its actions with those
of the mind? Could they reduce it to the mere moral sense, varying
according to education, circumstances, and physical constitution? But
even the moral sense in the most virtuous of men may be swept away by
a fever. Such at the time I now speak of were the views I held,--views
certainly not original nor pleasing; but I cherished them with as fond a
tenacity as if they had been consolatory truths of which I was the
first discoverer. I was intolerant to those who maintained opposite
doctrines,--despised them as irrational, or disliked them as
insincere. Certainly if I had fulfilled the career which my ambition
predicted,--become the founder of a new school in pathology, and summed
up my theories in academical lectures,--I should have added another
authority, however feeble, to the sects which circumscribe the interest
of man to the life that has its close in his grave.

Possibly that which I have called my intellectual pride was more
nourished than I should have been willing to grant by the self-reliance
which an unusual degree of physical power is apt to bestow. Nature had
blessed me with the thews of an athlete. Among the hardy youths of
the Northern Athens I had been preeminently distinguished for feats
of activity and strength. My mental labours, and the anxiety which
is inseparable from the conscientious responsibilities of the medical
profession, kept my health below the par of keen enjoyment, but had in
no way diminished my rare muscular force. I walked through the crowd
with the firm step and lofty crest of the mailed knight of old, who
felt himself, in his casement of iron, a match against numbers. Thus the
sense of a robust individuality, strong alike in disciplined reason
and animal vigour, habituated to aid others, needing no aid for itself,
contributed to render me imperious in will and arrogant in opinion. Nor
were such defects injurious to me in my profession; on the contrary,
aided as they were by a calm manner, and a presence not without that
kind of dignity which is the livery of self-esteem, they served to
impose respect and to inspire trust.






CHAPTER II.

I had been about six years at L---- when I became suddenly involved in
a controversy with Dr. Lloyd. Just as this ill-fated man appeared at the
culminating point of his professional fortunes, he had the imprudence
to proclaim himself not only an enthusiastic advocate of mesmerism as a
curative process, but an ardent believer of the reality of somnambular
clairvoyance as an invaluable gift of certain privileged organizations.
To these doctrines I sternly opposed myself,--the more sternly, perhaps,
because on these doctrines Dr. Lloyd founded an argument for the
existence of soul, independent of mind, as of matter, and built
thereon a superstructure of physiological fantasies, which, could it
be substantiated, would replace every system of metaphysics on which
recognized philosophy condescends to dispute.

About two years before he became a disciple rather of Puysegur than
Mesmer (for Mesmer hard little faith in that gift of clairvoyance of
which Puysegur was, I believe, at least in modern times, the first
audacious asserter), Dr. Lloyd had been afflicted with the loss of a
wife many years younger than himself, and to whom he had been tenderly
attached. And this bereavement, in directing the hopes that consoled
him to a world beyond the grave, had served perhaps to render him more
credulous of the phenomena in which he greeted additional proofs of
purely spiritual existence. Certainly, if, in controverting the notions
of another physiologist, I had restricted myself to that fair antagonism
which belongs to scientific disputants anxious only for the truth, I
should need no apology for sincere conviction and honest argument; but
when, with condescending good-nature, as if to a man much younger than
himself, who was ignorant of the phenomena which he nevertheless denied,
Dr. Lloyd invited me to attend his seances and witness his cures, my
amour propre became aroused and nettled, and it seemed to me necessary
to put down what I asserted to be too gross an outrage on common-sense
to justify the ceremony of examination. I wrote, therefore, a small
pamphlet on the subject, in which I exhausted all the weapons that irony
can lend to contempt. Dr. Lloyd replied; and as he was no very skilful
arguer, his reply injured him perhaps more than my assault. Meanwhile,
I had made some inquiries as to the moral character of his favourite
clairvoyants. I imagined that I had learned enough to justify me in
treating them as flagrant cheats, and himself as their egregious dupe.

Low Town soon ranged itself, with very few exceptions, on my side. The
Hill at first seemed disposed to rally round its insulted physician, and
to make the dispute a party question, in which the Hill would have been
signally worsted, when suddenly the same lady paramount, who had secured
to Dr. Lloyd the smile of the Eminence, spoke forth against him, and the
Eminence frowned.

“Dr. Lloyd,” said the Queen of the Hill, “is an amiable creature, but on
this subject decidedly cracked. Cracked poets may be all the better for
being cracked,--cracked doctors are dangerous. Besides, in deserting
that old-fashioned routine, his adherence to which made his claim to
the Hill’s approbation, and unsettling the mind of the Hill with wild
revolutionary theories, Dr. Lloyd has betrayed the principles on which
the Hill itself rests its social foundations. Of those principles Dr.
Fenwick has made himself champion; and the Hill is bound to support him.
There, the question is settled!”

And it was settled.

From the moment Mrs. Colonel Poyntz thus issued the word of command,
Dr. Lloyd was demolished. His practice was gone, as well as his repute.
Mortification or anger brought on a stroke of paralysis which, disabling
my opponent, put an end to our controversy. An obscure Dr. Jones, who
had been the special pupil and protege of Dr. Lloyd, offered himself as
a candidate for the Hill’s tongues and pulses. The Hill gave him little
encouragement. It once more suspended its electoral privileges, and,
without insisting on calling me up to it, the Hill quietly called me
in whenever its health needed other advice than that of its visiting
apothecary. Again it invited me, sometimes to dinner, often to tea; and
again Miss Brabazon assured me by a sidelong glance that it was no fault
of hers if I were still single.

I had almost forgotten the dispute which had obtained for me so
conspicuous a triumph, when one winter’s night I was roused from sleep
by a summons to attend Dr Lloyd, who, attacked by a second stroke a few
hours previously, had, on recovering sense, expressed a vehement desire
to consult the rival by whom he had suffered so severely. I dressed
myself in haste and hurried to his house.

A February night, sharp and bitter; an iron-gray frost below, a spectral
melancholy moon above. I had to ascend the Abbey Hill by a steep, blind
lane between high walls. I passed through stately gates, which stood
wide open, into the garden ground that surrounded the old Abbots’
House. At the end of a short carriage-drive the dark and gloomy building
cleared itself from leafless skeleton trees,--the moon resting keen and
cold on its abrupt gables and lofty chimney-stacks. An old woman-servant
received me at the door, and, without saying a word, led me through a
long low hall, and up dreary oak stairs, to a broad landing, at which
she paused for a moment, listening. Round and about hall, staircase, and
landing were ranged the dead specimens of the savage world which it had
been the pride of the naturalist’s life to collect. Close where I stood
yawned the open jaws of the fell anaconda, its lower coils hidden, as
they rested on the floor below, by the winding of the massive stairs.
Against the dull wainscot walls were pendent cases stored with grotesque
unfamiliar mummies, seen imperfectly by the moon that shot through the
window-panes, and the candle in the old woman’s hand. And as now she
turned towards me, nodding her signal to follow, and went on up the
shadowy passage, rows of gigantic birds--ibis and vulture, and huge sea
glaucus--glared at me in the false light of their hungry eyes.

So I entered the sick-room, and the first glance told me that my art was
powerless there.

The children of the stricken widower were grouped round his bed, the
eldest apparently about fifteen, the youngest four; one little girl--the
only female child--was clinging to her father’s neck, her face pressed
to his bosom, and in that room her sobs alone were loud.

As I passed the threshold, Dr. Lloyd lifted his face, which had been
bent over the weeping child, and gazed on me with an aspect of strange
glee, which I failed to interpret. Then as I stole towards him softly
and slowly, he pressed his lips on the long fair tresses that streamed
wild over his breast, motioned to a nurse who stood beside his pillow to
take the child away, and in a voice clearer than I could have expected
in one on whose brow lay the unmistakable hand of death, he bade
the nurse and the children quit the room. All went sorrowfully, but
silently, save the little girl, who, borne off in the nurse’s arms,
continued to sob as if her heart were breaking.

I was not prepared for a scene so affecting; it moved me to the quick.
My eyes wistfully followed the children so soon to be orphans, as one
after one went out into the dark chill shadow, and amidst the bloodless
forms of the dumb brute nature, ranged in grisly vista beyond the
death-room of man. And when the last infant shape had vanished, and the
door closed with a jarring click, my sight wandered loiteringly around
the chamber before I could bring myself to fix it on the broken form,
beside which I now stood in all that glorious vigour of frame which had
fostered the pride of my mind. In the moment consumed by my mournful
survey, the whole aspect of the place impressed itself ineffaceably
on lifelong remembrance. Through the high, deepsunken casement, across
which the thin, faded curtain was but half drawn, the moonlight rushed,
and then settled on the floor in one shroud of white glimmer, lost under
the gloom of the death-bed. The roof was low, and seemed lower still
by heavy intersecting beams, which I might have touched with my lifted
hand. And the tall guttering candle by the bedside, and the flicker from
the fire struggling out through the fuel but newly heaped on it, threw
their reflection on the ceiling just over my head in a reek of quivering
blackness, like an angry cloud.

Suddenly I felt my arm grasped; with his left hand (the right side was
already lifeless) the dying man drew me towards him nearer and nearer,
till his lips almost touched my ear, and, in a voice now firm, now
splitting into gasp and hiss, thus he said, “I have summoned you to gaze
on your own work! You have stricken down my life at the moment when it
was most needed by my children, and most serviceable to mankind. Had
I lived a few years longer, my children would have entered on manhood,
safe from the temptations of want and undejected by the charity
of strangers. Thanks to you, they will be penniless orphans.
Fellow-creatures afflicted by maladies your pharmacopoeia had failed
to reach came to me for relief, and they found it. ‘The effect of
imagination,’ you say. What matters, if I directed the imagination to
cure? Now you have mocked the unhappy ones out of their last chance of
life. They will suffer and perish. Did you believe me in error? Still
you knew that my object was research into truth. You employed against
your brother in art venomous drugs and a poisoned probe. Look at me! Are
you satisfied with your work?”

I sought to draw back and pluck my arm from the dying man’s grasp. I
could not do so without using a force that would have been inhuman. His
lips drew nearer still to my ear.

“Vain pretender, do not boast that you brought a genius for epigram to
the service of science. Science is lenient to all who offer experiment
as the test of conjecture. You are of the stuff of which inquisitors are
made. You cry that truth is profaned when your dogmas are questioned.
In your shallow presumption you have meted the dominions of nature, and
where your eye halts its vision, you say, ‘There nature must close;’
in the bigotry which adds crime to presumption, you would stone the
discoverer who, in annexing new realms to her chart, unsettles your
arbitrary landmarks. Verily, retribution shall await you! In those
spaces which your sight has disdained to explore you shall yourself be
a lost and bewildered straggler. Hist! I see them already! The gibbering
phantoms are gathering round you!”

The man’s voice stopped abruptly; his eye fixed in a glazing stare;
his hand relaxed its hold; he fell back on his pillow. I stole from the
room; on the landing-place I met the nurse and the old woman-servant.
Happily the children were not there. But I heard the wail of the female
child from some room not far distant.

I whispered hurriedly to the nurse, “All is over!” passed again under
the jaws of the vast anaconda, and on through the blind lane between the
dead walls, on through the ghastly streets, under the ghastly moon, went
back to my solitary home.






CHAPTER III.

It was some time before I could shake off the impression made on me by
the words and the look of that dying man.

It was not that my conscience upbraided me. What had I done? Denounced
that which I held, in common with most men of sense in or out of my
profession, to be one of those illusions by which quackery draws profit
from the wonder of ignorance. Was I to blame if I refused to treat
with the grave respect due to asserted discovery in legitimate science
pretensions to powers akin to the fables of wizards? Was I to descend
from the Academe of decorous science to examine whether a slumbering
sibyl could read from a book placed at her back, or tell me at L----
what at that moment was being done by my friend at the Antipodes?

And what though Dr. Lloyd himself might be a worthy and honest man, and
a sincere believer in the extravagances for which he demanded an equal
credulity in others, do not honest men every day incur the penalty
of ridicule if, from a defect of good sense, they make themselves
ridiculous? Could I have foreseen that a satire so justly provoked
would inflict so deadly a wound? Was I inhumanly barbarous because the
antagonist destroyed was morbidly sensitive? My conscience, therefore,
made me no reproach, and the public was as little severe as my
conscience. The public had been with me in our contest; the public knew
nothing of my opponent’s deathbed accusations; the public knew only that
I had attended him in his last moments; it saw me walk beside the bier
that bore him to his grave; it admired the respect to his memory which
I evinced in the simple tomb that I placed over his remains, inscribed
with an epitaph that did justice to his unquestionable benevolence and
integrity; above all, it praised the energy with which I set on foot a
subscription for his orphan children, and the generosity with which I
headed that subscription by a sum that was large in proportion to my
means.

To that sum I did not, indeed, limit my contribution. The sobs of the
poor female child rang still on my heart. As her grief had been keener
than that of her brothers, so she might be subjected to sharper trials
than they, when the time came for her to fight her own way through the
world; therefore I secured to her, but with such precautions that the
gift could not be traced to my hand, a sum to accumulate till she was
of marriageable age, and which then might suffice for a small wedding
portion; or if she remained single, for an income that would place
her beyond the temptation of want, or the bitterness of a servile
dependence.

That Dr. Lloyd should have died in poverty was a matter of surprise at
first, for his profits during the last few years had been considerable,
and his mode of life far from extravagant. But just before the date of
our controversy he had been induced to assist the brother of his lost
wife, who was a junior partner in a London bank, with the loan of his
accumulated savings. This man proved dishonest; he embezzled that and
other sums intrusted to him, and fled the country. The same sentiment of
conjugal affection which had cost Dr. Lloyd his fortune kept him silent
as to the cause of the loss. It was reserved for his executors to
discover the treachery of the brother-in-law whom he, poor man, would
have generously screened from additional disgrace.

The Mayor of L----, a wealthy and public-spirited merchant, purchased
the museum, which Dr. Lloyd’s passion for natural history had induced
him to form; and the sum thus obtained, together with that raised
by subscription, sufficed not only to discharge all debts due by the
deceased, but to insure to the orphans the benefits of an education that
might fit at least the boys to enter fairly armed into that game, more
of skill than of chance, in which Fortune is really so little blinded
that we see, in each turn of her wheel, wealth and its honours pass away
from the lax fingers of ignorance and sloth, to the resolute grasp of
labour and knowledge.

Meanwhile a relation in a distant county undertook the charge of the
orphans; they disappeared from the scene, and the tides of life in a
commercial community soon flowed over the place which the dead man had
occupied in the thoughts of his bustling townsfolk.

One person at L----, and only one, appeared to share and inherit the
rancour with which the poor physician had denounced me on his death-bed.
It was a gentleman named Vigors, distantly related to the deceased,
and who had been, in point of station, the most eminent of Dr. Lloyd’s
partisans in the controversy with myself, a man of no great scholastic
acquirements, but of respectable abilities. He had that kind of power
which the world concedes to respectable abilities when accompanied
with a temper more than usually stern, and a moral character more than
usually austere. His ruling passion was to sit in judgment upon others;
and being a magistrate, he was the most active and the most rigid of all
the magistrates L---- had ever known.

Mr. Vigors at first spoke of me with great bitterness, as having ruined,
and in fact killed, his friend, by the uncharitable and unfair acerbity
which he declared I had brought into what ought to have been an
unprejudiced examination of simple matter of fact. But finding no
sympathy in these charges, he had the discretion to cease from making
them, contenting himself with a solemn shake of his head if he heard my
name mentioned in terms of praise, and an oracular sentence or two,
such as “Time will show,” “All’s well that ends well,” etc. Mr. Vigors,
however, mixed very little in the more convivial intercourse of
the townspeople. He called himself domestic; but, in truth, he was
ungenial,--a stiff man, starched with self-esteem. He thought that his
dignity of station was not sufficiently acknowledged by the merchants of
Low Town, and his superiority of intellect not sufficiently recognized
by the exclusives of the Hill. His visits were, therefore, chiefly
confined to the houses of neighbouring squires, to whom his reputation
as a magistrate, conjoined with his solemn exterior, made him one of
those oracles by which men consent to be awed on condition that the awe
is not often inflicted. And though he opened his house three times
a week, it was only to a select few, whom he first fed and then
biologized. Electro-biology was very naturally the special entertainment
of a man whom no intercourse ever pleased in which his will was not
imposed upon others. Therefore he only invited to his table persons whom
he could stare into the abnegation of their senses, willing to say that
beef was lamb, or brandy was coffee, according as he willed them to say.
And, no doubt, the persons asked would have said anything he willed,
so long as they had, in substance, as well as in idea, the beef and the
brandy, the lamb and the coffee. I did not, then, often meet Mr. Vigors
at the houses in which I occasionally spent my evenings. I heard of his
enmity as a man safe in his home hears the sough of a wind on a common
without. If now and then we chanced to pass in the streets, he looked
up at me (he was a small man walking on tiptoe) with a sullen scowl of
dislike; and from the height of my stature, I dropped upon the small man
and sullen scowl the affable smile of supreme indifference.






CHAPTER IV.

I had now arrived at that age when an ambitious man, satisfied with
his progress in the world without, begins to feel in the cravings of
unsatisfied affection the void of a solitary hearth. I resolved to
marry, and looked out for a wife. I had never hitherto admitted into my
life the passion of love. In fact, I had regarded that passion, even
in my earlier youth, with a certain superb contempt,--as a malady
engendered by an effeminate idleness, and fostered by a sickly
imagination.

I wished to find in a wife a rational companion, an affectionate and
trustworthy friend. No views of matrimony could be less romantic, more
soberly sensible, than those which I conceived. Nor were my requirements
mercenary or presumptuous. I cared not for fortune; I asked nothing
from connections. My ambition was exclusively professional; it could be
served by no titled kindred, accelerated by no wealthy dower. I was
no slave to beauty. I did not seek in a wife the accomplishments of a
finishing-school teacher.

Having decided that the time had come to select my helpmate, I imagined
that I should find no difficulty in a choice that my reason would
approve. But day upon day, week upon week, passed away, and though among
the families I visited there were many young ladies who possessed more
than the qualifications with which I conceived that I should be amply
contented, and by whom I might flatter myself that my proposals would
not be disdained, I saw not one to whose lifelong companionship I should
not infinitely have preferred the solitude I found so irksome.

One evening, in returning home from visiting a poor female patient whom
I attended gratuitously, and whose case demanded more thought than that
of any other in my list,--for though it had been considered hopeless in
the hospital, and she had come home to die, I felt certain that I could
save her, and she seemed recovering under my care,--one evening--it was
the fifteenth of May--I found myself just before the gates of the house
that had been inhabited by Dr. Lloyd. Since his death the house had been
unoccupied; the rent asked for it by the proprietor was considered high;
and from the sacred Hill on which it was situated, shyness or pride
banished the wealthier traders. The garden gates stood wide open, as
they had stood on the winter night on which I had passed through them
to the chamber of death. The remembrance of that deathbed came vividly
before me, and the dying man’s fantastic threat rang again in my
startled ears. An irresistible impulse, which I could not then account
for, and which I cannot account for now,--an impulse the reverse of that
which usually makes us turn away with quickened step from a spot that
recalls associations of pain,--urged me on through the open gates up the
neglected grass-grown road, urged me to look, under the weltering sun of
the joyous spring, at that house which I had never seen but in the gloom
of a winter night, under the melancholy moon. As the building came in
sight, with dark-red bricks, partially overgrown with ivy, I perceived
that it was no longer unoccupied. I saw forms passing athwart the open
windows; a van laden with articles of furniture stood before the door;
a servant in livery was beside it giving directions to the men who were
unloading. Evidently some family was just entering into possession.
I felt somewhat ashamed of my trespass, and turned round quickly to
retrace my steps. I had retreated but a few yards, when I saw before me,
at the entrance gates, Mr. Vigors, walking beside a lady apparently of
middle age; while, just at hand, a path cut through the shrubs gave view
of a small wicketgate at the end of the grounds. I felt unwilling not
only to meet the lady, whom I guessed to be the new occupier, and to
whom I should have to make a somewhat awkward apology for intrusion, but
still more to encounter the scornful look of Mr. Vigors in what appeared
to my pride a false or undignified position. Involuntarily, therefore, I
turned down the path which would favour my escape unobserved. When about
half way between the house and the wicket-gate, the shrubs that had
clothed the path on either side suddenly opened to the left, bringing
into view a circle of sward, surrounded by irregular fragments of old
brickwork partially covered with ferns, creepers, or rockplants, weeds,
or wild flowers; and, in the centre of the circle, a fountain, or rather
well, over which was built a Gothic monastic dome, or canopy, resting
on small Norman columns, time-worn, dilapidated. A large willow overhung
this unmistakable relic of the ancient abbey. There was an air of
antiquity, romance, legend about this spot, so abruptly disclosed amidst
the delicate green of the young shrubberies. But it was not the ruined
wall nor the Gothic well that chained my footstep and charmed my eye.

It was a solitary human form, seated amidst the mournful ruins.

The form was so slight, the face so young, that at the first glance I
murmured to myself, “What a lovely child!” But as my eye lingered
it recognized in the upturned thoughtful brow, in the sweet, serious
aspect, in the rounded outlines of that slender shape, the inexpressible
dignity of virgin woman.

A book was on her lap, at her feet a little basket, half-filled with
violets and blossoms culled from the rock-plants that nestled amidst the
ruins. Behind her, the willow, like an emerald waterfall, showered down
its arching abundant green, bough after bough, from the tree-top to the
sward, descending in wavy verdure, bright towards the summit, in the
smile of the setting sun, and darkening into shadow as it neared the
earth.

She did not notice, she did not see me; her eyes were fixed upon the
horizon, where it sloped farthest into space, above the treetops and
the ruins,--fixed so intently that mechanically I turned my own gaze to
follow the flight of hers. It was as if she watched for some expected,
familiar sign to grow out from the depths of heaven; perhaps to greet,
before other eyes beheld it, the ray of the earliest star.

The birds dropped from the boughs on the turf around her so fearlessly
that one alighted amidst the flowers in the little basket at her feet.
There is a famous German poem, which I had read in my youth, called the
Maiden from Abroad, variously supposed to be an allegory of Spring, or
of Poetry, according to the choice of commentators: it seemed to me
as if the poem had been made for her. Verily, indeed, in her, poet
or painter might have seen an image equally true to either of those
adornments of the earth; both outwardly a delight to sense, yet both
wakening up thoughts within us, not sad, but akin to sadness.

I heard now a step behind me, and a voice which I recognized to be that
of Mr. Vigors. I broke from the charm by which I had been so lingeringly
spell-bound, hurried on confusedly, gained the wicket-gate, from which a
short flight of stairs descended into the common thoroughfare. And there
the every-day life lay again before me. On the opposite side, houses,
shops, church-spires; a few steps more, and the bustling streets! How
immeasurably far from, yet how familiarly near to, the world in which we
move and have being is that fairy-land of romance which opens out from
the hard earth before us, when Love steals at first to our side, fading
back into the hard earth again as Love smiles or sighs its farewell!






CHAPTER V.

And before that evening I had looked on Mr. Vigors with supreme
indifference! What importance he now assumed in my eyes! The lady with
whom I had seen him was doubtless the new tenant of that house in which
the young creature by whom my heart was so strangely moved evidently had
her home. Most probably the relation between the two ladies was that
of mother and daughter. Mr. Vigors, the friend of one, might himself be
related to both, might prejudice them against me, might--Here, starting
up, I snapped the thread of conjecture, for right before my eyes, on the
table beside which I had seated myself on entering my room, lay a card
of invitation:--


            MRS. POYNTZ.
              At Home,
         Wednesday, May 15th.
      Early.

Mrs. Poyntz,--Mrs. Colonel Poyntz, the Queen of the Hill? There, at her
house, I could not fail to learn all about the new comers, who could
never without her sanction have settled on her domain.

I hastily changed my dress, and, with beating heart, wound my way up the
venerable eminence.

I did not pass through the lane which led direct to Abbots’ House (for
that old building stood solitary amidst its grounds a little apart
from the spacious platform on which the society of the Hill was
concentrated), but up the broad causeway, with vistaed gaslamps; the
gayer shops still-unclosed, the tide of busy life only slowly ebbing
from the still-animated street, on to a square, in which the four main
thoroughfares of the city converged, and which formed the boundary of
Low Town. A huge dark archway, popularly called Monk’s Gate, at the
angle of this square, made the entrance to Abbey Hill. When the arch was
passed, one felt at once that one was in the town of a former day. The
pavement was narrow and rugged; the shops small, their upper stories
projecting, with here and there plastered fronts, quaintly arabesque.
An ascent, short, but steep and tortuous, conducted at once to the old
Abbey Church, nobly situated in a vast quadrangle, round which were
the genteel and gloomy dwellings of the Areopagites of the Hill. More
genteel and less gloomy than the rest--lights at the windows and flowers
on the balcony--stood forth, flanked by a garden wall at either side,
the mansion of Mrs. Colonel Poyntz.

As I entered the drawing-room, I heard the voice of the hostess; it
was a voice clear, decided, metallic, bell-like, uttering these words:
“Taken Abbots’ House? I will tell you.”






CHAPTER VI.

Mrs. Poyntz was seated on the sofa; at her right sat fat Mrs. Bruce, who
was a Scotch lord’s grand-daughter; at her left thin Miss Brabazon,
who was an Irish baronet’s niece. Around her--a few seated, many
standing--had grouped all the guests, save two old gentlemen, who had
remained aloof with Colonel Poyntz near the whist-table, waiting for the
fourth old gentleman who was to make up the rubber, but who was at that
moment spell-bound in the magic circle which curiosity, that strongest
of social demons, had attracted round the hostess.

“Taken Abbots’ House? I will tell you.--Ah, Dr. Fenwick, charmed to see
you. You know Abbots’ House is let at last? Well, Miss Brabazon, dear,
you ask who has taken it. I will inform you,--a particular friend of
mine.”

“Indeed! Dear me!” said Miss Brabazon, looking confused. “I hope I did
not say anything to--”

“Wound my feelings. Not in the least. You said your uncle Sir Phelim
employed a coachmaker named Ashleigh, that Ashleigh was an uncommon
name, though Ashley was a common one; you intimated an appalling
suspicion that the Mrs. Ashleigh who had come to the Hill was the coach
maker’s widow. I relieve your mind,--she is not; she is the widow of
Gilbert Ashleigh, of Kirby Hall.”

“Gilbert Ashleigh,” said one of the guests, a bachelor, whose parents
had reared him for the Church, but who, like poor Goldsmith, did not
think himself good enough for it, a mistake of over-modesty, for he
matured into a very harmless creature. “Gilbert Ashleigh? I was at
Oxford with him,--a gentleman commoner of Christ Church. Good-looking
man, very; sapped--”

“Sapped! what’s that?--Oh, studied. That he did all his life. He married
young,--Anne Chaloner; she and I were girls together; married the same
year. They settled at Kirby Hall--nice place, but dull. Poyntz and I
spent a Christmas there. Ashleigh when he talked was charming, but he
talked very little. Anne, when she talked, was commonplace, and she
talked very much. Naturally, poor thing,---she was so happy. Poyntz and
I did not spend another Christmas there. Friendship is long, but life is
short. Gilbert Ashleigh’s life was short indeed; he died in the seventh
year of his marriage, leaving only one child, a girl. Since then, though
I never spent another Christmas at Kirby Hall, I have frequently spent a
day there, doing my best to cheer up Anne. She was no longer talkative,
poor dear. Wrapped up in her child, who has now grown into a beautiful
girl of eighteen--such eyes, her father’s--the real dark blue--rare;
sweet creature, but delicate; not, I hope, consumptive, but delicate;
quiet, wants life. My girl Jane adores her. Jane has life enough for
two.”

“Is Miss Ashleigh the heiress to Kirby Hall?” asked Mrs. Bruce, who had
an unmarried son.

“No. Kirby Hall passed to Ashleigh Sumner, the male heir, a cousin.
And the luckiest of cousins! Gilbert’s sister, showy woman (indeed all
show), had contrived to marry her kinsman, Sir Walter Ashleigh Haughton,
the head of the Ashleigh family,--just the man made to be the reflector
of a showy woman! He died years ago, leaving an only son, Sir James,
who was killed last winter, by a fall from his horse. And here, again,
Ashleigh Summer proved to be the male heir-at-law. During the minority
of this fortunate youth, Mrs. Ashleigh had rented Kirby Hall of his
guardian. He is now just coming of age, and that is why she leaves.
Lilian Ashleigh will have, however, a very good fortune,--is what we
genteel paupers call an heiress. Is there anything more you want to
know?”

Said thin Miss Brabazon, who took advantage of her thinness to wedge
herself into every one’s affairs, “A most interesting account. What
a nice place Abbots’ House could be made with a little taste! So
aristocratic! Just what I should like if I could afford it!
The drawing-room should be done up in the Moorish style, with
geranium-coloured silk curtains, like dear Lady L----‘s boudoir at
Twickenham. And Mrs. Ashleigh has taken the house on lease too, I
suppose!” Here Miss Brabazon fluttered her fan angrily, and then
exclaimed, “But what on earth brings Mrs. Ashleigh here?”

Answered Mrs. Colonel Poyntz, with the military frankness by which she
kept her company in good humour, as well as awe,--

“Why do any of us come here? Can any one tell me?”

There was a blank silence, which the hostess herself was the first to
break.

“None of us present can say why we came here. I can tell you why Mrs.
Ashleigh came. Our neighbour, Mr. Vigors, is a distant connection of
the late Gilbert Ashleigh, one of the executors to his will, and the
guardian to the heir-at-law. About ten days ago Mr. Vigors called on me,
for the first time since I felt it my duty to express my disapprobation
of the strange vagaries so unhappily conceived by our poor dear friend
Dr. Lloyd. And when he had taken his chair, just where you now sit,
Dr. Fenwick, he said in a sepulchral voice, stretching out two fingers,
so,--as if I were one of the what-do-you-call-’ems who go to sleep when
he bids them, ‘Marm, you know Mrs. Ashleigh? You correspond with her?’
‘Yes, Mr. Vigors; is there any crime in that? You look as if there
were.’ ‘No crime, marm,’ said the man, quite seriously. ‘Mrs.
Ashleigh is a lady of amiable temper, and you are a woman of masculine
understanding.’”

Here there was a general titter. Mrs. Colonel Poyntz hushed it with a
look of severe surprise. “What is there to laugh at? All women would be
men if they could. If my understanding is masculine, so much the better
for me. I thanked Mr. Vigors for his very handsome compliment, and he
then went on to say that though Mrs. Ashleigh would now have to leave
Kirby Hall in a very few weeks, she seemed quite unable to make up her
mind where to go; that it had occurred to him that, as Miss Ashleigh was
of an age to see a little of the world, she ought not to remain buried
in the country; while, being of quiet mind, she recoiled from the
dissipation of London. Between the seclusion of the one and the turmoil
of the other, the society of L---- was a happy medium. He should be glad
of my opinion. He had put off asking for it, because he owned his belief
that I had behaved unkindly to his lamented friend, Dr. Lloyd; but he
now found himself in rather an awkward position. His ward, young Sumner,
had prudently resolved on fixing his country residence at Kirby Hall,
rather than at Haughton Park, the much larger seat which had so suddenly
passed to his inheritance, and which he could not occupy without a vast
establishment, that to a single man, so young, would be but a cumbersome
and costly trouble. Mr. Vigors was pledged to his ward to obtain him
possession of Kirby Hall, the precise day agreed upon, but Mrs. Ashleigh
did not seem disposed to stir,--could not decide where else to go. Mr.
Vigors was loth to press hard on his old friend’s widow and child. It
was a thousand pities Mrs Ashleigh could not make up her mind; she had
had ample time for preparation. A word from me at this moment would
be an effective kindness. Abbots’ House was vacant, with a garden so
extensive that the ladies would not miss the country. Another party was
after it, but--‘Say no more,’ I cried; ‘no party but my dear old friend
Anne Ashleigh shall have Abbots’ House. So that question is settled.’
I dismissed Mr. Vigors, sent for my carriage, that is, for Mr. Barker’s
yellow fly and his best horses,--and drove that very day to Kirby Hall,
which, though not in this county, is only twenty-five miles distant. I
slept there that night. By nine o’clock the next morning I had secured
Mrs. Ashleigh’s consent, on the promise to save her all trouble; came
back, sent for the landlord, settled the rent, lease, agreement; engaged
Forbes’ vans to remove the furniture from Kirby Hall; told Forbes to
begin with the beds. When her own bed came, which was last night, Anne
Ashleigh came too. I have seen her this morning. She likes the place,
so does Lilian. I asked them to meet you all here to-night; but Mrs.
Ashleigh was tired. The last of the furniture was to arrive today;
and though dear Mrs. Ashleigh is an undecided character, she is not
inactive. But it is not only the planning where to put tables and chairs
that would have tried her today: she has had Mr. Vigors on her hands
all the afternoon, and he has been--here’s her little note--what are the
words? No doubt ‘most overpowering and oppressive;’ no, ‘most kind and
attentive,’--different words, but, as applied to Mr. Vigors, they mean
the same thing.

“And now, next Monday---we must leave them in peace till then--you will
all call on the Ashleighs. The Hill knows what is due to itself; it
cannot delegate to Mr. Vigors, a respectable man indeed, but who does
not belong to its set, its own proper course of action towards those
who would shelter themselves on its bosom. The Hill cannot be kind and
attentive, overpowering or oppressive by proxy. To those newborn into
its family circle it cannot be an indifferent godmother; it has towards
them all the feelings of a mother,--or of a stepmother, as the case may
be. Where it says ‘This can be no child of mine,’ it is a stepmother
indeed; but in all those whom I have presented to its arms, it has
hitherto, I am proud to say, recognized desirable acquaintances, and to
them the Hill has been a mother. And now, my dear Mr. Sloman, go to your
rubber; Poyntz is impatient, though he don’t show it. Miss Brabazon,
love, we all long to see you seated at the piano,--you play so divinely!
Something gay, if you please; something gay, but not very noisy,--Mr.
Leopold Symthe will turn the leaves for you. Mrs. Bruce, your own
favourite set at vingt-un, with four new recruits. Dr. Fenwick, you are
like me, don’t play cards, and don’t care for music; sit here, and talk
or not, as you please, while I knit.”

The other guests thus disposed of, some at the card-tables, some round
the piano, I placed myself at Mrs. Poyntz’s side, on a seat niched in
the recess of a window which an evening unusually warm for the month of
May permitted to be left open. I was next to one who had known Lilian
as a child, one from whom I had learned by what sweet name to call
the image which my thoughts had already shrined. How much that I still
longed to know she could tell me! But in what form of question could I
lead to the subject, yet not betray my absorbing interest in it? Longing
to speak, I felt as if stricken dumb; stealing an unquiet glance towards
the face beside me, and deeply impressed with that truth which the Hill
had long ago reverently acknowledged,--namely, that Mrs. Colonel Poyntz
was a very superior woman, a very powerful creature.

And there she sat knitting, rapidly, firmly; a woman somewhat on the
other side of forty, complexion a bronze paleness, hair a bronze brown,
in strong ringlets cropped short behind,--handsome hair for a man; lips
that, when closed, showed inflexible decision, when speaking, became
supple and flexible with an easy humour and a vigilant finesse; eyes
of a red hazel, quick but steady,--observing, piercing, dauntless eyes;
altogether a fine countenance,--would have been a very fine countenance
in a man; profile sharp, straight, clear-cut, with an expression, when
in repose, like that of a sphinx; a frame robust, not corpulent; of
middle height, but with an air and carriage that made her appear tall;
peculiarly white firm hands, indicative of vigorous health, not a vein
visible on the surface.

There she sat knitting, knitting, and I by her side, gazing now on
herself, now on her work, with a vague idea that the threads in the
skein of my own web of love or of life were passing quick through those
noiseless fingers. And, indeed, in every web of romance, the fondest,
one of the Parcae is sure to be some matter-of-fact She, Social Destiny,
as little akin to romance herself as was this worldly Queen of the Hill.






CHAPTER VII.

I have given a sketch of the outward woman of Mrs. Colonel Poyntz. The
inner woman was a recondite mystery deep as that of the sphinx, whose
features her own resembled. But between the outward and the inward woman
there is ever a third woman,--the conventional woman,--such as the whole
human being appears to the world,--always mantled, sometimes masked.

I am told that the fine people of London do not recognize the title
of “Mrs. Colonel.” If that be true, the fine people of London must be
clearly in the wrong, for no people in the universe could be finer than
the fine people of Abbey Hill; and they considered their sovereign had
as good a right to the title of Mrs. Colonel as the Queen of England has
to that of “our Gracious Lady.” But Mrs. Poyntz herself never assumed
the title of Mrs. Colonel; it never appeared on her cards,--any more
than the title of “Gracious Lady” appears on the cards which convey the
invitation that a Lord Steward or Lord Chamberlain is commanded by
her Majesty to issue. To titles, indeed, Mrs. Poyntz evinced no
superstitious reverence. Two peeresses, related to her, not distantly,
were in the habit of paying her a yearly visit which lasted two or three
days. The Hill considered these visits an honour to its eminence. Mrs.
Poyntz never seemed to esteem them an honour to herself; never boasted
of them; never sought to show off her grand relations, nor put herself
the least out of the way to receive them. Her mode of life was free from
ostentation. She had the advantage of being a few hundreds a year
richer than any other inhabitant of the Hill; but she did not devote her
superior resources to the invidious exhibition of superior splendour.
Like a wise sovereign, the revenues of her exchequer were applied to the
benefit of her subjects, and not to the vanity of egotistical parade. As
no one else on the Hill kept a carriage, she declined to keep one. Her
entertainments were simple, but numerous. Twice a week she received the
Hill, and was genuinely at home to it. She contrived to make her parties
proverbially agreeable. The refreshments were of the same kind as those
which the poorest of her old maids of honour might proffer; but they
were better of their kind, the best of their kind,--the best tea, the
best lemonade, the best cakes. Her rooms had an air of comfort, which
was peculiar to them. They looked like rooms accustomed to receive, and
receive in a friendly way; well warmed, well lighted, card-tables and
piano each in the place that made cards and music inviting; on the walls
a few old family portraits, and three or four other pictures said to be
valuable and certainly pleasing,--two Watteaus, a Canaletti, a Weenix;
plenty of easy-chairs and settees covered with a cheerful chintz,--in
the arrangement of the furniture generally an indescribable careless
elegance. She herself was studiously plain in dress, more conspicuously
free from jewelry and trinkets than any married lady on the Hill. But
I have heard from those who were authorities on such a subject that she
was never seen in a dress of the last year’s fashion. She adopted the
mode as it came out, just enough to show that she was aware it was out;
but with a sober reserve, as much as to say, “I adopt the fashion as far
as it suits myself; I do not permit the fashion to adopt me.” In short,
Mrs. Colonel Poyntz was sometimes rough, sometimes coarse, always
masculine, and yet somehow or other masculine in a womanly way; but she
was never vulgar because never affected. It was impossible not to allow
that she was a thorough gentlewoman, and she could do things that
lower other gentlewomen, without any loss of dignity. Thus she was an
admirable mimic, certainly in itself the least ladylike condescension of
humour. But when she mimicked, it was with so tranquil a gravity, or so
royal a good humour, that one could only say, “What talents for society
dear Mrs. Colonel has!” As she was a gentlewoman emphatically, so the
other colonel, the he-colonel, was emphatically a gentleman; rather shy,
but not cold; hating trouble of every kind, pleased to seem a cipher in
his own house. If the sole study of Mrs. Colonel had been to make
her husband comfortable, she could not have succeeded better than by
bringing friends about him and then taking them off his hands. Colonel
Poyntz, the he-colonel, had seen, in his youth, actual service; but had
retired from his profession many years ago, shortly after his marriage.
He was a younger brother of one of the principal squires in the country;
inherited the house he lived in, with some other valuable property in
and about L----, from an uncle; was considered a good landlord; and
popular in Low Town, though he never interfered in its affairs. He was
punctiliously neat in his dress; a thin youthful figure, crowned with a
thick youthful wig. He never seemed to read anything but the newspapers
and the “Meteorological Journal:” was supposed to be the most
weatherwise man in all L----. He had another intellectual
predilection,--whist; but in that he had less reputation for wisdom.
Perhaps it requires a rarer combination of mental faculties to win
an odd trick than to divine a fall in the glass. For the rest, the
he-colonel, many years older than his wife, despite the thin youthful
figure, was an admirable aid-de-camp to the general in command, Mrs.
Colonel; and she could not have found one more obedient, more devoted,
or more proud of a distinguished chief.

In giving to Mrs. Colonel Poyntz the appellation of Queen of the Hill,
let there be no mistake. She was not a constitutional sovereign; her
monarchy was absolute. All her proclamations had the force of laws.

Such ascendancy could not have been attained without considerable
talents for acquiring and keeping it. Amidst all her off-hand, brisk,
imperious frankness, she had the ineffable discrimination of tact.
Whether civil or rude, she was never civil or rude but what she carried
public opinion along with her. Her knowledge of general society must
have been limited, as must be that of all female sovereigns; but she
seemed gifted with an intuitive knowledge of human nature, which she
applied to her special ambition of ruling it. I have not a doubt that if
she had been suddenly transferred, a perfect stranger, to the world of
London, she would have soon forced her way to its selectest circles,
and, when once there, held her own against a duchess.

I have said that she was not affected: this might be one cause of her
sway over a set in which nearly every other woman was trying rather to
seem, than to be, a somebody.

But if Mrs. Colonel Poyntz was not artificial, she was artful, or
perhaps I might more justly say artistic. In all she said and did there
were conduct, system, plan. She could be a most serviceable friend, a
most damaging enemy; yet I believe she seldom indulged in strong likings
or strong hatreds. All was policy,--a policy akin to that of a grand
party chief, determined to raise up those whom, for any reason of state,
it was prudent to favour, and to put down those whom, for any reason of
state, it was expedient to humble or to crush.

Ever since the controversy with Dr. Lloyd, this lady had honoured me
with her benignest countenance; and nothing could be more adroit
than the manner in which, while imposing me on others as an oracular
authority, she sought to subject to her will the oracle itself.

She was in the habit of addressing me in a sort of motherly way, as if
she had the deepest interest in my welfare, happiness, and reputation.
And thus, in every compliment, in every seeming mark of respect, she
maintained the superior dignity of one who takes from responsible
station the duty to encourage rising merit; so that, somehow or other,
despite all that pride which made me believe that I needed no helping
hand to advance or to clear my way through the world, I could not shake
off from my mind the impression that I was mysteriously patronized by
Mrs. Colonel Poyntz.

We might have sat together five minutes, side by side in silence as
complete as if in the cave of Trophonius--when without looking up from
her work, Mrs. Poyntz said abruptly,--

“I am thinking about you, Dr. Fenwick. And you--are thinking about some
other woman. Ungrateful man!”

“Unjust accusation! My very silence should prove how intently my
thoughts were fixed on you, and on the weird web which springs under
your hand in meshes that bewilder the gaze and snare the attention.”

Mrs. Poyntz looked up at me for a moment--one rapid glance of the bright
red hazel eye--and said,--

“Was I really in your thoughts? Answer truly.”

“Truly, I answer, you were.”

“That is strange! Who can it be?”

“Who can it be? What do you mean?”

“If you were thinking of me, it was in connection with some other
person,--some other person of my own sex. It is certainly not poor dear
Miss Brabazon. Who else can it be?”

Again the red eye shot over me, and I felt my cheek redden beneath it.

“Hush!” she said, lowering her voice; “you are in love!”

“In love!--I! Permit me to ask you why you think so?”

“The signs are unmistakable; you are altered in your manner, even in the
expression of your face, since I last saw you; your manner is generally
quiet and observant,--it is now restless and distracted; your expression
of face is generally proud and serene,--it is now humbled and
troubled. You have something on your mind! It is not anxiety for your
reputation,--that is established; nor for your fortune,--that is made;
it is not anxiety for a patient or you would scarcely be here. But
anxiety it is,--an anxiety that is remote from your profession, that
touches your heart and is new to it!”

I was startled, almost awed; but I tried to cover my confusion with a
forced laugh.

“Profound observer! Subtle analyst! You have convinced me that I must
be in love, though I did not suspect it before. But when I strive to
conjecture the object, I am as much perplexed as yourself; and with you,
I ask, who can it be?”

“Whoever it be,” said Mrs. Poyntz, who had paused, while I spoke, from
her knitting, and now resumed it very slowly and very carefully, as if
her mind and her knitting worked in unison together,--“whoever it be,
love in you would be serious; and, with or without love, marriage is
a serious thing to us all. It is not every pretty girl that would suit
Allen Fenwick.”

“Alas! is there any pretty girl whom Allen Fenwick would suit?”

“Tut! You should be above the fretful vanity that lays traps for a
compliment. Yes; the time has come in your life and your career when
you would do well to marry. I give my consent to that,” she added with
a smile as if in jest, and a slight nod as if in earnest. The knitting
here went on more decidedly, more quickly. “But I do not yet see the
person. No! ‘T is a pity, Allen Fenwick” (whenever Mrs. Poyntz called
me by my Christian name, she always assumed her majestic motherly
manner),--“a pity that, with your birth, energies, perseverance,
talents, and, let me add, your advantages of manner and person,--a pity
that you did not choose a career that might achieve higher fortunes and
louder fame than the most brilliant success can give to a provincial
physician. But in that very choice you interest me. My choice has been
much the same,--a small circle, but the first in it. Yet, had I been a
man, or had my dear Colonel been a man whom it was in the power of a
woman’s art to raise one step higher in that metaphorical ladder which
is not the ladder of the angels, why, then--what then? No matter! I
am contented. I transfer my ambition to Jane. Do you not think her
handsome?”

“There can be no doubt of that,” said I, carelessly and naturally.

“I have settled Jane’s lot in my own mind,” resumed Mrs. Poyntz,
striking firm into another row of knitting. “She will marry a country
gentleman of large estate. He will go into parliament. She will study
his advancement as I study Poyntz’s comfort. If he be clever, she will
help to make him a minister; if he be not clever, his wealth will make
her a personage, and lift him into a personage’s husband. And, now that
you see I have no matrimonial designs on you, Allen Fenwick, think if it
will be worth while to confide in me. Possibly I may be useful--”

“I know not how to thank you; but, as yet, I have nothing to confide.”

While thus saying, I turned my eyes towards the open window beside which
I sat. It was a beautiful soft night, the May moon in all her splendour.
The town stretched, far and wide, below with all its numberless
lights,--below, but somewhat distant; an intervening space was covered,
here, by the broad quadrangle (in the midst of which stood, massive and
lonely, the grand old church), and, there, by the gardens and scattered
cottages or mansions that clothed the sides of the hill.

“Is not that house,” I said, after a short pause, “yonder with the three
gables, the one in which--in which poor Dr. Lloyd lived--Abbots’ House?”

I spoke abruptly, as if to intimate my desire to change the subject of
conversation. My hostess stopped her knitting, half rose, looked forth.

“Yes. But what a lovely night! How is it that the moon blends into
harmony things of which the sun only marks the contrast? That stately
old church tower, gray with its thousand years, those vulgar tile-roofs
and chimney-pots raw in the freshness of yesterday,--now, under the
moonlight, all melt into one indivisible charm!”

As my hostess thus spoke, she had left her seat, taking her work with
her, and passed from the window into the balcony. It was not often that
Mrs. Poyntz condescended to admit what is called “sentiment” into
the range of her sharp, practical, worldly talk; but she did so at
times,--always, when she did, giving me the notion of an intellect much
too comprehensive not to allow that sentiment has a place in this life,
but keeping it in its proper place, by that mixture of affability and
indifference with which some high-born beauty allows the genius, but
checks the presumption, of a charming and penniless poet. For a few
minutes her eyes roved over the scene in evident enjoyment; then, as
they slowly settled upon the three gables of Abbots’ House, her face
regained that something of hardness which belonged to its decided
character; her fingers again mechanically resumed her knitting, and she
said, in her clear, unsoftened, metallic chime of voice, “Can you guess
why I took so much trouble to oblige Mr. Vigors and locate Mrs. Ashleigh
yonder?”

“You favoured us with a full explanation of your reasons.”

“Some of my reasons; not the main one. People who undertake the task
of governing others, as I do, be their rule a kingdom or a hamlet, must
adopt a principle of government and adhere to it. The principle that
suits best with the Hill is Respect for the Proprieties. We have not
much money; entre nous, we have no great rank. Our policy is, then, to
set up the Proprieties as an influence which money must court and rank
is afraid of. I had learned just before Mr. Vigors called on me that
Lady Sarah Bellasis entertained the idea of hiring Abbots’ House.
London has set its face against her; a provincial town would be more
charitable. An earl’s daughter, with a good income and an awfully bad
name, of the best manners and of the worst morals, would have made sad
havoc among the Proprieties. How many of our primmest old maids would
have deserted tea and Mrs. Poyntz for champagne and her ladyship! The
Hill was never in so imminent a danger. Rather than Lady Sarah Bellasis
should have had that house, I would have taken it myself, and stocked it
with owls.

“Mrs. Ashleigh turned up just in the critical moment. Lady Sarah is
foiled, the Proprieties safe, and so that question is settled.”

“And it will be pleasant to have your early friend so near you.”

Mrs. Poyntz lifted her eyes full upon me.

“Do you know Mrs. Ashleigh?”

“Not in the least.”

“She has many virtues and few ideas. She is commonplace weak, as I
am commonplace strong. But commonplace weak can be very lovable. Her
husband, a man of genius and learning, gave her his whole heart,--a
heart worth having; but he was not ambitious, and he despised the
world.”

“I think you said your daughter was very much attached to Miss Ashleigh?
Does her character resemble her mother’s?”

I was afraid while I spoke that I should again meet Mrs. Poyntz’s
searching gaze, but she did not this time look up from her work.

“No; Lilian is anything but commonplace.”

“You described her as having delicate health; you implied a hope that
she was not consumptive. I trust that there is no serious reason for
apprehending a constitutional tendency which at her age would require
the most careful watching!”

“I trust not. If she were to die--Dr. Fenwick, what is the matter?”

So terrible had been the picture which this woman’s words had brought
before me, that I started as if my own life had received a shock.

“I beg pardon,” I said falteringly, pressing my hand to my heart; “a
sudden spasm here,--it is over now. You were saying that--that--”

“I was about to say-” and here Mrs. Poyntz laid her hand lightly on
mine,--“I was about to say that if Lilian Ashleigh were to die, I should
mourn for her less than I might for one who valued the things of the
earth more. But I believe there is no cause for the alarm my words so
inconsiderately excited in you. Her mother is watchful and devoted; and
if the least thing ailed Lilian, she would call in medical advice. Mr.
Vigors would, I know, recommend Dr. Jones.”

Closing our conference with those stinging words, Mrs. Poyntz here
turned back into the drawing-room.

I remained some minutes on the balcony, disconcerted, enraged. With
what consummate art had this practised diplomatist wound herself into my
secret! That she had read my heart better than myself was evident from
that Parthian shaft, barbed with Dr. Jones, which she had shot over her
shoulder in retreat. That from the first moment in which she had decoyed
me to her side, she had detected “the something” on my mind, was perhaps
but the ordinary quickness of female penetration. But it was with no
ordinary craft that the whole conversation afterwards had been so shaped
as to learn the something, and lead me to reveal the some one to whom
the something was linked. For what purpose? What was it to her? What
motive could she have beyond the mere gratification of curiosity?
Perhaps, at first, she thought I had been caught by her daughter’s showy
beauty, and hence the half-friendly, half-cynical frankness with which
she had avowed her ambitious projects for that young lady’s matrimonial
advancement. Satisfied by my manner that I cherished no presumptuous
hopes in that quarter, her scrutiny was doubtless continued from that
pleasure in the exercise of a wily intellect which impels schemers and
politicians to an activity for which, without that pleasure itself,
there would seem no adequate inducement. And besides, the ruling passion
of this petty sovereign was power; and if knowledge be power, there is
no better instrument of power over a contumacious subject than that hold
on his heart which is gained in the knowledge of its secret.

But “secret”! Had it really come to this? Was it possible that the mere
sight of a human face, never beheld before, could disturb the whole
tenor of my life,--a stranger of whose mind and character I knew
nothing, whose very voice I had never heard? It was only by the
intolerable pang of anguish that had rent my heart in the words,
carelessly, abruptly spoken, “if she were to die,” that I had felt how
the world would be changed to me, if indeed that face were seen in it no
more! Yes, secret it was no longer to myself, I loved! And like all on
whom love descends, sometimes softly, slowly, with the gradual wing of
the cushat settling down into its nest, sometimes with the swoop of the
eagle on his unsuspecting quarry, I believed that none ever before loved
as I loved; that such love was an abnormal wonder, made solely for
me, and I for it. Then my mind insensibly hushed its angrier and more
turbulent thoughts, as my gaze rested upon the roof-tops of Lilian’s
home, and the shimmering silver of the moonlit willow, under which I had
seen her gazing into the roseate heavens.






CHAPTER VIII.

When I returned to the drawing-room, the party was evidently about to
break up. Those who had grouped round the piano were now assembled round
the refreshment-table. The cardplayers had risen, and were settling or
discussing gains and losses. While I was searching for my hat, which
I had somewhere mislaid, a poor gentleman, tormented by tic-doloureux,
crept timidly up to me,--the proudest and the poorest of all the
hidalgos settled on the Hill. He could not afford a fee for a
physician’s advice; but pain had humbled his pride, and I saw at a
glance that he was considering how to take a surreptitious advantage of
social intercourse, and obtain the advice without paying the fee. The
old man discovered the hat before I did, stooped, took it up, extended
it to me with the profound bow of the old school, while the other hand,
clenched and quivering, was pressed into the hollow of his cheek,
and his eyes met mine with wistful mute entreaty. The instinct of my
profession seized me at once. I could never behold suffering without
forgetting all else in the desire to relieve it.

“You are in pain,” said I, softly. “Sit down and describe the symptoms.
Here, it is true, I am no professional doctor, but I am a friend who is
fond of doctoring, and knows something about it.”

So we sat down a little apart from the other guests, and after a few
questions and answers, I was pleased to find that his “tic” did not
belong to the less curable kind of that agonizing neuralgia. I was
especially successful in my treatment of similar sufferings, for which I
had discovered an anodyne that was almost specific. I wrote on a leaf of
my pocketbook a prescription which I felt sure would be efficacious, and
as I tore it out and placed it in his hand, I chanced to look up, and
saw the hazel eyes of my hostess fixed upon me with a kinder and softer
expression than they often condescended to admit into their cold and
penetrating lustre. At that moment, however, her attention was drawn
from me to a servant, who entered with a note, and I heard him say,
though in an undertone, “From Mrs. Ashleigh.”

She opened the note, read it hastily, ordered the servant to wait
without the door, retired to her writing-table, which stood near the
place at which I still lingered, rested her face on her hand, and seemed
musing. Her meditation was very soon over. She turned her head, and to
my surprise, beckoned to me. I approached.

“Sit here,” she whispered: “turn your back towards those people, who are
no doubt watching us. Read this.”

She placed in my hand the note she had just received. It contained but a
few words, to this effect:--


   DEAR MARGARET,--I am so distressed.  Since I wrote to you a few
   hours ago, Lilian is taken suddenly ill, and I fear seriously.  What
   medical man should I send for?  Let my servant have his name and
   address.

                                                    A.  A.

I sprang from my seat.

“Stay,” said Mrs. Poyntz. “Would you much care if I sent the servant to
Dr. Jones?”

“Ah, madam, you are cruel! What have I done that you should become my
enemy?”

“Enemy! No. You have just befriended one of my friends. In this world
of fools intellect should ally itself with intellect. No; I am not your
enemy! But you have not yet asked me to be your friend.”

Here she put into my hands a note she had written while thus speaking.
“Receive your credentials. If there be any cause for alarm, or if I can
be of use, send for me.” Resuming the work she had suspended, but with
lingering, uncertain fingers, she added, “So far, then, this is settled.
Nay, no thanks; it is but little that is settled as yet.”






CHAPTER IX.

In a very few minutes I was once more in the grounds of that old gable
house; the servant, who went before me, entered them by the stairs and
the wicket-gate of the private entrance; that way was the shortest.
So again I passed by the circling glade and the monastic well,--sward,
trees, and ruins all suffused in the limpid moonlight.

And now I was in the house; the servant took up-stairs the note with
which I was charged, and a minute or two afterwards returned and
conducted me to the corridor above, in which Mrs. Ashleigh received me.
I was the first to speak.

“Your daughter--is--is--not seriously ill, I hope. What is it?”

“Hush!” she said, under her breath. “Will you step this way for a
moment?” She passed through a doorway to the right. I followed her,
and as she placed on the table the light she had been holding, I looked
round with a chill at the heart,--it was the room in which Dr. Lloyd had
died. Impossible to mistake. The furniture indeed was changed, there was
no bed in the chamber; but the shape of the room, the position of the
high casement, which was now wide open, and through which the moonlight
streamed more softly than on that drear winter night, the great square
beams intersecting the low ceiling,--all were impressed vividly on my
memory. The chair to which Mrs. Ashleigh beckoned me was placed just on
the spot where I had stood by the bedhead of the dying man.

I shrank back,--I could not have seated myself there. So I remained
leaning against the chimney-piece, while Mrs. Ashleigh told her story.

She said that on their arrival the day before, Lilian had been in more
than usually good health and spirits, delighted with the old house,
the grounds, and especially the nook by the Monk’s Well, at which Mrs.
Ashleigh had left her that evening in order to make some purchases in
the town, in company with Mr. Vigors. When Mrs. Ashleigh returned, she
and Mr. Vigors had sought Lilian in that nook, and Mrs. Ashleigh then
detected, with a mother’s eye, some change in Lilian which alarmed her.
She seemed listless and dejected, and was very pale; but she denied that
she felt unwell. On regaining the house she had sat down in the room in
which we then were,--“which,” said Mrs. Ashleigh, “as it is not required
for a sleeping-room, my daughter, who is fond of reading, wished to fit
up as her own morning-room, or study. I left her here and went into the
drawing-room below with Mr. Vigors. When he quitted me, which he did
very soon, I remained for nearly an hour giving directions about the
placing of furniture, which had just arrived, from our late residence.
I then went up-stairs to join my daughter, and to my terror found her
apparently lifeless in her chair. She had fainted away.”

I interrupted Mrs. Ashleigh here. “Has Miss Ashleigh been subject to
fainting fits?”

“No, never. When she recovered she seemed bewildered, disinclined to
speak. I got her to bed, and as she then fell quietly to sleep, my mind
was relieved. I thought it only a passing effect of excitement, in a
change of abode; or caused by something like malaria in the atmosphere
of that part of the grounds in which I had found her seated.”

“Very likely. The hour of sunset at this time of year is trying to
delicate constitutions. Go on.”

“About three quarters of an hour ago she woke up with a loud cry, and
has been ever since in a state of great agitation, weeping violently,
and answering none of my questions. Yet she does not seem light-headed,
but rather what we call hysterical.”

“You will permit me now to see her. Take comfort; in all you tell me I
see nothing to warrant serious alarm.”






CHAPTER X.

To the true physician there is an inexpressible sanctity in the sick
chamber. At its threshold the more human passions quit their hold on
his heart. Love there would be profanation; even the grief permitted to
others he must put aside. He must enter that room--a calm intelligence.
He is disabled for his mission if he suffer aught to obscure the
keen quiet glance of his science. Age or youth, beauty or deformity,
innocence or guilt, merge their distinctions in one common
attribute--human suffering appealing to human skill.

Woe to the households in which the trusted Healer feels not on his
conscience the solemn obligations of his glorious art! Reverently as in
a temple, I stood in the virgin’s chamber. When her mother placed her
hand in mine, and I felt the throb of its pulse, I was aware of no
quicker beat of my own heart. I looked with a steady eye on the face
more beautiful from the flush that deepened the delicate hues of
the young cheek, and the lustre that brightened the dark blue of the
wandering eyes. She did not at first heed me, did not seem aware of
my presence; but kept murmuring to herself words which I could not
distinguish.

At length, when I spoke to her, in that low, soothing tone which we
learn at the sick-bed, the expression of her face altered suddenly; she
passed the hand I did not hold over her forehead, turned round, looked
at me full and long, with unmistakable surprise, yet not as if the
surprise displeased her,--less the surprise which recoils from the
sight of a stranger than that which seems doubtfully to recognize an
unexpected friend. Yet on the surprise there seemed to creep something
of apprehension, of fear; her hand trembled, her voice quivered, as she
said,--

“Can it be, can it be? Am I awake? Mother, who is this?”

“Only a kind visitor, Dr. Fenwick, sent by Mrs. Poyntz, for I was uneasy
about you, darling. How are you now?”

“Better. Strangely better.”

She removed her hand gently from mine, and with an involuntary modest
shrinking turned towards Mrs. Ashleigh, drawing her mother towards
herself, so that she became at once hidden from me.

Satisfied that there was here no delirium, nor even more than the slight
and temporary fever which often accompanies a sudden nervous attack in
constitutions peculiarly sensitive, I retired noiselessly from the
room, and went, not into that which had been occupied by the ill-fated
Naturalist, but down-stairs into the drawing-room, to write my
prescription. I had already sent the servant off with it to the
chemist’s before Mrs. Ashleigh joined me.

“She seems recovering surprisingly; her forehead is cooler; she
is perfectly self-possessed, only she cannot account for her own
seizure,--cannot account either for the fainting or the agitation with
which she awoke from sleep.”

“I think I can account for both. The first room in which she
entered--that in which she fainted--had its window open; the sides of
the window are overgrown with rank creeping plants in full blossom. Miss
Ashleigh had already predisposed herself to injurious effects from the
effluvia by fatigue, excitement, imprudence in sitting out at the fall
of a heavy dew. The sleep after the fainting fit was the more disturbed,
because Nature, always alert and active in subjects so young, was
making its own effort to right itself from an injury. Nature has nearly
succeeded. What I have prescribed will a little aid and accelerate that
which Nature has yet to do, and in a day or two I do not doubt that your
daughter will be perfectly restored. Only let me recommend care to avoid
exposure to the open air during the close of the day. Let her avoid also
the room in which she was first seized, for it is a strange phenomenon
in nervous temperaments that a nervous attack may, without visible
cause, be repeated in the same place where it was first experienced. You
had better shut up the chamber for at least some weeks, burn fires in
it, repaint and paper it, sprinkle chloroform. You are not, perhaps,
aware that Dr. Lloyd died in that room after a prolonged illness. Suffer
me to wait till your servant returns with the medicine, and let me
employ the interval in asking you a few questions. Miss Ashleigh, you
say, never had a fainting fit before. I should presume that she is not
what we call strong. But has she ever had any illness that alarmed you?”

“Never.”

“No great liability to cold and cough, to attacks of the chest or
lungs?”

“Certainly not. Still I have feared that she may have a tendency to
consumption. Do you think so? Your questions alarm me!”

“I do not think so; but before I pronounce a positive opinion, one
question more. You say you have feared a tendency to consumption. Is
that disease in her family? She certainly did not inherit it from you.
But on her father’s side?”

“Her father,” said Mrs. Ashleigh, with tears in her eyes, “died young,
but of brain fever, which the medical men said was brought on by over
study.”

“Enough, my dear madam. What you say confirms my belief that your
daughter’s constitution is the very opposite to that in which the seeds
of consumption lurk. It is rather that far nobler constitution,
which the keenness of the nervous susceptibility renders delicate but
elastic,--as quick to recover as it is to suffer.”

“Thank you, thank you, Dr. Fenwick, for what you say. You take a load
from my heart; for Mr. Vigors, I know, thinks Lilian consumptive, and
Mrs. Poyntz has rather frightened me at times by hints to the same
effect. But when you speak of nervous susceptibility, I do not quite
understand you. My daughter is not what is commonly called nervous. Her
temper is singularly even.”

“But if not excitable, should you also say that she is not
impressionable? The things which do not disturb her temper may, perhaps,
deject her spirits. Do I make myself understood?”

“Yes, I think I understand your distinction; but I am not quite sure
if it applies. To most things that affect the spirits she is not more
sensitive than other girls, perhaps less so; but she is certainly very
impressionable in some things.”

“In what?”

“She is more moved than any one I ever knew by objects in external
nature, rural scenery, rural sounds, by music, by the books that she
reads,--even books that are not works of imagination. Perhaps in all
this she takes after her poor father, but in a more marked degree,--at
least, I observe it more in her; for he was very silent and reserved.
And perhaps also her peculiarities have been fostered by the seclusion
in which she has been brought up. It was with a view to make her a
little more like girls of her own age that our friend, Mrs. Poyntz,
induced me to come here. Lilian was reconciled to this change; but she
shrank from the thoughts of London, which I should have preferred. Her
poor father could not endure London.”

“Miss Ashleigh is fond of reading?”

“Yes, she is fond of reading, but more fond of musing. She will sit by
herself for hours without book or work, and seem as abstracted as if in
a dream. She was so even in her earliest childhood. Then she would tell
me what she had been conjuring up to herself. She would say that she had
seen--positively seen--beautiful lands far away from earth; flowers and
trees not like ours. As she grew older this visionary talk displeased
me, and I scolded her, and said that if others heard her, they would
think that she was not only silly but very untruthful. So of late years
she never ventures to tell me what, in such dreamy moments, she suffers
herself to imagine; but the habit of musing continues still. Do you not
agree with Mrs. Poyntz that the best cure would be a little cheerful
society amongst other young people?”

“Certainly,” said I, honestly, though with a jealous pang. “But here
comes the medicine. Will you take it up to her, and then sit with her
half an hour or so? By that time I expect she will be asleep. I will
wait here till you return. Oh, I can amuse myself with the newspapers
and books on your table. Stay! one caution: be sure there are no flowers
in Miss Ashleigh’s sleeping-room. I think I saw a treacherous rose-tree
in a stand by the window. If so, banish it.”

Left alone, I examined the room in which, oh, thought of joy! I had
surely now won the claim to become a privileged guest. I touched the
books Lilian must have touched; in the articles of furniture, as yet
so hastily disposed that the settled look of home was not about them,
I still knew that I was gazing on things which her mind must associate
with the history of her young life. That luteharp must be surely hers,
and the scarf, with a girl’s favourite colours,--pure white and pale
blue,--and the bird-cage, and the childish ivory work-case, with
implements too pretty for use,--all spoke of her.

It was a blissful, intoxicating revery, which Mrs. Ashleigh’s entrance
disturbed.

Lilian was sleeping calmly. I had no excuse to linger there any longer.

“I leave you, I trust, with your mind quite at ease,” said I. “You will
allow me to call to-morrow, in the afternoon?”

“Oh, yes, gratefully.”

Mrs. Ashleigh held out her hand as I made towards the door.

Is there a physician who has not felt at times how that ceremonious fee
throws him back from the garden-land of humanity into the market-place
of money,--seems to put him out of the pale of equal friendship, and
say, “True, you have given health and life. Adieu! there, you are paid
for it!” With a poor person there would have been no dilemma, but
Mrs. Ashleigh was affluent: to depart from custom here was almost
impertinence. But had the penalty of my refusal been the doom of never
again beholding Lilian, I could not have taken her mother’s gold. So I
did not appear to notice the hand held out to me, and passed by with a
quickened step.

“But, Dr. Fenwick, stop!”

“No, ma’am, no! Miss Ashleigh would have recovered as soon without me.
Whenever my aid is really wanted, then--but Heaven grant that time may
never come! We will talk again about her to-morrow.”

I was gone,--now in the garden ground, odorous with blossoms; now in the
lane, inclosed by the narrow walls; now in the deserted streets, over
which the moon shone full as in that winter night when I hurried from
the chamber of death. But the streets were not ghastly now, and the moon
was no longer Hecate, that dreary goddess of awe and spectres, but the
sweet, simple Lady of the Stars, on whose gentle face lovers have gazed
ever since (if that guess of astronomers be true) she was parted from
earth to rule the tides of its deeps from afar, even as love, from love
divided, rules the heart that yearns towards it with mysterious law.






CHAPTER XI.

With what increased benignity I listened to the patients who visited me
the next morning! The whole human race seemed to be worthier of love,
and I longed to diffuse amongst all some rays of the glorious hope that
had dawned upon my heart. My first call, when I went forth, was on the
poor young woman from whom I had been returning the day before, when an
impulse, which seemed like a fate, had lured me into the grounds where I
had first seen Lilian. I felt grateful to this poor patient; without her
Lilian herself might be yet unknown to me.

The girl’s brother, a young man employed in the police, and whose pay
supported a widowed mother and the suffering sister, received me at the
threshold of the cottage.

“Oh, sir, she is so much better to-day; almost free from pain. Will she
live now; can she live?”

“If my treatment has really done the good you say; if she be really
better under it, I think her recovery may be pronounced. But I must
first see her.”

The girl was indeed wonderfully better. I felt that my skill was
achieving a signal triumph; but that day even my intellectual pride was
forgotten in the luxurious unfolding of that sense of heart which had so
newly waked into blossom.

As I recrossed the threshold, I smiled on the brother, who was still
lingering there,--

“Your sister is saved, Wady. She needs now chiefly wine, and good though
light nourishment; these you will find at my house; call there for them
every day.”

“God bless you, sir! If ever I can serve you--” His tongue faltered, he
could say no more.

Serve me, Allen Fenwick--that poor policeman! Me, whom a king could not
serve! What did I ask from earth but Fame and Lilian’s heart? Thrones
and bread man wins from the aid of others; fame and woman’s heart he can
only gain through himself.

So I strode gayly up the hill, through the iron gates, into the fairy
ground, and stood before Lilian’s home.

The man-servant, on opening the door, seemed somewhat confused, and said
hastily before I spoke,--

“Not at home, sir; a note for you.”

I turned the note mechanically in my hand; I felt stunned.

“Not at home! Miss Ashleigh cannot be out. How is she?”

“Better, sir, thank you.”

I still could not open the note; my eyes turned wistfully towards
the windows of the house, and there--at the drawing-room window--I
encountered the scowl of Mr. Vigors. I coloured with resentment, divined
that I was dismissed, and walked away with a proud crest and a firm
step.

When I was out of the gates, in the blind lane, I opened the note. It
began formally. “Mrs. Ashleigh presents her compliments,” and went on to
thank me, civilly enough, for my attendance the night before, would not
give me the trouble to repeat my visit, and inclosed a fee, double the
amount of the fee prescribed by custom. I flung the money, as an asp
that had stung me, over the high wall, and tore the note into shreds.
Having thus idly vented my rage, a dull gnawing sorrow came heavily down
upon all other emotions, stifling and replacing them. At the mouth of
the lane I halted. I shrank from the thought of the crowded streets
beyond; I shrank yet more from the routine of duties, which stretched
before me in the desert into which daily life was so suddenly smitten. I
sat down by the roadside, shading my dejected face with a nervous hand.
I looked up as the sound of steps reached my ear, and saw Dr. Jones
coming briskly along the lane, evidently from Abbots’ House. He must
have been there at the very time I had called. I was not only dismissed
but supplanted. I rose before he reached the spot on which I had seated
myself, and went my way into the town, went through my allotted round of
professional visits; but my attentions were not so tenderly devoted,
my skill so genially quickened by the glow of benevolence, as my poorer
patients had found them in the morning. I have said how the physician
should enter the sick-room. “A Calm Intelligence!” But if you strike a
blow on the heart, the intellect suffers. Little worth, I suspect, was
my “calm intelligence” that day. Bichat, in his famous book upon Life
and Death, divides life into two classes,--animal and organic. Man’s
intellect, with the brain for its centre, belongs to life animal; his
passions to life organic, centred in the heart, in the viscera. Alas!
if the noblest passions through which alone we lift ourselves into the
moral realm of the sublime and beautiful really have their centre in the
life which the very vegetable, that lives organically, shares with us!
And, alas! if it be that life which we share with the vegetable, that
can cloud, obstruct, suspend, annul that life centred in the brain,
which we share with every being howsoever angelic, in every star
howsoever remote, on whom the Creator bestows the faculty of thought!






CHAPTER XII.

But suddenly I remembered Mrs. Poyntz. I ought to call on her. So I
closed my round of visits at her door. The day was then far advanced,
and the servant politely informed me that Mrs. Poyntz was at dinner. I
could only leave my card, with a message that I would pay my respects to
her the next day. That evening I received from her this note:--


   Dear Dr. Fenwick,--I regret much that I cannot have the pleasure of
   seeing you to-morrow.  Poyntz and I are going to visit his brother, at
   the other end of the county, and we start early.  We shall be away some
   days.  Sorry to hear from Mrs. Ashleigh that she has been persuaded by
   Mr. Vigors to consult Dr. Jones about Lilian. Vigors and Jones both
   frighten the poor mother, and insist upon consumptive tendencies.
   Unluckily, you seem to have said there was little the matter.  Some
   doctors train their practice as some preachers fill their churches,--by
   adroit use of the appeals to terror.  You do not want patients, Dr.
   Jones does.  And, after all, better perhaps as it is.
                           Yours, etc.
                                                 M. Poyntz.

To my more selfish grief, anxiety for Lilian was now added. I had seen
many more patients die from being mistreated for consumption than from
consumption itself. And Dr. Jones was a mercenary, cunning, needy man,
with much crafty knowledge of human foibles, but very little skill in
the treatment of human maladies. My fears were soon confirmed. A few
days after I heard from Miss Brabazon that Miss Ashleigh was seriously
ill, kept her room. Mrs. Ashleigh made this excuse for not immediately
returning the visits which the Hill had showered upon her. Miss Brabazon
had seen Dr. Jones, who had shaken his head, said it was a serious case;
but that time and care (his time and his care!) might effect wonders.

How stealthily at the dead of the night I would climb the Hill and look
towards the windows of the old sombre house,--one window, in which a
light burned dim and mournful, the light of a sick-room,--of hers!

At length Mrs. Poyntz came back, and I entered her house, having fully
resolved beforehand on the line of policy to be adopted towards the
potentate whom I hoped to secure as an ally. It was clear that neither
disguise nor half-confidence would baffle the penetration of so keen an
intellect, nor propitiate the good will of so imperious and resolute a
temper. Perfect frankness here was the wisest prudence; and after
all, it was most agreeable to my own nature, and most worthy of my own
honour.

Luckily, I found Mrs. Poyntz alone, and taking in both mine the hand
she somewhat coldly extended to me, I said, with the earnestness of
suppressed emotion,--

“You observed when I last saw you, that I had not yet asked you to be
my friend. I ask it now. Listen to me with all the indulgence you can
vouchsafe, and let me at least profit by your counsel if you refuse to
give me your aid.”

Rapidly, briefly, I went on to say how I had first seen Lilian, and how
sudden, how strange to myself, had been the impression which that first
sight of her had produced.

“You remarked the change that had come over me,” said I; “you divined
the cause before I divined it myself,--divined it as I sat there beside
you, thinking that through you I might see, in the freedom of social
intercourse, the face that was then haunting me. You know what has
since passed. Miss Ashleigh is ill; her case is, I am convinced,
wholly misunderstood. All other feelings are merged in one sense of
anxiety,--of alarm. But it has become due to me, due to all, to incur
the risk of your ridicule even more than of your reproof, by stating to
you thus candidly, plainly, bluntly, the sentiment which renders alarm
so poignant, and which, if scarcely admissible to the romance of some
wild dreamy boy, may seem an unpardonable folly in a man of my years and
my sober calling,--due to me, to you, to Mrs. Ashleigh, because still
the dearest thing in life to me is honour. And if you, who know Mrs.
Ashleigh so intimately, who must be more or less aware of her plans or
wishes for her daughter’s future,--if you believe that those plans or
wishes lead to a lot far more ambitious than an alliance with me could
offer to Miss Ashleigh, then aid Mr. Vigors in excluding me from the
house; aid me in suppressing a presumptuous, visionary passion. I cannot
enter that house without love and hope at my heart; and the threshold
of that house I must not cross if such love and such hope would be a sin
and a treachery in the eyes of its owner. I might restore Miss Ashleigh
to health; her gratitude might--I cannot continue. This danger must
not be to me nor to her, if her mother has views far above such a
son-in-law. And I am the more bound to consider all this while it is yet
time, because I heard you state that Miss Ashleigh had a fortune, was
what would be here termed an heiress. And the full consciousness that
whatever fame one in my profession may live to acquire, does not
open those vistas of social power and grandeur which are opened
by professions to my eyes less noble in themselves,--that full
consciousness, I say, was forced upon me by certain words of your own.
For the rest, you know my descent is sufficiently recognized as that
amidst well-born gentry to have rendered me no mesalliance to families
the most proud of their ancestry, if I had kept my hereditary estate and
avoided the career that makes me useful to man. But I acknowledge that
on entering a profession such as mine--entering any profession except
that of arms or the senate--all leave their pedigree at its door, an
erased or dead letter. All must come as equals, high-born or low-born,
into that arena in which men ask aid from a man as he makes himself; to
them his dead forefathers are idle dust. Therefore, to the advantage of
birth I cease to have a claim. I am but a provincial physician, whose
station would be the same had he been a cobbler’s son. But gold retains
its grand privilege in all ranks. He who has gold is removed from
the suspicion that attaches to the greedy fortune-hunter. My private
fortune, swelled by my savings, is sufficient to secure to any one I
married a larger settlement than many a wealthy squire can make. I need
no fortune with a wife; if she have one, it would be settled on herself.
Pardon these vulgar details. Now, have I made myself understood?”

“Fully,” answered the Queen of the Hill, who had listened to me quietly,
watchfully, and without one interruption, “fully; and you have done
well to confide in me with so generous an unreserve. But before I say
further, let me ask, what would be your advice for Lilian, supposing
that you ought not to attend her? You have no trust in Dr. Jones;
neither have I. And Annie Ashleigh’s note received to-day, begging me
to call, justifies your alarm. Still you think there is no tendency to
consumption?”

“Of that I am certain so far as my slight glimpse of a case that to me,
however, seems a simple and not uncommon one, will permit. But in
the alternative you put--that my own skill, whatever its worth, is
forbidden--my earnest advice is that Mrs. Ashleigh should take her
daughter at once to London, and consult there those great authorities to
whom I cannot compare my own opinion or experience; and by their counsel
abide.”

Mrs. Poyntz shaded her eyes with her hand for a few moments, and seemed
in deliberation with herself. Then she said, with her peculiar smile,
half grave, half ironical,--

“In matters more ordinary you would have won me to your side long ago.
That Mr. Vigors should have presumed to cancel my recommendation to a
settler on the Hill was an act of rebellion, and involved the honour
of my prerogative; but I suppressed my indignation at an affront so
unusual, partly out of pique against yourself, but much more, I think,
out of regard for you.”

“I understand. You detected the secret of my heart; you knew that Mrs.
Ashleigh would not wish to see her daughter the wife of a provincial
physician.”

“Am I sure, or are you sure, that the daughter herself would accept that
fate; or if she accepted it, would not repent?”

“Do you not think me the vainest of men when I say this,--that I cannot
believe I should be so enthralled by a feeling at war with my reason,
unfavoured by anything I can detect in my habits of mind, or even by the
dreams of a youth which exalted science and excluded love, unless I was
intimately convinced that Miss Ashleigh’s heart was free, that I could
win, and that I could keep it! Ask me why I am convinced of this, and I
can tell you no more why I think that she could love me than I can tell
you why I love her!”

“I am of the world, worldly; but I am a woman, womanly,--though I may
not care to be thought it. And, therefore, though what you say is,
regarded in a worldly point of view, sheer nonsense, regarded in a
womanly point of view, it is logically sound. But still you cannot know
Lilian as I do. Your nature and hers are in strong contrast. I do not
think she is a safe wife for you. The purest, the most innocent creature
imaginable, certainly that, but always in the seventh heaven; and you
in the seventh heaven just at this moment, but with an irresistible
gravitation to the solid earth, which will have its way again when
the honeymoon is over--I do not believe you two would harmonize by
intercourse. I do not believe Lilian would sympathize with you, and I am
sure you could not sympathize with her throughout the long dull course
of this workday life. And, therefore, for your sake, as well as hers, I
was not displeased to find that Dr. Jones had replaced you; and now, in
return for your frankness, I say frankly, do not go again to that house.
Conquer this sentiment, fancy, passion, whatever it be. And I will
advise Mrs. Ashleigh to take Lilian to town. Shall it be so settled?”

I could not speak. I buried my face in my hands--misery, misery,
desolation!

I know not how long I remained thus silent, perhaps many minutes. At
length I felt a cold, firm, but not ungentle hand placed upon mine; and
a clear, full, but not discouraging voice said to me,--

“Leave me to think well over this conversation, and to ponder well the
value of all you have shown that you so deeply feel. The interests of
life do not fill both scales of the balance. The heart, which does not
always go in the same scale with the interests, still has its weight in
the scale opposed to them. I have heard a few wise men say, as many a
silly woman says, ‘Better be unhappy with one we love, than be happy
with one we love not.’ Do you say that too?”

“With every thought of my brain, every beat of my pulse, I say it.”

“After that answer, all my questionings cease. You shall hear from me
to-morrow. By that time, I shall have seen Annie and Lilian. I shall
have weighed both scales of the balance,--and the heart here, Allen
Fenwick, seems very heavy. Go, now. I hear feet on the stairs, Poyntz
bringing up some friendly gossiper; gossipers are spies.”

I passed my hand over my eyes, tearless, but how tears would have
relieved the anguish that burdened them! and, without a word, went down
the stairs, meeting at the landing-place Colonel Poyntz and the old man
whose pain my prescription had cured. The old man was whistling a merry
tune, perhaps first learned on the playground. He broke from it to
thank, almost to embrace me, as I slid by him. I seized his jocund
blessing as a good omen, and carried it with me as I passed into the
broad sunlight. Solitary--solitary! Should I be so evermore?






CHAPTER XIII.

The next day I had just dismissed the last of my visiting patients, and
was about to enter my carriage and commence my round, when I received a
twisted note containing but these words:--


   Call on me to-day, as soon as you can.

                                           M. Poyntz.

A few minutes afterwards I was in Mrs. Poyntz’s drawing-room.

“Well, Allen Fenwick” said she, “I do not serve friends by halves. No
thanks! I but adhere to a principle I have laid down for myself. I spent
last evening with the Ashleighs. Lilian is certainly much altered,--very
weak, I fear very ill, and I believe very unskillfully treated by Dr.
Jones. I felt that it was my duty to insist on a change of physician;
but there was something else to consider before deciding who that
physician should be. I was bound, as your confidante, to consult your
own scruples of honour. Of course I could not say point-blank to Mrs.
Ashleigh, ‘Dr. Fenwick admires your daughter, would you object to him
as a son-in-law?’ Of course I could not touch at all on the secret with
which you intrusted me; but I have not the less arrived at a conclusion,
in agreement with my previous belief, that not being a woman of the
world, Annie Ashleigh has none of the ambition which women of the world
would conceive for a daughter who has a good fortune and considerable
beauty; that her predominant anxiety is for her child’s happiness, and
her predominant fear is that her child will die. She would never oppose
any attachment which Lilian might form; and if that attachment were for
one who had preserved her daughter’s life, I believe her own heart would
gratefully go with her daughter’s. So far, then, as honour is concerned,
all scruples vanish.”

I sprang from my seat, radiant with joy. Mrs. Poyntz dryly continued:
“You value yourself on your common-sense, and to that I address a few
words of counsel which may not be welcome to your romance. I said that
I did not think you and Lilian would suit each other in the long
run; reflection confirms me in that supposition. Do not look at me so
incredulously and so sadly. Listen, and take heed. Ask yourself what, as
a man whose days are devoted to a laborious profession, whose ambition
is entwined with its success, whose mind must be absorbed in its
pursuits,--ask yourself what kind of a wife you would have sought to
win; had not this sudden fancy for a charming face rushed over your
better reason, and obliterated all previous plans and resolutions.
Surely some one with whom your heart would have been quite at rest; by
whom your thoughts would have been undistracted from the channels into
which your calling should concentrate their flow; in short, a serene
companion in the quiet holiday of a trustful home! Is it not so?”

“You interpret my own thoughts when they have turned towards marriage.
But what is there in Lilian Ashleigh that should mar the picture you
have drawn?”

“What is there in Lilian Ashleigh which in the least accords with the
picture? In the first place, the wife of a young physician should not
be his perpetual patient. The more he loves her, and the more worthy she
may be of love, the more her case will haunt him wherever he goes. When
he returns home, it is not to a holiday; the patient he most cares for,
the anxiety that most gnaws him, awaits him there.”

“But, good heavens! why should Lilian Ashleigh be a perpetual patient?
The sanitary resources of youth are incalculable. And--”

“Let me stop you; I cannot argue against a physician in love! I will
give up that point in dispute, remaining convinced that there is
something in Lilian’s constitution which will perplex, torment, and
baffle you. It was so with her father, whom she resembles in face and in
character. He showed no symptoms of any grave malady. His outward form
was, like Lilian’s, a model of symmetry, except in this, that, like
hers, it was too exquisitely delicate; but when seemingly in the midst
of perfect health, at any slight jar on the nerves he would become
alarmingly ill. I was sure that he would die young, and he did so.”

“Ay, but Mrs. Ashleigh said that his death was from brain-fever, brought
on by over-study. Rarely, indeed, do women so fatigue the brain. No
female patient, in the range of my practice, ever died of purely mental
exertion.”

“Of purely mental exertion, no; but of heart emotion, many female
patients, perhaps? Oh, you own that! I know nothing about nerves; but I
suppose that, whether they act on the brain or the heart, the result
to life is much the same if the nerves be too finely strung for life’s
daily wear and tear. And this is what I mean, when I say you and Lilian
will not suit. As yet, she is a mere child; her nature undeveloped, and
her affections therefore untried. You might suppose that you had won her
heart; she might believe that she gave it to you, and both be deceived.
If fairies nowadays condescended to exchange their offspring with those
of mortals, and if the popular tradition did not represent a fairy
changeling as an ugly peevish creature, with none of the grace of its
parents, I should be half inclined to suspect that Lilian was one of the
elfin people. She never seems at home on earth; and I do not think she
will ever be contented with a prosaic earthly lot. Now I have told you
why I do not think she will suit you. I must leave it to yourself to
conjecture how far you would suit her. I say this in due season, while
you may set a guard upon your impulse; while you may yet watch, and
weigh, and meditate; and from this moment on that subject I say no more.
I lend advice, but I never throw it away.”

She came here to a dead pause, and began putting on her bonnet and
scarf, which lay on the table beside her. I was a little chilled by her
words, and yet more by the blunt, shrewd, hard look and manner which
aided the effect of their delivery; but the chill melted away in the
sudden glow of my heart when she again turned towards me and said,--

“Of course you guess, from these preliminary cautions, that you are
going into danger? Mrs. Ashleigh wishes to consult you about Lilian, and
I propose to take you to her house.”

“Oh, my friend, my dear friend, how can I ever repay you?” I caught her
hand, the white firm hand, and lifted it to my lips.

She drew it somewhat hastily away, and laying it gently on my shoulder,
said, in a soft voice, “Poor Allen, how little the world knows either
of us! But how little perhaps we know ourselves! Come, your carriage is
here? That is right; we must put down Dr. Jones publicly and in all our
state.”

In the carriage Mrs. Poyntz told me the purport of that conversation
with Mrs. Ashleigh to which I owed my re-introduction to Abbots’ House.
It seems that Mr. Vigors had called early the morning after my first
visit! had evinced much discomposure on hearing that I had been
summoned! dwelt much on my injurious treatment of Dr. Lloyd, whom,
as distantly related to himself, and he (Mr. Vigors) being distantly
connected with the late Gilbert Ashleigh, he endeavoured to fasten upon
his listener as one of her husband’s family, whose quarrel she was bound
in honour to take up. He spoke of me as an infidel “tainted with French
doctrines,” and as a practitioner rash and presumptuous; proving his own
freedom from presumption and rashness by flatly deciding that my opinion
must be wrong. Previously to Mrs. Ashleigh’s migration to L----, Mr.
Vigors had interested her in the pretended phenomena of mesmerism. He
had consulted a clairvoyante, much esteemed by poor Dr. Lloyd, as
to Lilian’s health, and the clairvoyante had declared her to be
constitutionally predisposed to consumption. Mr. Vigors persuaded Mrs.
Ashleigh to come at once with him and see this clairvoyante herself,
armed with a lock of Lilian’s hair and a glove she had worn, as the
media of mesmerical rapport.

The clairvoyante, one of those I had publicly denounced as an impostor,
naturally enough denounced me in return. On being asked solemnly by
Mr. Vigors “to look at Dr. Fenwick and see if his influence would be
beneficial to the subject,” the sibyl had become violently agitated, and
said that, “when she looked at us together, we were enveloped in a black
cloud; that this portended affliction and sinister consequences; that
our rapport was antagonistic.” Mr. Vigors then told her to dismiss my
image, and conjure up that of Dr. Jones. Therewith the somnambule became
more tranquil, and said: “Dr. Jones would do well if he would be guided
by higher lights than his own skill, and consult herself daily as to the
proper remedies. The best remedy of all would be mesmerism. But since
Dr. Lloyd’s death, she did not know of a mesmerist, sufficiently gifted,
in affinity with the patient.” In fine, she impressed and awed Mrs.
Ashleigh, who returned in haste, summoned Dr. Jones, and dismissed
myself.

“I could not have conceived Mrs. Ashleigh to be so utterly wanting in
common-sense,” said I. “She talked rationally enough when I saw her.”

“She has common-sense in general, and plenty of the sense most common,”
 answered Mrs. Poyntz; “but she is easily led and easily frightened
wherever her affections are concerned, and therefore, just as easily as
she had been persuaded by Mr. Vigors and terrified by the somnambule,
I persuaded her against the one, and terrified her against the other. I
had positive experience on my side, since it was clear that Lilian had
been getting rapidly worse under Dr. Jones’s care. The main obstacles
I had to encounter in inducing Mrs. Ashleigh to consult you again
were, first, her reluctance to disoblige Mr. Vigors, as a friend and
connection of Lilian’s father; and, secondly, her sentiment of shame
in re-inviting your opinion after having treated you with so little
respect. Both these difficulties I took on myself. I bring you to her
house, and, on leaving you, I shall go on to Mr. Vigors, and tell him
what is done is my doing, and not to be undone by him; so that matter
is settled. Indeed, if you were out of the question, I should not suffer
Mr. Vigors to re-introduce all these mummeries of clairvoyance and
mesmerism into the precincts of the Hill. I did not demolish a man I
really liked in Dr. Lloyd, to set up a Dr. Jones, whom I despise, in his
stead. Clairvoyance on Abbey Hill, indeed! I saw enough of it before.”

“True; your strong intellect detected at once the absurdity of the whole
pretence,--the falsity of mesmerism, the impossibility of clairvoyance.”

“No, my strong intellect did nothing of the kind. I do not know whether
mesmerism be false or clairvoyance impossible; and I don’t wish to know.
All I do know is, that I saw the Hill in great danger,--young ladies
allowing themselves to be put to sleep by gentlemen, and pretending
they had no will of their own against such fascination! Improper and
shocking! And Miss Brabazon beginning to prophesy, and Mrs. Leopold
Smythe questioning her maid (whom Dr. Lloyd declared to be highly
gifted) as to all the secrets of her friends. When I saw this, I said,
‘The Hill is becoming demoralized; the Hill is making itself ridiculous;
the Hill must be saved!’ I remonstrated with Dr. Lloyd as a friend; he
remained obdurate. I annihilated him as an enemy, not to me but to the
State. I slew my best lover for the good of Rome. Now you know why I
took your part,--not because I have any opinion, one way or the other,
as to the truth or falsehood of what Dr. Lloyd asserted; but I have a
strong opinion that, whether they be true or false, his notions were
those which are not to be allowed on the Hill. And so, Allen Fenwick,
that matter was settled.”

Perhaps at another time I might have felt some little humiliation
to learn that I had been honoured with the influence of this great
potentate not as a champion of truth, but as an instrument of policy;
and I might have owned to some twinge of conscience in having assisted
to sacrifice a fellow-seeker after science--misled, no doubt, but
preferring his independent belief to his worldly interest--and sacrifice
him to those deities with whom science is ever at war,--the Prejudices
of a Clique sanctified into the Proprieties of the World. But at that
moment the words I heard made no perceptible impression on my mind. The
gables of Abbots’ House were visible above the evergreens and lilacs;
another moment, and the carriage stopped at the door.






CHAPTER XIV.

Mrs. Ashleigh received us in the dining-room. Her manner to me, at
first, was a little confused and shy. But my companion soon communicated
something of her own happy ease to her gentler friend. After a short
conversation we all three went to Lilian, who was in a little room on
the ground-floor, fitted up as her study. I was glad to perceive that my
interdict of the deathchamber had been respected.

She reclined on a sofa near the window, which was, however, jealously
closed; the light of the bright May-day obscured by blinds and
curtains; a large fire on the hearth; the air of the room that of a
hot-house,--the ignorant, senseless, exploded system of nursing into
consumption those who are confined on suspicion of it! She did not heed
us as we entered noiselessly; her eyes were drooped languidly on the
floor, and with difficulty I suppressed the exclamation that rose to my
lips on seeing her. She seemed within the last few days so changed, and
on the aspect of the countenance there was so profound a melancholy!
But as she slowly turned at the sound of our footsteps, and her eyes met
mine, a quick blush came into the wan cheek, and she half rose, but sank
back as if the effort exhausted her. There was a struggle for breath,
and a low hollow cough. Was it possible that I had been mistaken, and
that in that cough was heard the warning knell of the most insidious
enemy to youthful life?

I sat down by her side; I lured her on to talk of indifferent
subjects,--the weather, the gardens, the bird in the cage, which was
placed on the table near her. Her voice, at first low and feeble, became
gradually stronger, and her face lighted up with a child’s innocent,
playful smile. No, I had not been mistaken! That was no lymphatic,
nerveless temperament, on which consumption fastens as its lawful prey;
here there was no hectic pulse, no hurried waste of the vital flame.
Quietly and gently I made my observations, addressed my questions,
applied my stethoscope; and when I turned my face towards her mother’s
anxious, eager eyes, that face told my opinion; for her mother sprang
forward, clasped my hand, and said, through her struggling tears,--

“You smile! You see nothing to fear?”

“Fear! No, indeed! You will soon be again yourself, Miss Ashleigh, will
you not?”

“Yes,” she said, with her sweet laugh, “I shall be well now very soon.
But may I not have the window open; may I not go into the garden? I so
long for fresh air.”

“No, no, darling,” exclaimed Mrs. Ashleigh, “not while the east winds
last. Dr. Jones said on no account. On no account, Dr. Fenwick, eh?”

“Will you take my arm, Miss Ashleigh, for a few turns up and down
the room?” said I. “We will then see how far we may rebel against Dr.
Jones.”

She rose with some little effort, but there was no cough. At first
her step was languid; it became lighter and more elastic after a few
moments.

“Let her come out,” said I to Mrs. Ashleigh. “The wind is not in the
east, and, while we are out, pray bid your servant lower to the last bar
in the grate that fire,--only fit for Christmas.”

“But--”

“Ah, no buts! He is a poor doctor who is not a stern despot.”

So the straw hat and mantle were sent for. Lilian was wrapped with
unnecessary care, and we all went forth into the garden. Involuntarily
we took the way to the Monk’s Well, and at every step Lilian seemed to
revive under the bracing air and temperate sun. We paused by the well.

“You do not feel fatigued, Miss Ashleigh?”

“No.”

“But your face seems changed. It is grown sadder.”

“Not sadder.”

“Sadder than when I first saw it,--saw it when you were seated here!” I
said this in a whisper. I felt her hand tremble as it lay on my arm.

“You saw me seated here!”

“Yes. I will tell you how some day.”

Lilian lifted her eyes to mine, and there was in them that same surprise
which I had noticed on my first visit,--a surprise that perplexed me,
blended with no displeasure, but yet with a something of vague alarm.

We soon returned to the house.

Mrs. Ashleigh made me a sign to follow her into the drawing-room,
leaving Mrs. Poyntz with Lilian.

“Well?” said she, tremblingly.

“Permit me to see Dr. Jones’s prescriptions. Thank you. Ay, I thought
so. My dear madam, the mistake here has been in depressing nature
instead of strengthening; in narcotics instead of stimulants. The main
stimulants which leave no reaction are air and light. Promise me that I
may have my own way for a week,--that all I recommend will be implicitly
heeded?”

“I promise. But that cough,--you noticed it?”

“Yes. The nervous system is terribly lowered, and nervous exhaustion is
a strange impostor; it imitates all manner of complaints with which
it has no connection. The cough will soon disappear! But pardon my
question. Mrs. Poyntz tells me that you consulted a clairvoyants about
your daughter. Does Miss Ashleigh know that you did so?”

“No; I did not tell her.”

“I am glad of that. And pray, for Heaven’s sake, guard her against all
that may set her thinking on such subjects. Above all, guard her against
concentring attention on any malady that your fears erroneously ascribe
to her. It is amongst the phenomena of our organization that you cannot
closely rivet your consciousness on any part of the frame, however
healthy, but it will soon begin to exhibit morbid sensibility. Try
to fix all your attention on your little finger for half an hour, and
before the half hour is over the little finger will be uneasy, probably
even painful. How serious, then, is the danger to a young girl, at the
age in which imagination is most active, most intense, if you force
upon her a belief that she is in danger of a mortal disease! It is a
peculiarity of youth to brood over the thought of early death much more
resignedly, much more complacently, than we do in maturer years. Impress
on a young imaginative girl, as free from pulmonary tendencies as you
and I are, the conviction that she must fade away into the grave, and
though she may not actually die of consumption, you instil slow poison
into her system. Hope is the natural aliment of youth. You impoverish
nourishment where you discourage hope. As soon as this temporary illness
is over, reject for your daughter the melancholy care which seems to her
own mind to mark her out from others of her age. Rear her for the air,
which is the kindest life-giver; to sleep with open windows: to be out
at sunrise. Nature will do more for her than all our drugs can do. You
have been hitherto fearing Nature; now trust to her.”

Here Mrs. Poyntz joined us, and having, while I had been speaking,
written my prescription and some general injunctions, I closed my advice
with an appeal to that powerful protectress.

“This, my dear madam, is a case in which I need your aid, and I ask
it. Miss Ashleigh should not be left with no other companion than her
mother. A change of faces is often as salutary as a change of air.
If you could devote an hour or two this very evening to sit with Miss
Ashleigh, to talk to her with your usual cheerfulness, and--”

“Annie,” interrupted Mrs. Poyntz, “I will come and drink tea with you at
half-past seven, and bring my knitting; and perhaps, if you ask him, Dr.
Fenwick will come too! He can be tolerably entertaining when he likes
it.”

“It is too great a tax on his kindness, I fear,” said Mrs. Ashleigh.
“But,” she added cordially, “I should be grateful indeed if he would
spare us an hour of his time.”

I murmured an assent which I endeavoured to make not too joyous.

“So that matter is settled,” said Mrs. Poyntz; “and now I shall go to
Mr. Vigors and prevent his further interference.”

“Oh, but, Margaret, pray don’t offend him,--a connection of my poor
dear Gilbert’s. And so tetchy! I am sure I do not know how you’ll manage
to--”

“To get rid of him? Never fear. As I manage everything and everybody,”
 said Mrs. Poyntz, bluntly. So she kissed her friend on the forehead,
gave me a gracious nod, and, declining the offer of my carriage, walked
with her usual brisk, decided tread down the short path towards the
town.

Mrs. Ashleigh timidly approached me, and again the furtive hand
bashfully insinuated the hateful fee.

“Stay,” said I; “this is a case which needs the most constant watching.
I wish to call so often that I should seem the most greedy of doctors if
my visits were to be computed at guineas. Let me be at ease to effect
my cure; my pride of science is involved in it. And when amongst all the
young ladies of the Hill you can point to none with a fresher bloom, or
a fairer promise of healthful life, than the patient you intrust to my
care, why, then the fee and the dismissal. Nay, nay; I must refer you to
our friend Mrs. Poyntz. It was so settled with her before she brought me
here to displace Dr. Jones.” Therewith I escaped.






CHAPTER XV.

In less than a week Lilian was convalescent; in less than a fortnight
she regained her usual health,--nay, Mrs. Ashleigh declared that she
had never known her daughter appear so cheerful and look so well. I had
established a familiar intimacy at Abbots’ House; most of my evenings
were spent there. As horse exercise formed an important part of my
advice, Mrs. Ashleigh had purchased a pretty and quiet horse for her
daughter; and, except the weather was very unfavourable, Lilian now
rode daily with Colonel Poyntz, who was a notable equestrian, and often
accompanied by Miss Jane Poyntz, and other young ladies of the Hill.
I was generally relieved from my duties in time to join her as she
returned homewards. Thus we made innocent appointments, openly, frankly,
in her mother’s presence, she telling me beforehand in what direction
excursions had been planned with Colonel Poyntz, and I promising to fall
in with the party--if my avocations would permit. At my suggestion,
Mrs. Ashleigh now opened her house almost every evening to some of the
neighbouring families; Lilian was thus habituated to the intercourse of
young persons of her own age. Music and dancing and childlike games made
the old house gay. And the Hill gratefully acknowledged to Mrs. Poyntz,
“that the Ashleighs were indeed a great acquisition.”

But my happiness was not uncheckered. In thus unselfishly surrounding
Lilian with others, I felt the anguish of that jealousy which is
inseparable from those earlier stages of love, when the lover as yet
has won no right to that self-confidence which can only spring from the
assurance that he is loved.

In these social reunions I remained aloof from Lilian. I saw her courted
by the gay young admirers whom her beauty and her fortune drew around
her,--her soft face brightening in the exercise of the dance, which the
gravity of my profession rather than my years forbade to join; and her
laugh, so musically subdued, ravishing my ear and fretting my heart
as if the laugh were a mockery on my sombre self and my presumptuous
dreams. But no, suddenly, shyly, her eyes would steal away from those
about her, steal to the corner in which I sat, as if they missed me,
and, meeting my own gaze, their light softened before they turned away;
and the colour on her cheek would deepen, and to her lip there came a
smile different from the smile that it shed on others. And then--and
then--all jealousy, all sadness vanished, and I felt the glory which
blends with the growing belief that we are loved.

In that diviner epoch of man’s mysterious passion, when ideas of
perfection and purity, vague and fugitive before, start forth and
concentre themselves round one virgin shape,--that rises out from the
sea of creation, welcomed by the Hours and adorned by the Graces,--how
the thought that this archetype of sweetness and beauty singles himself
from the millions, singles himself for her choice, ennobles and lifts
up his being! Though after-experience may rebuke the mortal’s illusion,
that mistook for a daughter of Heaven a creature of clay like himself,
yet for a while the illusion has grandeur. Though it comes from the
senses which shall later oppress and profane it, the senses at first
shrink into shade, awed and hushed by the presence that charms them. All
that is brightest and best in the man has soared up like long-dormant
instincts of Heaven, to greet and to hallow what to him seems life’s
fairest dream of the heavenly! Take the wings from the image of Love,
and the god disappears from the form!

Thus, if at moments jealous doubt made my torture, so the moment’s
relief from it sufficed for my rapture. But I had a cause for disquiet
less acute but less varying than jealousy.

Despite Lilian’s recovery from the special illness which had more
immediately absorbed my care, I remained perplexed as to its cause
and true nature. To her mother I gave it the convenient epithet of
“nervous;” but the epithet did not explain to myself all the symptoms I
classified by it. There was still, at times, when no cause was apparent
or conjecturable, a sudden change in the expression of her countenance,
in the beat of her pulse; the eye would become fixed, the bloom would
vanish, the pulse would sink feebler and feebler till it could be
scarcely felt; yet there was no indication of heart disease, of
which such sudden lowering of life is in itself sometimes a warning
indication. The change would pass away after a few minutes, during which
she seemed unconscious, or, at least, never spoke--never appeared to
heed what was said to her. But in the expression of her countenance
there was no character of suffering or distress; on the contrary,
a wondrous serenity, that made her beauty more beauteous, her very
youthfulness younger; and when this spurious or partial kind of syncope
passed, she recovered at once without effort, without acknowledging
that she had felt faint or unwell, but rather with a sense of recruited
vitality, as the weary obtain from a sleep. For the rest her spirits
were more generally light and joyous than I should have premised from
her mother’s previous description. She would enter mirthfully into the
mirth of young companions round her: she had evidently quick perception
of the sunny sides of life; an infantine gratitude for kindness; an
infantine joy in the trifles that amuse only those who delight in tastes
pure and simple. But when talk rose into graver and more contemplative
topics, her attention became earnest and absorbed; and sometimes a rich
eloquence, such as I have never before nor since heard from lips so
young, would startle me first into a wondering silence, and soon into a
disapproving alarm: for the thoughts she then uttered seemed to me too
fantastic, too visionary, too much akin to the vagaries of a wild though
beautiful imagination. And then I would seek to check, to sober,
to distract fancies with which my reason had no sympathy, and the
indulgence of which I regarded as injurious to the normal functions of
the brain.

When thus, sometimes with a chilling sentence, sometimes with a
half-sarcastic laugh, I would repress outpourings frank and musical
as the songs of a forest-bird, she would look at me with a kind of
plaintive sorrow,--often sigh and shiver as she turned away. Only in
those modes did she show displeasure; otherwise ever sweet and docile,
and ever, if, seeing that I had pained her, I asked forgiveness,
humbling herself rather to ask mine, and brightening our reconciliation
with her angel smile. As yet I had not dared to speak of love; as yet I
gazed on her as the captive gazes on the flowers and the stars through
the gratings of his cell, murmuring to himself, “When shall the doors
unclose?”






CHAPTER XVI.

It was with a wrath suppressed in the presence of the fair ambassadress,
that Mr. Vigors had received from Mrs. Poyntz the intelligence that I
had replaced Dr. Jones at Abbots’ House not less abruptly than Dr. Jones
had previously supplanted me. As Mrs. Poyntz took upon herself the whole
responsibility of this change, Mr. Vigors did not venture to condemn it
to her face; for the Administrator of Laws was at heart no little in awe
of the Autocrat of Proprieties; as Authority, howsoever established, is
in awe of Opinion, howsoever capricious.

To the mild Mrs. Ashleigh the magistrate’s anger was more decidedly
manifested. He ceased his visits; and in answer to a long and
deprecatory letter with which she endeavoured to soften his resentment
and win him back to the house, he replied by an elaborate combination
of homily and satire. He began by excusing himself from accepting
her invitations, on the ground that his time was valuable, his habits
domestic; and though ever willing to sacrifice both time and habits
where he could do good, he owed it to himself and to mankind to
sacrifice neither where his advice was rejected and his opinion
contemned. He glanced briefly, but not hastily, at the respect with
which her late husband had deferred to his judgment, and the benefits
which that deference had enabled him to bestow. He contrasted the
husband’s deference with the widow’s contumely, and hinted at the
evils which the contumely would not permit him to prevent. He could
not presume to say what women of the world might think due to deceased
husbands, but even women of the world generally allowed the claims of
living children, and did not act with levity where their interests were
concerned, still less where their lives were at stake. As to Dr. Jones,
he, Mr. Vigors, had the fullest confidence in his skill. Mrs. Ashleigh
must judge for herself whether Mrs. Poyntz was as good an authority upon
medical science as he had no doubt she was upon shawls and ribbons. Dr.
Jones was a man of caution and modesty; he did not indulge in the
hollow boasts by which charlatans decoy their dupes; but Dr. Jones had
privately assured him that though the case was one that admitted of no
rash experiments, he had no fear of the result if his own prudent system
were persevered in. What might be the consequences of any other system,
Dr. Jones would not say, because he was too high-minded to express his
distrust of the rival who had made use of underhand arts to supplant
him. But Mr. Vigors was convinced, from other sources of information
(meaning, I presume, the oracular prescience of his clairvoyants), that
the time would come when the poor young lady would herself insist on
discarding Dr. Fenwick, and when “that person” would appear in a very
different light to many who now so fondly admired and so reverentially
trusted him. When that time arrived, he, Mr. Vigors, might again be of
use; but, meanwhile, though he declined to renew his intimacy at Abbots’
House, or to pay unavailing visits of mere ceremony, his interest in
the daughter of his old friend remained undiminished, nay, was rather
increased by compassion; that he should silently keep his eye upon
her; and whenever anything to her advantage suggested itself to him,
he should not be deterred by the slight with which Mrs. Ashleigh
had treated his judgment from calling on her, and placing before her
conscience as a mother his ideas for her child’s benefit, leaving to
herself then, as now, the entire responsibility of rejecting the advice
which he might say, without vanity, was deemed of some value by those
who could distinguish between sterling qualities and specious pretences.

Mrs. Ashleigh’s was that thoroughly womanly nature which instinctively
leans upon others. She was diffident, trustful, meek, affectionate. Not
quite justly had Mrs. Poyntz described her as “commonplace weak,” for
though she might be called weak, it was not because she was commonplace;
she had a goodness of heart, a sweetness of disposition, to which
that disparaging definition could not apply. She could only be called
commonplace inasmuch as in the ordinary daily affairs of life she had a
great deal of ordinary daily commonplace good-sense. Give her a routine
to follow, and no routine could be better adhered to. In the allotted
sphere of a woman’s duties she never seemed in fault. No household, not
even Mrs. Poyntz’s, was more happily managed. The old Abbots’ House had
merged its original antique gloom in the softer character of pleasing
repose. All her servants adored Mrs. Ashleigh; all found it a pleasure
to please her; her establishment had the harmony of clockwork; comfort
diffused itself round her like quiet sunshine round a sheltered spot.
To gaze on her pleasing countenance, to listen to the simple talk that
lapsed from her guileless lips, in even, slow, and lulling murmur, was
in itself a respite from “eating cares.” She was to the mind what the
colour of green is to the eye. She had, therefore, excellent sense in
all that relates to every-day life. There, she needed not to consult
another; there, the wisest might have consulted her with profit. But
the moment anything, however trivial in itself, jarred on the routine to
which her mind had grown wedded, the moment an incident hurried her out
of the beaten track of woman’s daily life, then her confidence forsook
her; then she needed a confidant, an adviser; and by that confidant
or adviser she could be credulously lured or submissively controlled.
Therefore, when she lost, in Mr. Vigors, the guide she had been
accustomed to consult whenever she needed guidance, she turned;
helplessly and piteously, first to Mrs. Poyntz, and then yet more
imploringly to me, because a woman of that character is never quite
satisfied without the advice of a man; and where an intimacy more
familiar than that of his formal visits is once established with a
physician, confidence in him grows fearless and rapid, as the natural
result of sympathy concentrated on an object of anxiety in common
between himself and the home which opens its sacred recess to his
observant but tender eye. Thus Mrs. Ashleigh had shown me Mr. Vigors’s
letter, and, forgetting that I might not be as amiable as herself,
besought me to counsel her how to conciliate and soften her lost
husband’s friend and connection. That character clothed him with dignity
and awe in her soft forgiving eyes. So, smothering my own resentment,
less perhaps at the tone of offensive insinuation against myself than
at the arrogance with which this prejudiced intermeddler implied to a
mother the necessity of his guardian watch over a child under her
own care, I sketched a reply which seemed to me both dignified and
placatory, abstaining from all discussion, and conveying the assurance
that Mrs. Ashleigh would be at all times glad to hear, and disposed to
respect, whatever suggestion so esteemed a friend of her husband would
kindly submit to her for the welfare of her daughter.

There all communication had stopped for about a month since the date of
my reintroduction to Abbots’ House. One afternoon I unexpectedly met Mr.
Vigors at the entrance of the blind lane, I on my way to Abbots’ House,
and my first glance at his face told me that he was coming from it, for
the expression of that face was more than usually sinister; the sullen
scowl was lit into significant menace by a sneer of unmistakable
triumph. I felt at once that he had succeeded in some machination
against me, and with ominous misgivings quickened my steps.

I found Mrs. Ashleigh seated alone in front of the house, under a large
cedar-tree that formed a natural arbour in the centre of the sunny lawn.
She was perceptibly embarrassed as I took my seat beside her.

“I hope,” said I, forcing a smile, “that Mr. Vigors has not been telling
you that I shall kill my patient, or that she looks much worse than she
did under Dr. Jones’s care?”

“No,” she said. “He owned cheerfully that Lilian had grown quite strong,
and said, without any displeasure, that he had heard how gay she had
been, riding out and even dancing,--which is very kind in him, for he
disapproves of dancing, on principle.”

“But still I can see he has said something to vex or annoy you; and, to
judge by his countenance when I met him in the lane, I should conjecture
that that something was intended to lower the confidence you so kindly
repose in me.”

“I assure you not; he did not mention your name, either to me or to
Lilian. I never knew him more friendly; quite like old times. He is a
good man at heart, very, and was much attached to my poor husband.”

“Did Mr. Ashleigh profess a very high opinion of Mr. Vigors?”

“Well, I don’t quite know that, because my dear Gilbert never spoke to
me much about him. Gilbert was naturally very silent. But he shrank from
all trouble--all worldly affairs--and Mr. Vigors managed his estate, and
inspected his steward’s books, and protected him through a long lawsuit
which he had inherited from his father. It killed his father. I don’t
know what we should have done without Mr. Vigors, and I am so glad he
has forgiven me.”

“Hem! Where is Miss Ashleigh? Indoors?”

“No; somewhere in the grounds. But, my dear Dr. Fenwick, do not leave me
yet; you are so very, very kind, and somehow I have grown to look upon
you quite as an old friend. Something has happened which has put me out,
quite put me out.”

She said this wearily and feebly, closing her eyes as if she were indeed
put out in the sense of extinguished.

“The feeling of friendship you express,” said I, with earnestness, “is
reciprocal. On my side it is accompanied by a peculiar gratitude. I am
a lonely man, by a lonely fireside, no parents, no near kindred, and in
this town, since Dr. Faber left it, without cordial intimacy till I knew
you. In admitting me so familiarly to your hearth, you have given me
what I have never known before since I came to man’s estate,--a glimpse
of the happy domestic life; the charm and relief to eye, heart, and
spirit which is never known but in households cheered by the face of
woman. Thus my sentiment for you and yours is indeed that of an old
friend; and in any private confidence you show me, I feel as if I were
no longer a lonely man, without kindred, without home.”

Mrs. Ashleigh seemed much moved by these words, which my heart had
forced from my lips; and, after replying to me with simple unaffected
warmth of kindness, she rose, took my arm, and continued thus as we
walked slowly to and fro the lawn: “You know, perhaps, that my poor
husband left a sister, now a widow like myself, Lady Haughton.”

“I remember that Mrs. Poyntz said you had such a sister-in-law, but I
never heard you mention Lady Haughton till now. Well!”

“Well, Mr. Vigors has brought me a letter from her, and it is that which
has put me out. I dare say you have not heard me speak before of Lady
Haughton, for I am ashamed to say I had almost forgotten her existence.
She is many years older than my husband was; of a very different
character. Only came once to see him after our marriage. Hurt me by
ridiculing him as a bookworm; offended him by looking a little down on
me, as a nobody without spirit and fashion, which was quite true. And,
except by a cold and unfeeling letter of formal condolence after I lost
my dear Gilbert, I have never heard from her since I have been a widow,
till to-day. But, after all, she is my poor husband’s sister, and his
eldest sister, and Lilian’s aunt; and, as Mr. Vigors says, ‘Duty is
duty.’”

Had Mrs. Ashleigh said “Duty is torture,” she could not have uttered the
maxim with more mournful and despondent resignation.

“And what does this lady require of you, which Mr. Vigors deems it your
duty to comply with?”

“Dear me! What penetration! You have guessed the exact truth. But I
think you will agree with Mr. Vigors. Certainly I have no option; yes, I
must do it.”

“My penetration is in fault now. Do what? Pray explain.”

“Poor Lady Haughton, six months ago, lost her only son, Sir James. Mr.
Vigors says he was a very fine young man, of whom any mother would have
been proud. I had heard he was wild; Mr. Vigors says, however, that he
was just going to reform, and marry a young lady whom his mother chose
for him, when, unluckily, he would ride a steeplechase, not being
quite sober at the time, and broke his neck. Lady Haughton has been, of
course, in great grief. She has retired to Brighton; and she wrote to me
from thence, and Mr. Vigors brought the letter. He will go back to her
to-day.”

“Will go back to Lady Haughton? What! Has he been to her? Is he, then,
as intimate with Lady Haughton as he was with her brother?”

“No; but there has been a long and constant correspondence. She had a
settlement on the Kirby Estate,--a sum which was not paid off during
Gilbert’s life; and a very small part of the property went to Sir James,
which part Mr. Ashleigh Sumner, the heir-at-law to the rest of the
estate, wished Mr. Vigors, as his guardian, to buy during his minority,
and as it was mixed up with Lady Haughton’s settlement her consent was
necessary as well as Sir James’s. So there was much negotiation, and,
since then, Ashleigh Sumner has come into the Haughton property, on poor
Sir James’s decease; so that complicated all affairs between Mr. Vigors
and Lady Haughton, and he has just been to Brighton to see her. And
poor Lady Haughton, in short, wants me and Lilian to go and visit her.
I don’t like it at all. But you said the other day you thought sea air
might be good for Lilian during the heat of the summer, and she seems
well enough now for the change. What do you think?”

“She is well enough, certainly. But Brighton is not the place I would
recommend for the summer; it wants shade, and is much hotter than L----”

“Yes; but unluckily Lady Haughton foresaw that objection, and she has a
jointure-house some miles from Brighton, and near the sea. She says the
grounds are well wooded, and the place is proverbially cool and healthy,
not far from St. Leonard’s Forest. And, in short, I have written to say
we will come. So we must, unless, indeed, you positively forbid it.”

“When do you think of going?”

“Next Monday. Mr. Vigors would make me fix the day. If you knew how I
dislike moving when I am once settled; and I do so dread Lady Haughton,
she is so fine, and so satirical! But Mr. Vigors says she is very much
altered, poor thing! I should like to show you her letter, but I had
just sent it to Margaret--Mrs. Poyntz--a minute or two before you came.
She knows something of Lady Haughton. Margaret knows everybody. And we
shall have to go in mourning for poor Sir James, I suppose; and Margaret
will choose it, for I am sure I can’t guess to what extent we should
be supposed to mourn. I ought to have gone in mourning before--poor
Gilbert’s nephew--but I am so stupid, and I had never seen him. And--But
oh, this is kind! Margaret herself,--my dear Margaret!”

We had just turned away from the house, in our up-and-down walk; and
Mrs. Poyntz stood immediately fronting us. “So, Anne, you have actually
accepted this invitation--and for Monday next?”

“Yes. Did I do wrong?”

“What does Dr. Fenwick say? Can Lilian go with safety?”

I could not honestly say she might not go with safety, but my heart sank
like lead as I answered,--

“Miss Ashleigh does not now need merely medical care; but more than half
her cure has depended on keeping her spirits free from depression. She
may miss the cheerful companionship of your daughter, and other young
ladies of her own age. A very melancholy house, saddened by a recent
bereavement, without other guests; a hostess to whom she is a stranger,
and whom Mrs. Ashleigh herself appears to deem formidable,--certainly
these do not make that change of scene which a physician would
recommend. When I spoke of sea air being good for Miss Ashleigh, I
thought of our own northern coasts at a later time of the year, when
I could escape myself for a few weeks and attend her. The journey to a
northern watering-place would be also shorter and less fatiguing; the
air there more invigorating.”

“No doubt that would be better,” said Mrs. Poyntz, dryly; “but so far
as your objections to visiting Lady Haughton have been stated, they
are groundless. Her house will not be melancholy; she will have other
guests, and Lilian will find companions, young like herself,--young
ladies--and young gentlemen too!”

There was something ominous, something compassionate, in the look which
Mrs. Poyntz cast upon me, in concluding her speech, which in itself was
calculated to rouse the fears of a lover. Lilian away from me, in
the house of a worldly-fine lady--such as I judged Lady Haughton to
be--surrounded by young gentlemen, as well as young ladies, by admirers,
no doubt, of a higher rank and more brilliant fashion than she had yet
known! I closed my eyes, and with strong effort suppressed a groan.

“My dear Annie, let me satisfy myself that Dr. Fenwick really does
consent to this journey. He will say to me what he may not to you.
Pardon me, then, if I take him aside for a few minutes. Let me find you
here again under this cedar-tree.”

Placing her arm in mine, and without waiting for Mrs. Ashleigh’s answer,
Mrs. Poyntz drew me into the more sequestered walk that belted the lawn;
and when we were out of Mrs. Ashleigh’s sight and hearing, said,--

“From what you have now seen of Lilian Ashleigh, do you still desire to
gain her as your wife?”

“Still? Oh, with an intensity proportioned to the fear with which I now
dread that she is about to pass away from my eyes--from my life!”

“Does your judgment confirm the choice of your heart? Reflect before you
answer.”

“Such selfish judgment as I had before I knew her would not confirm
but oppose it. The nobler judgment that now expands all my reasonings,
approves and seconds my heart. No, no; do not smile so sarcastically.
This is not the voice of a blind and egotistical passion. Let me
explain myself if I can. I concede to you that Lilian’s character is
undeveloped; I concede to you, that amidst the childlike freshness and
innocence of her nature, there is at times a strangeness, a mystery,
which I have not yet traced to its cause. But I am certain that the
intellect is organically as sound as the heart, and that intellect and
heart will ultimately--if under happy auspices--blend in that felicitous
union which constitutes the perfection of woman. But it is because
she does, and may for years, may perhaps always, need a more devoted,
thoughtful care than natures less tremulously sensitive, that my
judgment sanctions my choice; for whatever is best for her is best for
me. And who would watch over her as I should?”

“You have never yet spoken to Lilian as lovers speak?”

“Oh, no, indeed.”

“And, nevertheless, you believe that your affection would not be
unreturned?”

“I thought so once; I doubt now,--yet, in doubting, hope. But why do you
alarm me with these questions? You, too, forebode that in this visit I
may lose her forever?”

“If you fear that, tell her so, and perhaps her answer may dispel your
fear.”

“What! now, already, when she has scarcely known me a month. Might I not
risk all if too premature?”

“There is no almanac for love. With many women love is born the moment
they know they are beloved. All wisdom tells us that a moment once gone
is irrevocable. Were I in your place, I should feel that I approached a
moment that I must not lose. I have said enough; now I shall rejoin Mrs.
Ashleigh.”

“Stay--tell me first what Lady Haughton’s letter really contains to
prompt the advice with which you so transport, and yet so daunt, me when
you proffer it.”

“Not now; later, perhaps,--not now. If you wish to see Lilian alone, she
is by the Old Monk’s Well; I saw her seated there as I passed that way
to the house.”

“One word more,--only one. Answer this question frankly, for it is one
of honour. Do you still believe that my suit to her daughter would not
be disapproved of by Mrs. Ashleigh?”

“At this moment I am sure it would not; a week hence I might not give
you the same answer.”

So she passed on with her quick but measured tread, back through the
shady walk, on to the open lawn, till the last glimpse of her pale gray
robe disappeared under the boughs of the cedar-tree. Then, with a
start, I broke the irresolute, tremulous suspense in which I had vainly
endeavoured to analyze my own mind, solve my own doubts, concentrate my
own will, and went the opposite way, skirting the circle of that haunted
ground,--as now, on one side its lofty terrace, the houses of the
neighbouring city came full and close into view, divided from my
fairy-land of life but by the trodden murmurous thoroughfare winding low
beneath the ivied parapets; and as now, again, the world of men abruptly
vanished behind the screening foliage of luxuriant June.

At last the enchanted glade opened out from the verdure, its borders
fragrant with syringa and rose and woodbine; and there, by the gray
memorial of the gone Gothic age, my eyes seemed to close their unquiet
wanderings, resting spell-bound on that image which had become to me the
incarnation of earth’s bloom and youth.

She stood amidst the Past, backed by the fragments of walls which man
had raised to seclude him from human passion, locking, under those lids
so downcast, the secret of the only knowledge I asked from the boundless
Future.

Ah! what mockery there is in that grand word, the world’s fierce
war-cry,--Freedom! Who has not known one period of life, and that so
solemn that its shadows may rest over all life hereafter, when one
human creature has over him a sovereignty more supreme and absolute than
Orient servitude adores in the symbols of diadem and sceptre? What crest
so haughty that has not bowed before a hand which could exalt or humble!
What heart so dauntless that has not trembled to call forth the voice
at whose sound open the gates of rapture or despair! That life alone is
free which rules, and suffices for itself. That life we forfeit when we
love!






CHAPTER XVII.

How did I utter it? By what words did my heart make itself known? I
remember not. All was as a dream that falls upon a restless, feverish
night, and fades away as the eyes unclose on the peace of a cloudless
heaven, on the bliss of a golden sun. A new morrow seemed indeed upon
the earth when I woke from a life-long yesterday,--her dear hand in
mine, her sweet face bowed upon my breast.

And then there was that melodious silence in which there is no sound
audible from without; yet within us there is heard a lulling celestial
music, as if our whole being, grown harmonious with the universe, joined
from its happy deeps in the hymn that unites the stars.

In that silence our two hearts seemed to make each other understood, to
be drawing nearer and nearer, blending by mysterious concord into the
completeness of a solemn union, never henceforth to be rent asunder.

At length I said softly: “And it was here on this spot that I first saw
you,--here that I for the first time knew what power to change our world
and to rule our future goes forth from the charm of a human face!”

Then Lilian asked me timidly, and without lifting her eyes, how I had
so seen her, reminding me that I promised to tell her, and had never yet
done so.

And then I told her of the strange impulse that had led me into the
grounds, and by what chance my steps had been diverted down the path
that wound to the glade; how suddenly her form had shone upon my
eyes, gathering round itself the rose hues of the setting sun, and how
wistfully those eyes had followed her own silent gaze into the distant
heaven.

As I spoke, her hand pressed mine eagerly, convulsively, and, raising
her face from my breast, she looked at me with an intent, anxious
earnestness. That look!--twice before it had thrilled and perplexed me.

“What is there in that look, oh, my Lilian, which tells me that there
is something that startles you,--something you wish to confide, and yet
shrink from explaining? See how, already, I study the fair book from
which the seal has been lifted! but as yet you must aid me to construe
its language.”

“If I shrink from explaining, it is only because I fear that I cannot
explain so as to be understood or believed. But you have a right to know
the secrets of a life which you would link to your own. Turn your face
aside from me; a reproving look, an incredulous smile, chill--oh, you
cannot guess how they chill me, when I would approach that which to me
is so serious and so solemnly strange.”

I turned my face away, and her voice grew firmer as, after a brief
pause, she resumed,--

“As far back as I can remember in my infancy, there have been moments
when there seems to fall a soft hazy veil between my sight and the
things around it, thickening and deepening till it has the likeness
of one of those white fleecy clouds which gather on the verge of the
horizon when the air is yet still, but the winds are about to rise; and
then this vapour or veil will suddenly open, as clouds open, and let in
the blue sky.”

“Go on,” I said gently, for here she came to a stop. She continued,
speaking somewhat more hurriedly,--

“Then, in that opening, strange appearances present them selves to
me, as in a vision. In my childhood these were chiefly landscapes of
wonderful beauty. I could but faintly describe them then; I could not
attempt to describe them now, for they are almost gone from my memory.
My dear mother chid me for telling her what I saw, so I did not impress
it on my mind by repeating it. As I grew up, this kind of vision--if
I may so call it--became much less frequent, or much less distinct; I
still saw the soft veil fall, the pale cloud form and open, but often
what may then have appeared was entirely forgotten when I recovered
myself, waking as from a sleep. Sometimes, however, the recollection
would be vivid and complete; sometimes I saw the face of my lost father;
sometimes I heard his very voice, as I had seen and heard him in my
early childhood, when he would let me rest for hours beside him as he
mused or studied, happy to be so quietly near him, for I loved him, oh,
so dearly! and I remember him so distinctly, though I was only in my
sixth year when he died. Much more recently--indeed, within the last few
months--the images of things to come are reflected on the space that
I gaze into as clearly as in a glass. Thus, for weeks before I came
hither, or knew that such a place existed, I saw distinctly the old
House, yon trees, this sward, this moss-grown Gothic fount; and, with
the sight, an impression was conveyed to me that in the scene before me
my old childlike life would pass into some solemn change. So that when I
came here, and recognized the picture in my vision, I took an affection
for the spot,--an affection not without awe, a powerful, perplexing
interest, as one who feels under the influence of a fate of which a
prophetic glimpse has been vouchsafed. And in that evening, when you
first saw me, seated here--”

“Yes, Lilian, on that evening--”

“I saw you also, but in my vision--yonder, far in the deeps of
space,--and--and my heart was stirred as it had never been before; and
near where your image grew out from the cloud I saw my father’s face,
and I heard his voice, not in my ear, but as in my heart, whispering--”

“Yes, Lilian--whispering--what?”

“These words,--only these,--‘Ye will need one another.’ But then,
suddenly, between my upward eyes and the two forms they had beheld,
there rose from the earth, obscuring the skies, a vague, dusky vapour,
undulous, and coiling like a vast serpent,--nothing, indeed, of its
shape and figure definite, but of its face one abrupt glare; a flash
from two dread luminous eyes, and a young head, like the Medusa’s,
changing, more rapidly than I could have drawn breath, into a grinning
skull. Then my terror made me bow my head, and when I raised it again,
all that I had seen was vanished. But the terror still remained, even
when I felt my mother’s arm round me and heard her voice. And then, when
I entered the house, and sat down again alone, the recollection of what
I had seen--those eyes, that face, that skull--grew on me stronger and
stronger till I fainted, and remember no more, until my eyes, opening,
saw you by my side, and in my wonder there was not terror. No, a sense
of joy, protection, hope, yet still shadowed by a kind of fear or awe,
in recognizing the countenance which had gleamed on me from the skies
before the dark vapour had risen, and while my father’s voice had
murmured, ‘Ye will need one another.’ And now--and now--will you love
me less that you know a secret in my being which I have told to no
other,--cannot construe to myself? Only--only, at least, do not mock me;
do not disbelieve me! Nay, turn from me no longer now: now I ask to meet
your eyes. Now, before our hands can join again, tell me that you do not
despise me as untruthful, do not pity me as insane.”

“Hush, hush!” I said, drawing her to my breast. “Of all you tell me
we will talk hereafter. The scales of our science have no weights fine
enough for the gossamer threads of a maiden’s pure fancies. Enough for
me--for us both--if out from all such illusions start one truth, told
to you, lovely child, from the heavens; told to me, ruder man, on the
earth; repeated by each pulse of this heart that woos you to hear and
to trust,--now and henceforth through life unto death, ‘Each has need of
the other,’--I of you, I of you! my Lilian! my Lilian!”






CHAPTER XVIII.

In spite of the previous assurance of Mrs. Poyntz, it was not without an
uneasy apprehension that I approached the cedar-tree, under which Mrs.
Ashleigh still sat, her friend beside her. I looked on the fair creature
whose arm was linked in mine. So young, so singularly lovely, and with
all the gifts of birth and fortune which bend avarice and ambition the
more submissively to youth and beauty, I felt as if I had wronged what a
parent might justly deem her natural lot.

“Oh, if your mother should disapprove!” said I, falteringly. Lilian
leaned on my arm less lightly. “If I had thought so,” she said with her
soft blush, “should I be thus by your side?”

So we passed under the boughs of the dark tree, and Lilian left me and
kissed Mrs. Ashleigh’s cheek; then, seating herself on the turf, laid
her head on her mother’s lap. I looked on the Queen of the Hill, whose
keen eye shot over me. I thought there was a momentary expression of
pain or displeasure on her countenance; but it passed. Still
there seemed to me something of irony, as well as of triumph or
congratulation, in the half-smile with which she quitted her seat, and
in the tone with which she whispered, as she glided by me to the open
sward, “So, then, it is settled.”

She walked lightly and quickly down the lawn. When she was out of sight
I breathed more freely. I took the seat which she had left, by Mrs.
Ashleigh’s side, and said, “A little while ago I spoke of myself as a
man without kindred, without home, and now I come to you and ask for
both.”

Mrs. Ashleigh looked at me benignly, then raised her daughter’s face
from her lap, and whispered, “Lilian;” and Lilian’s lips moved, but I
did not hear her answer. Her mother did. She took Lilian’s hand, simply
placed it in mine, and said, “As she chooses, I choose; whom she loves,
I love.”






CHAPTER XIX.

From that evening till the day Mrs. Ashleigh and Lilian went on the
dreaded visit, I was always at their house, when my avocations allowed
me to steal to it; and during those few days, the happiest I had ever
known, it seemed to me that years could not have more deepened my
intimacy with Lilian’s exquisite nature, made me more reverential of its
purity, or more enamoured of its sweetness. I could detect in her but
one fault, and I rebuked myself for believing that it was a fault.
We see many who neglect the minor duties of life, who lack watchful
forethought and considerate care for others, and we recognize the
cause of this failing in levity or egotism. Certainly, neither of those
tendencies of character could be ascribed to Lilian. Yet still in daily
trifles there was something of that neglect, some lack of that care and
forethought. She loved her mother with fondness and devotion, yet it
never occurred to her to aid in those petty household cares in which her
mother centred so much of habitual interest. She was full of tenderness
and pity to all want and suffering, yet many a young lady on the Hill
was more actively beneficent,--visiting the poor in their sickness, or
instructing their children in the Infant Schools. I was persuaded
that her love for me was deep and truthful; it was clearly void of all
ambition; doubtless she would have borne, unflinching and contented,
whatever the world considers to be a sacrifice and privation,--yet I
should never have expected her to take her share in the troubles
of ordinary life. I could never have applied to her the homely but
significant name of helpmate. I reproach myself while I write for
noticing such defect--if defect it were--in what may be called the
practical routine of our positive, trivial, human existence. No doubt it
was this that had caused Mrs. Poyntz’s harsh judgment against the wisdom
of my choice. But such chiller shade upon Lilian’s charming nature was
reflected from no inert, unamiable self-love. It was but the consequence
of that self-absorption which the habit of revery had fostered. I
cautiously abstained from all allusion to those visionary deceptions,
which she had confided to me as the truthful impressions of spirit, if
not of sense. To me any approach to what I termed “superstition” was
displeasing; any indulgence of fantasies not within the measured
and beaten track of healthful imagination more than displeased me in
her,--it alarmed. I would not by a word encourage her in persuasions
which I felt it would be at present premature to reason against, and
cruel indeed to ridicule. I was convinced that of themselves these
mists round her native intelligence, engendered by a solitary and musing
childhood, would subside in the fuller daylight of wedded life. She
seemed pained when she saw how resolutely I shunned a subject dear to
her thoughts. She made one or two timid attempts to renew it, but
my grave looks sufficed to check her. Once or twice indeed, on such
occasions, she would turn away and leave me, but she soon came back;
that gentle heart could not bear one unkindlier shade between itself
and what it loved. It was agreed that our engagement should be, for the
present, confided only to Mrs. Poyntz. When Mrs. Ashleigh and Lilian
returned, which would be in a few weeks at furthest, it should be
proclaimed; and our marriage could take place in the autumn, when I
should be most free for a brief holiday from professional toils.

So we parted-as lovers part. I felt none of those jealous fears
which, before we were affianced, had made me tremble at the thought of
separation, and had conjured up irresistible rivals. But it was with a
settled, heavy gloom that I saw her depart. From earth was gone a glory;
from life a blessing.






CHAPTER XX.

During the busy years of my professional career, I had snatched leisure
for some professional treatises, which had made more or less sensation,
and one of them, entitled “The Vital Principle; its Waste and Supply,”
 had gained a wide circulation among the general public. This last
treatise contained the results of certain experiments, then new in
chemistry, which were adduced in support of a theory I entertained as to
the re-invigoration of the human system by principles similar to
those which Liebig has applied to the replenishment of an exhausted
soil,--namely, the giving back to the frame those essentials to its
nutrition, which it has lost by the action or accident of time; or
supplying that special pabulum or energy in which the individual
organism is constitutionally deficient; and neutralizing or
counterbalancing that in which it super-abounds,--a theory upon which
some eminent physicians have more recently improved with signal success.
But on these essays, slight and suggestive, rather than dogmatic, I set
no value. I had been for the last two years engaged on a work of much
wider range, endeared to me by a far bolder ambition,--a work upon which
I fondly hoped to found an enduring reputation as a severe and
original physiologist. It was an Inquiry into Organic Life, similar in
comprehensiveness of survey to that by which the illustrious Muller, of
Berlin, has enriched the science of our age; however inferior, alas! to
that august combination of thought and learning in the judgment which
checks presumption, and the genius which adorns speculation. But at that
day I was carried away by the ardour of composition, and I admired my
performance because I loved my labour. This work had been entirely laid
aside for the last agitated month; now that Lilian was gone, I resumed
it earnestly, as the sole occupation that had power and charm enough to
rouse me from the aching sense of void and loss.

The very night of the day she went, I reopened my manuscript. I had left
off at the commencement of a chapter Upon Knowledge as derived from our
Senses. As my convictions on this head were founded on the well-known
arguments of Locke and Condillac against innate ideas, and on the
reasonings by which Hume has resolved the combination of sensations
into a general idea to an impulse arising merely out of habit, so I set
myself to oppose, as a dangerous concession to the sentimentalities or
mysticism of a pseudo-philosophy, the doctrine favoured by most of our
recent physiologists, and of which some of the most eminent of German
metaphysicians have accepted the substance, though refining into a
subtlety its positive form,--I mean the doctrine which Muller himself
has expressed in these words:--


   “That innate ideas may exist cannot in the slightest degree be denied:
    it is, indeed, a fact.  All the ideas of animals, which are induced by
    instinct, are innate and immediate: something presented to the mind, a
    desire to attain which is at the same time given.  The new-born lamb
    and foal have such innate ideas, which lead them to follow their
    mother and suck the teats.  Is it not in some measure the same with
    the intellectual ideas of man?” (1)

To this question I answered with an indignant “No!” A “Yes” would have
shaken my creed of materialism to the dust. I wrote on rapidly, warmly.
I defined the properties and meted the limits of natural laws, which I
would not admit that a Deity himself could alter. I clamped and soldered
dogma to dogma in the links of my tinkered logic, till out from my page,
to my own complacent eye, grew Intellectual Man, as the pure formation
of his material senses; mind, or what is called soul, born from and
nurtured by them alone; through them to act, and to perish with the
machine they moved. Strange, that at the very time my love for Lilian
might have taught me that there are mysteries in the core of the
feelings which my analysis of ideas could not solve, I should so
stubbornly have opposed as unreal all that could be referred to the
spiritual! Strange, that at the very time when the thought that I might
lose from this life the being I had known scarce a month had just before
so appalled me, I should thus complacently sit down to prove that,
according to the laws of the nature which my passion obeyed, I must
lose for eternity the blessing I now hoped I had won to my life! But how
distinctly dissimilar is man in his conduct from man in his systems!
See the poet reclined under forest boughs, conning odes to his mistress;
follow him out into the world; no mistress ever lived for him there!(2)
See the hard man of science, so austere in his passionless problems;
follow him now where the brain rests from its toil, where the heart
finds its Sabbath--what child is so tender, so yielding, and soft?

But I had proved to my own satisfaction that poet and sage are dust,
and no more, when the pulse ceases to beat. And on that consolatory
conclusion my pen stopped.

Suddenly, beside me I distinctly heard a sigh,--a compassionate,
mournful sigh. The sound was unmistakable. I started from my seat,
looked round, amazed to discover no one,--no living thing! The windows
were closed, the night was still. That sigh was not the wail of the
wind. But there, in the darker angle of the room, what was that? A
silvery whiteness, vaguely shaped as a human form, receding, fading,
gone! Why, I know not--for no face was visible, no form, if form it
were, more distinct than the colourless outline,--why, I know not, but
I cried aloud, “Lilian! Lilian!” My voice came strangely back to my own
ear; I paused, then smiled and blushed at my folly. “So I, too, have
learned what is superstition,” I muttered to myself. “And here is an
anecdote at my own expense (as Muller frankly tells us anecdotes of the
illusions which would haunt his eyes, shut or open),--an anecdote I may
quote when I come to my chapter on the Cheats of the Senses and Spectral
Phantasms.” I went on with my book, and wrote till the lights waned in
the gray of the dawn. And I said then, in the triumph of my pride, as
I laid myself down to rest, “I have written that which allots with
precision man’s place in the region of nature; written that which
will found a school, form disciples; and race after race of those
who cultivate truth through pure reason shall accept my bases if they
enlarge my building.” And again I heard the sigh, but this time it
caused no surprise. “Certainly,” I murmured, “a very strange thing is
the nervous system!” So I turned on my pillow, and, wearied out, fell
asleep.

(1) Muller’s “Elements of Physiology,” vol. ii. p. 134. Translated by
Dr. Baley.

(2) Cowley, who wrote so elaborate a series of amatory poems, is said
“never to have been in love but once, and then he never had resolution
to tell his passion.”--Johnson’s “Lives of the Poets:” COWLEY.






CHAPTER XXI.

The next day, the last of the visiting patients to whom my forenoons
were devoted had just quitted me, when I was summoned in haste to attend
the steward of a Sir Philip Derval not residing at his family seat,
which was about five miles from L----. It was rarely indeed that persons
so far from the town, when of no higher rank than this applicant, asked
my services.

But it was my principle to go wherever I was summoned; my profession
was not gain, it was healing, to which gain was the incident, not
the essential. This case the messenger reported as urgent. I went on
horseback, and rode fast; but swiftly as I cantered through the village
that skirted the approach to Sir Philip Derval’s park, the evident care
bestowed on the accommodation of the cottagers forcibly struck me. I
felt that I was on the lands of a rich, intelligent, and beneficent
proprietor. Entering the park, and passing before the manor-house, the
contrast between the neglect and the decay of the absentee’s stately
Hall and the smiling homes of his villagers was disconsolately mournful.

An imposing pile, built apparently by Vanbrugh, with decorated
pilasters, pompous portico, and grand perron (or double flight of stairs
to the entrance), enriched with urns and statues, but discoloured,
mildewed, chipped, half-hidden with unpruned creepers and ivy. Most of
the windows were closed with shutters, decaying for want of paint; in
some of the casements the panes were broken; the peacock perched on the
shattered balustrade, that fenced a garden overgrown with weeds. The
sun glared hotly on the place, and made its ruinous condition still more
painfully apparent. I was glad when a winding in the park-road shut
the house from my sight. Suddenly I emerged through a copse of ancient
yew-trees, and before me there gleamed, in abrupt whiteness, a building
evidently designed for the family mausoleum, classical in its outline,
with the blind iron door niched into stone walls of massive thickness,
and surrounded by a funereal garden of roses and evergreens, fenced with
an iron rail, party-gilt.

The suddenness with which this House of the Dead came upon me heightened
almost into pain, if not into awe, the dismal impression which the
aspect of the deserted home in its neighbourhood had made. I spurred my
horse, and soon arrived at the door of my patient, who lived in a fair
brick house at the other extremity of the park.

I found my patient, a man somewhat advanced in years, but of a robust
conformation, in bed: he had been seized with a fit, which was supposed
to be apoplectic, a few hours before; but was already sensible, and out
of immediate danger. After I had prescribed a few simple remedies, I
took aside the patient’s wife, and went with her to the parlour below
stairs, to make some inquiry about her husband’s ordinary regimen and
habits of life. These seemed sufficiently regular; I could discover no
apparent cause for the attack, which presented symptoms not familiar to
my experience. “Has your husband ever had such fits before?”

“Never!”

“Had he experienced any sudden emotion? Had he heard any unexpected
news; or had anything happened to put him out?”

The woman looked much disturbed at these inquiries. I pressed them more
urgently. At last she burst into tears, and clasping my hand, said, “Oh,
doctor, I ought to tell you--I sent for you on purpose--yet I fear you
will not believe me: my good man has seen a ghost!”

“A ghost!” said I, repressing a smile. “Well, tell me all, that I may
prevent the ghost coming again.”

The woman’s story was prolix. Its substance was this. Her husband,
habitually an early riser, had left his bed that morning still earlier
than usual, to give directions about some cattle that were to be sent
for sale to a neighbouring fair. An hour afterwards he had been found by
a shepherd, near the mausoleum, apparently lifeless. On being removed to
his own house, he had recovered speech, and bidding all except his wife
leave the room, he then told her that on walking across the park towards
the cattle-sheds, he had seen what appeared to him at first a pale light
by the iron door of the mausoleum. On approaching nearer, this light
changed into the distinct and visible form of his master, Sir Philip
Derval, who was then abroad,--supposed to be in the East, where he had
resided for many years. The impression on the steward’s mind was so
strong, that he called out, “Oh, Sir Philip!” when looking still
more intently, he perceived that the face was that of a corpse. As he
continued to gaze, the apparition seemed gradually to recede, as
if vanishing into the sepulchre itself. He knew no more; he became
unconscious. It was the excess of the poor woman’s alarm, on hearing
this strange tale, that made her resolve to send for me instead of the
parish apothecary. She fancied so astounding a cause for her husband’s
seizure could only be properly dealt with by some medical man reputed
to have more than ordinary learning; and the steward himself objected to
the apothecary in the immediate neighbourhood, as more likely to annoy
him by gossip than a physician from a comparative distance.

I took care not to lose the confidence of the good wife by parading too
quickly my disbelief in the phantom her husband declare

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