Book: A Strange Story, Volume 3.
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Edward Bulwer Lytton >> A Strange Story, Volume 3.
"Astrologers? No! They deal with the future! I live for the day; only I
wish the day never had a morrow!"
"Have you not, then that vague desire for the something beyond,--that not
unhappy, but grand discontent with the limits of the immediate Present,
from which man takes his passion for improvement and progress, and from
which some sentimental philosophers have deduced an argument in favour of
his destined immortality?"
"Eh!" said Margrave, with as vacant a stare as that of a peasant whom one
has addressed in Hebrew. "What farrago of words is this? I do not
comprehend you."
"With your natural abilities," I asked with interest, "do you never feel a
desire for fame?"
"Fame? Certainly not. I cannot even understand it!"
"Well, then, would you have no pleasure in the thought that you had
rendered a service to humanity?"
Margrave looked bewildered; after a moment's pause, he took from the table
a piece of bread that chanced to be there, opened the window, and threw
the crumbs into the lane. The sparrows gathered round the crumbs.
"Now," said Margrave, "the sparrows come to that dull pavement for the
bread that recruits their lives in this world; do you believe that one
sparrow would be silly enough to fly to a house-top for the sake of some
benefit to other sparrows, or to be chirruped about after he was dead? I
care for science as the sparrow cares for bread,--it may help me to
something good for my own life; and as for fame and humanity, I care for
them as the sparrow cares for the general interest and posthumous
approbation of sparrows!"
"Margrave, there is one thing in you that perplexes me more than all
else--human puzzle as you are--in your many eccentricities and
self-contradictions."
"What is that one thing in me most perplexing?"
"This: that in your enjoyment of Nature you have all the freshness of a
child, but when you speak of Man and his objects in the world, you talk in
the vein of some worn-out and hoary cynic. At such times, were I to close
my eyes, I should say to myself, 'What weary old man is thus venting his
spleen against the ambition which has failed, and the love which has
forsaken him?' Outwardly the very personation of youth, and revelling like
a butterfly in the warmth of the sun and the tints of the herbage, why
have you none of the golden passions of the young,--their bright dreams of
some impossible love, their sublime enthusiasm for some unattainable
glory? The sentiment you have just clothed in the illustration by which
you place yourself on a level with the sparrows is too mean and too gloomy
to be genuine at your age. Misanthropy is among the dismal fallacies of
gray beards. No man, till man's energies leave him, can divorce himself
from the bonds of our social kind."
"Our kind! Your kind, possibly; but I--" He swept his hand over his
brow, and resumed, in strange, absent, and wistful accents: "I wonder what
it is that is wanting here, and of which at moments I have a dim
reminiscence." Again he paused, and gazing on me, said with more
appearance of friendly interest than I had ever before remarked in his
countenance, "You are not looking well. Despite your great physical
strength, you suffer like your own sickly patients."
"True! I suffer at this moment, but not from bodily pain."
"You have some cause of mental disquietude?"
"Who in this world has not?"
"I never have."
"Because you own you have never loved. Certainly, you never seem to care
for any one but yourself; and in yourself you find an unbroken sunny
holiday,--high spirits, youth, health, beauty, wealth. Happy boy!"
At that moment my heart was heavy within me.
Margrave resumed,--
"Among the secrets which your knowledge places at the command of your art,
what would you give for one which would enable you to defy and to deride a
rival where you place your affections, which could lock to yourself, and
imperiously control, the will of the being whom you desire to fascinate,
by an influence paramount, transcendent?"
"Love has that secret," said I,--"and love alone."
"A power stronger than love can suspend, can change love itself. But if
love be the object or dream of your life, love is the rosy associate of
youth and beauty. Beauty soon fades, youth soon departs. What if in
nature there were means by which beauty and youth can be fixed into
blooming duration,--means that could arrest the course, nay, repair the
effects, of time on the elements that make up the human frame?"
"Silly boy! Have the Rosicrucians bequeathed to you a prescription for
the elixir of life?"
"If I had the prescription I should not ask your aid to discover its
ingredients."
"And is it in the hope of that notable discovery you have studied
chemistry, electricity, and magnetism? Again I say, Silly boy!"
Margrave did not heed my reply. His face was overcast, gloomy, troubled.
"That the vital principle is a gas," said he, abruptly, "I am fully
convinced. Can that gas be the one which combines caloric with oxygen?"
"Phosoxygen? Sir Humphrey Davy demonstrates that gas not to be, as
Lavoisier supposed, caloric, but light, combined with oxygen; and he
suggests, not indeed that it is the vital principle itself, but the
pabulum of life to organic beings." [1]
"Does he?" said Margrave, his, face clearing up. "Possibly, possibly,
then, here we approach the great secret of secrets. Look you, Allen
Fenwick: I promise to secure to you unfailing security from all the
jealous fears that now torture your heart; if you care for that fame which
to me is not worth the scent of a flower, the balm of a breeze, I will
impart to you a knowledge which, in the hands of ambition, would dwarf
into commonplace the boasted wonders of recognized science. I will do
all this, if, in return, but for one month you will give yourself up to my
guidance in whatever experiments I ask, no matter how wild they may seem
to you."
"My dear Margrave, I reject your bribes as I would reject the moon and the
stars which a child might offer to me in exchange for a toy; but I may
give the child its toy for nothing, and I may test your experiments for
nothing some day when I have leisure."
I did not hear Margrave's answer, for at that moment my servant entered
with letters. Lilian's hand! Tremblingly, breathlessly, I broke the
seal. Such a loving, bright, happy letter; so sweet in its gentle chiding
of my wrongful fears! It was implied rather than said that Ashleigh
Sumner had proposed and been refused. He had now left the house. Lilian
and her mother were coming back; in a few days we should meet. In this
letter were inclosed a few lines from Mrs. Ashleigh. She was more
explicit about my rival than Lilian had been. If no allusion to his
attentions had been made to me before, it was from a delicate
consideration for myself. Mrs. Ashleigh said that "the young man had
heard from L---- of our engagement, and--disbelieved it;" but, as Mrs.
Poyntz had so shrewdly predicted, hurried at once to the avowal of his own
attachment, and the offer of his own hand. On Lilian's refusal his pride
had been deeply mortified. He had gone away manifestly in more anger than
sorrow.
"Lady Delafield, dear Margaret Poyntz's aunt, had been most kind in
trying to soothe Lady Haughton's disappointment, which was rudely
expressed,--so rudely," added Mrs. Ashleigh, "that it gives us an
excuse to leave sooner than had been proposed,--which I am very glad
of. Lady Delafield feels much for Mr. Sumner; has invited him to
visit her at a place she has near Worthing. She leaves to-morrow in
order to receive him; promises to reconcile him to our rejection,
which, as he was my poor Gilbert's heir, and was very friendly at
first, would be a great relief to my mind. Lilian is well, and so
happy at the thoughts of coining back."
When I lifted my eyes from these letters I was as a new man, and the earth
seemed a new earth. I felt as if I had realized Margrave's idle
dreams,--as if youth could never fade, love could never grow cold.
"You care for no secrets of mine at this moment," said Margrave, abruptly.
"Secrets!" I murmured; "none now are worth knowing. I am loved! I am
loved!"
"I bide my time," said Margrave; and as my eyes met his, I saw there a
look I had never seen in those eyes before, sinister, wrathful, menacing.
He turned away, went out through the sash-door of the study; and as he
passed towards the fields under the luxuriant chestnut-trees, I heard his
musical, barbaric chant,--the song by which the serpent-charmer charms the
serpent,--sweet, so sweet, the very birds on the boughs hushed their carol
as if to listen.
[1] See Sir Humphrey Davy on Heat, Light, and the Combinations of Light
CHAPTER XXX.
I called that day on Mrs. Poyntz, and communicated to her the purport of
the glad news I had received.
She was still at work on the everlasting knitting, her firm fingers
linking mesh into mesh as she listened; and when I had done, she laid her
skein deliberately down, and said, in her favourite characteristic
formula,--
"So at last?--that is settled!"
She rose and paced the room as men are apt to do in reflection, women
rarely need such movement to aid their thoughts; her eyes were fixed on
the floor, and one hand was lightly pressed on the palm of the other,--the
gesture of a musing reasoner who is approaching the close of a difficult
calculation.
At length she paused, fronting me, and said dryly,--
"Accept my congratulations. Life smiles on you now; guard that smile, and
when we meet next, may we be even firmer friends than we are now!"
"When we meet next,--that will be to-night--you surely go to the mayor's
great ball? All the Hill descends to Low Town to-night."
"No; we are obliged to leave L---- this afternoon; in less than two hours
we shall be gone,--a family engagement. We may be weeks away; you will
excuse me, then, if I take leave of you so unceremoniously. Stay, a
motherly word of caution. That friend of yours, Mr. Margrave! Moderate
your intimacy with him; and especially after you are married. There is in
that stranger, of whom so little is known, a something which I cannot
comprehend,--a something that captivates and yet revolts. I find him
disturbing my thoughts, perplexing my conjectures, haunting my
fancies,--I, plain woman of the world! Lilian is imaginative; beware of
her imagination, even when sure of her heart. Beware of Margrave. The
sooner he quits L---- the better, believe me, for your peace of mind.
Adieu! I must prepare for our journey."
"That woman," muttered I, on quitting her house, "seems to have some
strange spite against my poor Lilian, ever seeking to rouse my own
distrust of that exquisite nature which has just given me such proof of
its truth. And yet--and yet--is that woman so wrong here? True!
Margrave with his wild notions, his strange beauty!--true--true--he might
dangerously encourage that turn for the mystic and visionary which
distresses me in Lilian. Lilian should not know him. How induce him to
leave L----? Ah, those experiments on which he asks my assistance! I
might commence them when he comes again, and then invent some excuse
tosend him for completer tests to the famous chemists of Paris or Berlin."
CHAPTER XXXI.
It is the night of the mayor's ball! The guests are assembling fast;
county families twelve miles round have been invited, as well as the
principal families of the town. All, before proceeding to the room set
apart for the dance, moved in procession through the museum,--homage to
science before pleasure!
The building was brilliantly lighted, and the effect was striking, perhaps
because singular and grotesque. There, amidst stands of flowers and
evergreens, lit up with coloured lamps, were grouped the dead
representatives of races all inferior--some deadly--to man. The fancy of
the ladies had been permitted to decorate and arrange these types of the
animal world. The tiger glared with glass eyes from amidst artificial
reeds and herbage, as from his native jungle; the grisly white bear peered
from a mimic iceberg. There, in front, stood the sage elephant, facing a
hideous hippopotamus; whilst an anaconda twined its long spire round the
stem of some tropical tree in zinc. In glass cases, brought into full
light by festooned lamps, were dread specimens of the reptile
race,--scorpion and vampire, and cobra capella, with insects of gorgeous
hues, not a few of them with venomed stings.
But the chief boast of the collection was in the varieties of the Genus
Simia,--baboons and apes, chimpanzees, with their human visage, mockeries
of man, from the dwarf monkeys perched on boughs lopped from the mayor's
shrubberies, to the formidable ourangoutang, leaning on his huge club.
Every one expressed to the mayor admiration, to each other antipathy, for
this unwonted and somewhat ghastly, though instructive, addition to the
revels of a ballroom.
Margrave, of course, was there, and seemingly quite at home, gliding from
group to group of gayly-dressed ladies, and brilliant with a childish
eagerness to play off the showman. Many of these grim fellow-creatures he
declared he had seen, played, or fought with. He had something true or
false to say about each. In his high spirits he contrived to make the
tiger move, and imitated the hiss of the terribly anaconda. All that he
did had its grace, its charm; and the buzz of admiration and the
flattering glances of ladies' eyes followed him wherever he moved.
However, there was a general feeling of relief when the mayor led the way
from the museum into the ballroom. In provincial parties guests arrive
pretty much within the same hour, and so few who had once paid their
respects to the apes and serpents, the hippopotamus and the tiger, were
disposed to repeat the visit, that long before eleven o'clock the museum
was as free from the intrusion of human life as the wilderness in which
its dead occupants had been born.
I had gone my round through the rooms, and, little disposed to be social,
had crept into the retreat of a window-niche, pleased to think myself
screened by its draperies,--not that I was melancholy, far from it; for
the letter I had received that morning from Lilian had raised my whole
being into a sovereignty of happiness high beyond the reach of the young
pleasure-hunters, whose voices and laughter blended with that vulgar
music.
To read her letter again I had stolen to my nook, and now, sure that none
saw me kiss it, I replaced it in my bosom. I looked through the parted
curtain; the room was comparatively empty; but there, through the open
folding-doors, I saw the gay crowd gathered round the dancers, and there
again, at right angles, a vista along the corridor afforded a glimpse of
the great elephant in the deserted museum.
Presently I heard, close beside me, my host's voice.
"Here's a cool corner, a pleasant sofa, you can have it all to yourself.
What an honour to receive you under my roof, and on this interesting
occasion! Yes, as you say, there are great changes in L---- since you
left us. Society has much improved. I must look about and find some
persons to introduce to you. Clever! oh, I know your tastes. We have a
wonderful man,--a new doctor. Carries all before him; very high
character, too; good old family, greatly looked up to, even apart from his
profession. Dogmatic a little,--a Sir Oracle,--'Lets no dog bark;' you
remember the quotation,--Shakspeare. Where on earth is he? My dear Sir
Philip, I am sure you would enjoy his conversation."
Sir Philip! Could it be Sir Philip Derval to whom the mayor was giving a
flattering yet scarcely propitiatory description of myself? Curiosity
combined with a sense of propriety in not keeping myself an unsuspected
listener; I emerged from the curtain, but silently, and reached the centre
of the room before the mayor perceived me. He then came up to me eagerly,
linked his arm in mine, and leading me to a gentleman seated on a sofa,
close by the window I had quitted, said,--
"Doctor, I must present you to Sir Philip Derval, just returned to
England, and not six hours in L----. If you would like to see the museum
again, Sir Philip, the doctor, I am sure, will accompany you."
"No, I thank you; it is painful to me at present to see, even under your
roof, the collection which my poor dear friend, Dr. Lloyd, was so proudly
beginning to form when I left these parts."
"Ay, Sir Philip, Dr. Lloyd was a worthy man in his way, but sadly duped in
his latter years; took to mesmerism, only think! But our young doctor
here showed him up, I can tell you."
Sir Philip, who had acknowledged my first introduction to his acquaintance
by the quiet courtesy with which a well-bred man goes through a ceremony
that custom enables him to endure with equal ease and indifference, now
evinced by a slight change of manner how little the mayor's reference to
my dispute with Dr. Lloyd advanced me in his good opinion. He turned away
with a bow more formal than his first one, and said calmly,
"I regret to hear that a man so simple-minded and so sensitive as Dr.
Lloyd should have provoked an encounter in which I can well conceive him
to have been worsted. With your leave, Mr. Mayor, I will look into your
ballroom. I may perhaps find there some old acquantances."
He walked towards the dancers, and the mayor, linking his arm in mine,
followed close behind, saying in his loud hearty tones,--
"Come along, you too, Dr. Fenwick, my girls are there; you have not spoken
to them yet."
Sir Philip, who was then half way across the room, turned round abruptly,
and, looking me full in the face, said,--
"Fenwick, is your name Fenwick,--Allen Fenwick?"
"That is my name, Sir Philip."
"Then permit me to shake you by the hand; you are no stranger, and no mere
acquaintance to me. Mr. Mayor, we will look into your ballroom later; do
not let us keep you now from your other guests."
The mayor, not in the least offended by being thus summarily dismissed,
smiled, walked on, and was soon lost amongst the crowd.
Sir Philip, still retaining my hand, reseated himself on the sofa, and I
took my place by his side. The room was still deserted; now and then a
straggler from the ballroom looked in for a moment, and then sauntered
back to the central place of attraction.
"I ain trying to guess," said I, "how my name should be known to you.
Possibly you may, in some visit to the Lakes, have known my father?"
"No; I know none of your name but yourself,--if, indeed, as I doubt not,
you are the Allen Fenwick to whom I owe no small obligation. You were a
medical student at Edinburgh in the year ----?"
"Yes."
"So! At that time there was also at Edinburgh a young man, named Richard
Strahan. He lodged in a fourth flat in the Old Town."
"I remember him very well."
"And you remember, also, that a fire broke out at night in the house in
which he lodged; that when it was discovered there seemed no hope of
saving him. The flames wrapped the lower part of the house; the staircase
had given way. A boy, scarcely so old as himself, was the only human
being in the crowd who dared to scale the ladder that even then scarcely
reached the windows from which the smoke rolled in volumes; that boy
penetrated into the room, found the inmate almost insensible, rallied,
supported, dragged him to the window, got him on the ladder,--saved his
life then: and his life later, by nursing with a woman's tenderness,
through the fever caused by terror and excitement, the fellow-creature he
had rescued by a man's daring. The name of that gallant student was Allen
Fenwick, and Richard Strahan is my nearest living relation. Are we
friends now?"
I answered confusedly. I had almost forgotten the circumstances referred
to. Richard Strahan had not been one of my more intimate companions, and
I bad never seen nor heard of him since leaving college. I inquired what
had become of him.
"He is at the Scotch Bar," said Sir Philip, "and of course without
practice. I understand that he has fair average abilities, but no
application. If I am rightly informed, he is, however, a thoroughly
honourable, upright man, and of an affectionate and grateful disposition."
"I can answer for all you have said in his praise. He had the qualities
you name too deeply rooted in youth to have lost them now."
Sir Philip remained for some moments in a musing silence; and I took
advantage of that silence to examine him with more minute attention than I
had done before, much as the first sight of him had struck me.
He was somewhat below the common height,--so delicately formed that one
might call him rather fragile than slight. But in his carriage and air
there was remarkable dignity. His countenance was at direct variance with
his figure; for as delicacy was the attribute of the last, so power was
unmistakably the characteristic of the first. He looked fully the age his
steward had ascribed to him,--about forty-eight; at a superficial glance,
more, for his hair was prematurely white,--not gray, but white as snow.
But his eyebrows were still jet black, and his eyes, equally dark, were
serenely bright. His forehead was magnificent,--lofty and spacious, and
with only one slight wrinkle between the brows. His complexion was
sunburnt, showing no sign of weak health. The outline of his lips was
that which I have often remarked in men accustomed to great dangers, and
contracting in such dangers the habit of self-reliance,--firm and quiet,
compressed without an effort. And the power of this very noble
countenance was not intimidating, not aggressive; it was mild, it was
benignant. A man oppressed by some formidable tyranny, and despairing to
find a protector, would, on seeing that face, have said, "Here is one who
can protect me, and who will!"
Sir Philip was the first to break the silence.
"I have so many relations scattered over England, that fortunately not one
of them can venture to calculate on my property if I die childless, and
therefore not one of them can feel himself injured when, a few weeks
hence, he shall read in the newspapers that Philip Derval is married. But
for Richard Strahan at least, though I never saw him, I must do something
before the newspapers make that announcement. His sister was very dear to
me."
"Your neighbours, Sir Philip, will rejoice at your marriage, since, I
presume, it may induce you to settle amongst them at Derval Court."
"At Derval Court! No! I shall not settle there." Again he paused a
moment or so, and then went on: "I have long lived a wandering life, and
in it learned much that the wisdom of cities cannot teach. I return to my
native land with a profound conviction that the happiest life is the life
most in common with all. I have gone out of my way to do what I deemed
good, and to avert or mitigate what appeared to me evil. I pause now and
ask myself, whether the most virtuous existence be not that in which
virtue flows spontaneously from the springs of quiet everyday action; when
a man does good without restlessly seeking it, does good unconsciously,
simply because he is good and he lives. Better, perhaps, for me, if I had
thought so long ago! And now I come back to England with the intention of
marrying, late in life though it be, and with such hopes of happiness as
any matter-of-fact man may form. But my hope will not be at Derval
Court. I shall reside either in London or its immediate neighbourhood,
and seek to gather round me minds by which I can correct, if I cannot
confide to them, the knowledge I myself have acquired."
"Nay, if, as I have accidentally heard, you are fond of scientific
pursuits, I cannot wonder, that after so long an absence from England, you
should feel interest in learning what new discoveries have been made, what
new ideas are unfolding the germs of discoveries yet to be. But, pardon
me, if in answer to your concluding remark, I venture to say that no man
can hope to correct any error in his own knowledge, unless he has the
courage to confide the error to those who can correct. La Place has
said, 'Tout se tient dans le chaine immense des verites;' and the mistake
we make in some science we have specially cultivated is often only to be
seen by the light of a separate science as specially cultivated by
another. Thus, in the investigation of truth, frank exposition to
congenial minds is essential to the earnest seeker."
"I am pleased with what you say," said Sir Philip, "and I shall be still
more pleased to find in you the very confidant I require. But what was
your controversy with my old friend, Dr. Lloyd? Do I understand our host
rightly, that it related to what in Europe has of late days obtained the
name of mesmerism?"
I had conceived a strong desire to conciliate the good opinion of a man
who had treated me with so singular and so familiar a kindness, and it was
sincerely that I expressed my regret at the acerbity with which I had
assailed Dr. Lloyd; but of his theories and pretensions I could not
disguise my contempt. I enlarged on the extravagant fallacies involved in
a fabulous "clairvoyance," which always failed when put to plain test by
sober-minded examiners. I did not deny the effects of imagination on
certain nervous constitutions. "Mesmerism could cure nobody; credulity
could cure many. There was the well-known story of the old woman tried as
a witch; she cured agues by a charm. She owned the impeachment, and was
ready to endure gibbet or stake for the truth of her talisman,--more than
a mesmerist would for the truth of his passes! And the charm was a scroll
of gibberish sewn in an old bag and given to the woman in a freak by the
judge himself when a young scamp on the circuit. But the charm cured?
Certainly; just as mesmerism cures. Fools believed in it. Faith, that
moves mountains, may well cure agues."