Book: A Strange Story, Volume 7.

E >> Edward Bulwer Lytton >> A Strange Story, Volume 7.







CHAPTER LXXII.

I turned back alone. The sun was reddening the summits of the distant
mountain-range, but dark clouds, that portended rain, were gathering
behind my way and deepening the shadows in many a chasm and hollow which
volcanic fires had wrought on the surface of uplands undulating like
diluvian billows fixed into stone in the midst of their stormy swell. I
wandered on and away from the beaten track, absorbed in thought. Could I
acknowledge in Julius Faber's conjectures any basis for logical
ratiocination; or were they not the ingenious fancies of that empirical
Philosophy of Sentiment by which the aged, in the decline of severer
faculties, sometimes assimilate their theories to the hazy romance of
youth? I can well conceive that the story I tell will be regarded by most
as a wild and fantastic fable; that by some it may be considered a vehicle
for guesses at various riddles of Nature, without or within us, which are
free to the license of romance, though forbidden to the caution of
science. But, I--I--know unmistakably my own identity, my own positive
place in a substantial universe. And beyond that knowledge, what do I
know? Yet had Faber no ground for his startling parallels between the
chimeras of superstition and the alternatives to faith volunteered by the
metaphysical speculations of knowledge? On the theorems of Condillac, I,
in common with numberless contemporaneous students (for, in my youth,
Condillac held sway in the schools, as now, driven forth from the schools,
his opinions float loose through the talk and the scribble of men of the
world, who perhaps never opened his page),--on the theorems of Condillac I
had built up a system of thought designed to immure the swathed form of
material philosophy from all rays and all sounds of a world not material,
as the walls of some blind mausoleum shut out, from the mummy within, the
whisper of winds and the gleaming of stars.

And did not those very theorems, when carried out to their strict and
completing results by the close reasonings of Hume, resolve my own living
identity, the one conscious indivisible me, into a bundle of memories
derived from the senses which had bubbled and duped my experience, and
reduce into a phantom, as spectral as that of the Luminous Shadow, the
whole solid frame of creation?

While pondering these questions, the storm whose forewarnings I had
neglected to heed burst forth with all the suddenness peculiar to the
Australian climes. The rains descended like the rushing of floods. In
the beds of watercourses, which, at noon, seemed dried up and exhausted,
the torrents began to swell and to rave; the gray crags around them were
animated into living waterfalls. I looked round, and the landscape was as
changed as a scene that replaces a scene on the player's stage. I was
aware that I had wandered far from my home, and I knew not what direction
I should take to regain it. Close at hand, and raised above the torrents
that now rushed in many a gully and tributary creek, around and before me,
the mouth of a deep cave, overgrown with bushes and creeping flowers
tossed wildly to and fro between the rain from above and the spray of
cascades below, offered a shelter from the storm. I entered,--scaring
innumerable flocks of bats striking against me, blinded by the glare of
the lightning that followed me into the cavern, and hastening to resettle
themselves on the pendants of stalactites, or the jagged buttresses of
primaeval wall.

From time to time the lightning darted into the gloom and lingered
amongst its shadows; and I saw, by the flash, that the floors on which I
stood were strewed with strange bones, some amongst them the fossilized
relics of races destroyed by the Deluge. The rain continued for more than
two hours with unabated violence; then it ceased almost as suddenly as it
had come on, and the lustrous moon of Australia burst from the clouds
shining bright as an English dawn, into the hollows of the cave. And then
simultaneously arose all the choral songs of the wilderness,--creatures
whose voices are heard at night,--the loud whir of the locusts, the
musical boom of the bullfrog, the cuckoo note of the morepork, and,
mournful amidst all those merrier sounds, the hoot of the owl, through the
wizard she-oaks and the pale green of the gum-trees.

I stepped forth into the open air and gazed, first instinctively on the
heavens, next, with more heedful eye, upon the earth. The nature of the
soil bore the evidence of volcanic fires long since extinguished. Just
before my feet, the rays fell full upon a bright yellow streak in the
block of quartz half imbedded in the soft moist soil. In the midst of all
the solemn thoughts and the intense sorrows which weighed upon heart and
mind, that yellow gleam startled the mind into a direction remote from
philosophy, quickened the heart to a beat that chimed with no household
affections. Involuntarily I stooped; impulsively I struck the block with
the hatchet, or tomahawk, I carried habitually about me, for the purpose
of marking the trees that I wished to clear from the waste of my broad
domain. The quartz was shattered by the stroke, and left disburied its
glittering treasure. My first glance had not deceived me. I, vain seeker
after knowledge, had, at least, discovered gold. I took up the bright
metal--gold! I paused; I looked round; the land that just before had
seemed to me so worthless took the value of Ophir. Its features had
before been as unknown to me as the Mountains of the Moon, and now my
memory became wonderfully quickened. I recalled the rough map of my
possessions, the first careless ride round their boundaries. Yes, the
land on which I stood--for miles, to the spur of those farther
mountains--the land was mine, and, beneath its surface, there was gold! I
closed my eyes; for some moments visions of boundless wealth, and of the
royal power which such wealth could command, swept athwart my brain. But
my heart rapidly settled back to its real treasure. "What matters," I
sighed, "all this dross? Could Ophir itself buy back to my Lilian's smile
one ray of the light which gave 'glory to the grass and splendour to the
flower'?"

So muttering, I flung the gold into the torrent that raged below, and went
on through the moonlight, sorrowing silently,--only thankful for the
discovery that had quickened my reminiscence of the landmarks by which to
steer my way through the wilderness.

The night was half gone, for even when I had gained the familiar track
through the pastures, the swell of the many winding creeks that now
intersected the way obliged me often to retrace my steps; to find,
sometimes, the bridge of a felled tree which had been providently left
unremoved over the now foaming torrent, and, more than once, to swim
across the current, in which swimmers less strong or less practised would
have been dashed down the falls, where loose logs and torn trees went
clattering and whirling: for I was in danger of life. A band of the
savage natives were stealthily creeping on my track,--the natives in those
parts were not then so much awed by the white man as now. A boomerang[1]
had whirred by me, burying itself amongst the herbage close before my
feet. I had turned, sought to find and to face these dastardly foes; they
contrived to elude me. But when I moved on, my ear, sharpened by danger,
heard them moving, too, in my rear. Once only three hideous forms
suddenly faced me, springing up from a thicket, all tangled with
honeysuckles and creepers of blue and vermilion. I walked steadily up to
them. They halted a moment or so in suspense; but perhaps they were
scared by my stature or awed by my aspect; and the Unfamiliar, though
Human, had terror for them, as the Unfamiliar, although but a Shadow, had
had terror for me. They vanished, and as quickly as if they had crept
into the earth.

At length the air brought me the soft perfume of my well-known acacias,
and my house stood before me, amidst English flowers and English
fruit-trees, under the effulgent Australian moon. Just as I was opening
the little gate which gave access from the pastureland into the garden, a
figure in white rose up from under light, feathery boughs, and a hand was
laid on my arm. I started; but my surprise was changed into fear when I
saw the pale face and sweet eyes of Lilian.

"Heavens! you here! you! at this hour! Lilian, what is this?"

"Hush!" she whispered, clinging to me; "hush! do not tell: no one knows.
I missed you when the storm came on; I have missed you ever since. Others
went in search of you and came back. I could not sleep, but the rest are
sleeping, so I stole down to watch for you. Brother, brother, if any harm
chanced to you, even the angels could not comfort me; all would be dark,
dark! But you are safe, safe, safe!" And she clung to me yet closer.

"Ah, Lilian, Lilian, your vision in the hour I first beheld you was indeed
prophetic,--'each has need of the other.' Do you remember?"

"Softly, softly," she said, "let me think!" She stood quietly by my side,
looking up into the sky, with all its numberless stars, and its solitary
moon now sinking slow behind the verge of the forest. "It comes back to
me," she murmured softly,--"the Long ago,--the sweet Long ago!"

I held my breath to listen.

"There, there!" she resumed, pointing to the heavens; "do you see? You
are there, and my father, and--and--Oh! that terrible face, those serpent
eyes, the dead man's skull! Save me! save me!"

She bowed her head upon my bosom, and I led her gently back towards the
house. As we gained the door which she had left open, the starlight
shining across the shadowy gloom within, she lifted her face from my
breast, and cast a hurried fearful look round the shining garden, then
into the dim recess beyond the threshold.

"It is there--there!--the Shadow that lured me on, whispering that if I
followed it I should join my beloved. False, dreadful Shadow! it will
fade soon,--fade into the grinning horrible skull. Brother, brother,
where is my Allen? Is he dead--dead--or is it I who am dead to him?"

I could but clasp her again to my breast, and seek to mantle her shivering
form with my dripping garments, all the while my eyes--following the
direction which hers had taken--dwelt on the walls of the nook within the
threshold, half lost in darkness, half white in starlight. And there I,
too, beheld the haunting Luminous Shadow, the spectral effigies of the
mysterious being, whose very existence in the flesh was a riddle unsolved
by my reason. Distinctly I saw the Shadow, but its light was far paler,
its outline far more vague, than when I had beheld it before. I took
courage, as I felt Lilian's heart beating against my own. I advanced, I
crossed the threshold,--the Shadow was gone.

"There is no Shadow here,--no phantom to daunt thee, my life's life," said
I, bending over Lilian.

"It has touched me in passing; I feel it--cold, cold, cold!" she answered
faintly.

I bore her to her room, placed her on her bed, struck a light, watched
over her. At dawn there was a change in her face, and from that time
health gradually left her; strength slowly, slowly, yet to me perceptibly,
ebbed from her life away.

[1] A missile weapon peculiar to the Australian savages.




CHAPTER LXXIII.

Months upon months have rolled on since the night in which Lilian had
watched for my coming amidst the chilling airs--under the haunting moon.
I have said that from the date of that night her health began gradually to
fail, but in her mind there was evidently at work some slow revolution.
Her visionary abstractions were less frequent; when they occurred, less
prolonged. There was no longer in her soft face that celestial serenity
which spoke her content in her dreams, but often a look of anxiety and
trouble. She was even more silent than before; but when she did speak,
there were now evident some struggling gleams of memory. She startled us,
at times, by a distinct allusion to the events and scenes of her early
childhood. More than once she spoke of commonplace incidents and mere
acquaintances at L----. At last she seemed to recognize Mrs. Ashleigh as
her mother; but me, as Allen Fenwick, her betrothed, her bridegroom, no!
Once or twice she spoke to me of her beloved as of a stranger to myself,
and asked me not to deceive her--should she ever see him again? There was
one change in this new phase of her state that wounded me to the quick.
She had always previously seemed to welcome my presence; now there were
hours, sometimes days together, in which my presence was evidently painful
to her. She would become agitated when I stole into her room, make signs
to me to leave her, grow yet more disturbed if I did not immediately obey,
and become calm again when I was gone.

Faber sought constantly to sustain my courage and administer to my hopes
by reminding me of the prediction he had hazarded,--namely, that through
some malady to the frame the reason would be ultimately restored.

He said, "Observe! her mind was first roused from its slumber by the
affectionate, unconquered impulse of her heart. You were absent; the
storm alarmed her, she missed you,--feared for you. The love within her,
not alienated, though latent, drew her thoughts into definite human
tracks. And thus, the words that you tell me she uttered when you
appeared before her were words of love, stricken, though as yet
irregularly, as the winds strike the harp-strings from chords of awakened
memory. The same unwonted excitement, together with lengthened exposure
to the cold night-air, will account for the shock to her physical system,
and the languor and waste of strength by which it has been succeeded."

"Ay, and the Shadow that we both saw within the threshold. What of that?"

"Are there no records on evidence, which most physicians of very extended
practice will perhaps allow that their experience more or less tend to
confirm--no records of the singular coincidences between individual
impressions which are produced by sympathy? Now, whether you or your
Lilian were first haunted by this Shadow I know not. Perhaps before it
appeared to you in the wizard's chamber it had appeared to her by the
Monks' Well. Perhaps, as it came to you in the prison, so it lured her
through the solitudes, associating its illusory guidance with dreams of
you. And again, when she saw it within your threshold, your fantasy, so
abruptly invoked, made you see with the eyes of your Lilian! Does this
doctrine of sympathy, though by that very mystery you two loved each other
at first,--though, without it, love at first sight were in itself an
incredible miracle,--does, I say, this doctrine of sympathy seem to you
inadmissible? Then nothing is left for us but to revolve the conjecture I
before threw out. Have certain organizations like that of Margrave the
power to impress, through space, the imaginations of those over whom they
have forced a control? I know not. But if they have, it is not
supernatural; it is but one of those operations in Nature so rare and
exceptional, and of which testimony and evidence are so imperfect and so
liable to superstitious illusions, that they have not yet been traced--as,
if truthful, no doubt they can be, by the patient genius of science--to
one of those secondary causes by which the Creator ordains that Nature
shall act on Man."

By degrees I became dissatisfied with my conversations with Faber. I
yearned for explanations; all guesses but bewildered me more. In his
family, with one exception, I found no congenial association. His nephew
seemed to me an ordinary specimen of a very trite human nature,--a young
man of limited ideas, fair moral tendencies, going mechanically right
where not tempted to wrong. The same desire of gain which had urged him
to gamble and speculate when thrown in societies rife with such example,
led him, now in the Bush, to healthful, industrious, persevering labour.
"Spes fovet agricolas," says the poet; the same Hope which entices the
fish to the hook impels the plough of the husband-man. The young farmer's
young wife was somewhat superior to him; she had more refinement of taste,
more culture of mind, but, living in his life, she was inevitably levelled
to his ends and pursuits; and, next to the babe in the cradle, no object
seemed to her so important as that of guarding the sheep from the scab and
the dingoes. I was amazed to see how quietly a man whose mind was so
stored by life and by books as that of Julius Faber--a man who had loved
the clash of conflicting intellects, and acquired the rewards of
fame--could accommodate himself to the cabined range of his kinsfolks'
half-civilized existence, take interest in their trivial talk, find
varying excitement in the monotonous household of a peasant-like farmer.
I could not help saying as much to him once. "My friend," replied the old
man, "believe me that the happiest art of intellect, however lofty, is
that which enables it to be cheerfully at home with the Real!"

The only one of the family in which Faber was domesticated in whom I found
an interest, to whose talk I could listen without fatigue, was the child
Amy. Simple though she was in language, patient of labour as the most
laborious, I recognized in her a quiet nobleness of sentiment, which
exalted above the commonplace the acts of her commonplace life. She had
no precocious intellect, no enthusiastic fancies, but she had an exquisite
activity of heart. It was her heart that animated her sense of duty, and
made duty a sweetness and a joy. She felt to the core the kindness of
those around her; exaggerated, with the warmth of her gratitude, the
claims which that kindness imposed. Even for the blessing of life, which
she shared with all creation, she felt as if singled out by the undeserved
favour of the Creator, and thus was filled with religion, because she was
filled with love.

My interest in this child was increased and deepened by my saddened and
not wholly unremorseful remembrance of the night on which her sobs had
pierced my ear,--the night from which I secretly dated the mysterious
agencies that had wrenched from their proper field and career both my mind
and my life. But a gentler interest endeared her to my thoughts in the
pleasure that Lilian felt in her visits, in the affectionate intercourse
that sprang up between the afflicted sufferer and the harmless infant.
Often when we failed to comprehend some meaning which Lilian evidently
wished to convey to us--we, her mother and her husband--she was understood
with as much ease by Amy, the unlettered child, as by Faber, the
gray-haired thinker.

"How is it,--how is it?" I asked, impatiently and jealously, of Faber.
"Love is said to interpret where wisdom fails, and you yourself talk of
the marvels which sympathy may effect between lover and beloved; yet when,
for days together, I cannot succeed in unravelling Lilian's wish or her
thought--and her own mother is equally in fault--you or Amy, closeted
alone with her for five minutes, comprehend and are comprehended."

"Allen," answered Faber, "Amy and I believe in spirit; and she, in whom
mind is dormant but spirit awake, feels in such belief a sympathy which
she has not, in that respect, with yourself, nor even with her mother.
You seek only through your mind to conjecture hers. Her mother has sense
clear enough where habitual experience can guide it, but that sense is
confused, and forsakes her when forced from the regular pathway in which
it has been accustomed to tread. Amy and I through soul guess at soul,
and though mostly contented with earth, we can both rise at times into
heaven. We pray."

"Alas!" said I, half mournfully, half angrily, "when you thus speak of
Mind as distinct from Soul, it was only in that Vision which you bid me
regard as the illusion of a fancy stimulated by chemical vapours,
producing on the brain an effect similar to that of opium or the
inhalation of the oxide gas, that I have ever seen the silver spark of the
Soul distinct from the light of the Mind. And holding, as I do, that all
intellectual ideas are derived from the experiences of the body, whether I
accept the theory of Locke, or that of Condillac, or that into which their
propositions reach their final development in the wonderful subtlety of
Hume, I cannot detect the immaterial spirit in the material
substance,--much less follow its escape from the organic matter in which
the principle of thought ceases with the principle of life. When the
metaphysician, contending for the immortality of the thinking faculty,
analyzes Mind, his analysis comprehends the mind of the brute, nay, of the
insect, as well as that of man. Take Reid's definition of Mind, as the
most comprehensive which I can at the moment remember: 'By the mind of a
man we understand that in him which thinks, remembers, reasons, and
wills.[1] But this definition only distinguishes the mind of man from
that of the brute by superiority in the same attributes, and not by
attributes denied to the brute. An animal, even an insect, thinks,
remembers, reasons, and wills.[1] Few naturalists will now support the
doctrine that all the mental operations of brute or insect are to be
exclusively referred to instincts; and, even if they do, the word
'instinct' is a very vague word,--loose and large enough to cover an abyss
which our knowledge has not sounded. And, indeed, in proportion as an
animal like the dog becomes cultivated by intercourse, his instincts grow
weaker, and his ideas formed by experience (namely, his mind), more
developed, often to the conquest of the instincts themselves. Hence, with
his usual candour, Dr. Abercrombie--in contending 'that everything mental
ceases to exist after death, when we know that everything corporeal
continues to exist, is a gratuitous assumption contrary to every rule of
philosophical inquiry'--feels compelled, by his reasoning, to admit the
probability of a future life even to the lower animals. His words are:
'To this anode of reasoning it has been objected that it would go to
establish an immaterial principle in the lower animals which in them
exhibits many of the phenomena of mind. I have only to answer, Be it so.
There are in the lower animals many of the phenomena of mind, and with
regard to these, we also contend that they are entirely distinct from
anything we know of the properties of matter, which is all that we mean,
or can mean, by being immaterial.'[2] Am I then driven to admit that if
man's mind is immaterial and imperishable, so also is that of the ape and
the ant?"

"I own," said Faber, with his peculiar smile, arch and genial,
"that if I were compelled to make that admission, it would not shock my
pride. I do not presume to set any limit to the goodness of the Creator;
and should be as humbly pleased as the Indian, if in--

"'yonder sky,
My faithful dog should bear me company.'

"You are too familiar with the works of that Titan in wisdom and error,
Descartes, not to recollect the interesting correspondence between the
urbane philosopher and our combative countryman, Henry More,[3] on this
very subject; in which certainly More has the best of it when Descartes
insists on reducing what he calls the soul (l'ame) of brutes into the same
kind of machines as man constructs from inorganized matter. The learning,
indeed, lavished on the insoluble question involved in the psychology of
the inferior animals is a proof at least of the all-inquisitive, redundant
spirit of man.[4] We have almost a literature in itself devoted to
endeavours to interpret the language of brutes.[5] Dupont de Nemours has
discovered that dogs talk in vowels, using only two consonants, G, Z, when
they are angry. He asserts that cats employ the same vowels as dogs; but
their language is more affluent in consonants, including M, N, B, R, V, F.
How many laborious efforts have been made to define and to construe the
song of the nightingale! One version of that song, by Beckstein, the
naturalist, published in 1840, I remember to have seen. And I heard a
lady, gifted with a singularly charming voice, chant the mysterious vowels
with so exquisite a pathos, that one could not refuse to believe her when
she declared that she fully comprehended the bird's meaning, and gave to
the nightingale's warble the tender interpretation of her own woman's
heart.

"But leaving all such discussions to their proper place amongst the
Curiosities of Literature, I come in earnest to the question you have so
earnestly raised; and to me the distinction between man and the lower
animals in reference to a spiritual nature designed for a future
existence, and the mental operations whose uses are bounded to an
existence on earth, seems ineffaceably clear. Whether ideas or even
perceptions be innate or all formed by experience is a speculation for
metaphysicians, which, so far as it affects the question of as immaterial
principle, I am quite willing to lay aside. I can well understand that a
materialist may admit innate ideas in Man, as he must admit them in the
instinct of brutes, tracing them to hereditary predispositions. On the
other hand, we know that the most devout believers in our spiritual nature
have insisted, with Locke, in denying any idea, even of the Deity, to be
innate.

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