Wilfrid Cumbermede Part 80

One night I had a strange experience. I give it without argument, perfectly aware that the fact may be set down to the disordered state of my physical nature, and that without injustice.

I had not for a long time thought about one of the questions which had so much occupied Charley and myself--that of immortality. As to any communication between the parted, I had never, during his life, pondered the possibility of it, although I had always had an inclination to believe that such intercourse had in rare instances taken place. Former periods of the world's history, when that blinding self-consciousness which is the bane of ours was yet undeveloped, must, I thought, have been far more favourable to its occurrence. Anyhow I was convinced that it was not to be gained by effort. I confess that, in the unthinking agony of grief after Charley's death, many a time when I woke in the middle of the night and could sleep no more, I sat up in bed and prayed him, if he heard me, to come to me, and let me tell him the truth--for my sake to let me know, at least, that he lived, for then I should be sure that one day all would be well. But if there was any hearing, there was no answer. Charley did not come; the prayer seemed to vanish in the darkness; and my more self-possessed meditations never justified the hope of any such being heard.

One night I was sitting in my grannie's room, which, except my uncle's, was now the only one I could bear to enter. I had been reading for some time very quietly, but had leaned back in my chair, and let my thoughts go wandering whither they would, when all at once I was possessed by the conviction that Charley was near me. I saw nothing, heard nothing; of the recognized senses of humanity not one gave me a hint of a presence; and yet my whole body was aware--so, at least, it seemed--of the proximity of another _I_. It was as if some nervous region commensurate with my frame, were now for the first time revealed by contact with an object suitable for its apprehension. Like Eliphaz, I felt the hair of my head stand up--not from terror, but simply, as it seemed, from the presence and its strangeness. Like others also of whom I have read, who believed themselves in the presence of the disembodied, I could not speak. I tried, but as if the medium for sound had been withdrawn, and an empty gulf lay around me, no word followed, although my very soul was full of the cry--_Charley! Charley!_ And alas! in a few moments, like the faint vanis.h.i.+ng of an unrealized thought, leaving only the a.s.surance that something half-born from out the unknown had been there, the influence faded and died. It pa.s.sed from me like the shadow of a cloud, and once more I knew but my poor lonely self, returning to its candles, its open book, its burning fire.

CHAPTER LVIII.

THE DARKEST HOUR.

Suffering is perhaps the only preparation for suffering: still I was but poorly prepared for what followed.

Having gathered strength, and a certain quietness which I could not mistake for peace, I returned to London towards the close of the Spring. I had in the interval heard nothing of Mary. The few letters Marston had sent on had been almost exclusively from my publishers. But the very hour I reached my lodging, came a note, which I opened trembling, for it was in the handwriting of Miss Pease.

DEAR SIR,--I cannot, I think, be wrong in giving you a piece of information which will be in the newspapers to-morrow morning. Your old acquaintance, and my young relative, Mr Brotherton, was married this morning, at St George's, Hanover Square, to your late friend's sister, Miss Mary Osborne. They have just left for Dover on their way to Switzerland. Your sincere well-wisher, 'JANE PEASE.'

Even at this distance of time, I should have to exhort myself to write with calmness, were it not that the utter despair of conveying my feelings, if indeed my soul had not for the time pa.s.sed beyond feeling into some abyss unknown to human consciousness, renders it unnecessary.

This despair of communication has two sources--the one simply the conviction of the impossibility of expressing _any_ feeling, much more such feeling as mine then was--and is; the other the conviction that only to the heart of love can the sufferings of love speak. The attempt of a lover to move, by the presentation of his own suffering, the heart of her who loves him not, is as unavailing as it is unmanly. The poet who sings most wailfully of the torments of the lover's h.e.l.l, is but a sounding bra.s.s and a tinkling cymbal in the ears of her who has at best only a general compa.s.sion to meet the song withal--possibly only an individual vanity which crowns her with his woes as with the trophies of a conquest. True, he is understood and wors.h.i.+pped by all the other wailful souls in the first infernal circle, as one of the great men of their order--able to put into words full of sweet torment the dire hopelessness of their misery; but for such the singer, singing only for ears eternally deaf to his song, cares nothing; or if for a moment he receives consolation from their sympathy, it is but a pa.s.sing weakness which the breath of an indignant self-condemnation--even contempt, the next moment sweeps away. In G.o.d alone there must be sympathy and cure; but I had not then--have I indeed yet found what that cure is? I am at all events now able to write with calmness. If suffering destroyed itself, as some say, mine ought to have disappeared long ago; but to that I can neither pretend nor confess.

For the first time, after all I had encountered, I knew what suffering could be. It is still at moments an agony as of h.e.l.l to recall this and the other thought that then stung me like a white-hot arrow: the shafts have long been drawn out, but the barbed heads are still there. I neither stormed nor maddened. I only felt a freezing hand lay hold of my heart, and gripe it closer and closer till I should have sickened, but that the pain ever stung me into fresh life; and ever since I have gone about the world with that hard lump somewhere in my bosom into which the griping hand and the griped heart have grown and stiffened.

I fled at once back to my solitary house, looking for no relief in its solitude, only the negative comfort of escaping the eyes of men. I could not bear the sight of my fellow-creatures. To say that the world had grown black to me, is as nothing: I ceased---I will not say _to believe_ in G.o.d, for I never dared say that mighty thing--but I ceased to hope in G.o.d. The universe had grown a negation which yet forced its presence upon me--death that bred worms. If there were a G.o.d anywhere, this universe could be nothing more than his forsaken moth-eaten garment. He was a G.o.d who did not care. Order was all an invention of phosph.o.r.escent human brains; light itself the mocking smile of a Jupiter over his writhing sacrifices. At times I laughed at the tortures of my own heart, saying to it, 'Writhe on, worm; thou deservest thy writhing in that thou writhest. G.o.dless creature, why dost thou not laugh with me? Am I not merry over thee and the world--in that ye are both rottenness to the core?' The next moment my heart and I would come together with a shock, and I knew it was myself that scorned myself.

Such being my mood, it will cause no surprise if I say that I too was tempted to suicide; the wonder would have been if it had been otherwise. The soft keen curves of that fatal dagger, which had not only slain Charley but all my hopes--for had he lived this horror could not have been--grew almost lovely in my eyes. Until now it had looked cruel, fiendish, hateful; but now I would lay it before me and contemplate it. In some griefs there is a wonderful power of self-contemplation, which indeed forms their only solace; the moment it can set the sorrow away from itself sufficiently to regard it, the tortured heart begins to repose; but suddenly, like a waking tiger, the sorrow leaps again into its lair, and the agony commences anew. The dagger was the type of my grief and its torture: might it not, like the brazen serpent, be the cure for the sting of its living counterpart?

But alas! where was the certainty? Could I slay _myself?_ This outer breathing form I could dismiss--but the pain was not _there_. I was not mad, and I knew that a deeper death than that could give, at least.

than I had any a.s.surance that could give, alone could bring repose.

For, impossible as I had always found it actually to believe in immortality, I now found it equally impossible to believe in annihilation. And even if annihilation should be the final result, who could tell but it might require ages of a horrible slow-decaying dream-consciousness to kill the living thing which felt itself other than its body?

Until now, I had always accepted what seemed the natural and universal repugnance to absolute dissolution as the strongest argument on the side of immortality;--for why should a man shrink from that which belonged to his nature? But now annihilation seemed the one lovely thing, the one sole only lonely thought in which lay no blackness of burning darkness. Oh, for one eternal unconscious sleep!--the nearest likeness we can cherish of that inconceivable nothingness--ever denied by the very thinking of it--by the vain attempt to realize that whose very existence is the knowing nothing of itself! Could that dagger have insured me such repose, or had there been any draught of Lethe, utter Lethe, whose blessed poison would have a.s.suredly dissipated like a fume this conscious self-tormenting _me_, I should not now be writhing anew, as in the clutches of an old grief, clasping me like a corpse, stung to simulated life by the galvanic battery of recollection. Vivid as it seems--all I suffer as I write is but a faint phantasm of what I then endured.

I learned, therefore, that to some minds the argument for immortality drawn from the apparently universal shrinking from annihilation must be ineffectual, seeing they themselves do not shrink from it. Convince a man that there is no G.o.d--or, for I doubt if that be altogether possible--make it, I will say, impossible for him to hope in G.o.d--and it cannot be that annihilation should seem an evil. If there is no G.o.d, annihilation is the one thing to be longed for, with all that might of longing which is the mainspring of human action. In a word, it is not immortality the human heart cries out after, but that immortal eternal thought whose life is its life, whose wisdom is its wisdom, whose ways and whose thoughts shall--must one day--become its ways and its thoughts. Dissociate immortality from the living Immortality, and it is not a thing to be desired--not a thing that can on those terms, or even on the fancy of those terms, be desired.

But such thoughts as these were far from me then. I lived because I despaired of death. I ate by a sort of blind animal instinct, and so lived. The time had been when I would despise myself for being able to eat in the midst of emotion; but now I cared so little for the emotion even, that eating or not eating had nothing to do with the matter. I ate because meat was set before me; I slept because sleep came upon me.

It was a horrible time. My life seemed only a vermiculate one, a crawling about of half-thoughts-half-feelings through the corpse of a decaying existence. The heart of being was withdrawn from me, and my life was but the vacant pericardium in which it had once throbbed out and sucked in the red fountains of life and gladness.

I would not be thought to have fallen to this all but bottomless depth only because I had lost Mary. Still less was it because of the fact that in her, around whom had gathered all the devotion with which the man in me could regard woman, I had lost all womankind. It was _the loss_ of Mary, as I then judged it, not, I repeat, the fact that _I_ had lost her. It was that she had lost herself. Thence it was, I say, that I lost my hope in G.o.d. For, if there were a G.o.d, how could he let purity be clasped in the arms of defilement? how could he marry my Athanasia--not to a corpse, but to a Plague? Here was the man who had done more to ruin her brother than any but her father, and G.o.d had given her to _him!_ I had had--with the commonest of men--some notion of womanly purity--how was it that hers had not instinctively shuddered and shrunk? how was it that the life of it had not taken refuge with death to shun bare contact with the coa.r.s.e impurity of such a nature as that of Geoffrey Brotherton? My dreams had been dreams indeed! Was my Athanasia dead, or had she never been? In my thought, she had 'said to Corruption, Thou art my father; to the worm, Thou art my mother and my sister.' Who should henceforth say of any woman that she was impure?

She _might_ love him--true; but what was she then who was able to love such a man? It was this that stormed the citadel of my hope, and drove me from even thinking of a G.o.d.

Gladly would I now have welcomed any bodily suffering that could hide me from myself; but no illness came. I was a living pain, a conscious ill-being. In a thousand forms those questions would ever recur, but without hope of answer. When I fell asleep from exhaustion, hideous visions of her with Geoffrey would start me up with a great cry, sometimes with a curse on my lips. Nor were they the most horrible of those dreams in which she would help him to mock me. Once, and only once, I found myself dreaming the dream of _that_ night, and I knew that I had dreamed it before. Through palace and chapel and charnel-house, I followed her, ever with a dim sense of awful result; and when at the last she lifted the s.h.i.+ning veil, instead of the face of Athanasia, the bare teeth of a skull grinned at me from under a spotted shroud, through which the sunlight shone from behind, revealing all its horrors. I was not mad--my reason had not given way: _how_ remains a marvel.

CHAPTER LIX.

THE DAWN.

All places were alike to me now--for the universe was but one dreary chasm whence I could not escape. One evening I sat by the open window of my chamber, which looked towards those trees and that fatal Moldwarp Hall. My suffering had now grown dull by its own excess, and I had moments of restless vacuity, the nearest approach to peace I had yet experienced. It was a fair evening of early summer--but I was utterly careless of nature as of all beyond it. The sky was nothing to me--and the earth was all unlovely. There I sat, heavy, but free from torture; a kind of quiet had stolen over me. I was roused by the tiniest breath of wind on my cheek, as if the pa.s.sing wing of some b.u.t.terfly had fanned me; and on that faintest motion came a scent as from long-forgotten fields, a scent like as of sweet-peas or wild roses, but of neither: flowers were none nearer me than the gardens of the Hall. I started with a cry. It was the scent of the garments of my Athanasia, as I had dreamed it in my dream! Whence that wind had borne it, who could tell? but in the husk that had overgrown my being it had found a cranny, and through that cranny, with the scent, Nature entered. I looked up to the blue sky, wept, and for the first time fell on my knees. 'O G.o.d!' I cried, and that was all. But what are the prayers of the whole universe more than expansions of that one cry? It is not what G.o.d can give us, but G.o.d that we want. Call the whole thing fancy if you will; it was at least no fancy that the next feeling of which I was conscious was compa.s.sion: from that moment I began to search heaven and earth and the soul of man and woman for excuses wherewith to clothe the idea of Mary Osborne. For weeks and weeks I pondered, and by degrees the following conclusions wrought themselves out in my brain:--

That she had never seen life as a whole; that her religious theories had ever been eating away and absorbing her life, so preventing her religion from interpenetrating and glorifying it; that in regard to certain facts and consequences she had been left to an ignorance which her innocence rendered profound; that, attracted by the worldly splendour of the offer, her father and mother had urged her compliance, and broken in spirit by the fate of Charley, and having always been taught that self-denial was in itself a virtue, she had taken the worldly desires of her parents for the will of G.o.d, and blindly yielded; that Brotherton was capable, for his ends, of representing himself as possessed of religion enough to satisfy the scruples of her parents, and, such being satisfied, she had resisted her own as evil things.

Whether his hatred of me had had any share in his desire to possess her, I hardly thought of inquiring.

Of course I did not for a single moment believe that Mary had had the slightest notion of the bitterness, the torture, the temptation of Satan it would be to me. Doubtless the feeling of her father concerning the death of Charley had seemed to hollow an impa.s.sable gulf between us. Worn and weak, and not knowing what she did, my dearest friend had yielded herself to the embrace of my deadliest foe. If he was such as I had too good reason for believing him, she was far more to be pitied than I. Lonely she must be--lonely as I--for who was there to understand and love her? Bitterly too by this time she must have suffered, for the dove can never be at peace in the bosom of the vulture, or cease to hate the carrion of which he must ever carry about with him at least the disgusting memorials. Alas! I too had been her enemy, and had cried out against her; but now I would love her more and better than ever! Oh! if I knew but something I could do for her, some service which on the bended knees of my spirit I might offer her! I clomb the heights of my grief, and looked around, but alas! I was such a poor creature! A dabbler in the ways of the world, a writer of tales which even those who cared to read them counted fantastic and Utopian, who was I to weave a single silken thread into the web of her life? How could I bear her one poorest service? Never in this world could I approach her near enough to touch yet once again the hem of her garment. All I could do was to love her. No--I could and did suffer for her. Alas! that suffering was only for myself, and could do nothing, for her! It was indeed some consolation to me that my misery came from her hand; but if she knew it, it would but add to her pain. In my heart I could only pray her pardon for my wicked and selfish thoughts concerning her, and vow again and ever to regard her as my Athanasia.--But yes! there was one thing I _could_ do for her: I would be a true man for her sake; she should have some satisfaction in me; I would once more arise and go to my Father.

The instant the thought arose in my mind, I fell down before the possible G.o.d in an agony of weeping. All complaint of my own doom had vanished, now that I began to do her the justice of love. Why should _I_ be blessed--here and now at least--according to my notions of blessedness? Let the great heart of the universe do with me as it pleased! Let the Supreme take his own time to justify himself to the heart that sought to love him! I gave up myself, was willing to suffer, to be a living pain, so long as he pleased; and the moment I yielded half the pain was gone; I gave my Athanasia yet again to G.o.d, and all _might_ yet, in some nigh, far-off, better-world-way, be well. I could wait and endure. If only G.o.d was, and was G.o.d, then it was, or would be, well with Mary--well with me!

But, as I still sat, a flow of sweet sad repentant thought pa.s.sing gently through my bosom, all at once the self to which, unable to confide it to the care of its own very life, the G.o.d conscious of himself and in himself conscious of it, I had been for months offering the sacrifices of despair and indignation, arose in spectral hideousness before me. I saw that I, a child of the infinite, had been wors.h.i.+pping the finite--and therein dragging down the infinite towards the fate of the finite. I do not mean that in Mary Osborne I had been wors.h.i.+pping the finite. It was the eternal, the lovely, the true that in her I had been wors.h.i.+pping: in myself I had been wors.h.i.+pping the mean, the selfish, the finite, the G.o.d of spiritual greed. Only in himself _can_ a man find the finite to wors.h.i.+p; only in turning back upon himself does he create the finite for and by his wors.h.i.+p. All the works of G.o.d are everlasting; the only perishable are some of the works of man. All love is a wors.h.i.+p of the infinite: what is called a man's love for himself, is not love; it is but a phantastic resemblance of love; it is a creating of the finite, a creation of death. A man _cannot_ love himself. If all love be not creation--as I think it is--it is at least the only thing in harmony with creation, and the love of oneself is its absolute opposite. I sickened at the sight of myself: how should I ever get rid of the demon? The same instant I saw the one escape: I must offer it back to its source--commit it to him who had made it. I must live no more from it, but from the source of it; seek to know nothing more of it than he gave me to know by his presence therein. Thus might I become one with the Eternal in such an absorption as Buddha had never dreamed; thus might I draw life ever fresh from its fountain. And in that fountain alone would I contemplate its reflex. What flashes of self-consciousness might cross me, should be G.o.d's gift, not of my seeking, and offered again to him in ever new self-sacrifice. Alas! alas! this I saw then, and this I yet see; but oh, how far am I still from that divine annihilation! The only comfort is, G.o.d is, and I am his, else I should not be at all.

I saw too that thus G.o.d also lives--in his higher way. I saw, shadowed out in the absolute devotion of Jesus to men, that the very life of G.o.d by which we live is an everlasting eternal giving of himself away. He a.s.serts himself, only, solely, altogether, in an infinite sacrifice of devotion. So must we live; the child must be as the father; live he cannot on any other plan, struggle as he may. The father requires of him nothing that he is not or does not himself, who is the one prime unconditioned sacrificer and sacrifice. I threw myself on the ground, and offered back my poor wretched self to its owner, to be taken and kept, purified and made divine.

The same moment a sense of reviving health began to possess me. With many fluctuations, it has possessed me, has grown, and is now, if not a persistent cheerfulness, yet an unyielding hope. The world bloomed again around me. The sunrise again grew gloriously dear; and the sadness of the moon was lighted from a higher sun than that which returns with the morning.

My relation to Mary resolved and re-formed itself in my mind into something I can explain only by the following--call it dream: it was not a dream; call it vision: it was not a vision; and yet I will tell it as if it were either, being far truer than either.

I lay like a child on one of G.o.d's arms. I could not see his face, and the arm that held me was a great cloudy arm. I knew that on his other arm lay Mary. But between us were forests and plains, mountains and great seas; and, unspeakably worse than all, a gulf with which words had nothing to do, a gulf of pure separation, of impa.s.sable nothingness, across which no device, I say not of human skill, but of human imagination, could cast a single connecting cord. There lay Mary, and here lay I--both in G.o.d's arms--utterly parted. As in a swoon I lay, through which suddenly came the words: 'What G.o.d hath joined, man cannot sunder.' I lay thinking what they could mean. All at once I thought I knew. Straightway I rose on the cloudy arm, looked down on a measureless darkness beneath me, and up on a great, dreary, world-filled eternity above me, and crept along the arm towards the bosom of G.o.d.

In telling my--neither vision nor dream nor ecstasy, I cannot help it that the forms grow so much plainer and more definite in the words than they were in the revelation. Words always give either too much or too little shape: when you want to be definite, you find your words clumsy and blunt; when you want them for a vague shadowy image, you straightway find them give a sharp and impertinent outline, refusing to lend themselves to your undefined though vivid thought. Forms themselves are hard enough to manage, but words are unmanageable. I must therefore trust to the heart of my reader.

I crept into the bosom of G.o.d, and along a great cloudy peace, which I could not understand, for it did not yet enter into me. At length I came to the heart of G.o.d, and through that my journey lay. The moment I entered it, the great peace appeared to enter mine, and I began to understand it. Something melted in my heart, and for a moment I thought I was dying, but I found I was being born again. My heart was empty of its old selfishness, and I loved Mary tenfold--no longer in the least for my own sake, but all for her loveliness. The same moment I knew that the heart of G.o.d was a bridge, along which I was crossing the unspeakable eternal gulf that divided Mary and me. At length, somehow, I know not how, somewhere, I know not where, I was where she was. She knew nothing of my presence, turned neither face nor eye to meet me, stretched out no hand to give me the welcome of even a friend, and yet I not only knew, but felt that she was mine. I wanted nothing from her; desired the presence of her loveliness only that I might know it; hung about her life as a b.u.t.terfly over the flower he loves; was satisfied that she could _be_. I had left my self behind in the heart of G.o.d, and now I was a pure essence, fit to rejoice in the essential. But alas! my whole being was not yet subject to its best. I began to long to be able to do something for her besides--I foolishly said _beyond_ loving her.

Back rushed my old self in the selfish thought: Some day--will she not know--and at least--? That moment the vision vanished. I was tossed--ah! let me hope, only to the other arm of G.o.d--but I lay in torture yet again. For a man may see visions manifold, and believe them all; and yet his faith shall not save him; something more is needed--he must have that presence of G.o.d in his soul, of which the Son of Man spoke, saying: 'If a man love me, he will keep my words: and my Father will love him, and we will come unto him, and make our abode with him.'

G.o.d in him, he will be able to love for very love's sake; G.o.d not in him, his best love will die into selfishness.

CHAPTER LX.

MY GREAT-GRANDMOTHER.

The morning then which had thus dawned upon me, was often over-clouded heavily. Yet it was the morning and not the night; and one of the strongest proofs that it was the morning lay in this, that again I could think in verse.

One day, after an hour or two of bitterness, I wrote the following. A man's trouble must have receded from him a little for the moment, if he descries any shape in it, so as to be able to give it form in words. I set it down with no hope of better than the vaguest sympathy. There came no music with this one.

If it be that a man and a woman Are made for no mutual grief; That each gives the pain to some other, And neither can give the relief;

If thus the chain of the world Is tied round the holy feet, I scorn to shrink from facing What my brothers and sisters meet.

But I cry when the wolf is tearing At the core of my heart as now: When I was the man to be tortured, Why should the woman be _thou?_

I am not so ready to sink from the lofty in to the abject now. If at times I yet feel that the whole creation is groaning and travailing, I know what it is for--its redemption from the dominion of its own death into that sole liberty which comes only of being filled and eternally possessed by G.o.d himself, its source and its life.

And now I found also that my heart began to be moved with a compa.s.sion towards my fellows such as I had never before experienced. I shall best convey what I mean by transcribing another little poem I wrote about the same time.