Book: THE TWO DESTINIES

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The first affliction that befell the little household was the
death of the grandmother, by the exhaustion of extreme old age.
In her last conscious moments, she said to Mary, "Never forget
that you and George are spirits consecrated to each other.
Wait--in the certain knowledge that no human power can hinder
your union in the time to come."

While those words were still vividly present to Mary's mind, our
visionary union by dreams was abruptly broken on her side, as it
had been abruptly broken on mine. In the first days of my
self-degradation, I had ceased to see Mary. Exactly at the same
period Mary ceased to see me.

The girl's sensitive nature sunk under the shock. She had now no
elder woman to comfort and advise her; she lived alone with her
father, who invariably changed the subject whenever she spoke of
the old times. The secret sorrow that preys on body and mind
alike preyed on _her_. A cold, caught at the inclement season,
turned to fever. For weeks she was in danger of death. When she
recovered, her head had been stripped of its beautiful hair by
the doctor's order. The sacrifice had been necessary to save her
life. It proved to be, in one respect, a cruel sacrifice--her
hair never grew plentifully again. When it did reappear, it had
completely lost its charming mingled hues of deep red and brown;
it was now of one monotonous light-brown color throughout. At
first sight, Mary's Scotch friends hardly knew her again.

But Nature made amends for what the head had lost by what the
face and the figure gained.

In a year from the date of her illness, the frail little child of
the old days at Greenwater Broad had ripened, in the bracing
Scotch air and the healthy mode of life, into a comely young
woman. Her features were still, as in her early years, not
regularly beautiful; but the change in her was not the less
marked on that account. The wan face had filled out, and the pale
complexion had found its color. As to her figure, its remarkable
development was perceived even by the rough people about her.
Promising nothing when she was a child, it had now sprung into
womanly fullness, symmetry, and grace. It was a strikingly
beautiful figure, in the strictest sense of the word.

Morally as well as physically, there were moments, at this period
of their lives, when even her own father hardly recognized his
daughter of former days. She had lost her childish vivacity--her
sweet, equable flow of good humor. Silent and self-absorbed, she
went through the daily routine of her duties enduringly. The hope
of meeting me again had sunk to a dead hope in her by this time.
She made no complaint. The bodily strength that she had gained in
these later days had its sympathetic influence in steadying her
mind. When her father once or twice ventured to ask if she was
still thinking of me, she answered quietly that she had brought
herself to share his opinions. She could not doubt that I had
long since ceased to think of her. Even if I had remained
faithful to her, she was old enough now to know that the
difference between us in rank made our union by marriage an
impossibility. It would be best (she thought) not to refer any
more to the past, best to forget me, as I had forgotten her. So
she spoke now. So, tried by the test of appearances, Dame
Dermody's confident forecast of our destinies had failed to
justify itself, and had taken its place among the predictions
that are never fulfilled.

The next notable event in the family annals which followed Mary's
illness happened when she had attained the age of nineteen years.
Even at this distance of time my heart sinks, my courage fails
me, at the critical stage in my narrative which I have now
reached.

A storm of unusual severity burst over the eastern coast of
Scotland. Among the ships that were lost in the tempest was a
vessel bound from Holland, which was wrecked on the rocky shore
near Dermody's place of abode. Leading the way in all good
actions, the bailiff led the way in rescuing the passengers and
crew of the lost ship. He had brought one man alive to land, and
was on his way back to the vessel, when two heavy seas, following
in close succession, dashed him against the rocks. He was
rescued, at the risk of their own lives, by his neighbors. The
medical examination disclosed a broken bone and severe bruises
and lacerations. So far, Dermody's sufferings were easy of
relief. But, after a lapse of time, symptoms appeared in the
patient which revealed to his medical attendant the presence of
serious internal injury. In the doctor's opinion, he could never
hope to resume the active habits of his life. He would be an
invalid and a crippled man for the rest of his days.

Under these melancholy circumstances, the bailiff's employer did
all that could be strictly expected of him, He hired an assistant
to undertake the supervision of the farm work, and he permitted
Dermody to occupy his cottage for the next three months. This
concession gave the poor man time to recover such relics of
strength as were still left to him, and to consult his friends in
Glasgow on the doubtful question of his life to come.

The prospect was a serious one. Dermody was quite unfit for any
sedentary employment; and the little money that he had saved was
not enough to support his daughter and himself. The Scotch
friends were willing and kind; but they had domestic claims on
them, and they had no money to spare.

In this emergency, the passenger in the wrecked vessel (whose
life Dermody had saved) came forward with a proposal which took
father and daughter alike by surprise. He made Mary an offer of
marriage; on the express understanding (if she accepted him) that
her home was to be her father's home also to the end of his life.

The person who thus associated himself with the Dermodys in the
time of their trouble was a Dutch gentleman, named Ernest Van
Brandt. He possessed a share in a fishing establishment on the
shores of the Zuyder Zee; and he was on his way to establish a
correspondence with the fisheries in the North of Scotland when
the vessel was wrecked. Mary had produced a strong impression on
him when they first met. He had lingered in the neighborhood, in
the hope of gaining her favorable regard, with time to help him.
Personally he was a handsome man, in the prime of life; and he
was possessed of a sufficient income to marry on. In making his
proposal, he produced references to persons of high social
position in Holland, who could answer for hi m, so far as the
questions of character and position were concerned.

Mary was long in considering which course it would be best for
her helpless father, and best for herself, to adopt.

The hope of a marriage with me had been a hope abandoned by her
years since. No woman looks forward willingly to a life of
cheerless celibacy. In thinking of her future, Mary naturally
thought of herself in the character of a wife. Could she fairly
expect in the time to come to receive any more attractive
proposal than the proposal now addressed to her? Mr. Van Brandt
had every personal advantage that a woman could desire; he was
devotedly in love with her; and he felt a grateful affection for
her father as the man to whom he owed his life. With no other
hope in her heart--with no other prospect in view--what could she
do better than marry Mr. Van Brandt?

Influenced by these considerations, she decided on speaking the
fatal word. She said, "Yes."

At the same time, she spoke plainly to Mr. Van Brandt,
unreservedly acknowledging that she had contemplated another
future than the future now set before her. She did not conceal
that there had once been an old love in her heart, and that a new
love was more than she could command. Esteem, gratitude, and
regard she could honestly offer; and, with time, love might come.
For the rest, she had long since disassociated herself from the
past, and had definitely given up all the hopes and wishes once
connected with it. Repose for her father, and tranquil happiness
for herself, were the only favors that she asked of fortune now.
These she might find under the roof of an honorable man who loved
and respected her. She could promise, on her side, to make him a
good and faithful wife, if she could promise no more. It rested
with Mr. Van Brandt to say whether he really believed that he
would be consulting his own happiness in marrying her on these
terms.

Mr. Van Brandt accepted the terms without a moment's hesitation.

They would have been married immediately but for an alarming
change for the worse in the condition of Dermody's health.
Symptoms showed themselves, which the doctor confessed that he
had not anticipated when he had given his opinion on the case. He
warned Mary that the end might be near. A physician was summoned
from Edinburgh, at Mr. Van Brandt's expense. He confirmed the
opinion entertained by the country doctor. For some days longer
the good bailiff lingered. On the last morning, he put his
daughter's hand in Van Brandt's hand. "Make her happy, sir," he
said, in his simple way, "and you will be even with me for saving
your life." The same day he died quietly in his daughter's arms.

Mary's future was now entirely in her lover's hands. The
relatives in Glasgow had daughters of their own to provide for.
The relatives in London resented Dermody's neglect of them. Van
Brandt waited, delicately and considerately, until the first
violence of the girl's grief had worn itself out, and then he
pleaded irresistibly for a husband's claim to console her.

The time at which they were married in Scotland was also the time
at which I was on my way home from India. Mary had then reached
the age of twenty years.


The story of our ten years' separation is now told; the narrative
leaves us at the outset of our new lives.

I am with my mother, beginning my career as a country gentleman
on the estate in Perthshire which I have inherited from Mr.
Germaine. Mary is with her husband, enjoying her new privileges,
learning her new duties, as a wife. She, too, is living in
Scotland--living, by a strange fatality, not very far distant
from my country-house. I have no suspicion that she is so near to
me: the name of Mrs. Van Brandt (even if I had heard it) appeals
to no familiar association in my mind. Still the kindred spirits
are parted. Still there is no idea on her side, and no idea on
mine, that we shall ever meet again.

CHAPTER VII.

THE WOMAN ON THE BRIDGE.

MY mother looked in at the library door, and disturbed me over my
books.

"I have been hanging a little picture in my room," she said.
"Come upstairs, my dear, and give me your opinion of it."

I rose and followed her. She pointed to a miniature portrait,
hanging above the mantelpiece.

"Do you know whose likeness that is?" she asked, half sadly, half
playfully. "George! Do you really not recognize yourself at
thirteen years old?"

How should I recognize myself? Worn by sickness and sorrow;
browned by the sun on my long homeward voyage; my hair already
growing thin over my forehead; my eyes already habituated to
their one sad and weary look; what had I in common with the fair,
plump, curly-headed, bright-eyed boy who confronted me in the
miniature? The mere sight of the portrait produced the most
extraordinary effect on my mind. It struck me with an
overwhelming melancholy; it filled me with a despair of myself
too dreadful to be endured. Making the best excuse I could to my
mother, I left the room. In another minute I was out of the
house.

I crossed the park, and left my own possessions behind me.
Following a by-road, I came to our well-known river; so beautiful
in itself, so famous among trout-fishers throughout Scotland. It
was not then the fishing season. No human being was in sight as I
took my seat on the bank. The old stone bridge which spanned the
stream was within a hundred yards of me; the setting sun still
tinged the swift-flowing water under the arches with its red and
dying light.

Still the boy's face in the miniature pursued me. Still the
portrait seemed to reproach me in a merciless language of its
own: "Look at what you were once; think of what you are now!"

I hid my face in the soft, fragrant grass. I thought of the
wasted years of my life between thirteen and twenty-three.

How was it to end? If I lived to the ordinary life of man, what
prospect had I before me?

Love? Marriage? I burst out laughing as the idea crossed my mind.
Since the innocently happy days of my boyhood I had known no more
of love than the insect that now crept over my hand as it lay on
the grass. My money, to be sure, would buy me a wife; but would
my money make her dear to me? dear as Mary had once been, in the
golden time when my portrait was first painted?

Mary! Was she still living? Was she married? Should I know her
again if I saw her? Absurd! I had not seen her since she was ten
years old: she was now a woman, as I was a man. Would she know
_me_ if we met? The portrait, still pursuing me, answered the
question: "Look at what you were once; think of what you are
now!"

I rose and walked backward and forward, and tried to turn the
current of my thoughts in some new direction.

It was not to be done. After a banishment of years, Mary had got
back again into my mind. I sat down once more on the river bank.
The sun was sinking fast. Black shadows hovered under the arches
of the old stone bridge. The red light had faded from the
swift-flowing water, and had left it overspread with one
monotonous hue of steely gray. The first stars looked down
peacefully from the cloudless sky. The first shiverings of the
night breeze were audible among the trees, and visible here and
there in the shallow places of the stream. And still, the darker
it grew, the more persistently my portrait led me back to the
past, the more vividly the long-lost image of the child Mary
showed itself to me in my thoughts.

Was this the prelude of her coming back to me in dreams; in her
perfected womanhood, in the young prime of her life?

It might be so.

I was no longer unworthy of her, as I had once been. The effect
produced on me by the sight of my portrait was in itself due to
moral and mental changes in me for the better, which had been
steadily proceeding since the time when my wound had laid me
helpless among strangers in a strange land. Sickness, which has
made itself teacher and friend to many a man, had made itself
teacher and friend to me. I looked back with horror at the vices
of my youth; at the fruitless after-days when I had impiously
doubted all that is most noble, all that is most consoling in
human life. Consecrated by sorrow, purified by repentance, was it
vain in me to hope that her spirit a nd my spirit might yet be
united again? Who could tell?

I rose once more. It could serve no good purpose to linger until
night by the banks of the river. I had left the house, feeling
the impulse which drives us, in certain excited conditions of the
mind, to take refuge in movement and change. The remedy had
failed; my mind was as strangely disturbed as ever. My wisest
course would be to go home, and keep my good mother company over
her favorite game of piquet.

I turned to take the road back, and stopped, struck by the
tranquil beauty of the last faint light in the western sky,
shining behind the black line formed by the parapet of the
bridge.

In the grand gathering of the night shadows, in the deep
stillness of the dying day, I stood alone and watched the sinking
light.

As I looked, there came a change over the scene. Suddenly and
softly a living figure glided into view on the bridge. It passed
behind the black line of the parapet, in the last long rays of
the western light. It crossed the bridge. It paused, and crossed
back again half-way. Then it stopped. The minutes passed, and
there the figure stood, a motionless black object, behind the
black parapet of the bridge.

I advanced a little, moving near enough to obtain a closer view
of the dress in which the figure was attired. The dress showed me
that the solitary stranger was a woman.

She did not notice me in the shadow which the trees cast on the
bank. She stood with her arms folded in her cloak, looking down
at the darkening river.

Why was she waiting there at the close of evening alone?

As the question occurred to me, I saw her head move. She looked
along the bridge, first on one side of her, then on the other.
Was she waiting for some person who was to meet her? Or was she
suspicious of observation, and anxious to make sure that she was
alone?

A sudden doubt of her purpose in seeking that solitary place, a
sudden distrust of the lonely bridge and the swift-flowing river,
set my heart beating quickly and roused me to instant action. I
hurried up the rising ground which led from the river-bank to the
bridge, determined on speaking to her while the opportunity was
still mine.

She neither saw nor heard me until I was close to her. I
approached with an irrepressible feeling of agitation; not
knowing how she might receive me when I spoke to her. The moment
she turned and faced me, my composure came back. It was as if,
expecting to see a stranger, I had unexpectedly encountered a
friend.

And yet she _was_ a stranger. I had never before looked on that
grave and noble face, on that grand figure whose exquisite grace
and symmetry even her long cloak could not wholly hide. She was
not, perhaps, a strictly beautiful woman. There were defects in
her which were sufficiently marked to show themselves in the
fading light. Her hair, for example, seen under the large garden
hat that she wore, looked almost as short as the hair of a man;
and the color of it was of that dull, lusterless brown hue which
is so commonly seen in English women of the ordinary type. Still,
in spite of these drawbacks, there was a latent charm in her
expression, there was an inbred fascination in her manner, which
instantly found its way to my sympathies and its hold on my
admiration. She won me in the moment when I first looked at her.

"May I inquire if you have lost your way?" I asked.

Her eyes rested on my face with a strange look of inquiry in
them. She did not appear to be surprised or confused at my
venturing to address her.

"I know this part of the country well," I went on. "Can I be of
any use to you?"

She still looked at me with steady, inquiring eyes. For a moment,
stranger as I was, my face seemed to trouble her as if it had
been a face that she had seen and forgotten again. If she really
had this idea, she at once dismissed it with a little toss of her
head, and looked away at the river as if she felt no further
interest in me.

"Thank you. I have not lost my way. I am accustomed to walking
alone. Good-evening."

She spoke coldly, but courteously. Her voice was delicious; her
bow, as she left me, was the perfection of unaffected grace. She
left the bridge on the side by which I had first seen her
approach it, and walked slowly away along the darkening track of
the highroad.

Still I was not quite satisfied. There was something underlying
the charming expression and the fascinating manner which my
instinct felt to be something wrong. As I walked away toward the
opposite end of the bridge, the doubt began to grow on me whether
she had spoken the truth. In leaving the neighborhood of the
river, was she simply trying to get rid of me?

I at once resolved to put this suspicion of her to the test.
Leaving the bridge, I had only to cross the road beyond, and to
enter a plantation on the bank of the river. Here, concealed
behind the first tree which was large enough to hide me, I could
command a view of the bridge, and I could fairly count on
detecting her, if she returned to the river, while there was a
ray of light to see her by. It was not easy walking in the
obscurity of the plantation: I had almost to grope my way to the
nearest tree that suited my purpose.

I had just steadied my foothold on the uneven ground behind the
tree, when the stillness of the twilight hour was suddenly broken
by the distant sound of a voice.

The voice was a woman's. It was not raised to any high pitch; its
accent was the accent of prayer, and the words it uttered were
these:

"Christ, have mercy on me!"

There was silence again. A nameless fear crept over me, as I
looked out on the bridge.

She was standing on the parapet. Before I could move, before I
could cry out, before I could even breathe again freely, she
leaped into the river.

The current ran my way. I could see her, as she rose to the
surface, floating by in the light on the mid-stream. I ran
headlong down the bank. She sank again, in the moment when I
stopped to throw aside my hat and coat and to kick off my shoes.
I was a practiced swimmer. The instant I was in the water my
composure came back to me--I felt like myself again.

The current swept me out into the mid-stream, and greatly
increased the speed at which I swam. I was close behind her when
she rose for the second time--a shadowy thing, just visible a few
inches below the surface of the river. One more stroke, and my
left arm was round her; I had her face out of the water. She was
insensible. I could hold her in the right way to leave me master
of all my movements; I could devote myself, without flurry or
fatigue, to the exertion of taking her back to the shore.

My first attempt satisfied me that there was no reasonable hope,
burdened as I now was, of breasting the strong current running
toward the mid-river from either bank. I tried it on one side,
and I tried it on the other, and gave it up. The one choice left
was to let myself drift with her down the stream. Some fifty
yards lower, the river took a turn round a promontory of land, on
which stood a little inn much frequented by anglers in the
season. As we approached the place, I made another attempt (again
an attempt in vain) to reach the shore. Our last chance now was
to be heard by the people of the inn. I shouted at the full pitch
of my voice as we drifted past. The cry was answered. A man put
off in a boat. In five minutes more I had her safe on the bank
again; and the man and I were carrying her to the inn by the
river-side.

The landlady and her servant-girl were equally willing to be of
service, and equally ignorant of what they were to do.
Fortunately, my medical education made me competent to direct
them. A good fire, warm blankets, hot water in bottles, were all
at my disposal. I showed the women myself how to ply the work of
revival. They persevered, and I persevered; and still there she
lay, in her perfect beauty of form, without a sign of life
perceptible; there she lay, to all outward appearance, dead by
drowning.

A last hope was left--the hope of restoring her (if I could
construct the apparatus in time) by the process called
"artificial respiration." I was just endeavoring to tell the
landlady what I wanted and was just conscious o f a strange
difficulty in expressing myself, when the good woman started
back, and looked at me with a scream of terror.

"Good God, sir, you're bleeding!" she cried. "What's the matter?
Where are you hurt?"

In the moment when she spoke to me I knew what had happened. The
old Indian wound (irritated, doubtless, by the violent exertion
that I had imposed on myself) had opened again. I struggled
against the sudden sense of faintness that seized on me; I tried
to tell the people of the inn what to do. It was useless. I
dropped to my knees; my head sunk on the bosom of the woman
stretched senseless upon the low couch beneath me. The
death-in-life that had got _her_ had got _me_. Lost to the world
about us, we lay, with my blood flowing on her, united in our
deathly trance.

Where were our spirits at that moment? Were they together and
conscious of each other? United by a spiritual bond, undiscovered
and unsuspected by us in the flesh, did we two, who had met as
strangers on the fatal bridge, know each other again in the
trance? You who have loved and lost--you whose one consolation it
has been to believe in other worlds than this--can you turn from
my questions in contempt? Can you honestly say that they have
never been _your_ questions too?

CHAPTER VIII.

THE KINDRED SPIRITS

THE morning sunlight shining in at a badly curtained window; a
clumsy wooden bed, with big twisted posts that reached to the
ceiling; on one side of the bed, my mother's welcome face; on the
other side, an elderly gentleman unremembered by me at that
moment--such were the objects that presented themselves to my
view, when I first consciously returned to the world that we live
in.

"Look, doctor, look! He has come to his senses at last."

"Open your mouth, sir, and take a sup of this." My mother was
rejoicing over me on one side of the bed; and the unknown
gentleman, addressed as "doctor," was offering me a spoonful of
whisky-and-water on the other. He called it the "elixir of life";
and he bid me remark (speaking in a strong Scotch accent) that he
tasted it himself to show he was in earnest.

The stimulant did its good work. My head felt less giddy, my mind
became clearer. I could speak collectedly to my mother; I could
vaguely recall the more marked events of the previous evening. A
minute or two more, and the image of the person in whom those
events had all centered became a living image in my memory. I
tried to raise myself in the bed; I asked, impatiently, "Where is
she?"

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