Book: A Strange Story, Volume 2.

E >> Edward Bulwer Lytton >> A Strange Story, Volume 2.




I was startled by the hearty voice of the merchant's son. "Ah, my dear
Fenwick, I was afraid you would not come,--you are late. There is the new
friend of whom I spoke to you last night; let me now make you acquainted
with him." He drew my arm in his, and led me up to the young man, where
he stood under the arching flowers, and whom he then introduced to me by
the name of Margrave.

Nothing could be more frankly cordial than Mr. Margrave's manner. In a
few minutes I found myself conversing with him familiarly, as if we had
been reared in the same home, and sported together in the same playground.
His vein of talk was peculiar, off-hand, careless, shifting from topic to
topic with a bright rapidity.

He said that he liked the place; proposed to stay in it some weeks; asked
my address, which I gave to him; promised to call soon at an early hour,
while my time was yet free from professional visits. I endeavoured, when
I went away, to analyze to myself the fascination which this young
stranger so notably exercised over all who approached him; and it seemed
to me, ever seeking to find material causes for all moral effects, that it
rose from the contagious vitality of that rarest of all rare gifts in
highly-civilized circles,--perfect health; that health which is in itself
the most exquisite luxury; which, finding happiness in the mere sense of
existence, diffuses round it, like an atmosphere, the harmless hilarity of
its bright animal being. Health, to the utmost perfection, is seldom
known after childhood; health to the utmost cannot be enjoyed by those who
overwork the brain, or admit the sure wear and tear of the passions. The
creature I had just seen gave me the notion of youth in the golden age of
the poets,--the youth of the careless Arcadian, before nymph or
shepherdess had vexed his heart with a sigh.




CHAPTER XXIV.

The house I occupied at L---- was a quaint, old-fashioned building, a
corner-house. One side, in which was the front entrance, looked upon a
street which, as there were no shops in it, and it was no direct
thoroughfare to the busy centres of the town, was always quiet, and at
some hours of the day almost deserted. The other side of the house
fronted a lane; opposite to it was the long and high wall of the garden to
a Young Ladies' Boarding-school. My stables adjoined the house, abutting
on a row of smaller buildings, with little gardens before them, chiefly
occupied by mercantile clerks and retired tradesmen. By the lane there
was a short and ready access both to the high turnpike-road, and to some
pleasant walks through green meadows and along the banks of a river.

This house I had inhabited since my arrival at L----, and it had to me so
many attractions, in a situation sufficiently central to be convenient for
patients, and yet free from noise, and favourable to ready outlet into the
country for such foot or horse exercise as my professional avocations
would allow me to carve for myself out of what the Latin poet calls the
"solid day," that I had refused to change it for one better suited to my
increased income; but it was not a house which Mrs. Ashleigh would have
liked for Lilian. The main objection to it in the eyes of the "genteel"
was, that it had formerly belonged to a member of the healing profession
who united the shop of an apothecary to the diploma of a surgeon; but that
shop had given the house a special attraction to me; for it had been built
out on the side of the house which fronted the lane, occupying the greater
portion of a small gravel court, fenced from the road by a low iron
palisade, and separated from the body of the house itself by a short and
narrow corridor that communicated with the entrance-hall. This shop I
turned into a rude study for scientific experiments, in which I generally
spent some early hours of the morning, before my visiting patients began
to arrive. I enjoyed the stillness of its separation from the rest of
the house; I enjoyed the glimpse of the great chestnut-trees, which
overtopped the wall of the school-garden; I enjoyed the ease with which,
by opening the glazed sash-door, I could get out, if disposed for a short
walk, into the pleasant fields; and so completely had I made this
sanctuary my own, that not only my man-servant knew that I was never to be
disturbed when in it, except by the summons of a patient, but even the
housemaid was forbidden to enter it with broom or duster, except upon
special invitation. The last thing at night, before retiring to rest, it
was the man-servant's business to see that the sash-window was closed,
and the gate to the iron palisade locked; but during the daytime I so
often went out of the house by that private way that the gate was then
very seldom locked, nor the sash-door bolted from within. In the town of
L---- there was little apprehension of house-robberies,--especially in the
daylight,--and certainly in this room, cut off from the main building,
there was nothing to attract a vulgar cupidity. A few of the apothecary's
shelves and cases still remained on the walls, with, here and there, a
bottle of some chemical preparation for experiment; two or three
worm-eaten, wooden chairs; two or three shabby old tables; an old
walnut-tree bureau without a lock, into which odds and ends were
confusedly thrust, and sundry ugly-looking inventions of mechanical
science, were, assuredly, not the articles which a timid proprietor would
guard with jealous care from the chances of robbery. It will be seen
later why I have been thus prolix in description. The morning after I had
met the young stranger by whom I had been so favourably impressed, I was
up as usual, a little before the sun, and long before any of my servants
were astir. I went first into the room I have mentioned, and which I
shall henceforth designate as my study, opened the window, unlocked the
gate, and sauntered for some minutes up and down the silent lace skirting
the opposite wall, and overhung by the chestnut-trees rich in the
garniture of a glorious summer; then, refreshed for work, I re-entered my
study, and was soon absorbed in the examination of that now well-known
machine, which was then, to me at least, a novelty,--invented, if I
remember right, by Dubois-Reymond, so distinguished by his researches into
the mysteries of organic electricity. It is a wooden cylinder fixed
against the edge of a table; on the table two vessels filled with salt and
water are so placed that, as you close your hands on the cylinder, the
forefinger of each hand can drop into the water; each of the vessels has a
metallic plate, and communicates by wires with a galvanometer with its
needle. Now the theory is, that if you clutch the cylinder firmly with
the right hand, leaving the left perfectly passive, the needle in the
galvanometer will move from west to south; if, in like manner, you exert
the left arm, leaving the right arm passive, the needle will deflect from
west to north. Hence, it is argued that the electric current is induced
through the agency of the nervous system, and that, as human Will produces
the muscular contraction requisite, so is it human Will that causes the
deflection of the needle. I imagine that if this theory were
substantiated by experiment, the discovery might lead to some sublime and
unconjectured secrets of science. For human Will, thus actively effective
on the electric current, and all matter, animate or inanimate, having more
or less of electricity, a vast field became opened to conjecture. By what
series of patient experimental deduction might not science arrive at the
solution of problems which the Newtonian law of gravitation does not
suffice to solve; and--But here I halt. At the date which my story has
reached, my mind never lost itself long in the Cloudland of Guess.

I was dissatisfied with my experiment. The needle stirred, indeed, but
erratically, and not in directions which, according to the theory, should
correspond to my movement. I was about to dismiss the trial with some
uncharitable contempt of the foreign philosopher's dogmas, when I heard a
loud ring at my street-door. While I paused to conjecture whether my
servant was yet up to attend to the door, and which of my patients was the
most likely to summon me at so unseasonable an hour, a shadow darkened my
window. I looked up, and to my astonishment beheld the brilliant face of
Mr. Margrave. The sash to the door was already partially opened; he
raised it higher, and walked into the room. "Was it you who rang at the
street-door, and at this hour?" said I.

"Yes; and observing, after I had rung, that all the shutters were still
closed, I felt ashamed of my own rash action, and made off rather than
brave the reproachful face of some injured housemaid, robbed of her
morning dreams. I turned down that pretty lane,--lured by the green of
the chestnut-trees,--caught sight of you through the window, took courage,
and here I am! You forgive me?" While thus speaking, he continued to
move along the littered floor of the dingy room, with the undulating
restlessness of some wild animal in the confines of its den, and he now
went on, in short fragmentary sentences, very slightly linked together,
but smoothed, as it were, into harmony by a voice musical and fresh as a
sky lark's warble. "Morning dreams, indeed! dreams that waste the life
of such a morning. Rosy magnificence of a summer dawn! Do you not pity
the fool who prefers to lie a bed, and to dream rather than to live?
What! and you, strong man, with those noble limbs, in this den! Do you
not long for a rush through the green of the fields, a bath in the blue of
the river?"

Here he came to a pause, standing, still in the gray light of the growing
day, with eyes whose joyous lustre forestalled the sun's, and lips which
seemed to laugh even in repose.

But presently those eyes, as quick as they were bright, glanced over the
walls, the floor, the shelves, the phials, the mechanical inventions, and
then rested full on my cylinder fixed to the table. He approached,
examined it curiously, asked what it was. I explained. To gratify him I
sat down and renewed my experiment, with equally ill success. The needle,
which should have moved from west to south, describing an angle of from
thirty degrees to forty or even fifty degrees, only made a few troubled,
undecided oscillations.

"Tut," cried the young man, "I see what it is; you have a wound in your
right hand."

That was true; I had burned my band a few days before in a chemical
experiment, and the sore had not healed.

"Well," said I, "and what does that matter?"

"Everything; the least scratch in the skin of the hand produces chemical
actions on the electric current, independently of your will. Let me try."

He took my place, and in a moment the needle in the galvanometer responded
to his grasp on the cylinder, exactly as the inventive philosopher had
stated to be the due result of the experiment.

I was startled.

"But how came you, Mr. Margrave, to be so well acquainted with a
scientific process little known, and but recently discovered?"

"I well acquainted! not so. But I am fond of all experiments that relate
to animal life. Electricity, especially, is full of interest."

On that I drew him out (as I thought), and he talked volubly. I was
amazed to find this young man, in whose brain I had conceived thought kept
one careless holiday, was evidently familiar with the physical sciences,
and especially with chemistry, which was my own study by predilection.
But never had I met with a student in whom a knowledge so extensive was
mixed up with notions so obsolete or so crotchety. In one sentence he
showed that he had mastered some late discovery by Faraday or Liebig; in
the next sentence he was talking the wild fallacies of Cardan or Van
Helmont. I burst out laughing at some paradox about sympathetic powders,
which he enounced as if it were a recognized truth.

"Pray tell me," said I, "who was your master in physics; for a cleverer
pupil never had a more crack-brained teacher."

"No," he answered, with his merry laugh, "it is not the teacher's fault.
I am a mere parrot; just cry out a few scraps of learning picked up here
and there. But, however, I am fond of all researches into Nature; all
guesses at her riddles. To tell you the truth, one reason why I have
taken to you so heartily is not only that your published work caught my
fancy in the dip which I took into its contents (pardon me if I say dip, I
never do more than dip into any book), but also because young ---- tells
me that which all whom I have met in this town confirm; namely, that you
are one of those few practical chemists who are at once exceedingly
cautious and exceedingly bold,--willing to try every new experiment, but
submitting experiment to rigid tests. Well, I have an experiment running
wild in this giddy head of mine, and I want you, some day when at leisure,
to catch it, fix it as you have fixed that cylinder, make something of it.
I am sure you can."

"What is it?"

"Something akin to the theories in your work. You would replenish or
preserve to each special constitution the special substance that may fail
to the equilibrium of its health. But you own that in a large
proportion of cases the best cure of disease is less to deal with the
disease itself than to support and stimulate the whole system, so as to
enable Nature to cure the disease and restore the impaired equilibrium by
her own agencies. Thus, if you find that in certain cases of nervous
debility a substance like nitric acid is efficacious, it is because the
nitric acid has a virtue in locking up, as it were, the nervous
energy,--that is, preventing all undue waste. Again, in some cases of
what is commonly called feverish cold, stimulants like ammonia assist
Nature itself to get rid of the disorder that oppresses its normal action;
and, on the same principle, I apprehend, it is contended that a large
average of human lives is saved in those hospitals which have adopted the
supporting system of ample nourishment and alcoholic stimulants."

"Your medical learning surprises me," said I, smiling; "and without
pausing to notice where it deals somewhat superficially with disputable
points in general, and my own theory in particular, I ask you for the
deduction you draw from your premises."

"It is simply this: that to all animate bodies, however various, there
must be one principle in common,--the vital principle itself. What if
there be one certain means of recruiting that principle; and what if that
secret can be discovered?"

"Pshaw! The old illusion of the mediaeval empirics."

"Not so. But the mediaeval empirics were great discoverers. You sneer at
Van Helmont, who sought, in water, the principle of all things; but Van
Helmont discovered in his search those invisible bodies called gases. Now
the principle of life must be certainly ascribed to a gas.[1] And what
ever is a gas chemistry should not despair of producing! But I can argue
no longer now,--never can argue long at a stretch; we are wasting the
morning; and, joy! the sun is up! See! Out! come out! out! and greet
the great Lifegiver face to face."

I could not resist the young man's invitation. In a few minutes we were
in the quiet lane under the glinting chestnut-trees. Margrave was
chanting, low, a wild tune,--words in a strange language.

"What words are those,--no European language, I think; for I know a little
of most of the languages which are spoken in our quarter of the globe, at
least by its more civilized races."

"Civilized race! What is civilization? Those words were uttered by men
who founded empires when Europe itself was not civilized! Hush, is it not
a grand old air?" and lifting his eyes towards the sun, he gave vent to a
voice clear and deep as a mighty bell! The air was grand; the words had a
sonorous swell that suited it, and they seemed to me jubilant and yet
solemn. He stopped abruptly as a path from the lane had led us into the
fields, already half-bathed in sunlight, dews glittering on the hedgerows.

"Your song," said I, "would go well with the clash of cymbals or the peal
of the organ. I am no judge of melody, but this strikes me as that of a
religious hymn."

"I compliment you on the guess. It is a Persian fire-worshipper's hymn to
the sun. The dialect is very different from modern Persian. Cyrus the
Great might have chanted it on his march upon Babylon."

"And where did you learn it?"

"In Persia itself."

"You have travelled much, learned much,--and are so young and so fresh.
Is it an impertinent question if I ask whether your parents are yet
living, or are you wholly lord of yourself?"

"Thank you for the question,--pray make my answer known in the town.
Parents I have not,--never had."

"Never had parents!"

"Well, I ought rather to say that no parents ever owned me. I am a
natural son, a vagabond, a nobody. When I came of age I received an
anonymous letter, informing me that a sum--I need not say what, but more
than enough for all I need--was lodged at an English banker's in my name;
that my mother had died in my infancy; that my father was also dead--but
recently; that as I was a child of love, and he was unwilling that the
secret of my birth should ever be traced, he had provided for me, not by
will, but in his life, by a sum consigned to the trust of the friend who
now wrote to me; I need give myself no trouble to learn more. Faith, I
never did! I am young, healthy, rich,--yes, rich! Now you know all, and
you had better tell it, that I may win no man's courtesy and no maiden's
love upon false pretences. I have not even a right, you see, to the name
I bear. Hist! let me catch that squirrel."

With what a panther-like bound he sprang! The squirrel eluded his grasp,
and was up the oak-tree; in a moment he was up the oak-tree too. In
amazement I saw him rising from bough to bough; saw his bright eyes and
glittering teeth through the green leaves. Presently I heard the sharp
piteous cry of the squirrel, echoed by the youth's merry laugh; and down,
through that maze of green, Hargrave came, dropping on the grass and
bounding up, as Mercury might have bounded with his wings at his heels.

"I have caught him. What pretty brown eyes!"

Suddenly the gay expression of his face changed to that of a savage; the
squirrel had wrenched itself half-loose, and bitten him. The poor brute!
In an instant its neck was wrung, its body dashed on the ground; and that
fair young creature, every feature quivering with rage, was stamping his
foot on his victim again and again! It was horrible. I caught him by the
arm indignantly. He turned round on me like a wild beast disturbed from
its prey,--his teeth set, his hand lifted, his eyes like balls of fire.

"Shame!" said I, calmly; "shame on you!"

He continued to gaze on me a moment or so, his eye glaring, his breath
panting; and then, as if mastering himself with an involuntary effort, his
arm dropped to his side, and he said quite humbly, "I beg your pardon;
indeed I do. I was beside myself for a moment; I cannot bear pain; "and
he looked in deep compassion for himself at his wounded hand. "Venomous
brute!" And he stamped again on the body of the squirrel, already crushed
out of shape.

I moved away in disgust, and walked on.

But presently I felt my arm softly drawn aside, and a voice, dulcet as the
coo of a dove, stole its way into my ears. There was no resisting the
charm with which this extraordinary mortal could fascinate even the hard
and the cold; nor them, perhaps, the least. For as you see in extreme old
age, when the heart seems to have shrunk into itself, and to leave but
meagre and nipped affections for the nearest relations if grown up, the
indurated egotism softens at once towards a playful child; or as you see
in middle life, some misanthrope, whose nature has been soured by wrong
and sorrow, shrink from his own species, yet make friends with inferior
races, and respond to the caress of a dog,--so, for the worldling or the
cynic, there was an attraction in the freshness of this joyous favourite
of Nature,--an attraction like that of a beautiful child, spoilt and
wayward, or of a graceful animal, half docile, half fierce.

"But," said I, with a smile, as I felt all displeasure gone, "such
indulgence of passion for such a trifle is surely unworthy a student of
philosophy!"

"Trifle," he said dolorously. "But I tell you it is pain; pain is no
trifle. I suffer. Look!"

I looked at the hand, which I took in mine. The bite no doubt had been
sharp; but the hand that lay in my own was that which the Greek sculptor
gives to a gladiator; not large (the extremities are never large in
persons whose strength comes from the just proportion of all the members,
rather than the factitious and partial force which continued muscular
exertion will give to one part of the frame, to the comparative weakening
of the rest), but with the firm-knit joints, the solid fingers, the
finished nails, the massive palm, the supple polished skin, in which we
recognize what Nature designs the human hand to be,--the skilled, swift,
mighty doer of all those marvels which win Nature herself from the
wilderness.

"It is strange," said I, thoughtfully; "but your susceptibility to
suffering confirms my opinion, which is different from the popular
belief,--namely, that pain is most acutely felt by those in whom the
animal organization being perfect, and the sense of vitality exquisitely
keen, every injury or lesion finds the whole system rise, as it were, to
repel the mischief and communicate the consciousness of it to all those
nerves which are the sentinels to the garrison of life. Yet my theory is
scarcely borne out by general fact. The Indian savages must have a health
as perfect as yours; a nervous system as fine,--witness their marvellous
accuracy of ear, of eye, of scent, probably also of touch; yet they are
indifferent to physical pain; or must I mortify your pride by saying that
they have some moral quality defective in you which enables them to rise
superior to it?"

"The Indian savages," said Margrave, sullenly, "have not a health as
perfect as mine, and in what you call vitality--the blissful consciousness
of life--they are as sticks and stones compared to me."

"How do you know?"

"Because I have lived with them. It is a fallacy to suppose that the
savage has a health superior to that of the civilized man,--if the
civilized man be but temperate; and even if not, he has the stamina that
can resist for years the effect of excesses which would destroy the savage
in a month. As to the savage's fine perceptions of sense, such do not
come from exquisite equilibrium of system, but are hereditary attributes
transmitted from race to race, and strengthened by training from infancy.
But is a pointer stronger and healthier than a mastiff, because the
pointer through long descent and early teaching creeps stealthily to his
game and stands to it motionless? I will talk of this later; now I
suffer! Pain, pain! Has life any ill but pain?"

It so happened that I had about me some roots of the white lily, which I
meant, before returning home, to leave with a patient suffering from one
of those acute local inflammations, in which that simple remedy often
affords great relief. I cut up one of these roots, and bound the cooling
leaves to the wounded hand with my handkerchief.

"There," said I. "Fortunately if you feel pain more sensibly than others,
you will recover from it more quickly." And in a few minutes my
companion felt perfectly relieved, and poured out his gratitude with an
extravagance of expression and a beaming delight of countenance which
positively touched me.

"I almost feel," said I, "as I do when I have stilled an infant's wailing,
and restored it smiling to its mother's breast."

"You have done so. I am an infant, and Nature is my mother. Oh, to be
restored to the full joy of life, the scent of wild flowers, the song of
birds, and this air--summer air--summer air!"

I know not why it was, but at that moment, looking at him and hearing him,
I rejoiced that Lilian was not at L----. "But I came out to bathe. Can
we not bathe in that stream?"

"No. You would derange the bandage round your hand; and for all bodily
ills, from the least to the gravest, there is nothing like leaving Nature
at rest the moment we have hit on the means which assist her own efforts
at cure."

"I obey, then; but I so love the water."

"You swim, of course?"

"Ask the fish if it swim. Ask the fish if it can escape me! I delight to
dive down--down; to plunge after the startled trout, as an otter does; and
then to get amongst those cool, fragrant reeds and bulrushes, or that
forest of emerald weed which one sometimes finds waving under clear
rivers. Man! man! could you live but an hour of my life you would know
how horrible a thing it is to die!"

"Yet the dying do not think so; they pass away calm and smiling, as you
will one day."

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