Book: A Strange Story, Volume 1.
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Edward Bulwer Lytton >> A Strange Story, Volume 1.
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 bad 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.