Book: A Strange Story, Volume 5.

E >> Edward Bulwer Lytton >> A Strange Story, Volume 5.




Bursting the links of this ghastly soliloquy with a laugh at my own folly,
I struck into a narrow path that led back towards the city, by a quiet and
rural suburb; the path wound on through a wide and solitary churchyard, at
the base of the Abbey-hill. Many of the former dwellers on that eminence
now slept in the lowly burial-ground at its foot; and the place,
mournfully decorated with the tombs which still jealously mark
distinctions of rank amidst the levelling democracy of the grave, was kept
trim with the care which comes half from piety, and half from pride.

I seated myself on a bench, placed between the clipped yew-trees that
bordered the path from the entrance to the church porch, deeming vaguely
that my own perplexing thoughts might imbibe a quiet from the quiet of the
place.

"And oh," I murmured to myself, "oh that I had one bosom friend to whom I
might freely confide all these torturing riddles which I cannot
solve,--one who could read my heart, light up its darkness, exorcise its
spectres; one in whose wisdom I could welcome a guide through the Nature
which now suddenly changes her aspect, opening out from the walls with
which I had fenced and enclosed her as mine own formal garden;--all her
pathways, therein, trimmed to my footstep; all her blooms grouped and
harmonized to my own taste in colour; all her groves, all her caverns, but
the soothing retreats of a Muse or a Science; opening out--opening out,
desert on desert, into clewless and measureless space! Gone is the
garden! Were its confines too narrow for Nature? Be it so! The Desert
replaces the garden, but where ends the Desert? Reft from my senses are
the laws which gave order and place to their old questionless realm. I
stand lost and appalled amidst Chaos. Did my Mind misconstrue the laws it
deemed fixed and immutable? Be it so! But still Nature cannot be
lawless; Creation is not a Chaos. If my senses deceive me in some things,
they are still unerring in others; if thus, in some things, fallacious,
still, in other things, truthful. Are there within me senses finer than
those I have cultured, or without me vistas of knowledge which instincts,
apart from my senses, divine? So long as I deal with the Finite alone, my
senses suffice me; but when the Infinite is obtruded upon me there, are my
senses faithless deserters? If so, is there aught else in my royal
resources of Man--whose ambition it is, from the first dawn of his glory
as Thinker, to invade and to subjugate Nature,--is there aught else to
supply the place of those traitors, the senses, who report to my Reason,
their judge and their sovereign, as truths seen and heard tales which my
Reason forfeits her sceptre if she does not disdain as lies? Oh, for a
friend! oh, for a guide!"

And as I so murmured, my eye fell upon the form of a kneeling child,--at
the farther end of the burial-ground, beside a grave with its new
headstone gleaming white amidst the older moss-grown tombs, a female
child, her head bowed, her hands clasped. I could see but the outline of
her small form in its sable dress,--an infant beside the dead. My eye and
my thoughts were turned from that silent figure, too absorbed in my own
restless tumult of doubt and dread, for sympathy with the grief or the
consolation of a kneeling child. And yet I should have remembered that
tomb! Again I murmured with a fierce impatience, "Oh, for a friend! oh,
for a guide!"

I heard steps on the walk under the yews; and an old man came in sight,
slightly bent, with long gray hair, but still with enough of vigour for
years to come, in his tread, firm, though slow, in the unshrunken muscle
of his limbs and the steady light of his clear blue eye. I started. Was
it possible? That countenance, marked, indeed, with the lines of
laborious thought, but sweet in the mildness of humanity, and serene in
the peace of conscience! I could not be mistaken. Julius Faber was
before me,--the profound pathologist, to whom my own proud self-esteem
acknowledged inferiority, without humiliation; the generous benefactor to
whom I owed my own smooth entrance into the arduous road of fame and
fortune. I had longed for a friend, a guide; what I sought stood suddenly
at my side.




CHAPTER XLV.

Explanation on Faber's part was short and simple. The nephew whom he
designed as the heir to his wealth had largely outstripped the liberal
allowance made to him, had incurred heavy debts; and in order to extricate
himself from the debts, had plunged into ruinous speculations. Faber had
come back to England to save his heir from prison or outlawry, at the
expense of more than three-fourths of the destined inheritance. To add to
all, the young man had married a young lady without fortune; the uncle
only heard of this marriage on arriving in England. The spendthrift was
hiding from his creditors in the house of his father-in-law, in one of the
western counties. Faber there sought him; and on becoming acquainted
with his wife, grew reconciled to the marriage, and formed hopes of his
nephew's future redemption. He spoke, indeed, of the young wife with
great affection. She was good and sensible; willing and anxious to
encounter any privation by which her husband might reprieve the effects
of his folly. "So," said Faber, "on consultation with this excellent
creature--for my poor nephew is so broken down by repentance, that others
must think for him how to exalt repentance into reform--my plans were
determined. I shall remove my prodigal from all scenes of temptation. He
has youth, strength, plenty of energy, hitherto misdirected. I shall take
him from the Old World into the New. I have decided on Australia. The
fortune still left to me, small here, will be ample capital there. It is
not enough to maintain us separately, so we must all live together.
Besides, I feel that, though I have neither the strength or the experience
which could best serve a young settler on a strange soil, still, under my
eye, my poor boy will be at once more prudent and more persevering. We
sail next week."

Faber spoke so cheerfully that I knew not how to express compassion; yet,
at his age, after a career of such prolonged and distinguished labour, to
resign the ease and comforts of the civilized state for the hardships and
rudeness of an infant colony, seemed to me a dreary prospect; and, as
delicately, as tenderly as I could to one whom I loved and honoured as a
father, I placed at his disposal the fortune which, in great part, I owed
to him,--pressing him at least to take from it enough to secure to
himself, in his own country, a home suited to his years and worthy of his
station. He rejected all my offers, however earnestly urged on him, with
his usual modest and gentle dignity; and assuring me that he looked
forward with great interest to a residence in lands new to his experience,
and affording ample scope for the hardy enjoyments which had always most
allured his tastes, he hastened to change the subject.

"And who, think you, is the admirable helpmate my scape-grace has had the
saving good luck to find? A daughter of the worthy man who undertook the
care of poor Dr. Lloyd's orphans,--the orphans who owed so much to your
generous exertions to secure a provision for them; and that child, now
just risen from her father's grave, is my pet companion, my darling ewe
lamb,--Dr. Lloyd's daughter Amy."

Here the child joined us, quickening her pace as she recognized the old
man, and nestling to his side as she glanced wistfully towards myself. A
winning, candid, lovable child's face, somewhat melancholy, somewhat more
thoughtful than is common to the face of childhood, but calm, intelligent,
and ineffably mild. Presently she stole from the old man, and put her
hand in mine.

"Are you not the kind gentleman who came to see him that night when he
passed away from us, and who, they all say at home, was so good to my
brothers and me? Yes, I recollect you now." And she put her pure face to
mine, wooing me to kiss it.

I kind! I good! I--I! Alas! she little knew, little guessed, the
wrathful imprecation her father had bequeathed to me that fatal night!

I did not dare to kiss Dr. Lloyd's orphan daughter, but my tears fell over
her hand. She took them as signs of pity, and, in her infant
thankfulness, silently kissed me.

"Oh, my friend!" I murmured to Faber, "I have much that I yearn to say to
you--alone--alone! Come to my house with me, be at least my guest as long
as you stay in this town."

"Willingly," said Faber, looking at me more intently than he had done
before, and with the true eye of the practised Healer, at once soft and
penetrating.

He rose, took my arm, and whispering a word in the ear of the little girl,
she went on before us, turning her head, as she gained the gate, for
another look at her father's grave. As we walked to my house, Julius
Faber spoke to me much of this child. Her brothers were all at school;
she was greatly attached to his nephew's wife; she had become yet more
attached to Faber himself, though on so short an acquaintance; it bad been
settled that she was to accompany the emigrants to Australia.

"There," said he, "the sum, that some munificent, but unknown friend of
her father has settled on her, will provide her no mean dower for a
colonist's wife, when the time comes for her to bring a blessing to some
other hearth than ours." He went on to say that she had wished to
accompany him to L----, in order to visit her father's grave before
crossing the wide seas; "and she has taken such fond care of me all the
way, that you might fancy I were the child of the two. I come back to
this town, partly to dispose of a few poor houses in it which still belong
to me, principally to bid you farewell before quitting the Old World, no
doubt forever. So, on arriving to-day, I left Amy by herself in the
churchyard while I went to your house, but you were from home. And now I
must congratulate you on the reputation you have so rapidly acquired,
which has even surpassed my predictions."

"You are aware," said I, falteringly, "of the extraordinary charge from
which that part of my reputation dearest to all men has just emerged!"

He had but seen a short account in a weekly journal, written after my
release. He asked details, which I postponed.

Reaching my home, I hastened to provide for the comfort of my two
unexpected guests; strove to rally myself, to be cheerful. Not till
night, when Julius Faber and I were alone together, did I touch on what
was weighing at my heart. Then, drawing to his side, I told him all,--all
of which the substance is herein written, from the deathscene in Dr.
Lloyd's chamber to the hour in which I had seen Dr. Lloyd's child at her
father's grave. Some of the incidents and conversations which had most
impressed me I had already committed to writing, in the fear that,
otherwise, my fancy might forge for its own thraldom the links of
reminiscence which my memory might let fall from its chain. Faber
listened with a silence only interrupted by short pertinent questions;
and when I had done, he remained thoughtful for some moments; then the
great physician replied thus:--

"I take for granted your conviction of the reality of all you tell me,
even of the Luminous Shadow, of the bodiless Voice; but, before admitting
the reality itself, we must abide by the old maxim, not to accept as cause
to effect those agencies which belong to the Marvellous, when causes less
improbable for the effect can be rationally conjectured. In this case are
there not such causes? Certainly there are--"

"There are?"

"Listen; you are one of those men who attempt to stifle their own
imagination. But in all completed intellect, imagination exists, and will
force its way; deny it healthful vents, and it may stray into morbid
channels. The death-room of Dr. Lloyd deeply impressed your heart, far
more than your pride would own. This is clear from the pains you took to
exonerate your conscience, in your generosity to the orphans. As the
heart was moved, so was the imagination stirred; and, unaware to yourself,
prepared for much that subsequently appealed to it. Your sudden love,
conceived in the very grounds of the house so associated with
recollections in themselves strange and romantic; the peculiar temperament
and nature of the girl to whom your love was attracted; her own visionary
beliefs, and the keen anxiety which infused into your love a deeper poetry
of sentiment,--all insensibly tended to induce the imagination to dwell on
the Wonderful; and, in overstriving to reconcile each rarer phenomenon to
the most positive laws of Nature, your very intellect could discover no
solution but in the Preternatural.

"You visit a man who tells you he has seen Sir Philip Derval's ghost; on
that very evening, you hear a strange story, in which Sir Philip's name is
mixed up with a tale of murder, implicating two mysterious pretenders to
magic,--Louis Grayle and the Sage of Aleppo. The tale so interests your
fancy that even the glaring impossibility of a not unimportant part of it
escapes your notice,--namely, the account of a criminal trial in which
the circumstantial evidence was more easily attainable than in all the
rest of the narrative, but which could not legally have taken place as
told. Thus it is whenever the mind begins, unconsciously, to admit the
shadow of the Supernatural; the Obvious is lost to the eye that plunges
its gaze into the Obscure. Almost immediately afterwards you become
acquainted with a young stranger, whose traits of character interest and
perplex, attract yet revolt you. All this time you are engaged in a
physiological work which severely tasks the brain, and in which you
examine the intricate question of soul distinct from mind.

"And, here, I can conceive a cause deep-hid amongst what metaphysicians
would call latent associations, for a train of thought which disposed you
to accept the fantastic impressions afterwards made on you by the scene in
the Museum and the visionary talk of Sir Philip Derval. Doubtless, when
at college you first studied metaphysical speculation you would have
glanced over Beattie's 'Essay on Truth' as one of the works written in
opposition to your favourite, David Hume."

"Yes, I read the book, but I have long since forgotten its arguments."

"Well in that essay, Beattie[1] cites the extraordinary instance of Simon
Browne, a learned and pious clergyman, who seriously disbelieved the
existence of his own soul; and imagined that, by interposition of Divine
power, his soul was annulled, and nothing left but a principle of animal
life, which he held in common with the brutes! When, years ago, a
thoughtful imaginative student, you came on that story, probably enough
you would have paused, revolved in your own mind and fancy what kind of a
creature a man might be, if, retaining human life and merely human
understanding, he was deprived of the powers and properties which
reasoners have ascribed to the existence of soul. Something in this young
man, unconsciously to yourself, revives that forgotten train of meditative
ideas. His dread of death as the final cessation of being, his brute-like
want of sympathy with his kind, his incapacity to comprehend the motives
which carry man on to scheme and to build for a future that extends beyond
his grave,--all start up before you at the very moment your reason is
overtasked, your imagination fevered, in seeking the solution of problems
which, to a philosophy based upon your system, must always remain
insoluble. The young man's conversation not only thus excites your
fancies,--it disturbs your affections. He speaks not only of drugs that
renew youth, but of charms that secure love. You tremble for your Lilian
while you hear him! And the brain thus tasked, the imagination thus
inflamed, the heart thus agitated, you are presented to Sir Philip Derval,
whose ghost your patient had supposed he saw weeks ago.

"This person, a seeker after an occult philosophy, which had possibly
acquainted him with some secrets in nature beyond the pale of our
conventional experience, though, when analyzed, they might prove to be
quite reconcilable with sober science, startles you with an undefined
mysterious charge against the young man who had previously seemed to you
different from ordinary mortals. In a room stored with the dead things of
the brute soulless world, your brain becomes intoxicated with the fumes of
some vapour which produces effects not uncommon in the superstitious
practices of the East; your brain, thus excited, brings distinctly before
you the vague impressions it had before received. Margrave becomes
identified with the Louis Grayle of whom you had previously heard an
obscure and, legendary tale, and all the anomalies in his character are
explained by his being that which you had contended, in your physiological
work, it was quite possible for man to be,--namely, mind and body without
soul! You were startled by the monster which man would be were your own
theory possible; and in order to reconcile the contradictions in this very
monster, you account for knowledge, and for powers that mind without soul
could not have attained, by ascribing to this prodigy broken memories of a
former existence, demon attributes from former proficiency in evil magic.
My friend, there is nothing here which your own study of morbid
idiosyncracies should not suffice to solve."

"So, then," said I, "you would reduce all that have affected my senses as
realities into the deceit of illusions? But," I added, in a whisper,
terrified by my own question, "do not physiologists agree in this: namely,
that though illusory phantasms may haunt the sane as well as the insane,
the sane know that they are only illusions, and the insane do not."

"Such a distinction," answered Faber, "is far too arbitrary and rigid for
more than a very general and qualified acceptance. Muller, indeed, who is
perhaps the highest authority on such a subject, says, with prudent
reserve, 'When a person who is not insane sees spectres and believes, them
to be real, his intellect must be imperfectly exercised.'[2] He would,
indeed, be a bold physician who maintained that every man who believed he
had really seen a ghost was of unsound mind. In Dr. Abercrombie's
interesting account of spectral illusions, he tells us of a servant-girl
who believed she saw, at the foot of her bed, the apparition of Curran, in
a sailor's jacket and an immense pair of whiskers.[3] No doubt the
spectre was an illusion, and Dr. Abercrombie very ingeniously suggests the
association of ideas by which the apparition was conjured up with the
grotesque adjuncts of the jacket and the whiskers; but the servant-girl,
in believing the reality of the apparition, was certainly not insane.
When I read in the American public journals[4] of 'spirit manifestations,'
in which large numbers of persons, of at least the average degree of
education, declare that they have actually witnessed various phantasms,
much more extraordinary than all which you have confided to me, and
arrive, at once, at the conclusion that they are thus put into direct
communication with departed souls, I must assume that they are under an
illusion; but I should be utterly unwarranted in supposing that, because
they credited that illusion, they were insane. I should only say with
Muller, that in their reasoning on the phenomena presented to them, 'their
intellect was imperfectly exercised.' And an impression made on the
senses, being in itself sufficiently rare to excite our wonder, may be
strengthened till it takes the form of a positive fact, by various
coincidences which are accepted as corroborative testimony, yet which are,
nevertheless, nothing more than coincidences found in every day matters
of business, but only emphatically noticed when we can exclaim, 'How
astonishing!' In your case such coincidences have been, indeed, very
signal, and might well aggravate the perplexities into which your reason
was thrown. Sir Philip Derval's murder, the missing casket, the exciting
nature of the manuscript, in which a superstitious interest is already
enlisted by your expectation to find in it the key to the narrator's
boasted powers, and his reasons for the astounding denunciation of the man
whom you suspect to be his murderer,--in all this there is much to
confirm, nay, to cause, an illusion; and for that very reason, when
examined by strict laws of evidence, in all this there is but additional
proof that the illusion was--only illusion. Your affections contribute
to strengthen your fancy in its war on your reason. The girl you so
passionately love develops, to your disquietude and terror, the visionary
temperament which, at her age, is ever liable to fantastic caprices. She
hears Margrave's song, which you say has a wildness of charm that affects
and thrills even you. Who does not know the power of music? and of all
music, there is none so potential as that of the human voice. Thus, in
some languages, charm and song are identical expressions; and even when a
critic, in our own sober newspapers, extols a Malibran or a Grisi, you
may be sure that he will call her 'enchantress.' Well, this lady, your
betrothed, in whom the nervous system is extremely impressionable, hears a
voice which, even to your ear, is strangely melodious, and sees a form and
face which, even to your eye, are endowed with a singular character of
beauty. Her fancy is impressed by what she thus hears and sees; and
impressed the more because, by a coincidence not very uncommon, a face
like that which she beholds has before been presented to her in a dream
or a revery. In the nobleness of genuine, confiding, reverential love,
rather than impute to your beloved a levity of sentiment that would seem
to you a treason, you accept the chimera of 'magical fascination.' In
this frame of mind you sit down to read the memoir of a mystical
enthusiast. Do you begin now to account for the Luminous Shadow? A
dream! And a dream no less because your eyes were open and you believed
yourself awake. The diseased imagination resembles those mirrors which,
being themselves distorted, represent distorted pictures as correct.

"And even this Memoir of Sir Philip Derval's--can you be quite sure that
you actually read the part which relates to Haroun and Louis Grayle?
You say that, while perusing the manuscript, you saw the Luminous
Shadow, and became insensible. The old woman says you were fast asleep.
May you not really have fallen into a slumber, and in that slumber
have dreamed the parts of the tale that relate to Grayle,--dreamed that
you beheld the Shadow? Do you remember what is said so well by Dr.
Abercrombie, to authorize the explanation I suggest to you: 'A
person under the influence of some strong mental impression falls asleep
for a few seconds, perhaps without being sensible of it: some scene or
person appears in a dream, and he starts up under the conviction
that it was a spectral appearance.'" [5]

"But," said I, "the apparition was seen by me again, and when, certainly,
I was not sleeping."

"True; and who should know better than a physician so well read as
yourself that a spectral illusion once beheld is always apt to return
again in the same form? Thus, Goethe was long haunted by one image,--the
phantom of a flower unfolding itself, and developing new flowers.[6]
Thus, one of our most distinguished philosophers tells us of a lady known
to himself, who would see her husband, hear him move and speak, when he
was not even in the house.[7] But instances of the facility with which
phantasms, once admitted, repeat themselves to the senses, are numberless.
Many are recorded by Hibbert and Abercrombie, and every physician in
extensive practice can add largely, from his own experience, to the list.
Intense self-concentration is, in itself, a mighty magician. The
magicians of the East inculcate the necessity of fast, solitude, and
meditation for the due development of their imaginary powers. And I have
no doubt with effect; because fast, solitude, and meditation--in other
words, thought or fancy intensely concentred--will both raise apparitions
and produce the invoker's belief in them. Spinello, striving to conceive
the image of Lucifer for his picture of the Fallen Angels, was at last
actually haunted by the Shadow of the Fiend. Newton himself has been
subjected to a phantom, though to him, Son of Light, the spectre presented
was that of the sun! You remember the account that Newton gives to Locke
of this visionary appearance. He says that 'though he had looked at the
sun with his right eye only, and not with the left, yet his fancy began
to make an impression upon his left eye as well as his right; for if he
shut his right and looked upon the clouds, or a book, or any bright object
with his left eye, he could see the sun almost as plain as with the right,
if he did but intend his fancy a little while on it;' nay, 'for some
months after, as often as he began to meditate on the phenomena, the
spectrum of the sun began to return, even though he lay in bed at
midnight, with his curtains drawn!' Seeing, then, how any vivid
impression once made will recur, what wonder that you should behold in
your prison the Shining Shadow that had first startled you in a wizard's
chamber when poring over the records of a murdered visionary? The more
minutely you analyze your own hallucinations--pardon me the word--the more
they assume the usual characteristics of a dream; contradictory,
illogical, even in the marvels they represent. Can any two persons be
more totally unlike each other, not merely as to form and years, but as to
all the elements of character, than the Grayle of whom you read, or
believe you read, and the Margrave in whom you evidently think that Grayle
is existent still? The one represented, you say, as gloomy, saturnine,
with vehement passions, but with an original grandeur of thought and will,
consumed by an internal remorse; the other you paint to me as a joyous and
wayward darling of Nature, acute yet frivolous, free from even the
ordinary passions of youth, taking delight in innocent amusements,
incapable of continuous study, without a single pang of repentance for the
crimes you so fancifully impute to him. And now, when your suspicions, so
romantically conceived, are dispelled by positive facts, now, when it is
clear that Margrave neither murdered Sir Philip Derval nor abstracted the
memoir, you still, unconsciously to yourself, draw on your imagination in
order to excuse the suspicion your pride of intellect declines to banish,
and suppose that this youthful sorcerer tempted the madman to the murder,
the woman to the theft--"

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