Book: A Strange Story, Volume 6.
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Edward Bulwer Lytton >> A Strange Story, Volume 6.
But that was no time for resentment to her or rebuke to myself. She was
now the woman who could best protect and save from slander my innocent,
beloved Lilian. But how approach that perplexing subject?
Mrs. Poyntz approached it, and with her usual decision of purpose, which
bore so deceitful a likeness to candour of mind.
"But it was not to talk of my affairs that I asked you to call, Allen
Fenwick." As she uttered my name, her voice softened, and her manner took
that maternal, caressing tenderness which had sometimes amused and
sometimes misled me. "No, I do not forget that you asked me to be your
friend, and I take without scruple the license of friendship. What are
these stories that I have heard already about Lilian Ashleigh, to whom you
were once engaged?"
"To whom I am still engaged."
"Is it possible? Oh, then, of course the stories I have heard are all
false. Very likely; no fiction in scandal ever surprises me. Poor dear
Lilian, then, never ran away from her mother's house?"
I smothered the angry pain which this mode of questioning caused me; I
knew how important it was to Lilian to secure to her the countenance and
support of this absolute autocrat; I spoke of Lilian's long previous
distemper of mind; I accounted for it as any intelligent physician,
unacquainted with all that I could not reveal, would account. Heaven
forgive me for the venial falsehood, but I spoke of the terrible charge
against myself as enough to unhinge for a time the intellect of a girl so
acutely sensitive as Lilian; I sought to create that impression as to the
origin of all that might otherwise seem strange; and in this state of
cerebral excitement she had wandered from home--but alone. I had tracked
every step of her way; I had found and restored her to her home. A
critical delirium had followed, from which she now rose, cured in health,
unsuspicious that there could be a whisper against her name. And then,
with all the eloquence I could command, and in words as adapted as I could
frame them to soften the heart of a woman, herself a mother, I implored
Mrs. Poyntz's aid to silence all the cruelties of calumny, and extend her
shield over the child of her own early friend.
When I came to an end, I had taken, with caressing force, Mrs. Poyntz's
reluctant hands in mine. There were tears in my voice, tears in my eyes.
And the sound of her voice in reply gave me hope, for it was unusually
gentle. She was evidently moved. The hope was soon quelled.
"Allen Fenwick," she said, "you have a noble heart; I grieve to see how it
abuses your reason. I cannot aid Lilian Ashleigh in the way you ask. Do
not start back so indignantly. Listen to me as patiently as I have
listened to you. That when you brought back the unfortunate young woman
to her poor mother, her mind was disordered, and became yet more
dangerously so, I can well believe; that she is now recovered, and thinks
with shame, or refuses to think at all, of her imprudent flight, I can
believe also; but I do not believe, the World cannot believe, that she did
not, knowingly and purposely, quit her mother's roof, and in quest of that
young stranger so incautiously, so unfeelingly admitted to her mother's
house during the very time you were detained on the most awful of human
accusations. Every one in the town knows that Mr. Margrave visited daily
at Mrs. Ashleigh's during that painful period; every one in the town knows
in what strange out-of-the-way place this young man had niched himself;
and that a yacht was bought, and lying in wait there. What for? It is
said that the chaise in which you brought Miss Ashleigh back to her home
was hired in a village within an easy reach of Mr. Margrave's lodging--of
Mr. Margrave's yacht. I rejoice that you saved the poor girl from ruin;
but her good name is tarnished; and if Anne Ashleigh, whom I sincerely
pity, asks me my advice, I can but give her this: 'Leave L----, take your
daughter abroad; and if she is not to marry Mr. Margrave, marry her as
quietly and as quickly as possible to some foreigner.'"
"Madam! madam! this, then, is your friendship to her--to me! Oh, shame
on you to insult thus an affianced husband! Shame on me ever to have
thought you had a heart!"
"A heart, man!" she exclaimed, almost fiercely, springing up, and
startling me with the change in her countenance and voice. "And little
you would have valued, and pitilessly have crushed this heart, if I had
suffered myself to show it to you! What right have you to reproach me? I
felt a warm interest in your career, an unusual attraction in your
conversation and society. Do you blame me for that, or should I blame
myself? Condemned to live amongst brainless puppets, my dull occupation
to pull the strings that moved them, it was a new charm to my life to
establish friendship and intercourse with intellect and spirit and
courage. Ah! I understand that look, half incredulous, half
inquisitive."
"Inquisitive, no; incredulous, yes! You desired my friendship, and how
does your harsh judgment of my betrothed wife prove either to me or to her
mother, whom you have known from your girlhood, the first duty of a
friend,--which is surely not that of leaving a friend's side the moment
that he needs countenance in calumny, succour in trouble!"
"It is a better duty to prevent the calumny and avert the trouble. Leave
aside Anne Ashleigh, a cipher that I can add or abstract from my sum of
life as I please. What is my duty to yourself? It is plain. It is to
tell you that your honour commands you to abandon all thoughts of Lilian
Ashleigh as your wife. Ungrateful that you are! Do you suppose it was no
mortification to my pride of woman and friend, that you never approached
me in confidence except to ask my good offices in promoting your courtship
to another; no shock to the quiet plans I had formed as to our familiar
though harmless intimacy, to hear that you were bent on a marriage in
which my friend would be lost to me?"
"Not lost! not lost! On the contrary, the regard I must suppose you had
for Lilian would have been a new link between our homes."
"Pooh! Between me and that dreamy girl there could have been no sympathy,
there could have grown up no regard. You would have been chained to your
fireside, and--and--but no matter. I stifled my disappointment as soon as
I felt it,--stifled it, as all my life I have stifled that which either
destiny or duty--duty to myself as to others--forbids me to indulge. Ah,
do not fancy me one of the weak criminals who can suffer a worthy liking
to grow into a debasing love! I was not in love with you, Allen Fenwick."
"Do you think I was ever so presumptuous a coxcomb as to fancy it?"
"No," she said, more softly; "I was not so false to my household ties and
to my own nature. But there are some friendships which are as jealous as
love. I could have cheerfully aided you in any choice which my sense
could have approved for you as wise; I should have been pleased to have
found in such a wife my most intimate companion. But that silly
child!--absurd! Nevertheless, the freshness and enthusiasm of your love
touched me; you asked my aid, and I gave it. Perhaps I did believe that
when you saw more of Lilian Ashleigh you would be cured of a fancy
conceived by the eye--I should have known better what dupes the wisest men
can be to the witcheries of a fair face and eighteen! When I found your
illusion obstinate, I wrenched myself away from a vain regret, turned to
my own schemes and my own ambition, and smiled bitterly to think that, in
pressing you to propose so hastily to Lilian, I made your blind passion an
agent in my own plans. Enough of this. I speak thus openly and boldly to
you now, because now I have not a sentiment that can interfere with the
dispassionate soundness of my counsels. I repeat, you cannot now marry
Lilian Ashleigh; I cannot take my daughter to visit her; I cannot destroy
the social laws that I myself have set in my petty kingdom."
"Be it as you will. I have pleaded for her while she is still Lilian
Ashleigh. I plead for no one to whom I have once given my name. Before
the woman whom I have taken from the altar, I can place, as a shield
sufficient, my strong breast of man. Who has so deep an interest in
Lilian's purity as I have? Who is so fitted to know the exact truth of
every whisper against her? Yet when I, whom you admit to have some
reputation for shrewd intelligence,--I, who tracked her way,--I, who
restored her to her home,--when I, Allen Fenwick, am so assured of her
inviolable innocence in thought as in deed, that I trust my honour to her
keeping,--surely, surely, I confute the scandal which you yourself do not
believe, though you refuse to reject and to annul it?"
"Do not deceive yourself, Allen Fenwick," said she, still standing beside
me, her countenance now hard and stern. "Look where I stand, I am the
World! The World, not as satirists depreciate, or as optimists extol its
immutable properties, its all-persuasive authority. I am the World! And
my voice is the World's voice when it thus warns you. Should you make
this marriage, your dignity of character and position would be gone! If
you look only to lucre and professional success, possibly they may not
ultimately suffer. You have skill, which men need; their need may still
draw patients to your door and pour guineas into your purse. But you have
the pride, as well as the birth of a gentleman, and the wounds to that
pride will be hourly chafed and never healed. Your strong breast of man
has no shelter to the frail name of woman. The World, in its health, will
look down on your wife, though its sick may look up to you. This is not
all. The World, in its gentlest mood of indulgence, will say
compassionately, 'Poor man! how weak, and how deceived! What an
unfortunate marriage!' But the World is not often indulgent,--it looks
most to the motives most seen on the surface. And the World will more
frequently say, 'No; much too clever a man to be duped! Miss Ashleigh had
money. A good match to the man who liked gold better than honour.'"
I sprang to my feet, with difficulty suppressing my rage; and, remembering
it was a woman who spoke to me, "Farewell, madam," said I, through my
grinded teeth. "Were you, indeed, the Personation of The World, whose
mean notions you mouth so calmly, I could not disdain you more." I turned
to the door, and left her still standing erect and menacing, the hard
sneer on her resolute lip, the red glitter in her remorseless eye.
CHAPTER LVIII.
If ever my heart vowed itself to Lilian, the vow was now the most trustful
and the most sacred. I had relinquished our engagement before; but then
her affection seemed, no matter from what cause; so estranged from me,
that though I might be miserable to lose her, I deemed that she would be
unhappy in our union. Then, too, she was the gem and darling of the
little world in which she lived; no whisper assailed her: now I knew that
she loved me; I knew that her estrangement had been involuntary; I knew
that appearances wronged her, and that they never could be explained. I
was in the true position of man to woman: I was the shield, the bulwark,
the fearless confiding protector! Resign her now because the world
babbled, because my career might be impeded, because my good name might be
impeached,--resign her, and, in that resignation, confirm all that was
said against her! Could I do so, I should be the most craven of
gentlemen, the meanest of men!
I went to Mrs. Ashleigh, and entreated her to hasten my union with her
daughter, and fix the marriage-day.
I found the poor lady dejected and distressed. She was now sufficiently
relieved from the absorbing anxiety for Lilian to be aware of the change
on the face of that World which the woman I had just quitted personified
and concentred; she had learned the cause from the bloodless lips of Miss
Brabazon.
"My child! my poor child!" murmured the mother. "And she so
guileless,--so sensitive! Could she know what is said, it would kill her.
She would never marry you, Allen,--she would never bring shame to you!"
"She never need learn the barbarous calumny. Give her to me, and at once;
patients, fortune, fame, are not found only at L----. Give her to me at
once. But let me name a condition: I have a patrimonial independence, I
have amassed large savings, I have my profession and my repute. I cannot
touch her fortune--I cannot,--never can! Take it while you live; when you
die, leave it to accumulate for her children, if children she have; not
to me; not to her--unless I am dead or ruined!"
"Oh, Allen, what a heart! what a heart! No, not heart, Allen,--that bird
in its cage has a heart: soul--what a soul!"
CHAPTER LIX.
How innocent was Lilian's virgin blush when I knelt to her, and prayed
that she would forestall the date that had been fixed for our union, and
be my bride before the breath of the autumn had withered the pomp of
thewoodland and silenced the song of the birds! Meanwhile, I was so
fearfully anxious that she should risk no danger of hearing, even of
surmising, the cruel slander against her--should meet no cold contemptuous
looks, above all, should be safe from the barbed talk of Mrs. Poyntz--that
I insisted on the necessity of immediate change of air and scene. I
proposed that we should all three depart, the next day, for the banks of
my own beloved and native Windermere. By that pure mountain air, Lilian's
health would be soon re-established; in the church hallowed to me by the
graves of my fathers our vows should be plighted. No calumny had ever
cast a shadow over those graves. I felt as if my bride would be safer in
the neighbourhood of my mother's tomb.
I carried my point: it was so arranged. Mrs. Ashleigh, however, was
reluctant to leave before she had seen her dear friend, Margaret Poyntz.
I had not the courage to tell her what she might expect to hear from that
dear friend, but, as delicately as I could, I informed her that I had
already seen the Queen of the Hill, and contradicted the gossip that had
reached her; but that as yet, like other absolute sovereigns, the Queen of
the Hill thought it politic to go with the popular stream, reserving all
check on its direction till the rush of its torrent might slacken; and
that it would be infinitely wiser in Mrs. Ashleigh to postpone
conversation with Mrs. Poyntz until Lilian's return to L---- as my wife.
Slander by that time would have wearied itself out, and Mrs. Poyntz
(assuming her friendship to Mrs. Ashleigh to be sincere) would then be
enabled to say with authority to her subjects, "Dr. Fenwick alone knows
the facts of the story, and his marriage with Miss Ashleigh refutes all
the gossip to her prejudice."
I made that evening arrangements with a young and rising practitioner to
secure attendance on my patients during my absence. I passed the greater
part of the night in drawing up memoranda to guide my proxy in each case,
however humble the sufferer. This task finished, I chanced, in searching
for a small microscope, the wonders of which I thought might interest and
amuse Lilian, to open a drawer in which I kept the manuscript of my
cherished Physiological Work, and, in so doing, my eye fell upon the wand
which I had taken from Margrave. I had thrown it into that drawer on my
return home, after restoring Lilian to her mother's house, and, in the
anxiety which had subsequently preyed upon my mind, had almost forgotten
the strange possession I had as strangely acquired. There it now lay, the
instrument of agencies over the mechanism of nature which no doctrine
admitted by my philosophy could accept, side by side with the presumptuous
work which had analyzed the springs by which Nature is moved, and decided
the principles by which reason metes out, from the inch of its knowledge,
the plan of the Infinite Unknown.
I took up the wand and examined it curiously. It was evidently the work
of an age far remote from our own, scored over with half-obliterated
characters in some Eastern tongue, perhaps no longer extant. I found that
it was hollow within. A more accurate observation showed, in the centre
of this hollow, an exceedingly fine thread-like wire, the unattached end
of which would slightly touch the palm when the wand was taken into the
hand. Was it possible that there might be a natural and even a simple
cause for the effects which this instrument produced? Could it serve to
collect, from that great focus of animal heat and nervous energy which is
placed in the palm of the human hand, some such latent fluid as that which
Reichenbach calls the "odic," and which, according to him, "rushes through
and pervades universal Nature"? After all, why not? For how many
centuries lay unknown all the virtues of the loadstone and the amber? It
is but as yesterday that the forces of vapour have become to men genii
more powerful than those conjured up by Aladdin; that light, at a touch,
springs forth from invisible air; that thought finds a messenger swifter
than the wings of the fabled Afrite. As, thus musing, my hand closed over
the wand, I felt a wild thrill through my frame. I recoiled; I was
alarmed lest (according to the plain common-sense theory of Julius Faber)
I might be preparing my imagination to form and to credit its own
illusions. Hastily I laid down the wand. But then it occurred to me that
whatever its properties, it had so served the purposes of the dread
Fascinator from whom it had been taken, that he might probably seek to
repossess himself of it; he might contrive to enter my house in my
absence; more prudent to guard in my own watchful keeping the
incomprehensible instrument of incomprehensible arts. I resolved,
therefore, to take the wand with me, and placed it in my travelling-trunk,
with such effects as I selected for use in the excursion that was to
commence with the morrow. I now lay down to rest, but I could not sleep.
The recollections of the painful interview with Mrs. Poyntz became vivid
and haunting. It was clear that the sentiment she had conceived for me
was that of no simple friendship,--something more or something less, but
certainly something else; and this conviction brought before me that proud
hard face, disturbed by a pang wrestled against but not subdued, and that
clear metallic voice, troubled by the quiver of an emotion which, perhaps,
she had never analyzed to herself. I did not need her own assurance to
know that this sentiment was not to be confounded with a love which she
would have despised as a weakness and repelled as a crime; it was an
inclination of the intellect, not a passion of the heart. But still it
admitted a jealousy little less keen than that which has love for its
cause,--so true it is that jealousy is never absent where self-love is
always present. Certainly, it was no susceptibility of sober friendship
which had made the stern arbitress of a coterie ascribe to her interest
in me her pitiless judgment of Lilian. Strangely enough, with the image
of this archetype of conventional usages and the trite social life, came
that of the mysterious Margrave, surrounded by all the attributes with
which superstition clothes the being of the shadowy border-land that lies
beyond the chart of our visual world itself. By what link were creatures
so dissimilar riveted together in the metaphysical chain of association?
Both had entered into the record of my life when my life admitted its own
first romance of love. Through the aid of this cynical schemer I had been
made known to Lilian. At her house I had heard the dark story of that
Louis Grayle, with whom, in mocking spite of my reason, conjectures, which
that very reason must depose itself before it could resolve into
distempered fancies, identified the enigmatical Margrave. And now both
she, the representative of the formal world most opposed to visionary
creeds, and he, who gathered round him all the terrors which haunt the
realm of fable, stood united against me,--foes with whom the intellect I
had so haughtily cultured knew not how to cope. Whatever assault I might
expect from either, I was unable to assail again. Alike, then, in this,
are the Slander and the Phantom,--that which appalls us most in their
power over us is our impotence against them.
But up rose the sun, chasing the shadows from the earth, and brightening
insensibly the thoughts of man. After all, Margrave had been baffled and
defeated, whatever the arts he had practised and the secrets he possessed.
It was, at least, doubtful whether his evil machinations would be renewed.
He had seemed so incapable of long-sustained fixity of purpose, that it
was probable he was already in pursuit of some new agent or victim; and as
to this commonplace and conventional spectre, the so-called World, if it
is everywhere to him whom it awes, it is nowhere to him who despises it.
What was the good or bad word of a Mrs. Poyntz to me? Ay, but to Lilian?
There, indeed, I trembled; but still, even in trembling, it was sweet to
think that my home would be her shelter,--my choice her vindication. Ah!
how unutterably tender and reverential Love becomes when it assumes the
duties of the guardian, and hallows its own heart into a sanctuary of
refuge for the beloved!
CHAPTER LX.
The beautiful lake! We two are on its grassy margin,--twilight melting
into night; the stars stealing forth, one after one. What a wonderful
change is made within us when we come from our callings amongst men,
chafed, wearied, wounded; gnawed by our cares, perplexed by the doubts of
our very wisdom, stung by the adder that dwells in cities,--Slander; nay,
even if renowned, fatigued with the burden of the very names that we have
won! What a change is made within us when suddenly we find ourselves
transported into the calm solitudes of Nature,--into scenes familiar to
our happy dreaming childhood; back, back from the dusty thoroughfares of
our toil-worn manhood to the golden fountain of our youth! Blessed is
the change, even when we have no companion beside us to whom the heart
can whisper its sense of relief and joy. But if the one in whom all our
future is garnered up be with us there, instead of that weary World which
has so magically vanished away from the eye and the thought, then does the
change make one of those rare epochs of life in which the charm is the
stillness. In the pause from all by which our own turbulent struggles for
happiness trouble existence, we feel with a rapt amazement how calm a
thing it is to be happy. And so as the night, in deepening, brightened,
Lilian and I wandered by the starry lake. Conscious of no evil in
ourselves, how secure we felt from evil! A few days more--a few days
more, and we two should be as one! And that thought we uttered in many
forms of words, brooding over it in the long intervals of enamoured
silence.
And when we turned back to the quiet inn at which we had taken up our
abode, and her mother, with her soft face, advanced to meet us, I said to
Lilian,--
"Would that in these scenes we could fix our home for life, away and afar
from the dull town we have left behind us, with the fret of its wearying
cares and the jar of its idle babble!"
"And why not, Allen? Why not? But no, you would not be happy."
"Not be happy, and with you? Sceptic, by what reasoning do you arrive at
that ungracious conclusion?"
"The heart loves repose and the soul contemplation, but the mind needs
action. Is it not so?"
"Where learned you that aphorism, out of place on such rosy lips?"
"I learned it in studying you," murmured Lilian, tenderly.
Here Mrs. Ashleigh joined us. For the first time I slept under the same
roof as Lilian. And I forgot that the universe contained an enigma to
solve or an enemy to fear.
CHAPTER LXI.
Twenty days--the happiest my life had ever known--thus glided on. Apart
from the charm which love bestows on the beloved, there was that in
Lilian's conversation which made her a delightful companion. Whether it
was that, in this pause from the toils of my career, my mind could more
pliantly supple itself to her graceful imagination, or that her
imagination was less vague and dreamy amidst those rural scenes, which
realized in their loveliness and grandeur its long-conceived ideals, than
it had been in the petty garden-ground neighboured by the stir and hubbub
of the busy town,--in much that I had once slighted or contemned as the
vagaries of undisciplined fancy, I now recognized the sparkle and play of
an intuitive genius, lighting up many a depth obscure to instructed
thought. It is with some characters as with the subtler and more ethereal
order of poets,--to appreciate them we must suspend the course of
artificial life; in the city we call them dreamers, on the mountain-top we
find them interpreters.
In Lilian, the sympathy with Nature was not, as in Margrave, from the
joyous sense of Nature's lavish vitality; it was refined into exquisite
perception of the diviner spirit by which that vitality is informed.
Thus, like the artist, from outward forms of beauty she drew forth the
covert types, lending to things the most familiar exquisite meanings
unconceived before. For it is truly said by a wise critic of old, that
"the attribute of Art is to suggest infinitely more than it expresses;
"and such suggestions, passing from the artist's innermost thought into
the mind that receives them, open on and on into the Infinite of Ideas, as
a moonlit wave struck by a passing oar impels wave upon wave along one
track of light.