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veturi
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HARVARD
COLLEGE
LIBRARY




















Contenta.
Bulwer Lyttow, Sir E. (G. E.L.). A Strange
Hory. B. 1862.
Kathewo, 6. Big Abel, and the Little Mau-
I hattan N.Y. 18450
Harkeray, Will. The Kicklebungs on the
! Rhine. N.Y. 1851


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WU
À Strange Sirsa
Tiesī
LETI at the Monks Well
UN ATTIE


A STRANGE STORY.
BY
Conored
SIR E. BULWER-LYTTON.
WITH
ENGRAVINGS ON STEEL BY F. O. FREEMAN,
DRAWINGS BY J. N. HYDE,
FROM DESIGNS BY GARDNER A. FULLER.
BOSTON:
GARDNER A. FULLER.
18 6 2.


2 2483:20
1961, 16.12.
Cilin riskini,
sinične
Entered according to Act of Congress, in the year 1862, by
GARDNER A. FULLER,
in the Clerk's Office of the District Court of the District of Massachusetts.
HARVARD
UNIVERSITY
LIBRARY )
CAMBRIDGE: .
Allen & Farnham, Stereotypers and Printers.


A STRANGE STORY.
CHAPTER I.
In the year 18– I settled as a physician at one of the wealthiest
of our great English towns, which I will designate by the initial L-
I was yet young, but I had acquired some reputation by a professional
work which is, I believe, still among the received authorities on the sub-
ject of which it treats. I had studied at Edinburgh and at Paris, and
had borne away from both those illustrious schools of medicine whatever
guarantees for future distinction the praise of professors may concede to
the ambition of students. On becoming a member of the College of
Physieians, I made a tour of the principal cities of Europe, taking let-
ters of introduction to eminent medical men; and, gathering from many
theories and modes of treatment lints to enlarge the foundations of un-
• prejudiced and comprehensive practice, I had resolved to fix my ulti-
mate residence in London. But before this preparatory tour was com-
pleted my · resolve was changed by one of those unexpected events
which determine the fate man in vain would work out for himself. In
passing through the Tyrol, on my way into the north of Italy, I found in
a small inn, remote from medical attendance, an English traveller -
seized with acute inflammation of the lungs, and in a state of imminent
danger. I devoted myself to him night and day, and, perhaps more
through careful nursing than active remedies, I had the happiness to effect
his complete recovery. The traveller proved to be Julius Faber, a
physician of great distinction - contented to reside, where he was born,
in the provincial city of L , but whose reputation as a profound and
original pathologist was widely spread, and whose writings had formed
no unimportant part of my special studies. It was during a short holiday
excursion, from which he was about to return with renovated vigor, that
he had been thus stricken down. The patient so accidentally met with
became the founder of my professional fortunes. He conceived a warm


A STRANGE STORY.
attachment for me; perhaps the more affectionate because he was a
childless bachelor, and the nephew who would succeed to his wealth
evinced no desire to succeed to the toils by which the wealth had been
acquired. Thus, having an heir for the one, he had long looked about
for an heir to the other, and now resolved on finding that heir in me. So
when we parted Dr. Faber made me promise to correspond with him
regularly, and it was not long before he disclosed by letter the plans he
had formed in my favor. He said that he was growing old ; his practice
was beyond his strength; he needed a partner; he was not disposed to
put up to sale the health of patients whom he had learned to regard as his
children. Money was no object to him ; but it was an object close at his
heart that the humanity he had served, and the reputation he had acquired
should suffer no loss in his choice of a successor. In fine, he proposed
that I should at once come to
L a s his partner, with the view of suc-
ceeding to his entire practice at the end of two years, when it was his
intention to retire.
The opening into fortune thus afforded to me was one that rarely pre-
sents itself to a young man entering upon an overcrowded profession.
And to an aspirant less allured by the desire of fortune than the hope
of distinction, the fame of the physician who thus generously offered to
me the inestimable benefits of his long experience, and his cordial' intro-
duction, was in itself an assurance that a metropolitan practice is not
essential to a national renown.
I went, then, to L- , and before the two years of my partnership
had expired, my success justified my kind friend's selection, and far more
than realized my own expectations. I was fortunate in effecting some
notable cures in the earliest cases submitted to me, and it is every thing
in the career of a physician when good luck wins betimes for him that
confidence which patients rarely accord except to lengthened experience.
To the rapid facility with which my way was made, some circumstances
apart from professional skill probably combined. I was saved from the
suspicion of a medical adventurer by the accidents of birth and fortune.
I belonged to an ancient family (a branch of the once powerful border
clan of the Fenwicks), that had for many generations held a 'fair estate
in the neighborhood of Windermere. As an only son I had succeeded to
that estate on attaining my majority, and had sold it to pay off the debts
which had been made by my father, who had the costly tastes of an anti-
quarian and collector. The residue on the sale insured me a modest in-
dependence apart from the profits of a profession, and as I had not been
legally bound to defray my father's debts, so I obtained that character for
disinterestedness and integrity which always in England tends to propi-
tiate the public to the successes achieved by industry or talent. Perhaps,


A STRANGE STORY.
too, any professional ability I might possess was the more readily conceded,
because I had cultivated with assiduity the sciences and the scholarship
which are collaterally connected with the study of medicine. Thus, in a
word, I established a social position which came in aid of my professional
repute, and silenced much of that envy which usually imbitters and some-
times impedes success.
Dr. Faber retired at the end of the two years agreed upon. He went
abroad, and being, though advanced in years, of a frame still robust, and
habits of mind still inquiring and eager, he commenced a lengthened course
of foreign travel, during which our correspondence, at first frequent, grad-
ually languished, and finally died away.
I succeeded at once to the larger part of the practice which the labors
of thirty years had secured to my predecessor. My chief rival was a
Dr. Lloyd, a benevolent, fervid man, not without genius - if genius be
present where judgment is absent; not without science, if that may be
science which fails in precision. One of those clever desultory men who,
in adopting a profession, do not give up to it the whole force and heat
of their minds. Men of that kind habitually accept a mechanical routine,
because in the exercise of their ostensible calling their imaginative facul-
ties are drawn away to pursuits more alluring. Therefore, in their
proper vocation they are seldom bold or inventive — out of it they are
sometimes both to excess. And when they do take up a novelty in their
own profession they cherish it with an obstinate tenacity, and an extrav-
agant passion, unknown to those quiet philosophers who take up novelties
every day, examine them with the sobriety of practised eyes, to lay down
altogether, modify in part, or accept in whole, according as inductive ex-
periment supports or destroys conjecture.
Dr. Lloyd had been esteemed a learned naturalist long before he was
admitted to be a tolerable physician. Amidst the privations of his youth
he had contrived to form, and with each succeeding year he had persever-
ingly increased, a zoological collection of creatures, not alive, but, happily
for the beholder, stuffed or embalmed. From what I have said it will be
truly inferred that Dr. Lloyd's earlier career as a physician had not been
brilliant; but of late years he had gradually rather aged than worked
himself into that professional authority and station which time confers on
a thoroughly respectable man, whom no one is disposed to envy and all
are disposed to like. »
Now in L— there were two distinct social circles: that of the wealthy
merchants and traders, and that of a few privileged families, inhabiting a
part of the town aloof from the marts of commerce, and called the Abbey
Hill. These superb Areopagites exercised over the wives and daughters
of the inferior citizens to whom all of L-—, except the Abbey Hill, owed


A STRANGE STORY.
its prosperity, the same kind of mysterious influence which the fine ladies
of Mayfair and Belgravia are reported to hold over the female denizens
of Bloomsbury and Marylebone.
Abbey Hill was not opulent, but it was powerful by a concentration of
its resources in all matters of patronage. Abbey Hill had its own milliner,
and its own draper, its own confectioner, butcher, baker, and tea-dealer,
and the patronage of Abbey Hill was like the patronage of royalty — less
lucrative in itself than as a solemn certificate of general merit. The
shops on which Abbey Hill conferred its custom were certainly not the
cheapest, possibly not the best. But they were undeniably the most
imposing. The proprietors were decorously pompous — the shopmen
superciliously polite. They could not be more so if they had belonged to
the State, and been paid by a public which they benefited and despised.
The ladies of Low Town (as the city subjacent to the Hill had been styled
from a date remote in the feudal ages) entered those shops with a certain
awe, and left them with a certain pride. There they had learned what
the Hill approved. There they had bought what the Hill had purchased.
It is much in this life to be quite sure that we are in the right, whatever
that conviction may cost us. Abbey Hill had been in the habit of appoint-
mg, among other objects of patronage, its own physician. But that habit
had fallen into disuse during the latter years of my predecessor's practice.
His superiority over all other medical men in the town had become so
incontestible that, though he was emphatically the doctor of Low Town,
the head of its hospitals and infirmaries, and by birth related to its prin-
cipal traders, still as Abbey Hill was occasionally subject to the physical
infirmities of meaner mortals, so on those occasions it deemed it best not to
push the point of honor to the wanton sacrifice of life. Since Low Town
possessed one of the most famous physicians in England, Abbey Hill mag-
nanimously resolved not to crush him by a rival. Abbey Hill let him
feel its pulse.
When my predecessor retired I had presumptuously expected that the
Hill would have continued to suspend its normal right to a special physi-
cian, and shown to me the same generous favor it had shown to him, who
had declared me worthy to succeed to his honors. I had the more excuse
for this presumption because the Hill had already allowed me to visit a
fair proportion of its invalids, had said some very gracious things to me
about the great respectability of the Fenwick family, and sent me some
invitations to dinner, and a great many invitations to tea.
But my self-conceit received a notable check. Abbey Hill declared
that the time had come to reassert its dormant privilege -- it must have a
doctor of its own choosing -a doctor who might, indeed, be permitted to
visit Low Town from motives of humanity or gain, but who must emphat-


A STRANGE STORY.
ically assert his special allegiance to Abbey Hill by fixing his home on
that venerable promontory. Miss Brabazon, a spinster of uncertain age,
but undoubted pedigree, with small fortune, but high nose, which she
would pleasantly observe was a proof of her descent from Humphrey
Duke of Gloucester (with whom, indeed, I have no doubt, in spite of chron-
ology, that she very often dined), was commissioned to inquire of me
diplomatically, and without committing Abbey Till too much by overture,
whether I would take a large and antiquated mansion, in which abbots
were said to have lived many centuries ago, and which was still popularly
styled Abbots' House, situated on the verge of the Hill, as in that case the
“ Hill” would think of me.
“ It is a large house for. a single man, I allow," said Miss Brabazon,
candidly; and then added, with a sidelong glance of alarming sweetness,
" but when Dr. Fenwick has taken his true position (so old a family !)
among Us, he need not long remain single unless he prefer it.”
I replied, with more asperity than the occasion called for, that I had
no thought of changing my residence at present. And if the Hill wanted
me, the Hill must send for me.
Two days afterward Dr. Lloyd took Abbots' House, and in less than a
week was proclaimed medical adviser to the Hill. The election had been
decided by the fiat of a great lady, who reigned supreme on the sacred
eminence, under the name and title of Mrs. volonel Poyntz.
“Dr. Fenwick," said this lady, " is a clever young man and a gentle-
man, but he gives himself airs — the Hill does not allow any airs but its
own. Besides, he is a new-comer: resistance to new-comers, and, indeed,
to all things new, except caps and novels, is one of the bonds that keep
old established societies together. Accordingly, it is by my advice that
Dr. Lloyd has taken Abbots' House ; the rent would be too high for his
means if the Hill did not feel bound in honor to justify the trust he has
placed in its patronage. I told him that all my friends, when they had
any thing the matter with them, would send for him; those who are my
friends will do so. What the Hill does, plenty of common people down
there will do also — so that question is settled !” And it was settled.
Dr. Lloyd, thus taken by the hand, soon extended the range of his visits
beyond the Hill, which was not precisely a mountain of gold to doctors,
and shared with myself, though in a comparatively small degree, the much
more lucrative practice of Low Town.
I had no cause to grudge his success, nor did I. But to my theories of
medicine his diagnosis was shallow, and his prescriptions obsolete. When
we were summoned to a joint consultation, our views as to the proper
course of treatment seldom agreed. Doubtless he thought I ought to have
deferred to his seniority in years, but I held the doctrine which youth


A STRANGE STORY.
deems a truth and age a paradox, namely, that in science the young men
are the practical elders, inasmuch as they are schooled in the latest expe-
riences science has gathered up, while their seniors are cramped by the
dogmas they were schooled to believe when the world was some decades
the younger.
Meanwhile my reputation continued rapidly to advance; it became
more than local; my advice was sought even by patients from the me- ·
tropolis. That ambition which, conceived in early youth, had decided my
career and sweetened all its labors — the ambition to take a rank and
leave a name as one of the great pathologists to whom humanity accords
a grateful, if calm, renown — saw before it a level field and a certain
goal:
I know not whether a success far beyond that usually attained at the
age I had reached served to increase, but it seemed to myself to justify
the main characteristic of my moral organization — intellectual pride.
Though mild and gentle to the sufferers under my care, as a necessary
element of professional duty, I was intolerant of contradiction from those
who belonged to my calling, or even from those who, in general opinion,
opposed my favorite theories.
I had espoused a school of medical philosophy severely rigid in its in-
ductive logic. My creed was that of stern materialism. I had a con-
tempt for the understanding of men who accepted with credulity what
they could not explain by reason. My favorite phrase was “common
sense.” At the same time I had no prejudice against bold discovery, and
discovery necessitates conjecture; but I dismissed as idle all conjecture
that could not be brought to a practical test.
As in medicine I had been the pupil of Broussais, so in metaphysics I
was the disciple of Condillac. I believed with that philosopher that " all
our knowledge we owe to Nature ; that in the beginning we can only
instruct ourselves through her lessons, and that the whole art of reasoning
consists in continging as she has compelled us to commence.” Keeping
natural philosophy apart from the doctrines of revelation, I never assailed
the last, but I contended that by the first no accurate reasoner could
arrive at the existence of the soul as a third principle of being equally
distinct from mind and body. That by a miracle man might live again,
was a question of faith and not of understanding. I left faith to religion,
and banished it from philosophy. How define with a precision to satisfy
the logic of philosophy what was to live again? The body? We know
that the body rests in its grave till by the process of decomposition its
elemental parts enter into other forms of matter. The mind ? But the
mind was as clearly the result of the bodily organization as the music of
the harpsichord is the result of the instrumental mechanism. The mind


A STRANGE STORY.
shared the decrepitude of the-body in extreme old age, and in the full
vigor of youth a sudden injury to the brain might forever destroy the
intellect of a Plato or a Shakspeare. But the third principle -- the soul
— the something lodged within the body, which yet was to survive it?
Where was that soul hid out of the ken of the anatomist? When philos-
ophers attempted to define it, were they not compelled to confound its
nature and its actions with those of the mind ? Could they reduce it to
the mere moral sense, varying according to education, circumstances,
and physical constitution ? But even the moral sense in the most vir-
tuous of men may be swept away by a fever. Such at the time I now
speak of were the views I held. Views certainly not original nor pleas-
ing; but I cherished them with as fond a tenacity as if they had been
consolatory truths of which I was the first discoverer. I was intolerant
to those who maintained opposite doctrines — despised them as irrational,
or disliked them as insincere. Certainly if I had fulfilled the career
which my ambition predicted — become the founder of a new school in
pathology, and summed up my theories in academical lectures, I should
have added another authority, however feeble, to the sects which circum-
scribe the interests of man to the life which has its close in his grave.
Possibly that which I have called my intellectual pride was more nour-
ished than I should have been willing to grant by that self-reliance which
an unusual degree of physical power is apt to bestow. Nature had
blessed me with the thews of an athlete. Among the hardy youths of
the Northern Athens I had been preëminently distinguished for feats of
activity and strength. My mental labors and the anxiety which is insep-
arable from the conscientious responsibilities of the medical profession,
kept my health below the par of keen enjoyment, but had in no way
diminished my rare muscular force. I walked through the crowd with
the firm step and lofty crest of the mailed knight of old, who felt himself,
in his casement of iron, a match against numbers. Thus the sense of a
robust individuality, strong alike in disciplined reason and animal vigor-
habituated to aid others, needing no aid for itself — contributed to render
me imperious in will and arrogant in opinion. Nor were such defects
injurious to me in my profession; on the contrary, aided as they were by
a calm manner, and a presence not without that kind of dignity which is
the livery of self-esteem, they served to impose respect and to inspire
trust.
.


A STRANGE STORY.
CHAPTER II.
I HAD been about six years at L- , when I became suddenly
involved in a controversy with Dr. Lloyd. Just as this ill-fated man ap-
peared at the culminating point of his professional fortunes, he had the
imprudence to proclaim himself not only an enthusiastic advocate of mes-
merism, as a curative process, but an ardent believer of the reality of
somnambular clairvoyance as an invaluable gift of certain privileged
organizations. To these doctrines I sternly opposed myself, the more .
sternly, perhaps, because on these doctrines Dr. Lloyd founded an argu-
ment for the existence of soul, independent of mind, 'as of matter, and
built thereon a superstructure of physiological phantasies, which, could it
be substantiated, would replace every system of metaphysics on which
recognized philosophy condescends to dispute. .
About two years before he became a disciple rather of Puysegur than
Mesmer (for Mesmer had little faith in that gift of clairvoyance of which
Puysegur was, I believe, the first audacious assertor), Dr. Lloyd had
been afflicted with the loss of a wife many years younger than himself,
and to whom he had been tenderly attached. And this bereavement, in
directing the hopes that consoled him to a world beyond the grave, had.
'served perhaps to render him more credulous of the phenomena in which
he greeted additional proofs of purely spiritual existence. . Certainly, if,
in controverting the notions of another physiologist, I had restricted my-
self to that fair antagonism which belongs to scientific disputants anxious
only for the truth, I should need no apology for sincere conviction and
honest argument; but when, with condescending good-nature, as if to a
man much younger than himself, who was ignorant of the phenomena
which he nevertheless denied, Dr. Lloyd invited me to attend his séances
and witness his cures, my amour propre became roused and nettled, and
it seemed to me necessary to put down what I asserted to be too gross an
outrage on common sense to justify the ceremony of examination. I
wrote, therefore, a small pamphlet on the subject, in which I exhausted
all the weapons that irony can lend to contempt. Dr. Lloyd replied,
and as he was no very skilful arguer, his reply injured him perhaps more
than my assault. Meanwhile, I had made some inquiries as to the moral
character of his favorite clairvoyants. I imagined that I had learned
enough to justify me in treating them as flagrant cheats, and himself as
their egregious dupe.


A STRANGE STORY.
11
Low Town soon ranged itself, with very few exceptions, on my side.
The Hill at first seemed disposed to rally round its insulted physician,
and to make the dispute a party question, in which the Hill would have
been signally worsted, when suddenly the same lady paramount, who
had secured to Dr. Lloyd the smile of the Eminence, spoke forth against
him, and the Eminence frowned.
"Dr. Lloyd,” said the Queen of the Hill, "is an amiable creature, but
on this subject decidedly cracked. Cracked poets may be all the better
for being cracked; cracked doctors are dangerous. Besides, in deserting
that old-fashioned routine, his adherence to which made his claim to the
Hill's approbation; and unsettling the mind of the Hill with wild revolu-
tionary theories, Dr. Lloyd has betrayed the principles on which the Hill
itself rests its social foundations. Of those principles Dr. Fenwick has
made himself champion; and the Hill is bound to support him. There,
the question is settled!”
And it was settled.
From the moment Mrs. Colonel Poyntz thus issued the word of com-
mand, Dr. Lloyd was demolished. His practice was gone, as well as his
repute. Mortification or anger brought on a stroke of paralysis, which,
disabling my opponent, put an end to our controversy. An obscure Dr.
Jones, who had been the special pupil and protégé of Dr. Lloyd, offered
himself as a candidate for the Hill's tongues and pulses. The Hill gave
him little encouragement. It once more suspended its electoral privi-
leges, and, without insisting on calling me up to it, it quietly called me in
whenever its health needed other advice than that of its visiting apothe-
cary. Again it invited me, sometimes to dinner, often to tea. And
again Miss Brabazon assured me by a sidelong glance that it was no fault
of hers if I were still single.
I had almost forgotten the dispute which had obtained for me so con-
spicuous a triumph, when one winter's night I was roused from sleep by
a summons to attend Dr. Lloyd, who, attacked by a second stroke a few
hours previously, had, on recovering sense, expressed a vehement desire
to consult the rival by whom he had suffered so severely. I dressed my-
self in haste and hurried to his house.
A February night, sharp and bitter. An iron-gray frost below --a
spectral melancholy moon above. I had to ascend the Abbey Hill by a
steep, blind lane between high walls. . I passed through stately gates,
which stood wide open, into the garden ground that surrounded the old
Abbots' House. At the end of a short carriage-drive the dark and gloomy
building cleared itself from leafless skeleton trees, the moon resting keen
and cold on its abrupt gables and lofty chimney-stacks. An old woman
servant received me at the door, and, without saying a word, led me


12
A STRANGE STORY.
through a long low hall, and up dreary oak stairs, to a broad landing, at
which she paused for a moment, listening. Round and about hall, stair-
case, and landing, were ranged the dead specimens of the savage world
which it had been the pride of the naturalist's life to collect. Close where
I stood yawned the open jaws of the fell anaconda— its lower coils hid,
as they rested on the floor below, by the winding of the massive stairs.
Against the dull wainscot walls were pendant cases stored with grotesque
unfamiliar mummies, seen imperfectly by the moon that shot through the
window-panes, and the candle in the old woman's hand. And as now:
she turned toward me, nodding her signal to follow, and went on up the
shadowy passage, rows of gigantic birds - ibis and vulture, and huge sea
glaucus — glared at me in the false life of their angry eyes.
So I entered the sick-room, and the first glance told me that my art
was powerless there.
The children of the stricken widower were grouped round his bed, the
the eldest apparently about fifteen, the youngest four; one little girl -
the only female child -- was clinging to her father's neck, her face pressed
to his bosom, and in that room her sobs alone were loud.
As I passed the threshold Dr. Lloyd lifted his face, which had been -
bent over the weeping child, and gazed on me with an aspect of strange
glee, which I failed to interpret.' Then, as I stole toward him softly and
slowly, he pressed his lips on the long fair tresses that streamed wild over
his breast, motioned to a nurse who stood beside his pillow to take the
child away, and, in a voice clearer than I could have expected in one on
whose brow lay the unmistakable hand of death, he bade the nurse and
the children quit the room. All went sorrowfully, but silently, save the
little girl, who, borne off in the nurse's arms, continued to sob as if her
heart were breaking
I was not prepared for a scene so affecting; it moved me to the quick.
My eyes wistfully followed the children, so soon to be orphans, as one
afier one went out into the dark chill shadow, and amidst the bloodless
forins of the dumb brute nature, ranged in grisly vista beyond the death-
room of man. And when the last infant shape had vanished, and the door
closed, with a jarring click, my sight wandered loiteringly around the
chamber before I could bring myself to fix it on the broken form, beside
which I now stood in all that glorious vigor of frame which had fostered
the pride of my mind.
In the moment consumed by my mournful survey the whole aspect of
the place impressed itself ineffaceably on life-long remembrance. Through-
the high, deep-sunken casement, across which the thin, faded curtain was
· but half-drawn, the moonlight rushed, and then settled on the floor in one
shroud of white glimmer, lost under the gloom of the death-bed. The


A STRANGE STORY.
13
ang,
sher
C
roof was low, and seemed lower still by heavy intersecting beams, which
I might have touched with my lifted hand. And the tall, guttering can-
dle by the bed-side, and the flicker from the fire struggling out through
the fuel but newly heaped on it, threw their reflection on the ceiling just
over my head in a reek of quivering blackness, like an angry cloud.
Suddenly I felt my arm grasped, with his left hand (the right side was
already lifeless); the dying man drew me toward him nearer and nearer,
till his lips almost touched my ear. And, in a voice now firm, now split-
ting into gasp and hiss, thus he said:
" I have summoned you to gaze on your own work! You have stricken
down my life at the moment when it was most needed by my children,
and most serviceable' to mankind. Had I lived a few years longer, my
children would have entered on manhood, safe from the temptations of
want and undejected by the charity of strangers. Thanks to you, they
will be penniless orphans. Fellow-creatures afflicted by maladies your
pharmacopæia had failed to reach, came to me for relief, and they found
it. The effect of imagination,' you say. What matters, if I directed the
imagination to cure ? Now you have mocked the unhappy ones out of
their last chance of life. They will suffer and perish. Did you believe
me in error ? Still you knew that my object was research into truth.
You employed against your brother in art venomous drugs and a poisoned
probe. Look at me! Are you satisfied with your work ?”
I sought to draw back and pluck my' arın from the dying man's grasp.
I could not do so without using a force that would have been inhuman.
His lips drew nearer still to my ear.
“Vain pretender, do not boast that you brought a genius for epigram
to the service of science. Science is lenient to all who offer experiment
. as the test of conjecture. You are of the stuff of which inquisitors are
made. You cry that truth is profaned when your dogmas are questioned.
In your shallow presumption you have meted the dominions of nature,
and where your eye halts its vision, you say, There, nature must close ;'
in the bigotry which adds crime to presumption, you would stone the dis-
coverer who, in annexing new realms to her chart, unsettles your arbi-,
trary landmarks. Verily, retribution shall await you. In those spaces
which your sight has disdained to explore you shall yourself be a lost and
bewildered straggler. Hist! I see them already! The gibbering phan-
toms are gathering round you !”
The man's voice stopped abruptly ; his eye fixed in a glazing ståre;
bis hand relaxed its hold; he fell back on his pillow. I stole from the
room; on the landing-place I met the nurse and the old woman servant.
Happily the children were not there. But I heard the wail of the female
child from some room not far distant.
. 2


14
A STRANGE STORY.
I whispered hurriedly to the nurse, “ All is over ! ” — passed again
under the jaws of the vast anaconda — and on through the blind lạne
between the dead walls — on through the ghastly streets, under the
ghastly moon - went back to my solitary home.
. CHAPTER III."
It was some time before I could shake off the impression made on me
by the words and look of that dying man.
It was not that my conscience upbraided me. What had I done?
Denounced that which I held, in common with most men of sense in or
out of my profession, to be one of those illusions by which quackery draws
profit from the wonder of ignorance. Was I to blame if I had refused to
treat with the grave respect due to asserted discovery in legitimate science
pretensions to powers akin to the fables of wizards ? was I to descend from
the Academe of decorous science to examine whether a slumbering sibyl
could read from a book placed at her back, or tell me at L- what at
that moment was being done by my friend at the Antipodes?
And what though Dr. Lloyd himself might be a worthy and honest
man, and a sincere believer in the extravagances for which he demanded
an equal credulity in others, do not honest men every day incur the pen-
alty of ridicule if, from a defect of good sense, they make themselves
ridiculous ? Could I have foreseen that a satire so justly provoked would
inflict so deadly a wound? Was I inhumanly barbarous because the
antagonist destroyed was morbidly sensitive ? My conscience, therefore,
made me no reproach, and the public was as little severe as my conscience:
The public had been with me in our contest -- the public knew nothing
of my opponent's death-bed accusations — the public knew only that I
had attended him in his last moments -- it admired the respect to his
memory which I evinced in the simple tomb that I placed over his re-
mains, inscribed with an epitaph that did justice to his incontestable benev-
olence and integrity:— above all, it saw me walk beside the bier that bore
him to his grave – it praised the energy with which I set on foot a sub-
scription for his orphan children, and the generosity with which I headed
that subscription by a sum that was large in proportion to my means. .
To that sum I did not, indeed, limit my contribution. The sobs of the
poor female child rang still on my heart. As her grief had been keener
than that of her brothers, so she might be subjected to sharper trials than
they, when the time came for her to fight her own way through the
world; therefore I secured to her, but with such precautions that the gift


A STRANGE STORY.'
15
could not be traced to my hand, a sum to accumulate till she was of mar-
riageable age, and which then might suffice for a small wedding portion;
or, if she remained single, for an income that would place her beyond the
temptation of want, or the bitterness of a servile dependence.
That Dr. Lloyd should have died in poverty was a matter of surprise
at first, for his profits during the last few years had been considerable,
and his mode of life far from extravagant. But just before the date of
our controversy he had been induced to assist the brother of his lost wife,
who was a junior partner in a London bank, with the loan of his accumu-
lated savings. This man proved dishonest; he embezzled that and
other sums intrusted to him, and fled the country. The same sentiment
of conjugal affection which had cost Dr. Lloyd his fortune kept him silent
as to the cause of the loss. It was reserved for his executors to discover
the treachery of the brother-in-law whom he, poor man, would have gen-
erously screened from additional disgrace.
The mayor of L- , a wealthy and public-spirited merchant, purchased
the museum which Dr. Lloyd's passion for natural history had induced
him to form ; and the sum thus obtained, together with that raised by sub-
scription, sufficed, not only to discharge all debts due by the deceased, but
to insure to the orphans the benefits of an education that might fit at least
the boys to enter fairly armed into that game, more of skill than of chance,
in which Fortune is really so little blinded that we see, in each turn of
her wheel, wealth and its honors pass away from the lax fingers of igno-
rance and sloth to the resolute grasp of labor and knowledge.
Meanwhile a relation in a distant country undertook the charge of the
orphans; they disappeared from the scene, and the tides of life in a
commercial community soon flowed over the place which the dead man
had occupied in the thoughts of his bustling townsfolk.
One person at L- ; and only one, appeared to share and inherit the
rancor with which the poor physician had denounced me on his death-
bed. It was a gentleman named Vigors, distantly related to the de-
ceased, and who had been, in point of station, the most eminent of Dr.
Lloyd's partisans in the controversy with myself; a man of no great
scholastic acquirements, but of respectable abilities. He had that kind
of power which the world concedes to respectable abilities, when accom-
panied with a temper more than usually stern, and a moral character
more than usually austere. His ruling passion was to sit in judgment
upon others; and, being a magistrate, he was the most active and the
most rigid of all the magistrates - had ever known.
Mr. Vigors at first spoke of me with great bitterness, as having ruined,
and in fact killed, his friend by the uncharitable and unfair acerbity
which he declared I had brought into what ought to have been an un.


16
A STRANGE STORY.
prejudiced examination of a simple matter of fact. But finding no sym-
pathy in these charges, he had the discretion to cease from making them,
contenting himself with a solemn shake of his head if he heard my name
mentioned in terms of praise, and an oracular sentence or two, such as,
“ Time will show;" “ All's well that ends well,” etc. Mr. Vigors, how-
ever, mixed very little in the more convivial intercourse of the towns-
people. He called himself domestic; but, in truth, he was ungenial. A
stiff man, starched with self-esteem. He thought that his dignity of sta-
tion was not sufficiently acknowledged by the merchants of Low Town,
and his superiority of intellect not sufficiently recognized by the exclu-
sives of the Hill. His visits were, therefore, chiefly confined to the
houses of neighboring squires, to whom his reputation as a magistrate,
conjoined with his solemn exterior, made him one of those oracles by
which men consent to be awed on condition that the awe is not often in-
flicted. And though he opened his house three times a week, it was only
to a select few, whom he first fed and then biologized. Electro-biology
was very naturally the special entertainment of a man whom no inter-
course ever pleased in which his will was not imposed upon others.
Therefore he only invited to his table persons whom he could stare into
the abnegation of their senses, willing to say that beef was lamb, or
brandy was coffee, according, as he willed them to say. And, no doubt,
the persons asked would have said any thing he willed so long as they -
had, in substance as well as in idea, the beef and the brandy, the lamb
and the coffee. I did not, then, often meet Mr. Vigors at the houses in
which I occasionally spent my evenings. I heard of his enmity as a man
safe in his home hears the sough of a wind on the common without. If
now and then we chanced to pass in the streets, he looked up at me (he
was a small man walking on tip-toe) with the sullen scowl of dislike.
And from the height of my stature I dropped upon the small man and
sullen scowl the affable smile of supreme indifference.
CHAPTER IV.
I HAD now arrived at that age when an ambitious man, satisfied with
his progress in the world without, begins to feel, in the cravings of unsat-
isfied affection, the void of a solitary hearth. I resolved to marry, and
looked out for a wife. I had never hitherto admitted into my life the
passion of love. In fact, I had regarded that passion, even in my earlier
youth, with a certain superb contempt — as á malady engendered by an
effeminate idleness, and fostered by a sickly imagination.


A STRANGE 'STORY.
17
I wished to find in a wife a rational companion, an affectionate and
trust-worthy friend. No views of matrimony could be less romantic,
more soberly sensible, than those which I conceived. Nor were my re-
quirements mercenary or presumptuous. I cared not for fortune; I
asked nothing from connections. My ambition was exclusively profes-
sional; it could be served by no titled kindred, accelerated by no
wealthy dower. I was no slave to beauty. I did not seek in a wife the
accomplishments of a finishing school-teacher.
Having decided that the time had come to select my helpmate, I im-
agined that I should find no difficulty in a choice that my reason would
approve. But day upon day, week upon week passed away, and though
among the families I visited there were many young ladies who possessed
more than the qualifications with which I conceived that I should be am-
ply contented, and by whom I might flatter myself that my proposals
would not be disdained, I saw not one to whose life-long companionship
I should not infinitely have preferred the solitude I found so irksome.
One evening, in returning home from visiting a poor female patient
whom I attended gratuitously, and whose case demanded more thought
than that of any other in my list for though it had been considered
hopeless in the hospital, and she had come home to die, I felt certain that
I could save her, and she seemed recovering under my care - one even-
ing, it was the 12th of May, I found myself just before the gates of the
house that had been inhabited by Dr. Lloyd. Since his death the house
had been unoccupied; the rent asked for it by the proprietor was consid-
ered high; and from the sacred Hill on which it was situated shyness or
pride banished the wealthier traders. The garden gates stood wide open,
as they had stood in the winter night on which I had passed through
them to the chamber of death. The remembrance of that death-bed
came vividly before me, and the dying man's fantastic threat rang again
in my startled ears. An irresistible impulse, which I could not then ac-
count for, and which I cannot account for now -- an impulse the reverse
of that which usually makes us turn away with quickened step from a
spot that recalls associations of pain — urged me on through the open
gates, up the neglected, grass-grown road; urged me to look, under the
westering sun of the joyous spring, at that house which I had never seen
but in the gloom of a winter night, under the melancholy moon. As the
building came in sight, with dark red bricks, partially overgrown with
ivy, I perceived that it was no longer unoccupied. I saw forms passing
athwart the open windows; a van laden with articles of furniture stood
before the door; a servant in livery was beside it giving directions to the
men who were unloading. Evidently some family was just entering into
possession. I felt somewhat ashamed of my trespass and turned round
2*


18.
A STRANGE STORY.
quickly to retrace my steps. I had retreated but a few-yards when I
saw before me, at the entrance gates, Mr. Vigors, walking beside a lady
apparently of middle age; while just at hand a path cut through the
shrubs gave a view of a small wicket-gate at the end of the grounds. I
felt unwilling not only to meet the lady, whom I guessed to be the new
occupier, and to whom I should have to make a somewhat awkward.
apology for intrusion, but still more to encounter the scornful look of
Mr. Vigors, in what appeared to my pride a false or undignified position.
Involuntariiy, therefore, I turned down the path which would favor my
escape unobserved. When about half way between the house and the
wicket-gate the shrubs that had clothed the path on either side suddenly
opened to the left, bringing into view a circle of sward, surrounded by
irregular fragments of old brick-work, partially covered with ferns,
creepers, or rock-plants, weeds, or wild-flowers, and in the centre of the
circle a fountain, or rather water-cistern, over which was built a Gothic
monastic dome, or canopy, resting on small Norman columns, time-worn,
dilapidated. A large willow overhung this unmistakable relic of the
ancient abbey. There was an air of antiquity, romance, legend about
this spot, so abruptly disclosed amidst the delicate green of the young
shrubberies. But it was not the ruined wall nor the Gothic well that
chained my footstep and charmed my eye.
It was a solitary human form - seated there amidst the mournful ruins.
The form was so slight, the face so young, that at the first glance I
murmured to myself, “ What a lovely child !” But as my eye lingered,
it recognized in the upturned, thoughtful brow, in the sweet, serious
aspect, in the rounded outlines of that slender shape, the inexpressible
dignity of virgin woman.
A book was on her lap, at her feet a little basket, half filled with violets
and blossoms culled from the rock plants that nestled amidst the ruins.
-Behind her, the willow, like an emerald waterfall, showered down its
arching abundant green, bough after bough, from the tree-top to the sward,
descending in wavy verdure, bright toward the summit, in the smile of
the setting sun, and darkening into shadow as it neared the earth.
She did not notice, she did not see me; her eyes were fixed upon the
horizon, where it sloped furthest into space, above the tree-tops and the
ruins — fixed so intently that mechanically I turned my own gaze to fol
low the flight of hers. It was as if she watched for some expected famil-
iar sign to grow out from the depths of heaven; perhaps to greet, before
other eyes beheld it, the ray of the earliest star.
The birds dropped from the boughs on the turf around her, so fear-
lessly that one alighted amidst the flowers in the little basket at her
feet. There is a famous German poem, which I had read in my youth,


A STRANGE STORY.
19
called “ The Maiden from Abroad,” variously supposed to be an allegory
of Spring, or of Poetry, according to the choice of commentators; it
seemed to me as if the poem had been made for her. Verily, indeed, in
her poet or painter might have seen an image equally true to either of
those adorners of the earth; both outwarılly a delight to sense, yet both
wakening up thoughts within us, not sad, but akin to sadness.
I heard now a step behind me, and a voice which I recognized to be
that of Mr. Vigors. I broke from the charm by which I had been so lin-
geringly spell-bound, hurried on confusedly, gained the wicket-cate from
which a short fight of stairs descended into the common thoroughfare.
And there the everyday life lay again before me. On the opposite side
houses, shops, church-spires; a few steps more, and the bustling streets !
How immeasurably far from, yet how familiarly near to the world in
which we move and have being is that fairy land of romance which opens
out from the hard earth before us, when Love steals at first to our side,
fading back into the hard earth again as Love smiles or sighis its farewell!
.
CHAPTER V...
And before that evening I had looked on Mr. Vigors with supreme
indifference — what importance he now assumed in my eyes! The lady
with whom I had seen him was doubtless the new tenant of that liouse in
which the young creature by whom my heart was so strangely moved
evidently had her home. Most probably the relation between the two .
ladies was that of mother and daughter. Mr. Vigors, the friend of one,
might himself be related to both — might prejudlive them against me —
might- here, starting up, I snapped the thread of conjecture, for right
before my eyes, on the table beside which I had seated myself on enter-
ing the room, lay a card of invitation :
Mes. PornTZ.
At Home,
Wednesday, May 15.
Early.
Mrs. Poyntz - Mrs. Colonel Poyntz! the Queen of the Hill. There,
at her house, I could not fail to learn all about the new-comers, who
could never without her sanction have settled on her domain:
I hastily changed my dress, and, with beating heart, wound my way,
up the venerable eminence.
I did not pass through the lane which led direct to Abbots' House (for
that old building stood solitary amidst its grounds, a little apart from the


20
A STRANGE STORY.
20.
.
spacious platform on which the society of the Hill was concentred), but
up the broad causeway, with vistaed gas-lamps; the gayer shops still un-
closed, the tide of busy life only słowly ebbing from the still animated
street, on to a square, in which the four main thoroughfares of the city
converged, and which formed the boundary of Low Town. A huge
dark archway, popularly called Monk's Gate, at the angle of this square,
made the entrance to Abbey Hill. When the arch was passed, one felt
wat once that one was in the town of a former day. The pavement was
narrow and rugged; the shops small, their upper stories projecting, with
here and there, plastered fronts, quaintly arabesqued. An ascent, short,
but Asteep and tortuous, conducted at once to the old Abbey Church,
nobly situated in a vast quadrangle, round which were the genteel and
gloomy dwellings of the Areopagites of the Hill. More genteel and less
gloomy than the rest - lights at the windows and flowers on the balcony
- stood forth, flanked by a garden wall at either side, the mansion of
Mrs. Colonel Poyntz.
As I entered the drawing-room I heard the voice of the hostess; it was
'a voice clear, decided, metallic, bell-like, uttering these words: “ Taken
Abbots' House? I will tell you."
CHAPTER VI.
Mrs. Poentz was seated on the sofa; at her right sat fat Mrs. Bruce,
who was a Scotch lord's grand-daughter; at her left thin Miss Brabazon,
who was an Irish baronet's niece. Around her -- a few seated, many
standing — had grouped all the guests, save two old gentlemen, who re-
mained aloof with Colonel Poyntz near the whist-table, waiting for the
fourth old gentlenian, who was to make up the rubber, but who was at
that moment speil-bound in the magic circle, which curiosity, that strong-
est of social demons, had attracted round the hostess.
“ Taken Abbots' House ? I will tell you. Ah, Dr. Fenwick! charmed
to see you. You know Abbots' House is let at last? Well, Miss Bra-
bazon, dear, you ask who has taken it. I will tell you - a particular
friend of mine."
“ Indeed! Dear me!” said Miss Brabazon, looking confused. “I hope
I did not say any thing to —”
“ Wound my feelings. Not in the least. You said your uncle, Sir
Phelim, had a coach-maker named Ashleigh, that Ashleigh was an uncom-
mon name, though Ashley was a common one; you intimated an appall-
ing suspicion that the Mrs. Ashleigh who had come to the Hill was the


A STRANGE STORY.
21
coach-maker's widow. I relieve your mind — she is not; she is the
widow of Gilbert Ashleigh, of Kirby Hall."
"Gilbert Ashleigh,” said one of the guests, a bachelor, whose parents
had reared him for the church, but who, like poor Goldsmith, did not think
himself good enough for it - a mistake of over-modesty, for he matured
into a very harmless creature. “Gilbert Ashleigh. I was at Oxford
with him — a gentleman commoner of Christ Church. Good-looking
man - very: sapped—”
“ Sapped! what's that? Oh, studied. That he did all his life. He
married young — Anne Chaloner; she and I were girls together : mar-
ried the same year. They settled at Kirby Hall — nice place, but dull.
Poyntz and I spent a Christmas there. Ashleigh when he talked was
charming, but he talked very little. Anne, when she talked, was com-
mon-place, and she talked very much. Naturally, poor thing, she was so
happy. Poyntz and I did not spend another Christmas there. Friend-
ship is long, but life is short. Gilbert Ashleigh's life was short indeed;
he died in the fifth year of his marriage, leaving only one child, a girl.
Since then, though I never spent another Christmas at Kirby Hall, I have
frequently spent a day there, doing my best to cheer up Anne. She was
no longer talkative, poor dear. Wrapt up in her child, who has now
grown into a beautiful girl of eighteen — such eyes, her father's — the
real dark blue — rare ; sweet creature, but delicate ; not, I hope, con-
sumptive, but delicate ; quiet — wants life. My girl Jane adores her.
Jane has life enough for two.”
. “Is Miss Ashleigh the heiress to Kirby Hall ?” asked Mrs. Bruce, who
had an unmarried son.
“No. Kirby Hall passed to Ashleigh Sumner, the male heir, a cousin.
And the luckiest of cousins! Gilbert's sister, showy woman (indeed, all
show), had contrived to marry her kinsman, Sir Walter Ashleigh Haugh-
ton, the head of the Ashleigh family,— just the man made to be the re-
flector of a showy woman! He died years ago, leaving an only son, Sir
James, who was killed last winter by a fall from his horse. . And here,
again, Ashleigh Sumner proved to be the male heir at law. During the
minority of this fortunate youth, Mrs. Ashleigh had rented Kirby Hall of
his guardian. He is now just coming of age, and that is why she leaves.
Lilian Ashleigh will have, however, a very good fortune - is what we gen-
teel paupers call an heiress. Is there any thing more you want to know ?”
Said thin Miss Brabazon, who took advantage of her thinness to wedge
herself into every one's affairs, “ A most interesting account. But what
brings Mrs. Ashleigh here?”
Answered Mrs. Colonel Poyntz, with the military frankness by which
she kept her company in good-humor, as well as awe:


22
A STRANGE STORY.
" Why do any of us come here? Can any one tell me ?”
There was a blank silence, which the hostess herself was the first to break.
“ None of us present can say why we came here. I can tell you why
Mrs. Ashleigh came. Our neighbor Mr. Vigors is a distant connection
of the late Gilbert Ashleigh, one of the executors of his will, and the guar-
dian to the heir-at-law. About ten days ago Mr. Vigors called on me, for
the first time since I felt it my duty to express my opinion about the
strange vagaries of our poor dear friend, Dr. Lloyd. And when he had
taken his chair, just where you now sit, Dr. Fenwick, he said, in a sepul-
chral voice, stretching out two fingers, so, as if I were one of the what-
do-you-call-'ems who go to sleep when he bids them, “marm, you know
Mrs. Ashleigh ? You correspond with her.' Yes, Mr. Vigors ; is there
any crime in that? You look as if there were. “No crime, marm,' said
the man, quite seriously. “Mrs. Ashleigh is a lady of amiable temper,
and you are a woman of mascưline understanding.'”
Here there was a general titter. Mrs. Colonel Poyntz hushed it with
a look of severe surprise. " What is there to laugh at ? All women
would be men if they could. If my understanding is masculine, so much
the better for me. I thanked Mr. Vigors for his very handsome compli-
ment, and he then went on to say, 'that though Mrs. Ashleigh would now
have to leave Kirby Hall in a very few weeks, she seemed quite unable
to make up her mindwhere to go; that it had occurred to him that, as
Miss Ashleigh was now of an age to see a little of the world, she ought
not to remain buried in the country; while, being of quiet mind, she re-
coiled from the dissipation of London. Between the seelusion of the one
and the turmoil of the other, the society of L— was a happy medium.
He should be glad of my opinion. He had put off asking for it, because
he owned his belief that I had behaved unkindly to his lamented friend,
Dr. Lloyd; but he now found himself in rather an awkward position,
Ilis ward, young Ashleigh Sumner, had prudently resolved on fixing his
country residence at Kirby Hall, rather than at Haughton Park, the much
larger seat, which had so suddenly passed to his inheritance, and which he
could not occupy without a vast establishment, that to a single man, so
young, would be but a cumbersome and costly trouble.. Mr. Vigors was
pledged to his ward to obtain him possession of Kirby Hall the precise day
agreed upon, but Mrs. Ashleigh did not seem disposed to stir-could not
decide where else to go. Mr. Vigors was loth to press hard on his old
friend's widow and child. It was a thousand pities Mrs. Ashleigh could
not make up her mind; she had had ample time for preparation. A word
from me, at this moment, would be an effective kindness. Abbots' House
was vacant, with a garden so extensive that the ladies would not miss the
country. Another party was after it, but-'Say no more,' I cried;


A STRANGE STORY.
23
'no party but my dear old friend, Anne Ashleigh, shall have Abbots' House.
So that question is settled.' I dismissed Mr. Vigors, sent for my carriage -
that is, for Mr. Barker's yellow fly and his best horses -- and drove that very
day to Kirby Hall, which, though not in this county, is only twenty-five
miles distant. I slept there that night. By nine o'clock the next morning
I had secured Mrs. Ashleigh's consent, on the promise to save her all trou-
ble, came back, sent for the landlord, settled the rent, lease, agreement;
engaged Forbes' vans to remove the furniture from Kirby Hall, told Forbes
to begin with the beds. When her own bed came, .which was last night,
Anne Ashleigh came too. I have seen her this morning. She likes the
place, so does Lilian. I asked them to meet you all here to-night; but Mrs.
Ashleigh was tired. The last of the furniture was to arrive to-day; and
though dear Mrs. Ashleigh is an undecided character, she is not inactive.
But it is not only the planning where to put tables and chairs that would have
tired her to-day; she has had Mr. Vigors on her hands all the afternoon,
and he has been — here's her little note — what are the words ? no doubt,
most overpowering and oppressive' - no, most kind and attentive'-
different words, but, as applied to Mr. Vigors, they mean the same thing.”
“And now next Monday — we must leave them in peace till then -
you will all call on the Ashleighs. The Hill knows what is due to itself;
it cannot delegate to Mr. Vigors, a respectable man indeed, but who does
not belong to its set, its own proper course of action towards those who
would shelter themselves on its bosom. The Hill cannot be kind and
attentive, overpowering or oppressive, by proxy. To those new born
into its family circle it cannot be an indifferent godmother; it has toward
them all the feelings of a mother, or of a step-mother, as the case may
be. Where it says, “ This can be no child of mine,' it is a step-mother
indeed; but, in all those whom I have presented to its arms, it has hith-
erto, I am proud to say, recognized desirable acquaintances, and to them
the Hill has been a Mother. And now, my dear Mr. Sloman, go to your
rubber; Poyntz is impatient, though he don't show it. Miss Brabazon,
love, oblige us at the piano; something gay, but not very noisy - Mr.
Leopold Smythe will turn the leaves for you. Mrs. Bruce, your own
favorite set at vingt-un, with four new recruits. Dr. Fenwick, you are
like me, don't play cards, and don't care for music: sit here, and talk or
not, as you please, while I knit.”
The other guests thus disposed of, some at the card-tables, some round
the piano, I placed myself at Mrs. Poyntz's side, on a seat niched in the
recess of a window, which an evening unusually warm for the month of
May permitted to be left open. I was next to one who had known Lilian
as a child, one from whom I had learned by what sweet name to call the
image which my thoughts had already shrined. How much that I still


A STRANGE STORY.
longed to know she could tell me! But in what form of question could I
lead to the subject, yet not betray my absorbing interest in it? Long-
ing to speak, I felt as if stricken dumb; stealing an unquiet glance toward
the face beside me, and deeply impressed with that truth which the Hill
had long ago reverently acknowledged, that Mrs. Colonel Poyntz was a
very superior woman — a very powerful creature.
And there she sat knitting - rapidly, firmly: a woman somewhat on
the other side of forty, complexion a bronzed paleness, hair a bronzed
brown, in strong ringlets, cropped short behind — handsome hair for a
man; lips that, when closed, showed inflexible decision, when speaking,
became supple and flexile with an easy humor and a vigilant finesse;
eyes of a red hazel, quick but steady; observant, piercing, dauntless
eyes ; altogether a fine countenance - would have been a very fine
countenance in a man ; profile sharp, straight, clear-cut, with an expres-
sion, when in repose, like that of a sphinx; à frame robust, not corpu-
lent, of middle height, but with an air and carriage that made her appear
tall; peculiarly white firm hands, indicative of vigorous health, not a vein
visible on the surface.
There she sat knitting, knitting, and I by her side, gazing now on her-
self, now on her work, with a vague idea that the threads in the skein of
my own web of love or of life were passing quick through those noiseless
fingers. And, indeed, in every web of romance, the fondest, one of the
Parcæ is sure to be some matter-of-fact she, social Destiny, as little akin
to romance herself - as was this worldly Queen of the Hill.
CHAPTER VII. .
I HAVE given a sketch of the outward woman of Mrs. Colonel Poyntz.
The inner woman was a recondite mystery, deep as that of the sphinx,
whose features her own resembled. But between the outward and the in-
ward woman there is ever a third woman — the conventional woman -
such as the whole human being appears to the world — always mantled,
sometimes masked.
I am told that the fine people of London do not recognize the title of
“Mrs. Colonel.” If that be true, the fine people of London must be
clearly in the wrong, for no people in the universe could be finer than
the fine people of Abbey Hill; and they considered their sovereign had
as good a right to the title of Mrs. Colonel as the Queen of England has


A' STRANGE STORY.
to that of “ our Gracious Lady.” But Mrs. Poyntz herself never assumed
the title of Mrs. Colonel; it never appeared on her cards any more than
the title of " Gracious Lady” appears on the cards which convey the
invitation that a Lord Steward or Lord Chamberlain is commanded by
her Majesty to issue. To titles, indeed, Mrs. Poyntz evinced no supersti-
tious reverence. Two peeresses related to her, not distantly, were in the
habit of paying her a yearly visit, which lasted two or three days. Thes
Hill considered these visits an honor to its eminence. Mrs. Poyntz never
seemed to esteem them an honor to herself; never boasted of them;
never sought to show off her grand relations, nor put herself the least out
of the way to receive them. Her mode of life was free from ostentation.
She had the advantage of being a few hundreds a year richer than any
other inhabitant of the Hill; but she did not devote her superior re-
sources to the invidious exhibition of superior splendor. Like a wise sov-
ereign, the revenues of her exchequer were applied to the benefit of her
subjects, and not to the vanity of egotistical parade. As no one else on the
Hill kept a carriage, she declined to keep one. Her entertainments were
simple, but numerous. Twice a week she received the Hill, and was gen-
uinely at home to it. She contrived to make her parties proverbially
agreeable. The refreshments were of the same kind as those which the
poorest of her old maids of honor might proffer; but they were better of
their kind, the best of their kind — the best tea, the best lemonadle, the
best cakes. Her rooms had an air of comfort which was peculiar to
them. They looked like rooms accustomed to receive, and receive in a
friendly way; well warmed, well lighted, card-tables and piano in the
place that made cards and music inviting. On the walls a few old family
portraits, and three or four other pictures, said to be valuable, and ver-
tainly pleasing-two Watteau's, a Canaletti, a Weenix - plenty of easy
chairs and settees covered with a cheerful chintz. In the arrangement
of the furniture generally, an indescribable careless elegance. She her-
self was studiously plain in dress, more conspicuously free from jewelry
and trinkets than any married lady on the Hill. But I have heard
from those who were authorities on such a subject, that she was never
seen in a dress of the last year's fashion. She adopted the noile as it
came out, just enough to show that she was aware it was out; but with a
sober reserve, as much as to say, “ I adopt the fashion as far as it suits
myself; I do not permit the fashion to adopt me.” In short, Mrs. Colonel
Poyntz was sometimes rough, sometimes coarse, always masculine; and
yet, somehow or other, masculine in a womanly way; but she was never
vulgar, because never affected. It was impossible not to allow that she
was a thorough gentlewoman, and she could do things that lower other
gentlewomen without any loss of dignity. Thus she was an admirable


26
A STRANGE STORY.
mimic, certainly in itself the least lady-like condescension of humor. But
when she mimicked, it was with so tranquil a gravity, or so royal a good-
humor, that one could only say, “ What talents for society dear Mrs.
Colonel has !” As she was a gentlewoman emphatically, so the other
colonel, the he-colonel, was emphatically a gentleman ; rather shy, but
not cold; hating trouble of every kind, pleased to seem a cipher in his
7 own house. If the sole study of Mrs Colonel had been to make her hus-
band comfortable, she could not have succeeded better than by bringing
friends about him and then taking them off his hands. Colonel Poyntz,
the he-colonel, had seen in his youth actual service; but had retired from
his profession many years ago, shortly after his marriage. He was a
younger brother of one of the principal squires in the county; inherited
the house he lived in, with some other valuable property in and about
L- , from an uncle; was considered a good landlord ; and popular in
Low Town, though he never interfered in its affairs. He was punctili-
ously neat in his dress; a thin youthful figure, crowned with a thick
youthful wig. He never seemed to read any thing but the newspapers
and the Meteorological Journal ; was supposed to be the most weather-
wise man in all - He had another intellectual predilection ---
whist. But in that he had less reputation for wisdom. Perhaps it re-
quires a rarer combination of mental faculties to win an odd trick than to
divine a fall in the glass. For the rest, the he-colonel, many years older
than his wife, despite the thin youthful figure, was an admirable aid-de-
camp to the general in command, Mrs. Colonel ; and she could not have
found one more obedient, more devoted, or more proud of a distinguished
chief.
In giving to Mrs. Colonel Poyntz the appellation of Queen of the
Hill, let there be no mistake. She was not a constitutional sovereign;
her monarchy was absolute. All her proclamations had the force of
laws.
Such ascendency could not have been attained without considerable
talents for acquiring and keeping it. Amidst all her off-hand, brisk, im-
perious frankness, she had the ineffable discrimination of tact. Whether
civil or rude, she was never civil or rude but what she carried public
opinion along with her. Her knowledge of general society must have
been limited, as must be that of all female sovereigns. But she seemed
gifted with an intuitive knowledge of human nature which she applied to
her special ambition of ruling it. I have not a doubt that if she had
been suddenly transferred, a perfect stranger, to the world of London,
she would have soon forced her way to its selectest circles, and, when
once there, held her own against a duchess.
I have said that she was not affected; this might be one cause of her


A STRANGE STORY.
27
sway over a set in, which nearly every other female was trying rather to
seem, than to be, a somebody.
But if Mrs. Colonel Poyntz was not artificial, she was artful, or per-
haps I might more justly say — artistic. In all she said and did there
were conduct, system, plan. She could be a most serviceable friend, a
most damaging enemy; yet I believe she seldom indulged in strong lik-
ings or strong hatreds. All was policy - a policy akin to that of a grand
party chief, determined to raise up those whom, for any reason of state,
it was prudent to favor, and to put down those whom, for any reason of
state, it was expedient to humble or to crush.
Ever since the controversy with Dr. Lloyd this lady had honored me
with her benignest countenance. And nothing could be more adroit
than the manner in which, while imposing me on others as an oracular
authority, she sought to subject to her will the oracle itself.
She was in the habit of addressing me in a sort of motherly way as if
she had the deepest interest in my welfare, happiness, and reputation.
And thus, in every compliment, in every seeming mark of respect, she
maintained the superior dignity of one who takes from responsible station
the duty to encourage rising merit: so that, somehow or other, despite all
that pride which made me believe that I needed no helping hand to ad-
vance or to clear my way through the world, I could not shake off from
my mind the impression that I was mysteriously patronized by Mrs. Col-
onel Poyntz.
We might have sat together five minutes, side by side — in silence as
complete as if in the cave of Trophonius — when, without looking up from
her work, Mrs. Poyntz said abruptly,
“I am thinking about you, Dr. Fenwick. And you — are thinking
about some other woman. Ungrateful man!”
“Unjust accusation! My'very silence should prove how intently my
thoughts were fixed on you, and on the weird web which springs under
your hand in meshes that bewilder the gaze and snare the attention.”
Mrs. Poyntz looked up at me for a moment — one rapid glance of the
bright red hazel eye — and said,
“ Was I really in your thoughts? Answer truly."
Truly, I answer, you were.”
" That is strange! Who can it be?”
“ Who can it be! What do you mean ? "
“ If you were thinking of me, it was in connection with some other
person — some other person of my own sex. It is certainly not poor
dear Miss Brabazon. Who-else can it be?”.
Again the red eye shot over me, and I felt my cheek redden beneath it.
“ Hush !” she said, lowering her voice; “ you are in love !"


•
A STRANGE STORY.
“In love!—I! Permit me to ask you why you think so ?”
“ The signs are unmistakable; you are altered in your manner, even
in the expression of your face, since I last saw you; your manner is gen-
erally quiet and observant, it is now restless and distracted; your expres-
sion of face is generally proud and serene, it is now humbled and
troubled. You have something on your mind! It is not anxiety for
your reputation, that is established; nor for your fortune, that is made;
it is not anxiety for a patient, or you would scarcely be here. But anxi-
ety it is, an anxiety that is remote from your profession, that touches
your heart and is new to it!”
I was startled, almost awed. But I tried to cover my confusion with a
forced laugh.
“ Profound observer! Subtle analyst! You have convinced me that
I must be in love, though I did not suspect it before. But when I strive
to conjecture the object, I am as much perplexed as yourself; and with
you, I ask, who can it be!”
“Whoever it be,” said Mrs. Poyntz, who had paused, while I spoke,
from her knitting, and now resumed it very slowly and very carefully, as
if her mind and her knitting worked in unison together. “Whoever it
be, love in you would be serious; and, with or without love, marriage is
a serious thing to us all. It is not every pretty girl that would suit
Allen Fenwick.”
“ Alas! is there any pretty girl whom Allen Fenwick would suit ?”
“ Tut! You should be above the fretful vanity that lays traps for a
compliment. Yes; the time has come in your life and your career when
you would do well to marry. I give my consent to that,” she added, with
a smile as if in jest, and a slight nod as if in earnest. The knitting here
went on more decidedly, more quickly.
“ But I do not yet see the person. No! 'Tis a pity, Allen Fenwick "
(whenever Mrs. Poyntz called me by my Christian name, she always
assumed her majestic motherly manner), “ a pity that, with your birth,
energies, perseverance, talents, and, let me add, your advantages of man-
ner and person — a pity that you did not choose a career that might
achieve higher fortunes and louder fame than the most brilliant success
can give to a provincial physician. But in that very choice you interest
me. My choice has been much the same. A small circle, but the first
in it. Yet, had I been a man, or had my dear colonel been a man whom
it was in the power of woman's art to raise one step higher in that meta-
phorical ladder which is not the ladder of the angels, why, then — what
then? No matter! I am contented. I transfer my ambition to Jane.
Do you not think her handsome ?”
“ There can be no doubt of that,” said I, carelessly and naturally.
lo


A STRANGE STORY.
“I have settled Jane's lot in my own mind,” resumed Mrs. Poyntz, strik-
ing firm into another row of the knitting. “She will marry a country
gentleman of large estate. He will go into Parliament. She will study
his advancement as I study Poyntz's comfort. If he be clever, she will
help to make him a minister; if he be not clever, his wealth will make
her a personage, and lift him into a personage's husband. And, now that
you see I have no matrimonial designs on you, Allen Fenwick, think if it
be worth while to confide in me. Possibly I may be useful — "
“I know not how to thank you. But, as yet I have nothing to con-
fide.”
While thus saying, I turned my eyes toward the open window, beside
which I sat. It was a beautiful soft night. The May moon in all her
splendor. The town stretched, far and wide, below with all its number-
less lights; below — but somewhat distant — an intervening space was
covered, here, by the broad quadrangle (in the midst of which stood, mas-
sive and lonely, the grand old church); and, there, by the gardens and
scattered cottages or mansions that clothed the sides of the hill.
“Is not that house,” I said, after a short pause, “yonder, with the three
gables, the one in which – which poor Dr. Lloyd lived - Abbots' House ?”
I spoke abruptly, as if to intimate my desire to change the subject of
conversation. My hostess stopped her knitting, half rose, looked forth.
“Yes. But what a lovely night! How is it that the moon blends into
harmony things of which the sun only marks the contrast? That stately
old church tower, gray with its thousand years — those vulgar tile-roofs
and chimney-pots raw in the freshness of yesterday; now, under the
moonlight, all melt into one indivisible charm!”
As my hostess thus spoke she had left her seat, taking her work with
her, and passed from the window into the balcony. It was not often that
Mrs. Poyntz condescended to adinit what is called “sentiment” into the
range of her sharp, practical, worldly talk, but she did so at times; always,
when she did, giving me the notion of an intellect much too comprehensive
not to allow that sentiment has a place in this life, but keeping it in its
proper place by that mixture of affability and indifference with which
some high-born beauty allows the genius but checks the presumption of a
charming and penniless poet. For a few minutes her eyes roved over
the scene in evident enjoyment; then, as they slowly settled upon the
three gables of Abbots' House, her face regained that something of hard-
ness which belonged to its decided character; her fingers again mechani-
cally resumed their knitting, and she said, in her clear, unsoftened, me-
tallic chime of voice, “ Can you gug te why I took so much trouble to oblige
Mr. Vigors and locate. Mrs. Ashleyi yonder ? "
“ You favored us with a full explanation of your reasons.”
3*


30
A STRANGE STORY.
“ Some of my reasons; not the main one. People who undertake the
task of governing others, as L do, be their rule a kingdom or a hamlet,
must adopt a principle of government and adhere to it. The principle
that suits best with the Hill is respect for the Proprieties. We have not
much money; entre nous, we have no great rank. Our policy is, then, to
set up the Proprieties as an influence which money must court and rank
is afraid of. I had learned just before Mr. Vigors called on me that Lady
* Sarah Bellasis entertained the idea of hiring Abbots' House. London has
set its face against her; a provincial town would be more charitable. An
earl's daughter, with a good income and an awfully bad name, of the best
manners and of the worst morals, would have made sad havoc among the
Proprieties. · How many of our primmest old maids would have deserted
Tea and Mrs. Poyntz, for Champagne and her ladyship? The Hill was
never in so imminent a danger. Rather than Lady Sarah Bellasis should
have had that house I would have taken it myself and stocked it with
owls.
“ Mrs. Ashleigh turned up just in the critical moment. Lady Sarah is
foiled, the Proprieties safe, and so that question is settled.”
“ And it will be pleasant to have your early friend so near you.”
Mrs. Poyntz lifted her eyes full upon me.
“ Do you know Mrs. Ashleigh ?”
“ Not the least."
“ She has many virtues and few ideas. She is commonplace weak, as
I am commonplace strong. But commonplace weak can be very lovable.
Her husband, a man of genius and learning, gave her his whole heart -
a heart worth having; but he was not ambitious, and he despised the
world.”
“ I think you said your daughter was very much attached to Miss Ash-
leigh ? Does her character resemble her mother's ?”
I was afraid while I spoke that I should again meet Mrs. Poyntz's
searching gaze, but she did not this time look up from her work.
"No; Lilian is any thing but commonplace."
“ You describe her as having delicate health; you implied a hope that
she was not consumptive. I trust that there is no serious reason for ap-
prehending a constitutional tendency which at her age would require
the most careful watching!”
“I trust not. If she were to die - Dr. Fenwick, what is the mat-
ter?»
So terrible had been the picture which this woman's words had
brought before me, that I started as if my own life had received a shock.
“I beg pardon,” I said, falteringly, pressing my hand to my heart; "a
sudden spasm here - it is over now. You were saying that -- that "


A STRANGE STORY.
31
,
"I was about to say " and here Mrs. Poyntz laid her hand lightly
on mine. “I was about to say, that if Lilian Ashleigh were to die, I
should mourn for her less than I might for one who valued the things of
the earth more. But I believe there is no cause for the alarm my words
so inconsiderately excited in you. Her mother is watchful and devoted ;
and if the least thing ailed Lilian, she would call in medical advice. Mr.
Vigors would, I know, recommend Dr. Jones.”
Closing our conference with those stinging words, Mrs. Poyntz here
turned back into the drawing-room.
I remained some minutes on the balcony, disconcerted, enraged. With
what consummate art had this practised diplomatist wound herself into
my secret. That she had read my heart better than myself was evident
from that Parthian shaft, barbed with Dr. Jones, which she had shot over
her shoulder in retreat. That from the first moment in which she had
decoyed me to her side, she had detected “the something” on my mind,
was perhaps but the ordinary quickness of female penetration. But it
was with no ordinary craft that her whole conversation afterward had
been so shaped as to learn the something, and lead me to reveal the
some one to whom the something was linked. For what purpose ?
What was it to her ? What motive could she have beyond the mere
gratification of curiosity ? Perhaps, at first, she thought I had been
caught by her daughter's showy beauty, and hence the half-friendly, half-
eynical frankness with which she had avowed her ambitious projects for
that young lady's matrimonial advancement. Satisfied by my manner
that I cherished no presumptuous hopes in that quarter, her scrutiny was
doubtless continued from that pleasure in the exercise of a wily intellect
which impels schemers and politicians to an activity for which, without
that pleasure itself, there would seem no adequate inducement; and be-
sides, the ruling passion of this petty sovereign was power. And if knowl-
edge be power, there is no better instrument of power over a contumacious
subject than that hold on his heart which is gained in the knowledge of
its secret.
But “ secret!” Had it really come to this? Was it possible that the
mere sight of a human face, never beheld before, could disturb the whole
tenor of my life -- a stranger of whose mind and character I knew
nothing, whose very voice I had never heard ? It was only by the intol-
erable pang of anguish that had rent my heart in the words, carelessly,
abruptly spoken, “ if she were to die,” that I had felt how the world
would be changed to me, if indeed that face were seen in it no more !
Yes, secret it was no longer to myself - I loved! And like all on whom
love descends, sometimes softly, slowly, with the gradual wing of the.
cushat settling down into its nest, sometimes with the swoop of the eagle


A STRANGE STORY.
on his unsuspecting quarry, I believed that none ever before loved as I
loved; that such love was an abnormal wonder, made solely for me, and I
for it. Then my mind insensibly hushed its angrier and more turbulent
thoughts, as my gaze rested upon the roof-tops of Lilian's home, and the
shimmering silver of the moonlit willow, under which I had seen her
gazing into the roseate heavens.
CHAPTER VIII.
When I returned to the drawing-room, the party was evidently about
to break up. Those who had grouped round the piano were now assem-
bled round the refreshment table. The card-players had risen, and
were settling or discussing gains and losses. While I was searching for
my hat, which I had somewhere mislaid, a poor old gentleman, tormented
by tic doloreux, crept timidly up to me — the proudest and the poorest
of all the hidalgoes settled on the Hill. He could not afford a fee for a
physician's advice, but pain had humbled his pride, and I saw at a glance
that he was considering how to take a surreptitious advantage of social
intercourse, and obtain the advice without paying the fee. The old man
discovered the hat before I did, stooped, took it up, extended it to me
with the profound bow of the old school, while the other hand, clenched
and quivering, was pressed into the hollow of his cheek, and his eyes met
mine with wistful mute entreaty. The instinct of my profession seized
me at once. I could never behold suffering without forgetting all else in
the desire to relieve it.
- You are in pain,” said I, softly. “ Sit down and describe the symp-
toms. Here, it is true, I am no professional doctor, but I am a friend
who is fond of doctoring, and knows something about it.”
So we sat down a little apart from the other guests, and, after a few
questions and answers, I was pleased to find that his “tic” did not belong
to the less curable kind of that agonizing neuralgia. I was especially
successful in my treatment of similar sufferings for which I had dis-
covered an anodyne that was almost specific. I wrote on a leaf of my
po ket-book a prescription which I felt sure would be efficacious, and as
I tore it out and placed it in his hand, I chanced to look up, and saw the
luzel eyes of my hostess fixed upon me with a kinder and softer expres-
sion than they often condescended to admit into their cold and penetrat-
ing lustre. At that moment, however, her attention was drawn from me


A STRANGE STORY.
33
to a servant, who entered with a note, and I heard him say, though in an
undertone, “ From Mrs. Ashleigh.” . . l.
- She opened the note, read it hastily, ordered the servant to wait with-
out the door, retired to her writing-table, which stood near the place at
which I still lingered, rested her face on her hand, and seemed musing.
Her meditation was very soon over. She turned her head, and, to my
surprise, beckoned to me. I approached.
“ Sit here,” she whispered; “turn your back toward those people,
who are no doubt watching us. Read this.”
She placed in my hand the note she had just received. It contained
but a few words to this effect:.
"DEAR MARGARET, - I am so distressed. Since I wrote to you, a few hours
ago, Lilian is taken suddenly ill, and I fear seriously. What medical man should
I send for? Let my servant have his name and address.
A. A."
I sprang from my seat.
“Stay,” said Mrs. Poyntz. “Would you much care if I sent the ser--
vant to Dr. Jones ? "
“Ah, Madam, you are cruel! What have I done that you should be-
come my enemy?”
“ Enemy! No. You have just befriended one of my friends. In this
world of fools, intellect should ally itself with intellect. No; I am not
your enemy! But you have not yet asked me to be your friend."
Here she put into my hands a note she had written while thus speak-
ing. “ Receive your credentials. If there be any cause for alarm, or if
I can be of use, send for me.” Resuming the work she had suspended,
but with lingering, uncertain fingers, she added, “ So far, then, this is
settled. Nay, no thanks; it is but little that is settled as yet.”
CHAPTER IX.
In'a very few minutes I was once more in the grounds of that old gable
house. The servant, who went before me, entered them by the stairs and
the wicket-gate of the private entrance; that way was the shortest. So
again I passed by the circling glade and the monastic well — sward, trees,
and ruins, all suffused in the limpid moonlight.
And now I was in the house; the servant took up stairs the note with
which I was charged, and a minute or two afterward returned and con-


84
A STRANGE STORY.
ducted me to the corridor above, in which Mrs. Ashleigh received me. I
was the first to speak. “ Your daughter-is-is — not seriously ill, I
hope. What is it?”
“ Hush !” she said, under her breath. “Will you step this way for a
moment ?” She passed through a door-way to the right. I followed her,
and as she placed on the table the light she had been holding, I looked
round with a chill at the heart-it was the room in which Dr. Lloyd had
died. Impossible to mistake. The furniture, indeed, was changed —
there was no bed in the chamber; but the shape of the room, the position
of the high casement, which was now wide open, and through which the
moonlight streamed more softly than on that drear winter night, the great
square beams intersecting the low ceiling — all were impressed vividly on
my memory. The chair to which Mrs. Ashleigh beckoned me was placed
just on the spot where I had stood by the bed-head of the dying man.
I shrank back — I could not have seated myself there. So I remained
leaning against the chimney-piece, while Mrs. Ashleigh told her story.
She said that on their arrival the day before, Lilian had been in more
than usually good health and spirits, delighted with the old house, the
grounds, and especially the nook by the Monk's Well, at which Mrs. Ash-
leigh had left her that evening in order to make some purchases in the
town, in company with Mr. Vigors. When Mrs. Ashleigh returned, she
and Mr. Vigors had sought Lilian in that nook, and Mrs. Ashleigh then
detected, with a mother's eye, some change in Lilian, which alarmed her.
She seemed listless and dejected, and was very pale; but she denied that
she felt unwell. On regaining the house she had sat down in the room in
which we then were “which,” said Mrs. Ashleigh, “as it is not required
for a sleeping-room, my daughter, who is fond of reading, wished to fit up
as her morning-room, or study. I left her here and went into the draw-
ing-room below with Mr. Vigors. When he quitted me, which he did
very soon, I remained for nearly an hour giving directions about the plac-
ing of furniture, which had just arrived from our late residence. I then
went up stairs to join my daughter, and to my terror found her apparently
lifeless in her chair. She had fainted away.”
I interrupted Mrs. Ashleigh here. “Has Miss Ashleigh been subject
to fainting fits ?”
“No, never. When she recovered she seemed bewildered - disinclined
to speak. I got her to bed, and as she then fell quietly to sleep, my mind
was relieved. I thought it only a passing effect of excitement, in a change
of abode; or caused by something like malaria in the atmosphere of that
part of the grounds in which I had found her seated.”
“ Very likely. The hour of sunset at this time of year is trying to deli-
cate constitutions. Go on."
.


A STRANGE STORY,
35
“ About three-quarters of an hour ago she woke up with a loud cry, and
has been ever since in a state of great agitation, weeping violently, and
answering none of my questions. Yet she does not seem light-headed,
but rather what we call hysterical.”
“ You will permit me now to see her. Take comfort — in all you tell
me I see nothing to warrant serious alarm.”
CHAPTER X.
To the true physician there is an inexpressible sanctity in the sick-
chamber. At its threshold the more human passions quit their hold on
his heart. Love there would be profanation. Even the grief permitted
to others he must put aside. He must enter that room — a Calm Intelli-
gence. He is disabled for his mission if he suffer aught to obscure the
keen quiet glance of his science. Age or youth, beauty or deformity,
innocence or guilt, merge their distinctions in one common attribute
human suffering appealing to human skill.
Woe to the households in which the trusted Healer feels not on his
conscience the solemn obligations of his glorious art. Reverently, as in a
temple, I stood in the virgin's chamber. When her mother placed her
hand in mine, and I felt the throb of its pulse, I was aware of no quicker
beat of my own heart. I looked with a steady eye on the face, more
beautiful from the flush that deepened the delicate hues of the young
cheek, and the lustre that brightened the dark blue of the wandering
eyes. She did not at first heed me; did not seem aware of my presence;
but kept murmuring to herself words which I could not distinguish.
At length, when I spoke to her, in that low, soothing tone which we
learn at the sick-bed, the expression of her face altered suddenly; she
passed the hand I did not hold over her forehead, turned round, looked
at me full and long, with unmistakable surprise, yet not as if the surprise
displeased her; less the surprise which recoils from the sight of a stranger
than that which seems doubtfully to recognize an unexpected friend!
Yet on the surprise there seemed to creep something of apprehension —
of fear; her hand trembled, her voice quivered, as she said,
“ Can it be, can it be? Am I awake? Mother, who is this?”
“ Only a kind visitor, Dr. Fenwick, sent by Mrs. Poyntz, for I was un-
easy about you darling. How are you now?”
“Better. Strangely better.”
"


1
A STRANGE STORY.
36
She removed her hand gently from mine, and with an involuntary
modest shrinking, turned towards Mrs. Ashleigh, drawing her mother
toward herself, so that she became at once hidden from me.
Satisfied that there was here no delirium, nor even more than the
slight and temporary fever which often accompanies a sudden nervous
attack in constitutions peculiarly sensitive, I retired noiselessly from the
room, and went not into that which had been occupied by the deceased
inmate, but down stairs into the drawing-room, to write my prescription.
I had already sent the servant off with it to the chemist's before Mrs.
Ashleigh joined me.
“ She seems recovering surprisingly ; her forehead is cooler ; she is
perfectly self-possessed, only she cannot account for her own seizure, can-
not account either for the fainting or the agitation with which she awoke
from sleep.”
" I think I can account for both. The first room in which she entered -
that in which she fainted — had its window open; the sides of the win-
dow are overgrown with rank, creeping plants in full blossom. Miss
Ashley had already predisposed herself to injurious effects from the
effluvia, by fatigue, excitement, imprudence in sitting out at the fall of a
heavy dew. The sleep after the fainting fit was the more disturbed,
because nature, always alert and active in subjects so young, was making
its own effort to right itself from an injury. Nature has nearly succeeded.
What I have prescribed will a little aid and accelerate that which nature
has yet to do, and in a day or two I do not doubt that your daughter will
be perfectly restored. Only let me recommend care to avoid exposure
to the open air during the close of the day. Let her avoid also the room
in which she was first seized, for it is a strange phenomenon in nervous
temperaments that a nervous attack may, without visible cause, be
repeated in the same place where it was first experienced. You had
better shut up the chamber for at least some weeks, burn fires in it,
repaint and paper it, sprinkle chloroform. You are not, perhaps, aware
that Dr. Lloyd died in that room after a prolonged illness. Suffer me to
wait till your servant returns with the medicine, and let me employ the
interval in asking a few questions. Miss Ashleigh, you say, never had a
fainting fit before. I should presume that she is not what we call strong.
But has she ever had any illness that alarmed you ?”
“Never.”
“ No great liability to cold and cough, to attacks of the chest or
lungs ? "
“ Certainly not. Still I have feared that she may have a tendency to
consumption. Do you think so ? Your questions alarm me!”
“I do not think so; but before I pronounce a positive opinion, one


A STRANGE STORY.
37
question more. You say you feared a tendency to consumption. Is that
disease in her family? She certainly did not inherit it from you. But on
her father's side ? ”
“Her father,” said Mrs. Ashleigh, with tears in her voice, " died young,
but of brain fever, which the medical men said was brought on by over-
study.”
“Enough, my dear Madam. What you say confirms my belief that
your daughter's constitution is the very opposite to that in which the
seeds of consumption lurk. It is rather that far nobler constitution which
the keenness of the nervous susceptibility renders delicate but elastic - as
quick to recover as it'is to suffer.”
“ Thank you, thank you, Dr. Fenwick, for what you say. You take a
load from my heart. For Mr. Vigors, I know, thinks Lilian consump-
tive, and Mrs. Poyntz has rather frightened me at times by hints to the
same effect. But when you speak of nervous susceptibility, I do not quite
understand you. My daughter is not what is commonly called nervous.
y even
Her temper is singularly even."
“ But if not excitable, should you also say that she is not impression-
able? The things which do not disturb her temper may, perhaps, deject.
her spirits. Do I make myself understood ?”
“Yes, I think I understand your distinction. But I am not quite sure
if it applies. To most things that affect the spirits she is not more sensi-
tive than other girls, perhaps less so. But she is certainly very impres-
sionable in some things.”
“In what?”
“She is more moved than any one I ever knew by objects in external
nature, rural scenery, rural sounds, by music, by the books that she reads
- even books that are not works of imagination. Perhaps in all this she
takes after her poor father, but in a more marked degree - at least, I
observe it more in her. For he was peculiarly silent and reserved. And
perhaps also her peculiarities have been fostered by the seclusion in which
she has been brought up. It was with a view to make her a little more
like girls of her own age that our friend, Mrs. Poyntz, induced me to come
here. Lilian was reconciled to this change; but she shrank from the
thoughts of London which I should have preferred. Her poor father
could not endure London.”
“ Miss Ashleigh is fond of reading ?”
“ Yes, she is fond of reading, but more fond of music. She will sit by
herself for hours without book or work, and seem as abstracted as if in a
dream. She was so even in her earliest childhood. Then she would tell
me, what she had been conjuring up to herself. She would say that she
had seen — positivelv seen - beautiful lands far away from earth; flowers
th


38
A STRANGE STORY..
and trees not like ours. As she grew older this visionary talk displeased
me, and I scolded her, and said that if others heard her they would think
that she was not only silly, but very untruthful. So of late years she
never ventures to tell me what, in such dreamy moments, she suffers her-
self to imagine; but the habit of musing continues still. Do you not agree
with Mrs. Poyntz, that the best cure would be a little cheerful society
among other young people ?”
“ Certainly,” said I, honestly, though with a jealous pang. “But here
comes the medicine. Will you take it up to her, and then sit with her
half an hour or so ? By that time I expect she will be asleep. I will
wait here till you return. Oh, I can amuse myself with the newspapers
and books on your table. Stay! one caution: be sure there are no flow-
ers in Miss Ashleigh's sleeping-room. I think I saw a treacherous rose-
tree in a stand by the window. If so, banish it.”
Left alone, I examined the room in which, O thought of joy! I had
surely now won the claim to become a privileged guest. I touched the
books Lilian must have touched ; in the articles of furniture, as yet so
hastily disposed that the settled look of home was not about them, I still
knew that I was gazing on things which her mind must associate with the
history of her young life. That lute-harp must be surely hers, and the
scarf, with a girl's favorite colors - pure white and pale blue — and the
bird-cage, and the childish ivory work-case, with implements too pretty
for use, all spoke of her.
It was a blissful, intoxicating reverie, which Mrs. Ashleigh's entrance
disturbed.
Lilian was sleeping calmly. I had no pretence to linger there any
longer.
“ I leave you, I trust, with your mind quite at ease," said I. “You
will allow me to call to-morrow in the afternoon ?”.
“Oh yes, gratefully.”
Mrs. Ashleigh held out her hand as I made toward the door.
Is there a physician who has not felt at times how that ceremonious fee
throws him back from the garden land of humanity into the market-
place of money - seems to put him out of the pale of equal friendship,
and say, " True, you have given health and life. Adieu ! there, you are
paid for it.” With a poor person there would have been no dilemma,
but Mrs. Ashleigh was affluent: to depart from custom here was almost
impertinence. But had the penalty of my refusal been the doom of
never again beholding Lilian, I could not have taken her mother's gold.
So I did not appear to notice the hand held out to me, and passed by
with a quickened step.
“ But, Dr. Fenwick, stop!”


A STRANGE STORY:
-"o, ma'am, nol Miss Ashleigh would have recovered as soon with-
ou' me. Whenever my aid is really wanted, then — but Heaven grant
t'eat time may never come! We will talk again about her to-morrow."
I was gone. Now in the garden ground, odorous with blossoms; now
in the lane, inclosed by the narrow walls ;- now in the deserted streets,
over which the moon shone full as in that winter night when I hurried
from the chamber of death. But the streets were not ghastly now, and
the moon was no longer Hecate, that dreary goddess of awe and spec-
tres, but the sweet, simple Lady of the Stars, on whose gentle face lov-
ers have gazed ever since (if that guess of astronomers be true) she was
parted from earth to rule the tides of its deeps from afar, even as love
from love divided rules the heart that yearns toward.it with mysterious
law!
sinori CHAPTER XI.
WITo what increased benignity I listened to the patients who visited
prieste next morning! The whole human race seemed to me worthier
of love, and I longed to diffuse among all some rays of the glorious hope
that had dawned upon my heart. My first call, when I went forth, was
on the poor young woman from whom I had been returning the day
before, when an impulse, which seemed like a fate, had lured me into the
grounds where I had first seen Lilian. I felt grateful to this poor
patient; without her, Lilian herself might be yet unknown to me.
The girl's brother, a young man employed in the police, and whose
pay supported a widowed mother and the suffering sister, received me at
the threshold of the cottage.
“Oh, Sir! she is so much better to-day; almost free from pain. Will
she live now? can she live ? "
“If my treatment has really done the good you say; if she be really
better under it, I think her recovery may be pronounced. But I must
1o my more as indeed wonderfully better. I felt that my skill was
en many more al triumph, but that day even my intellectual pride was
consumption iluxurious unfolding of that sense of heart which had so
maal, with murh er.Jossom.
in the treatment of huureshold I smiled on the brother who was still lin-
few days after I heard it is
usly ill -- kept her room. Waby. She needs now chiefly wine and good
9 sately returning the visits


40
.
A STRANGE ST
though light nourishment; these you wil und at my house, call there
for them every day.”
“God bless you, Sir! If ever I can serve you --- His tongue fala o
tered — he could say no more.
Serve me — Allen Fenwiek --- that poor policeman ! Me, whom a
king could not serve! What did I ask from earth but Fame and Lilian's
heart? Thrones and bread man wins from the aid of others. Fame and
woman's heart he can only gain through himself. : 5310
So I strode gayly up the hill, through the iron gates into the fairy
ground, and stood before Lilian's home. . ,
The man-servant, on opening the door, seemed somewhat confused, and
said, hastily, before I spoke,
“Not at home, Sir; a note for you."
I turned the note mechanically in my hand; I felt stunned.
“ Not at home! Miss Ashleigh cannot be out. How is she?”
“Better, Sir, thank you.”
I still could not open the note; my eres turned wistfully towards the
windows of the house, and there — at the drawing-room window - I en-
countered the scowl of Mr. Vigors. I colored with resentment, divined
that I was dismissed, and walked away with a prou crest and
step.
When I was out of the gates, in the blind lane, I opened the note. It
began formally, “ Mrs. Ashleigh presents her compliments,” and went on
to thank me, civilly enough, for my attendance the night before, would
not give me the trouble to repeat my visit, and inclosed a fee, double the
amount of the fee prescribed by custom, I flung the money, as an asp
that had stung me, over the high wall, and tore the note into shreds.
Having thus idly vented my rage, a dull gnawing sorrow came heavily
down upon all other emotions, stilling and replacing them. At the mouth
of the lane I halted. I shrank from the thought of the crowded streets
beyond. I shrank yet more from the routine of duties which stretched
before me in the desert into which daily life was so suddenly smitten. I
sat down by the roadside, shading my dejected face with a nerveless hand.
I looked up as the sound of steps reached my ear, and say !r Tanna
coming briskly along the lane, evidently from Abbots' Hous
have been there at the very time I had called. I was not
but supplanted. I rose before he reached the spot on w!
myself, and went my way into the town, went through
of professional visits, but my attentions were not so
skill so genially quickened by the glow of bene
patients had found them in the morning.
I have said how a physician should enter tb


A STRANGE STORY.
41
Intelligice!” But if you strike a blow on the heart, the intellect suffers.
Little urth, I suspect, was my “calm intelligence” that day. Bichat, in
his fames book upon ! " and Death, divides life into two classes --- ani-
mal ancorganic. Man's intellect, with the brain for its centre, belongs
'to life aimal; hi passions to life organic, centred in the heart, in the
viscera. Alas: if the noblest passions, through which alone we lift our-
selves ito the moral realm of the sublime and beautiful, really have their
oprie in the life which the very vegetable, that lives organically, shares
with us! And, alas ! if it be that life which we share with the vegetable,
hat can cloud, obstruct, suspend, annul that life centred in the brain,
which we share with every being howsoever angelic, in every star how-
joever remote, on whom the Creator bestows the faculty of thought !
CHAPTER XII.
Rut suddenly I remembered Mrs. Poyntz. I ought to call on her. So
· closti op round of visits at her door. But the day was then far ad-
Fanced, and win ovi vant politely informed me that Mrs. Poyntz was at
dinner. I could only leave my card, with a message that I would pay
my respects to her the next day. That erening I received from her this
Aote:
"DEAR DR. FENWICK, - regret much that I cannot have the pleasure of see-
ng you to-morrow. Poyntz and I are going to visit his brother, at the other end
of the county, and we start early. We shall be away some days. Sorry to hear
tom Mrs. Ashleigh that she has been persuaded by Mr. Vigors to consult Dr. Jones
About Lilian. Vigors and Jones both frighten the poor mother, and insist upon
consumptive tendencies. Unluckily, you seem to have said there was little the
matter. Some doctors gain their practice, as some preachers fill their churches, by
adroit use of the appeals to terror. You do not want patients; Dr. Jones does.
And, after all, better perhaps as it is. Yours, etc.
"M. POYNTZ."
To my more selfish grief anxiety for Lilian was now added. I had
seen many more patients die from being mistreated for consumption than
from consumption itself. And Dr. Jones was a mercenary, cunning, needy
man, with much crafty knowledge of human foibles, but very little skill
in the treatment of human maladies. My fears were soon confirmed. A
few days after I heard from Miss Brabazon that Miss Ashleigh was seri-
basly ill — kept her room. Mrs. Ashleigh made this excuse for not imme-
iately returning the visits which the Hill had showered upon her. Miss


42
A STRANGE STORY.
..
Brabazon had seen Dr. Jones, who had shaken his head; sal it was a
serions case, but that time and care (his cime and his care!) ught effect
wonders.
How stealthily at the dead of the night I would imb the Hi, and look
toward the windows of the old sombre house - on window, ia which a
light burned dim and mournful, the light of a sick-room ---of krs! .
At length Mrs. Poyntz came back, and I entered her house, having
fully resolved beforehand on the line of policy to be adopted towrd tle
potentate whom I hoped to secure as an ally. It was clear that neither
disguise nor half-confidence would baffle the penetration of so keen an
intellect, nor propitiate the good-will of so imperious and resolute a tem.
per. Perfect frankness here was the wisest prudence; and, after all, it
was most agreeable to my own nature, and most worthy of my own honor.
Luckily, I found Mrs. Poyntz alone, and, taking in both mine the hand
she somewhat coldly extended to me, I said, with the earnestness of sup-
pressed emotion :
- You observed, when I last saw you, that I had not yet asked yon to
be my friend. I ask it now. Listen to me with all the indulgence you
can vouchsafe, and let me at least profit by your counsel if you refuse to
give me your aid.” ?
Rapidly, briefly, I vent on to say how I had first-oppan, and how
sudden, how strange to myself had been che impression which that first
sight of her had produced.
“You remarked the change that had come over me," said I; “you di-
vined the cause before I divined it myself; divined it as I sat there beside
you, thinking that through you, I might see, in the freedom of social in-
tercourse, the face that was then haunting me. You know what has since
passed. Miss Ashleigh is ill; her case is, I am convinced, wholly misun-
derstood. All other feelings are merged in one sense of anxiety -- of
alarm. But it has become due to me, due to all, to incur the risk of your
ridicule even more than of your reproof, by stating to you thus candidly,
plainly, bluntly, the sentiment which renders alarm so poignant, and
which if scarcely admissible to the romance of some wild, dreamy boy,
may seem an unpardonable folly in a man of my years and my sober call-
ing; due to me, to you, to Mrs. Ashleigh; because still the dearest thing
in life to me is honor. And if you, who know Mrs. Ashleigh so intimately,
who must be more or less aware of her plans or wishes for her daughter's
future; if you believe that those plans or wishes lead to a lot får more
ambitious than an alliance with me could offer to Miss Ashleigh, then aid,
Mr. Vigors in excluding me from the house ; aid me in suppressing a pre-
sumptuous, visionary passion. I cannot enter that house without love art
hope at my heart. And the threshold of that house I must not cross.
i


A STRANGE STORY.
43
such love and such hope would be a sin and a treachery in the eyes of its
owner. I might restore Miss Ashleigh to health ; her gratitude might -
I cannot continue. This danger must not be to me nor to her, if her
mother has views far above such a son-in-law. And I am the more bound
to consider all this while it is yet time, because I heard you state that Miss
Ashleigh. had a fortune -- was what would be here termed an heiress.
And the full consciousness that whatever fame one in my profession may
live to acquire, does not open those vistas of social power and grandeur
which are opened by professions to my eyes less noble in themselves -
that full consciousness, I say, was forced upon me by certain words of
your own. For the rest, you know my descent is sufficiently recognized
as that amidst well-born gentry to have rendered me no mésalliance to
families the most proud of their ancestry, if I had kept my hereditary
estate and avoided the career that makes me useful to man. But I ac-
knowledge that on entering a profession such as mine - entering any
profession except that of arms or the senate — all leave their pedigree at
its door, an erased or dead letter. All must come as equals, high-born or
low-born, into that arena in which men ask aid from a man as he makes
himself; to them his dead forefathers are idle dust. Therefore, to the
advantage of birth I cease to have a claim. I am but a provincial physi-
cian, whose station would be the same had he been a cobbler's son. But
gold retains its grand privilege in all ranks. He who has gold is removed
from the suspicion that attaches to the greedy fortune-hunter. My pri-
vate fortune, swelled by my savings, is sufficient to secure to any one I
married a larger settlement than many a wealthy squire can make. I
need no fortune with a wife; if she have one, it would be settled on her-
self. Pardon these vulgar details. Now, have I made myself under-
stood ?”
“Fully," answered the Queen of the Hill, who had listened to me qui-
etly, watchfully, and without one interruption. .
“Fully. And you have done well to confide in me with so generous
an unreserve. But before I say further, let me ask, what would be your
advice for Lilian, supposing that you ought not to attend her ? You have
no trust in Dr. Jones; neither have I. And Anne Ashleigh's note received
to-day, begging me to call, justifies your alarm. Still you think there is
no tendency to consumption ? ".
“ Of that I am certain, so far as my slight glimpse of a case that to me,
however, seems a simple and not uncommon one, will permit. But in the
alternative you put — that my own skill, whatever its worth, is forbidden
- my earnest advice is, that Mrs. Ashleigh should take her daughter at
once to London, and consult there those great authorities to whom I can-
not compare my own opinion or experience ; and by their counsel
abide."


44
A STRANGE STORY.
· Mrs. Poyntz shaded her eyes with her hand for a few moments, and
seemed in deliberation with herself. Then she said, with her peculiar
smile, half grave, half ironical :
“In matters more ordinary you would have won me to your side long
ago. That Mr. Vigors should have presumed to cancel my recommenda-
tion to a settler on the Hill, was an act of rebellion, and involved the honor
of my prerogative. But I suppressed my indignation at an affront so un-
usual, partly out of pique against yourself, but much more, I think, out of
regard for you."
"I understand. You detected the secret of my heart; you knew that
Mrs. Ashleigh would not wish to see her daughter the wife of a provincial
physician.”
“ Am I sure, or are you sure, that the daughter herself would accept
that fate; or if she accepted it, would not repent ?”
“Do not think me the vainest of men when I say this -- that I cannot
believe I should be so enthralled by a feeling at war with my reason,
unfavored by any thing I can detect in my habits of mind, or even by
the dreams of a youth which exalted science and excluded love, unless
I was intimately convinced that Miss Ashleigh's heart was free — that I
could win, and that I could keep it! Ask me why I am convinced of
this, and I can tell you no more why I think that she could love me, than
I can tell you why I love her!”
“I am of the world, worldly. But I am woman, womanly — though I
may not care to be thought it. And therefore, though what you say is -
regarded in a worldly point of view, sheer nonsense — regarded in a
womanly point of view, it is logically sound. But still you cannot know
Lilian as I do. Your nature and hers are in stronge ontrast. I do not
think she is a safe wife for you. The purest, the most innocent creature
imaginable, certainly that, but always in the seventh heaven.' And you
in the seventh heaven just at this moment, but with an irresistible gravi-
tation to the solid earth, which will have its way again when the honey-
moon is over. I do not believe you two would harmonize by intercourse.
I do not believe Lilian would sympathize with you, and I am sure you
could not sympathize with her throughout the long dull course of this
work-day life. And therefore, for your sake as well as hers, I was not
displeased to find that Dr. Jones had replaced you; and now, in return
for your frankness, I say, frankly + do not go again to that house. Con-
quer this sentiment, fancy, passion, whatever it be. And I will ad-
vise Mrs. Ashleigh to take Lilian to town. Shall it be so settled ? ”
I could not speak. I buried my face in my hands — misery, misery,
desolation! I know not how long I remained thus silent, perhaps many
minutes. At length I felt a cold, firm, but not ungentle hand placed
upon mine; and a clear, full, but not discouraging voice said to me: '


A STRANGE STORY.
45
" Leave me to think well over this conversation, and to ponder well
the value of all you have shown that you so deeply feel. The interests
of life do not fill both scales of the balance. The heart which does not
always go in the same scale with the interests, still has its weight in the
scale opposed to them. I have heard a few wise men say, as many a silly
woman says, “Better be unhappy with one we love, than be happy with
one we love not.' Do you say that, too?”
“With every thought of my brain, every beat of my pulse, I say it."
« After that answer, all my questionings cease. You shall hear from
me to-morrow. By that time, I shall have seen Anne and Lilian. I
shall have weighed both scales of the balance, and the heart here, Allen
Fenwick, seems very heavy. Go, now. I hear feet on the stairs.
Poyntz bringing up some friendly gossiper; gossipers are spies.”
I passed my hand over my eyes, tearless, but how tears would have
relieved the anguish that burdened them! and, without a word, went
down the stairs, meeting at the landing-place Colonel Poyntz and the old
man whose pain my prescription had cured. The old man was whistling
a merry tune, perhaps first learned on the play-ground. He broke from
it to thank, almost to embrace me, as I slid by him. I seized his jocund
blessing as a good omen, and carried it with me as I passed into the
broad sunlight. Solitary -- solitary. Should I be so evermore ?
CHAPTER XIII.
THE next day I had just dismissed the last of my visiting patients, and
was about to enter my carriage and commence my round, when I re-
ceived a twisted note containing but these words : :
“Call on me to-day, as soon as you can.
M. POYNTZ."
A few minutes afterward I was in Mrs. Poyntz's drawing-room.
“ Well, Allen Fenwick,” said she, “I do not serve friends by halves.
No thanks! I but adhere to a principle I have laid down for myself. I
spent last evening with the Ashleighs. Lilian is certainly much altered -
very weak, I fear very ill, and I believe very unskilfully treated by Dr.
Jones. I felt that it was my duty to insist on a change of physician, but
there was something else to consider before deciding who that physician
should be. I was bound, as your confidant, to consult your own scruples


46
A STRANGE STORY.
of honor. Of course I could not say point-blank to Mrs. Ashleigh, Dr.
Fenwick admires your daughter, would you object to him as a son-in-law?
Of course I could not touch at all on the secret with which you intrusted
me; but I have not the less arrived at a conclusion, in agreement with
my previous belief, that not being a woman of the world, Anne Ashleigh
has none of the ambition which women of the world would conceive for a
daughter who has a good fortune and considerable beauty; that her pre-
dominant anxiety is for her child's happiness, and her predominant fear
is that her child will die. She would never oppose any attachment which
Lilian might form, and if that attachment were for one who had pre-
served her daughter's life, I believe her own heart would gratefully go
with her daughter's. So far, then, as honor is concerned, all scruples
vanish.”
I sprang from my seat, radiant with joy. Mrs. Poyntz dryly con-
tinued: “ You value yourself on your common sense, and to that I
address a few words of counsel which may not be welcome to your
romance. I said that I did not think you and Lilian would suit each
other in the long-run; reflection confirms me in that supposition.
Do not look at me so incredulously and so sadly. Listen and take heed.
Ask yourself what, as a man whose days are devoted to a laborious
profession, whose ambition is entwined with its success, whose mind must
be absorbed in its pursuits - ask yourself what kind of wife you would
have sought to win, had not this sudden fancy for a charming face rushed
over your better reason, and obliterated all previous plans and resolu-
tions. Surely some one with whom your heart would have been quite at
rest; by whom your thoughts would have been undistracted from the
channels into which your calling should concentratu their flow ; in short,
a serene companion in the quiet holiday of a trustful home. Is it not
so ?”
“You interpret my own thoughts when they have turned toward mar-
riage. But what is there in Lilian Ashleigh that should mar the picture
you have drawn?”
“What is there in Lilian Ashleigh which in the least accords with the
picture? In the first place, the wife of a young physician should not be
his perpetual patient. The more he loves her, and the more worthy she
may be of love, the more her case will haunt him wherever he goes.
When he returns home, it is not to a holiday; the patient he most cares
for, the anxiety that most gnaws him, awaits him there."
“ But, good Heavens! why should Lilian Ashleigh be a perpetual pa-
tient? The sanitary resources of youth are incalculable. And —”
“Let me stop you; I cannot argue against a physician in love! I
will give up that point in dispute, remaining convinced that there is a


A STRANGE STORY.
47
TTU
something in Lilian's constitution which will perplex, torment, and baffle
you. It was so wit her father, whom she resembles in face and in char-
acter. He showed no symptoms of any grave malady. His outward form
was like Lilian's, a model of symmetry, except in this, that, like hers, it
was too exquisitely delicate ; but, when seemingly in the midst of perfect
health, at any slight jar on the nerves he would become alarmingly ill.
I was sure that he would die young, and he did so."
En “Ay, but Mrs. Ashleigh said that his death was from brain-fever
att brought on by over-study. Rarely, indeed, do women so fatigue the brain.
w No female patient, in the range of my practice ever died of purely men-
tal exertion.”
“ Of purely mental exertion, no; but of heart emotion many female
patients, perhaps? Oh, you own that; I know nothing about nerves.
But 'I suppose that, whether they act on the brain or the heart, the result
to life is much the same if the nerves be too finely strung for life's daily
Dal wear and tear. And this is what I mean when I say you and Lilian will
19 hot suit. As yet she is a mere child; her nature undeveloped, and her
fatal affe&Non, therefore, untried. You might suppose that you had won her
heart, she might believe that she gave it to you, and both be deceived.
If fairies nowadays condescended to exchange their offspring with those of
mortals, and if the popular tradition did not represent a fairy changeling
as an ugly peevish creature with none of the grace of its parents, I should
be half inclined to suspect that Lilian was one of the elfin people. She
never seems at home on earth; and I do not think she will ever be con-
tented with a prosaic earthly lot. Now I have told you why I do not think
she will suit you. I must leave it to yourself to conjecture how far you
would suit her. I say this in due season, while you may yet set a guard
upon impulse; while you may yet watch, and weigh, and meditate; and
from this moment on that subject I say no more. I lend advice, but I
never throw it away."
She came here to a dead pause, and began putting on her bonnet and
scarf which lay on the table beside her. I was a little chilled by her
words, and yet more by the blunt, shrewd, hard look and manner which
aided the effect of their delivery. But the chill melted away on the sud-
den glow of my heart when she again turned toward me and said:
“ Of course you guess, from these preliminary cautions, that you are
going into danger ? 'Mrs. Ashleigh wishes to consult you about Lilian,
and I propose to take you to her house."
“Oh, my friend, my dear friend, how can I ever repay you !” I caught
her hand, the white firm hand, and lifted it to my lips.
She drew it somewhat hastily away, and laying it gently on my shoul-
der, said, in a soft voice,“ poor Allen, how little the world knows either


48
A STRANGE STORY.
of us! But how little, perhaps, do we know ourselves. Come, your çar-
riage is here ? That is right; we must put down Dr. Jones publicly and
in all our state.”
In the carriage Mrs. Poyntz told me the purport of that conversation
with Mrs. Ashleigh to which I owed my reintroduction to Abbots' House.
It seems that Mr. Vigors had called early the morning after my first visit;
had evinced much discomposure on hearing that I had been summoned;
dwelt much on my injurious treatment of Dr. Lloyd, whom, as distantly
related to himself, and he (Mr. Vigors) being distantly connected to the
late Gilbert Ashleigh, he endeavored to fasten upon his listener as one of
her husband's family, whose quarrel she was bound in honor to take up.
He spoke of me as an infidel “ tainted with French doctrines,” and as a
practitioner rash and presumptuous, proving his own freedom from pre-
sumption and rashness by flatly deciding that my opinion must be wrong.
Previous to Mrs. Ashleigh's migration to L- , Mr. Vigors had interested
her in the pretended phenomena of mesmerism. He had consulted a
clairvoyant much esteemed by poor Dr. Lloyd, as to Lilian's health and
the clairvoyant had declared her to be constitutionally predisposed to
consumption. Mr. Vigors persuaded Mrs. Ashleigh to come at once with
him and see this clairvoyant herself, armed with a lock of Lilian's hair
and a glove she had worn, as the media of mesmerical rapport.
The clairvoyant, one of those I had publicly denounced as an impostor,
naturally enough denounced me in return. On being asked solemnly by
Mr. Vigors “to look at Dr. Fenwick and see if his influence would be
beneficial to the subject,” the sibyl had become violently agitated, said that,
“ when she looked at us together, we were enveloped in a black cloud;
that this portended affliction and sinister consequences; that our rapport
was antagonistic.” Mr. Vigors then told her to dismiss my image and
conjure up that of Dr. Jones. Therewith the somnambule became more
tranquil, and said, “Dr. Jones would do well if he would be guided by
higher lights than his own skill, and consult herself daily as to the proper
remedies. The best remedy of all would be mesmerism. But since Dr.
Lloyd's death she did not know of a mesmerist, sufficiently gifted, in affin-
ity with the patient.” In fine, she impressed and awed Mrs. Ashleigh,
who returned in haste, summoned Dr. Jones, and dismissed myself.
. “I could not have conceived Mrs. Ashleigh to be so utterly wanting in
common sense,” said I. “She talked rationally enough when I saw her.”
“She has common sense in general, and plenty of the sense most com-
mon," answered Mrs. Poyntz. “But she is easily led and easily fright-
ened wherever her affections are concerned, and therefore just as easily
as she had been persuaded by Mr. Vigors and terrified by the somnambule,
I persuaded her against the one, and terrified her against the other. I


A STRANGE STORY.
49
had positive experience on my side, since it was clear that Lilian had
been getting rapidly worse under Dr. Jones's care. The main objections
I had to encounter in inducing her to consult you again žere, first, in
Mrs. Ashleigh's reluctance to disoblige Mr. Vigors, as a friend and con-
nection of Lilian's father; and, secondly, a sentiment of shame in rein-
viting your opinion after having treated you with so little respect. Both
these difficulties I took upon myself. I bring you to her house, and, on
leaving you, I shall go on to Mr. Vigors, and tell him what is done is my
doing, and not to be undone by him ; so that matter is settled. Indeed,
· if you were out of the question, I should not suffer Mr. Vigors to reintro-
duce all these mummeries of clairvoyance and mesmerism into the pre-
cincts of the Hill. I did rfot demolish a man I'really liked in Dr. Lloyd,
to set up a Dr. Jones, whom I despise, in his stead. Clairvoyance on
Abbey Hill, indeed! I saw enough of it before.”
“ True; your strong intellect detected at once the absurdity of the
whole pretende — the falsity of mesmerism — the impossibility of clair-
voyance.”
“ No, my strong intellect did nothing of the kind. I do not know
whether mesmerism be false or clairvoyance impossible; and I don't wish
to know. All I do know is, that I saw the Hill in great danger; young
ladies allowing themselves to be put to sleep by gentlemen, and pretend-
ing they had no will of their own against such fascination! Improper
and shocking! And Miss Brabazon beginning to prophesy, and Mrs.
Leopold Smythe questioning her maid (whom Dr. Lloyd declared to be
highly gifted) as to all the secrets of her friends. When I saw this, I
said, “The Hill is being demoralized; the Hill is making itself ridiculous;
the Hill must be saved !' I remonstrated with Dr. Lloyd, as a friend ;
he remained obdurate. I annihilated him as an enemy, not to me, but to
the State. I slew my best lover for the good of Rome. Now you know
why I took your part; not because I have any opinion one way or the
other as to the truth or falsehood of what Dr. Lloyd asserted; but I have
a strong opinion that whether they be true or false, his notions were
those which are not to be allowed on the Hill. And so, Allen Fenwick,
that matter was settled.”
Perhaps at another time I might have felt some little humiliation to
learn that I had been honored with the influence of this great potentate,
not as a champion of truth, but as an instrument of policy ; and I might
have owned to some twinge of conscience in having assisted to sacrifice
a seeker after science- misled, no doubt, but preferring his indepen-
dent belief to his worldly interest -- and sacrifice him to those deities
with whom science is ever at war--the Prejudices of a Clique sanctified
into the Proprieties of the world. But at that moment the words I


50
A STRANGE STORY,
heard made no perceptible impression on my mind. The gables of Ab-
bots' House were visible above the evergreens and lilacs; another mo-
ment, and the carriage stopped at the door.
CHAPTER XIV.
MRS. ASHLEIGH received us in the dining-room. Her manner to me,
at first, was a little confused and shy. But my companion soon commu-
nicated something of her own happy ease to her gentler friend. After a
short conversation we all three went to Lilian, who was in a little room
on the ground floor, fitted up as her study. I was glad to perceive that
my interdict of the death-chamber had been respected.
She reclined on a sofa near the window, which was, however, jealously
closed; the light of the bright May-day obscured by blinds and curtains;
a large fire on the hearth ; the air of the room that of a hot-house — the
ignorant, insensible, exploded system of nursing into consumption those
who are confined on suspicion of it. She did not heed us as we entered
noiselessly; her eyes were drooped languidly on the floor, and with
difficulty I suppressed the exclamation that rose to my lips on seeing her.
She seemed within the last few days so changed, and on the aspect of
the countenance there was so profound a melancholy. But as she slowly
turned at the sound of our footsteps, and her eyes met mine, a quick
blush came into the wan cheek, and she half rose, but sank back as if
the effect exhausted her. There was a struggle for breath, and a low
hollow cough. Was it possible that I had been mistaken, and that in
that cough was heard the warning knell of the most insidious enemy to
youthful life?
I sat down by her side. I lured her on to talk of indifferent subjects —
the weather, the gardens, the bird in the cage, which was placed on the
table near her. Her voice, at first low and feeble, became gradually
stronger, and her face lighted up with a child's innocent playful smile.
No, I had not been mistaken. That was no lymphatic nerveless temper-
muament on which consumption fastens as its lawful prey — here there was
no hectic pulse, no hurried waste of the vital flame. Quietly and gently
I made my observations, addressed my questions, applied my stethoscope;
and when I turned my face towards her mother's anxious, eager eyes,
that face spoke for me, for her mother sprang forward, clasped my hand,
and said, through her struggling tears,
“ You smile! You see nothing to fear ? ”.


A STRANGE STORY.
51
" Fear-no, indeed! You will soon be again yourself, Miss Ashleigh,
will you not ?”
• “Yes,” she said, with her sweet laugh, “ I shall be well now very soon.
But may I not have the window open ? may I not go into the garden ?
I so long for fresh air.”
“No, no, darling,” exclaimed Mrs. Ashleigh, “not while the east winds
last. Dr. Jones said on no account. On no account, Dr. Fenwick, eh?”
“Will you take my arm, Miss Ashleigh, and walk about the room ?”
said I. “We will then see how far we may rebel against Dr. Jones.”
She rose with some little effort, but there was no cough. At firstcher
step was languid - it became lighter and more elastie after a few mo-
· ments.
“Let her come out,” said I to Mrs. Ashleigh. “The wind is not in the
east, and, while we are out, pray bid your servant lower to the last bar
in the grate, that fire-only fit for Christmas."
“But-"
“Ah, no buts. He is a poor doctor who is not a stern despot.”
So the straw hat and mantle were sent for. Lilian was wrapped with
unnecessary care, and we all went forth into the garden. Involuntarily
we took the way to the Monk's well, and at every step Lilian seemed to
revive under the bracing air and temperate sun. We paused by the well.
“You do not feel fatigued, Miss Ashleigh ? "
"No."
“But your face seems changed. It is grown sadder.”
* Not sadder."
“ Sadder than when I first saw it-saw it when you were seated
here ! ” I said this in a whisper. I felt her hand tremble as it lay on
my arm.
“ You saw me seated here !”
“Yes. I will tell you how some day.” .
Lilian lifted her eyes to mine, and there was in them that same sur-
prise which I had noticed on my first visit - a surprise that perplexed
me, blended with no displeasure, but yet with a something of vague
alarm.
We soon returned to the house.
Mrs. Ashleigh made me a sign to follow her into the drawing-room,
leaving Mrs. Poyntz with Lilian.
“Well?” said she, tremblingly.
“Permit me to see Dr. Jones's prescriptions. Thank you. Ay, I
thought so. , My dear Madam, the mistake here has been in depressing
nature instead of strengthening; in narcotics instead of stimulants. The
main stimulants which leave no reaction are air and light. Promise me
.


52
A STRANGE STORY.
that I may have my own way for a week; that all I recommend will be
implicitly heeded ?”
“I promise. But that cough; you noticed it ?”
“Yes. The nervous system is terribly lowered, and nervous exhaus-
tion is a strange impostor — it imitates all manner of complaints with
which it has no connection. The cough will soon disappear! But par-
don my question. Mrs. Poyntz tells me that you consulted a clairvoy-
ant about your daughter. Does Miss Ashleigh know that you did
so ?”
“No, I did not tell her.”
"I am glad of that. And pray, for Heaven's sake, guard her against
all that may set her thinking on such subjects. Above all, guard her
against concentring attention on any malady that your fears errone-
ously ascribe to her. It is among the phenomena of our organization
that you cannot closely rivet your consciousness on any part of the
frame, however healthy, but it will soon begin to exhibit morbid sensibil-
ity. Try to fix all your attention on your little finger for half an hour,
and before the half hour is over the little finger will be uneasy, probably
even painful. How serious then is the danger to a young girl at the age
in which imagination is most active, most intense, if you force upon her
a belief that she is in danger of a mortal disease ; it is a peculiarity of
youth to brood over the thought of early death much more resignedly,
much more complacently, than we do in maturer years. Impress on a
young imaginative girl, as free from pulmonary tendencies 'as you and I
are, the conviction that she must fade away into the grave, and though.
she may not actually die of consumption, you instil slow poison into her
system. Hope is the natural aliment of youth. You impoverish nour-
ishment where you discourage hope. As soon as this temporary illness
is over, reject for your daughter the melancholy care which seems to her
own mind to mark her out from others of her age. Rear her for the air
— which is the kindest life-giver; to sleep with open windows; to be out
at sunrise. Nature will do more for her than all our drugs can do.
You have been hitherto fearing nature, now trust to her.”
Here Mrs. Poyntz joined us, and having, while I had been speaking,
written my prescription and some general injunctions, I closed my advice
with an appeal to that powerful protectress. .
“ This, my dear Madam, is a case in which I need your aid, and I ask
it. Miss Ashleigh should not be left with no other companion than her
mother. A change of faces is often as salutary as a change of air. If
you could devote an hour or two this very evening to sit with Miss Ash-
leigh, to talk to her with your usual easy cheerfulness, and — "
66 Anne," interrupted Mrs. Poyntz, “I will come and drink tea with .


A STRANGE STORY.
you at half-past seven, and bring my knitting; and perhaps, if you ask
him, Dr. Fenwick will come too! He can be tolerably entertaining
when he likes it.” .
“It is too great a tax on his kindness, I fear,” said Mrs. Ashleigh...
“But,” she added cordially, “I should be grateful indeed if he would
spare us an hour of his time.”
I murmured an assent, which I endeavored to make not too joyous.
“ So that matter is settled,” said Mrs. Payntz; “ and now I shall go to
Mr. Vigors and prevent his further interference.”
“Oh! but, Margaret, pray don't offend him ; a connection of my poor
dear Gilbert's. And so tetchy! I am sure I do not know how you'll
manage to "
" To get rid of him? Never fear. As I manage every thing and ev-
erybody,” said Mrs. Poyntz, bluntly. So she kissed her friend on the
forehead, gave me a gracious nod, and, declining the offer of my carri-
age, walked with her usual brisk, decided tread down the short path to-
ward the town.
Mrs. Ashleigh timidly approached me, and again the furtive hand
bashfully insinuating the hateful fee!
“ Stay,” said I; “this is a case which needs the most constant watching,
I wish to call so often that I should seem the most greedy of doctors if
my visits were to be computed at guineas. Let me be at ease to effect my
cure; my pride of science is involved in it. And when among all the
young ladies of the Hill you can point to none with a fresher bloom, or a
fairer promise of healthful life than the patient you intrust to my care,
why, then the fee and the dismissal. Nay, nay; I must refer you to our
friend, Mrs. Poyntz. It was so settled with her before she brought me
here to displace Dr. Jones.” Therewith I escaped.
CHAPTER XV.
In less than a week Lilian was convalescent; in less than a fortnight
she regained her usual health ; nay Mrs. Ashleigh declared that she had
never known her daughter appear so cheerful and look so well. I had
established a familiar intimacy at Abbots' House; most of my evenings
were spent there. As horse exercise formed an important part of my
advice, Mrs. Ashleigh had purchased a pretty and quiet horse for her
daughter; and, except the weather was very unfavorable, Lilian now
5
*


54
A STRANGE STORY.
rode daily with Colonel Poyntz, who was a notable equestrian, and often
accompanied by Miss Jane Poyntz, and other young ladies of the Hill.
I was generally relieved from my duties in time to join her as she returned
homeward. Thus we made innocent appointments openly, frankly, in
her mother's presence, she telling me beforehand in what direction ex-
cursions had been planned with Colonel Poyntz, and I promising to fall
in with the party — if my avocations would permit. At my suggestion,
Mrs. Ashleigh now opened her house almost every evening to some of the
neighboring families. Lilian was thus habituated to the intercourse of
young persons of her own age. Music and dancing and childlike games
made the old house gay. And the Hill gratefully acknowledged to Mrs.
Poyntz “that the Ashleighs were indeed a great acquisition.”
But my happiness was not uncheckered. In thus unselfishly surround-
ing Lilian with others, I felt the anguish of that jealousy which is insep-
arable from those earlier stages of love -- when the lover as yet has won
no right to that self-confidence which can only spring from the assurance
that he is loved. .
In these social reunions I remained aloof from Lilian. I saw her
courted by the gay young admirers whom her beauty and her fortune
drew around her; her soft face brightening in the exercise of the dance,
which the gravity of my profession rather than my years forbade me to join
- and her laugh, so musically subdued, ravishing my ear and fretting my
heart as if the laugh were a mockery on my sombre self and my presump-
tuous dreams. But no, suddenly, shyly, her eyes would steal away from
those about her, steal to the corner in which I sat, as if they missed me,
and, meeting my own gaze, their light softened before they turned away;
and the color on her cheek would deepen, and to her lip there came a
smile different from the smile that it shed on others. And then- and
then -- all jealousy, all sadness vanished, and I felt the glory which blends
with the growing belief that we are loved.
In that diviner epoch of man's mysterious passion, when ideas of per-
fection and purity, vague and fugitive before, start forth and concentre
themselves round one virgin shape — that rises out from the sea of crea-
tion, welcomed by the Houries and adorned by the Graces — how the
thought that this archetype of sweetness and beauty singles himself from
the millions, singles himself for her choice, ennobles and lifts up his being.
Though after experience may rebuke the mortal's illusion that mistook.
for a daughter of heaven a creature of clay like himself, yet for a while
the illusion has grandeur. Though it comes from the senses which shall
later oppress and profane it, the senses at first shrink into shade, awed
and hushed by the presence that charms them. All that is brightest and
best in the man has soared up like long dormant instincts of Heaven, to


A STRANGE STORY.
55
.
greet and to hallow what to him seems life's fairest dream of the heav-
enly! Take the wings from the image of Love, and the god disappears
from the form!
Thus, if at moments jealous doubt made my torture, so the moment's
relief from it sufficed for my rapture. But I had a cause for disquiet less
acute but less varying than jealousy.
Despite Lilian's recovery from the special illness which had more im-
mediately absorbed my care, I remained perplexed as to its cause and
true nature. To her mother I gave it the convenient epithet of “ner-
vous.” But the epithet did not explain to myself alt the symptoms I clas-
sified by it. There was still, at times, when no cause was apparent or
conjecturable, a sudden change in the expression of her countenance; in
the beat of her pulse; the eye would become fixed, the bloom would van-
ish, the pulse would sink feebler and feebler till it could be scarcely felt;
yet there was no indication of heart disease, of which such sudden lower-
ing of life is, in itself, sometimes a warning indication. The change would
pass away after a few minutes, during which she seemed unconscious, or,
at least, never spoke — never appeared to heed what was said to her. But
in the expression of her countenance there was no character of suffering
or distress; on the contrary, a wondrous serenity that made her beauty
more beauteous, her very youthfulness younger; and when this spurious
or partial kind of syncope passed, she recovered at once without effort,
without acknowledging that she had felt faint or unwell, but rather with
a sense of recruited vitality, as the weary obtain from a sleep. For the
rest, her spirits were more generally light and joyous than I should have
premised from her mother's previous description. She would enter mirth-
fully into the mirth of young companions round her; she had evidently
quick perception of the sunny sides of life ; an infantine gratitude for
kindness; an infantine joy in the trifles that amuse only those who de-
light in tastes pure and simple. But when talk rose into graver and more
contemplative topics, her attention became earnest and absorbed, and
sometimes a rich eloquence, such as I have never before or since heard
from lips so young, would startle me first into a wondering silence, and
soon into a disapproving alarm. For the thoughts she then uttered
seemed to me too fantastic, too visionary, too much akin to the vagaries
of a wild though beautiful imagination. And then I would seek to check,
to sober, to distract fancies with which my reason had no sympathy, and
the indulgence of which I regarded as injurious to the normal functions
of the brain.
When thus, sometimes with a chilly sentence, sometimes with a half-
sarcastic laugh, I would repress outpourings frank and musical as the
songs of a forest bird, she would look at me with a kind of plaintive sor-


56
A STRANGE STORY.
row - sometimes sigh and shiver as she turned away. Only in these
modes did she show displeasure; otherwise ever sweet and docile, and
ever, if, seeing that I had pained her, I asked forgiveness, humbling her-
self rather to ask mine, and brightening our reconciliation with her angel
smile. As yet I had not dared to speak of love; as yet I gazed on her as
the captive gazes on the flowers and the stars through the gratings of his
cell, murmuring to himself, “ When shall the doors unclose ?”
CHAPTER XVI.
It was with a wrath suppressed in the presence of the fair embassa-
dress that Mr. Vigors had received from Mrs. Poyntz the intelligence that
I had replaced Dr. Jones at Abbots' House, not less abruptly than Dr.
Jones had previously supplanted me. As Mrs. Poyntz took upon herself
the whole responsibility of this change, Mr. Vigors did not venture to
condemn it to her face: for the Administrator of Laws was at heart no
little in awe of the Autocrat of Proprieties; as Authority, howsoever
established, is in awe of Opinion, howsoever capricious.
To the mild Mrs. Ashleigh, the magistrate's anger was more decidedly
manifested. He ceased from his visits; and in answer to a long and dep-
récatory letter with which she endeavored to soften his resentment and
win him back to the house, he replied by an elaborate combination of
homily and satire. He began by excusing himself from accepting her in-
vitations on the ground that his time was valuable, his habits domestic;
and though ever willing to sacrifice both time and habits where he could
do good, he owed it to himself and to mankind to sacrifice neither where
his advice was rejected and his opinion contemned. He glanced briefly, .
but not hastily, at the respect with which her late husband had deferred
to his judgment, and the benefits which that deference had enabled him
to bestow. He contrasted the husband's deference with the widow's con-
tumely, and hinted at the evils which the contumely would not permit
him to prevent. He could not presume to say what women of the world
might think due to deceased husbands, but even women of the world gen-
erally allowed the claims of living children, and did not act with levity
where their interests were concerned, still less where their lives were at
stake. As to Dr. Jones, he, Mr. Vigors, had the fullest confidence in his skill.
Mrs. Ashleigh must judge for herself whether Mrs. Poyntz was as good an
authority upon medical science as he had no doubt she was upon shawls
, and ribbons. Dr. Jones was a man of caution and modesty; he did not


A STRANGE STORY.
57
indulge in the hollow boasts by which charlatans decoyed their dupes;
but Dr. Jones had privately assured him that though the case was one
that admitted of no rash experiments, he had no fear of the result if his own
prudent system were persevered in. What might be the consequences
of any other system Dr. Jones would not say, because he was too high-
minded to express his distrust of the rival who had made use of under-
hand arts to supplant him. But Mr. Vigors was convinced, from other
sources of information (meaning, I presume, the oracular prescience
of his clairvoyants), that the time would come when the poor young lady
herself would insist on discarding Dr. Fenwick, and when “ that person "
would appear in a very different light to many who now so fondly ad-
mired and so reverentially trusted him. When that time arrived he, Mr.
Vigors, might again be of use ; but, meanwhile, though he declined to
renew his intimacy at Abbots' House, or to pay unavailing visits of mere
ceremony, his interest in the daughter of his old friend remained undi-
minished, nay, was rather increased by compassion; that he should silently
keep his eye upon-her; and whenever any thing to her advantage sug-
gested itself to him, he should not be deterred by the slight with which
Mrs. Ashleigh had treated his judgment from calling on her, and placing
before her conscience as a mother his ideas for her child's benefit, leaving
to herself then, as now, the entire responsibility of rejecting the advice
which he might say, without vanity, was deemed of some value by those
who could distinguish between sterling qualities and specious pretences.
Mrs. Ashleigh's was that thoroughly womanly nature which instinctively
leans upon others. She was diffident, trustful, meek, affectionate. Not
quite justly had Mrs. Poyntz described her as “commonplace and weak,"
for though she might be called weak, it was not because she was common-
place; she had a goodness of heart, a sweetness of disposition, to which
that disparaging definition could not apply. She could only be called
commonplace, inasmuch as in the ordinary daily affairs of life she had a
great deal of ordinary daily commonplace good sense. Give her a routine
to follow, and no routine could be better adhered to. In the allotted
sphere of a woman's duties she never seemed in fault. No household, not
even Mrs. Poyntz's, was more happily managed. The old Abbots' House
had merged its original antique gloom in the softer character of pleas-
ing repose. All her servants adored Mrs. Ashleigh; all found it a pleas-
ure to please her; her establishment had the harmony of clock-work;
comfort diffused itself round her like quiet sunshine round a sheltered
spot. To gaze on her pleasing countenance, to listen to the simple talk
that lapsed from her guileless lips in even, slow, and lulling murmur, was
in itself a respite from “ eating cares.” She was to the mind what the
color of green is to the eye. She had, therefore, excellent sense in all


58
A STRANGE STORY,
that relates to everyday life. There, she needed not to consult another;
there, the wisest might have consulted her with profit. But the moment
any thing, however in itself trivial, jarred on the routine to which her
mind had grown wedded; the moment an incident hurried her out of the
beaten track of woman's daily life, then her confidence forsook her; then
she needed a confidant, an adviser, and by that confidant or adviser she
could be credulously lured or submissively controlled. Therefore, when
she lost, in Mr. Vigors, the guide she had been accustomed to consult
whenever she needed guidance, she turned helplessly and piteously, first
to Mrs. Poyntz, and then yet more imploringly to me, because a woman
of that character is never quite satisfied without the advice of a man.
And where an intimacy more familiar than that of his formal visits is once
established with a physician, confidence in him grows fearless and rapid,
as the natural result of sympathy concentred on an object of anxiety in
common between himself and the home which opens its sacred recess to
his observant but tender eye. Thus Mrs. Ashleigh had shown me Mr.
Vigors' letter, and forgetting that I might not be as amiable as herself,
besought me to counsel her how to conciliate and soften her lost husband's
friend and connection. That character clothed him with dignity and awe
in her soft forgiving eyes. So, smothering my own resentment, less per-
haps at the tone of offensive insinuation against myself than at the arro-
gance with which this prejudiced intermeddler implied to a mother the
necessity of his guardian watch over a child under her own care, I'sketched
a reply which seemed to me both dignified and placatory, abstaining
from all discussion, and conveying the assurance that Mrs Ashleigh would
be at all times glad to hear, and disposed to respect, whatever suggestion
so esteemed a friend of her husband's would kindly submit to her for the
welfare of her daughter.
There all communication had stopped for about a month since the date
of my reintroduction to Abbots' House. One afternoon I unexpectedly
met Mr. Vigors at the entrance of the blind lane, I on my way to Abbots'
House, and my first glance at his face told me that he was coming from
it, for the expression of that face was more than usually sinister; the sul-
len scowl was lit into significant menace by a sneer of unmistakable tri-
umph. I felt at once that he had succeeded in some machination against
me, and with ominous misgivings quickened my steps.
I found Mrs. Ashleigh seated alone in front of the house, under a large
cedar-tree that formed a natural arbor in the centre of the sunny lawn.
She was perceptibly embarrassed as I took my seat beside her.
: “I hope,” said I, forcing a smile, “ that Mr. Vigors has not been telling
you that I shall kill my patient, or that she looks much worse than she
did under Dr. Jones's care ?”


A STRANGE STORY.
59
“ No," she said. “He owned cheerfully that Lilian was grown quite
strong, and said, without any displeasure, that he had heard how gay she
had been; riding out and even dancing — which is very kind in him -
for he disapproves dancing, on principle.
“But still, I can see he has said something to vex or annoy you; and,
to judge by his countenance when I met him in the lane, I should con-
jecture that that something was intended to lower the confidence you so
kindly repose in me.”
“I assure you not; he did not mention your name, either to me
or to Lilian.. I never knew him more friendly ; quite like old times.
He is a good man at heart, very ; and was much attached to my poor
husband.”
“ Did Mr. Ashleigh profess a very high opinion of Mr. Vigors ?”
“ Well, I don't quite know that, because my dear Gilbert never spoke
to me much about him. Gilbert was naturally very silent. But he
shrank from all trouble — all worldly affairs — and Mr. Vigors managed
his estate, and inspected his steward's books, and protected him through
a long lawsuit which he had inherited from his father. It killed his
father. I don't know what we should have done without Mr. Vigors, and
I am so glad he has forgiven me.”
“ Hem! Where is Miss Ashleigh? In-doors ?”
“ No; somewhere in the grounds. But my dear Dr. Fenwick, do not
leave me yet: you are so very, very kind; and somehow I have grown
to look on you quite as an old friend. Something has happened which
has put me out — quite put me out."
She said this wearily and feebly, closing her eyes as if she were indeed
put out in the sense of extinguished.
“ The feeling of friendship you express," said I, with earnestness, “ is
reciprocal. On my side it is accompanied with a peculiar gratitude. I
am a lonely man, by a lonely fireside - no parents, no near kindred,
and in this town, since Dr. Faber left it, no cordial intimacy till I knew
you. In admitting me so familiarly to your hearth, you have given me
what I have never known before since I came to man's estate: a glimpse
of the happy domestic life; the charm and relief to eye, heart, and spirit,
which is never known but in households cheered by the face of woman:
thus my sentiment for you and yours is indeed that of an old friend ; and
in any private confidence you show me, I feel as if I were no longer a
lonely man, without kindred, without home.”
Mrs. Ashleigh seemed much moved by these words, which my heart
had forced from my lips, and after replying to me with simple unaffected
warmth of kindness, she rose, took my arm, and continued thus as we
walked slowly to and fro the lawn:


60
A STRANGE STORY.
“ You know, perhaps, that my poor husband left a sister, now a widow
as myself, Lady Haughton.”
“I remember that Mrs. Poyntz said you had such a sister, but I never
heard you mention Lady Haughton till now. Well !”
“Well, Mr. Vigors has brought me a letter from her, and it is that
which has put me out. I dare say you have not heard me speak before
of Lady Haughton, for I am ashamed to say I had almost forgotten her
existence. She is many years older than my husband was ; of a very
different character. Only came once to see him after our marriage.
Hurt me by ridiculing him as a book-worm. Offended him by looking a
little down on me, as a nobody without spirit and fashion, which was
quite true. And, except by a cold and unfeeling letter of formal condo-
lence after I lost my dear Gilbert, I never heard from her since I have
been a widow, till to-day. But, after all, she is my poor husband's sister,
and his elder sister, and Lilian's aunt; and, as Mr. Vigor says, Duty is
duty.”
Had Mrs. Ashleigh said “ Duty is torture,” she could not have uttered
the maxim with more mournful and despondent a resignation.
“ And what does this lady require of you, which Mr. Vigors deems it
your duty to comply with ?”
“ Dear me! what penetration! You have guessed the exact truth.
But I think you will agree with Mr. Vigors. Certainly I have no option;
yes, I must do it.”
. “My penetration is in fault now. Do what? .Pray explain ?”
“ Poor Lady Haughton, six months ago, lost her only son, Sir James.
Mr. Vigors says he was a very fine young man, of whom any mother
would have been proud; I had heard he was wild. Mr. Vigors says, how-
ever, that he was just going to reform, and marry a young lady whom his
mother chose for him, when, unluckily, he would ride a steeple-chase, not
being quite sober at the time, and broke his neck. Lady Haughton has
been, of course, in great grief. She has retired to Brighton; and she
wrote to me from thence, and Mr. Vigors brought the letter. He will go
back to her to-day."
“ Will go back to Lady Haughton? What! has he been to her? Is
he, then, as intimate with Lady Haughton as he was with her brother ? ”
“No; but there has been a long and constant correspondence. She
had a settlement on the Kirby estate –a sum which was not paid off
during Gilbert's life; and a very small part of the property went to Sir
James, which part Mr. Ashleigh Sumner, the heir-at-law to the rest of
the estate, wished Mr. Vigors, as his guardian, to buy during his minority,
and, as it was mixed up with Lady Haughton's settlement, her consent
was necessary as well as Sir James's." So there was much negotiation,


A STRANGE STORY.
61
and, since then, Ashleigh Sumner has come into the Haughton property,
on poor Sir James's decease ; so, that complicated all affairs between Mr.
Vigors and Lady Haughton, and he has just been to Brighton to see her.
And poor Lady Haughton, in short, wants me and Lilian to come and
visit her. I don't like it at all. But you said the other day you thought
sea air might be good for Lilian during the heat of the summer, and she
seems well enough now for the change. What do you think?”
“ She is well enough, certainly. But Brighton is not the place I would
recommend for the summer; it wants shade, and is much hotter than
L ” .
“ Yes, but unluckily Lady Haughton foresaw that objection, and she
has a jointure-house some miles from Brighton, and near the sea. She
says the grounds are well wooded, and the place is proverbially cool and
healthy, not far from St. Leonard's Forest. And, in short, I have written
to say we will come. So we must, unless, indeed, you positively forbid
it.”
“When do you think of going ?”
“Next Monday. Mr. Vigors would have me fix the day. If you knew
how I dislike moving when I am once settled; and I do so dread
Lady Haughton, she is so fine, and so satirical. But Mr. Vigors says she
is very much altered, poor thing! I should like to show you her letter,
but I had just sent it to Margaret -- Mrs. Poyntz-a minute or two
before you came. She knows something of Lady Haughton. Margaret
knows everybody. And we shall have to go in mourning for poor Sir
James, I suppose ; and Margaret will choose it, for I am sure I can't
guess to what extent we should be supposed to mourn. I ought to have
gone in mourning before — poor Gilbert's nephew — but I am so stupid,
and I had never seen him. And — but oh, this is kind ! Margaret her-
self— my dear Margaret !”.
We had just turned away from the house, in our up and down walk;
and Mrs. Poyntz stood immediately fronting us.
“ So Anne, you have actually accepted this invitation -- and for Mon-
day next ? ”
“ Yes. Did I do wrong ?”
“ What does Dr. Fenwick say? Can Lilian go with safety ?”
I could not honestly say she might not go with safety, but my heart
sank like lead as I answered :
“ Miss Ashleigh does not now need merely medical care; but more
than half her cure has depended on keeping her spirits free from depres-
sion. She may miss the cheerful companionship of your own daughter,
and other young ladies of her own age; a very melancholy house, sad-
dened by a recent bereavement, without other guests; a hostess to whom


62
A STRANGE STORY.
she is a stranger, and whom Mrs. Ashleigh herself appears to deem
formidable, certainly these do not make that change of scene which a
physician would recommend. When I spoke of sea air being good for Miss
Ashleigh, I thought of our own northern coasts, at a later time of the
year, when I could escape myself for a few weeks and attend her. The
journey, too, would be shorter and less fatiguing; the air more invigo-
rating.
“No doubt that would be better,” said Mrs. Poyntz, dryly; " but so
far as your objections to visiting Lady Haughton have been stated, they
are groundless. Her house will not be melancholy; she will have other
guests, and Lilian will find other companions young like herself - young
ladies and young gentlemen too!”.
There was something ominous, something compassionate, in the look
which Mrs. Poyntz cast upon me, in concluding her speech, which in itself
was calculated to rouse the fears of a lover. Lilian away from me, in
the house of a worldly fine lady — such as I judged Lady Haughton to
be - surrounded by young gentlemen, as well as young ladies, by
admirers, no doubt, of a higher rank and more brilliant fashion than she
had yet known! I closed my eyes, and with strong effort suppressed a
groan.
“My dear Anne, let me satisfy myself that Dr. Fenwick really does
consent to this journey. He will say to me what he may not to you.
Pardon me, then, if I take him aside for a few minutes. Let me find
you here again under this cedar-tree.”
Placing her arm in mine, and without waiting for Mrs. Ashleigh's an-.
swer, Mrs. Poyntz drew me into the more sequestered walk that belted
the lawn; and, when we were out of Mrs. Ashleigh's sight and hearing,
said:
“ From what you have now seen of Lilian Ashleigh, do you still desire
to gain her as your wife ?”
“ Still? Oh! with an intensity proportioned to the fear with which I
now dread that she is about to pass away from my eyes — from my
life!”
“Does your judgment confirm the choice of your heart ? Reflect be-
fore you answer.”
66 Such selfish judgment as I had before I knew her would not confirm,
but oppose it. The nobler judgment that now expands all my reason-
ings, approves and seconds my heart. No, no; do not smile so sarcas-
tically. This is not the voice of a blind and egotistical passion. Let me
explain myself if I can. I concede to you that Lilian's character is unde-
veloped. I concede to you that, amidst the childlike freshness and inno-
cence of her nature, there is at times a strangeness, a mystery, which I


A STRANGE STORY.
63
have not yet traced to its cause. But I am certain that the intellect is
organically as sound as the heart, and that intellect and heart will ulti-
mately — if under happy auspices — blend in that felicitous union which
constitutes the perfection of woman. But it is because she does, and may
for years, may perhaps always, need a more devoted, thoughtful care
than natures less tremulously sensitive, that my judgment sanctions my
choice; for whatever is best for her is best for me. And who would
watch over her as I should ?”
“ You have never yet spoken to Lilian as lovers speak ? "
“Oh no, indeed.”
“ And, nevertheless, you believe that your affection would not be unre-
turned ?”
“ I thought so once-I doubt now— yet, in doubting, hope. But why
do you alarm me with these questions? You, too, forebode that in this
visit I may lose her forever ?”.
“ If you fear that, tell her so, and perhaps her artswer may dispel your
fear.”
“What, now — already, when she has scarcely known me a month!
Might I not risk all if too premature ?”
“ There is no almanac for love. With many women love is born the
moment they know they are beloved. All wisdom tells us that a moment
once gone is irrevocable. Were I in your place I should feel that I ap-
proached a moment that I must not lose. I have said enough ; now I
shall rejoin Mrs. Ashleigh.”
“Stay — tell me first what Lady Haughton's letter really contained to
prompt the advice with which you so transport, and yet so daunt, me when
you proffer it.”
“Not now — later, perhaps — not now. If you wish to see Lilian alone,
she is by the old Monk's Well; I saw her seated there as I came that
way to the house."
"One word more — only one. Answer this question frankly, for it is
one of honor. Do you still believe now that my suit to her daughter
would not be disapproved by Mrs. Ashleigh ?”
“ At this moment I am sure it would not; a week hence I might not
give you the same answer.”.
So she passed on, with her quick but measured tread, back through
the shady walk on to the open lawn, till the last glimpse of her pale gray
robe disappeared under the boughs of the cedar-tree. Then, with a
start, I broke the irresolute tremulous suspense in which I had vainly
endeavored to analyze my own mind, solve my own doubts, concentrate
my own will, and went the opposite way, skirting the circle of that
haunted ground; as now, on one side its lofty terrace, the houses of the
.


64
A STRANGE STORY.
neighboring city came full and close into view, divided from my fairy-
land of life but by the trodden murmurous thoroughfare winding low
beneath the ivied parapets; and as now, again, the world of men abruptly
vanished behind the screening foliage of luxuriant June. .
At last the enchanted glade opened out from the verdure, its borders
fragrant with syringa, and rose, and woodbine; and there, by the gray
memorial of the gone Gothic age, my eyes seemed to close their unquiet
wanderings, resting spell-bound on that image which had become to me
the incarnation of earth’s bloom and youth.
She stood amidst the Past, backed by the fragments of walls which
man had raised to seclude him from human passion, locking under those
lids so downcast the secret of the only knowledge I asked from the bound-
less Future.
Ah, what mockery there is in that grand word, the world's fierce war-
cry, Freedom! Who has not known one period of life, and that so
solemn that its shadows may rest over all life hereafter, when one human
creature has over him a sovereignty more supreme and absolute than
Orient servitude adores in the symbols of diadem and sceptre ? What
crest so haughty that has not bowed before a hand which could exalt or
humble? What heart so dauntless that has not trembled to call forth
the voice at whose sound ope the gates of rapture or despair ? That life
alone is free which rules and suffices for itself. That life we forfeit when
we love!
CHAPTER XVII.
How did I utter Ht? By what words did my heart make itself
known? I remember not. All was as a dream that falls upon a restless,
feverish night, and fades away as the eyes unclose on the peace of a
cloudless heaven, on the bliss of a golden sun. A new morrow seemed
indeed upon the earth when I awoke from a lifelong yesterday, her dear
hand in mine, her sweet face bowed upon my breast.
And then there was that melodious silence in which there is no sound
audible from without; yet within us there is heard a lulling celestial mu-
sic, 'as if our whole being, grown harmonious with the universe, joined
from its happy deeps in the hymn that unitès the stars.
In that silence our two hearts seemed to make each other understood,
to be growing near and nearer, blending by mysterious concord into the


A STRANGE STORY.
65
completedness of a solemn union, never henceforth to be rent asun-
der.
At length I said softly: “ And it was here, on this spot, that I first saw
you — here that I for the first time knew what power to change our
, world and to rule our future goes forth from the charm of a human
face!”
And Lilian asked me timidly, and without lifting her eyes, how I had
so seen her, reminding me that I promised to tell her, and had never yet
done so.
And then I told her of the strange impulse that had led me into the
grounds, and by what chance my steps had been diverted down the path
that wound to the glade; how suddenly her form had shone upon my eyes,
gathering round itself the rose hues of the setting sun; and how
wistfully those eyes had followed her own silent gaze into the distant
heaven.
As I spoke her hand pressed mine eagerly, convulsively, and, raising
her face from my breast, she looked at me with an intent, anxious
earnestness. That look !-twice before it had thrilled and perplexed
me.
“ What is there in that look, oh, my Lilian, which tells me that there is
something that startles you — something you wish to confide, and yet
shrink from explaining ? See how, already, I study the fair book from
which the seal has been lifted, but as yet you must aid me to construe its
language.” .
“If I shrink from explaining, it is only because I fear that I cannot
explain so as to be understood or believed. But you have a right to know
the secrets of a life which you would link to your own. Turn your face
* aside from me;, a reproving look, an incredulous smile, chill-oh! you
cannot guess how they chill me — when I would approach that which to
me is so serious and so solemnly strange."
I turned my face aside, and her voice grew firmer as, after a brief pause,
she resumed:
“ As far back as I can remember in my infancy, there have been mo-
ments when there seems to fall a soft, hazy veil between my sight and the
things around it, thickening and deepening till it has the likeness of one
of those white fleecy clouds which gather on the verge of the horizon
when the air is yet still, but the winds are about to rise, and then this
vapor or veil will suddenly open, as clouds open, and let in the blue
sky.”
“Go on,” I said, gently, for here she came to a stop.
She continued, speaking somewhat more hurriedly.
“ Then, in that opening, strange appearances present themselves to me,


66
A STRANGE STORY.
as in a vision. In my childhood these were chicfly landscapes of won-
derful beauty. I could but faintly describe them then; I could not at-
tempt to describe them now, for they are almost gone from my memory.
My dear mother chid me for telling her what I saw, so I did not impress
it on my mind by repeating it. As I grew up this kind of vision - if I may
so call it — became much less frequent or much less distinct; I still saw
the soft veil fall, the pale cloud form and open, but often what may then
have appeared was entirely forgotten when I recovered myself, waking
as from a sleep. Sometimes, however, the recollection would be vivid
and complete : sometimes I saw the face of my lost father; sometimes I
heard his very voice, as I had seen and heard him in my early childhood,
when he would let me rest for hours beside him as he mused or studied,
happy to be so quietly near him — for I loved him, oh, so dearly! and I
remember him so distinctly, though I was only in my sixth year when
he died. Much more recently, indeed, within the last few months —
the images of things to come are reflected on the space that I gaze into
as clearly as in a glass. Thus, for weeks before I came hither, or knew
that such a place existed, I saw distinctly the old House, yon trees, this
sward, this moss-grown Gothic fount, and, with the sight, an impression
was conveyed to me that in the scene before me my old childlike life
would pass into some solemn change. So that when I came here, and
recognized the picture in my vision, I took an affection for the spot; an
affection not without awe; a powerful, perplexing interest, as one who
feels under the influence of a fate of which a prophetic glimpse has
been vouchsafed. And in that evening when you first saw me, seated
here - "
“Yes, Lilian, on that evening — ?”.
“I saw you also, but in my vision — yonder, far in the deeps of space
-- and -- and my heart was stirred as it had never been before; and near
where your image grew out from the cloud I saw my father's face, and I
heard his voice, not in my ear, but as in my heart whispering — ”
“Yes, Lilian, whispering ---- what?”
“ These words - only these — Ye will need one another. But then,
suddenly, between my upward eyes and the two forms they had beheld,
there rose from the earth, obscuring the skies, a vague dusky vapor, un-
dulous, and coiling like a vast serpent, nothing, indeed, of its shape and
figure definite, but of its face one abrupt glare — a flash from two dread
luminous eyes, and a young head, like the Medusa’s, changing more rap-
idly than I could have drawn breath into a grinning skull. Then my ter-
ror made me bow my head, and when I raised it again all that I had seen
was vanished. But the terror still remained, even when I felt my moth-
er's arm round me and heard her voice. And then, when I entered the


A STRANGE STORY.
67
House and sat down again alone, the recollection of what I had seen-
those eyes — that face — that skull —grew on me stronger and stronger
till I fainted, and remember no more until my eyes, opening, saw you by
my side, and in my wonder there was not terror; no, a sense of joy, pro-
tection, hope, yet still shadowed by a kind of fear or awe, in recognizing
the countenance which had gleamed on me from the skies before the dark
vapor had risen, and while my father's voice hadmurmured, · Ye will
need one another. And now - and now — will you love me less that
you know a secret in my being which I have told to no other cannot
construe to myself ? - only — only, at least, do not mock me - do not
disbelieve me. Nay, turn from me no longer now: now I ask to meet
*your eyes. Now, before our hands can join again, tell me that you do
· not despise me as untruthful, do not pity me as insane."
“Hush — hush !” I said, drawing her to my breast. “Of all you
tell me we will talk hereafter. The scales of our science have no weights
fine enough for the gossamer threads of a maiden's pure fancies. Enough
for me — for us both - if out from all such illusions start one truth told
to you, lovely child, from the heavens; told to me, ruder man, on the
earth — repeated by each pulse of this heart that woos you to hear and
to trust; now and henceforth, through life unto death - Each has need
of the other'-I of you - I of you! my Lilian - my Lilian!”
CHAPTER XVIII.
· In spite of the previous assurance of Mrs. Poyntz, it was not without
an uneasy apprehension that I approached the cedar-tree, under which
Mrs. Ashleigh still sat, her friend beside her. I looked on the fair crea-
ture whose arm was linked in mine. So young, so singularly lovely, and
with all the gifts of birth and fortune which bend avarice and ambition
the more submissively to youth and beauty, I felt as if I had wronged
what a parent might justly deem her natural lot.
“Oh, if your mother should disapprove,” said I, falteringly.
Lilian leaned on my arm less lightly. “If I had thought so," she said,
with her soft blush, “ should I be thus by your side ?”
So we passed under the boughs of the dark tree, and Lilian left me,
and kissed Mrs. Ashleigh's cheek, then seating herself on the turf, laid
her head quietly on her mother's lap. I looked on the Queen of the Hill,
whose keen eye shot over me. I thought there was a momentary expres-


68
A STRANGE STORY.
.
sion of pain or displeasure on her countenance; but it passed. Still there
seemed to me something of irony, as well as of triumph or congratulation,
in the half smile with which she quitted her seat, and in the tone with
which she whispered, as she glided by me to the open sward, “ So, then,
it is settled.”
She walked lightly and quickly down the lawn. When she was out of
sight, I breathed more freely. I took the seat which she had quitted, by
Mrs. Ashleigh's side, and said, " A little while ago, I spoke of myself as a
man without kindred, without home, and now I come to you and ask for
both.”
· Mrs. Ashleigh looked at me benignly, then raised her daughter's face
from her lap, and whispered, “ Lilian,” and Lilian's lips moved, but I did
not hear her answer. Her mother did. She took Lilian's hand, simply
placed it in mine, and said, “ As she chooses, I choose ; whom she loves,
I love."
CHAPTER XIX.
From that evening till the day Mrs. Ashleigh and Lilian went on the
dreaded visit, I was always at their house when my avocations allowed
me to steal to it; and during those few days, the happiest I had ever
known, it seemed to me that years could not have more deepened my in-
timacy with Lilian's exquisite nature, made me more reverential of its
purity, or more enamoured of its sweetness. I could detect in her but one
fault, and I rebuked myself for believing that it was a fault. We see many
who neglect the minor duties of life, who lack watchful forethought and
considerate care for others, and we recognize the cause of this failing in
levity or egotism. Certainly neither of those tendencies of character
could be ascribed to Lilian. Yet still in daily trifles there was something
of that neglect, some lack of that care and forethought. She loved her
mother with fondness and devotion, yet it never occurred to her to aid in
. those petty household cares in which her mother centred so much of habit-
ual interest. She was full of tenderness and pity to all want and suffer-
ing, yet many a young lady on the Hill was more actively beneficent — vis-
iting the poor in their sickness, or instructing their children in the Infant
Schools. I was persuaded that her love for me was deep and truthful ;
it was clearly void of all ambition ; doubtless she would have borne un-
flinching and contented whatever the world considers to be sacrifice and


A STRANGE STORY.
69
privation - yet I should never have expected her to take her share in the
troubles of ordinary life. I could never have applied to her the homely
but significant name of helpmate. I reproach myself while I write for
noticing such defect -- if defect it were – in what may be called the
practical routine of our positive, trivial, human existence. No doubt it
was this that had caused Mrs. Poyntz's harsh judgment against the wis-
dom of my choice. But such chiller shade upon her charming nature
was reflected from no inert unamiable self-love. It was but the conse-
quence of that self-absorption which the habit of reverie had fostered.
I cautiously abstained from all allusion to those visionary deceptions,
which she had confided to me, as the truthful impressions of spirit if not.
of sense. To me any approach to what I termed superstition was dis-
pleasing; any indulgence of phantasies not within the measured and
beaten tracks of healthful imagination, more than displeased me in her —
it alarmed. I would not by a word encourage her in persuasions which I
felt it would be at present premature to reason against, and cruel indeed
to ridicule. I was convinced that of themselves these mists round her
native intelligence, engendered by a solitary and musing childhood,
would subside in the fuller daylight of wedded life. She seemed pained
when she saw how resolutely I shunned a subject dear to her thoughts.
She made one or two timid attempts to renew it, but my grave look suf-
ficed to check her. Once or twice, indeed, on such occasions she would
turn away and leave me, but she soon came back — that gentle heart
could not bear one unkindlier shade between that and what it loved. It
was agreed that our engagement should be for the present confided only
to Mrs. Poyntz. When Mrs. Ashleigh and Lilian returned, which would
be in a few weeks at furthest, it should be proclaimed; and our marriage
could take place in the autumn, when I should be most free for one brief
holiday from professional toils.
So we parted — as lovers part. I felt none of those jealous fears
which, before we were affianced, had made me tremble at the thought of
separation, and had conjured up irresistible rivals. But it was with a
settled heavy gloom that I saw her depart. From earth was gone a
glory; from life a blessing.
CHAPTER XX.
DURING the busy years of my professional career I had snatched leisure
· for some professional treatises, which had made more or less sensation, and


70
A STRANGE STORY.
one of them, entitled “ The Vital Principle its Waste and Supply," had
gained a wide circulation among the general public. This last treatise
contained the results of certain experiments, then new in chemistry,
which were adduced in support of a theory I entertained as to the rein-
vigoration of the human system by principles similar to those which
Liebig has applied to the replenishment of an exhausted soil, namely,
the giving back to the frame those essentials to its nutrition which it has
lost by the action or accident of time; or supplying that special pabu-
lum or energy in which the individual organism is constitutionally defi-
cient; and neutralizing or counterbalancing that in which it supera-
bounds — a theory upon which some eminent physicians have more
recently improved with signal success. But on these essays, slight and
suggestive, rather than dogmatic, I set no value. I had been for the last
two years engaged on a work of much wider range, endeared to me by a
far bolder ambition - a work upon which I fondly hoped to found an
enduring reputation as a severe and original physiologist. It was an
“ Inquiry into Organic Life,” similar in comprehensiveness of survey to
that by which the illustrious Müller, of Berlin, has enriched the science
of our age; however inferior, alas, to that august combination of thought
and learning, in the judgment which checks presumption, and the genius
which adorns speculation. But at that day I was carried away by the
ardor of composition, and I admired my performance because I loved my
labor. This work had been entirely laid aside for the last agitated month.
Now that Lilian was gone, I resumed it earnestly, as the sole occupation
that had power and charm enough to rouse me from the aching sense of
void and loss.
The very night of the day she went I reopened my MS. I had left off
at the commencement of a chapter 6 Upon Knowledge as derived from
our Senses.” As my convictions on this head were founded on the well-
known arguments of Locke and Condillac against innate ideas, and on the
reasonings by which Hume had resolved the combination of sensations into
a general idea, to an impulse arising merely out of habit, so I set myself
to oppose, as a dangerous concession to the sentimentalities or mysticism
of a pseudo-philosophy, the doctrine favored by most of our recent physi-
ologists, and of which some of the most eminent of German metaphysi-
cians have accepted the substance, though refining into a subtlety its pos-
itive form - I mean the doctrine which Müller himself has expressed in
these words:
• That innate ideas may exist, cannot in the slightest degree be denied;
it is, indeed, a fact. All the ideas of animals, which are induced by
instinct, are innate and immediate. Something presented to the mind, a
desire to attain which is at the same time given. The new-born lamb


A. STRANGE STORY.
and foal have such innate ideas, which lead them to follow their mother
and suck the teats. Is it not in some measure the same with the intellect-
ual ideas of man? "*
To this question I answered with an indignant “no." A “yes” would
have shaken my creed of materialism to the dust. I wrote on rapidly,
warmly. I defined the properties and meted the limits of natural laws,
which I would not admit that a Deity himself could alter. I clamped and
soldered dogma to dogma in the links of my tinkered logic, till out from
my page, to my own complacent eye, grew Intellectual Man, as the pure
formation of his material senses ; mind, or what is called soul, born from
and nurtured by them alone; though to act, and to perish with the ma-
chinery they moved. Strange, that at the very time my love for Lilian
might have taught me that there are mysteries in the core of the feelings
which my analysis of ideas could not solve, I should so stubbornly have
opposed as unreal all that could be referred to the spiritual! Strange,
that at the very time when the thought that I might lose from this life the
being I had known scarce a month had just before so appalled me, I
should thus complacently sit down to prove that according to the laws of
the nature which my passion obeyed, I must lose for eternity the blessing
I now hoped I had won to my life! But how distinctly dissimilar is man
in his conduct from man in his systems ! See the poet reclined under
forest-boughs, conning odes to his mistress; follow him out into the world;
no mistress ever lived for him there! See the hard man of science, so
austere in his passionless problems; follow him now where the brain rests
from its toil, where the heart finds its Sabbath - what child is so tender,
so yielding and soft ?
But I had proved to my own satisfaction that poet and sage are dust,
and no more, when the pulse ceases to beat. And at that consolatory
conclusion my pen stopped.
Suddenly beside me I distinctly heard a sigh- a compassionate, mourn-
ful sigh. The sound was unmistakable. I started from my seat; looked
round, amazed to discover no one — no living thing! The windows were
closed, the night was still. That sigh was not the wail of the wind. But
there, in the darker angle of the room, what was that? A silvery white-
ness — vaguely shaped as a human form - receding, fading, gone! Why
I know not — for no face was visible, no form, if form it were, more dis-
tinct than the colorless outline — why I know not, but I cried aloud,
“ Lilian! Lilian!” My voice came strangely back to my own ear. I
* Müller's Elements of Physiology. Vol. ii. p. 134. Translated by Dr. Baley,
† Cowley, who wrote so elaborate a series of amatory poems, is said “never to
have been in love but once, and then he never had resolution to tell his passion.” —
Johnson's Lives of the Poets: COWLEY.


* 72
A STRANGE STORY.
smiled and blushed at my foldy. “So I, too, have learned what is super-
stition,” I muttered to myself. “And here is an anecdote at my own ex-
pense (as Müller frankly tells us anecdotes of the illusions which would
haunt his eyes, shut or open), an anecdote I may quote when I come to my
Chapter on the Cheats of the Senses and Spectral Phantoms.” I went
on with my book, and wrote till the lights waned in the gray of the dawn.
And I said then, in the triumph of my pride, as I laid myself down to
rest, “ I have written that which allots with precision man's place in the
region of nature; written that which will found a school — form disciples;
and race after race of those who cultivate truth through pure reason shall
accept my basis if they enlarge my building.” And again I heard the
sigh, but this time it caused no surprise. “ Certainly," I murmured, “ a
very strange thing is the nervous system !” So I turned on my pillow,
and, wearied out, fell asleep.
CHAPTER XXI.
The next day the last of the visiting patients to whom my forenoons
were devoted had just quitted me when I was summoned in haste to at-
tend the steward of a Sir Philip Derval, not residing at his family seat,
which was about five miles from L- It was rarely indeed that per-
sons so far from the town, when of no higher rank than this applicant,
asked my services. But it was my principle to go wherever I was sum-
moned; my profession was not gain, it was healing, to which gain was
an incident, not the essential. This case the messenger reported as
urgent. I went on horseback, and rode fast; but swiftly as I cantered
through the village that skirted the approach to Sir Philip Derval's park
the evident care bestowed on the accommodation of the cottagers forcibly
struck me. I felt that I was on the lands of a rich, intelligent, and be-
neficent proprietor. Entering the park, and passing before the manor-
house, the contrast between the neglect and decay of the absentee's
stately hall and the smiling homes of his villagers was disconsolately
mournful.
An imposing pile, built apparently by Vanbrugh, the decorated pilas-
ters, pompous portico, with grand perron (or double flight of stairs to the
entrance), enriched with urns and statues, but discolored, mildewed,
chipped, half hid with unpruned creepers and ivy. Most of the windows
were closed with shutters, decaying for want of paint; in some of the case-


A STRANGE STORY.
73
ments the panes were broken; the peacock perched on the shattered
balustrade that fenced a garden overgrown with weeds. The sun glared
hotly on the place, and made its ruinous condition still more painfully
apparent. I was glad when a winding in the park road shut the house
from my sight. Suddenly, I emerged through a copse of ancient yew-
trees, and before me there gleamed, in abrupt whiteness, a building evi-
dently designed for the family mausoleum. Classical in its outline, with
the blind iron door niched into stonewalls of massive thickness, and sur-
rounded by a funereal garden of roses and evergreens, fenced with an iron
rail, parti-gilt.
The suddenness with which this House of the Dead came upon me
heightened almost into pain, if not into awe, the dismal impression which
the aspect of the deserted home, with its neighborhood, had made. I
spurred my horse and soon arrived at the door of my patient, who lived
in a fair brick house at the other extremity of the park.
I found my patient, a man somewhat advanced in years, but of a ro-
bust conformation, in bed; he had been seized with a fit, which was sup-
posed to be apoplectic, a few hours before; but was already sensible, and
out of immediate danger. After I had prescribed a few simple remedies,
I took aside the patient's wife, and went with her to the parlor below
stairs, to make some inquiry about her husband's ordinary regimen and
habits of life. These seemed sufficiently regular; I could discover no ap-
parent cause for the attack, which presented symptoms not familiar to my
experience. “ Has your husband never had such fits before ?"
"Never.”
“ Had he experienced any sudden emotion ? Had he heard any unex-
pected news? or had any thing happened to put him out?”
The woman looked much disturbed at these inquiries. I pressed them
more urgently. At last she burst into tears, and, clasping my hand, said,
“Oh! doctor, I ought to tell you — I sent for you on purpose — yet I
fear you will not believe me — my good man has seen a ghost !”
• "A ghost !” said I, repressing a smile. “ Well, tell me all, that I may
prevent the ghost coming again.”
The woman's story was prolix. Its substance was this: Her husband,
habitually an early riser, had left his bed that morning still earlier than
usual, to give directions about some cattle that were to be sent for sale to
a neighboring fair. An hour afterwards he had been found by a shep-
herd near the mausoleum apparently lifeless. On being removed to his
own house he had recovered speech, and bidding all except his wife leave
the room, he then told her that on walking across the park toward the
cattle-sheds he had seen what appeared to him at first a pale light by the
iron door of the mausoleum. On approaching nearer, this light changed


74
A STRANGE STORY.
into the distinct and visible form of his master, Sir Philip Derval, who
was then abroadsupposed to be in the East - where he had resided
for many years. The impression on the steward's mind was so strong
that he called out, “ Oh! Sir Philip!” when, looking still more intently,
he perceived that the face was that of a corpse. As he continued to gaze
the apparition seemed gradually to recede, as if vanishing into the sepul-
chre itself. He knew no more; he became unconscious. It was the
excess of the poor woman's alarm, on hearing this strange tale, that had
made her resolve to send for me instead of the parish apothecary. She
fancied so astounding a cause for her husband's seizure could only be
properly dealt with by some medical man reputed to have more than
ordinary learning. And the steward himself objected to the apothecary
in the immediate neighborhood as more likely to annoy him by gossip
than a physician from a comparative distance.
I took care not to lose the confidence of the good wife by parading too
quickly my disbelief in the phantom her husband declared that he had
seen ; but as the story itself seemed at once to decide the nature of the
fit to be epileptic, I began to tell her of similar delusions which, in my
experience, had occurred to those subjected to epilepsy, and finally
soothed her into the conviction that the apparition was clearly reducible
to natural causes. Afterward I led her on to talk about Sir Philip Der-
val, less from any curiosity I felt about the absent proprietor than
from my desire to re-familiarize her own mind to his image as a living
man. The steward had been in the service of Sir Philip's father, and had
known Sir Philip himself from a child. He was warmly attached to his
master, whom the old woman described as a man of rare benevolence and
great eccentricity, which last she imputed to his studious habits. He had
succeeded to the title and estates as a minor. For the first few years
after attaining his majority he had mixed much in the world. When at
Derval Court his house had been filled with gay companions, and was the
scene of lavish hospitality. But the estate was not in proportion to the.
grandeur of the mansion, still less to the expenditure of the owner. He
had become greatly embarrassed, and some love disappointment (so it was
rumored) occurring simultaneously with his pecuniary difficulties, he had
suddenly changed his way of life, shut himself up from his old friends,
lived in seclusion, taking to books and scientific pursuits, and, as the old
woman said, vaguely but expressively, “ to odd ways." He had gradually,
by an economy that, towards himself, was penurious, but which did not
preclude much judicious generosity to others, cleared off his debts, and,
once more rich, he had suddenly quitted the country, and taken to a life
of travel. He was now about forty-eight years old, and had been eighteen
years abroad. He wrote frequently to his steward, giving him minute


A STRANGE STORY..
75
and thoughtful instructions as to the employment, comforts, and homes of
the peasantry, but peremptorily ordering him to spend no money on the
grounds and mansion, stating, as a reason why the latter might be al-
lowed to fall to decay, his intention to pull it down whenever he returned
to England.
I staid some time longer than my engagements well warranted at my
patient's house, not leaving till the sufferer, after a quiet sleep, had re-
moved from his bed to his arm-chair, taken food, and seemed perfectly
recovered from his attack.
Riding homeward I mused on the difference that education makes, even
pathologically, between man and man. Here was a brawny inhabitant of
rural fields, leading the healthiest of lives, not conscious of the faculty we
call imagination, stricken down almost to death's door by his fright at an
optical illusion, explicable, if examined, by the same simple causes which
had impressed me the night before with a moment's belief in a sound and
a spectre- me, who, thanks to sublime education, went so quietly to sleep
a few minutes after, convinced that no phantom, the ghostliest that ear ever
heard, or eye ever saw, can be any thing else but a nervous phenomenon
CHAPTER XXII.
,
That evening I went to Mrs. Poyntz's; it was one of her ordinary
“ reception nights,” and I felt that she would naturally expect my attend-
ance as “ a proper attention.”
I joined a group engaged in general conversation, of which Mrs.
Poyntz herself made the centre, knitting, as usual, rapidly while she
talked, slowly when she listened.
Without mentioning the visit I had paid that morning, I turned the
conversation on the different country places in the neighborhood, and
then incidentally asked, “ What sort of a man is Sir Philip Derval ? Is
it not strange that he should suffer so fine a place to fall into decay ?”
The answers I received added little to the information I had already ob-
tained. Mrs. Poyntz knew nothing of Sir Philip Derval, except as a
man of large estates, whose rental had been greatly increased by a rise
in the value of property he possessed in the town of L- , and which
lay contiguous to that of her husband. Two or three of the older inhabi-
tants of the Hill had remembered him in his early days, when he was
gay, high-spirited, hospitable, lavish. One observed that the only person


76
A STRANGE STORY.
in L- whom he had admitted to his subsequent seclusion was Dr.
Lloyd, who was then without practice, and whom he had employed as an
assistant in certain chemical experiments.
Here a gentleman struck into the conversation. He was a stranger to
me and to L- , a visitor to one of the dwellers on the Hill, who had
asked leave to present him to its Queen as a great traveller and an accom-
plished antiquarian.
Said this gentleman : “ Sir Philip Derval ! I know him. I met him in
the East. He was then still, I believe, very fond of chemical science; a
clever, odd, philanthropical man; had studied medicine, or at least prac-
tised it; was said to have made many marvellous cures. I became ac-
quainted with him in Aleppo. He had come to that town, not much
frequented by English travellers, in order to inquire into the murder of
two men, of whom one was his friend, and the other his countryman.”
“ This is interesting,” said Mrs. Poyntz, dryly. “We who live on this
innocent Hill all love stories of crime --- murder is the pleasantest subject
you could have hit on. Pray give us the details."
“ So encouraged,” said the traveller, good-humoredly, “I will not hesi.
tate to communicate the little I know. In Aleppo there had lived for
some years a man who was held by the natives in great reverence. He
had the reputation of extraordinary wisdom, but was difficult of access ;
the lively imagination of the Orientals invested his character with the
fascinations of fable ; in short, Haroun of Aleppo was popularly consid-
ered as a magician. Wild stories were told of his powers, of his preter-
natural age, of his hoarded treasures. Apart from such disputable titles
to homage, there seemed no question, from all I heard, that his learning
was considerable, his charities extensive, bis manner of life irreproachably
ascetic. · He appears to have resembled those Arabian sages of the Gothic
age to whom modern science is largely indebted — a mystic enthusiast
but an earnest scholar. A wealthy but singular Englishman, long resi-
dent in another part of the East, afflicted by some languishing disease,
took a journey to Aleppo to consult this sage, who, among his other
acquirements, was held to have discovered rare secrets in medicine — his
countrymen said in charms. One morning, not long after the English-
man's arrival, Haroun was found dead in his bed, apparently strangled,
and the Englishman, who lodged in another part of the town, had disap-
peared; but some of his clothes, and a crutch on which he habitually
supported himself, were found a few miles distant from Aleppo near the
roadside. There appeared no doubt that he, too, had been murdered,
but his corpse could not be discovered. Sir Philip Derval had been a
loving disciple of this Sage of Aleppo, to whom he assured me he owed
not only that knowledge of medicine which, by report, Sir Philip pos-


A STRANGE STORY.
77
sessed, but the insight into various truths of nature, on the promulgation
of which it was evident Sir Philip cherished the ambition to found a phil-
osophical celebrity for himself.”
“Of what description were those truths of nature?” I asked, some-
what sarcastically.
“Sir, I am unable to tell you, for Sir Philip did not inform me, nor did
I much care to ask, for what may be revered as truths in Asia are usually
despised as dreams in Europe. To return to my story. Sir Philip had
been in Aleppo a little time before the murder; had left the Englishman
under the care of Haroun; he returned to Aleppo on hearing the tragic
events I have related, and was busied in collecting such evidence as
could be gleaned, and instituting inquiries after our missing countryman
at the time that I myself chanced to arrive in the city. I assisted in his
researches, but without avail. The assassins remained undiscovered. I
do not myself doubt that they were mere vulgar robbers. Sir Philip had
a darker suspicion, of which he made no secret to me, but as I confess
that I thought the suspicion groundless, you will pardon me if I do not
repeat it. Whether, since I left the East, the Englishman's remains have
been discovered, I know not. Very probably; for I understand that his
heirs have got hold of what fortune he left, less than was generally
supposed, but it was reported that he had buried great treasures, a ru-
mor, however absurd, not altogether inconsistent with his character.”
“ What was his character ?” asked Mrs. Poyntz.
“ One of evil and sinister repute. He was regarded with terror by the
attendants who had accompanied him to Aleppo. But he had lived in a
very remote part of the East, little known to Europeans, and, from all I
could learn, had there established an extraordinary power, strengthened
by superstitious awe. He was said to have studied deeply that knowledge
which the philosophers of old called occult,' not, like the sage of Aleppo,
for benevolent, but for malignant ends. He was accused of conferring
with evil spirits, and filling his barbaric court (for he lived in a kind of
savage royalty) with charmers and sorcerers. I suspect, after all, that he
was only like myself, an ardent antiquarian, and cunningly made use of
the fear he inspired in order to secure his authority, and prosecute, in
safety, researches into ancient sepulchres or temples. His great passion
was, indeed, in excavating such remains in his neighborhood, with what re-
sult I know not, never having penetrated so far into regions infested by
robbers and pestiferous with malaria. He wore the Eastern dress, and al-
ways carried jewels about him. I came to the conclusion that for the sake
of these jewels he was murdered, perhaps by some of his own servants,
who then at once buried his body, and kept their own secret. He was old,
very infirm; could never have got far from the town without assistance.”


78
A STRANGE STORY.
• “You have not yet told his name,” said Mrs. Poyntz. .
“ His name was Grayle.”
“Grayle !” exclaimed Mrs. Poyntz, dropping her work, “ Louis
Grayle ? ”
“ Yes, Louis Grayle. You could not have known him ?”
“ Known bim! No. But I have often heard my father speak of him.
Such, then, was the tragic end of that strong dark creature, for whom as a
young girl in the nursery, I used to feel a kind of fearful admiring interest ?”
“ It is your turn to narrate now," said the traveller.
And we all drew closer round our hostess, who remained silent some
moments, her brow thoughtful, her work suspended.
"Well,” said she, at last, looking round us with a lofty air which
seemed half defying ; " force and courage are always fascinating, even
when they are quite in the wrong. I go with the world, because the
world goes with me; if it did not —” Here she stopped for a moment,
clenched the firm white hand, and then scornfully waved it, left the sen-
tence unfinished, and broke into another.
“Going with the world, of course we must march over those who stand
against it. But when one man stands single-handed against our march
we do not despise him; it is enough to crush. I am very glad I did not
see Louis Grayle when I was a girl of sixteen.” Again she paused a
moment- and resumed : “ Louis Grayle was the only son of an usurer,
infamous for the rapacity with which he had acquired enormous wealth.
Old Grayle desired to rear his heir as a gentleman ; sent him to Eton ;
boys are always aristocratic; his birth was soon thrown in his teeth ; he
was fierce ; he struck boys bigger than himself — fought till he was half
killed. My father was at school with him; described him as a tiger
whelp. One day he — still a fag -struck a sixth-form boy. Sixth-form
boys do not fight fags — they punish them. Louis Grayle was ordered to
hold out his hand to the cane; he received the blow, drew forth his school-,
boy knife and stabbed the punisher. After that he left Eton. I don't
think he was publicly expelled — too mere a child for that honor -- but he
was taken or sent away; educated with great care under the first masters
at home: when he was of age to enter the University old Grayle was
dead. Louis was sent by his guardians to Cambridge, with acquirements
far exceeding the average of young men, and with unlimited command of
money. My father was at the same college, and described him again -
haughty, quarrelsome, reckless, handsome, aspiring, brave. Does that
kind of creature interest you, my dears ? ” (appealing to the ladies).
“La!” said Miss Brabazon ; “ a horrid usurer's son !”
“ Ay, trae; the vulgar proverb says it is good to be born with a silver
spoon in one's mouth; so it is when one has one's own family crest on it;
but when it is a spoon on which people recognize their family crest, and


A STRANGE STORY.
79
cry out, Stolen from our plate-chest!' it is a heritage that outlaws a babe
in his cradle. However, young men at college who want money are less
· scrupulous about descent than boys at Eton are. Louis Grayle found,
· while at college, plenty of well-born acquaintances willing to recover
from him some of the plunder his father had extorted from theirs. He
was too wild to distinguish himself by academical honors, but my father
said that the tutors of the college declared there were not six undergrad-
uates in the wiversity who knew as much hard and dry science as wild
Louis Grayle. He went into the world, no doubt, hoping to shine ; but.
his father's name was too notorious to admit the son into good society.
The Polite World, it is true, does not examine a scutcheon with the nice
eye of a herald, nor look upon riches with the stately contempt of a
stoic — still the Polite World has its family pride and its moral sentiment.
It does not alike to be cheated -I mean in money matters — and when
the son of the man who has. emptied its purse and foreclosed on its acres,
rides by its club windows, hand on haunch, and head in the air, no lion
has a scowl more awful, no hyæna a laugh more dread, than that same
easy, good-tempered, tolerant, polite, well-bred world which is so pleasant
an acquaintance, so languid a friend, and so remorseless an enemy.
In short, Louis Grayle claimed the right to be courted — he was shunned;
to be admired — he was loathed. Even his old college acquaintances
were shamed out of knowing him. Perhaps he could have lived through
all this had he sought to glide quietly into position ; but he wanted the
tact of the well-bred, and strove to storm his way, not to steal it. Re-
duced for companions to needy parasites, he braved and he shocked all
decorous opinion by that ostentation of excess which made Richelieus and
Lauzuns the rage. But then Richelieus and Lauzuns were dukes! He
now very naturally took the Polite World into hate — gave it scorn for
scorn. He would ally himself with Democracy; his wealth could not get
him into a club, but it would buy him into parliament; he could not be
a Lauzun, nor, perhaps, a Mirabeau ; but he might be a Danton. He
had plenty of knowledge and audacity, and with knowledge and audacity
a good hater is sure to be eloquent. Possibly, then, this poor Louis Grayle
might have made a great figure, left his mark on his age and his name in
history; but in contesting the borough which he was sure to carry, he had
to face an opponent in a real fine gentleman whom his father had ruined,
cool and high-bred, with a tongue like a rapier, a sneer like an adder. A
quarrel of course ; Louis Grayle sent a challenge. The fine gentleman,
known to be no coward (fine gentlemen never are), was at first disposed
to refuse with contempt. But Grayle had made himself the idol of the
mob; and at a word from Grayle the fine gentleman might have been
ducked at a pump, or tossed in a blanket -- that would have made him
ridiculous - to be shot at is a trifle, to be laughed at is serious. He


80
A STRANGE STORY.
'
therefore condescended to accept the challenge, and my father was his
second.
" It was settled, of course, according to English custom, that both com-
batants should fire at the same time, and by signal. The antagonist fired
at the right moment, his ball grazed Louis Grayle's temple. Louis Grayle
had not fired. He now seemed to the seconds to take slow and deliberate
aim. They called out to him not to fire -- they were rushing to prevent
him— when the trigger was pulled and his opponent fall dead on the
field. The fight was, therefore, considered unfair; Louis Grayle was
tried for his life; he did not stand the trial in person. He escaped to
the continent; hurried on to some distant uncivilized lands; could not be
traced; reappeared in England no more. The lawyer who conducted
his defence pleaded skilfully. He argued that the delay in firing was not
intentional, therefore not criminal — the effect of the stun which the
wound in the temple had occasioned. The judge was a gentleman, and
summed up the evidence so as to direct the jury to a verdict against the
low wretch who had murdered a gentleman. But the jurors were not
gentlemen, and Grayle's advocate had of course excited their sympathy
for a son of the people whom a gentleman had wantonly insulted— the
verdict was manslaughter. But the sentence emphatically marked the aggra-
vated nature of the homicide — three years' imprisonment. Grayle eluded
the prison, but he was a man disgraced, his ambition blasted, his career an
outlaw's, and his age not yet twenty-three. He left the country. My
father said that he was supposed to have changed his name; none knew
what had become of him. And so in his old age this creature, brilliant
and daring, whom if born under better auspices we might now be all
fawning on, cringing to - after living to old age, no one knows how -
dies, murdered at Aleppo, no one, you say, knows by whom.”
“I saw some account of his death in the papers, about three years
ago,” said one of the party, - but the name was misspelled, and I had no
idea that it was the same man who had fought the duel which Mrs. Col-
onel Poyntz has so grapically described. I have a vague recollection
of the trial; it took place when I was a boy more than forty years since.
The affair made a stir at the time, but was soon forgotten.”
“Soon forgotten,” said Mrs. Poyntz; ay, what is not ? Leave your
place in the world for ten minutes, and when you come back somebody
else has taken it: but when you leave the world for good who remembers
that you had ever a place even in the parish register !”.
“Nevertheless,” said I, “ a great poet has said, finely and truly,
""The sun of Homer shines upon us still.””
“But it does not shine upon Homer; and learned folks tell me that we
know no more who and what Homer was, if there was ever a single


A STRANGE STORY.
81
Homer at all, or rather a whole herd of Homers, than we know about
the man in the moon - if there be one man there, or a million. Now, my
dear Miss Brabazon, it will be very kind in you to divert our thoughts into
channels less gloomy. Some pretty French air- Dr. Fenwick, I have
something to say to you.” She drew me toward the window. “So,
Anne Ashleigh writes me word that I am not to mention your engage-
ment. Do you think it quite prudent to keep it a secret ?”
"I do not see how prudence is concerned in keeping it secret one way
or the other — it is a mere matter of feeling. Most people wish to abridge,
as far as they can, the time in which their private arrangements are the
topic of public gossip.”
“ Public gossip is sometimes the best security for the due completion of
private arrangements. As long as a girl is not known to be engaged, her
betrothed must be prepared for rivals. Announce the engagement, and
rivals are warned off.”
“I fear no rivals.” .
Do you not ? Bold man! I suppose you will write to Lilian ?”
“ Certainly.”
“Do so, and constantly. By the way, Mrs. Ashleigh, before she went,
asked me to send her back Lady Haughton's letter of invitation. What
for ? to show to you?”
“ Very likely. Have you the letter still ? May I see it ?”
“ Not just at present. When Lilian or Mrs. Ashleigh write to you,
come and tell me how they like their visit, and what other guests form
the party”
Therewith she turned away and conversed apart with the traveller.
Her words disquieted me, and I felt that they were meant to do so.
Wherefore, I could not guess. But there is no language on earth which
has more words with a double meaning than that spoken by the Clever
Woman, who is never so guarded as when she appears to be frank.
As I walked home thoughtfully I was accosted by a young man, the
son of one of the wealthiest merchants in the town. I had attended him
with success, some months before, in a rheumatic fever; he and his family
were much attached to me.
“Ah, my dear Fenwick, I am so glad to see you ; I owe you an obli-
gation of which you are not aware - an exceedingly pleasant travelling
companion. I came with him to-day from London, where I have been
sight-seeing and holiday-making for the last fortnight.”
“I suppose you mean that you kindly bring me a patient ?”
“ No, only an admirer. I was staying at Fenton's Hotel. It so hap-
pened one day that I had left in the coffee-room your last work on the
Vital Principle, which, by-the-by, the bookseller assures me is selling


82
A STRANGE STORY.
immensely among readers as non-professional as myself. Coming into
the coffee-room again I found a gentleman reading it. I claimed it
politely; he as politely tendered his excuse for taking it. We made ac-
quaintance on the spot. The next day we were intimate. He expressed
great interest and curiosity about your theory and your experiments. I
told him I knew you. You may guess if I described you as less clever in
your practice than you are in your writings. And, in short, he came
with me to L- , partly to see our flourishing town, principally on my
promise to introduce him to you. My mother, you know, has what she
calls a déjeûner to-morrow ; déjeûner and dance. You will be there ?”
“ Thank you for reminding me of her invitation. I will avail myself
of it if I can. Your new friend will be present ? Who and what is he?
A medical student ?”
“No, a mere gentleman at ease; but seems to have a good deal of
general information. Very young; apparently very rich; wonderfully
good-looking. I am sure you will like him; everybody must.”
“ It is quite enough to prepare me to like him, that he is a friend of
yours.” And so we shook hands and parted.
CHAPTER XXIII.
It was late in the afternoon of the following day before I was able to
join the party assembled at the merchant's house ; it was a villa about
two miles out of the town, pleasantly situated, amidst flower-gardens cel-
ebrated in the neighborhood for their beauty. The breakfast had been
long over; the company was scattered over the lawn ; some formed into
a dance on the smooth lawn; some seated under shady awnings; others
gliding amidst parterres, in which all the glow of color took a glory yet
more vivid under the flush of a brilliant sunshine, and the ripple of a soft
western breeze. Music, loud and lively, mingled with the laughter of
happy children, who formed much the larger number of the party.
Standing at the entrance of an arched trellis, that led from the hardier
flowers of the lawn to a rare collection of tropical plants under a lofty
glass dome (connecting, as it were, the familiar vegetation of the North
with that of the remotest East), was a form that instantaneously caught
and fixed my gaze. The entrance of the arcade was covered with para-
site creepers in prodigal luxuriance, of variegated gorgeous tints - scarlet,
golden, purple – and the form, an idealized picture of man's youth fresh


A STRANGE STORY.
83
from the hand of Nature, stood literally in a frame of blooms. Never
have I seen human face so radiant as that young man's.
There was in the aspect an indescribable something that literally daz-
zled. As one continued to gaze, it was with surprise one was forced to
acknowledge that in the features themselves there was no faultless regu-
larity; nor was the young man's stature imposing — about the middle
height. But the effect of the whole was not less transcendent. Large
eyes, unspeakably lustrous; a most harmonious coloring; an expression
of contagious animation and joyousness; and the form itself so critically
fine that the welded strength of its sinews was best shown in the light-
ness and grace of its movements.
He was resting one hand carelessly on the golden locks of a child that
had nestled itself against his knees, looking up in his face in that silent
loving wonder with which children regard something too strangely beau-
tiful for noisy admiration; he himself was conversing with the host, an
old gray-haired, gouty man, propped on his crutch-stick, and listening
with a look of mournful envy. To the wealth of the old man, all the
flowers in that garden owed their renewed delight in the summer air and
sun. Oh that his wealth could renew to himself one hour of the youth
that stood beside him, lord, indeed, of Creation ; its splendor woven into
his crown of beauty ; its enjoyments subject to his sceptre of hope and
gladness!
I was startled by the hearty voice of the merchant's son: “Ah, my
dear Fenwick, I was afraid you would not come you are late. There
is the new friend of whom I spoke to you last night ; let me now make
you acquainted with him.” He drew my arm in his and led me up to
the young man, where he stood under the arching flowers, and whom he ·
then introduced to me by the name of Margrave.
Nothing could be more frankly cordial than Mr. Margrave's man-
ner. In a few minutes I found myself conversing with him familiarly, as
if we had been reared in the same home, and sported together in the
same play-ground. His vein of talk was peculiar, off-hand, careless,
shifting from topic to topic, with a bright rapidity.
He said that he liked the place; proposed to stay in it some weeks;
asked my address, which I gave to him; promised to call soon at an early
hour, while my time was yet free from professional visits. I endeavored,
when I went away, to analyze to myself the fascination which this young
stranger so notably exercised over all who approached him; and it
seemed to me, ever seeking to find material causes for all moral effects,
that it arose from the contagious vitality of that rarest of all rare gifts in
highly civilized circles — perfect health ; that health which is in itself the
most exquisite luxury, which, finding happiness in the mere sense of ex-


84
A STRANGE STORY.
istence, diffuses round it, like an atmosphere, the harmless hilarity of its
bright animal being. Health, to the utmost perfection, is seldom 'known
after childhood; health to the utmost cannot be enjoyed by those who
overwork the brain, or admit the sure wear and tear of the passions.
The creature I had just seen gave me the notion of youth in the golden
age of the poets — the youth of the careless Arcadian, before nymph or
shepherdess had vexed his heart with a sigh.
CHAPTER XXIV.
The house I occupied at L— was a quaint, old-fashioned building
- a corner house - one side, in which was the front entrance, looked
upon a street which, as there were no shops in it, and it was no direct
thoroughfare to the busy centres of the town, was always quiet; and at
some hours of the day almost deserted. The other side of the house
fronted a lane; opposite to it was the long and high wall of the garden
to a Young Ladies' Boarding-School. My stables adjoined the house,
abutting on a row of smaller buildings, with little gardens before them,
chiefly occupied by mercantile clerks and retired tradesmen. By the
lane there was short and ready access both to the high turnpike-road and
to some pleasant walks through green meadows and along the banks of a
river.
This house I had inhabited since my arrival at L— , and it had to me
so many attractions, in a situation sufficiently central to be convenient
for patients, and yet free from noise, and favorable to ready outlet into
the country for such foot or horse exercise as my professional avocations
would allow me to carve for myself out of what the Latin poet calls the
• solid mass of the day,” that I had refused to change it for one better
suited to my increased income; but it was not a house which Mrs. Ash-
leigh would have liked for Lilian. The main objection to it, in the eyes
of the “genteel,” was, that it had formerly belonged to a member of the
healing profession, who united the shop of an apothecary to the diploma
of a surgeon: but that shop had given the house a special attraction to
me;' for it had been built out on that side of the house which fronted the
· lane, occupying the greater portion of a small gravel court, fenced from
the road by a low iron palisade, and separated from the body of the house
itself by a short and narrow corridor that communicated with the en-
trance-hall. This shop I turned into a rude study for scientific experi-


A STRANGE STORY.
ments, in which I generally spent some early hours of the morning, be-
fore my visiting patients began to arrive. I enjoyed the stillness of its
separation from the rest of the house; I enjoyed the glimpse of the great
chestnut-trees which overtopped the wall of the school garden ; I enjoyed
the ease with which, by opening the glazed sash-door, I could get out, if
disposed for a short walk, into the pleasant fields; and so completely had
I made this sanctuary my own, that not only my man-servant knew that I
was never to be disturbed when in it, except by the summons of a patient,
but even the house-maid was forbidden to enter it with broom or duster.
except upon special invitation. The last thing at night, before retiring to
rest, it was the man-servant's business to see that the sash-window was
closed and the gate to the iron palisade locked, but during the daytime
I so often went out of the house by that private way that the gate was
then very seldom locked, nor the sash-door bolted from within. In the
town of L- there was very little apprehension of house-robberies —
especially in the daylight — and certainly in this room, cut off from the
main building, there was nothing to attract a vulgar cupidity. A few of
the apothecary's shelves and cases still remained on the walls, with here
and there a bottle of some chemical preparation for experiment. Two
or three worm-eaten wooden chairs; two or three shabby old tables; an
old walnut-tree bureau, without a lock, into which odds-and-ends were
confusedly thrust, and sundry ugly-looking inventions of mechanical sci-
ence, were assuredly not the articles which a timid proprietor would
guard with jealous care from the chances of robbery. It will be seen
later why I have been thus prolix in description. The morning after I
had met the young stranger by whom I had been so favorably impressed,
I was up, as usual, a little before the sun, and long before any of my ser-
vants were astir. I went first into the room I have mentioned, and which
I shall henceforth designate as my study, opened the window, unlocked
the gate, and sauntered for some minutes up and down the silent lane
skirting the opposite wall and overhung by the chestnut-trees, rich in the
garniture of a glorious summer; then, refreshed for work, I reëntered
my study, and was soon absorbed in the examination of that now well-
known machine, which was then, to me at least, a novelty — invented, if
I remember right, by Monsieur Dubois Reymond, so distinguished by his
researches into the mysteries of organic electricity. It is a wooden cylin-
der fixed against the edge of a table; on the table two vessels filled with
salt and water are so placed that, as you close your hands on the cylinder,
the forefinger of each hand can drop into the water; each of the vessels
has a metallic plate, and communicates by wires with a galvanometer
with its needle. Now the theory is, that if you clutch the cylinder firmly
with the right hand, leaving the left perfectly passive, the needle in the


86
A STRANGE STORY.
galvanometer will move from west to south ; if, in like manner, you ex-
ert the left arm leaving the right arm passive, the needle will deflect
from west to north. Hence, it is argued that the electric current is in-
duced through the agency of the nervous system, and that as human Will
produces the muscular contraction requisite, so is it human Will that
causes the deflection of the needle. I imagined that if this theory were
substantiated by experiment, the discovery might lead to some sublime
and unconjectured secrets of science. For human Will, thus actively
effective on the electric current, and all matter, animate or inanimate,
having more or less of electricity, a vast field became opened to conjec-
ture. By what series of patient experimental deduction might not science
arrive at the solution of problems which the Newtonian law of gravitation
does not suffice to solve; and— But I must not suffer myself to be led
away into the vague world of guess by the vague reminiscences of a
knowledge long since wholly neglected, or half forgotten.
I was dissatisfied with my experiment. The needle stirred, indeed, but
erratically, and not in directions which, according to the theory, should
correspond to my movement. I was about to dismiss the trial with some
uncharitable contempt of the French philosopher's dogmas, when I heard
a loud ring at my street door. While I paused to conjecture whether my
servant was yet up to attend to the door, and which of my patients was
the most likely to summon me at so unseasonable an hour, a shadow dark-
ened my window. I looked up, and to my astonishment beheld the bril-
liant face of Mr. Margrave. The sash to the door was already partially
opened; he raised it higher and walked into the room.“ Was it you who
rang at the street door, and at this hour ?” said I.
"Yes; and observing, after I had rung, that all the shutters were still
closed, I felt ashamed of my own rash action, and made off rather than
brave the reproachful face of some injured house-maid, robbed of her
morning dreams. I turned down that pretty lane — lured by the green
of the chestnut-trees — caught sight of you through the window, took cour-
age, and here I am! You forgive me?” While thus speaking he con-
tinued to move along the littered floor of the dingy room with the undu-
lating restlessness of some wild animal in the confines of its den, and he
now went on, in short fragmentary sentences, very slightly linked together,
but smoothed, as it were, into harmony by a voice musical and fresh as a
skylark's warble. “Morning dreams, indeed! dreams that waste the life
of such a morning. Rosy magnificence of a summer dawn! Do you not
pity the fool who prefers to lie abed, and to dream rather than to live?
What! and you, strong man, with those noble limbs, in this den! Do
you not long for a rush through the green of the fields, a bath in the blue
of the river?"


A STRANGE STORY.
Here he came to a pause, standing, still in the gray light of the grow-
ing day, with eyes whose joyous lustre forestalled the sun's, and lips which
seemed to laugh even in repose.
But presently those eyes, as quick as they were bright, glanced over
the walls; the floor, the shelves, the phials, the mechanical inventions, and
" then rested full on my cylinder fixed to the table. He approached, ex-
amined it curiously, asked what it was? I explained. To gratify him,
I sat down, and renewed my experiment, with equally ill success. The
needle, which should have moved from west to south, describing an angle
of from 30 deg. to 40 or even 50 deg., only made a few troubled un-
decided oscillations.
“ Tut!” cried the young man, “I see what it is; you have a wound in
your right hand.”
That was true. I had burned my hand a few days before in a chemical
experiment, and the sore had not healed.
“Well,” said I, “and what does that matter ? ”
. “Every thing; the least scratch in the skin of the hand produces chem-
ical actions on the electric current, independently of your will. Let me
try.”
He took my place, and in a moment the needle in the galvanometer
responded to his grasp on the cylinder, exactly as the French philosopher
had stated to be the due result of the experiment.
I was startled.
“But how came you, Mr. Margrave, to be so well acquainted with a
scientific process little known, and but recently discovered ?”
“I well acquainted ! not so. But I am fond of all experiments that
relate to animal life. Electricity especially is full of interest.”
On that I drew him out (as I thought), and he talked volubly. I was
amazed to find this young man, in whose brain I had conceived thought
kept one careless holiday, was evidently familiar with the physical sci-
ences, and especially with chemistry, which was my own study by predi-
letion. But never had I met with a student in whom a knowledge so
extel'sive was mixed up with notions so obsolete or so crotchety. In one
sentence he showed that he had mastered some late discovery by Faraday
or Liebig; in the next sentence he was talking the wild fallacies of Car-
dan or Van Helmont. I burst out laughing at some paradox about sym-
pathetic powders, which he enounced as if it were a recognized truth.
"Pray tell me,” said I,“ who was your master in physics, for a cleverer
pupil never had a more crack-brained teacher.”
“No,” he answered, with his merry laugh, “it is not the teacher's fault.
I am a mere parrot; just cry out a few scraps of learning picked up here
and there. But, however, I am fond of all researches into nature; all


88
A STRANGE STORY. ,
guesses at her riddles. To tell you the truth, one reason why I have
taken to you so heartily is not only that your published work caught my
fancy in the dip which I took into the contents (pardon me if I say dip, I
never do more than dip into any book), but also because young ****
tells me that which all whom I have met in this town confirm; namely,
that you are one of those few practical chemists who are at once exceed-
ingly cautious and exceedingly bold — willing to try every new experi-
ment, but submitting experiment to rigid tests. Well, I have an experi-
ment running wild in this giddy head of mine, and I want you, some day
when at leisure, to catch it, fix it as you have fixed that cylinder: make
something of it. I am sure you can.”
" What is it?”
"" Something akin to the theories in your work. You would replenish
or preserve to each special constitution the special substance that may fail
to the equilibrium of its health. But you own that in a large proportion
of cases, the best cure of disease is less to deal with the disease itself than
to support and stimulate the whole system, so as to enable nature to cure
the disease and restore the impaired equilibrium by her own agencies.
Thus, if you find that in certain cases of nervous debility a substance like
nitric acid is efficacious, it is because the nitric acid has a virtue in lock-
ing up, as it were, the nervous energy, that is, preventing all undue waste.
Again, in some cases of what is commonly called feverish cold, stimulants
like ammonia assist nature itself to get rid of the disorder thať oppresses
its normal action; and, on the same principle, I apprehend, it is contended
that a large average of human lives is saved in those hospitals which have
adopted the supporting system of ample nourishment and alcoholic stimu-
lants.
“ Your medical learning surprises me," said I, smiling, “ and without
pausing to notice where it deals somewhat superficially with disputable
points in general, and my own theory in particular, I ask you for the de-
duction you draw from your premises.”
“ It is simply this: that to all animate bodies, however various, there.
must be one principle in common — the vital principle itself. What if
there be one certain means of recruiting that principle ? and what if that
secret can be discovered ? ”.
“ Pshaw! The old illusion of the medieval empirics."
“ Not so. But the medieval empirics were great discoverers. You
sneer at Van Helmont, who sought in water the principle of all things:
but Van Helmont discovered in his search those invisible bodies called
gases. Now the principle of life must certainly be ascribed to a gas.*
* According to the views we have mentioned, we must ascribe life to a gas,
that is, to an aeriform body. - Liebig, Organic Chemistry, Playfair's translation,
p. 363.


A STRANGE STORY.
89
And whatever is a gas, chemistry should not despair of producing! But
I can argue no longer now — never can argue long at a stretch — we are
wasting-the morning; and joy! the sun is up! See! Out! come out!
out! and greet the great Life-giver face to face.”
I could not resist the young man's invitation. In a few minutes we
were in the quiet lane under the glinting chestnut-trees. Margrave was
chanting, low, a wild tune – words in a strange language...
“What words are those ? no European language, I think; for I know
a little of most of the languages which are spoken in our quarter of the
globe, at least by its more civilized races."
“ Civilized races! What is civilization ? Those words were uttered
by men who founded empires when Europe itself was not civilized !
Hush, is it not a grand old air ? ” and lifting his eyes towards the sun, he
gave vent to a voice clear and deep as a mighty bell! The air was
grand — the words had a sonorous swell that suited it, and they seemed
to me jubilant and yet solemn. He stopped abruptly, as a path from the
lane had led us into the fields, already half-bathed in sunlight - dews glit-
tering on the hedge-rows.
“ Your song,” said I, “ would go well with the clash of cymbals or the
peal of the organ. I am no judge of melody, but this strikes me as that
of a religious hymn.”
"I compliment you on the guess. It is a Persian fire-worshipper's
hymn to the sun. The dialect is very different from modern Persian..
Cyrus the Great might have chanted it on his march upon Babylon."
"And where did you learn it ?”.
" In Persia itself.”
"You have travelled much — learned much — and are so young and
so fresh. Is it an impertinent question if I ask whether your parents are
yet living, or are you wholly lord of yourself ?"
“ Thank you for the question - pray make my answer known in the
town. Parents I have not — never had.”
“Never had parents !”
“ Well, I ought rather to say that no parents ever owned me. I am a
natural son — a vagabond — a nobody.. When I came of age I received
an anonymous letter, informing me that a sum – I need not say what -
but more than enough for all I need, was lodged at an English banker's
in my name ; that my mother had died in my infancy; that my father
was also dead — but recently; that as I was a child of love, and he was
unwilling that the secret of my birth should ever be traced, he had pro-
vided for me, not by will, but in his life, by a sum consigned to the trust
of the friend who now wrote to me; I need give myself no trouble to
learn more ; faith, I never did. I am young, healthy, rich — yes, rich!


A STRANGE STORY.
Now you know all, and you had better tell it, that I may win no man's
courtesy and no maiden's love upon false pretences. I have not even a
right, you see, to the name I bear. Hist! let me catch that squirrel.”
With what a panther-like bound he sprang! The squirrel eluded his
grasp, and was up the oak-tree; in a moment he was up the oak-tree too.
In amazement I saw him rising from bough to bough; saw his bright eyes
and glittering teeth through the green leaves; presently I heard the sharp,
piteous cry of the squirrel — echoed by the youth's merry laugh — and
down, through that maze of green, Margrave came, dropping on the
grass and bounding up as Mercury might have bounded with his wings at
his heels.
“I have caught him — what pretty brown eyes!”
Suddenly the gay expression of his face changed to that of a savage; the
squirrel had wrenched itself half-loose and bitten him. The poor brute! In
an instant its neck was wrung - its body dashed on the ground; and that
fair young creature, every feature quivering with rage, was stamping his
foot on his victim again and again! It was horrible. I caught him by
the arm indignantly. He turned round on me like a wild beast disturbed
from its prey — his teeth set, his hand lifted, his eyes like balls of fire.
“ Shame !” said I, calmly; "shame on you!”
He continued to gaze on me a moment or so his eye glaring, his
breath panting — and then, as if mastering himself with an involuntary
effort, his arm dropped to his side, and he said, quite humbly, “I beg
your pardon ; indeed I do. I was beside myself for a moment; I cannot
bear pain : ” and he looked in deep compassion for himself at his wounded
hand. “ Venomous brute!” And he stamped again on the body of the
squirrel, already crushed out of shape.
I moved away in disgust, and walked on.
But presently I felt my arm softly drawn aside, and a voice, dulcet as
the coo of a dove, stole its way into my ears. There was no resisting the
charm with which this extraordinary mortal could fascinate even the hard
and the cold; nor them, perhaps, the least. For as you see in extreme
old age, when the heart seems to have shrunk into itself, and to leave but
meagre and nipped affections for the nearest relations if grown up, the
indurated egotism softens at once toward a playful child; or as you see in
middle life some misanthrope, whose nature has been soured by wrong
and sorrow, shrink from his own species, yet make friends with inferior
races, and respond to the caress of a dog — so, for the worldling or the
cynic, there was an attraction in the freshness of this joyous favorite of
Nature ; — an attraction like that of a beautiful child, spoilt and way.
ward, or of a graceful animal, half docile, half fierce.
“But,” said I, with a smile, as I felt all displeasure gone, “such indul-
-
--


A STRANGE STORY.
gence of passion for such a trifle is surely unworthy a student of philoso-
phy.”
“ Trifle,” he said, dolorously. But I tell you it is pain; pain is no
trifle. I suffer. Look !”
I looked at the hand, which I took in mine. The bite no doubt had
been sharp; but the hand that lay in my own was that which the Greek
sculptor gives to a gladiator; not large (the extremities are never large
in persons whose strength comes from the just proportion of all the mem-
bers, rather than the factitious and partial force which continued muscu-
lar exertion will give to one part of the frame, to the comparative
weakening of the rest), but with the firm-knit joints, the solid fingers,
the finished nails, the massive palm, the supple polished skin in which we
recognize what nature designs the human hand to be — the skilled, swift,
mighty doer of all those marvels which win Nature herself from the wil-
derness.
" It is strange,” said I, thoughtfully; “ but your susceptibility to suffer-
ing confirms my opinion, which is different from the popular belief, viz. :
that pain is most acutely felt by those in whom the animal organization
being perfect, and the sense of vitality exquisitely keen, every injury or
lesion finds the whole system rise, as it were, to repel the mischief and
communicate the consciousness of it to all those nerves which are the
sentinels to the garrison of life. Yet my theory is scarcely borne out by
general fact. The Indian savages must have a health as perfect as yours;
a nervous system as fine. Witness their marvellous accuracy of ear, of
eye, of scent, probably also of touch, yet they are indifferent to physical
pain; or must I mortify your pride by saying that they have some moral
quality defective in you which enables them to rise superior to it.”
“ The Indian savages,” said Margrave, sullenly, “ have not a health as
perfect as mine, and in what you call vitality — the blissful consciousness
of life -- they are as sticks and stones compared to me."
“ How do you know ?”
“ Because I have lived with them. It is a fallacy to suppose that the
savage has a health superior to that of the civilized man, -- if the civil-
ized man be but temperate, - and even if not, he has a stamina that can
resist for years what would destroy the savage in a month. As to their
fine perceptions of sense, such do not come from exquisite equilibrium of
system, but are hereditary attributes transmitted from race to race, and
strengthened by training from infancy. But is a pointer stronger and
healthier than a mastiff, because the pointer through long descent and
early teaching creeps stealthily to his game and stands to it motionless ?
I will talk of this later; now I suffer! Pain, pain! Has life any ill but
pain ?"


92
A STRANGE STORY.
It so happened that I had about me some roots of the white lily, which
I meant,, before returning home, to leave with a patient suffering from
one of those acute local inflammations, in which that simple remedy
often affords great relief. I cut up one of these roots, and bound the
cooling leaves to the wounded hand with my handkerchief.
“ There,” said I. “ Fortunately, if you feel pain more sensibly than
others, you will recover from it more quickly.”
And in a few minutes my companion felt perfectly relieved, and
poured out his gratitude with an extravagance of expression and a beam-
ing delight of countenance which positively touched me.
“I almost feel,” said I, “as I do when I have stilled an infant's wailing,
and restored it smiling to its mother's breast."
“ You have done so. I am an infant, and Nature is my mother. Oh,
to be restored to the full joy of life, the scent of wild flowers, the song
of birds, and this air - summer air - summer air !”
I know not why it was, but at that moment, looking at him and hear-
ing him, I rejoiced that Lilian was not at -
“ But I came out to bathe. Can we not bathe in that stream?”
“No. You would derange the bandage round your hand; and for all
bodily ills, from the least to the gravest, there is nothing like leaving
Nature at rest the moment we have hit on the means which assist her
own efforts at cure.”
" I obey, then, but I do so love the water."
6 You swim, of course ?”
“ Ask the fish if it swim. Ask the fish if it can escape me! I delight
to dive down - down; to plunge after the startled trout, as an otter
does; and then to get among those cool, fragrant reeds and bulrushes, or
that forest of emerald weed which one sometimes finds waving under
clear rivers. Man! man! could you live but an hour of my life you
would know how horrible a thing it is to die !”
“ Yet the dying do not think so; they pass away calm and smiling, as
you will one day.”
“I–I! die one day — die !” and he sank on the grass, and buried
his face among the herbage, sobbing aloud.
* Before I could get through half a dozen words, meant to soothe, he
had once more bounded up, dashed the tears from his eyes, and was
again singing some wild, barbaric chant. I did not disturb him; in fact I
soon grew absorbed in my own meditations on the singular nature, so
wayward, so impulsive, which had forced intimacy on a man so grave and
practical as myself.
I was puzzled how to reconcile so passionate a childishness, so undisci-
plined a want of self-control, with an experience of mankind so extended


A STRANGE STORY.
93
from
by travel, with an education, desultory and irregular indeed, but which
must have been at some time or other familiarized to severe reasonings
and laborious studies. There seemed to be wanting in him that mysteri-
ous something which is needed to keep our faculties, however severally
brilliant, harmoniously linked together - as the string by which a child
mechanically binds the wild flowers it gathers, shaping them at choice
into the garland or the chain.
and
eam-
CHAPTER XXV.
ar-
My intercourse with Margrave grew habitual and familiar. He came
to my house every morning before sunrise; in the evenings we were
again brought together: sometimes in the houses to which we were both
invited, sometimes at his hotel, sometimes in my own home.
Nothing more perplexed me than his aspect of extreme youthfulness,
contrasted with the extent of the travels, which, if he were to be believed,
had left little of the known world unexplored. One day I asked him,
bluntly, how old he was ?
“How old do I look? How old should you suppose me to be ?”
“ I should have guessed you to be about twenty, till you spoke of hav-
ing come of age some years ago." '
“Is it a sign of longevity when a man looks much younger than he is ?”
“ Conjoined with other signs, certainly!”.
“ Have I the other signs ?”
“ Yes, a magnificent, perhaps a matchless, constitutional organization.
But you have evaded my question as to your age; was it an impertinence
to put it?”
“ No. I came of age -- let me see — three years ago."
6 So long since ? Is it possible? I wish I had your secret!”
“ Secret! What secret ?”
6. The secret of preserving so much of boyish freshness in the wear and
tear of man-like passions and man-like thoughts.”
“ You are still young yourself - under forty ?”
" Oh yes! some years under forty.”
“ And Nature gave you a much grander frame and a much finer sym-
metry of feature than she gave to me.”
“ Pooh! pooh! You have the beauty that must charm the eyes of
woman, and that beauty in its sunny forenoon of youth. Happy man!
if you love -- and wish to be sure that you are loved again."


94
A STRANGE STORY.
“What you call love — the unhealthy sentiment, the feverish folly-I
left behind me, I think forever, when — "
“ Ay, indeed — when?”
“I came of age !”
“ Hoary cynic! and you despise love! So did I once. Your time
may come.”
“I think not. Does any animal, except man, love its fellow she-ani-
mal as man loves woman ?”
“ As man loves woman? No, I suppose not.”
“And why should the subject-animals be wiser than their king? But,
to return — you would like to have my youth and my careless enjoyment
of youth?”
“ Can you ask — who would not ?" Margrave looked at me for a mo-
ment with unusual seriousness, and then, in the abrupt changes common
to his capricious temperament, began to sing softly one of his barbaric
chants — a chant different from any I had heard him sing before - made
either by the modulation of his voice or the nature of the tune - so sweet
that, little as music generally affected me, this thrilled to my very heart's
core. I drew closer and closer to him, and murmured when he paused,
" Is not that a love-song ?”
“No,” said he, “it is the song by which the serpent-charmer charms the
serpent." ;
CHAPTER XXVI.
INCREASED intimacy with my new acquaintance did not diminish the
charm of his society, though it brought to light some startling defects, both
in his mental and moral organization. I have before said that his knowl-
edge, though it had swept over a wide circuit and dipped into curious,
unfrequented recesses, was desultory and erratic. It certainly was not
that knowledge, sustained and aspiring, which the poet assures us is
" the wing on which we mount to heaven.” So; in his faculties them-
selves there were singular inequalities, or contradictions. His power
of memory in some things seemed prodigious; but when examined it
was seldom accurate; it could apprehend, but did not hold together
with a binding grasp, what metaphysicians call “ complex ideas.” He
thus seemed unable to put it to any steadfast purpose in the sciences of
which it retained, vaguely and loosely, many recondite principles. For
the sublime and beautiful in literature he had no taste whatever. A pas-


A STRANGE STORY.
95
sionate lover of nature, his imagination had no response to the arts by
which nature is expressed or idealized; wholly unaffected by poetry or
painting. Of the fine arts, music alone attracted and pleased him. His
conversation was often imminently suggestive, touching on much, whether
in books or mankind, that set one thinking; but I never remember him
to have uttered any of those lofty or tender sentiments which form the
connecting links between youth and genius. For if poets sing to the
young, and the young hail their own interpreters in poets, it is because
the tendency of both is to idolize the realities of life, finding everywhere
in the Real a something that is noble or fair, and making the fair yet
fairer, and the noble nobler still.
In Margrave's character there seemed no special vices, no special vir-
tues; but a wonderful vivacity, joyousness, animal good-humor. He was
singularly temperate, having a dislike to wine, perhaps from that purity
of taste which belongs to health absolutely perfect. No healthful child
likes alcohols, no animal, except man, prefers wine to water.
But his main moral defect seemed to me, in a want of sympathy, even
where he professed attachment. He who could feel so acutely for him-
self, be unmanned at the bite of a squirrel, and sob at the thought that he
should one day die, was as callous to the sufferings of another as a deer
who deserts and butts from him a wounded comrade.
I give an instance of this hardness of heart where I should have least
expected to find it in him.
He had met and joined me as I was walking to visit a patient on the
outskirts of the town, when we fell in with a group of children, just let
loose for an hour or two from their day-school. Some of these children
joyously recognized him as having played with them at their homes ; they
ran up to him, and he seemed as glad as themselves at the meeting.
He suffered them to drag him along with them, and became as merry
and sportive as the youngest of the troop.
6 Well,” said I, laughing, “if you are going to play at leap-frog, pray
don't let it be on the high road, or you will be run over by carts and
draymen; see that meadow just in front to the left - off with you
there!”
“ With all my heart,” cried Margrave," while you pay your visit. Come
along, boys.”.
A little urchin, not above six years old, but 'who was lame, began to
, cry, he could not run -- he should be left behind...
Margrave stopped. “ Climb on my shoulder, little one, and I'll be your
horse."
The child dried its tears, and delightedly obeyed.
“Certainly,” said I, to myself, “ Margrave, after all, must have a nature


A STRANGE STORY. .
as gentle as it is simple. What other young man, so courted by all the
allurements that steal innocence from pleasure, would stop in the thorough-
fares to play with children ?”
The thought had scarcely passed through my mind when I heard a
scream of agony. Margrave had leaped the railing that divided the
meadow from the road, and in so doing the poor child, perched on his
shoulder, had, perhaps from surprise or fright, loosened its hold, and fallen
heavily. Its cries were piteous. Margrave clapped his hands to his ears
- uttered an exclamation of anger — and not even stopping to lift up the
boy, or examine what the hurt was, called to the other children to come
on, and was soon rolling with them on the grass, and pelting them with
daisies. When I came up only one child remained by the sufferer - its
little brother, a year older than itself. The child had fallen on its arm,
which was not broken, but violently contused. The pain must have been
intense. I carried the child to its home, and had to remain there some
time. I did not see Margrave till the next morning, when he then called.
I felt so indignant that I could scarcely speak to him. When at last I
rebuked him for his inhumanity, he seemed surprised; with difficulty re-
membered the circumstance, and then merely said - as if it were the most
natural confession in the world —
“ Oh, nothing so discordant as a child's wail. I hate discords. I am
pleased with the company of children; but they must be children who
laugh and play. Well! why do you look at me in that way? What have
I said to shock you?”.
“ Shock me — you shock manhood itself! Go; I can't talk to you
now. I am busy."
But he did not go; and his voice was so sweet, and his ways so winning,
that disgust insensibly melted into that sort of forgiveness one accords
(let me repeat the illustration) to the deer that forsakes its comrade.
The poor thing knows no better. And what a graceful, beautiful thing
this was !
The fascination — I can give it no other name — which Margrave ex-
ercised was not confined to me, it was universal - old, young, high, low,
man, woman, child, all felt it. Never in Low Town had stranger, even
the most distinguished by fame, met with a reception so cordial — so flat-
tering. His frank confession that he was a natural son, far from being to
his injury, served to interest people more in him, and to prevent all those
inquiries in regard to his connections and antecedents, which would other-
wise have been afloat. To be sure, he was evidently rich; at least he had
plenty of money. He lived in the best rooms in the principal hotel; was
very hospitable ; entertained the families with whom he had grown inti-
mate; made them bring their children - music and dancing after dinner.


A STRANGE STORY. I
97
Among the houses in which he had established familiar acquaintance was
that of the mayor of the town, who had bought Dr. Lloyd's collection of
subjects in natural history. To that collection the mayor had added
largely by a very recent purchase. He had arranged these various speci-
mens, which his last acquisitions had enriched by the interesting carcasses
of an elephant and a hippopotamus, in a large wooden building con-
tiguous to his dwelling, and which had been constructed by a former
proprietor (a retired fox-hunter) as a riding-house. And being a man
who much affected the diffusion of knowledge, he proposed to open
this museum to the admiration of the general public, and at his death to
·bequeath it to the Athenæum or Literary Institute of bis native town.
Margrave, seconded by the influence of the mayor's daughters, had scarcely
been three days at I- before he had persuaded this excellent and
public-spirited functionary to inaugurate the opening of his museum by
• the popular ceremony of a ball. A temporary corridor should unite the
drawing-rooms, which were on the ground-floor, with the building that
contained the collection; and thus the fête would be elevated above the
frivolous character of a fashionable amusement, and consecrated to the
solemnization of an intellectual institute. Dazzled by the brilliancy of
this idea, the mayor announced his intention to give a ball that should in-
clude the surrounding neighborhood, and be worthy, in all expensive re-
spects, of the dignity of himself and the occasion. A night had been fixed
for the ball a night that became memorable indeed to me! The enter-
tainment was anticipated with a lively interest, in which even the Hill
condescended to share. The Hill did not much patronize mayors in gen-
eral; but when a mayor gave a ball for a purpose so patriotic, and on a
scale so splendid, the Hill liberally acknowledged that Commerce was, on
the whole, a thing which the Eminence might, now and then, condescend
to acknowledge without absolutely derogating from the rank which Provi-
dence had assigned to it among the High Places of earth. Accordingly,
the Hill was permitted by its Queen to honor the first magistrate of Low
Town by a promise to attend his ball. Now, as this festivity had origi-
nated in the suggestion of Margrave, so, by a natural association of ideas,
every one, in talking of the ball, talked also of Margrave.
The Hill had at first affected to ignore a stranger whose début had
been made in the mercantile circle of Low Town. But the Queen of
the Hill now said, sententiously, “ This new man in a few days has be-
come a Celebrity. It is the policy of the Hill to adopt Celebrities, if the
Celebrities pay respect to the Proprieties. Dr. Fenwick is requested to
procure Mr. Margrave the advantage of being known to the Hill.” .
I found it somewhat difficult to persuade Margrave to accept the Hill's
condescending overture. He seemed to have a dislike to all societies


98
, A STRANGE STORY.
pretending to aristocratic distinction - a dislike expressed with a fierce-
ness so unwonted that it made one suppose he had at some time or other
been subjected to mortification by the supercilious airs that blow upon
heights so elevated. However, he yielded to my instances, and accom-
panied me one evening to Mrs. Poyntz's house. The Hill was encamped
there for the occasion. Mrs. Poyntz was exceedingly civil to him, and
after a few commonplace speeches, hearing that he was fond of music,
consigned him to the caressing care of Miss Brabazon, who was at the
head of the musical department in the Queen of the Hill's administra-
tion.
Mrs. Poyntz retired to her favorite seat near the window, inviting me
to sit beside her; and while she knitted in silence, in silence my eye
glanced toward Margrave in the midst of the group assembled round the
piano.
Whether he was in more than usually high spirits, or whether he was ,
actuated by a malign and impish desire to upset the established laws of
decorum by which the gayeties of the Hill were habitually subdued into
a serene and somewhat pensive pleasantness, I know not; but it was not
many minutes before the orderly aspect of the place was grotesquely
changed.
Miss Brabazon having come to the close of a complicated and dreary
sonata, I heard Margrave abruptly ask her if she could play the Taran-
-tella, that famous Neapolitan air which is founded on the legendary belief
that the bite of the tarantula excites an irresistible desire to dance. On
that high-bred spinster's confession that she was ignorant of the air, and
had not even heard of the legend, Margrave said, “ Let me play it to
you, with variations of my own." Miss Brabazon graciously yielded her
place at the instrument. Margrave seated himself — there was great
curiosity to hear his performance. Margrave's fingers rushed over the
keys, and there was a general start, the prelude was so unlike any known
combination of harmonious sounds. Then he began a chant- song ).
can scarcely call it - words certainly not in Italian, perhaps in some un-
civilized tongue, perhaps in impromptu gibberish. And the torture of
the instrument now commenced in good earnest : it shrieked, it groaned :
wilder and noisier. Beethoven's Storm, roused by the fell touch of a
German pianist, were mild in comparison ; and the mighty voice, domin-
ating the anguish of the cracking keys, had the full diapason of a chorus.
Certainly I am no judge of music, but to my ear the discord was ter-
rific — to the ears of better informed amateurs it seemed ravishing. All
were spell-bound; even Mrs. Poyntz paused from her knitting, as the
Fates paused from their web at the lyre of Orpheus. To this breathless
· delight, however, soon succeeded a general desire for movement. To


A STRANGE STORY..
99
my amazement, I be held these formal matrons and sober fathers of fami-
lies forming themselves into a dance, turbulent as a children's ball at
Christmas. And when, suddenly desisting from his music, Margrave
started up, caught the skeleton hand of lean Miss Brabazon, and whirled
her into the centre of the dance, I could have fancied myself at a witch's
sabbat. My eye turned in scandalized alarm toward Mrs. Poyntz. That
great creature seemed as much astounded as myself. Her eyes were
fixed on the scene in a stare of positive stupor. For the first time, no
doubt, in her life, she was overcomè, deposed, dethroned. The awe of
her presence was literally whirled away. The dance ceased as suddenly
as it had begun. Darting from the galvanized mummy whom he had se-
lected as his partner, Margrave shot to Mrs. Poyntz's side, and said,
“ Ten thousand pardons for quitting you so soon, but the clock warns me
that I have an engagement elsewhere.” In another moment he was
gone.
The dance halted, people seemed slowly returning to their senses, look-
ing at each other bashfully and ashamed.
; "I could not help it, dear,” sighed Miss Brabazon at last, sinking into
a chair, and casting her deprecating, fainting eyes upon the hostess.
“ It is witchcraft,” said fat Mrs. Bruce, wiping her forehead.
“Witchcraft!" echoed Mrs. Poyntz, “ it does indeed look like it. An
amazing and portentous exhibition of animal spirits, and not to be en-
dured by the Proprieties. Where on earth can that young savage have
come from ?”
From savage lands,” said I. “So he says.”
“Do not bring him here again,” said Mrs. Poyntz. "He would soon
turn the Hill topsy-turvy. But how charming! I should like to see more
of him,” she added irran under voice,“ if he would call on me some morn-
ing, and not in the presence of those for whose Proprieties I am respon-
sible. Jane must be out in her ride with the Colonel.”
Margrave never again attended the patrician festivities of the Hill.
Invitations were poured upon him, especially by Miss Brabazon and the
other old maids, but in vain.
“ Those people,” said he, “ are too tame and civilized for me; and so
few young persons among them. Even that girl Jane is only young on
the surface; inside, as old as the World or her mother. I like youth,
real youth-I am young, I am young!”
And, indeed, I observed that he would attach himself to some young
person, often to some child, as if with cordial and special favor, yet for
not more than an hour or so, never distinguishing them by the same pref-
erence when he next met them. I made the remark to him, in rebuke


100
A STRANGE STORY..
of his fickleness, one evening when he had found me at work on my am-
bitious book, reducing to rule and measure the Laws of Nature. '
It is not fickleness," said he, “it is necessity.”
“Necessity! Explain yourself.”
“ I seek to find what I have not found,” said he; “it is my necessity to
seek it, and among the young; and disappointed in one, I turn to the
other. Necessity again. . But find it at last I must."
" I suppose you mean what the young usually seek in the young; and .
if, as you said the other day, you have left love behind you, you now .
wander back to re-find it.”
“Tush! If I may judge by the talk of young fools, love may be found
every day by him who looks out for it. What I seek is among the rarest
of all discoveries. You might aid me to find it, and in so doing aid your-
self to a knowledge far beyond all that your formal experiments can
bestow.”
“ Prove your words, and command my services,” said I, smiling some-
what disdainfully.
“ You told me that you had examined into the alleged phenomena of
animal magnetism, and proved some persons who pretend to the gift which
the Scotch call, second sight to be bungling impostors. You were right.
I have seen the clairvoyants who drive their trade in this town; a com-
mon gipsy could beat them in their own calling. But your experience
must have shown you that there are certain temperaments in which the
gift of the Pythoness is stored, unknown to the possessor, undetected by
the common observer; but the signs of which should be as apparent to
the modern physiologist as they were to the ancient priest.” - .
“I at least, as a physiologist, am ignorant of the signs -- what are
they?”
“I should despair of making you comprehend them by mere verbal
description. I could guide your observation to distinguish them uner-
ringly were living subjects before us. But not one in a million has the
gift to an extent available for the purposes to which the wise would apply
it. Many have imperfect glimpses ; few, few indeed, the unveiled, lucent
sight. They who have but the imperfect glimpses mislead and dupe the
minds that consult them, because, being sometimes marvellously right,
they excite a credulous belief in their general accuracy; and as they are
but translators of dreams in their own brain, their assurances are no more
to be trusted than are the dreams of commonplace sleepers. But where
the gift exists to perfection, he who knows how to direct and to profit by
it should be able to discover all that he desires to know for the guidance
and preservation of his own life. He will be forewarned of every danger,


A STRANGE STORY.
101
.
forearmed in the means by which danger is avoided. For the eye of the
true Pythoness matter has no obstruction, space no confines, time no
measurement."
“My dear Margrave, you may well say that creatures so gifted are
rare; and for my part, I would as soon search for a unicorn as, to use
your affected expression, for a Pythoness." . i.
“Nevertheless, whenever there come across the course of your prac-
tice some young creature to whom all the evil of the world is as yet un-
known, to whom the ordinary cares and duties of the world are strange
and unwelcome; who from the earliest dawn of reason has loved to sit
apart and to muse; before whose eyes visions pass unsolicited; who con-
verses with those who are not dwellers on the earth, and beholds in the
space landscapes which the earth does not reflect —”
“ Margrave, Margrave ! of whom do you speak?”
“ Whose frame, though exquisitely sensitive, has still a health and a
soundness in which you recognize no disease; whose mind has a truthful-
ness that you know cannot deceive you, and a simple intelligence too
clear to deceive itself; who is moved to a mysterious degree by all the
varying aspects of external nature – innocently joyous, or unaccountably
sad; — when, I say, such a being comes across your experience, inform me;
and the chances are that the true Pythoness is found.”
I had listened with vague terror, and with more than one exclamation
of amazement, to descriptions which brought Lilian Ashleigh before me;
and I now sat mute, bewildered, breathless, gazing upon Margrave, and
rejoicing that at least Lilian he had never seen.
He returned my own gaze steadily, searchingly, and then, breaking
into a slight laugh, resumed :
“ You call my word · Pythoness' affected. I know of no other. My
recollections of classic anecdote and history are confused and dim ; but
somewhere I have read or heard that the priests of Delphi were accus-
tomed to travel chiefly into Thrace or Thessaly in search of the virgins
who might fitly administer their oracles, and that the oracles gradually
ceased in repute as the priests became unable to discover the organiza-
tion requisite in the priestesses, and supplied by craft and imposture, or
by such imperfect fragmentary developments as belong now to profes-
sional clairvoyants, the gifts which Nature failed to afford. Indeed, the
demand was one that must have rapidly exhausted so limited a supply.
The constant strain upon faculties so wearing to the vital functions in
their relentless exercise, under the artful stimulants by which the priests
heightened their power, was mortal, and no Pythoness ever retained her
life more than three years from the time that her gift was elaborately
trained and developed.”


102
A STRANGE STORY.
“ Pooh! I know of no classical authority for the details you so confi-
dently cite. Perhaps some such legends may be found in the Alexan-
drian Platonists; but those mystics are no authority on such a subject.
After all,” I added, recovering from my first surprise or awe, “the Del-
phic oracles wefe i proverbially ambiguous, and their responses might be
read either way; a proof that the priests dictated the verses, though their
- arts on the unhappy priestess might throw her into real convulsions, and
the real convulsions, not the false gift, might shorten her life. Enough
of such idle subjects! Yet no! one question more. If you found your
Pythoness, what then ?”.
“ What then ? Why, through her aid I might discover the process of
an experiment which your practical science would assist me to com-
plete.”
“ Tell me of what kind is your experiment; and precisely because
· such little science as I possess is exclusively practical, I may assist you
without the help of the Pythoness.”
Margrave was silent for some minutes, passing his hand several times
across his forehead, which was a frequent gesture of his, and then rising,
he answered, in listless accents :
“I cannot say more now, my brain is fatigued; and you are not yet
in the right mood to hear me. By the way, how close and reserved you
are with me.”
“ How so ? "
“ You never told me that you were engaged to be married. You
leave me, who thought to have won your friendship, to hear what con-
cerns you so intimately from a comparative stranger."
“ Who told you ? "
“ That woman with eyes that pry and lips that scheme, to whose house
you took me."
“ Mrs. Poyntz! Is it possible? When?"
“ This afternoon. I met her in the street — she stopped me, and, after
some unmeaning talk, asked if I had seen you lately ; if I did not find
you very absent and distracted ; no wonder — you 'were in love. The
young lady was away on a visit, and wooed by a dangerous rival.'”
" Wooed by a dangerous rival!”
“ Very'rich, good-looking, young. Do you fear him? You turn pale."
“I do not fear, except so far as he who loves truly, loves humbly, and
fears not that another may be preferred, but that another may be wor-
thier of preference than himself. But that Mrs. Poyntz should tell you
all this does amaze me. Did she mention the name of the young lady ?"
“ Yes; Lilian Ashleigh. Henceforth be more frank with me. Who
knows? I may help you. Adieu ! "


A STRANGE STORY.
103
CHAPTER XXVII.
When Margrave had gone I glanced at the clock — not yet nine. I
resolved to go at once to Mrs. Poyntz. It was not an evening on which
she received, but doubtless she would see me. She owed me an expla-
nation. How thus carelessly divulge a secret she had been enjoined to
keep ? and this rival of whom I was ignorant ? It was no longer a matter
of wonder that Margrave should have described Lilian's peculiar idiosyn-
crasies in his sketch of his fabulous Pythoness. Doubtless, Mrs. Poyntz
had, with unpardonable levity of indiscretion, revealed all of which she
disapproved in my choice. But for what object? Was this her boasted
friendship for me? Was it consistent with the regard she professed for
Mrs. Ashleigh and Lilian? Occupied by these perplexed and indignant
thoughts, I arrived at Mrs. Poyntz's house, and was admitted to her pres-
ence. She was fortunately alone ; her daughter and the Colonel had
gone to some party on the Hill. I would not take the hand she held out
to me on entrance ; seated myself in stern displeasure, and proceeded at
once to inquire if she had really betrayed to Mr. Margrave the secret of
my engagement to Lilian.
“Yes, Allen Fenwick; I have this day told not only Mr. Margrave,
but every person I met who is likely to tell it to some one else, the secret
of your engagement to Lilian Ashleigh. I never promised to conceal it;
on the contrary, I wrote word to Anne Ashleigh that I would therein act
as my own judgment counselled me. I think my words to you were that
* public gossip was sometimes the best security for the fulfilment of private
engagements.'”
- Do you mean that Mrs. or Miss Ashleigh recoils from the engage-
ment with me, and that I should meanly compel them to fulfil it by call-
ing in the public to censure them — if- if — Oh, madam, this is worldly
artifice indeed!”
"Be good enough to listen to me quietly. I have never yet showed
you the letter to Mrs. Ashleigh, written by Lady Haughton, and deliv-
ered by Mr. Vigors. That letter I will now show to you; but before
doing so I must enter into a preliminary explanation. Lady Haughton
is one of those women who love power, and cannot obtain it except
through wealth and station - by her own intellect never obtain it. When
her husband died she was reduced from an income of twelve thousand a
year to a jointure of twelve hundred, but with the exclusive guardianship
of a young son, a minor, and adequate allowances for the charge ; she


104
A STRANGE STORY.
continued, therefore, to preside as mistress _over the establishments in
town and country; still had the administration of her son's wealth and
rank. She stinted his education in order to maintain her ascendency
over him. He became a brainless prodigal — spendthrift alike of health
and fortune. Alarmed, she saw that probably he would die young and a
beggar; his only hope of reform was in marriage. She reluctantly
resolved to marry him to a penniless, well-born, soft-minded young lady
whom she knew she could control: just before this marriage was to
take place he was killed by a fall from his horse. The Haughton
estate passed to his cousin, the luckiest young man 'alive; the same
,Ashleigh Sumner who had already succeeded, in default of male issue,
to poor Gilbert Ashleigh's landed possessions. Over this young man
Lady Haughton could expect no influence. She would be a stranger in
his house. But she had a niece! Mr. Vigors assured her the niece
was beautiful. And if the niece could become Mrs. Ashleigh Sumner,
then Lady Haughton would be a less unimportant Nobody in the world,
because she would still have her nearest relation in a Somebody at
Haughton Park. Mr. Vigors had his own pompous reasons for approving
an alliance which he might help to bring about. The first step towards
that alliance was obviously to bring into reciprocal attractions the natural
charms of the young lady and the acquired merits of the young gentleman.
Mr. Vigors could easily induce his ward to pay a visit to Lady Haughton,
and Lady Haughton had only to extend her invitations to her niece;
hence the letter to Mrs. Ashleigh, of which Mr. Vigors was the bearer,
and hence my advice to you, of which you can now understand the mo-
tive. Since you thought Lilian Ashleigh the only woman you could love,
and since I thought there were other women in the world who might do
as well for Ashleigh Sumner, it seemed to me fair for all parties that
Lilian should not go to Lady Haughton's in ignorance of the sentiments
with which she had inspired you. A girl can seldom be sure that she
loves until she is sure that she is loved. And now," added Mrs. Poyntz,
rising and walking across the room to her bureau -—"now I will show you
Lady Haughton's invitation to Mrs. Ashleigh. Here it is !”
I ran my eye over the letter which she thrust into my hand, resuming
her knitwork while I read.
The letter was short, couched in conventional terms of hollow affection.
The writer blamed herself for having so long neglected her brother's widow
and child; her heart had been wrapped up too much in the son she had
lost; that loss had made her turn to the ties of blood still left to her; she
had heard much of Lilian from their common friend, Mr. Vigors; she
longed to embrace so charming a niece. Then followed the invitation
and the postscript. The postscript ran thus, so far as I can remember:


A STRANGE STORY.
..
105
“ Whatever my own grief at my irreparable bereavement, I am no egotist,
I keep my sorrow to myself. You will find some pleasant guests at my
house, among others our joint connection, young Ashleigh Sumner.” .
6 Woman's postscripts are proverbial for their significance,” said Mrs.
Poyntz, when I had concluded the letter and laid it on the table ; " and
if I did not at once show you this hypocritical effusion, it was simply
because at the name Ashleigh Sumner its object became transparent, not
perhaps to poor Anne Ashleigh nor to innocent Lilian, but to my knowl-
edge of the parties concerned, and to that shrewd intelligence which you
derive partly from nature, partly from the insight into life which a true
physician cannot fail to acquire. And if I know any thing of you, you
would have romantically said, had you seen the letter at first, and un-
derstood its covert intention, “Let me not shackle the choice of the
woman I love, and to whom an alliance so coveted in the eyes of the
world might, if she were left free, be proffered.'”
“I should not have gathered from the postscript all that you see in it,
but had its purport been so suggested to me, you are right, I should have
so said. Well, and as Mr. Margrave tells me that you informed him that
I have a rival, I am now to conclude that the rival is Mr. Ashleigh
Sumner?”
“ Has not Mrs. Ashleigh or Lilian mentioned him in writing to you?”
“Yes, both ; Lilián very slightly; Mrs. Ashleigh with some praise, as
a young man of high character, and very courteous to her.”
“Yet, though I asked you to come and tell me who were the guests at
Lady Haughton's you never did so."
“Pardon me; but of the guests I thought nothing, and letters addressed
to my heart seemed to me too sacred to talk about. And Ashleigh Sum-
ner then courts Lilian! How do you know ?”
“I know every thing that concerns me; and here the explanation is,
simple. My aunt, Lady Delafield, is staying with Lady Haughton.
. Lady Delafield is one of the women of fashion who shine by their own
light; Lady Haughton shines by borrowed light, and borrows every ray
she can find.”
“ And Lady Delafield writes you word”
“ That Ashleigh Sumner is caught by Lilian's beauty.” .
“ And Lilian herself —”.
6 Women like Lady Delafield do not readily believe that any girl
would refuse Ashleigh Sumner; considered in himself, he is steady and
good-looking; considered as owner of Kirby Hall and Haughton Park, he
has, in the eyes of any sensible' mother, the virtues of Cato, and the
beauty of Antinous.”
I pressed my hand to my heart-close to my heart lay a letter from


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A STRANGE STORY.
Lilian - and there was no word in that letter which showed that her
heart was gone from mine. I shook my head gently, and smiled in con-
fiding triumph.
• Mrs. Poyntz surveyed me with a bent brow and à compressed lip.
"I understand your smile,” she said, ironically. “Very likely Lilian
may be quite untouched by this young man's admiration, but Anne Ash-
leigh may be dazzled by so brilliant a prospect for her daughter. And,
in short, I thought it desirable to let your engagement be publicly known
throughout the town to-day; that information will travel – it will reach
Ashleigh Sumner through Mr. Vigors, or others in this neighborhood,
with whom I know that he corresponds. It will bring affairs to a crisis,
and before it may be too late. I think it well that Ashleigh Sumner
should leave that house; if he leaves it for good so much the better.
And, perhaps, the sooner Lilian returns to L- the lighter your own
heart will be.”
“ And for those reasons you have published the secret of —"
“Your engagement? Yes. Prepare to be congratulated wherever
you go. And now, if you hear either from mother or daughter, that
Ashleigh Sumner has proposed, and been, let us say, refused, I do not
doubt that in the pride of your heart you will come and tell me.”
“ Rely upon it, I will; but before I take my leave allow me to ask why
you described to a young man like Mr. Margrave — whose wild and
strange humors you have witnessed and not approved — any of those
traits of character in Miss Ashleigh which distinguish her from other girls
of her age ?”
“I? You mistake. I said nothing to him of her character. I men-
tioned her name, and said she was beautiful, that was all.”
“Nay, you said that she was fond of musing, of solitude; that in her
fancies she believed in the reality of visions which might flit before her
eyes as they flit before the eyes of all imaginative dreamers."
“Not a word did I say to Mr. Margrave of such peculiarities in Lilian;
not a word more than what I have told you, on my honor!”
Still incredulous, but disguising my incredulity with that convenient
smile by which we accomplish so much of the polite dissimulation indis-
pensable to the decencies of civilized life, I took my departure, returned
home, and wrote to Lilian.


A STRANGE STORY.
107
CHAPTER XXVIII.
Tas conversation with Mrs. Poyntz left my mind restless and disqui-
eted. I had no doubt, indeed, of Lilian's truth; but could I be sure that
the attentions of a young man with advantages of fortune so brilliant,
would not force on her thoughts the contrast of the humbler lot and the
duller walk of life in which she had accepted as companion a man re-
moved from her romantic youth less by disparity of years than by gravity
of pursuits? And would my suit now be as welcomed as it had been by
a mother even so unworldly as Mrs. Ashleigh ? Why, too, should both
$ mother and daughter have left me so unprepared to hear that I had à
rival? Why not have implied some consoling assurance that such rivalry
need not cause me alarm. Lilian's letters, it is true, touched but little
on any of the persons round her - they were filled with the outpourings
of an ingenuous heart, colored by the glow of a golden fancy. They
were written as if in the wide world we two stood apart, alone, consecrated
É from the crowd by the love that, in linking us together, had hallowed
each to each. But Mrs. Ashleigh's letters were more general and diffu-
sive, detailed the habits of the household, sketched the guests, intimated
continued fear of Lady Haughton, but had said nothing more of Mr.
Ashleigh Sumner than I had repeated to Mrs. Poyntz. However, in my .
letter to Lilian I related the intelligence that had reached me, and im-
patiently I awaited her reply.
Three days after the interview with Mrs. Poyntz, and two days before
the long-anticipated event of the mayor's ball, I was summoned to attend
a nobleman who had lately been added to my list of patients, and whose
residence was about twelve miles from - The nearest way was
through Sir Philip Derval's park. I went on horseback, and proposed to
stop on the way to inquire after the steward, whom I had seen but once
since his fit, and that was two days after it, when he called himself at my
house to thank me for my attendance, and to declare that he was quite
recovered.
As I rode somewhat fast through Sir P. Derval's park, I came, however,
upon the steward, just in front of the house. I reined in my horse and
accosted him. He looked very cheerful.
“ Sir,” said he, in a whisper, “ I have heard from Sir Philip; his letter
is dated since -since--my good woman told you what I saw; well, since
then. So that it must have been alt a delusion of mine, as you told her.
And yet, well - well - we will not talk of it, doctor. But I hope you


108
A STRANGE STORY.
have kept the secret. Sir Philip would not like to hear of it if he comes
back.”
“ Your secret is quite safe with me. But is Sir Philip likely to come
back?”
“I hope so, doctor. His letter is dated Paris, and that's nearer home
than he has been for many years; and — but bless me — some one is com-
ing out of the house ? a young gentleman! Who can it be ?”
I looked, and to my surprise I saw Margrave descending the stately
stairs that led from the front door. The steward turned toward him, and
I mechanically followed, for I was curious to know what had brought
Margrave to the house of the long-absent traveller.
It was easily explained. Mr. Margrave had heard at L— much of
the pictures and internal decorations of the mansion. He had by dint
of coaxing (he said, with his enchanting laugh), persuaded the old house-
keeper to show him the rooms.
" It is against Sir Philip's positive orders to show the house to any
stranger, sir; and the housekeeper has done very wrong," said the stew-
ard.
“Pray don't scold her. I dare say Sir Philip would not have refused
me a permission he might not give to every idle sight-seer. Fellow-trar-
ellers have a freemasonry with each other; and I have been much in the
same far countries as himself. I heard of him there, and could tell you
more about him, I dare say, than you know yourself.”
“ You, sir! pray do then.”
"“ The next time I come,” said Margrave, gayly; and with a nod to me
he glided off through the trees of the neighboring grove, along the wind-
ing foot-path that led to the lodge.
“A very cool gentleman,” muttered the steward; “ but what pleas-
ant ways he has! You seem to know him, sir. Who is he --- may
I ask?” .
“Mr. Margrave. A visitor at M , and he has been a great travel-
ler, as he says; perhaps he met Sir Philip abroad."
“I must go and hear what he said to Mrs. Gates; excuse me, sir, but
I am so anxious about Sir Philip."
“ If it be not too great a favor, may I be allowed the same privilege
granted to Mr. Margrave? To judge by the outside of the house, the
inside must be worth seeing; still, if it be against Sir Philip's positive
orders —”
“ His orders, were not to let the Court become a show-house --- to ad-
mit none without my consent; but I should be ungrateful indeed, doctor,
if I refused that consent to you.” •
I tied my horse to the rusty gate of the terrace walk, and followed the


A STRANGE STORY.
109.
steward up the broad stairs of the terrace. The great doors were unlocked.
We entered a lofty hall with a domed ceiling; at the back of the hall the
grand staircase ascended by a double flight. The design was undoubt-
edly Vanbrugh's, an architect who, beyond all others, sought the effect
of grandeur less in space than in proportion. But Vanbrugh's designs
need the relief of costume and movement, and the forms of a more pom-
pous generation, in the bravery of velvets and laces, glancing amid
those gilded columns, or descending with stately tread those broad pala-
tial stairs. His halls and chambers are so made for festival and throng,
that they become like deserted theatres, inexpressibly desolate, as we
miss the glitter of the lamps and the movement of the actors.
The housekeeper had now' appeared; a quiet, timid old woman. She
exeused herself for admitting Margrave, not very intelligibly. It was
plain to see that she had, in truth, been unable to resist what the steward
termed his “ pleasant ways.”
As if to escape from a scolding, she talked volubly all the time, bus-
tling nervously through the rooms, along which I followed her guidance
with a hushed footstep. The principal apartments were on the ground-
floor, or rather a floor raised some ten or fifteen feet above the ground;
they had not been modernized since the date in which they were built.
Hangings of faded silk; tables of rare marble, and mouldered gilding;
comfortless chairs at drill against the walls; pictures, of which connois-
seurs alone could estimate the value,"darkened by dust or blistered by
sun and damp, made a general character of discomfort. On not one
room, on not one nook, still lingered some old smile of Home.
Meanwhile I gathered from the housekeeper's rambling answers to ques-
tions put to her by the steward, as I moved on, glancing at the pictures,
that Margrave's visit that day was not his first. He had been over the
house twice before; his ostensible excuse that he was an amateur in pic-
tures (though as I have before observed, for that department of art he
had no taste); but each time he had talked much of Sir Philip. He said
that, though not personally known to him, he had resided in the same
towns abroad, and had friends equally intimate with Sir Philip; but when
the steward inquired if the visitor had given any information as to the
absentee, it became very clear that Margrave had been rather asking
questions than volunteering intelligence.
We had now come to the end of the state apartments, the last of which
was a library. “ And,” said the old woman, “I don't wonder the gentle-
man knew Sir Philip, for he seemed a scholar, and looked very hard over
the books, especially those old ones by the fire-place, which Sir Philip,
Heaven bless him, was always poring over.”
Mechanically I turned to the shelves by the fire-place, and examined
10


110
A STRANGE STORY.
the volumes ranged in that department. I found they contained the
works of those writers whom we may class together under the title of
mystics — Porphyry and Plotinus ; Swedenborg and Behmen; Sandivo-
gius, Van Helmont, Paracelsus, Cardan. Works, too, were there, by
writers less renowned, on astrology, geomancy, chiromancy, etc. I began
to understand among what class of authors Margrave had picked up the
strange notions with which he was apt to interpolate the doctrines of
practical philosophy.
" I suppose this library was Sir Philip's usual sitting-room ?” said I.
“No, sir; he seldom sat here. This was his study;” and the old
woman opened a small door, masked by false book backs. I followed her
into a room of moderate size, and evidently of much earlier date than the
rest of the house. “ It is the only room of an older mansion,” said the
steward, in answer to my remarks. “I have heard it was left standing
on account of the chimney-piece. But there is a Latin inscription which
will tell you all about it. I don't know Latin myself,” said the steward.
The chimney-piece reached to the ceiling. The frieze of the lower
part rested on rude stone caryatides; in the upper part were oak panels
very curiously carved in the geometrical designs favored by the taste
prevalent in the reigns of Elizabeth and James, but different from any
I had ever seen in drawings of old houses. And I was not quite un-
learned in such matters, for my poor father was a passionate antiquarian
in all that relates to medieval art. The design in the oak panels was
composed of triangles interlaced with varied ingenuity, and inclosed in
circular bands inscribed with the signs of the Zodiac
On the stone frieze supported by the caryatide, immediately under the
wood-work, was inserted a metal plate, on which was written, in Latin, a
few lines to the effect that “in this room Simon Forman, the seeker of
hidden truth, taking refuge from unjust persecution, made those discov-
eries in nature which he committed, for the benefit of a wiser age, to the
charge of his protector and patron, the worshipful Sir Miles Derval,
knight.”
Forman! The name was not quite unfamiliar to me; but it was not
without an effort that my memory enabled me to assign it to one of the
most notorious of those astrologers or soothsayers whom the superstition
of an earlier age alternately persecuted and honored.
The general character of the room was more cheerful than the statelier
chambers I had hitherto passed through, for it had still the look of habitation.
The arm-chair by the fire-place; the knee-hole writing-table beside it;
the sofa near the recess of a large bay-window, with book-prop and can-
dlestick screwed to its back; maps, coiled in their cylinders, ranged under
the cornice ; low strong safes skirting two sides of the room, and appar-


A STRANGE STORY.
111
ently intended to hold papers and title deeds ; seats carefully affixed to
their jealous locks. Placed on the top of these old-fashioned receptacles
were articles familiar to modern use; a fowling-piece here ; fishing-rods
there ; two or three simple flower vases ; a pile of music-books; a box
of crayons. All in this room seemed to speak of residence and owner-
ship — of the idiosyncrasies of a lone single man, it is true, but of a man
of one's own time - a country gentleman of plain habits but not unculti-
vated tastes.
I moved to the window; it opened by a sash upon a large balcony,
within which a wooden stair wound to a little garden, not visible in front
of the house, surrounded by a thick grove of evergreens, through which
i one broad vista was cut'; and that vista was closed by a view of the
mausoleum.
I stepped out into the garden - a patch of sward with a fountain in
the centre — and parterres, now more filled with weeds than flowers.
At the left corner, was a tall wooden summer-house or pavilion ; its
door wide open. “ Oh, that's where Sir Philip used to study many a long
summer's night," said the steward.
“What! in that damp pavilion ?”
“It was a pretty place enough then, sir; but it is very old. They say
as old as the room you have just left.”
“Indeed, I must look at it then.” - The walls of this summer-house had
once been painted in the arabesques of the Rennaissance period; but the
figures now were scarcely traceable. The wood-work had started in
some places, and the sunbeams stole through the chinks and played on
the floor, which was formed from old tiles quaintly tesselated and in tri-
; angular patterns, similar to those I had remarked in the chimney-piece.
The room in the pavilion was large, furnished with old worm-eaten tables
and settles.
" It was not only here that Sir Philip studied, but sometimes in the
room above,” said the steward.
“How do you get to the room above? Oh, I see; a staircase in the
angle."
I ascended the stairs with some caution, for they were crooked and
decayed; and on entering the room above, comprehended at once why
Sir Philip had favored it.
The cornice of the ceiling rested on pilasters, within which the compart-
ments were formed into open, unclosed arches, surrounded by a railed
balcony. Through these arches, on three sides of the room, the eye com-
manded a magnificent extent of prospect. On the fourth side the view
was bounded by the mausoleum. In this room was a large telescope, and
on stepping into the balcony, I saw that a winding stair mounted


112
A STRANGE STORY.
thence to a platform on the top of the pavilion - perhaps once used as
an observatory by Forman himself.
“ The gentleman who was here to-day was very much pleased with this
look-out, sir,” said the housekeeper.
“Who would not be ?” “I suppose Sir Philip has a taste for astron-
omy.
"I dare say, sir,” said the steward, looking grave; "he likes most out-
of-the-way things."
The position of the sun now warned me that my time pressed, and that I
should have to ride fast to reach my new patient at the hour appointed. I
therefore hastened back to my horse, and spurred on, wondering whether
in that chain of association which so subtly links our pursuits in manhood
to our impressions in childhood, it was the Latin inscription on the chim-
ney-piece that had originally biased Sir Philip Derval's literary taste
toward the mystic jargon of the books at which I had contemptuously
glanced.
CHAPTER XXIX.
I did not see Margrave the following day, but the next morning, a
little after sunrise, he walked into my study, according to his ordinary
habit.
“ So you know something about Sir Philip Derval ?” said I. “What
sort of a man is he?”
“ Hateful!” cried Margrave; and then checking himself, burst out into
his merry laugh. “ Just like my exaggerations! I am not acquainted
with any thing to his prejudice. I came across his track once or twice in
the East. Travellers are always apt to be jealous of each other." '
. “You are a strange compound of cynicism and credulity. But I
should have fancied that you and Sir Philip would have been congenial.
spirits, when I found among his favorite books Van Helmont and Para-
celsus. Perhaps you, too, study Swedenborg, or, worse, still, Ptolemy
and Lilly ? "
“ Astrologers ? No! They deal with the future! I live for the day,
only I wish the day never had a morrow!” .
“ Have you not, then, that vague desire for the something beyond ;
that not unhappy, but grand discontent with the limits of the immediate
Present, from which Man takes his passion for improvement and progress,
and from which some sentimental philosophers have deduced an argument
in favor of his destined immortality ? "


A STRANGE STORY,
113
"Eh!” said Margrave, with as vacant a stare as that of a peasant
whom one has addressed in Hebrew. “What farrago of words is this?
I do not comprehend you." .
“ With your natural abilities,” I asked, with interest, “ do you never
feel a desire for fame?”
“ Fame! Certainly not. I cannot even understand it !”
"Well, then, would you have no pleasure in the thought that you had
rendered a service to humanity ?”
Margrave looked bewildered. After a moment's pause he took from
the table a piece of bread that chanced to be there, opened the window,
and threw the crumbs into the lane. The sparrows gathered round the
crumbs.
“Now," said Margrave, “ the sparrows come to that dull pavement for
the bread that recruits their lives in this world ; do you believe that one
sparrow would be silly enough to fly to a house-top for the sake of some
benefit to other sparrows, or to be chirruped about after he was dead ?
I care for science as the sparrow cares for bread; it may help me to
something good for my own life, and as for fame and humanity, I care for
them as a sparrow cares for the general interest and posthumous approba-
tion of sparrows !”
“ Margrave! there is one thing in you that perplexes me more than all
else — human puzzle-as you are in your many eccentricities and self-
contradictions.”
“ What is that one thing in me most perplexing ?”
“ This; that in your enjoyment of nature you have all the freshness of
a child, but when you speak of man and his objects in the world, you talk
in the vein of some worn-out and hoary cynic. At such times, were I to
close my eyes, I should say to myself, 'What weary old man is venting
his spleen against the ambition which has failed, and the love which has
forsaken him ? " Outwardly the very personation of youth, and revelling
like a butterfly in the warmth of the sun and the tints of the herbage,
why have you none of the golden passions of the young ? their bright
dreams of some impossible love -- their sublime enthusiasm for some un-
attainable glory? The sentiment you have just clothed in your parable
of the sparrows is too mean and too gloomy to be genuine at your age.
Misanthropy is among the dismal fallacies of graybeards. No man, till
man's energies leave him, can divorce himself from the bonds of our
social kind.”
“Our kind — your kind, possibly! But I —” He swept his hand
over his brow, and resumed, in strange, absent, and wistful accents : “I
wonder what it is that is wanting here, and of which at moments I have
a dim reminiscence.” Again he paused, and gazing on me, said, with
10*


114
A STRANGE STORY.
more appearance of friendly interest than I had ever before remarked on
his countenance, “ You are not looking well. Despite your great physi-
cal strength, you suffer like your own sickly patients.”
“ True! I suffer at this moment, but not from bodily pain.”
" You have some cause of mental disquietude.”
“ Who in this world has not?”
"I never have."
“Because you own you have never loved ; and certainly you never
seem to care for any one but yourself; and in yourself you find an un-
broken sunny holiday - high spirits, youth, health, beauty, wealth.
Happy boy!”
At that moment my heart was heavy within me.
Margrave resumed:
“ Among the secrets which your knowledge places at the command of
your art, what would you give for one which would enable you to defy
and deride a rival where you place your affections, which could lock to
yourself and imperiously control the will of the being whom you desire
to fascinate, by an influence paramount, transcendent ? ”
“Love has that secret,” said I," and love alone.”
“A power stronger than love can suspend, can change, love itself.
But if love be the object or dream of your life, love is the rosy associate
of youth and beauty. Beauty soon fades, youth soon departs. What if
in nature were the means by which beauty and youth can be fixed into
blooming duration - means that can arrest the course, nay, repair the
effects, of time on the elements that make up the human frame !"
“Silly boy! Have the Rosicrucians bequeathed to you a prescription
for the elixir of life ?"
“If I had the prescription I should not ask your aid to discover its
ingredients.”
“And is it on the hope of that notable discovery you have studied
chemistry, electricity, and magnetism? Again I say, Silly boy!”
Margrave did not hèed my reply. His face was overcast, gloomy,
troubled.
“ That the vital principle is a gas,” said he, abruptly, “I am fully con-
vinced. Can that gas be the one which combines caloric with oxygen?”
“ Phosoxygen? Sir Humphrey Davy demonstrates that gas not to be,
as Lavoisier supposed, caloric, but light, combined with oxygen, and he
suggests, not indeed that it is the vital principle itself, but the pabulum
of life to organic beings." *
"Does he ?” said Margrave, his face clearing up. “Possibly, possibly
* See Sir Humphrey Davy on Heat, Light, and the Combinations of Light.


A STRANGE STORY.
115
then, here we approach the great secret of secrets. Look you, Allen Fen-
wick, I promise to secure to you unfailing security from all the jealous
fears that now torture your heart; if you care for that fame which to me
is not worth the scent of a flower, the balm of a breeze. I will impart to
you. a knowledge which, in the hands of ambition, would dwarf into com-
monplace the boasted wonders of recognized science. I will do all this,
if, in return, but for one month you will give yourself up to my guidance
in whatever experiments I ask, no matter how wild they may seem to
you.”
“ My dear Margrave, I reject your bribes as I would reject the moon
and the stars which a child might offer to me in exchange for a toy. But I
may give the child its toy for nothing, and I may test your experiments
for nothing some day when I have leisure." ;
I did not hear Margrave's answer, for at that moment my servant en-
tered with letters. Lilian's hand! Tremblingly, breathlessly, I broke
the seal. Such a loving, bright, happy letter; so sweet in its gentle chid-
ing of my wrongful fears. It was implied rather than said that Ashleigh
Sumner had proposed, and been refused. He had now left the house. Lil-
ian and her mother were coming back; in a few days we should meet. In
this letter were inclosed a few lines from Mrs. Ashleigh. She was more ex-
plicit as to my rival than Lilian had been. If no allusion to his attentions
had been made to me before, it was from delicate consideration for myself.
Mrs. Ashleigh said that “the young man had heard from — of our
engagement, and — disbelieved it;” but, as Mrs. Poyntz had so shrewdly
predicted, hurried at once to the avowal of his own attachment, and the
offer of his own hand. On Lilian's refusal his pride had been deeply morti-
fied. He had gone away manifestly in more anger than sorrow. “ Lady
Delafield, dear Margaret Poyntz's aunt, had been most kind in trying to
soothe Lady Haughton's disappointment, which was rudely expressed — SO
rudely,” added Mrs. Ashleigh, “ that it gives us an excuse to leave sooner
than had been proposed — which I am very glad of. Lady Delafield feels
much for Mr. Sumner; has invited him to visit her at a place she has
near Worthing: she leaves to-morrow in order to receive him ; promises
to reconcile him to our rejection, which, as he was my poor Gilbert's heir,
and was very friendly at first, would be a great relief to my mind. Lilian
is well, and so happy at the thoughts of coming back.”
When I lifted my eyes from these letters I was as a new man, and the
earth seemed a new earth. I felt as if I had realized Margrave's idle
dreams - as if youth could never fade, love could never grow cold.
“You care for no secrets of mine at this moment,” said Margrave,
abruptly.
“ Secrets," I murmured; "none now are worth knowing. I am loved
- I am loved !”


116
A STRANGE STORY.
“ I bide my time,” said Margrave; and as my eyes met his, I saw there
a look I had never seen in those eyes before — sinister, wrathful, menac-
ing. He turned away, went out through the sash door of the study; and
as he passed toward the fields under the luxuriant chestnut-trees, I heard
his musical barbaric chant - the song by which the serpent-charmer
charms the serpent; - sweet, so sweet - the very birds on the boughs
hushed their carol as if to listen.“
CHAPTER XXX.
I CALLED that day on Mrs. Poyntz, and communicated to her the
prospect of the glad news I had received.
She was still at work on the everlasting knitting, her firm fingers link-
ing mesh into mesh as she listened; and when I had done, she laid her
skein deliberately down, and said, in her favorite characteristic formula,
“ So at last ! — that is settled !”
She rose and paced the room as men are apt to do in reflection — women
rarely need such movement to aid their thoughts — her eyes were fixed
on the floor, and one hand was lightly pressed on the palm of the other,
the gesture of a musing reasoner who is approaching the close of a diffi-
cult calculation.
At length she paused fronting me, and said, drily,
“ Accept my congratulations — life smiles on you now - guard that
smile, and when we meet next may we be even firmer friends than we
are now !”
“When we meet next — that will be to-night — you surely go to the
mayor's great ball. All the Hill descends to Low Town to-night.”
“No; we are obliged to leave L- this afternoon - in less than two
hours we shall be gone — a family engagement. We may be weeks
away; you will excuse me, then, if I take leave of you so unceremo
niously. Stay: a motherly word of caution. That friend of yours, Mr.
Margrave! Moderate your intimacy with him, and especially after you
are married. There is in that stranger, of whom so little is known, a
something which I cannot comprehend — a something that captivates,
and yet revolts. I find him disturbing my thoughts, perplexing my con-
jectures, haunting my fancies — I, plain woman of the world! Lilian is
imaginative: beware of her imagination, even when sure of her heart.
Beware of Margrave. The sooner he quits L , the better, believe
me, for your peace of mind. Adieu, I must prepare for our journey."


. A STRANGE STORY.
117
“ That woman," muttered I, on quitting her house, “ seems to have
some strange spite against my poor Lilian, ever seeking to rouse my own
distrust of that exquisite nature which has just given me such proof of its
truth. And yet — and yet - is that woman so 'wrong here? True !
Margrave with his wild notions, his strange beauty!- true - true - he
might dangerously encourage that turn for the mystic and visionary which
distresses me in Lilian. Lilian should not know him. How induce him
to leave L- ? Ah— those experiments on which he asks my assist-
ance! I might commence them when he comes again, and then invent
some reason to send him for completer tests to the famous chemists of
Paris or Berlin.”
CHAPTER XXXI.
It is the night of the mayor's ball! The guests are assembling fast;
county families twelve miles round have been invited, as well as the prin-
cipal families of the town. All, before proceeding to the room set apart
for the dance, moved in procession through the museum - homage to
science before pleasure!
The building was brilliantly lighted, and the effect was striking, per-
haps because singular and grotesque. There, amidst stands of flowers
and evergreens, lit up with colored lamps, were grouped the dead repre-
sentatives of races all inferior — some deadly - to man. The fancy of
the ladies had been permitted to decorate and arrange these types of the
animal world. The tiger glared with glass eyes from amidst artificial
reeds and herbage, as from his native jungle; the grizzly white bear
peered from a mimic iceberg. There, in front, stood the sage elephant,
facing a hideous hippopotamus; while an anaconda twined its long spire
· round the stem of some tropical tree in zinc. In glass cases, brought
into full light by festooned lamps, were dread specimens of the reptile
race — scorpion and vampire, and cobra capella, with insects of gorgeous
hues, not a few of them with venomed stings.
But the chief boast of the collection was in the varieties of the genus
simia — baboons and apes, chimpanzees, with their human visage, mock-
eries of man, from the dwarf monkeys perched on boughs lopped from
the mayor's shrubberies, to the formidable orang-outang leaning on his
huge club. .
Every one expressed to the mayor delight, and to each other antipathy,
for this unwonted and somewhat ghastly, though instructive addition to
the revels of a ball-room.


118
A STRANGE STORY.
Margrave, of course, was there, and seemingly quite at home, gliding
from group to group of gayly-dressed ladies, and brilliant with a childish
eagerness to play off the showman. Many of these grim fellow-creatures
he declared he had seen, played, or fought with. He had something
true or false to say about each. In his high spirits he contrived to make
the tiger move, and imitated the hiss of the terrible anaconda. All that
he did had its grace, its charm; and the buzz of admiration and the flat-
tering glances of ladies' eyes followed him wherever he moved.
However, there was a general feeling of relief when the mayor led the
way from the museum into the ball-room. In provincial parties guests
arrive pretty much within the same hour, and so few who had once paid
their respects to the apes and serpents, the hippopotamus and the tiger,
were disposed to repeat the visit, that long before eleven o'clock the
museum was as free from the intrusion of human life as the wilderness in
which its dead occupants had been born.
I had gone my round through the rooms, and, little disposed to be so-
cial, had crept into the retreat of a window-niche, pleased to think myself
screened by its draperies -- not that I was melancholy, far from it — for
the letter I had received that morning from Lilian had raised my whole
being into a sovereignty of happiness high beyond the reach of the
young pleasure-hunters whose voices and laughter blended with that vul-
gar music.
To read her letter again I had stolen to my nook — and now, sure
that none saw me kiss it, I replaced it in my bosom. I looked through
the parted curtain ; the room was comparatively empty; but there,
through the open folding-doors, I saw the gay crowd gathered round the
dancers; and there again, at right angles, a vista along the corridor af-
forded a glimpse of the great elephant in the deserted museum.
Presently I heard, close beside me, my host's voice...
“ Here's a cool corner, a pleasant sofa, you can have it all to yourself;
what an honor to receive you under my roof, and on this interesting oc-
casion! Yes, as you say, great changes are here since you left us. So
ciety is much improved. I must look about and find some persons to
introduce to you. Clever! oh, I know your tastes. We have a wonder-
ful man--a new doctor. Carries all before him-a very high character,
too - good old family - greatly looked up to, even apart from his profes-
sion. Dogmatic a little-a Sir Oracle - Lets no dog bark;' you
remember the quotation - Shakspeare. Where on earth is he? My
dear Sir Philip, I am sure you would enjoy his conversation."
Sir Philip! Could it be Sir Philip Derval to whom the mayor was
giving a flattering, yet scarcely propitiatory description of myself? Curi-
osity combined with a sense of propriety in not keeping myself an unsus-


A STRANGE STORY.
119
pected listener: I emerged from the curtain, but silently, and reached
the centre of the room before the mayor perceived me. He then came
up to me eagerly, linked his arm in mine, and leading me to a gentle-
man seated on a sofa close by the window I had quitted, said:
“ Doctor, I must present you to Sir Philip Derval, just returned to
England, and not six hours in L- If you would like to see the
museum again, Sir Philip, the doctor, I'm sure, will accompany you.”
“ No, I thank you ; it is painful to me at present to see, even under
your roof, the collection which my poor dear friend, Dr. Lloyd, was so
proudly beginning to form when I left these parts.”
“Ay, Sir Philip - Dr. Lloyd was a worthy man in his way, but sadly
duped in his latter years: took to mesmerism, only think. But our young
doctor here showed him up, I can tell you."
Sir Philip, who had acknowledged my first introduction to his acquaint-
ance by the quiet courtesy with which a well-bred man goes through a
ceremony which custom enables him to endure with equal ease and indif-
ference, now evinced by a slight change of manner how little the mayor's
reference to my dispute with Dr. Lloyd advanced me in his good opin-
ion. He turned away with a bow more formal than his first one, and
said, calmly,
"I regret to hear that a man so simple-minded and so sensitive as Dr.
Lloyd should have provoked an encounter in which I can well conceive
him to have been worsted. With your leave, Mr. Mayor, I will look
into your ball-room. I may perhaps find there some old acquaintances.”
He walked toward the dancers, and the mayor, linking his arm in mine,
followed close behind, saying, in his loud, hearty tones,
“Come along, you too, Dr. Fenwick, my girls are here; you have not
spoken to them yet.”
Sir Philip who was then half-way across the room turned round
abruptly, and looking me full in the face, said,
“Fenwick, is your name Fenwick ? - Allen Fenwick ?"
" That is my name, Sir Philip.”
“ Then permit me to shake you by the hand; you are no stranger, and
no mere acquaintance to me. Mr. Mayor we will look into your ball-
room later; do not let us keep you now from your other guests.”
The mayor, not in the least offended by being thus summarily dis-
missed, smiled, walked on, and was soon lost among the crowd.
Sir Philip, still retaining my hand, reseated himself on the sofa, and I
took my place by his side. ' The room was still deserted : now and then
a straggler from the baH-room looked in for a moment, and then saun-
tered back to the central place of attraction.


120
A STRANGE STORY.
“I am trying to guess," said I, “ how my name should be known to you.
Possibly you may, in some visit to -the Lakes, have known my father ?”
“ No; I know none of your name but yourself — if, indeed, as I doubt
not, you are the Allen Fenwick to whom I owe no small obligation.
You were a medical student at Edinburgh in the year * * *?"
“Yes."
“So! At that time there was also at Edinburgh a young man, named
Richard Straban. He lodged in a fourth flat in the old town!”
" I remember him very well.”
" And you remember, also, that a fire broke out at night in the house
in which he lodged ; that when it was discovered there seemed no hope
of saving him. The flames wrapped the lower part of the house ; the
staircase had given way. A boy, scarcely so old as himself, was the only
human being in the crowd who dared to scale the ladder, that even then
scarcely reached the windows from which the smoke rolled in volumes ;
that boy penetrated into the room — found the inmate almost insensible —
rallied, supported, dragged him to the window - got him on the ladder-
saved his life then — and his life later, by nursing with a woman's tender-
ness, through the fever caused by terror and excitement, the fellow-
creature he had rescued by a man's daring. The name of that gallant
student was Allen Fenwick, and Richard Strahan is my nearest living
relation. Are we friends now?”
I answered confusedly. I had almost forgotten the circumstance referred
to. Richard Strahan had not been one of my more intimate companions,
and I had never seen nor heard of him since leaving college. I inquired
what had become of him.
“ He is at the Scotch bar,” said Sir Philip, “ and of course without
practice. I understand that he has fair average abilities, but no applica-
tion. If I am rightly informed he is, however, a thoroughly honorable,
upright man, and of an affectionate and grateful disposition.”
“I can answer for all you have said in his praise. He had the qualities
you name too deeply rooted in youth to have lost them now."
Sir Philip remained for some moments in a musing silence. And I
took advantage of that silence to examine him with more minute atten-
tion than I had done before, much as the first sight of him had struck me.
He was somewhat below the common height. So delicately formed
that you might call him rather fragile than slight. But in his carriage
and air there was a remarkable dignity. His countenance was at direct
variance with his figure. For as delicacy was the attribute of the last, so
power was unmistakably the characteristic of the first. He looked full
the age his steward had ascribed to him - about forty-eight; at a super-


A STRANGE STORY.
121
ficial glance, more ; for his hair was prematurely white — not gray, but
white as snow. But his eyebrows were still jet black, and his eyes,
equally dark, were serenely bright. His forehead was magnificent; lofty,
and spacious, and with only one slight wrinkle between the brows. His
complexion was sunburned, showing no sign of weak health. The out-
line of his lips was that which I have often remarked in men accustomed
to great dangers, and contracting in such dangers the habit of self-reliance;
firm and quiet, compressed without an effort. And the power of this
very noble countenance was not intimidating, not aggressive; it was
mild - it was benignant. A man oppressed by some formidable tyranny,
and despairing to find a protector, would, on seeing that face, have said,
“ Here is one who can protect me, and who will !” .
Sir Philip was the first to break the silence.
“ I have so many relations scattered over England that fortunately not
one of them can venture to calculate on my property 'if I die childless,
and therefore not one of them can feel himself injured when a few weeks
hence he shall read in the newspapers that Sir Philip Derval is married.
But for Richard Strahan, at least, though I never saw him, I must do
something before the newspapers make that announcement. His sister
was very dear to me.”
“ Your neighbors, Sir Philip, will rejoice at your marriage, since, I
presume, it may induce you to settle among them at Derval Court.”
“At Derval Court ! No! I shall not settle there.” Again he paused
a moment or so, and then went on. “I have long lived a wandering life,
and in it learned much that the wisdom of cities cannot teach. I return
to my native land with a profound conviction that the happiest life is the
life most in common with all. I have gone out of my way to do what I
deemed good, and to avert or mitigate what appeared to me evil. I
pause now and ask myself, whether the most virtuous existence be not
that in which virtue flows spontaneously from the springs of quiet, every-
day action; when a man does good without restlessly seeking it, does
good unconsciously, simply because he is good and he lives? Better, per-
haps, for me if I had thought so long ago! And now I come back to
England with the intention of marrying, late in life though it be, and with
such hopes of happiness as any matter-of-fact man may form. But my
home will not be at Derval Court. I shall reside either in London or its
immediate neighborhood, and seek to gather round me.minds by which I
can correct, if I cannot confide, the knowledge I myself have acquired.”
“ Nay, if, as I have accidentally heard, you are fond of scientific pur-
suits, I cannot wonder that after so long an absence from England, you
should feel interest in learning what new discoveries have been made,
what new ideas are unfolding the germs of discoveries yet to be. But
11


122
A STRANGE STORY.
pardon me if, in answer to your concluding remark, I venture to say that
no man can hope to correct any error in his own knowledge, unless he
has the courage to confide the error to those who can correct. La Place
has said, “ Tout se tient dans la chaîne immense des vérités ;' and the mis-
take we make in some science we have specially cultivated is often only
to be seen by the light of a separate science as specially cultivated by
another. Thus, in the investigation of truth, frank exposition to conge-
nial minds is essential to the earnest seeker.”
“I am pleased with what you say," said Sir Philip, " and I shall be still
more pleased to find in you the very confidant I require. But what was
your controversy with my old friend Dr. Lloyd ? ' Do I understand our
host rightly, that it related to what in Europe has of late days obtained
the name of mesmerism?”.
I had conteived a strong desire to conciliate the good opinion of a man
who had treated me with so singular and so familiar a kindness, and it
was sincerely that I expressed my regret at the acerbity with which I had
assailed Dr. Lloyd ; but of his theories and pretensions I could not dis-
guise my contempt. I enlarged on the extravagant fallacies involved in
a fabulous 6 clairvoyance,” which always failed when put to plain test by
sober-minded examiners. I did not deny the effects of imagination on
certain nervous constitutions.“ Mesmerism could cure nobody; credu-
lity could cure many. There was the well-known story of the old woman
tried as a witch; she cured agues by a charm; she owned the impeach-
ment, and was ready to endure gibbet or stake for the truth of her talis-
man - more than a mesmerist would for the truth of his passes ! And
the charm was a scroll of gibberish sewn in an old bag and given to the
woman in a freak by the judge himself when a young scamp on the cir-
cuit. But the charm cured ? Certainly; just as mesmerism cures. Fools
believed in it. Faith, that moves mountains, may well cure agues.”
Thus I ran on, supporting my views with anecdotes and facts, to which
Sir Philip listened with placid gravity.
When I had come to an end, he said, “ Of mesmerism, as practised in
Europe, I know nothing, except by report. I can well understand, that
medical men may hesitate to admit it among the legitimate resources of or-
thodox pathology; because, as I gather from what you and others say of
its practice, it must, at the best, be far too uncertain in its application to
satisfy the requirements of science. Yet an examination of its pretensions
may enable you to perceive the truth that lies hid in the powers ascribed
to witchcraft; benevolence is but a weak agency compared to malignity;
magnetism perverted to evil may solve half the riddles of sorcery. On
this, however, I say no more at present. But as to that which you appear
to reject as the most preposterous and incredible pretension of the mes.


A STRANGE STORY.
123
-
merists, and which you designate by the word “ clairvoyance,' it is clear
to me that you have never yourself witnessed even those very imperfect
exhibitions which you decide at once to be imposture. I say imperfect,
because it is only a limited number of persons whom the eye or the passes
of the mesmerist can affect, and by such means, unaided by other means,
it is rarely indeed that the magnetic sleep advances beyond the first vague,
shadowy twilight dawn of that condition to which only in its fuller devel-
opments I would apply the name of trance.' But still trance is as essen-
tial a condition of being as sleep or as waking, having privileges peculiar
to itself. By means within the range of the science that explores its na-
ture and its laws, trance, unlike the clairvoyance you describe, is produci-
ble in every human being, however unimpressible to mere mesmerism.”
Producible in every human being! Pardon me if I say, that I will
give any enchanter his own terms who will produce that effect upon me.”
“Will you? You consent to have the experiment tried on your-
self ? »
“Consent most readily."
“I will remember that promise. But to return to the subject. By the
word trance I do not mean exclusively the spiritual trance of the Alex-
andrian Platonists. There is one kind of trance — that to which all hu-
man beings are susceptible - in which the soul has no share ; for of this
kind of trance, and it was of this I spoke, some of the inferior animals are
susceptible ; and, therefore, trance is no more a proof of soul than is the
clairvoyance of the mesmerists, or the dream of our ordinary sleep, which
last has been called a proof of soul, though any man who has kept a dog
must have observed that dogs dream as vividly as we do. But in this
trance there is an extraordinary cerebral activity — a projectile force
given to the mind — distinct from the soul — by which it sends forth its
own emanations to a distance in spite of material obstacles, just as a flower,
in an altered condition of atmosphere, sends forth the particles of its aro-
ma. This should not surprise you. Your thought travels over land and
sea in your waking state; thought, too, can travel in trance, and in trance
may acquire an intensified force. There is, however, another kind of
trance which is truly called spiritual, a trance much more rare, and in
which the soul entirely supersedes the mere action of the mind.”
“Stay," said I, " you speak of the soul as something distinct from the
mind. What the soul may be I cannot pretend to conjecture. But I
cannot separate it from the intelligence!”.
“Can you not ? A blow on the brain can destroy the intelligence; do
you think it can destroy the soul? It is recorded of Newton, that, in the
decline of his life, his mind had so worn out its functions that his own
theorems had become to him unintellible. Can you suppose that Newton's


124
A STRANGE STORY.
soul was as worn out as his mind? If you cannot distinguish mind from
soul, I know not by what rational inductions you arrive at the conclusion
that the soul is imperishable.”
I remained silent. Sir Philip fixed on me his dark eyes quietly and
searchingly, and after a short pause said:
“ Almost every known body in nature is susceptible of three several
states of existence — the solid, the liquid, the æriform. These conditions
depend on the quantity of heat they contain. The same object at one
moment may be liquid, at the next moment solid, at the next æriform.
The water that flows before your gaze may stop consolidated into ice, or
ascend into air as vapor. Thus is man susceptible of three states of ex-
istence — the animal, the mental, the spiritual - and according as he is
brought into relation or affinity with that occult agency of the whole nat-
ural world, which we familiarly call HEAT, and which no science has
yet explained; which no scale can weigh, and no eye discern; one or the
other of these three states of being prevails or is subjected.”
I still continued silent, for I was unwilling discourteously to say to a
stranger, so much older than myself, that he seemed to me to reverse all
the maxims of the philosophy to which he made pretence, in founding
speculations audacious and abstruse upon unanalogous comparisons that
would have been fantastic even in a poet. And Sir Philip, after another
pause, resumed with a half smile:
“ After what I have said, it will perhaps not very much surprise you
when I add that but for my belief in the powers I ascribe to trance, we
should not be known to each other at this moment."
“How?-pray explain.”
“ Certain circumstances, which I trust to relate to you in detail here-
after, have impoșed on me the duty to discover, and to bring human laws
to bear upon, a creature armed with terrible powers of evil. This mon-
ster - for, without metaphor, monster it is, not man like ourselves - bas,
by arts superior to those of ordinary fugitives, however dextrous in con-
cealment, hitherto for years eluded my research. Through the trance of
an Arab child, who in her waking state never heard of his existence, I
have learned that this being is in England is in L . I am here to en-
counter him. I expect to do so this very night, and under this very roof."
“ Sir Philip!”
“ And if you wonder, as well you may, why I have been talking to you
with this startling unreserve, know that this same Arab child, on whom
I thus implicitly rely, informs me that your life is mixed up with that of
the being I seek to unmask and disarm - to be destroyed by his arts or
his agents — or to combine in the causes by which the destroyer himself
shall be brought to destruction.”


A STRANGE STORY.
125
“ My life !— your Arab child named me, Allen Fenwick?”
“My Arab child told me that the person in whom I should thus natur-
ally seek an ally was he who had saved the life of the man whom I then
meant for my heir, if I died unmarried and childless. She told me that
I should not be many hours in this town, which she described minutely,
before you would be made known to me. She described this house, with
yonder lights and yon dancers. In her trance she saw us sitting together,
as now we sit. I accepted the invitation of our host when he suddenly
accosted me on entering the town, confident that I should meet you here,
without even asking whether a person of your name were a resident in
the place; and now you know why I have so freely unbosomed myself of
much that might well make you, a physician, doubt the soundness of my
understanding. The same infant, whose vision has been realized up to
this moment, has warned me also that I am here at great peril. What
that peril may be I have declined to learn, as I have ever declined to ask
from the future what affects only my own life on this earth. That life I
regard with supreme indifference, conscious that I have only to discharge,
while it lasts, the duties for which it is imposed on me to the best of my
imperfect power; and aware that minds the strongest and souls the pur-
est may fall into the sloth habitual to predestinarians if they-suffer the
actions due to the present hour to be awed and paralyzed by some grim
shadow on the future! It is only where, irrespectively of aught that can
menace myself, a-light not struck out of my own reason can guide me to
disarm evil or minister to good, that I feel privileged to avail myself of
those mirrors on which things, near and far, reflect themselves calm and
distinct as the banks and the mountain peaks are reflected in the glass of
a lake. Here, then, under this roof, and by your side, I shall behold him
who- Lo! the moment has come -I behold him now !”
As he spoke these last words Sir Philip had risen, and, startled by his
action and voice, I involuntarily rose too.
Resting one hand on my shoulder, he pointed with the other toward
the threshold of the ball-room. There, the prominent figure of a gay
group- the sole male amidst a fluttering circle of silks and lawn, of flow-
ery wreaths, of female loveliness, and female frippery - stood the radi-
ant image of Margrave. His eyes were not turned toward us. He was
looking down, and his light laugh came soft, yet ringing, through the gen-
eral murmur.
I turned my astonished gaze back to Sir Philip - yes, unmistakably it
was on Margrave that his look was fixed.
Impossible to associate crime with the image of that fair youth! Eccen-
tric notions — fantastic speculations — vivacious egotism - defective be-
nevolence - yes. But crime! No-- impossible.
11*


126
A STRANGE STORY.
“Impossible!” I said, aloud. As I spoke the group had moved on.
Margrave was no longer in sight. At the same moment some other guests
came from the ball-room and seated themselves near us.
Sir Philip looked round, and observing the deserted museum at the end
of the corridor, drew me into it.
When we were alone he said in a voice quick and low, but decided:
“ It is of importance that I should convince you at once of the nature
of that prodigy which is more hostile to mankind than the wolf is to the
sheepfold. No words of mine could at present suffice to clear your sight
from the deception which cheats it. I must enable you to judge for your-
self. It must be now, and here. He will learn this night, if he has not
learned already, that I am in the town. Dim and confused though his
memories of myself may be, they are memories still; and he well knows
what cause he has to dread me. I must put another in possession of his
secret. Another, and at once. For all his arts will be brought to bear
against me, and I cannot foretell its issue. Go, then ; enter that giddy
crowd - select that seeming young man - bring him hither. Take care
only not to mention my name; and when here, turn the key in the door,
so as to prevent interruption — five minutes will suffice."
“ Am I sure that I guess whom you mean? The young lighted-hearted
man, known in this place under the name of Margrave? The young
man with the radiant eyes, and the curls of a Grecian statue ?”
“The same; him whom I pointed out; quick, bring him hither." .
My curiosity was too much roused to disobey. Had I conceived that
Margrave, in the heat of youth, had committed some offence which placed
him in danger of the law and in the power of Sir Philip Derval, 1 pos-
sessed enough of the old borderers' black-mail loyalty to have given to
the man whose hand I had familiarly clasped a hint and a help to escape.
But all Sir Philip's talk had been so out of the reach of common sense,
that I rather expected to see him confounded by some egregious illusion
than Margrave exposed to any well-grounded accusation. All, then, that
I felt as I walked into the ball-room and approached Margrave, was that
curiosity which, I think, any one of my readers will acknowledge that, in
my position, he himself would have felt.
Margrave was standing near the dancers, not joining them, but talking
with a young couple in the ring. I drew him aside.
“Come with me for a few minutes into the museum ; I wish to talk to
you.”
“ What about ? 'an experiment ?”
“ Yes, an experiment.”
“ Then I am at your sevice.”
In a minute more he had followed me into the desolate, dead museum.
I looked round but did not see Sir Philip.


A STRANGE STORY.
127
CHAPTER XXXII.
MARGRAVE threw himself on a seat just under the great anaconda ; Į
closed and locked the door. When I had done so, my eye fell on the
young man's face, and I was surprised to see that it had lost its color;
that it showed great anxiety, great distress; that his hands were visibly
trembling.
" What is this?” he said, in feeble tones, and raising himself half from
his seat as if with great effort. “Help me up --- come away! Something
in this room is hostile to me - hostile, overpowering! What can it be ?”
“ Truth and my presence,"answered a stern, low voice; and Sir Philip
Derval, whose slight form the huge bulk of the dead elephant had before
obscured from my view, came suddenly out from the shadow into the full
rays of the lamps which lit up, as if for Man's revel, that mocking tomb
for the playmates of nature which he enslaves for his service or, slays for
his sport. As Sir Philip spoke and advanced, Margrave sank back into
his seat, shrinking, collapsing, nerveless ; terror the most abject expressed
in his staring eyes and parted lips. On the other hand, the simple dig-
nity of Sir Philip Derval's bearing, and the mild power of his countenance,
were alike inconceivably heightened. A change had come over the
whole man, the more impressive because wholly undefinable.
Halting opposite Margrave, he uttered some words in a language un-
known to me, and stretched one hand over the young man's head. Mar-
grave at once became stiff and rigid, as if turned to stone. Sir Philip
said to me,
“ Place one of those lamps on the floor — there, by his feet.”
I took down one of the colored lamps from the mimic tree round which
the huge anaconda coiled its spires, and placed it as I was told.
“ Take the seat opposite to him, and watch.”
I obeyed.
Meanwhile Sir Philip had drawn from his breast-pocket a small steel
casket, and I observed, as he opened it, that the interior was subdivided
into several compartments, each with its separate lid; from one of these
he took and sprinkled over the flame of the lamp a few grains of a powder,
colorless and sparkling as diamond dust; in a second or so a delicate per-
fume, wholly unfamiliar to my sense, rose from the lamp.
“You would test the condition of trance - test it, and in the spirit.”
And as he spoke his hand rested lightly on my head. Hitherto, amidst
a surprise not unmixed with awe, I had preserved a certain defiance, a
certain distrust. I had been, as it were, on my guard.


128
. A STRANGE STORY.
But as those words were spoken, as that hand rested on my head, as
that perfume arose from the lamp, all power of will deserted me. My
first sensation was that of passive subjugation, but soon I was aware of a
strange intoxicating effect from the odor of the lamp, round which there
now played a dazzling vapor. The room swam before me. Like a man
oppressed by a nightmare, I tried to move, to cry out — feeling that to do
so would suffice to burst the thrall that bound me; in vain.
A time that seemed to me inexorably long, but which, as I found after-
ward, could only have occupied a few seconds, elapsed in this preliminary
state, which, however powerless, was not without a vague luxurious sense
of delight. And then suddenly came pain — pain, that in rapid grada-
tions passed into a rending agony. Every bone, sinew, nerve, fibre of
the body, seemed as if wrenched' open, and as if some hitherto unconject-
ured Presence in the vital organization were forcing itself to light with all
the pangs of travail. The veins seemed swollen to bursting, the heart
laboring to maintain its action by fierce spasms. I feel in this description
how language fails me. Enough that the anguish I then endured sur-
passed all that I have ever experienced of physical pain. This dreadful
interval subsided as suddenly as it had commenced. I felt as if a some-
thing undefinable by any name had rushed from me, and in that rush that
a struggle was over. I was sensible of the passive bliss which attends the
release from torture, and then there grew on me a wonderful calm, and
in that calm a consciousness of some lofty intelligence immeasurably be-
yond that which human memory gathers from earthly knowledge. I saw
before me the still rigid form of Margrave, and my sight seemed with ease
to penetrate through its covering of flesh and to survey the mechanism
of the whole interior being.
66 View that tenement of clay which now seems so fair, as it was when
last I beheld it, three years ago, in the house of Haroun of Aleppo ! ”
I looked, and gradually, and as shade after shade falls on the moun-
tain-side, while the clouds gather, and the sun vanishes at last, so the form
and face on which I looked changed from exuberant youth into infirm
old age. The discolored wrinkled skin, the bleared dim eye, the flaccid
muscles, the brittle, sapless bones. Nor was the change that of age
alone; the expression of the countenance had passed into gloomy dis-
content, and in every furrow a passion or a vice had sown the seeds of
grief.
And the brain now opened on my sight, with all its labyrinth of cells.
I seemed to have the clew to every winding in the maze.
I saw therein a moral world, charred and ruined, as, in some fable I
have read, the world of the moon is described to be; yet withal it was
a brain of magnificent formation. The powers abused to evil had been


A STRANGE STORY.
129
originally of rare order; imagination, and scope: the energies that dare ;
the faculties that discover. But the moral part of the brain had failed
to dominate the mental. Defective veneration of what is good or great;
cynical disdain of what is right and just; in fine, a great intellect first
misguided, then perverted, and now falling with the decay of the body
into ghastly but imposing ruins. Such was the world of that brain as it
had been three years ago. And still continuing to gaze thereon, I ob-
served three separate emanations of light; the one of a pale red hue, the
second of a pale azure, the third a silvery spark.
The red light, which grew paler and paler as I looked, undulated from
the brain along the arteries, the veins, the nerves. And I murmured to
myself, “ Is this the principle of animal life ?”
The azure light equally permeated the frame, crossing and uniting
with the red, but in a separate and distinct ray, exactly as in the outer
world a ray of light crosses or unites with a ray of heat, though in itself
a separate individual agency. And again I murmured to myself, “ Is
this the principle of intellectual being, directing or influencing that of
animal life; with it, yet not of it?”
But the silvery spark! What was that? Its centre seemed the brain.
But I could fix it to no single organ. Nay, wherever I looked through
the system, it reflected itself as a star reflects itself upon water. And I
observed that while the red light was growing feebler and feebler, and
the azure light was confused, irregular-now obstructed, now hurrying,
now almost lost — the silvery spark was unaltered, undisturbed. So in-
dependent of all which agitated and vexed the frame, that I became
strangely aware that if the heart stopped its action, and the red light
died out, if the brain were paralyzed, that energic mind smitten into idi-
ocy, and the azure light wandering objectless as a meteor wanders over
the morass, — still that silver spark would shine the same, indestructible
by aught that shattered its tabernacle. And I murmured to myself,
“ Can that starry spark speak the presence of the soul ? Does the sil-
ver light shine within creatures to which no life immortal has been prom-
ised by Divine Revelation ?”
Involuntarily I turned my sight toward the dead forms in the motley
collection, and lo, in my trance or my vision, life returned to them all!
To the elephant and the serpent; to the tiger, the vulture, the beetle,
the moth; to the fish and the polypus, and to yon mockery of man in the
giant ape.
I seemed to see each as it lived in its native realm of earth, or of air,
or of water; and the red light played, more or less warm, through the
structure of each, and the azure light, though duller of hue, seemed to
shoot through the red, and communicate to the creatures an intelligence


130
A STRANGE STORY.
far inferior indeed to that of man, but sufficing to conduct the current of
their will, and influence the cunning of their instincts. But in none,
from the elephant to the moth, from the bird in which brain was the
largest to the hybrid in which life seemed to live as in plants -- in none
was visible the starry silver spark. I turned my eyes from the creatures
around, back again to the form cowering under the huge anaconda, and
in terror at the animation which the carcasses took in the awful illusions
of that marvellous trance; for the tiger moved as if scenting blood, and
to the eyes of the serpent the dread fascination seemed slowly return-
ing.
Again I gazed on the starry spark in the form of the man. And I
murmured to myself, “ But if this be the soul, why is it so undisturbed
and undarkened by the sins which have left such trace and such ravage
in the world of the brain ?" And gazing yet more intently on the spark,
I became vaguely aware that it was not the soul, but the halo around the
soul, as the star we see in heaven is not the star itself, but its circle of
rays. And if the light itself was undisturbed and undarkened, it was
because no sins done in the body could annihilate its essence, nor affect
the eternity of its duration. The light was clear within the ruins of its
lodgment, because it might pass away but could not be extinguished.
But the soul itself, in the heart of the light, reflected back on my own
soul within me its ineffable trouble, humiliation, and sorrow; for those
ghastly wrecks of power placed at its sovereign command it was responsi-
ble : and, appalled by its own sublime fate of duration, was about to
carry into eternity the account of its mission in time. Yet it seemed that
while the soul was still there, though so forlorn and so guilty, even the
wrecks around it were majestic. And the soul, whatever sentence it
might merit, was not among the hopelessly lost. For in its remorse and
its shame it might still have retained what could serve for redemption.
And I saw that the mind was storming the soul in some terrible rebel-
lious war - all of thought, of passion, of desire, through which the azure
light poured its restless flow, were surging up round the starry spark, as
in siege. And I could not comprehend the war, nor guess what it was
that the mind demanded the soul to yield. Only the distinction between
the two was made intelligible by their antagonism. And I saw that the
soul, sorely tempted, looked afar for escape from the subjects it had ever
so ill controlled, and who sought to reduce to their vassal the power
which had lost authority as their king. I could feel its terror in the sym-
pathy of my own terror, the keenness of my own supplicating pity. I
knew that it was imploring release from the perils it confessed its want
of strength to encounter. And suddenly the starry spark rose from the
ruins and the tumult around it - rose into space and vanished. And


A STRANGE STORY.
131
where my soul had recognized the presence of soul there was a void.
But the red light burned still, becoming more and more vivid ; and as it
thus repaired and recruited its lustre, the whole animal form which had
been so decrepit grew restored from decay, grew into vigor and youth :
and I saw Margrave as I had seen him in the waking world, the radiant
image of animal life in the beauty of its fairest bloom.
And over this rich vitality and this symmetric mechanism now reigned
only, with the animal life, the mind. The starry light fled and the soul
vanished, still was left visible the mind - mind, by which sensations con-
vey and cumulate ideas, and muscles obey volition; mind, as in those
animals that have more than the elementary instincts – mind as it might
be in men, were men not immortal. As my eyes, in the vision, followed
the azure light, undulating as before through the cells of the brain, and
crossing the red amidst the labyrinth of the nerves, I perceived that the
essence of that azure light had- undergone a change; it had lost that
faculty of continuous and concentrated power by which man improves on
the works of the past, and weaves schemes to be developed in the future.
of remote generations; it had lost all sympathy in the past, because it
had lost all conception of a future beyond the grave; it had lost con-
science, it had lost remorse. The being it informed was no longer ac-
countable through eternity for the employment of time. The azure light
was even more vivid in certain organs useful to the conservation of exist-
ence, as in those organs I had observed it more vivid among some of the
inferior animals than it is in man – secretiveness, destructiveness, and
the ready perception of things immediate to the wants of the day. And
the azure light was brilliant in cerebral cells, where before it had been
dark, such as those which harbor mirthfulness and hope, for there the
light was recruited by the exuberant health of the joyous animal being.
But it was lead-like, or dim, in the great social organs through which
man suborns his own interest to that of his species, and utterly lost in
those through which man is reminded of his duties to the throne of his
Maker.
In that marvellous penetration with which the Vision endowed me, I
perceived that in this mind, though in energy far superior to many,
though retaining, from memories of the former existence, the relics of a
culture wide and in some things profound; though sharpened and quick-
ened into formidable, if desultory, force whenever it schemed or aimed at
the animal self-conservation, which now made its master-impulse or in-
stinct; and though among the reminiscences of its state before its change
were arts which I could not comprehend, but which I felt were dark and
terrible, lending to a will never checked by remorse, arms that no health-
ful philosophy has placed in the arsenal of disciplined genius; though the


132
A STRANGE STORY.
mind in itself had an ally in a body as perfect in strength and elasticity
as man can take from the favor of nature — still, I say, I felt that that.
mind wanted the something, without which men never could found cities,
frame laws, bind together, beautify, exalt the elements of this world, by
creeds that habitually subject them to a reference to another. The ant,
and the bee, and the beaver congregate and construct; but they do not
improve. Man improves because the future impels onward that which is
not found in an ant, the bee, and the beaver — that which was gone from
the being before me.
I shrank appalled into myself, covered my face with my hands, and
groaned aloud : “Have I ever then doubted that the soul is distinct from
mind!”
A hand here again touched my forehead, the light in the lamp was
extinguished, I became insensible, and when I recovered I found myself
back in the room in which I had first conversed with Sir Philip Derval,
and seated, as before, on the sofa by his side.
CHAPTER XXXIII.
My recollections of all which I have just attempted to describe were
distinct and vivid ; except, with respect to time, it seemed to me as if
many hours must have elapsed since I had entered the museum with
Margrave; but the clock on the mantelpiece met my eyes as I turned
them wistfully round the room; and I was indeed amazed to perceive
that five minutes had sufficed for all which it has taken me so long to
narrate, and which in their transit had hurried me through ideas and
emotions so remote from anterior experience.
To my astonishment, now succeeded shame and indignation — shame
that I, who had -scoffed at the possibility of the comparatively.credible
influences of mesmeric action, should have been so helpless a puppet
under the hand of the slight fellow-man beside me, and so morbidly im-
pressed by phantasmagorical illusions; indignation that by some fumes
which had special potency over the brain, I had thus been, as it were,
conjured out of my senses: and, looking full into the calm face at my side,
I said, with a smile to which I sought to convey disdain:
“I congratulate you, Sir Philip Derval, on having learned in your
travels in the East so expert a familiarity with the tricks of its jugglers."
“ The East has a proverb,"answered Sir Philip, quietly," that the jug-


A STRANGE STORY. .
133
gler may learn much from the dervish, but the dervish can learn nothing
from the juggler. You will pardon me, however, for the effect produced
on you for a few minutes, whatever the cause of it may be, since it may
serve to guard your whole life from calamities, to which it might other-
wise have been exposed. And however you may consider that which
you have just experienced to be a mere optical illusion, or the figment of
a brain super-excited by the fumes of a vapor, look within yourself and
tell me if you do not feel an inward and unanswerable conviction that
there is more reason to shun and to fear the creature you left asleep un-
der the dead jaws of the giant serpent, than there would be in the ser-
pent itself could the venom return to its breath ?”
I was silent, for I could not deny that that conviction had come to me.
"Henceforth, when you recover from the confusion or anger which
now disturbs your impressions, you will be prepared to listen to my ex-
planations and my recital, in a spirit far different from that with which
you would have received them before you were subjected to the experi-
ment, which, allow me to remind you, you invited and defied. You will
now, I trust, be fitted to become my confidant and assistant - you will
advise with me, how, for the sake of humanity, we should act together
against the incarnate lie, the anomalous prodigy which glides through the
crowd in the image of joyous beauty. For the present, I quit you. I
have an engagement on worldly affairs, in the town this night. I am
staying at L- , which I shall leave for Derval Court to-morrow even-
ing. Come to me there the day after to-morrow; at any hour that may
suit you the best. Adieu.” :
Here, Sir Philip Derval rose, and left the room. I made no effort to
detain him. My mind was too occupied in striving to recompose itself,
and account for the phenomena that had scared it, and for the strength
of the impression it still retained.
I sought to find natural and accountable causes for effects so abnormal.
Lord Bacon suggests that the ointments with which witches anointed
themselves might have had the effect of stopping the pores and congest-
ing the brain, and thus impressing the sleep of the unhappy dupes of
their own imagination with dreams so vivid that, on waking, they were
firmly convinced that they had been borne through the air to the Sabbat.
I remembered also having heard a distinguished French traveller-
whose veracity was unquestionable--say, that he had witnessed extra-
ordinary effects produced on the sensorium by certain fumigations used.
by an African pretender to magic. A person, of however healthy a
brain, subjected to the influence of these fumigations, was induced to
believe that he saw the most frightful apparitions.
However extraordinary such effects, they were not incredible — not at
12


134
A STRANGE STORY.
variance with our notions of the known laws of nature. And to the
vapor, or the odors which a powder applied to a lamp had called forth, I
was, therefore, prepared to ascribe properties similar to those which
Bacon's conjecture ascribed to the witches' ointment, and the French
traveller to the fumigations of the African conjurer.
But, as I came to that conclusion, I was seized with an intense curiosity
to examine for myself these chemical agencies with which Sir Philip Der-
val appeared so familiar;- to test the contents in that mysterious casket
of steel. I also felt a curiosity no less eager, but more, in spite of my-
self, intermingled with fear, to learn all that Sir Philip had to communi-
cate of the past history of Margrave. I could but suppose that the young
man must indeed be a terrible criminal, for a person of years so grave,
and station so high, to intimate accusations so vaguely dark, and to use
means so extraordinary in order to enlist my imagination rather than my
reason against a youth in whom there appeared none of the signs which
suspicion interprets into guilt.
While thus musing, I lifted my eyes and saw Margrave himself there,
at the threshold of the ball-room -- there, where Sir Philip had first
pointed him out as the criminal he had come to L- to seek and dis-
arm; and now, as then, Margrave was the radiant centre of a joyous
group; not the young boy-god, Iacchus, amidst his nymphs could, in Gre- -
cian frieze or picture, have seemed more the type of the sportive, hilari-
ous vitality of sensuous nature. He must have passed, unobserved by
me, in my preoccupation of thought, from the museum and across the
room in which I sat ; and now there was as little trace in that animated
countenance of the terror it had exhibited at Sir Philip's approach, as of
the change it had undergone in my trance or my phantasy.
But he caught sight of me - left his young companions -- came gaily
to my side.'
“ Did you not ask me to go with you into that museum about half an
hour ago, or did I dream that I went with you ?” .
“ Yes; you went with me into that museum.”
“ Then pray what dull theme did you select, to set me asleep there ?”
I looked hard at him, and made no reply. Somewhat to my relief, I
now heard my host's voice:
- Why, Fenwick, what has become of Sir Philip Derval ?”
" He has left; he had business.” And, as I spoke, again I looked hard
on Margrave.
His countenance now showed a change; not surprise, not dismay, but
rather a play of the lip, a flash of the eye, that indicated complacency
even triumph.
** So! Sir Philip Derval. He is in L ; he has been here to-night
Sol as I expected.”


A STRANGE STORY.
135
“ Did you expect it ?” said our host. “No one else did. Who could
have told you ?”
“ The movements of men so distinguished need never take us by sur-
prise. I knew he was in Paris the other day. Natural he should come
here. I was prepared for his coming.”
Margrave here turned away towards the window, which he threw open
and looked out..
“ There is a storm in the air,” said he, as he continued to gaze into the
night.
Was it possible that Margrave was so wholly unconscious of what had
passed in the museum, as to include in oblivion even the remembrance of
Sir Philip Derval's presence before he had been rendered insensible, or
laid asleep? Was it now only for the first time that he learned of Sir
Philip's arrival in L , and visit to that house ? Was there any inti-
mation of menace in his words and his aspect ?
I felt that the trouble of my heart communicated itself to my counte-
nance and manner; and, longing for solitude and fresh air, I quitted the
house. When I found myself in the street, I turned round and saw Mar-
grave still standing at the open window, but he did not appear to notice
me; his eyes seemed fixed abstractedly on space.
CHAPTER XXXIV..
I WALKED on slowly and with the downcast head of a man absorbed in
meditation. I had gained the broad place in which the main streets of
the town converged, when I was overtaken by a violent storm of rain.
I sought shelter under the dark archway of that entrance to the district
of Abbey Hill which was still called Monk-gate. The shadow within the
arch was so deep that I was not aware that I had a companion, till I heard
my own name, close at my side. I recognized the voice before I could
distinguish the form of Sir Philip Derval.
“ The storm will be soon over,” said he, quietly. “I saw it coming on
in time. I fear you neglected the first warning of those sable clouds, and
must be already drenched.”
I made no reply, but moved involuntarily away towards the mouth of
the arch.
“I see that you cherish a grudge against me!” resumed Sir Philip.
“ Are you then, by nature, vindictive? ”


136
A STRANGE STORY.
· Somewhat softened by the friendly tone of this reproach, I answered,
half in jest, half in earnest,
You must own, Sir Philip, that I have some little reason for the un-
charitable anger your question imputes to me. But I can forgive you on
one condition.”
“ What is that?”
“ The possession, for half an hour, of that mysterious steel casket which
you carry about with you, and full permission to analyze and test its con-
tents."
“Your analysis of the contents,” returned Sir Philip, dryly, “ would
leave you as ignorant as before, of the uses to which they can be applied.
But I will own to you frankly, that it is my intention to select some con-
fidant among men of science, to whom I may safely communicate the
wonderful properties which certain essences in that casket possess. I in-
vite your acquaintance, nay, your friendship, in the hope that I may find
such a confidant in you. But the casket contains other combinations,
which, if wasted, could not be re-supplied; at least, by any process which
the great Master from whom I received them, placed within reach of my
i knowledge. In this they resemble the diamond; when the chemist has
found that the diamond affords no other substance by its combustion than
pure carbonic acid gas, and that the only chemical difference between
the costliest diamond, and a lump of pure charcoal, is a proportion of
hydrogen, less than one fifty thousandth part of the weight of the sub-
stance — can the chemist make you a diamond ?
“ These, then, the more potent, but also the more perilous of the cas-
ket's contents, shall be explored by no science, submitted to no test. They
are the keys to masked doors in the ramparts of Nature, which no mortal
can pass through without rousing dread sentries never seen upon this side
her wall. The powers they confer are secrets locked in my breast, to be
lost in my.grave; as the casket which lies on my breast shall not be trans-
ferred to the hands of another, till all the rest of my earthly possessions
pass away with my last breath in life, and my first in eternity.”
“ Sir Philip Derval,” said I, struggling against the appeals to fancy or
to awe, made in words so strange, uttered in a tone of earnest conviction,
and heard amidst the glare of the lightning, the howl of the winds, and
the roll of the thunder — " Sir Philip Derval, you accost me in language
which, but for my experience of the powers at your command, I should
hear with the contempt that is due to the vaunts of a mountebank, or the
pity we give to the morbid beliefs of his dupe. As it is, I decline the con
fidence with which you would favor me, subject to the conditions which
it seems you would impose. My profession abandons to quacks all drug


A STRANGE STORY.
137
which may not be analyzed; all secrets which may not be fearlessly told:
I cannot visit you at Derval Court. I cannot trust myself, voluntarily,
again in the power of a man, who has arts of which I may not examine
the nature, by which he can impose on my imagination, and steal away
my reason."
“Reflect well, before you so decide,” said Sir Philip, with a solemnity
that was stern. “If you refuse to be warned and to be armed by me,
your reason and your imagination will alike be subjected to influences
which I can only explain by telling you that there is truth in those im-
memorial legends which depose to the existence of magic.”
“Magic!”
“ There is magic of two kinds — the dark and evil, appertaining to
witchcraft or necromancy; the pure and beneficent, which is but philoso-
phy, applied to certain mysteries in Nature remote from the beaten tracks
of science, but, which deepened the wisdom of ancient sages, and can yet
unriddle the myths of departed races.”
“ Sir Philip,” I said, with impatient and angry interruption, “ if you
think that a jargon of this kind be worthy a man of your acquirements
and station, it is at least a waste of time to address it to me. I am led to
conclude that you desire to make use of me for some pnrpose which I
have a right to suppose honest and upright, because all you know of 'me.
is, that I rendered to your relation services which cannot lower my char-
acter in your eyes. If your object be, as you have intimated, to aid you
in exposing and disabling a man whose antecedents have been those of
guilt, and who threatens with danger the society which receives him, you
must give me proofs that are not reducible to magic; and you must pre-
possess me against the person you accuse, not by powders and fumes
that disorder the brain, but by substantial statements, such as justify one
man in condemning another. And, since you have thought fit to convince
me that there are chemical means at your disposal, by which the imagina-
tion can be so affected as to accept, temporarily, illusions for realities, so
I again demand, and now still more decidedly than before, that while you
address yourself to my reason, whether to explain your object or to vin-
dicate your charges against a man whom I have admitted to my acquaint-
ance, you will divest yourself of all means and agencies to warp my judg-
ment, so illicit and fraudulent as those which you own yourself to possess.
Let the casket, with all its contents, be transferred to my hands, and
pledge me your word that, in giving that casket, you reserve to yourself
no other means by which chemistry can be abused to those influences
over physical organization, which ignorance or imposture may ascribe to
- magic."
12* . .


138
A STRANGE STORY.
"I accept no conditions for my confidence, though I think the better
of you for attempting to make them. If I live, you will seek me yourself
and implore my aid. Meanwhile, listen to me, and "
“No; I prefer the rain and the thunder to the whispers that steal to
my ear in the dark from one of whom I have reason to beware."
So saying, I stepped forth, and at that moment the lightning flashed
through the arch, and brought into full view the face of the man beside
me. Seen by that glare, it was pale as the face of a corpse, but its ex-
pression was compassionate and serene.
I hesitated, for the expression of that hueless countenance touched me;
it was not the face which inspires distrust or fear.
“Come,” said I, gently; "grant my demand. The casket - "
“ It is no scruple of distrust that now makes that demand; it is a curi-
osity which in itself is a fearful tempter. Did you now possess what at
this moment you desire, how bitterly you would repent.” .
“Do you still refuse my demand ?”
“I refuse."
“ If then you really need me, it is you who will repent.” .
I passed from the arch into the open space. The rain had paused, the
thunder was more distant. I looked back when I had gained the opposite
side of the way, at the angle of a street which led to my own house. As
I did so, again the skies lightened, but the flash was comparatively slight
and evanescent; it did not penetrate the gloom of the arch; it did not
bring the form of Sir Philip into view ; but, just under the base of the
outer buttress to the gateway, I descried the outline of a dark figure, cow-
ering down, huddled up for shelter, the outline so indistinct and so soon
lost to sight, as the flash faded, that I could not distinguish if it were man
or brute. If it were some chance passer-by, who had sought refuge from
the rain, and overheard any part of our strange talk," the listener,"
thought I, with a half smile, “must have been mightily perplexed.”
CHAPTER XXXV.
On reaching my own home, I found my servant sitting up for me, with
the information that my attendance was immediately required. The lit-
tle boy whom Margrave's carelessness had so injured, and for whose in-
jury he had shown so little feeling, had been weakened by the confine-
ment which the nature of the injury required, and for the last few days


A STRANGE STORY.
139
che
23 3
had been generally ailing. The father had come to my house a few min-
utes before I reached it, in great distress of mind, saying that his child
had been seized with fever; and had become delirious. Hearing that I
was at the mayor's house, he had hurried thither in search of me.
I felt as if it were almost a relief to the troubled and haunting thoughts
which tormented me, to be summoned to the exercise of a familiar knowl-
edge. I hastened to the bedside of the little sufferer, and soon forgot all
else in the anxious struggle for a human life. The struggle promised to
be successful; the worst symptoms began to yield to remedies prompt and
energetic, if simple. I remained at the house, rather to comfort and sup-
port the parents, than because my continued attendance was absolutely,
needed, till the night was wellnigh gone, and, all cause of immediate dan-
ger having subsided, I then found myself once more in the streets. An
atmosphere palely clear in the gray, of dawn had succeeded to the thun-
der-clouds of the stormy night; the street lamps, here and there, burned
wan and still. I was walking slowly and wearily, so tired out that I was
scarcely conscious of my own thoughts, when, in a narrow lane, my feet
stopped almost mechanically before a human form stretched at full length
in the centre of the road, right in my path. The form was dark in the
shadow thrown from the neighboring houses. “Some poor drunkard,"
thought I, and the humanity inseparable from my calling not allowing me
to leave a fellow-creature thus exposed to the risk of being run over by
the first drowsy wagoner who might pass along the thoroughfare, I stooped
to rouse and to lift the form. What was my horror when my eyes met
the rigid stare of a dead man's. I started, looked again; it was the face
of Sir Philip Derval! He was lying on his back, the countenance up-
turned, a dark stream oozing from the breast --- murdered, by two ghastly
wounds — murdered not long since; the blood was still warm. Stunned
and terror-stricken, I stood bending over the body. Suddenly I was
touched on the shoulder.
“ Hollo! what is this?” said a gruff voice.
“Murder!” I answered, in hollow accents, which sounded strangely to
my own ear.
“Murder! so it seems." And the policeman who had thus accosted me
lifted the body. .
“A gentleman, by his dress. How did this happen? How did you
come here ?” and the policeman glanced suspiciously at me.
At this moment, however, there came up another policeman, in whom
I recognized the young man whose sister I had attended and cured.
“Dr. Fenwick," said the last, lifting his hat respectfully, and at the
sound of my name, his fellow-policeman changed his manner, and muttered
an apology.
07


140
À STRANGE STORY.
I now collected myself sufficiently to state the name and rank of the
murdered man. The policemen bore the body to their station, to which
I accompanied them. I then returned to my own house, and had searcely
sunk on my bed, when sleep came over me. But what a sleep! Never
till then, had I known how awfully distinct dreams can be. The phan-
tasmagoria of the naturalist's collection revived. Life again awoke in the
serpent and the tiger, the scorpion moved, and the vulture flapped its
wings. And there was Margrave, and there Sir Philip; but their posi-
tion of power was reversed. And Margrave's foot was on the breast of
the dead man. Still I slept on till' I was roused by the summons to at-
tend on Mr. Vigors, the magistrate, to whom the police had reported the
murder.
I dressed hastily, and went forth. As I passed through the street, I
found that the dismal news had already spread. I was accosted on my
way to the magistrate by a hundred eager, tremulous, inquiring tongues.
The scanty evidence I could impart was soon given. My introduction
to Sir Philip at the mayor's house, our accidental meeting under the arch,
my discovery of the corpse some hours afterwards on my return from my
patient, my professional belief that the deed must have been done a very
short time, perhaps but a few minutes, before I had chanced upon its vic-
tim. But, in that case, how account for the long interval that had elapsed
between the time in which I had left Sir Philip under the arch, and the
time in which the murder must have been committed ? Sir Philip could
not have been wandering through the streets all those hours. This doubt,
however, was easily and speedily cleared up. A Mr. Jeeves, who was
one of the principal solicitors in the town, stated that he had acted as Sir
Philip's legal agent and adviser ever since Sir Philip came of age, and
was charged with the exclusive management of some valuable house
property which the deceased had possessed in ~ ; that when Sir
Philip had arrived in the town late in the afternoon of the previous day, he
had sent for Mr. Jeeves; informed him that he, Sir Philip, was engaged
to be married; that he desired to have full and minute information as to
the details of his house property (which had greatly increased in value
since his absence from England), in connection with the settlements his
marriage would render necessary; and that this information was also re-
quired by him in respect to a codicil he desired to add to his will.
He had, accordingly, requested Mr. Jeeves to have all the books and
statements concerning the property ready for his inspection that night,
when he would call, after leaving the ball which he had promised the
mayor, whom he had accidentally met on entering the town, to attend.
Sir Philip had also asked Mr. Jeeves to detain one of his clerks in his of
fice, in order to serve conjointly with Mr. Jeeves as a witness to the codi-


'A STRANGE STORY.
141
,
cil he desired to add to his will. Sir Philip had accordingly come to Mr.
Jeeves's house a little before midnight; had gone carefully through all
the statements prepared for him, and had executed the fresh codicil to his
testament, which testament he had in their previous interview given to
Mr. Jeeves's care, sealed up. Mr. Jeeves stated that Sir Philip, though
a man of remarkable talents and great acquirements, was extremely ec-
centric, and of a very peremptory temper, and that the importance at-
tached to a promptitude for which there seemed no pressing occasion, did
not surprise him in Sir Philip as it might have done in an ordinary client.
Sir Philip said, indeed, that he should devote the next morning to the
draft for his wedding settlements, according to the information of his
property which he had acquired; and after a visit of very brief duration
to Derval Court, should quit the neighborhood and return to Paris, where
: his intended bride then was, and in which city it had been settled that the
marriage ceremony should take place.
Mr. Jeeves had, however, observed to him, that if he were so soon to
be married it was better to postpone any revision of testamentary be-
quests, since after marriage he would have to make a new will alto-
gether.
And Sir Philip had simply answered,. .
"Life is uncertain; who can be sure of the morrow ?”
Sir Philip's visit to Mr. Jeeves's house had lasted some hours, for the
conversation between them had branched off from actual business to va-
rious topics. Mr. Jeeves had not noticed the hour when Sir Philip went;
he could only say that as he attended him to the street door, he observed,
rather to his own surprise, that it was close upon daybreak.
Sir Philip's body had been found not many yards distant from the ho-
tel at which he had put up, and to which, therefore, he was evidently re-
turning, when he left Mr. Jeeves. An old-fashioned hotel, which had
been the principal one at L- when Sir Philip left England, though
now outrivalled by the new and more central establishment, in which
Margrave was domiciled.
The primary and natural súpposition was, that Sir Philip had been
murdered for the sake of plunder; and this supposition was borne out by
the fact to which his valet deposed : namely,
That Sir Philip had about his person, on going to the mayor's house,
a purse containing notes and sovereigns; and this purse was now miss-
ing.
The valet, who, though an Albanian, spoke English fluently, said that
the purse had a gold clasp, on which Sir Philip's crest and initials were
engraved. Sir Philip's watch was, however, untaken.
And, now, it was not without a quick beat of the heart, that I heard


142
STRANGE STORY.
the valet declare that a steel casket, to which Sir Philip attached ex-
traordinary value, and always carried about with him, was also missing.
The Albanian described this casket as of ancient Byzantian workman-
ship, opening with a peculiar spring, only known to Sir Philip, in whose
possession it had been, so far as the servant knew, about three years;-
when, after a visit to Aleppo, in which the servant had not accompanied
him, he had first observed it in his master's hands. He was asked if this
casket contained articles to account for the value Sir Philip set on it-
such as jewels, bank-notes, letters of credit, etc. The man replied that
it might possibly do so ; he had never been allowed the opportunity of
examining its contents; but that he was certain the casket held medicines,
for he had seen Sir Philip take from it some small phials, by which he
had performed great cures in the East, and especially during a pestilence
which had visited Damascus, just after Sir Philip had arrived at that city
on quitting Aleppo. Almost every European traveller is supposed to be a
physician; and Sir Philip was a man of great benevolence, and the ser-
vant firmly believed him also to be of great medical skill. After this state-
ment, it was very naturally and generally conjectured that Sir Philip was
an amateur disciple of homeopathy, and that the casket contained the
phials or globules in use among homeopathists.
Whether or not Mr. Vigors enjoyed a vindictive triumph in making me
feel the weight of his authority, or whether his temper was ruffled in the
excitement of so grave a case, I cannot say, but his manner was stern and
his tone discourteous in the questions which he addressed to me. Nor
did the questions themselves seem very pertinent to the object of inves-
tigation.
“ Pray, Dr. Fenwick,” said he, knitting his brows, and fixing his eyes
on me rudely, " did Sir Philip Derval, in his conversation with you, men-
tion the steel casket which it seems he carried about with him ? ”
I felt my countenance change slightly, as I answered, “ Yes."
** Did he tell you what it contained ? "
“ He said it contained secrets."
“ Secrets of what nature, medicinal or chemical ? Secrets which a phy-
sician might be curious to learn and covetous to possess ?”
This question seemed to me so offensively significant that it roused my
indignation, and I answered haughtily, that “a physician of any degree
of merited reputation did not much believe in, and still less covet, those
secrets in his art, which were the boast of quacks and pretenders."
" My question need not offend you, Dr. Fenwick. I put it in another
shape. Did Sir Philip Derval so boast of the secrets contained in his
casket, that a quack or pretender might deem such secrets of use to him?"
“Possibly he might, if he believed in such a boast."


A STRANGE STORY.
143 •
finden “Humph - he might if he so believed. I have no more questions to
put to you, at present, Dr. Fenwick.”
Little of any importance in connection with the deceased, or his mur-
TE der, transpired in the course of that day's examination and inquiries.
bone The next day, a gentleman, distantly related to the young lady, to
whom Sir Philip was engaged, and who had been for some time in cor-
78 respondence with the deceased, arrived at L— He had been sent for
pas at the suggestion of the Albanian servant, who said that Sir Philip had
stayed a day at this gentleman's house in London, on his way to I- ,
by mai from Dover.
The new comer, whose name was Danvers, gave a more touching pa-
thos to the horror which the murder had excited. It seemed that the
inje motives which had swayed Sir Philip in the choice of his betrothed, were
min singularly pure and noble. The young lady's father -- an intimate col-
lege friend - had been visited by a sudden reverse of fortune, which had
mis brought on a fever, that proved mortal. He had died some years ago,
leaving his only child penniless, and had bequeathed her to the care and
guardianship of Sir Philip.
The orphan received her education at a convent near Paris; and when
Sir Philip, a few weeks since, arrived in that city from the East, he of-
fered her his hand and fortune. “I know," said Mr. Danvers, “ from the
conversation I held with him when he came to me in London, that he was
induced to this offer by the conscientious desire to discharge the trust
consigned to him by his old friend. Sir Philip was still too young to take
under his own roof a female ward of eighteen, without injury to her good
name. He could only get over that difficulty by making the ward his
wife. She will be safer and happier with the man she will love and honor
for her father's sake,' said the chivalrous gentleman, 'than she will be
under any other roof I could find for her.””
And now there arrived another stranger to L- , sent for by Mr.
Jeeves, the lawyer; - a stranger to L , but not to me; my old Edin-
burgh acquaintance, Richard Strahan.
The will in Mr. Jeeves's keeping, with its recent codicil, was opened and
read. The will itself bore date about six years anterior to the testator's
tragic death; it was very short, and, with the exception of a few legacies,
'of which the most important was ten thousand pounds to his ward, the
whole of his property was left to Richard Strahan, on the condition that
he took the name and arms of Derval within a year from the date of Sir
Philip's decease. The codicil, added to the will the night before his
death, increased the the legacy to the young lady from ten to thirty thou-
sand pounds, and bequeathed an annuity of one hundred pounds a year
to his Albanian servant. Accompanying the will, and within the same
10


144
A STRANGE STORY.
envelope, was a sealed letter, addressed to Richard Strahan, and dated
at Paris two weeks before Sir Philip's decease. Strahan brought that
letter to me. It ran thus : “ Richard Strahan, I advise you to pull down
the house called Derval Court, and to build another on a better site, the
plans of which, to be modified according to your own taste and require-
ments, will be found among my papers. This is a recommendation, not
a command. But I strictly enjoin you entirely to demolish the more
ancient part, which was chiefly occupied by myself, and to destroy by
fire, without perusal, all the books and manuscripts found in the safes in
my study. I have appointed you my sole executor, as well as my heir,
because I have no personal friends in whom I can confide as I trust I may
do in the man I have never seen, simply because he will bear my name
and represent my lineage. There will be found in my writing-desk,
which always accompanies me in my travels, an autobiographical work, a
record of my own life, comprising discoveries, or hints at discovery, in
science, through means little cultivated in our age. You will not be sur-
prised that before selecting you as my heir and executor, from a crowd
of relations not more distant, I should have made inquiries in order to
justify my selection. The result of those inquiries informs me that you
have not yourself the peculiar knowledge nor the habits of mind that
could enable you to judge of matters which demand the attainments and
the practice of science; but that you are of an honest affectionate nature,
and will regard as sacred the last injunctions of a benefactor. I enjoin
you, then, to submit the aforesaid manuscript memoir to some man on
whose character for humanity and honor you can place confidential reli-
ance, and who is accustomed to the study of the positive sciences, more
especially chemistry, in connection with electricity and magnetism. My
'desire is that he shall edit and arrange this memoir for publication; and
that, wherever he feels a conscientious doubt whether any discovery, or
hint of discovery, therein contained, would not prove more dangerous
than useful to mankind, he shall consult with any other three men of sci-
ence whose names are a guarantee for probity and knowledge, and ac-
cording to the best of his judgment, after such consultation, suppress or
publish the passage of which he has so doubted. I own the ambition
which first directed me towards studies of a very unusual character, and
which has encouraged me in their pursuit through many years of volun-
tary exile, in lands where they could be best facilitated or aided - the
ambition of leaving behind me the renown of a bold discoverer in those
recesses of nature which philosophy has hitherto abandoned to supersti-
tion. But I feel, at the moment in which I trace these lines, & fear lest,
in the absorbing interest of researches which tend to increase to a mar-
vellous degree the power of man over all matter, animate or inanimate, I


A STRANGE STORY.
145
.
may have blunted my own moral perceptions; and that there may be
much in the knowledge which I sought and acquired from the pure desire
of investigating hidden truths, that could be more abused to purposes of
tremendous evil than be likely to conduce to benignant good. And of
this a mind disciplined to severe reasoning, and uninfluenced by the en-
thusiasm which has probably obscured my own judgment, should be the
unprejudiced arbiter. Much as I have coveted and still do covet that
fame which makes the memory of one man the common inheritance of all, I
would infinitely rather that my name should pass away with my breath,
than that I should transmit to my fellow men any portion of a knowledge
which the good might forbear to exercise and the bad might unscrupu-
lously pervert. I bear about with me, wherever I wander, a certain steel
casket. I received this casket with its contents from a man whose mem-
ory I hold in profound veneration. Should I live to find a person whom,
after minute and intimate trial of his character, I should deem worthy of
such confidence, it is my intention to communicate to him the secret how
to prepare and how to use such of the powders and essences stored within
that casket as I myself have ventured to employ. Others I have never
tested, nor do I know how they could be re-supplied if lost or wasted.
But as the contents of this casket, in the hands of any one not duly in-
structed as to the mode of applying them, would either be useless, or con-
duce, through inadvertent and ignorant misapplication, to the most dan-
gerous consequences; so, if I die without having found, and in writing
named, such a confidant as I have described above, I command you im-
mediately to empty all the powders and essences found therein into any
running stream of water, which will at once harmlessly dissolve them.
On no account must they be cast into fire!
“This letter, Richard Strahan, will only come under your eyes in case
the plans and the hopes which I have formed for my earthly future should
be frustrated by the death on which I do not calculate, but against the
chances of which this will and this letter provide. I am about to re-visit
England, in defiance of a warning that I shall be there subjected to some
peril which I refuse to have defined, because I am unwilling that any
mean apprehension of personal danger should enfeeble my nerves in the
discharge of a stern and solemn duty. If I overcome that peril, you will
not be my heir; my testament will be remodelled; this letter will be re-
called and destroyed. I shall farm ties which promise me the happiness
I have never hitherto found, though it is common to all men — the affec-
tions of home, the caresses of children, among whom I may find one to
whom hereafter I may bequeath, in my knowledge, a far nobler heritage
than my lands. In that case, however, my first care would be to assure
your own fortune. And the sum which this codicil assures to my be-
13


146
A STRANGE STORY.
trothed, would be transferred to yourself on my wedding-day. Do you
know why, never having seen you, I thus select you for preference to all
my other kindred? Why my heart, in writing thus, warms to your
image ? Richard Strahan, your only sister, many years older than your-
self — you were then a child — was the object of my first love. We were
to have been wedded, for her parents deceived me into the belief that she
returned my affection. With a rare and noble candor, she herself in-
formed me, that her heart was given to another, who possessed not my
worldly gifts of wealth and station. In resigning my claims to her hand,
I succeeded in propitiating her parents to her own choice. I obtained
for her husband the living which he held, and I settled on your sister the
dower which at her death passed to you as the brother to whom she had
shown a mother's love, and the interest of which has secured you a mod-
est independence.
“If these lines ever reach you, recognize my title to reverential obedi-
ence to commands which may seem to you wild, perhaps irrational; and
repay, as if a debt due from your own lost sister, the affection I have
borne to you for her sake.”
While I read this long and strange letter, Strahan sat by my side, cov-
ering his face with his hands and weeping with honest tears for the man
whose death had made him powerful and rich..
“ You will undertake the trust ordained to me in this letter,” said hè,
struggling to compose himself. “You will read and edit this memoir;
you are the very man he himself would have selected. Of your honor
and humanity there can be no doubt, and you have studied with success
the sciences which he specifies as requisite for the discharge of the task
he commands."
At this request, though I could not be wholly unprepared for it, my
first impulse was that of a vague terror. It seemed to me as if I were be-
coming more and more entangled in a mysterious and fatal web. But
this impulse soon faded in the eager yearnings of an ardent and irresist-
ible curiosity.
I promised to read the manuscript, and in order that I might fully im-
bue my mind with the object and wish of the deceased, I asked leave to
make a copy of the letter I had just read. To this Strahan readily as-
sented, and that copy I have transcribed in the preceding pages.
I asked Strahan if he had yet found the manuscript; he said, “ No, he
had not yet had the heart to inspect the papers left by the deceased. He
would now do so. He should go in a day or two to Derval Court, and
reside there till the murderer was discovered, as, doubtless, he soon must
be through the vigilance of the police. Not till that discovery was made


A STRANGE STORY.
147
should Sir Philip's remains, though already placed in their coffin, be con-
signed to the family vault.”
122 Strahan seemed to have some "superstitious notion that the murderer
hari might be more secure from justice if his victim were thrust, unavenged,
into the tomb.
CHAPTER XXXVI.
The belief prevalent in the town ascribed the murder of Sir Philip to
3 the violence of some vulgar robber, probably not an inhabitant of L-
Mr. Vigors did not favor that belief. He intimated an opinion
seemed extravagant and groundless, that Sir Philip had been mullered,
for the sake not of the missing purse, but of the missing casket. D as
currently believed that the solemn magistrate had consulted one of his
non pretended clairvoyants, and that this impostor had gulled him with assur-
ances, to which he attached a credit that perverted into egregiously ab-
surd directions his characteristic activity and zeal.
Be that as it may, the coroner's inquest closed without casting anylight
on so mysterious a tragedy.
What were my own conjectures I scarcely dared to admit - I certainly
- could not venture to utter them. But my suspicions centred upon Mar-
grave. That for some reason or other he had cause to dread Sir Philips
presence in L- was clear, even to my reason. And how could my
reason reject all the influences which had been brought to bear on my
imagination, whether by the scene in the museum or my conversation
with the deceased ? But it was impossible to act on such suspicions — im-
possible even to confide them. Could I have told to any man the effect
produced on me in the museum, he would have considered me a liar or a
madman. And in Sir Philip's accusations against Margrave, there was
nothing tangible - nothing that could bear repetition. Those accusa-
tions, if analyzed, vanished into air. What did they imply?— that Mar-
grave was a magician, a monstrous prodigy, a creature exceptional to the
ordinary conditions of humanity. Would the most reckless of mortals
have ventured to bring against the worst of characters such a charge, on
the authority of a deceased witness, and to found on evidence so fantastic
the awful accusation of murder? But of all men, certainly I-a sober,
practical physician - was the last whom the public could excuse for such
incredible implications — and certainly, of all men, the last against whom
any suspicion of heinous crime would be readily entertained was that
joyous youth in whose sunny aspect life and conscience alike seemed to

Shop


148
A STRANGE STORY.
keep careless holiday. But I could not overcome, nor did I attempt to
reason against, the horror akin to detestation, that had succeeded to the
fascinating attraction by which Margrave had before conciliated a liking
founded rather on admiration than esteem.
In order to avoid his visits I kept away from the study in which I had
habitually spent my mornings, and to which he had been accustomed to
so ready an access. And if he called at the front door I directed my
servant to tell him that I was either from home or engaged. He did at-
tempt for the first few days to visit me as before, but when my intention
to shun him became thus manifest, desisted ; naturally enough, as any
other man so pointedly repelled would have done.
I abstained from all those houses in which I was likely to meet him;
and went my professional round of visits in a close carriage; so that I
might not be accosted by him in his walks.
One morning, a very few days after Strahan had shown me Sir Philip
Derval's letter, I received a note from my old college acquaintance, stat-
ing that he was going to Derval Court that afternoon; that he should
take with him the memoir which he had found; and begging me to visit
him at his new home the next day, and commence my inspection of the
mi pucript. I consented eagerly.
That morning, on going my round, my carriage passed by another
dray up to the pavement, and I recognized the figure of Margrave
standing beside the vehicle, and talking to some one seated within it. I
looked back, as my-own carriage whirled rapidly by, and saw with un-
easiness and alarm that it was Richard Strahan to whom Margrave was
thus familiarly addressing himself. How had the two made acquaint-
ance? Was it not an outrage on Sir Philip Derval's memory, that the
heir he had selected should be thus apparently intimate with the man
whom he had so sternly denounced ? I became still more impatient to
read the memoir - in all probability it would give such explanations with
respect to Margrave's antecedents, as, if not sufficing to criminate him of
legal offences, would at least effectually terminate any acquaintance be-
tween Sir Philip's successor and himself.
All my thoughts were, however, diverted to channels of far deeper
interest even than those in which my mind had of late been so tumultu-
ously whirled along; when, on returning home, I found a note from Mrs.
Ashleigh. She and Lilian had just come back to L- , sooner than she
had led me to anticipate. Lilian had not seemed quite well the past day
or two, and had been anxious to return.


A STRANGE STORY.
149
H
CHAPTER XXXVII.
.
Let me recall it — softly - softly! Let me recall that evening spent
with her!- that evening, the last before darkness rose between us like a
solid wall. .
It was evening, at the close of summer. The sun had set, the twilight
was lingering still. We were in the old monastic garden — garden so
quiet, so cool, so fragrant. She was seated on a bench under the one
great cedar-tree that rose sombre in the midst of the grassy lawn, with
its little paradise of flowers. I had thrown myself on the sward at her
feet; her hand so confidingly lay in the clasp of mine. I see heran.
how young, how fair, how innocent !
Strange, strange! So inexpressibly English ; so thoroughly the sunat,
ture of our sober, homely life! The pretty delicate white robe that I
touch so timorously, and the ribbon-knots of blue that so well become the
soft color of the fair cheek, the wavy silk of the brown hair! She is mur
muring low her answer to my trembling question-
po As well as when last we parted ? Do you love me as well still ?"
“There is no still’ written here,” said she, softly, pressing her hand
to, her heart. “Yesterday is as to-morrow in the Forever.”
“Ah! Lilian, if I could reply to you in words as akin to poetry as
your own.”
" Fie ! you who affect not to care for poetry!”
-" That was before you went away — before I missed you from my eyes,
from my life – before I was quite conscious how precious you were to
me, more precious than common words can tell! Yes, there is one period
in love when all men are poets, however the penury of their language
may belie the luxuriance of their fancies. What would become of me if
you ceased to love me?"
“Or of me, if you ceased to love ?"
" And somehow it seems to me this evening as if my heart drew nearer
to you — nearer as if for shelter.”
" It is sympathy,” said she, with tremulous eagerness ; " that sort of
mysterious sympathy which I have often heard you deny or deride ; for
I, too, feel drawn nearer to you, as if there were a storm at hand. I was
oppressed by an indescribable terror in returning home, and the moment
I saw you there came a sense of protection.”.
Her head sank on my shoulder; we were silent some moments ; then.
we both rose by the same involuntary impulse, and round her slight forir-
I twined my strong arm of man. And now we are winding slow und
13 *


150
· A STRANGE STORY.
the lilacs and acacias that belt the lawn. Lilian has not yet heard of the
murder, which forms the one topic of the town, for all tales of violence
and blood affected her as they affect a fearful child. Mrs. Ashleigh,
therefore, had judiciously concealed from her the letters and the journals
by which the dismal news had been carried to herself. I need scarcely
say that the grim subject was not broached by me. In fact, my own
mind escaped from the events which had of late so perplexed and tor:
mented it; the tranquillity of the scene, the bliss of Lilian's presence,
had begun to chase away even that melancholy foreboding which had
overshadowed me in the first moments of our reunion. So we came
gradually to converse of the future of the day, not far distant, when
we two should be as one. We planned our bridal excursion. We would
Visit the scenes endeared to her by song, to me by childhood - the banks
and waves of my native Windermere — our one brief holiday before life
returned to labor, and hearts now so disquieted by hope and joy settled
down to the calm serenity of home.
As we thus talked, the moon, nearly rounded to her full, rose amidst
skies without a cloud. We paused to gaze on her solemn haunting
beauty, as where are the lovers who have not paused to gaze? We were
then on the terrace walk, which commanded a view of the town beloft.
Before us was a parapet wall, low on the garden side, but inaccessible on
the outer side, forming part of a straggling irregular street that made one
of the boundaries dividing Abbey Hill from Low Town. The lamps of
whe thoroughfares, in many a line and row beneath us, stretched far away,
obscured, here and there, by intervening roofs and tall church towers.
The hum of the city came to our ears, low and mellowed into a lulling
sound. It was not displeasing to be reminded that there was a world
without, as close and closer we drew each to each — worlds to one
another! Suddenly, there carolled forth the song of a human voice — a
wild, irregular, half-savage melody - foreign, uncomprehended words -
air and words not new to me. I recognized the voice and chant of Mar-
grave. I started, and uttered an angry exclamation.
“ Hush !” whispered Lilian, and I felt her frame shiver within my
encircling arm. “Hush ! listen! Yes; I have heard that voice before
last night "
“ Last night! you were not here; you were more than a hundred
miles away.”
“ I heard it in a dream! Hush, hush !”
The song rose louder; impossible to describe its effect, in the midst of
- the tranquil night, chiming over the serried roof-tops, and under the soli-
tary moon. It was not like the artful song of man, for it was defective
in the methodical harmony of tune ; it was not like the song of the wild


A STRANGE STORY.
151
-
-
-
bird, for it had no monotony in its sweetness : it was wandering and
various as the sounds from an Æolian harp. But it affected the senses
to a powerful degree, as in remote lands and in vast solitudes I have since
found the note of the mocking-bird, suddenly heard, affect the listener
half with delight, half with awe, as if some demon creature of the desert
were mimicking man for its own merriment. The chant now had changed
into an air of defying glee, of menacing exultation ; it might have been
the triumphant war-song of some antique barbarian tribe. The note was
•sinister ; a shudder passed through me, and Lilian had closed her eyes,
and was sighing heavily; then with a rapid change, sweet as the coo
with which an Arab mother lulls her babe to sleep, the melody died away.
“ There, there, look," murmured Lilian, moving from me, “ the same I
saw last night in sleep; the same I saw in the space above, on the even-
ing I first knew you !".
· Her eyes were fixed — her hand raised; my looks followed hers, and
rested on the face and form of Margrave. The moon shone full upon
him, so full as if concentrating all its light upon his image. The place on
which he stood (arbalcony to the upper story of a house about fifty yards
distant) was considerably above the level of the terrace from which we
gazed on him. His arms were folded on his breast, and he appeared to
be looking straight towards us. ' Even at that distance the lustrous youth
of his countenance appeared to me terribly distinct, and the light of his
wondrous eye seemed to rest on us in one lengthened, steady ray through
the limpid moonshine. Involuntarily I seized Lilian's hand, and drew
her away almost by force, for she was unwilling to move, and as I led her
back, she turned her head to look round; I, too, turned in jealous rage!
I breathed more freely. Margrave had disappeared.
“How came he there? It is not his hotel. Whose house is it?" I
said aloud, though speaking to myself.
Lilian remained silent; her eyes fixed upon the ground as if in deep
reverie. I took her hand; it did not return my pressure. I felt cut to
the heart when she drew coldly from me that hand, till then so frankly
cordial. I stopped short: “Lilian, what is this ? you are chilled towards
me. Can the mere sound of that man's voice, the mere glimpse of that
man's face, have — ” I paused; I did not dare to complete my question.
Lilian lifted her eyes to mine, and I saw at once in those eyes a change.
Their look was cold; not haughty, but abstracted. “I do not understand
you,” she said, in a weary, listless accent. “It is growing late; I must
go in."
So we walked on moodily, no longer arm in arm, nor hand in hand.
Then, it occurred to me that, the next day, Lilian would be in that nar-
row world of society; that there she could scarcely fail to hear of Mar-


152
A STRANGE STORY.
grave, to meet, to know him. Jealously seized me with all its imaginary
terrors, and amidst that jealousy a nobler, purer apprehension for herself.
Had I been Lilian's brother instead of her betrothed, I should not have
trembled less to foresee the shadow of Margrave's mysterious influence
passing over a mind so predisposed to the charm which Mystery itself has
for those whose thoughts fuse their outlines in fancies ; — whose world
melts away into Dreamland. Therefore I spoke.
" Lilian, at the risk of offending you - alas! I have never done so
before this night-I must address to you a prayer which I implore you
not to regard as the dictate of a suspicion unworthy you and myself. The
person whom you have just heard and seen is, at present, much courted
in the circles of this town. I entreat you not to permit any one to intro-
duce him to you. I entreat you not to know him. I cannot tell you all
my reasons for this petition ; enough that I pledge you my honor that
those reasons are grave. Trust, then, in my truth as I trust in yours.
Be assured that I stretch not the rights which your heart has bestowed
upon mine in the promise I ask, as I shall be freed from all fear by a
promise which I know will be sacred when once it is given.”
“What promise ?” asked Lilian, absently, as if she had not heard my
words.
“ What promise ? Why, to refuse all acquaintance with that man; his
name is Margrave. Promise me, dearest, promise me."
" Why is your voice so changed ?” said Lilian. “It's tone jars on my
ear,” she added, with a peevishness so unlike her, that it startled me more
than it offended ; and, withỐut a word further, she quickened her pace
and entered the house.
For the rest of the evening we were both taciturn and distant towards
each other. In vain Mrs. Ashleigh kindly sought to break down our
mutual reserve. I felt that I had the right to be resentful, and I clung to
that right the more because Lilian made no attempt at reconciliation.
This, too, was wholly unlike herself, for her temper was ordinarily sweet -
sweet to the extreme of meekness; saddened if the slightest misunder-
standing between us had ever vexed me, and yearning to ask forgiveness
if a look or a word had pained me. I was in hopes that, before I went
away, peace between us would be restored. But long ere her usual hour
for retiring to rest, she rose abruptly, and complaining of fatigue and
headache, wished me good night, and avoided the hand I sorrowfully.
held out to her as I opened the door.
“ You must have been very unkind to poor Lilian,” said Mrs. Ashleigh,
between jest and earnest, "for I never saw her so cross to you before.
And the first day of her return, too!”
“ The fault is not mine," said I, somewhat sullenly; “ I did but ask
heart
is


A STRANGE STORY.
153,
Lilian, and that as a humble prayer, not to make the acquaintance of a
stranger in this town against whom I have reasons for distrust and aver-
sion. I know not why that prayer should displease her.”
“ Nor I. Who is the stranger?”
“ A person who calls himself Margrave. . Let me at least entreat you
to avoid him ? "
- " Oh, I have no desire to make acquaintance with strangers. But, now
Lilian is gone, do tell me all about this dreadful murder ? The servants
are full of it, and I cannot keep it long concealed from Lilian. I was in
hopes that you would have broken it to her.”
I rose impatiently; I could not bear to talk thus of an event the trag-
edy of which was associated in my mind with circumstances so mysterious.
I became agitated and even angry when Mrs. Ashleigh persisted in ram-
bling woman-like inquiries — “Whº was suspected of the deed ? Who
did I think had committed it? What sort of a man was Sir Philip?
What was that strange story about a casket ?” Breaking from such
interrogations, to which I could give but abrupt and evasive answers, I
seized my hat, and took my departure.
A
s, 1
CHAPTER XXXVIII.
LETTER FROM ALLEN FENWICK TO LILIAN ASHLEIGH.
“ I have promised to go to Derval Court to-day, and shall not return
till to-morrow. I cannot bear the thought that so many hours should pass
away with one feeling less kind than usual resting like a cloud upon you
and me. Lilian, if I offended you, forgive me? Send me one line to
say so ? — one line which I can place next to my heart and cover with
grateful kisses till we meet again ?"
REPLY.
“ I scarcely know what you mean, nor do I quite understand my own
state of mind at this moment. It cannot be that I love you less — and
yet — but I will not write more now. I feel glad that we shall not meet
for the next day or so, and then I hope to be quite recovered. I am not
well at this moment. Do not ask me to forgive you - but if it is I who
am in fault — forgive me, oh, forgive me, Allen.”
And with this unsatisfactory note --- not worn next my heart, not cov-
ered with kisses, but thrust crumbled into my desk like a creditor's un-


154
A STRANGE STORY.
.
welcome bill — I Aung myself on my horse and rode to Derval Court. I
was naturally proud; my pride came now to my aid. I felt bitterly
indignant against Lilian, so indignant that I resolved on my return to say
to her, “ If in those words, ' And yet,' you implied a doubt whether you
loved me less, I cancel your vows, I give you back your freedom.” And
I could have passed from her threshold with a firm foot, though with the
certainty that I should never smile again.
Does her note seem to you who may read these pages to justify such
resentment? Perhaps not. But there is an atmosphere in the letters of
the one we love, which we alone — we who love — can feel, and in the
'atmosphere of that letter I felt the chill of the coming winter.
- I reached the park lodge of Derval Court late in the day. I had occa-
sion to visit some patients whose houses lay scattered many miles apart,
and for that reason, as well as from the desire of some quick bodily exer-
cise which is so natural an effect of irritable perturbation of mind, I had
made the journey on horseback instead of using a carriage, that I could
not have got through the lanes and field-paths by which alone the work
set to myself could be accomplished in time..
Just as I had entered the park, an uneasy thought seized hold of me
with the strength which is ascribed to presentiments. I had passed
through my study (which has been so elaborately described) to my
stables, as I generally did when I wanted my saddle-horse, and, in so
doing, had, doubtless, left open the gate to the iron palisade, and, proba-
bly, the window of the study itself. I had been in this careless habit for
several years, without ever once having cause for self-reproach. As I
before said, there was nothing in my study to tempt a thief; the study
shut out from the body of the house, and the servant sure at nightfall both
to close the window and lock the gate; yet now, for the first time, I felt
an impulse, urgent, keen, and disquieting, to ride back to the town and
see those precautions taken. I could not guess why, but something whis-
pered to me that my neglect had exposed me to some great danger. I
even checked my horse and looked at my watch; too late! - already just
on the stroke of Strahan's dinner-hour as fixed in his note; my horse, too,
was fatigued and spent; besides, what folly! what bearded man can
believe in the warnings of a "presentiment.” I pushed on, and soon
halted before the old-fashioned flight of stairs that led up to the ball.
Here I was accosted by the old steward; he had just descended the stairs,
and, as I dismounted, he thrust his arm into mine unceremoniously, and
drew me a little aside.
“ Doctor, I was right; it was his ghost that I saw by the iron door of
the mausoleum. I saw it again at the same place last night, but I had no
fit then. Justice on his murderer! Blood for blood ! ”


A STRANGE STORY.
155
"Ay!” said I, sternly; for if I suspected Margrave before, I felt con-
vinced now that the inexpiable deed was his. Wherefore convinced ?
Simply because I now hated him more, and hate is so easily convinced !
“ Lilian ! Lilian!” I murmured to myself that name; the flame of my
bate was fed by my jealousy. “Ay!” said I, sternly, “ murder will out.”
“What are the police about ?” said the old man, querulously; “ days
pass on days, and no nearer the truth. But what does the new owner
care ? He has the rents and acres; what does he care for the dead? I
will never serve another master. I have just told Mr. Strahan so. How
do I know whether he did not do the deed! Who else had an interest
in it."
“ Hush, hush !” I cried ; “ you do not know what you say so wildly."
• The old man stared at me, shook his head, released my arm, and strode
away.
· A laboring man came out of the garden, and having unbuckled the
saddle-bags, which contained the few things required for so short a visit,
I consigned my horse to his care, and ascended the perron. The old in telo
housekeeper met me in the hall, conducted me up the great staircase,
showed me into a bedroom prepared for me, and told me that Mr. Strahan
was already waiting dinner for me. I should find him in the study. I,
hastened to join him. He began apologizing, very unnecessarily, for the
state of his establishment. He had, as yet, engaged no new servants.
The housekeeper, with the help of a housemaid, did all the work.
- Richard Straban at college had been as little distinguishable from other
young men as a youth neither rich nor poor, neither clever nor stupid,
neither handsome nor ugly, neither audacious sinner nor formal saint, .
possibly could be.
Yet, to those who understood him well, he was not without some of..
those moral qualities by which a youth of mediocre intellect often matures
into a superior man.
He was, as Sir Philip had been rightly informed, thoroughly honest
and upright. But with a strong sense of duty, there was also a certain
latent hardness. He was not indulgent. He had outward frankness
with acquaintances, but was easily roused to suspicion. He had much of
the thriftiness and self-denial of the North Countryman, and I have no
doubt that he had lived with calm content and systematic economy on an
income which made him, as a bachelor, independent of his nominal profes-
sion, but would not have sufficed, in itself, for the fitting maintenance of a
wife and family. He was, therefore, still single. .
It seemed to me, even during the few minutes in which we conversed
before dinner was announced, that his character showed a new phase
with his new fortunes. He talked in a grandiose style of the duties of
·


156
A STRANGE STORY.
.
station and the woes of wealth. He seemed to be very much afraid of
spending, and still more appalled at the idea of being cheated. His tem-
per, too, was ruffled; the steward had given him notice to quit. Mr.
Jeeves, who had spent the morning with him, had said the steward would
be a great loss, and a steward, at once sharp and honest, was not to be
easily found.
What trifles can embitter the possession of great goods! Strahan had
taken a fancy to the old house; it was conformable to his notiohs, both of
comfort and pomp, and Sir Philip had expressed a desire that the old
house should be pulled down. Strahan had inspected the plans for the
new mansion to which Sir Philip had referred, and the plans did not
please him; on the contrary, they terrified.
“Jeeves says that I could not build such a house under seventy or
eighty thousand pounds, and then it will require twice the establishment
which will suffice for this. I shall be ruined,” cried the man who had
just come into possession of at least twelve thousand a year.
“ Sir Philip did not enjoin you to pull down the old house; he only
advised you to do so. Perhaps he thought the site less healthy than that
which he proposes for a new building, or was aware of some other draw-
· back to the house, which you may discover later. Wait a little and see
before deciding.”
“But, at all events, I suppose I must pull down this curious old room-
the nicest part of the whole house !”
· Strahan, as he spoke, looked wistfully round at the quaint oak chimney-
piece; the carved ceiling; the well-built solid walls, with the large mul-
lion casement, opening so pleasantly on the sequestered gardens. He
had ensconced himself in Sir Philip's study, the chamber in which the
once famous mystic, Forman, had found a refuge.
“ So cozy a room for a single man!” sighed Strahan. “Near the
stables and dog-kennels, too! But I suppose I must pull it down. I am
not bound to do so legally; it is no condition of the will. But in honor
and gratitude I ought not to disobey poor Sir Philip's positive injunc-
tion."
“Of that,” said I, gravely, “ there cannot be a doubt."
Here our conversation was interrupted by Mrs. Gates, who informed
us that dinner was served in the library. Wine of great age was brought
from the long-neglected cellars; Strahan filled and refilled his glass, and,
warmed into hilarity, began to talk of bringing old college friends around
him in the winter season, and making the roof-tree ring with laughter and
song once more.
Time wore away, and night had long set in, when Strahan at last rose
from the table, his speech thick and his tongue unsteady, We returned
.


A STRANGE STORY.
157
to the study, and I reminded my host of the special object of my visit to
him, namely, the inspection of Sir Philip's manuscript.
" It is tough reading,” said Strahan; “ better put it off till tomorrow.
You will stay here two or three days.”
“ No; I must return to L- to-morrow. I cannot absent myself
from my patients. And it is the more desirable that no time should be
lost before examining the contents of the manuscript, because probably
they may give some clue to the detection of the murderer.”
“ Why do you think that ? ” cried Strahan, startled from the drowsiness
that was creeping over him.
“ Because the manuscript may show that Sir Philip had some enemy -
and who but an enemy could have had a motive for such a crime? Come,
bring forth the book. You of all men are bound to be alert in every
research that may guide the retribution of justice to the assassin of your
benefactor.”
“ Yes, yes. I will offer a reward of five thousand pounds for the dis-
covery. Allen, that wretched old steward had the insolence to tell me
that I was the only man in the world who could have an interest in the
death of his master; and he looked at me as if he thought that I had com":
mitted the crime. You are right, it becomes me, of all men, to be alert. *
The assassin must be found. He must hang."
While thus speaking, Strahan had risen, unlocked a desk which stood
on one of the safes, and drawn forth a thick volume, the contents of which
were protected by a clasp and lock. Strahan proceeded to open this lock
by one of a bunch of keys, which he said had been found on Sir Philip's
person.
“ There, Allen, this is the memoir, I need not tell you what store. I
place on it; not, between you and me, that I expect it will warrant poor
Sir Philip's high opinion of his own scientific discoveries. That part of
his letter seems to me very queer, and very flighty. But he evidently set
his heart on the publication of his work, in part if not in whole. And, is
naturally, I must desire to comply with a wish so distinctly intimated by
one to whom I owe so much. I beg you, therefore, not to be too fastidi-'.
ous. Some valuable hints in medicine, I have reason to believe, the man-
uscript will contain, and those may help you in your profession, Allen.”,
“ You have reason to believe! Why?”.
“Oh, a charming young fellow, who, with most of the other gentry res-
ident at L- , called on me at my hotel, told me that he had travelled
in the East, and had there heard much of Sir Philip's knowedge of chem-
istry, and the cures it had enabled him to perform.”
- “ You speak of Mr. Margrave. He called on you?”
" Yes."
14


158
A STRANGE STORY.
“ You did not, I trust, mention to him the existence of Sir Philips
manuscript."
“ Indeed I did; and I said you had promised to examine it. He seemed
delighted at that, and spoke most highly of your peculiar fitness for the
task.”
“Give me the manuscript,” said I abruptly, “and, after I have looked
at it to-night, I may have something to say to you to-morrow in reference
to Mr. Margrave."
“ There is the book,” said Strahan; “I have just glanced åt it, and
find much of it written in Latin; and I am ashamed to say that I have
so neglected the little Latin I learned in our college days, that I could
not construe what I looked at.”
I sat down and placed the book before me; Strahan fell into a doze,
from which he was wakened by the housekeeper, who brought in the tea-
things.
“ Well,” said Strahan, languidly, “ do you find much in the book that
explains the many puzzling riddles in poor Sir Philip's eccentric life and
pursuits ? "
.:6 Yes,” said I. Do not interrupt me.” .
Strahan again began to doze, and the housekeeper asked if we should
want any thing more that night, and if I thought I could find my way to
my bedroom.
I dismissed her impatiently, and continued to read. . .
Strahan woke up again as the clock struck eleven, and finding me still
absorbed in the manuscript, and disinclined to converse, lighted his can-
dle, and telling me to replace the manuscript in the desk when I had done
with it, and be sure to lock the desk and take charge of the key, which
he took off the bunch and gave me, went up stairs, yawning.
I was alone, in the wizard Forman’s chamber, and bending over a
stranger record than had ever excited my infant wonder, or, in later
years, provoked my sceptic smile.
CHAPTER XXXIX.
THE Manuscript was written in a small and peculiar handwriting, which,
though evidently by the same person whose letter to Strahan I had read,
was, whether from haste or some imperfection in the ink, much more hard
to decipher. Those parts of the memoir which related to experiments,


. A STRANGE STORY.
159
or alleged secrets in Nature, that the writer intimated a desire to submit
exclusively to scholars or men of science, were in Latin — and Latin
which, though grammatically correct, was frequently obscure. But all
that detained the eye and attention on the page, necessarily served to
impress the contents more deeply on remembrance.
The narrative commenced with the writer's sketch of his childhood.
Both his parents had died before he attained his seventh year. The
orphan had been sent by his guardians to a private school, and his holi-
days had been passed at Derval Court. Here, his earliest reminiscences
were those of the quaint old room, in which I now sat, and of his childish
wonder at the inscription on the chimney-piece — who, and what was the
Simon Forman who had there found a refuge from persecution ? Of
what nature were the studies he had cultivated, and the discoveries he
boasted to have made ?
When he was about sixteen, Philip Derval had begun to read the many
mystic books which the library contained; but without other result on
his mind than the sentiment of disappointment and disgust. The im-
pressions produced on the credulous imagination of childhood vanished.
He went to the university; was sent abroad to travel: and on his return
took that place in the circles of London which is so readily conceded to
a young idler of birth and fortune. He passed quickly over that period
of his life, as one of extravagance and dissipation, from which he was
first drawn by the attachment for his cousin to which his letter to Strahan
referred. Disappointed in the hopes which that affection had conceived, .
and bis fortune impaired, partly by some years of reckless profusion, and .
partly by the pecuniary sacrifices at which he had effected his cousin's
marriage with another, he retired to Derval Court, to live there in soli-
tude and seclusion. On searching for some old title-deeds required for a
mortgage, he chanced upon a collection of manuscripts much discolored
and, in part, eaten away by moth or damp. These, on examination,
proved to be the writings of Forman. Some of them were astrological
observations and predictions; some were upon the nature of the Cabala ;
some upon the invocations of spirits and the magic of the dark ages. All
had a certain interest, for they were interspersed with personal remarks,
anecdotes of eminent actors in a very stirring time, and were composed
as Colloquies, in imitation of Erasmus; the second person in the dialogue
being Sir Miles Derval, the patron and pupil; the first person being
Forman, the philosopher and expounder.
But along with these shadowy lucubrations were treatises of a more
uncommon and a more startling character; discussions on various occult
laws of nature, and detailed accounts of analytical experiments. These
opened a new, and what seemed to Sir Philip a practical, field of inquiry


160
A STRANGE STORY.
- a true border land between natural science and imaginative specula-
tion. Sir Philip had cultivated philosophical science at the university;
he resumed the study, and tested himself the truth of various experiments
suggested by Forman. Some, to his surprise, proved successful — some
wholly failed. These lucubrations first tempted the writer of the memoir
towards the studies in which the remainder of his life had been consumed.
But he spoke of the lucubrations themselves as valuable only where sug-
gestive of some truths which Forman had accidentally approached, with-
out being aware of their true nature and importance. They were debased
by absurd puerilities, and vitiated by the vain and presumptuous ignor-
ance which characterized the astrology of the middle ages. For these
reasons the writer intimated his intention (if he lived to return to Eng-
land) to destroy Forman's manuscripts, together with sundry other books,
and a few commentaries of his own upon studies which had for a while
misled him — all now deposited in the safes of the room in which I sat.
After some years passed in the retirement of Derval Court, Sir Philip
was seized with the desire to travel, and the taste he had imbibed for oc-
cult studies led him toward those Eastern lands in which they took their
origin, and still retain their professors.
Several pages of the manuscript were now occupied with minute state-
ments of the writer's earlier disappointment in the objects of his singular
research. The so-called magicians, accessible to the curiosity of Euro-
pean travellers, were either but ingenious jugglers, or produced effects
& that perplexed him by practices they had mechanically learned, but of
the rationale of which they were as ignorant as himself. It was not till
he had resided some considerable time in the East, and acquired a famil-
iar knowledge of its current languages and the social habits of its various
populations, that he became acquainted with men in whom he recognized
earnest cultivators of the lore which tradition ascribes to the colleges and
priesthoods of the ancient world; men generally living remote, from
others, and seldom to be bribed by money to exhibit their marvels or di-
vulge their secrets. In his intercourse with these sages, Sir Philip arrived
at the conviction that there does exist an art of magic, distinct from the
guile of the conjurer, and applying to certain latent powers and affinities
in nature a philosophy akin to that which we receive in our acknowledged
schools, inasmuch as it is equally based upon experiment, and produces
from definite causes definite results. In support of this startling proposi-
tion, Sir Philip now devoted more than half his volume to the details of
various experiments, to the process and result of which he pledged his
guarantee as the actual operator. As most of these alleged experiments
appeared to me wholly incredible, and as all of them were unfamiliar to
my practical experience, and could only be verified or falsified by tests


À STRANGE STORY.
161
.
that would require no inconsiderable amount of time and care, I passed,
with little heed, over the pages in which they were set forth. I was im-
patient to arrive at that part of the manuscript which might throw light
on the mystery in which my interest was the keenest. What were the
links which connected the existence of Margrave with the history of Sir
Philip Derval ? Thus hurrying on page after page, I suddenly, toward
the end of the volume, came upon the name that arrested my attention
- Haroun of Aleppo. He who has read the words addressed to me in
my trance may well conceive the thrill that shot through my heart when
I came upon that name, and will readily understand how much more
vividly my memory retains that part of the manuscript to which I now
proceed than all which had gone before.
“ It was,” wrote Sir Philip, “ in an obscure suburb of Aleppo that I at
length met with the wonderful man from whom I have acquired a knowledge
immeasurably more profound and occult than that which may be tested
in the experiments to which I have devoted so large a share of this me-
moir. Haroun of Aleppo had, indeed, mastered every secret in nature
which the nobler, or theurgic, magic seeks to fathom.
“He had discovered the great Principle of Life, which had hitherto
baffled the subtlest anatomist :- provided only that the great organs were
not irreparably destroyed, there was no disease that he could not cure;
no decrepitude to which he could not restore vigor; yet his science was
based on the same theory as that espoused by the best professional prac-
titioners of medicine - namely, that the true art of healing is to assist
Nature to throw off the disease — to summon, as it were, the whole sys-
tem to eject the enemy that has fastened on a part. And thus his pro-
cesses, though occasionally varying in the means employed, all combined
in this —- namely, the reinvigorating and recruiting of the principle of
life.”
No one knew the birth or origin of Haroun ; no one knew his age. In
outward appearance he was in the strength and prime of mature man-
hood. But, according to testimonies in which the writer of the memoir
expressed a belief that, I need scarcely say, appeared to me egregiously
credulous, Haroun's existence under the same name, and known by the
same repute, could be traced back to more than a hundred years. He
told Sir Philip that he had thrice renewed his own life, and had resolved
to do so no more - he had grown weary of living on. With all his gifts,
Haroun owned himself to be consumed by a profound melancholy. He
complained that there was nothing new to him under the sun; he said
that, while he had at his command unlimited wealth, wealth had ceased to
bestow enjoyment; and he preferred living as simply as a peasant: he
had tired out all the affections and all the passions of the human heart;
14 *


162
A STRANGE STORY.
he was in the universe as in a solitude. In a word, Haroun would often
repeat, with mournful solemnity, “ The soul is not meant to inhabit this
earth, and in feshly tabernacle, for more than the period usually assigned
to mortals; and when by art in repairing the walls of the body, we so
retain it, the soul repines, becomes inert or dejected.” “ He only,” said
Haroun,“ would feel continued joy in continued existence who could pre-
serve in perfection the sensual part of man, with such mind or reason as
may be independent of the spiritual essence; but whom soul itself has 123
quitted! Man, in short, as the grandest of the animals, but without the
sublime discontent of earth, which is the peculiar attribute of soul.”
E
One evening Sir Philip was surprised to find at Haroun's house another
European. He paused in his narrative to describe this man. He said to
that for three or four years previously he had heard frequent mention,
amongst the cultivators of magic, of an orientalized Englishman engaged
in researches similar to his own, and to whom was ascribed a terrible : TE
knowledge in those branches of the art which, even in the East, are con-
demned as instrumental to evil. Sir Philip here distinguished at length,
as he had so briefly distinguished in his conversation with me, between
the two kinds of magic — that which he alleged to be as pure from sin as
any other species of experimental knowledge, and that by which the
agencies of witchcraft are invoked for the purposes of guilt.
The Englishman, to whom the culture of this latter and darker kind
of magic was ascribed, Sir Philip Derval had never hitherto come across.
He now met him at the house of Haroun ; decrepit, emaciated, bowed
down with infirmities, and racked with pain. Though little more than
sixty, his aspect was that of extreme old age, but still on his face there
were seen the ruins of a once singular beauty; and still, in his mind,
there was a force that contrasted the decay of the body. Sir Philip had
never met with an intellect more powerful and more corrupt. The sono
of a notorious usurer, heir to immense wealth, and endowed with the
talents which justify ambition, he had entered upon life burdened with
the odium of his father's name. A duel, to which he had been provoked
by an ungenerous taunt on his origin, but in which a temperament fiercely
vindictive had led him to violate the usages prescribed by the social laws
that regulate such encounters, had subjected him to a trial in which he
escaped conviction, either by a flaw in the technicalities of legal proced-
ure, or by the compassion of the jury; but the moral presumptions against
him were sufficiently strong to set an indelible brand on his honor, and
an insurmountable barrier to the hopes which his early ambition had con-
ceived. After this trial he had quitted his country to return to it no
more. Thenceforth, much of his life had been passed out of sight-or con-
jecture of civilized men, in remote regions and amongst barbarous tribes.
Te AB
a case
till
mi klie
en love


A STRANGE STORY.
163
in
.
At intervals, however, he had reappeared in European capitals; shunned
by and shunning his equals, surrounded by parasites, amongst whom were
always to be found men of considerable learning, whom avarice or pov-
subjected to the influences of his wealth. For the last nine or ten
years he had settled in Persia, purchased extensive lands, maintained
the retinue, and exercised more than the power, of an Oriental prince.
Such was the man who, prematurely worn out, and assured by physicians
that he had not six weeks of life, had come to Aleppo with the gaudy
escort of an Eastern satrap, had caused himself to be borne in his litter to
the mud-hut of Haroun the Sage, and now called on the magician, in
whose art was his last hope, to reprieve him from the grave.
He turned round to Sir Philip when the latter entered the room, and
exclaimed in English, “ I am here because you are. Your intimacy with
this man was known to me. I took your character as the guarantee of
his own. Tell me that I am no credulous dupe. Tell him that I, Louis
Grayle, am no needy petitioner. Tell me of his wisdom; assure him of
my wealth.”
Sir Philip looked inquiringly at Haroun, who remained seated on his
carpet in profound silence.
" What is it you ask of Haroun ?”
“ To live on --- to live on. For every year of life he can give me, I
will load these floors with gold.”
“ Gold will not tempt Haroun."
“ What will ?”
“ Ask him yourself; you speak his language.”
-“I have asked him ; he vouchsafes me no answer.”
Haroun here suddenly roused himself as from a reverie. He drew
from under his robe a small phial, from which he let fall a single drop
into a cup of water, and said, “ Drink this. Send to me to-morrow for
such medicaments as I may prescribe. Return hither yourself in three
days; not before ! ”
When Grayle was gone, Sir Philip, moved to pity, asked Haroun if,
indeed, it were within the compass of his art to preserve life in a frame
that appeared so thoroughly exhausted. Haroun answered, “ A fever
may so waste the lamp of life that one ruder gust of air could extinguish
the flame, yet the sick man recovers. This sick's man's existence has
been one long fever; this sick man can recover.”
“ You will aid him to do so ?”
66 Three days hence I will tell you.”
On the third day Grayle revisited Haroun, and, at Haroun's request,
Sir Philip came also. Grayle declared that he had already derived un-
speakable relief from the remedies administered; he was lavish in expres-


164
A STRANGE STORY.
sions of gratitude; pressed large gifts on Haroun, and seemed pained
when they were refused. This time, Haroun conversed freely, drawing
forth Grayle's own irregular, perverted, stormy, but powerful intellect..
I can best convey the general nature of Grayle's share in the dialogue
between himself, Haroun, and Derval - recorded in the narrative in
words which I cannot trust my memory to repeat in detail — by stating
the effect it produced on my own mind. It seemed, while I read, as if
there passed before me some convulsion of Nature - a storm, an earth-
quake. Outcries of rage, of scorñ, of despair; a despots vehemence of
will; a rebels scoff at authority. Yet, ever and anon, some swell of
lofty thought, some burst of passionate genius — abrupt variations from
the vaunt of superb defiance to the wail of intense remorse.
The whole had in it, I know not what, of uncouth but colossal — like
the chant, in the old lyrical tragedy, of one of those mythical giants, who,
proud of descent from Night and Chaos, had held sway over the elements,
while still crude and conflicting, to be crushed under the rocks, upheaved
in their struggle, as Order and Harmony subjected a brightening Crea-
tion to the milder Influences personified and throned in Olympus. But
it was not till the later passages of the dialogue in which my interest was
now absorbed, that the language ascribed to this sinister personage lost a
gloomy pathos, not the less impressive for the awe with which it was
mingled. For, till then, it seemed to me as if in that tempestuous nature
there were still broken glimpses of starry light ; that a character origi-
nally lofty, if irregular and fierce, had been embittered by early and
continuous war with the social world, and bad, in that war, become
maimed and distorted; that, under happier circumstances, its fiery
strength might have been disciplined to good; that even now, where
remorse was so evidently poignant, evil could not be irredeemably con-
firmed.
At length all the dreamy compassion previously inspired vanished in
one unqualified abhorrence.
The subjects discussed changed from those which, relating to the com-
mon world of men, were within the scope of my reason. Haroun led his
wild guest to boast of his own proficiency in magic, and, despite my
incredulity, I could not overcome the shudder with which fictions, how-
ever extravagant, that deal with that dark Unknown abandoned to the
chimeras of poets, will, at night and in solitude, send through the veins
of men the least accessible to imaginary terrors.
Grayle spoke of the power he had exercised through the agency of
evil spirits - a power to fascinate and to destroy. He spoke of the aid
revealed to him, now too late, which such direful allies could afford, not
only to a private revenge, but to a kingly ambition. Had he acquired


166
A STRANGE STORY.
tained to earth, yoked to the mind that corrupts it, and enslaved to the
senses which thou bidst me restore to their tyrannous forces.”
And Grayle bowed his head and covered his face with his hands in
silence and in trembling.
Then Sir Philip, seized with compassion, pleaded for him. “At least
could not the soul have longer time on earth for repentance?” And
while Sir Philip was so pleading, Grayle fell prostrate in a swoon like
that of death. When he recovered, his head was leaning on Haroun's
knee, and his opening eyes fixed on the glittering phial which Haroun
held, and from which his lips had been moistened.
“Wondrous !” he murmured; “ how I feel life flowing back to me.
And that, then, is the elixir! it is no fable ! ”
His hands stretched greedily as to seize the phial, and he cried, im-
ploringly, “More, more !” Haroun replaced the vessel in the folds of
his robe and answered:
"I will not renew thy youth, but I will release thee from bodily suffer-
ing; I will leave the mind and the soul free from the pangs of the flesh,
to reconcile, if yet possible, their long war. My skill may afford thee
months yet for repentance; seek, in that interval, to atone for the evil
of sixty years; apply thy wealth where it may most compensate for in-
jury done, most relieve the indigent, and most aid the virtuous. Listen
to thy remorse. Humble thyself in prayer.”
Grayle departed, sighing heavily, and muttering to himself.
The next day Haroun summoned Sir Philip Derval and said to him:
“ Depart to Damascus. In that city the Pestilence has appeared. Go
thither thou, to heal and to save. In this easket are stored the surest
antidotes to the poison of the plague. Of that essence, undiluted and
pure, which tempts to the undue prolongation of soul in the prison of
flesh, this casket contains not a drop. I curse not my friend with so
mournful a boon. Thou hast learned enough of my art to know by what
simples the health of the temperate is easily restored to its balance, and
their path to the grave smoothed from pain. Not more should Man covet
from Nature for the solace and weal of the body. Nobler gifts far than
aught for the body this casket contains. Herein are the essences which
quicken the life of those duplicate senses that lie dormant and coiled in
their chrysalis web, awaiting the wings of a future development - the
senses by which we can see, though not with the eye, and hear, but not
by the ear. Herein are links between Man's mind and Nature's; herein
are secrets more precious even than these those extracts of light which
enable the Soul to distinguish itself from the Mind, and discriminate the
spiritual life, not more from life carnal than life intellectual. Where thou
seest some noble intellect, studious of Nature, intent upon Truth, yet ig- ja


A STRANGE STORY.
167
noring the fact that all animal life has a mind, and Man alone on the
earth ever asked, and has asked, from the hour his step trod the Earth
and his eye sought the Heaven, · Have I not a soul — Can it perish ?' —
there, such aids to the soul, in the innermost vision vouchsafed to the
mind, thou mayst lawfully use. But the treasures contained in this cas-
ket are like all which a mortal can win from the mines he explores ; -
good or ill in their uses as they pass to the hands of the good or the evil.
Thou wilt never confide them but to those who will not abuse; and even
then, thou art an adept too versed in the mysteries of Nature not to dis- ·
criminate between the powers that may serve the good to good ends, and
the powers that may tempt the good — where less wise than experience
has made thee and me to the ends that are evil; and not even to thy
friend, the most virtuous --if less proof against passion, than thou and I
have become - wilt thou confide such contents of the casket as may
work on the fancy, deafen the conscience, and imperil the soul.”
Sir Philip took the casket, and with it directions for use, which he did
not detail. He then spoke to Haroun about Louis Grayle, who had in-
spired him with a mingled sentiment of admiration and abhorrence; of
pity and terror. And Haroun answered. Repeating, thus, the words
ascribed to him, so far as I can trust, in regard to them -- as to all else in
this marvellous narrative — to a memory habitually tenacious even in or-
dinary matters, and strained to the utmost extent of its power, by the
strangeness of the ideas presented to it, and the intensity of my personal
interest in whatever admitted a ray into that cloud which, gathering fast
over my reason, now threatened storm to my affections :
“ When the mortal deliberately allies himself to the spirits of evil, he
surrenders the citadel of his being to the guard of its enemies; and those
who look from without can only dimly guess what passes within the pre-
cincts abandoned to Powers whose very nature we shrink to contemplate,
lest our mere gaze should invite them. This man, whom thou pitiest, is
not yet everlastingly consigned to the fiends ; because his soul still strug-
gles against them. His life has been one long war between his intellect
which is mighty and his spirit which is feeble. The intellect, armed and
winged by the passions, has besieged and oppressed the soul; but the soul
has never ceased to repine and to repent. And at moments it has
gained its inherent ascendancy, persuaded revenge to drop the prey it
had seized, turned the mind astray from hatred and wrath into unwonted
paths of charity and love. In the long desert of guilt, there have been
green spots and fountains of good. The fiends have occupied the intel-
lect which invoked them, but they have never yet thoroughly mastered the
soul which their presence appalls. In the struggle that now passes within


168
A STRANGE STORY.
that breast, amidst the flickers of waning mortality, only Allah, whose
eye never slumbers, can aid.”
Haroun continued, in words yet more strange and yet more deeply
graved in my memory:
“ There have been men (thou mayst have known such), who, after an
illness in which life itself seemed suspended, have arisen, as out of a
sleep, with characters wholly changed. Before, perhaps gentle and good
and truthful, they now become bitter, malignant, and false. To the per-
sons and the things they had before loved, they evince repugnance and
loathing. Sometimes this change is so marked and irrational, that their
kindred ascribe it to madness. Not the madness which affects them in
the ordinary business of life, but that which turns into harshness and dis-
cord the moral harmony that results from natures whole and complete.
But there are dervishes who hold that in that illness, which had for its
time the likeness of death, the soul itself has passed away, and an evil
genius has fixed itself into the body and the brain, thus left void of their
former tenant, and animates them in the unaccountable change from the
past to the present existence. Such mysteries have formed no part of
my study, and I tell you the conjecture received in the East without haz-
arding a comment whether of incredulity or belief. But if, in this war
between the mind which the fiends have seized and the soul which im-
plores refuge of Allah; if, while the mind of yon traveller now covets life
lengthened on earth for the enjoyments it had perverted its faculties to
seek and to find in sin, and covets so eagearly that it would shrink from
no crime, and revolt from no fiend, that could promise the gift — the soul
shudderingly implores to be saved from new guilt, and would rather
abide by the judgment of Allah on the sins that have darkened it, than
pass forever irredeemably away to the demons: if this be so, what if the
soul's petition be heard – what if it rise from the ruins around it — what
if the ruins be left to the witchcraft that seeks to rebuild them? There,
if demons might enter, that which they sought as their prize has escaped
them; that which they find would mock them by its own incompleteness
even in evil. In vain might animal life the most perfect be given to the
machine of the flesh; in vain might the mind, freed from the check of
the soul, be left to roam at will through a brain stored with memories of
knowledge and skilled in the command of its faculties; in vain, in
addition to all that body and brain bestow on the normal condition of
man, might unhallowed reminiscences gather all the arts and charms of
the sorcery by which the fiends tempted the soul, before it fled, through
the passions of flesh and the cravings of mind: the Thing, thus devoid
of a soul, would be an instrument of evil, doubtless; but an instrument


À STRANGE STORY.
169
that of itself could not design, invent, and complete. The demons them-
selves could have no permanent hold on the perishable materials. They
might enter it for some gloomy end which Allah permits in his inscrutable
wisdom; but they could leave it no trace when they pass from it, because
there is no conscience where soul is wanting. The human’animal with-
out soul, but otherwise made felicitously perfect in its mere vital organi-
zation, might ravage and destroy, as the tiger and the serpent may
destroy and ravage, and the moment after, would sport in the sunlight
harmless and rejoicing, because, like the serpent and the tiger it is inca-
pable of remorse.”
“Why startle my wonder,” said Derval, “ with so fantastic an im-
age ? "
“Because, possibly, the image may come into palpable form! I know,
while I speak to thee, that this miserable man is calling to his aid the
evil sorcery over which he boasts his control. To gain the end he de-
sires, he must pass through a crime. Sorcery whispers to him how to pass
through it secure from the detection of man. The soul resists, but, in re-
sisting, is weak against the tyranny of the mind to which it has submitted
so long. Question me no more. But if I vanish from thine eyes, if thou
hear that the death which, to my sorrow and in my foolishness I have
failed to recognize as the merciful minister of Heaven, has removed me
at last from the earth, believe that the Pale Visitant was welcome, and
that I humbly accept as a blessed release the lot of our common human-
ity.”
Sir Philip went to Damascus. There, he found the pestilence raging
- there, he devoted himself to the cure of the afflicted ; in no single in-
stance, so, at least, he declared, did the antidotes stored in the casket fail.
in their effect. The pestilence had passed; his medicaments were ex-
hausted; when the news reached him that Haroun was no more. The
Sage had been found one morning, lifeless in his solitary home, and, ac-
cording to popular rumor, marks on his throat betrayed the murderous
hand of the strangler. Simultaneously, Louis Grayle had disappeared
from the city, and was supposed to have shared the fate of Haroun, and
been secretly.buried by the assassins who had deprived him of life. Sir
Philip hastened to Aleppo. There, he ascertained that on the night in
which Haroun died, Grayle did not disappear alone; with him were also
missing two of his numerous suite; the one an Arab woman, named
Ayesha, who had for some years been his constant companions, his pupil
and associate in the mystic practices to which his intellect had been de-
based, and who was said to have acquired a singular influence over him,
partly by her beauty, and partly by the tenderness with which she had
nursed him through his long decline: the other, an Indian, specially as
15


170
A STRANGE STORY.
.
signed to her service, of whom all the wild retainers of Grayle spoke
with detestation and terror. He was believed by them to belong to that
murderous sect of fanatics whose existence as a community has only re-
cently been made known to Europe, and who strangle their unsuspect-
ing victim in the firm belief that they thereby propitiate the favor of the
goddess they serve. The current opinion at Aleppo was, that if these
two persons had conspired to murder Haroun, perhaps for the sake of
the treasures he was said to possess, it was still more certain that they
had made away with their own English Lord, whether for the sake of
the jewels he wore about him, or for the sake of treasures less doubtful
than those imputed to Haroun — and of which the hiding-place would to
them be much better known. “I did not share that opinion," wrote the
narrator; " for I assured myself that Ayesha sincerely loved her awful
master; and that love need excite no wonder, for Louis Grayle was one
whom if a woman, and especially a woman of the East, had once loved,
before old age and infirmity fell on him, she would love and cherish still
more devotedly when it became her task to protect the being who, in his
day of power and command, had exalted his slave into the rank of his
pupil and companion. And the Indian whom Grayle had assigned to
her service, was allowed to have that brute kind of fidelity which,
though it recoils from no crime for a master, refuses all crime against i
him.
“I came to the conclusion that Haroun had been murdered by order
of Louis Grayle — for the sake of the elixir of life — murdered by Juma
the Strangler; and that Grayle himself had been aided in his flight from
Aleppo, and tended, through the effects of the life-giving drug thus mur-
derously obtained, by the womanly love of the Arab woman, Ayesha.
These convictions (since I could not — without being ridiculed as the
wildest of dupes — even hint at the vital elixir) I failed to impress on the
Eastern officials, or even on a countryman of my own whom I chanced to
find at Aleppo. They only arrived at what seemed the common-sense
verdict, namely, Haroun might have been strangled, or might have died
in a fit (the body, little examined, was buried long before I came to
Aleppo); Louis Grayle was murdered by his own treacherous dependents.
But all trace of the fugitives was lost.
“ And now," wrote Sir Philip, “ I will state by what means I discovered
that Louis Grayle still lived — changed from age into youth; a new form,
a new being; realizing, I verily believe, the image which Haroun's words
had raised up, in what then seemed to me the metaphysics of phantasy;
criminal, without consciousness of crime; the dreadest of the mere animal
race; an incarnation of the blind powers of Nature - beautiful and joy.
ous, wanton, and terrible, and destroying! Such as ancient myths have


A STRANGE STORY.
171
personified in the idols of Oriental creeds; such as Nature, of herself,
might form man in her moments of favor, if man were wholly the animal,
and spirit were no longer the essential distinction between himself and
the races to which by superior formation and subtler perceptions he would
still be the king.
“But this being is yet more dire and potentous tloun the mere animal
man, for in him are not only the fragmentary memories of a pristine in-
telligence which no mind, unaided by the presence of soul, could have
originally compassed, but amidst that intelligence are the secrets of the
magic which is learned through the agencies of spirits, to our race the
most hostile. And who shall say whether the fiends do not enter at their
will this void and deserted temple whence the soul has departed, and use
as their tools, passive and unconscious, all the faculties which, skilful in
sorcery, still place a Mind at the control of their malice ?
" It was in the interest excited in me by the strange and terrible fate
that befel an Armenian family with which I was slightly acquainted, that
I first traced, in the creature I am now about to describe, and whose
course I devote myself to watch and trust to bring to a close--the mur-
derer of Haroun for the sake of the elixir of youth.
" In this Armenian family, there were three daughters; one of
them "
I had just read thus far, when a dim Shadow fell over the page, and a
cold air seemed to breathe on me. Cold--so cold, that my blood halted
in my veins as if suddenly frozen! Involuntarily I started, and looked
up, sure that some ghastly preseuce was in the room. And then, on the
opposite side of the wall, I beheld an unsubstantial likeness of a human
form. Shadow I call it, but the word is not strictly correct, for it was
luminous, though with a pale shine. In some exhibition in London there
is shown a curious instance of optical illusion; at the end of a corridor you
see, apparently in strong light, a human skull. You are convinced it is
there as you approach; it is, however, only a reflection from a skull at a
distance. The image before me was less vivid, less seemingly prominent
than is the illusion I speak of. I was not deceived. I felt it was a spec-
trum, a phantasm, but I felt no less surely that it was a reflection from
an animate form — the form and the face of Margrave; it was there, dis-
tinct, unmistakable. Conceiving that he himself must be behind me, I
sought to rise, to turn round, to examine. I could not move; limb and
muscle were over-mastered by some incomprehensible spell. Gradually
my senses forsook me, I became unconscious as well as motionless. When
I recovered, I heard the clock strike three. I must have been nearly two
hours insensible; the candles before me were burning low; my eyes
rested on the table ; the dead man's manuscript was gone! .


172
A STRANGE STORY.
CHAPTER XL.
The dead man's manuscript was gone. But how? A phantom might
delude my eye, a human will, though exerted at a distance, might, if the
tales of mesmerism be true, deprive me of movement and of consciousness;
but neither phantom nor mesmeric will could surely remove from the ta-
ble before me the material substance of the book that had vanished!
Was I to seek explanation in the arts of sorcery ascribed to Louis Grayle
in the narrative ?- I would not pursue that conjecture. Against it my
reason rose up half alarmed, half disdainful. Some one must have en-
tered the room - some one have removed the manuscript. I looked
round. The windows were closed, the curtains partially drawn over the
shutters, as they were before my consciousness had left me; all seemed
undisturbed. Snatching up one of the candles, fast dying out, I went
into the adjoining library, the desolate state-rooms, into the entrance-hall
and examined the outer door. Barred and locked! The robber had left
no vestige of his stealthy presence.
I resolved to go at once to Strahan's room, and tell him of the loss sus-
tained. A deposit had been confided to me, and I felt as if there were a
slur on my honor every moment in which I kept its abstraction concealed
from him to whom I was responsible for the trust. I hastily ascended the
great staircase, grim with faded portraits, and found myself in a long cor-
ridor opening on my own bed-room; no doubt also on Strahan’s. Which
was his? I knew not. I opened rapidly, door after door, peered into
empty chambers, went blundering on, when, to the right, down a narrow
passage, I recognized the signs of my host's whereabout-- signs familiarly
commonplace and vulgar, signs by which the inmate of any chamber in
lodging-house or inn makes himself known — a chair before a doorway,
clothes negligently thrown on it, beside it a pair of shoes. And so ludic-
rous did such testimony of common every-day life, of the habits which
Strahan would necessarily have contracted in his desultory unluxurious
bachelor's existence - so ludicrous, I say, did these homely details seem
to me, so grotesquely at variance with the wonders of which I had been
reading, with the wonders yet more incredible of which I myself had been
witness and victim, that as I turned down the passage, I heard my own
unconscious half-hysterical laugh; and, startled by the sound of that laugh
as if it came from some one else, I paused, my hand on the door, and asked
myself: “Do I dream ? Am I awake? And if awake, what am I to
say to the commonplace mortal I am about to rouse ? Speak to him of
a phantom! Speak to him of some weird spell over this strong frame !


À STRANGE STORY.
173
Speak to him of a mystic trance in which has been stolen what he con-
fided to me, without my knowledge! What will he say? What should
I have said a week since to any man who told such a tale to me?” I
did not wait to resolve these questions. I entered the room. There was
Strahan sound asleep on his bed. I shook him roughly. He started up,
rubbed his eyes — “You, Allen - you! What the deuce ? — what's the
matter?”
“ Strahan, I have been robbed !--- robbed of the manuscript you lent
me. I could not rest till I had told you.”
“Robbed, robbed! Are you serious !”
By this time Strahan had thrown off the bed-clothes, and sat upright,
staring at me.
And then those questions which my mind had suggested while I was
standing at his door, repeated themselves with double force. Tell this
man, this unimaginative, hard-headed, raw-boned, sandy-haired North
countryman - tell this man a story which the most credulous school-girl
would have rejected as a fable! Impossible.
“ I fell asleep,” said I, coloring and stammering, for the slightest devia-
tion from truth was painful to me, “and — and — when I woke — the
manuscript was gone. Some one must have entered, and committed the
theft "
“Some one entered the house at this hour of the night, and then only
steal a manuscript which could be of no value to him! Absurd! If
thieves have come in, it must be for other objects -- for plate, for money,
I will dress; we will see !”
Strahan hurried on his clothes, muttering to himself, and avoiding my
eye. He was embarrassed. He did not like to say to an old friend what
was on his mind, but I saw at once that he suspected I had resolved to
deprive him of the manuscript, and invented a wild tale in order to con-
ceal my own dishonesty.
Nevertheless, he proceeded to search the house. I followed him in si-
lence, oppressed with my own thoughts, and longing for solitude in my
own chamber. We found no one, no trace of any one, nothing to
excite suspicion. There were but two female servants sleeping in the
house — the old housekeeper, and a country girl who assisted her. It
was not possible to suspect either of these persons, but in the course of
our search we opened the doors of their rooms. We saw that they were
both in bed, both seemingly asleep; it seemed idle to wake and question
them. When the formality of our futile investigation was concluded, Stra-
han stopped at the door of my bed-room, and for the first time fixing his
eyes on me steadily, said:
.
15 *


174
A STRANGE STORY.
“ Allen Fenwick, I would have given half the fortune I have come into
rather than this had happened. The manuscript, as you know, was be-
queathed to me as a sacred trust by a benefactor whose slightest wish it
is my duty to observe religiously. If it contained aught valuable to a
man of your knowledge and profession, — why, you were free to use its
contents. Let me hope, Allen, that the book will reappear to-morrow.”
He said no more, drew himself away from the hand I voluntarily ex-
tended, and walked quickly back towards his own room.
Alone once more, I sank on a seat, buried my face in my hands, and
strove in vain to collect into some definite shape my own tumultuous and
disordered thoughts. Could I attach serious credit to the marvellous narra-
tive I had read? Were there, indeed, such powers given to man? such
influences latent in the calm routine of Nature? I could not believe it; I
must have some morbid affection of the brain ; I must be under an hallu-
cination. Hallucination ? The phantom, yes — the trance, yes. But,
still, how came the book gone? That, at least, was not hallucination.
I left my room the next morning, with a vague hope that I should find
the manuscript somewhere in the study; that, in my own trance, I might
have secreted it, as sleep-walkers are said to secrete things, without re-
membrance of their acts in their waking state.
I searched minutely in every conceivable place. Straban found me still
employed in that hopeless task. He had breakfasted in his own room, and
it was past eleven o'clock when he joined me. His manner was now
hard, cold, and distant, and his suspicion so bluntly shown that my distress
gave way to resentment.
“Is it possible,” I cried, indignantly, “ that you who have known me so
well can suspect me of an act so base, and so gratuitously base? Purloin,
conceal a book confided to me, with full power to copy from it whatever
I might desire, use its contents in any way that might seem to me service-
able to science, or useful to me in my own calling!”.
"I have not accused you," answered Strahan, sullenly. “But what are
we to say to Mr. Jeeves; to all others who know that this manuscript ex-
isted? Will they believe what you tell me ?”
“Mr. Jeeves," I said, “ cannot suspect a fellow-townsman, whose char-
acter is as high as mine, of untruth and theft. And to whom else have
you communicated the facts connected with a memoir and a request of so
extraordinary a nature ?”
“ To young Margrave; I told you so !”
" True, true. We need not go further to find the thief. Margrave
has been in this house more than once. He knows the position of the
rooms. You have named the robber!”


A STRANGE STORY.
175
“ Tut! what on earth could a gay young fellow like Margrave want
with a work of such dry and recondite nature, as I presume my poor
kinsman's memoir must be ?”
I was about to answer, when the door was abruptly opened, and the
servant girl entered, followed by two men, in whom I recognized the su-
perintendent of the police, and the same subordinate who had
found me by Sir Philip's corpse.
The superintendent came up to me with a grave face, and whispered
in my ear. I did not at first comprehend him. “Come with you,” I
said, “ and to Mr. Vigors, the magistrate ? I thought my deposition was
closed."
The superintendent shook his head. “I have the authority here, Dr.
Fenwick.”
“Well, I will come, of course. Has any thing new transpired ?”
The superintendent turned to the servant girl, who was standing with
gaping mouth and staring eyes. “ Show us Dr. Fenwick's room. You
had better put up, sir, whatever things you have brought here. I will go
up-stairs with you,” he whispered again. “Come, Dr. Fenwick, I am in
the discharge of my duty.”
Something in the man's manner was so sinister and menacing that I felt,
at once, that some new.and strange calamity had befallen me. I turned
towards Strahan. He was at the threshold, speaking in a low voice to the
subordinate policeman, and there was an expression of amazement and
horror in his countenance. As I came towards him he darted away with-
out a word.
I went up the stairs, entered my bed-room, the superintendent close
behind me. As I took up mechanically the few things I had brought with
me, the police-officer drew them from me with an abruptness that appeared
insolent, and deliberately searched the pockets of the coat which I had
worn the evening before, then opened the drawers in the room, and even
pried into the bed.
• What do you mean ?” I asked, haughtily.
“Excuse me, sir. Duty. You are
“Well, I am what?”
“My prisoner; here is the warrant.”
“Warrant! on what charge ?"
66 The murder of Sir Philip Derval.”
“I-I! Murder !” I could say no more.
I must hurry over this awful passage in my marvellous record. It is
torture to dwell on the details, and indeed I have so sought to chase them
from my recollection, that they only come back to me in hideous frag-
ments, like the broken, incoherent remains of a horrible dream.


176
A STRANGE STORY.
All that I need state is as follows: Early on the very morning on which
I had been arrested, a man, a stranger in the town, had privately sought
Mr. Vigors, and deposed that, on the night of the murder, he had been
taking refuge from a sudden storm under shelter of the eaves and but-
tresses of a wall adjoining an old arch-way; that he had heard men talking
within the archway; had heard one say to the other, “ You still bear me
a grudge.” The other had replied, “I can forgive you on one condition."
That he then lost much of the conversation that ensued, which was in a
lower voice; but he gathered enough to know that the condition demanded
by the one was the possession of a casket which the other carried about
with him. That there seemed an altercation on this matter between the
two men, which, to judge by the tone of voice, was angry on the part of
the man demanding the casket; that, finally, this man said in a loud key,
“Do you still refuse?” and on receiving the answer, which the witness
did not overhear, exclaimed threateningly, “ It is you who will repent;"
and then stepped forth from the arch into the street. The rain had then
ceased, but, by a broad flash of lightning, the witness saw distinctly the
figure of the person thus quitting the shelter of the arch; a man of tall
stature, powerful frame, erect carriage. A little time afterwards, witness
saw a slighter and older man come from the arch, whom he could only
examine by the flickering ray of the gas-lamp near the wall, the lightning
having ceased, but whom he fully believed to be the person he afterwards
discovered to be Sir Philip Derval.
He'said that he himself had only arrived at the town a few hours be-
fore; a stranger to LM , and indeed to England; having come from
the United States of America, where he had passed his life from childhood.
He had journeyed on foot to L- , in the hope of finding there some
distant relatives. He had put up at a small inn, after which he had
strolled through the town, when the storm had driven him to seek shelter.
He had then failed to find his way back to the inn, and after wandering
about in vain, and seeing no one at that late hour of night of whom he
could ask the way, he had crept under a portico and slept for two or
three hours. Waking towards the dawn, he had then got up, and again
sought to find his way to the inn, when he saw in a narrow street before
him two men, one of whom he recognized as the taller of the two, to
whose conversation he had listened under the arch, the other he did not
recognize at the moment. The taller man seemed angry and agitated,
and he heard him say, “ The casket; I will have it.” There then seemed
a struggle between these two persons, when the taller one struck down
the shorter, knelt on his breast, and he caught distinctly the gleam of some
steel instrument. That he was so frightened that he could not stir from
the place, and that though he cried out, he believed his voice was not


A STRANGE STORY.
177
.
heard. He then saw the taller man rise, the other resting on the pave-
ment motionless, and a minute or so afterwards beheld policemen com-
ing to the place, on which he, the witness, walked away. He did not
know that a murder had been committed; it might be only an assault; it
was no business of his, he was a stranger. He thought it best not to inter-
fere, the policemen having cognizance of the affair. He found out his
inn; for the next few days he was, however, absent from L- in search
of his relations who had left the town, many years ago, to fix their resi-
dence in one of the neighboring villages.
He was, however, disappointed, none of these relations now survived.
He had returned to heard of the murder, was in doubt what to
do, might get himself into trouble if, a mere stranger, he gave an unsup-
ported testimony. But, on the day before the evidence was volunteered,
as he was lounging in the streets, he had seen a gentleman pass by on
horseback, in whom he immediately recognized the man who, in his
belief, was the murderer of Sir Philip Derval. He inquired of a by-
stander the name of the gentleman, the answer was · Dr. Fenwick.'
That, the rest of the day, he felt much disturbed in his mind, not liking to
volunteer such a charge against a man of apparent respectability and
station. But that his conscience would not let him sleep that night, and
he had resolved at morning to go to a magistrate and make a clean
breast of it.
This story was in itself so improbable that any other magistrate but Mr.
Vigors would, perhaps, have dismissed it in contempt. But Mr. Vigors,
already so bitterly prejudiced against me, and not sorry, perhaps, to subject
me to the humiliation of so horrible a charge, immediately issued his warrant
to search my house. I was absent at Derval Court; the house was searched.
In the bureau in my favorite study, which was left unlocked, the steel casket
was discovered, and a large case-knife, on the blade of which the stains of
blood were still perceptible. On this discovery I was apprehended, and on
these evidences, and on the deposition of this vagrant stranger, I was, not
indeed committed to take my trial for murder, but placed in confinement;
all bail for my appearance refused, and the examination adjourned to give
time for further evidence and inquiries. I had requested the professional
aid of Mr. Jeeves. To my surprise and dismay Mr. Jeeves begged me
to excuse him. He said he was preëngaged by Mr. Strahan to detect
and prosecute the murderer of Sir P. Derval, and could not assist one
accused of the murder. I gathered from the little he said that Strahan
had already been to him that morning and told him of the missing man-
uscript — that Strahan had ceased to be my friend. I engaged another
solicitor, a young man of ability, and who professed personal esteem for
me. Mr. Stanton (such was the lawyer's name) believed in my inno-


178
A STRANGE STORY.
cence; but he warned me that appearances were grave, he implored me
to be perfectly frank with him. Had I held conversation with Sir Philip
under the archway as reported by the witness ?. Had I'used such or sim-
ilar words? Had the deceased said, “I had a grudge against him ?”
Had I demanded the casket ? Had I threatened Sir Philip that he would
repent? And of what? His refusal ?
I felt myself grow pale as I answered, “ Yes, I thought such or similar
expressions had occurred in my conversation with the deceased.”
“ What was the reason of the grudge? What was the nature of this
casket, that I should so desire its possession ?"
There, I became terribly embarrassed. What could I say to a keen,
sensible, worldly man of law ? Tell him of the powder and the fume, of
the scene in the museum, of Sir Philip's tale, of the implied identity of
the youthful Margrave with the aged Grayle, of the elixir of life, and of
magic arts ? I-I tell such a romance! I, the noted adversary of all
pretended mysticism! I-I-a sceptical practitioner of medicine! Had
that manuscript of Sir Philip's been available -- a substantial record of
marvellous events by a man of repute for intellect and learning - I
might, perhaps, have ventured to startle the solicitor of L- with my
revelations. But the sole proof that all which the solicitor urged me to
confide was not a monstrous fiction or an insane delusion, had disap-
peared; and its disappearance was a part of the terrible mystery that en-
veloped the whole. I answered, therefore, as composedly as I could, that
“ I could have no serious grudge against Sir Philip, whom I had never
seen before that evening; that the words, which applied to my supposed
grudge, were lightly said by Sir Philip in reference to a physiological dis-
pute on matters connected with mesmerical phenomena; that the de-
ceased had declared his casket, which he had shown to me at the mayor's
house, contained drugs of great potency in medicine; that I had asked
permission to test those drugs myself; and that when I said he would re-
pent of his refusal, I merely meant that he would repent of reliance on
drugs not warranted by the experiments of professional science."
My replies seemed to satisfy the lawyer so far, but “How could I
account for the casket and the knife being found in my room ? "
“In no way but this; the window of that room was a door-window
opening on the lane, from which any one might enter it. I was in the
habit, not only of going out myself that way, but of admitting through
that door any more familiar private acquaintance."
“ Whom, for instance ?"
, I hesitated a moment, and then said, with a significance I could not
forbear, “Mr. Margrave! He would know the locale perfectly; he
would know that the door was rarely bolted from within during the day-


-
179
A STRANGE STORY.
time; he could enter at all hours; he could place, or instruct any one to
deposit, the knife and casket in my bureau, which he knew I never kept
locked; it contained no secrets, no private correspondence-chiefly sur-
gical implements, or such things as I might want for professional experi-
ments.
.“ Mr. Margrave! But you cannot suspect him - a lively, charming
young man, against whose character not a whisper was ever heard of
connivance with such a charge against you ; a connivance that would
implicate him in the murder itself, for if you are accused wrongfully, he
who accuses you is either the criminal or the criminal's accomplice ; his
instigator or his tool.”
“ Mr. Stanton,” I said firmly, after a moment's pause, “ I do suspect
Mr. Margrave of a hand in this crime. Sir Philip, on seeing him at the
mayor's house, expressed a strong abhorrence of him, more than hinted
at crimes he had committed; appointed me to come to Derval Court the
day after that on which the murder was committed. Sir Philip liad
known something of this Margrave in the East - Margrave might dread
exposure, revelations- of what I know not; but, strange as it may seem
to you, it is my conviction, that this young man, apparently so gay and
so thoughtless, is the real criminal, and in some way, which I cannot con-
jecture, has employed this lying vagabond in the fabrication of a charge
against myself. Reflect: of Mr. Margrave's antecedents we know noth-
ing; of them nothing was known even by the young gentleman who first
introduced him to the society of this town. If you would serve and save
me, it is to that quarter that you will direct your vigilant and unrelaxing
researches."
I had scarcely so said when I repented my candor; for I observed in
the face of Mr. Stanton a sudden revulsion of feeling, an utter incredulity
of the accusation' I had thus hazarded, and for the first time a doubt of my
own innocence. The fascination exercised by Margrave was universal;
nor was it to be wondered at; for, besides the charm of his joyous pres-
ence, he seemed so singularly free from even the errors common enough
with the young. So gay and boon a companion, yet a shunner of wine ;
so dazzling in aspect, so more than beautiful, so courted, so idolized by
women, yet no tale of seduction, of profligacy, attached to his name !
As to his antecedents, he had so frankly owned himself a natural son, a
nobody, a traveller, an idler; his expenses, though lavish, were so unos-
tentatious, so regularly defrayed. He was so wholly the reverse of the
character assigned to criminals, that it seemed as absurd to bring a charge
of homicide against a butterfly or a goldfinch as against this seemingly.
innocent and delightful favorite of humanity and nature.
However, Mr. Stanton said little or nothing, and shortly afterwards


180
A STRANGE STORY.
left me, with a dry expression of hope that my innocence would be cleared
in spite of evidence that, he was bound to say, was of the most serious
character.
I was exhausted. I fell into a profound sleep early that night; it might
be a little after twelve when I woke, and woke as fully, as completely, as
much restored to life and consciousness, as it was then my habit to be at
the break of day. And, so waking, I saw on the wall, opposite my bed,
the same luminous phantom I had seen in the wizard's study at Derval
Court. I have read in Scandinavian legends of an apparition called the
Scin-Læca, or shining corpse. It is supposed, in the northern supersti-
tion, sometimes to haunt sepulchres, sometimes to foretell doom. It is
the spectre of a human body seen in a phosphoric light. And so exactly
did this phantom correspond to the description of such an apparition in
Scandinavian fable that I know not how to give it a better name than
that of Scin-Læca — the shining corpse.
There it was before me, corpse-like, yet not dead; there, as in the
haunted study of the wizard Forman! — the form and the face of Margrave.
Constitutionally, my nerves are strong, and my temper hardy, and now I
was resolved to battle against any impression which my senses might re-
ceive from my own deluding fancies. Things that witnessed for the first
time daunt us, witnessed for the second time lose their terror. I rose
from my bed with a bold aspect, I approached the phantom with a firm
step; but when within two paces of it, and my hand outstretched to
touch it, my arm became fixed in air, my feet locked to the ground. I
did not experience fear; I felt that my heart beat regularly, but an in-
vincible something opposed itself to me. I stood as if turned to stone,
and then from the lips of this phantom there came a voice, but a voice
which seemed borne from a great distance - very low, muffled, and yet
distinct: I could not even be sure that my ear heard it, or whether the
sound was not conveyed to me by an inner sense.
" I, and I alone, can save and deliver you," said the voice. "I will do
so, and the conditions I ask, in return, are simple and easy.”
“ Fiend or spectre, or mere delusion of my own brain,” cried I, “ there
can be no compact between thee and me. I despise thy malice, I reject
thy services; I accept no conditions to escape from tlie one or to obtain
the other."
“ You may give a different answer when I ask again.”
The Scin-Læca slowly waned, and, fading first into a wan shadow, then
vanished. I rejoiced at the reply I had given. Two days elapsed before
Mr. Stanton again came to me; in the interval the Scin-Læca did not
reappear. I had mustered all my courage, all my common sense, noted
down all the weak points of the false evidence against me, and felt calm
and supported by the strength of my innocence.
199 999
there a
at his
Statesti


A STRANGE STORY. :
181
The first few words of the solicitor dashed all my courage to the ground.
For I was anxious to hear news of Lilian, anxious to have some message
from her that might cheer and strengthen me, and my first question was
this:
“ Mr. Stanton, you are aware that I am engaged in marriage to Miss
Ashleigh. Your family are not unacquainted with her. What says, what
thinks she of this monstrous charge against her betrothed ?”
. “I was for two hours at Mrs. Ashleigh's house last evening,” replied
the lawyer; "she was naturally anxious to see me as employed in your
defence. Who do you think was there? Who, eager to defend you, to
express bis persuasion of your innocence, to declare his conviction that
the real criminal would be soon discovered — who but that same Mr. Mar-
grave, whom, pardon my frankness, you so rashly and groundlessly sus-
pected.”
- “ Heavens! Do you say that he is received in that house ? that he —
he is familiarly admitted to her presence ?”
“My good sir, why these unjust prepossessions against a true friend.
It was as your friend that, as soon as the charge against you amazed and
shocked the town of L- , Mr. Margrave called on Mrs. Ashleigh -
presented to her by Miss Brabazon — and was so cheering and hopeful
that — ”
. "Enough!” I exclaimed — “enough !”
I paced the room in a state of excitement and rage, which the lawyer
in vain endeavored to calm, until at length I halted abruptly: “ Well,
- and you saw Miss Ashleigh ? What message does she send to me —
her betrothed ? ”
Mr. Stanton looked confused.“ Message! Consider, sir — Miss Ash-
leigh's situation — the delicacy - and — and "
“I understand! no message, no word, from a young lady so respectable
to a man accused of murder.”
Mr. Stanton was silent for some moments; and then said quietly, “Let
us change this subject; let us think of what more immediately presses.
I see you have been making some notes ; may I look at them — ”
I composed myself and sat down. “ This accuser! have inquiries really
been made as to himself, and his statement of his own proceedings? He
comes, he says, from America - in what ship? At what port did he
land? Is there any evidence to corroborate his story of the relations he
tricd to discover — of the inn at which he first put up, and to which he
could not find his way?”
"Your suggestions are sensible, Dr. Fenwick. I have forestalled them.
It is true that the man lodged at a small inn - the Rising Sun - true
that he made inquiries about some relations of the name of Walls, who
16


182
A STRANGE STORY. :
..
formerly resided at - and afterwards removed to a village ten miles
distant - two brothers -- tradesmen of small means but respectable char-
acter. He at first refused to say at what seaport he landed, in what ship
he sailed. I suspect that he has now told a falsehood as to these matters.
I have sent my clerk to Southampton - for it is there he said that he was
put on shore; we shall see — the man himself is detained in close custody.
I hear that his manner is strange and excitable ; but he preserves silence
as much as possible. . It is generally believed that he is a bad character,
perhaps a returned convict, and that this is the true reason why he so
long delayed giving evidence, and has been since so reluctant to account
for himself. But even if his testimony should be impugned, should break
down, still we should have to account for the fact that the casket and the
case-knife were found in your bureau. For, granting that a person could,
in your absence, have entered your study and placed the articles in your
bureau, it is clear that such a person must have been well acquainted
with your house, and this stranger to L- could not have possessed
that knowledge.”
“ Of course not -- Mr. Margrave did possess it!”
" Mr. Margrave again! - oh, sir."
I arose and moved away, with an impatient gesture. I could not trust
myself to speak. That night I did not sleep; I watched impatiently, gaz-
ing on the opposite wall, for the gleam of the Scin-Læca. But the night
passed away, and the spectre did not appear.
CHAPTER XLI.
The lawyer came the next day, and almost with a smile on his lips.
He brought me a few lines in pencil from Mrs. Ashleigh ; they were
kindly expressed, bade me of good cheer; "she never for a moment be-
lieved in my guilt; Lilian bore up wonderfully under so terrible a trial;
it was an unspeakable comfort to both to receive the visits of a friend so
attached to me, and so confident of a triumphant refutation of the hideous
calumny- under which I now suffered as Mr. Margrave !!
The lawyer had seen Margrave again – seen him in that house. Mar-
grave seemed almost domiciled there!
I remained sullen and taciturn during this visit. I longed again for
the night. Night came. I heard the distant clock strike twelve, when
again the icy wind passed through my hair, and against the wall stood
the Luminous Shadow.


A STRANGE STORY.
183
“Have you considered ?” whispered the voice, still as from afar. “I
repeat it — I alone can save you."
"Is it among the conditions which you ask, in return, that I shall re-
sign to you the woman I love ?”
"No."
“Is it one of the conditions that I should commit some crime — a crime
perhaps heinous as that of which I am accused ?”
s
"No."
4 With such reservations, I accept the conditions you may name, pro
vided I, in my turn, may demand one condition from yourself.”
“ Name it."
"I ask you to quit this town. I ask you, meanwhile, to cease your
visits to the house that holds the woman betrothed to me.”
"I will cease those visits. And before many days are over, I will quit
this town.”
“Now, then, say what you ask from me. I am prepared to concede
it. And not from fear for myself, but because I fear for the pure and
innocent being who is under the spell of your deadly fascination. This
is your power over me. You command me through my love for another.
Speak.”
“My conditions are simple. You will pledge yourself to desist from
all charge or insinuation against myself, of what nature soever. You will
not, when you meet me in the flesh, refer to what you have known of my
likeness in the Shadow. You will be invited to the house at which I
may be also a guest ; you will come; you will meet and converse with
me as guest speaks with guest in the house of a host.”
“Is that all ?”
" It is all.”
" Then I pledge you my faith ; keep your own.”
"Fear not; sleep secure in the certainty that you will soon be released
from these walls.”
The Shadow waned and faded. Darkness settled back, and a sleep,
profound and calm, fell over me.
The next day Mr. Stanton again visited me. He had received that
morning a note from Mr. Margrave, stating that he had left L- to
pursue, in person, an investigation which he had already commenced
through another, affecting the man who had given evidence against me,
and that, if his hope should prove well founded, he trusted to establish
my innocence, and convict the real murderer of Sir Philip Derval. In
the research he thus volunteered, he had asked for, and obtained, the as-
sistance of the policeman Waby, who, grateful to me for saving the life
of his sister, had expressed a strong desire to be employed in my service.


184
A STRANGE STORY.
Meanwhile, my most cruel assailant was my old college friend, Richard
Strahan. For Jeeves had spread abroad Strahan's charge of purloining
the memoir which had been intrusted to me, and that accusation had
done me great injury in public opinion, because it seemed to give proba-
bility to the only motive which ingenuity could ascribe to the foul deed
imputed to me. That motive had been first suggested by Mr. Vigors.
Cases are on record of men whose life had been previously blameless,
who have committed a crime, which seemed to belie their nature, in the
monomania of some intense desire. In Spain, a scholar reputed of aus-
tere morals, murdered and robbed a traveller for money in order to pur-
chase books; books written, too, by Fathers of his Church ! He was
intent on solving some problem of theological casuistry. In France, an
antiquarian esteemed not more for his learning, than for amiable and
gentle qualities, murdered his most intimate friend for the possession of a
medal, without which his own collection was incomplete. These, and
similar anecdotes, tending to prove how fatally any vehement desire,
morbidly cherished, may suspend the normal operations of reason and
conscience, were whispered about by Dr. Lloyd's vindictive partisan, and
the inference drawn from them and applied to the assumptions against
myself, was the more credulously received, because of that over-refin-
ing speculation on motive and act which the shallow accept, in their
eagerness to show how readily they understand the profound.
I was known to be fond of scientific, especially of chemical experi-
ments; to be eager in testing the truth of any novel invention. Strahan,
catching hold of the magistrate's fantastic hypothesis, went about repeat-
ing anecdotes of the absorbing passion for analysis and discovery which had
characterized me in youth as a medical student, and to which, indeed, I
owed the precocious reputation I had acquired.
Sir Philip Derval, according not only to report, but according to the
direct testimony of his servant, had acquired in his travels many secrets
in natural science, especially as connected with the healing art - his ser-
vant had deposed to the remarkable cures he had effected by the medi-
cinals stored in the stolen casket — doubtless Sir Philip, in boasting of
these medicinals in the course of our conversation, had excited my curi-
osity, influenced my imagination, and thus, when I afterwards suddenly
met him in a lone spot, a passionate impulse had acted on a brain heated
into madness by curiosity and covetous desire.
All these suppositions, reduced into system, were corroborated by Stra-
han's charge that I had made away with the manuscript supposed to con-
tain the explanations of the medical agencies employed by Sir Philip,
and had sought to shelter my theft by a tale so improbable, that a man
of my reputed talent could not have hazarded it if in his sound senses.


A STRANGE STORY. .
185
I saw the web that had thus been spread around me by hostile preposses-
sions and ignorant gossip: how could the arts of Margrave scatter that
web to the winds? I knew not, but I felt confidence in his promise and
his power. Still, so great had been my alarm for Lilian, that the hope
of clearing my own innocence was almost lost in my joy that Margrave,
at least, was no longer in her presence, and that I had received his pledge
to quit the town in which she lived.
Thus, hours rolled on hours, till, I think, on the third day from that
night in which I had last beheld the mysterious Shadow, my door was
hastily thrown open, a confused crowd presented itself at the threshold —
o the governor of the prison, the police superintendent, Mr. Stanton, and
other familiar faces shut out from me since my imprisonment. I knew at
the first glance that I was no longer an outlaw beyond the pale of human
friendship. And proudly, sternly, as I had supported myself hitherto in
solitude and anxiety, when I felt warm hands clasping mine, heard joya :
ous voices proffering congratulations, saw in the eyes of all that my inno-
cence had been cleared, the revulsion of emotion was too strong for me-
the room reeled on my sight - I fainted. I pass, as quickly as I can,
oper the explanations that crowded on me when I recovered, and that
were publicly given in evidence in Court next morning. I had owed all
to Margrave. It seems that he had construed to my favor the very sup-
position which had been bruited abroad to my prejudice. “For,” said
he," it is conjectured that Fenwick committed the crime of which he is
accused on the impulse of a disordered reason. That conjecture is based
upon the probability that a madman alone could have committed a crime
without adequate motive. But it seems quite clear that the accused is
not - mad; and I see cause to suspect that the accuser is.” Groạnding
this assumption on the current reports of the witness's manner and bear-
ing since he had been placed under official surveillance, Margrave had
commissioned the policeman, Waby, to make inquiries in the village to
which the accuser asserted he had gone in quest of his relations, and
Waby had, there, found persons who remembered to have heard that the
two brothers named Walls lived less by the gains of the petty shop which
they kept than by the proceeds of some property consigned to them as
the nearest of kin to a lunatic who had once been tried for his life. Mar-
grave had then examined the advertisements in the daily newspapers.
One of them, warning the public against a dangerous maniac who had
effected his escape from an asylum in the west of England, caught his
attention. To that asylum he had repaired.
There he learned that the patient advertised was one whose propen-
sity was homicide, consigned for life to the asylum on account of a mur-'
der, for which he had been tried. The description of this person exactly
16 *


186
A STRANGE STORY,
tallied with that of the pretended American. The medical superintend-
ent of the asylum, hearing all the particulars from Margrave, expressed
a strong persuasion that the witness was his missing patient, and had
himself committed the crime of which he had accused another. If so, the
superintendent undertook to coax from him the full confession of all the
circumstances. Like many other madmen, and not least those whose
propensity is to crime, the fugitive maniac was exceedingly cunning,
treacherous, secret, and habituated to trick and stratagem. More subtle
than even the astute in possession of all their faculties, whether to achieve
his purpose or to conceal it, and fabricate appearances against another.
But, while, in ordinary conversation, he seemed rational enough to those
who were not accustomed to study him, he had one hallucination which,
when humored, led him always, not only to betray himself, but to glory
in any crime proposed or committed. He was under the belief that he
had made a bargain with Satan, who, in return for implicit obedience,
would bear him harmless through all the consequences of such submission,
and finally raise him to great power and authority. It is no unfrequent
illusion of homicidal maniacs to suppose they are under the influence of
the Evil One, or possessed by a Demon. Murderers have assigned as the
only reason they themselves could give for their crime, that "the Devil
got into them," and urged the deed. But the insane have, perhaps, no
attribute more in common than that of superweening self-esteem. The
maniac who has been removed from a garret, stick straws in his hair and
calls them a crown. So much does inordinate arrogance characterize
mental aberration, that, in the course of my own practice, I have de-
tected, in that infirmity, the certain symptom of insanity, especially moral
insanity, long before the brain had made its disease manifest even to the
most familiar kindred..
Morbid self-esteem accordingly pervaded the dreadful illusion by which
the man I now speak of was possessed. He was proud to be the protected
agent of the Fallen Angel. And if that self-esteem were artfully appealed
to, he would exult superbly in the evil he held himself ordered to per-
form, as if a special prerogative, an official rank and privilege ; then, he
would be led on to boast gleefully of thoughts which the most cynical of
criminals, in whom intelligence was not ruined, would shrink from owning.
Then, he would reveal himself in all his deformity with as complaçent
and frank a self-glorying as some vain good man displays in parading his
amiable sentiments and his beneficent deeds.
“ If,” said the superintendent, “ this be the patient who has escaped from
me, and if his propensity to homicide has been, in some way directed
towards the person who has been murdered, I shall not be with him a
quarter of an hour before he will inform me how it happened; and detail


A STRANGE STORY.
187
the arts he employed in shifting his crime upon another - all will be told as
minutely as a child tells the tale of some schoolboy exploit, in which he
counts on your sympathy, and feels sure of your applause.”
Margrave brought this gentleman back to L-, took him to the mayor,
who was one of my warmest supporters ; the mayor had sufficient influ-
ence to dictate and arrange the rest. The superintendent was introduced
to the room in which the pretended American was lodged. At his own
desire a select number of witnesses were admitted with him — Margrave
excused himself; he said candidly that he was tuo intimate a friend of
mine to be an impartial listener to aught that concerned me so nearly..
The superintendent proved right in his suspicions, and verified his
promises. My false accuser was his missing patient; the man recognized
Dr. *** with no apparent terror, rather with an air of condescension,
and in a very few minutes was led to tell his own tale with a gloating
complacency both at the agency by which he deemed himself exalted, and
at the dexterous cunning with which he had acquitted himself of the task,
that increased the horror of his narrative. .
He spoke of the mode of his escape, which was extremely ingenious,
but of which the details, long in themselves, did not interest me, and I
understood them too imperfectly to repeat. He had encountered a sea-
faring traveller on the road, whom he had knocked down with a stone
and robbed of his glazed hat and pea-jacket, as well as of a small sum in
coin, which last enabled him to pay his fare in a railway that conveyed
him eighty miles away from the asylum. Some trifling remnant of this
money still in his pocket, he then travelled on foot along the high road
till he came to a town about twenty miles distant from L- ; there. he
had stayed a day or two, and there he said “ that the Devil had told him
to buy a case-knife, which he did.” “He knew by that order that the
Devil meant him to do something great.” “ His Master," as he called the
fiend, then directed him the road he should take. He came to L-
put up, as he had correctly.stated before, at a small inn, wandered at
night about the town, was surprised by the sudden storm, took shelter
under the convent arch, overheard somewhat more of my conversation
with Sir Philip than he had previously deposed — heard enough to excite
his curiosity as to the casket: “While he listened, his Master told him that
he must get possession of that casket.” Sir Philip had quitted the archway
almost immediately after I had done so, and he would then have attacked
him if he had not caught sight of a policeman going his rounds. He had
followed Sir Philip to a house (Mr. Jeeves's). “ His Master told him to
wait and watch.” He did so. When Sir Philip came forth, towards the
dawn, he followed him, saw him enter a narrow street, came up to him,
seized him by the arm, demanded all he had about him. Sir Philip tried


188
À STRANGE STORY.
to shake him off --- struck at him. What follows, I spare the reader. The
deed was done. He robbed the dead man both of the casket and of the
purse that he found in the pockets ; had scarcely done so when he heard
footsteps. He had just time to get behind the portico of a detached house
at angles with the street, when I came up. He witnessed, from his hiding-
place, the brief conference between myself and the policeman, and when
they moved on, bearing the body, stole unobserved away. He was going
back towards the inn, when it occurred to him that it would be safer if
the casket and purse were not about his person ; that he asked his Master
to direct him how to dispose of them ; that his Master guided him to an
open yard (a stone-mason's), at a very little distance from the inn; that
in this yard there stood an old wych-elm tree, from the gnarled roots of
which the earth was worn away, leaving chinks and hollows, in one of
which he placed the casket and purse, taking from the latter only two
sovereigns and some silver, and then heaping loose mould over the hiding-
place. That he then repaired to his inn, and left it late in the morning,
on the pretence of seeking for his relatives persons, indeed, who really
had been related to him, but of whose death years ago he was aware.
He returned to L- a few days afterwards, and, in the dead of night,
went to take up the casket and the money. He found the purse with its
contents undisturbed ; but the lid of the casket was unclosed. From the
hasty glance he had taken of it before burying it, it had seemed to be
firmly locked — he was alarmed lest some one had been to the spot. But
his Master whispered to him not to mind, told him that he might now take
the casket, and would be guided what to do with it; that he did so, and,
opening the lid found the casket empty; that he took the rest of the
· money out of the purse, but that he did not take the purse itself, for it
had a crest and initials on it, which might lead to discovery of what had
been done ; that he therefore left it in the hollow amongst the roots,
heaping the mould over it as before; that, in the course of the day, he
heard the people at the inn talk of the murder, and that his own first im-
pulse was to get out of the town immediately, but that his Master “ made
him too wise for that," and bade him stay; that passing through the
streets, he saw me come out of the sash-window door, go to a stable-yarde
on the other side of the house, mount on horseback and ride away; that
he observed the sash-door was left partially open; that he walked by it,"
and saw the room empty ;. there was only a dead wall opposite, the place
was solitary, unobserved ; that his Master directed him to lift up the sash
gently, enter the room, and deposit the knife and the casket in a large
walnut-tree bureau which stood unlocked near the window. All that fol-
lowed — his visit to Mr. Vigors, his accusation against myself, his whole
tale — was, he said, dictated by his Master, who was highly pleased with


A STRANGE STORY.
189
him, and promised to bring "him safely through. And here he turned
round with a hideous smile, as if for approbation of his notable cleverness
and respect for his high employ.
Mr. Jeeves had the curiosity to request the keeper to inquire how, in
what form, or in what manner, the Fiend appeared to the narrator, or
conveyed his infernal dictates. The man at first refused to say; but it
was gradually drawn from him that the Demon had no certain and inva-
riable form; sometimes it appeared to him in the form of a rat; sometimes
even of a leaf, or a fragment of wood, or a rusty nail; but, that his-Mas-
ter's voice always came to him distinct, whatever shape he appeared in ;
only, he said, with an air of great importance, his Master, this time, had
graciously condescended, ever since he left the asylum, to communicate
with him in a much more pleasing and imposing aspect than he had ever
done before - in the form of a beautiful youth, or, rather, like a bright
rose-colored shadow, in which the features of a young man were visible,
and that he had heard the voice more distinctly than usual, though in a
milder tone, and seeming to come to him from a great distance.
After these revelations the man became suddenly disturbed. He shook
from limb to limb, he seemed convulsed with terror; he cried out that he
had betrayed the secret of his Master, who had warned him not to describe
his appearance and mode of communication, or he would give his servant
up to the tormentors. Then the maniac's terror gave way to fury; his
more direful propensity made itself declared; he sprang into the midst of
his frightened listeners, seized Mr. Vigors by the throat, and would have
strangled him but for the prompt rush of the superintendent and his sat-
ellites. Foaming at the mouth, and horribly raving, he was then mana-
cled, a strait-waistcoat thrust upon him, and the group so left him in
charge of his captors. Inquiries were immediately directed towards such
circumstantial evidence as might corroborate the details he had so minutely
set forth. The purse, recognized as Sir Philip's, by the valet of the de-
ceased, was found buried under the wych-elm. A policeman, despatched,
express, to the town in which the maniac declared the knife to have been
purchased, brought back word that a cutler in the place remembered
perfectly to have sold such a knife to a seafaring man, and identified the
instrument when it was shown to him. From the chink of a door ajar, in
the wall opposite my sash-window, a maid-servant, watching for her sweet-
heart (a journeyman carpenter, who habitually passed that way on going
home to dine), had, though unobserved by the murderer, seen him come
out of my window at a time that corresponded with the dates of his own
story, though she had thought nothing of it at the moment. He might be
a patient, or have called on business ; she did not know that I was from
home. The only point of importance not cleared up was that which re-


190
A STRANGE STORY.
lated to the opening of the casket - the disappearance of the contents;
the lock had been unquestionably forced. No one, however, could sup-
pose that some third person had discovered the hiding-place and forced
open the casket to abstract its contents and then 'rebury it. The only
probable supposition was, that the man himself had forced it open, and,
deeming the contents of no value, had thrown them away before he had
hidden the casket and purse, and, in the chaos of his reason, had forgot-
ten that he had so done. Who could expect that every link in a mad-
man's tale would be found integral and perfect ? In short, little impor-
tance was attached to this solitary doubt. Crowds accompanied me to my
door, when I was set free, in open court, stainless ; -- it was a triumphal
procession. The popularity I had previously enjoyed, superseded for a
moment by so horrible a charge, came back to me tenfeld, as with the
reaction of generous repentance for a momentary doubt. One man
shared the public favor - the young man whose acuteness had delivered
me from the peril, and cleared the truth from so awful a mystery; but
Margrave had escaped from congratulation and compliment; he had
gone on a visit to Strahan at Derval Court.
Alone, at last, in the welcome sanctuary of my own home, what were
my thoughts? Prominent amongst them all was that assertion of the
madman, which had made me shudder when repeated to me: he had
been guided to the murder and to all the subsequent proceedings by the
luminous shadow of the beautiful youth — the Scin-Læca to which I had
pledged myself. If Sir Philip Derval could be believed, Margrave was-
possessed of powers, derived from fragmentary recollections of a knowl-
edge acquired in a former state of being, which would render his re-
morseless intelligence infinitely dire, and frustrate the endeavors of a
reason unassisted by similar powers, to thwart his designs or bring the law
against his crimes. Had he then the arts that could thus influence the
minds of others to serve his fell purposes, and achieve securely his own
evil ends through agencies that could not be traced home to himself?
But for what conceivable purpose had I been subjected as a victim to
influences as much beyond my control as the Fate or Demoniac Neces
sity of a Greek Myth? In the legends of the classic world some august
sufferer is oppressed by Powers more than mortal, but with an ethical if
gloomy vindication of his chastisement - he pays the penalty of crime
committed by his ancestors or himself, or he has bráved, by arrogating
equality with the gods, the mysterious calamity which the gods alone can
inflict. But I, no descendant of Pelops, no (Edipus, boastful of a wisdom
which could interpret the enigmas of the Sphinx, while ignorant even of .!
his own birth — what had I done to be singled out from the herd of men ·
for trials and visitations from the Shadowland of ghosts and sorcerers ?


A STRANGE STORY.
191
:
It would be ludicrously absurd to suppose that Dr. Lloyd's dying impre-
cation could have had a prophetic effect upon my destiny; to believe
that the pretences of mesmerism were specially favored by Providence,
and that to question their assumptions was an offence of profanation to
be punished by exposure to preternatural agencies. There was not even
that congruity between cause and effect which fable seeks in excuse for
its inventions. Of all men living, I, unimaginative disciple of austere
science, should be the last to become the sport of that witchcraft which
even imagination reluctantly allows to the machinery of poets, and
science casts aside into the mouldy lumber-room of obsolete supersti-
tion.
Rousing my mind from enigmas impossible to solve - it was with in-
tense and yet with most melancholy satisfaction that I turned to the im-
age of Lilian, rejoicing, though with a thrill of awe, that the promise so
mysteriously conveyed to my senses, had, here too, been already fulfilled
- Margrave had left the town; Lilian was no longer subjected to his
-evil fascination. But an instinct told me that that fascination had al-
ready produced an effect adverse to all hope of happiness for me. Lil-
ian's love for myself was gone. Impossible otherwise that she -- in
whose nature I had always admired that generous devotion which is,
more or less, inseparable from the romance of youth - should have never
conveyed to me one word of consolation in the hour of my agony and
trial: that she who, till the last evening we had met, had ever been so
docile, in the sweetness of a nature femininely submissive, to my slightest
wish, should have disregarded my solemn injunction, in admitting Mar-
grave to acquaintance, nay, to familiar intimacy; and at the very time
when to disobey my injunctions was to embitter my ordeal, and add her
own contempt to the degradation imposed upon my honor! No, her
heart must be wholly gone from me; her very nature wholly warped.
A union between us had become impossible. My love for her remained
unshattered; the more tender, perhaps, for a sentiment of compassion.
But my pride was shocked, my heart was wounded. My love was not
mean and servile. Enough for me to think that she would be at least
saved from Margrave. Her life associated with his ! — contemplation,
horrible and ghastly!-- from that fate she was saved. Later, she would
recover the effect of an influence happily so brief. She might form some
new attachment - some new tie. But love once withdrawn is never to
be restored and her love was withdrawn from me. I had but to re-
lease her, with my own lips from our engagement - she would welcome
that release. Mournful but firm in these thoughts and these resolutions,
I sought Mrs. Ashleigh's house.


192. .
A STRANGE STORY.
CHAPTER XLII.
It was twilight when I entered, unannounced (as had been my wont
in our familiar intercourse), the quiet sitting-room in which I expected to
find mother and child. But Lilian was there alone, seated by the open
window, her hands crossed and drooping on her knee, her eye fixed upon
the darkening summer skies, in which the evening star had just stolen
forth, bright and steadfast, near the pale sickle of a half-moon that was
dimly visible, but gave as yet no light.. .
Let any lover imagine the reception he would expect to meet from his
betrothed, coming into her presence after he had passed triumphant
through a terrible peril to life and fame — and conceive what ice froze
my blood, what anguish weighed down my heart, when Lilian, turning
towards me, rose not, spoke not — gazed at me heedlessly as 'if at some
indifferent stranger — and — and But no matter! I cannot bear to
recal it even now, at the distance of years! I sat down beside her, and
took her hand, without pressing it; it rested languidly, passively in mine
- one moment;—I dropped it then with a bitter sigh.
“Lilian,” I said, quietly, “you love me no longer. Is it not so ?”
She raised her eyes to mine, looked at me wistfully, and pressed her
hand on her forehead, then said, in a strange voice,“ Did I ever love
you? What do you mean ?”
“Lilian, Lilian, rouse yourself; are you not, while you speak, un-
der some spell, some influence which you cannot describe nor account
for?”
She paused a moment before she answered, calmly, “No! Again I.
ask, what do you mean?”
“ What do I mean? Do you forget that we are betrothed ? Do you
forget how often, and how recently, our vows of affection and constancy
have been exchanged ?"
“ No, I do not forget; but I must have deceived you and myself - "
“It is true, then, that you love me no more ?”
" I suppose so."
· “But, oh, Lilian, is it that your heart is only closed to me? or is it —
oh, answer truthfully – is it given to another ? — to him — to him—
against whom I warned you, whom I implored you not to receive. Tell
me, at least, that your love is not gone to Margrave "
* To him - love to him! Oh no, no
“What, then, is your feeling toward him ?”
Lilian's face grew visibly paler -- even in that dim light. “I know


A STRANGE STORY.
193
not,” she said, almost in a whisper; “but it is — partly awe-
partly ”
“What?”
“ Abhorrence!” she said, almost fiercely, and rose to her feet, with a
wild, defying start. ".
“ If that be so," I said gently, “ you would not grieve were you never
again to see him "
"But I shall see him again,” she murmured, in a tone of weary sad-
ness, and sank back once more into her chair.
“I think not,” said I, " and I hope not. And now hear me and heed
me, Lilian. It is enough for me, no matter what your feelings toward
another, to hear from yourself that the affection you once professed for
me is gone. I release you from your troth. If folks ask why we two
henceforth separate the lives we had agreed to join, you may say, if you
please, that you could not give your hand to a man who had known the
taint of a felon's prison, even on a false charge. If that seems to you an
ungenerous reason, we will leave it to your mother to find a better.
Farewell! For your own sake I can yet feel happiness — happiness to
hear that you do not love the man against whom I warn you still more
solemnly than before! Will you not give me your hand in parting —
and have I not spoken your own wish ?”
She turned away her face, and resigned her hand to me in silence.
Silently I held it in mine, and my emotions nearly stifled me. One
symptom of regret, of reluctance, on her part, and I should have fallen
at her feet and cried, “Do not let us break a tie which our vows should
have made indissoluble; heed not my offers — wrung from a tortured
heart. You cannot have ceased to love me!” But no such symptom of
relenting showed itself in her, and with a groan I left the room.
CHAPTER XLIII.
I was just outside the garden-door, when I felt an arm thrown round
me, my cheek kissed, and wetted with tears. Could it be Lilian? Alas,
no! It was her mother's voice, that, between laughing and crying, ex-
claimed hysterically: “ This is joy, to see you again, and on these
thresholds. I have just come from your house; I went there on pur-
pose. to congratulate you, and to talk to you about Lilian. But you have
seen her ? "
- 17


194
STRANGE STORY.
“ Yes; I have but this moment left her. Come this way." I drew
Mrs. Ashleigh back into the garden, along the old winding walk, which
the shrubs concealed from view of the house. We sat down on a rustic
seat, where I had often sat with Lilian, midway between the house and
the Monk's Well. I told the mother what had passed between me and
her daughter; I made no complaint of Lilian's coldness and change; I
did not hint at its cause. · Girls of her age will change,” said I, “and all
that now remains is for us two to agree on such a tale to our curious
neighbors, as may rest the whole blame on me. Man's name is of robust
fibre; it could not push its way to a place in the world, if it could not
bear, without sinking, the load idle tongues may lay on it. Not so,
Woman's Name — what is but gossip against Man, is scandal against
Woman.”
* Do not be rash, my dear Allen,” said Mrs. Ashleigh, in great distress.
“I feel for you, I understand; in your case I might act as you do. I can-
not blame you. Lilian is changed -changed unaccountably. Yet sure
I am that the change is only on the surface, that her heart is really yours,
as entirely and as faithfully as ever it was; and that later, when she re-
covers from the strange, dreamy kind of torpor which appears to have
come over all her faculties and all her affections, she would awake with a
despair which you cannot conjecture, to the knowledge that you had re-
nounced her.”
“I have not renounced her,” said I, impatiently; " I did but restore
her freedom of choice. But pass by this now, and explain to me more
fully the change in your daughter, which I gather from your words is not
confined to me.”
"I wished to speak of it before you saw her, and for that reason came
to your house. It was on the morning in which we left her aunt's to re-
turn hither that I first noticed something peculiar in her look and manner.
She seemed absorbed and absent, so much so that I asked her several
times to tell me what made her so grave, but I could only get from her
that she had had a confused dream which she could not recal distinctly
enough to relate, but that she was sure it boded evil. During the jour-
ney she became gradually more herself, and began to look forward with
delight to the idea of seeing you again. Well, you came that evening.
What passed between you and her, you know best. You complained that
she slighted your request to shun all acquaintance with Mr. Margrave.
I was surprised that, whether your wish were reasonable or not, she could
have hesitated to comply with it. I spoke to her about it, after you had
gone, and she wept bitterly at thinking she had displeased you.”
" She wept! You amaze me. Yet the next day what a note she re-
turned to mine!”


A STRANGE STORY.
195
.
“ The next day the change in her became very visible to me. She
told me, in an excited manner, that she was convinced she ought not to
marry you. Then came, the following day, the news of your committal.
I heard of it, but dared not break it to her. I went to our friend the
mayor, to consult with him what to say, what do; and to learn more dis-
tinctly than I had done from terrified, incoherent servants, the rights of
so dreadful a story. When I returned, I found, to my amazement, a
young stranger in the drawing-room; it was Mr. Margrave — Miss Bra-
bazon had brought him at his request. Lilian was in the room, too, and
my astonishment was increased when she said to me with a singular smile,
vague but tranquil: “I know all about Allen Fenwick; Mr. Margrave
has told me all. He is a friend of Allen's. He says there is no cause for
fear. Mr. Margrave then apologized to me for his intrusion in a caress-
ing, kindly manner, as if one of the family. He said he was so intimate
with you that he felt that he could best break to Miss Ashleigh an infor-
mation she might receive elsewhere, for that he was the only man in the
town who treated the charge with ridicule. You know the wonderful
charm of this young man's manner. I cannot explain to you how it was,
but in a few moments I was as much at home with him as if he had been
your brother. To be brief, having once come, he came constantly. He
had moved, two days before you went to Derval Court, from his hotel to
apartments in Mr. 's house, just opposite. We could see him on his
balcony from our terrace; he would smile to us and come across. I did
wrong in slighting your injunction, and suffering Lilian to do so. I could
not help it, he was such a comfort to me - to her, too — in our tribulation.
He alone had no doleful words, wore no long face; he alone was inva-
riably cheerful. •Every thing,' he said, ' would come right in a day or
two.'”
“ And Lilian could not but admire this young man, he is so beauti-
ful.”
“ Beautiful ? Well, perhaps. But if you have a jealous feeling you
were never more mistaken. Lilian, I am convinced, does more than dis-
like him; he has inspired her with repugnance, with terror. And much
as I own I like him, in his wild, joyous, careless, harmless way, do not
think I flatter you if I say that Mr. Margrave is not the man to make any
girl untrue to you — untrue to a lover with infinitely less advantages than
you may pretend to. He would be an universal favorite, I grant; but
there is a something in him, or a something wanting in him, which makes
liking and admiration stop short of love. I know not why; perhaps, be-
cause, with all his good humor, he is so absorbed in himself, so intensely
egotistical — so light; were he less clever, I should say so frivolous. He
could not make love, he could not say in the serious tone of a man in


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A STRANGE STORY
earnest, "I love you.' He owned as much to me, and owned, too, that he
knew not even what love was. As to myself - Mr. Margrave appears
rich; no whisper against his character or his honor ever reached me.
Yet were you out of the question, and were there no stain on his birth,
pay, were he as high in rank and wealth as he is favored by Nature in
personal advantages, I confess I could never consent to trust him with
my daughter's fate. A voice at my heart would cry, · No! It may be
an unreasonable prejudice, but I could not bear to see him touch Lilian's
hand !”
“Did she never, then — never suffer him even to take her hand ?”
“Never. Do not think so meanly of her as to suppose that she could
be caught by a fair face, a graceful manner. Reflect; just before, she
had refused, for your sake, Ashleigh Sumner, whom Lady Haughton said,
«no girl in her senses could refuse;' and this change in Lilian really be-
gan before we returned to L ; before she had ever seen Mr. Mar-
grave. I am convinced it is something in the reach of your skill as physi-
cian – it is on the nerves, the system. I will give you a proof of what I
say, only do not betray me to her. It was during your imprisonment, the
night before your release, that I was awakened by her coming to my bed-
side. She was sobbing as if her heart would break. “Oh, mother,
mother!' she cried, pity me, help me - I am so wretched.' What is
the matter, darling?' I have been so cruel to Allen, and I know I shall
be so again. I cannot help it. Don't question me; only, if we are sep.
arated, if he cast me off, or I reject him, tell him some day — perhaps
when I am in my grave - not to believe appearances; and that I, in my
heart of hearts, never ceased to love him!""
“She said that! You are not deceiving me ? "
“Oh no; how can you think so ?”
“ There is hope still,” I murmured; and I bowed my head upon my
hands, hot tears forcing their way through the clasped fingers.
“One word more," said I; "you tell me that. Lilian has a repugnance
to this Margrave, and yet that she found comfort in his visits — a comfort
that could not be wholly ascribed to cheering words he might say about
myself, since it is all but certain that I was not, at that time, uppermost
in her mind." Can you explain this apparent contradiction ?”
“I cannot, otherwise than by a conjecture which you would ridicule.”
“ I can ridicule nothing now. What is your conjecture ?”
“ I know how much you disbelieve in the stories one hears of animal
magnetism and electro-biology, otherwise ”
“ You think that Margrave exercises some power of that kind over
Lilian? Has he spoken of such a power ?”
“ Not exactly; but he said that he was sure Lilian possessed a faculty


A STRANGE STORY.,
197
that he called by some hard name, not clairvoyance, but a faculty, which
he said, when I asked him to explain, was akin to prevision — to second
sight. Then he talked of the Priestesses who had administered the an-
cient oracles. Lilian, he said, reminded him of them, with her deep eyes
and mysterious smile.”
« And Lilian heard him? What said she ?”
“Nothing; she seemed in fear while she listened.”
“ He did not offer to try any of those arts practised by professional
mesmerists and other charlatans ?”
“ I thought he was about to do so, but I forestalled him, saying I never
would consent to any experiment of that kind, either on myself or my
daughter.”
“ And he replied ?"
“ With his gay laugh, that I was very foolish ; that a person possessed
of such a faculty as he attributed to Lilian, would, if the faculty were de-
veloped, be an invaluable adviser, He would have said more, but I
begged him to desist. Still I fancy at times --- do not be angry - that he
does somehow or other bewitch her, unconsciously to herself; for she
always knows when he is coming. Indeed, I am not sure that he does
not bewitch myself, for I by no means justify my conduct in admitting
him to an intimacy so familiar, and in spite of your wish; I have re-
proached myself, resolved to shut my door on him, or to show by my
manner that his visits were unwelcome ; yet when Lilian has said, in the
drowsy lethargic tone which has come into her voice (her voice naturally
earnest and impressive, though always low), · Mother, he will be here in
two minutes - I wish to leave the room, and cannot'-1, too, have felt
as if something constrained me against my will; as if, in short, I were
under that influence which Mr. Vigors -- whom I will never forgive for
his conduct to you would ascribe to mesmerism. But will you not
come in and see Lilian again ?"
“No, not to-night; but watch and heed her, and if you see aught to
make you honestly believe that she regrets the rupture of the old tie from
which I have released her -- why you know, Mrs. Ashleigh, that -- that
" My voice failed — I wrung the good woman's hand, and went
my way.
I had always till then considered Mrs. Ashleigh -- if not as Mrs. Poyntz
described her-common-place weak'-still of an intelligence somewhat
below mediocrity. I now regarded her with respect as well as grateful
tenderness; her plain sense had divined what all my boasted knowledge
had failed to detect in my earlier intimacy with Margrave - namely,
that in him there was a something present, or a something wanting, which
17*


198
A STRANGE STORY.
forbade love and excited fear. Young, beautiful, wealthy, seemingly
blameless in life as he was, she would not have given her daughter's hand
to him! '
CHAPTER XLIV.
The next day my house was filled with visitors. I had no notion that
I had so many friends. Mr. Vigors wrote me a generous and handsome
letter, owning his prejudices against me on account of his sympathy with
poor Dr. Lloyd, and begging my pardon for what he now felt to have
been harshness, if not distorted justice. But what most moved me, was
the entrance of Strahan, who rushed up to me with the heartiness of old
college days. “Oh, my dear Allen, can you ever forgive me; that I
should have disbelieved your word — should have suspected you of ab-
stracting my poor cousin's memoir ?”
“ Is it found, then ? "
“Oh yes; you must thank Margrave. He, clever fellow, you know,
came to me on a visit yesterday. He put me at once on the right scent.
Only guess; but you never can! It was that wretched old housekeeper
who purloined the manuscript. You remember she came into the room
while you were looking at the memoir. She heard us talk about it; her
curiosity was roused; she longed to know the history of her old master,
_under his own hand; she could not sleep; she heard me go up to bed;
she thought you might leave the book on the table when you, too, went
to rest. She stole down stairs, peeped through the keyhole of the lobby,
saw you asleep, the book lying before you, entered, took away the book
softly, meant to glance at its contents and to return it. You were sleep-
ing so soundly she thought you would not wake for an hour; she carried
it into the library, leaving the door open, and there began to pore over
it; she stumbled first on one of the passages in Latin; she hoped to find
some part in plain English, turned over the leaves, putting her candle
close to them, for the old woman's eyes were dim, when she heard you
make some sound in your sleep. Alarmed, she looked round; you were
moving uneasily in your seat, and muttering to yourself. From watching
you she was soon diverted by the consequence of her own confounded
curiosity and folly. In moving, she had unconsciously brought the poor
manuscript close to the candle; the leaves caught the flame; her own


A STRANGE STORY.
199
cap and hand burning first made her aware of the mischief donę. She
threw down the book; her sleeve was in flames; she had first to tear off
the sleeve, which was, luckily for her, not sewn to her dress. By the
time she recovered presence of mind to attend to the book half its leaves
were reduced to tinder. She did not dare then to replace what was left
of the manuscript on your table; returned, with it, to her room, hid it,
and resolved to keep her own secret. I should never have guessed it; I
had never even spoken to her on the occurrence; but when I talked over
the disappearance of the book to Margrave last night, and expressed my
disbelief of your story, he said, in his merry way: ‘But do you think
Fenwick the only person curious about your cousin's odd ways and
strange history? Why, every servant in the household would have been
equally curious. You have examined your servants, of course ?' 'No,
I never thought of it.' •Examine them now, then. Examine especially
that old housekeeper. I observe a great change in her manner since I
came here, weeks ago, to look over the house. She has something on
her mind - I see it in her eyes. Then it occurred to me, too, that the
woman's manner had altered, and that she seemed always in a tremble
and a fidget. I went at once to her room, and charged her with stealing
the book. She fell on her knees, and told the whole story as I have told
it to you, and as I shall take care to tell it to all to whom I have so fool-
ishly blabbed my yet more foolish suspicions of yourself. But can you
forgive me, old friend ?”
“Heartily, heartily! And the book is burned ?”
“ See;" and he produced the mutilated manuscript. Strange, the
part burned — reduced, indeed, to tinder -- was the concluding part that
related to Haroun - to Grayle; no vestige of that part left; the earlier
portions were scorched and mutilated, but, in some places, still decipher-
able; but as my eye hastily ran over these places, I saw only mangled
sentences of the experimental problems which the writer had so minutely
elaborated...
“Will you keep the manuscript as it is, and as long as you like ?” said
Strahan.
“No, no; I will have nothing more to do with it. Consult some other
man of science. And so this is the old woman's whole story? No ac-
complice - none? No one else shared her curiosity and her task ?”.
“No. Oddly enough, though, she made much the same excuse for her
pitiful fobby that the madman made for his terrible crime; she said the
Devil put it into her head.' Of course he did, as he puts every thing
wrong into any one's head. That does not mend the matter.”
“How! did she, too, say she saw a Shadow and heard a Voice ?”
“ No; not such a liar as that, and not mad enough for such a lie. But


200
A STRANGE STORY.
she said that when she was in bed, thinking over the book, something
irresistible urged her to get up and go down into the study; swore she felt
something lead her by the hand; swore, too, that when she first discov-
ered the manuscript was not in English, something whispered in her ear
to turn over the leaves and approach them to the candle. But I had no
patience to listen to all this rubbish. I sent her out of the house, bag and
baggage. But, alas ! is this to be the end of all my wise cousin's grand
discoveries?”
True, of labors that aspired to bring into the chart of science new
worlds, of which even the traditionary rumor was but à voice from the
land of fable --nought left but broken vestiges of a daring footstep! The
hope of a name imperishable amidst the loftiest hierarchy of Nature's
secret temple, with all the pomp of recorded experiment, that applied to
the mysteries of Egypt and Chaldæa the inductions of Bacon, the tests of
Liebig — was there nothing left of this but what, here and there, some
puzzled student might extract, garbled, mutilated, perhaps unintelligible,
from shreds of sentences, wrecks of problems ? O mind of man, can the
works, on which thou wouldst found immortality below, be annulled into
smoke and tinder by an inch of candle in the hand of an old woman!
When Strahan left me, I went out, but not yet to visit patients. I stole
through by-paths into the fields; I needed solitude to bring my thoughts
into shape and order. What was delusion, and what not ? — was I right
or the public ? Was Margrave really the most innocent and serviceable
of human beings, kindly, affectionate, employing a wonderful acuteness
for benignant ends ? Was I, in truth, indebted to him for the greatest
boon one man can bestow on another ? For life rescued, for fair name
justified? Or had he, by some demoniac sorcery, guided the hand of
the murderer against the life of the person who alone could imperil his
own ? had he, by the same dark spells, urged the woman to the act that
had destroyed the only record of his monstrous being the only evi-
dence that I was not the sport of an illusion in the horror with which he
inspired me?
But if the latter supposition could be admissible, did he use his agents
only to betray them afterwards to exposure, and that, without any possi-
ble clue to his own detection as the instigator? Then, there came over
me confused recollections of tales of mediæval witchcraft, which I had
read in boyhood. Were there not on judicial record attestation and evi-
dence solemn and circumstantial, of powers analogous to those how exer-
cised by Margrave? Of sorcerers instigating to sin through influences
ascribed to Demons — making their apparitions glide through guarded
walls, their voices heard from afar in the solitude of dungeons or monas-
tic cells ? subjugating victims to their will, by means which no vigilanco


A STRANGE STORY.
201
could have detected, if the victims themselves had not confessed the
witchcraft that had ensnared - courting a sure and infamous death in
that confession — preferring such death to a life so haunted? Were
stories so gravely set forth in the pomp of judicial evidence, and in the
history of times comparatively recent, indeed, to be massed — pell-mell
together, as a moles indigesta of senseless superstition, — all the witnesses
to be deemed liars ? all the victims and tools of the sorcerers, lunatics?
all the examiners or judges, with their solemn gradations- lay and cleri-
cal -- from Commissions of Inquiry to Courts of Appeal, — to be despised
for credulity, loathed for cruelty ; or, amidst records so numerous, so im-
posingly attested, — were there the fragments of a terrible truth ? And
had our ancestors been so unwise in those laws we now deem so savage,
by which the world was rid of scourges more awful and more potent than
the felon with his candid dagger ? Fell instigators of the evil in men's
secret hearts — shaping into action the vague, half-formed desire, and
guiding with agencies, impalpable, unseen, their spell-bound instruments
of calamity and death.
Such were the gloomy questions that I — by repute, the sternest advo-
cate of common sense against fantastic errors; by profession, the
searcher into flesh and blood, and tissue, and nerve, and sinew, for the
causes of all that disease the mechanism of the universal human frame;-
1, self-boasting physician, sceptic, philosopher, materialist — revolved, not
amidst gloomy pines, under grim winter skies, but as I paeed slow through
laughing meadows, and by the banks of merry streams, in the ripeness of
the golden August; the hum of insects in the fragrant grass, the flutter
of birds ainid the delicate green of boughs chequered by playful sunbeams
and gentle shadows, and ever in sight of the resorts of busy work-day
man. Walls, roof-tops, church-spires rising high. There, white and
modern, the handwriting of our race, in this practical nineteenth century,
on its square plain masonry and Doric shafts, the Town-Hall, central in
the animated market-place. And I-I-prying into long-neglected
corners and dust-holes of memory for what my reason had flung there as
worthless rubbish; reviving the jargon of French law, in the procès ver-
bal, against a Gille de Retz, or an Urbain Grandier, and sifting the equity
of sentences on witchcraft!
Bursting the links of this ghastly soliloquy with a laugh at my own folly,
I struck into a narrow path that led back toward 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 emi-
nence now slept in the lowly burial-ground at its foot. And the place,
mournfully decorated with the tombs which still jealously mark distinc-


202
A STRANGE STORY.
tions of rànk 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, assured of its truthfulness, and
wise enough to enlighten its troubles."
And as I so murmured, my eye fell upon the form of a kneeling
child ; at the furthest 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 ab-
sorbed 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 bosom friend in whom I could confide!”
I heard steps on the walks under the yews. And an old man came in
sight, slightly bent, with long gray hair, but still with enough vigor 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 confidant; what I sought stood
suddenly at my side.
CHAPTER XLV.
EXPLANATION, on his 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


A STRANGE STORY.
203
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 becom-
ing 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 retrieve
the effects of his folly. “So,” said Faber, “ on consultation with this
excellent creature — for my poor nephew is so broken down by repent-
ance, that others must think for him how to exalt repentance into re-
form - 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 nor 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 labor,
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 honored 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 him-
self, in his own country, a home suited to his years and worthy of his sta-
tion. He rejected all my offers, however earnestly urged on him, with
his usual modest and gentle dignity; and assuring me that he looked for-
ward 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 scapegrace 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."


204
A STRANGE STORY.
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, intel-
ligent, 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 thank-
fulness, silently kissed me.
“Oh, my friend !” I murmured to Faber, “I have much that I long 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 had
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 ac-
quired, which has even surpassed my predictions."
“ You are aware,” said I, falteringly, “ of the extraordinary charge


A STRANGE STORY.
205
.
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 busied myself 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 death scene 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, other-
wise, 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 physi-
cian replied thus:
"I take for granted your conviction of the reality of all you tell me,
even of the Luminous Shadow, 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 chan-
nels. 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 your-
self, prepared for much that subsequently appealed to it. Your sudden
love, conceived in the very grounds of the house so associated with recol-
lections in themselves strange and romantic; the peculiar temperament
and nature of the girl to whom your love was attracted ; her own vision-
ary 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 Philips
18


206
A STRANGE STORY,
.
name is mixed up with a tale of murder, implicating two mysterious pre-
tenders to magic - Louis Grayle, and the Sage of Aleppo. The tale so
interests your fancy that even the glaring impossibility of a not unimpor-
tant 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 en-
gaged in a physiological work that 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 metaphy-
sicians 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. Doubt-
less, 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 favorite, David Hume." .
“ Yes, I read the book, but I have long since forgotten all its argu-
ments.”
“Well, in that essay, Beattie * 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 rea-
soners 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 be-
yond 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
* Beattie's Essay on Truth, part i. c. ii. 3. The story of Simon Browne is to be
found in The Adventurer.


A STRANGE STORY.
207
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 Lil-
ian 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 con-
ventional experience, though, when analyzed, they might prove to be
quite reconcilable with sober science, startles you with an undefined mys-
terious 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 vapor 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 physiolog-
ical 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 contradic-
tions 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 idiosyncrasies 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, ter-
rified 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. Müller, indeed,
who is, perhaps, the highest authority on such a subject, says, with pru-
dent réserve, “When a person who is not insane sees spectres and believes
them to be real, his intellect must be imperfectly exercised.'* 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
* Müller's Physiology of the Senses, p. 394.


208
A STRANGE STORY,
believed she saw, at the foot of her bed, the apparition of Curran, in a
sailor's jacket and an immense pair of whiskers.* No doubt the spectre
was an illusion, and Dr. Abercrombie very ingeniously suggests the asso-
ciation 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 t of spirit manifestation, 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 Müller, 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 mur-
derer; 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 iden-
tical expressions; and even when a critic, in our own sober newspapers
* Abercrombie on the Intellectual Powers, p. 281. (15th edition.). -
† At the date of Faber's conversation with Alen Fenwick, the (so-called) spirit
manifestations had not spread from America over Europe. But if they had, Faber's
views would, no doubt, have remained the same.


A STRANGE STORY.
209
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 im-
pressed 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 reverie. In the noble-
ness 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 dis-
eased imagination resembles those mirrors which, being themselves dis-
torted, 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 convic-
tion that it was a spectral appearance.'”*
* Abercrombie on the Intellectual Powers, p. 278. (15th edition.) This author,
not more to be admired for his intelligence than his candor, and who is entitled to
praise for a higher degree of original thought than that to which he modestly pre-
tends, relates a curious anecdote illustrating, “the analogy between dreaming and
spectral illusion, which he received from the gentleman to whom it occurred — an
eminent medical friend:” “Having set up late one evening, under considerable
anxiety for one of his children, who was ill, he fell asleep in his chair, and had a
frightful dream, in which the prominent figure was an immense baboon. He awoke
with the fright, got up instantly, and walked to a table which was in the middle of
the room. He was then quite awake, and quite conscious of the articles around
him; but close by the wall in the end of the apartment he distinctly saw the
baboon making the same grimaces which he had seen in his dream; and this
spectre continued visible for about half a minute.” Now, a man who saw only a
baboon would be quite ready to admit that it was but an optical illusion; but if,
instead of a baboon, he had seen an intimate friend, and that friend, by some coin-
18 *


210
A STRANGE STORY.
But,” said I, “ the apparition was seen by me again, and when I, cer-
tainly, 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.* Thus,
one of our own 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. † But instances of the facility which phan-
tasms, 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 first 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 cur-
tains 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 ana-
lyze your own hallucinations - pardon me the word — the more they
assume the usual characteristics of a dream; contradictory, illogical, even
cidence of time, had died about that date, he would be a very strong-minded man
if he admitted, for the mystery of seeing his friend, the same natural solution which
he would readily admit for seeing a baboon.
* See Müller's observations on this phenomenon, Physiology of the Senses,
Bayley's translation, p. 1395.
† Sir David Brewster's Letters on Natural Magic, p. 39.


A STRANGE STORY.
211
.
..
in the marvels they represent. Can any two persons be more totally in
like each other, not merely as to form and years, but as to all the elements
of character, than the Grayle of whom you read, and the Margrave in
whom you evidently think that Grayle is existent still ? The one repre-
sented, you say, as gloomy, saturnine, with violent 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 con-
ceived, 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
theft - ”
“But you forget the madman said that he was led on by the Lu-
minous Shadow of a beautiful youth,' that the woman said also that she
was impelled by some mysterious agency."
“I do not forget those coincidences; but how your learning would dis-
miss them as nugatory were your imagination not disposed to exaggerate
them! When you read the authentic histories of any popular illusion,
such as the spurious inspirations of the Jansenist Convulsionaries, the ap-
paritions that invaded convents, as deposed to in the trial of Urbain
Grandier, the confessions of witches and wizards in places the most re-
mote from each other, or, at this day, the tales of spirit-manifestation'
recorded in half the towns and villages of America — do not all the
superstitious impressions of a particular time have a common family like-
ness? What one sees another sees, though there has been no commu-
nication between the two. I cannot tell you why these phantasms thus
partake of the nature of an atmospheric epidemic; the fact remains incon-
testable. And, strange as may be the coincidence between your impres-
sions of a mystic agency and those of some other brains not cognizant of
the chimeras of your own, still is it not simpler philosophy to say, “ They
are coincidences of the same nature which made witches in the same
epoch all tell much the same story of the broomsticks they rode and the
sabbats at which they danced to the fiend's piping,' and there leave the
matter, as in science we must leave many of the most elementary and
familiar phenomena inexplicable as to their causes — is not this, I say,
more philosophical than to insist upon an explanation which accepts the
supernatural rather than leave the extraordinary unaccounted for ?”


212
A STRANGE STORY.
“ As you speak,” said I, resting my downcast face upon my band, “I
should speak to any patient who had confided to me the tale I have told
to you."
“ And yet the explanation does not wholly satisfy you? Very likely:
to some phenomena there is, as yet, no explanation. Perhaps Newton
himself could not explain quite to his own satisfaction why he was
baunted at midnight by the spectrum of a sun ; though I have no doubt
that some later philosopher, whose ingenuity has been stimulated by
Newton's account, has, by this time, suggested a rational solution of that
enigma.* To return to your own case. I have offered such interpreta-
* Newton's explanation is as follows: “This story I tell you to let you under-
stand, that in the observation related by Mr. Boyle, the man's fancy probably
concurred with the impression made by the sun's light to produce that phantasm
of the sun which he constantly saw in bright objects, and so your question about
the cause of this phantasm involves another about the power of the fancy, which I
must confess is too hard a knot for me to untie. To place this effect in a constant
motion is hard, because the sun ought then to appear perpetually. It seems rather
to consist in a disposition of the sensorium to move the imagination strongly, and
to be easily moved both by the imagination and by the light as often as bright ob-
jects are looked upon." - Letter from Sir I. Newton to Locke, Lord King's Life of
Locke, vol. i. pp. 405-408.
Dr. Roget (Animal and Vegetable Physiology Considered with reference to Nat-
ural Theology, Bridgewater Treatise, pp. 524, 525), thus refers to this phenome-
non, which he states all of us may experience:".
“When the impressions are very vivid” (Dr. Roget is speaking of visual im-
pressions)“ another phenomenon often takes place, namely, their subsequent recur-
rence after a certain interval, during which they are not felt, and quite independently
of any renewed application of the cause which had originally excited them.” (I
mark by italics the words which more precisely coincide with Julius Faber's ex-
planations.) “If, for example, we look steadfastly at the sun for a second or two,
and then immediately close our eyes, the image or spectrum of the sun remains
for a long time present to the mind as if the light were still acting on the retina.
It then gradually fades and disappears; but if we continue to keep the eyes shut,
the same impression will, after a certain time, recur and again vanish: and this phe-
nomenon will be repeated at intervals, the sensation becoming fainter at each
renewal. It is probable that these reappearances of the image, after the light
which produced the original impression has been withdrawn, are occasioned by
spontaneous affections of the retina itself which are conveyed to the sensorium. In
other cases where the impressions are less strong, the physical changes producing
these changes are perhaps confined to the sensorium."
It may be said that there is this difference between the spectrum of the sun and
such a phantom as that which perplexed Allen Fenwick — namely, that the sun
has been actually beheld before its visionary appearance can be reproduced, and
that Allen Fenwick only imagines he has seen the apparition which repeats itself
to his fancy. “But there are grounds for the suspicion” (says Dr. Hibbert, Phi-


A STRANGE STORY.
213
tions of the mysteries that confound you, as appear to me authorized by
physiological science. Should you adduce other facts which physiologi-
cal science wants the data to resolve into phenomena always natural,
however rare, still hold fast to that simple saying of Goethe's, — Myste-
ries are not necessarily miracles. And, if all which physiological science
comprehends in its experience wholly fails us, I may then hazard certain
conjectures which, by acknowledging ignorance, is compelled to recog-
nize the marvellous -- (for, as where knowledge enters the marvellous
recedes, so where knowledge falters the marvellous advances) — yet still,
even in those conjectures, I will distinguish the marvellous from the su-,
pernatural. But, for the present, I advise you to accept the guess that
may best quiet the fevered imagination which any bolder guess would
only yet more excite."
“You are right,” said I, rising proudly to the full height of my stature,
my head erect and my heart defying. “ And so, let this subject be re-
newed no more between us. I will brood over it no more myself. I re-
gain the unclouded realm of my human intelligence; and, in that intelli-
gence, I mock the sorcerer and disdain the spectre.”
CHAPTER XLVI.
JULIUS FABER and Amy Lloyd stayed in my house three days, and
in her presence I felt a healthful sense of security and peace. Amy
losophy of Apparitions, p. 250), “ that when ideas of vision are vivified to the height
of sensation, a corresponding affection of the optic nerve accompanies the illusion.”.
Müller (Physiology of the Senses, p. 1392, Baley's translation) states the same
opinion still more strongly, and Sir David Brewster, quoted by Dr. Hibbert (p.
251), says: “In examining these mental impressions I have found that they follow
the motions of the eyeball exactly like the spectral impressions of luminous objects,
and that they resemble them also in their apparent immobility when the eye is dis-
placed by an external force. If this result (which I state with much diffidence,
from having only my own experience in its favor) shall be found generally true by
others, it will follow that the objects of mental contemplation may be seen as distinctly
as external objects, and will occupy the same local position in the axis of vision, as if
they had been formed by the agency of light.” Hence the impression of an image
once conveyed to the senses, no matter how, whether by actual or illusory vision,
is liable to renewal,“independently of any renewed application of the cause which
had originally excited it," and can be seen in that renewal “as distinctly as exter-
nal objects," for indeed “the revival of the fantastic figure really does affect those
points of the retina which had been previously impressed."


214
A STRANGE STORY.
wished to visit her father's house, and I asked Faber, in taking her there,
to seize the occasion to see Lilian, that he might communicate to me his
impression of a case so peculiar. I prepared Mrs. Ashleigh for this visit
by a previous note. When the old man and the child came back, both
brought me comfort. Amy was charmed with Lilian, who had received
her with the sweetness natural to her real character, and I loved to hear
Lilian's praise from those innocent lips.
Faber's report was still more calculated to console me:
“I have seen, I have conversed with her long and familiarly. You
were quite right, there is no tendency to consumption in that exquisite,
if delicate, organization; nor do I see cause for the fear to which your
statement had preinclined me. That head is too nobly formed for any
constitutional cerebral infirmity. In its organization, ideality, wonder,
veneration are large, it is true, but they are balanced by other organs,
now perhaps almost dormant, but which will come into play as life passes
from romance into duty. Something at this moment evidently oppresses
her mind. In conversing with her, I observe abstraction - listlessness ;
but I am so convinced of her truthfulness, that if she has once told you
she returned your affection, and pledged to you her faith, I should, in
your place, rest perfectly satisfied that whatever be the cloud that now
rests on her imagination, and for a time obscures the idea of yourself, it
will pass away.”
Faber was a believer in the main divisions of phrenology, though he
did not accept all the dogmas of Gall and Spurzheim; while, to my mind,
the refutation of phrenology in its fundamental propositions had been tri-
umphantly established by the lucid arguments of Sir W. Hamilton.* But
when Faber rested on phrenological observations, assurances in honor of
Lilian, I forgot Sir W. Hamilton, and believed in phrenology. As iron
girders and pillars expand and contract with the mere variations of tem-
perature, so will the strongest conviction on which the human intellect
rests its judgment, vary with the changes of the human heart; and the
building is only safe where these variations are foreseen and allowed for
by a wisdom intent on self-knowledge. +
There was much in the affection that had sprung up between Julius
Faber and Amy Lloyd which touched my heart and softened all its emo-
* The summary of this distinguished lecturer's objections to phrenology is to be
found in the Appendix to vol. i. of Lectures on Metaphysics, p. 404 et seq. Edi-
tion 1859.
† The change of length in iron girders caused by variation of temperature, has
not unfrequently brought down the whole edifice into which they were admitted.
Good engineers and architects allow for such changes produced by temperature.
In the tubular bridge across the Menai Straits, a self-acting record of the daily
amount of its contraction and expanse is ingeniously contrived.


A STRANGE STORY.
215
tions. This man, unblessed, like myself, by conjugal and parental ties, had,
in his solitary age, turned for solace to the love of a child, as I, in the
prime of manhood, had turned to the love of woman. But his love was
without fear, without jealousy, without trouble. My sunshine came to me,
in a fitful ray, through clouds that had gathered over my noon; his sun-
shine covered all his landscape, hallowed and hallowing by the calm of
declining day.
And Amy was no common child. She had no exuberant imagination ;
she was haunted by no whispers from Afar; she was a creature fitted for
the earth, to accept its duties and to gladden its cares. Her tender ob-
servation, fine and tranquil, was alive to all the important household tri-
fles, by which, at the earliest age, man's allotted soother asserts her privi-
lege to tend and to comfort. It was pleasant to see her moving so noise-
lessly through the rooms I had devoted to her venerable protector, know-
ing all his simple wants, and providing for them as if by the mechanism
of a heart exquisitely moulded to the loving uses of life. Sometimes
when I saw her setting his chair by the window (knowing, as I did, how
much he habitually loved to be near the light) and smoothing his papers
(in which he was apt to be unmethodical), placing the mark in his book
when he ceased to read, divining, almost without his glance, some wish
passing through his mind, and then seating herself at his feet, often with
her work - which was always destined for him or for one of her absent
brothers — now and then, with the one small book that she had carried
with her, a selection of Bible stories compiled for children ; — sometimes
when I saw her thus, how I wished that Lilian, too, could have seen her,
and have compared her own ideal phantasies with those young develop-
ments of the natural heavenly Woman!
But was there nothing in that sight from which I, proud of my arid ·
reason even in its perplexities, might have taken lessons for myself ?
On the second evening of Faber's visit I brought to him the draft of
deeds for the sale of his property. He had never been a man of business
out of his profession; he was impatient to sell his property, and disposed
to accept an offer at half its value. I insisted on taking on myself the
task of negotiator; perhaps, too, in this office I was egotistically anxious
to prove to the great physician that that which he believed to be my
" hallucination ” had in no way obscured my common sense in the daily
affairs of life. So I concluded, and in a few hours, terms for his property
that were only just, but were infinitely more advantageous than had ap-
peared to himself to be possible. But, as I approached him with the
papers, he put his finger to his lips. Amy was standing by him with her
little book in her hand, and his own Bible lay open on the table. He
was reading to her from the Sacred Volume itself, and impressing on her


216
A STRANGE STORY.
the force and beauty of one of the Parables, the adaptation of which had
perplexed her; when he had done, she kissed him, bade him good night,
and went away to rest. Then said Faber thoughtfully, and as if to him-
self more than me,
“What a lovely bridge between old age and childhood is religion !
How intuitively the child begins with prayer and worship on entering
life, and how intuitively on quitting life the old man turns back to prayer
and worship, putting himself again side by side with the infant!”
I made no answer, but, after a pause, spoke of fines and freeholds,
title-deeds and money; and when the business on hand was concluded,
asked my learned guest if, before he departed, he would deign to look
over the pages of my ambitious Physiological Work. There were parts
of it on which I much desired his opinion, touching on subjects in which
his special studies made him an authority as high as our land possessed.
He made me bring him the manuscript, and devoted much of that
night and the next day to its perusal.
When he gave it me back, which was not till the morning of his de-
parture, he commenced with eulogies on the scope of its design and the
manner of its execution, which flattered my vanity so much that I could
not help exclaiming, “ Then, at least, there is no trace of 'hallucination'
here!”
“ Alas, my poor Allen ! here, perhaps, hallucination, or self-deception,
is more apparent than in all the strange tales you confided to me. For
here is the hallucination of a man seated on the shores of Nature, and
who would say to its measureless sea, “ So far shalt thou go and no fur-
ther!' - here is the hallucination of the creature, who, not content with
exploring the laws of the Creator, ends with submitting to his interpreta-
tion of some three or four laws, in the midst of a code of which all the
rest are in language unknown to him— the powers and free-will of the
Lawgiver himself; here is the hallucination by which Nature is left God-
less — because Man is left soulless. What would matter all our specula-
tions on a Deity who would cease to exist for us when we are in the
grave? Why mete out, like Archytas, the earth and the sea, and num-
ber the sands on the shore that divides them, if the end of this wisdom be
a handful of dust sprinkled over a skull!
"Nec quidquam tibi prodest
Aerias tentasse domos, animoque rotundum
Percurrisse polum morituro.'
Your book is a proof of the soul that you fail to discover. Without a' ?
soul, no man would work for a Future that begins for his fame when the
breath is gone from his body. Do you remember how you saw that little


A STRANGE STORY.
217
child praying at the grave of her father? Shall I tell you that in her
simple orisons she prayed for the benefactor — who had cared for the or-
phan; who had reared over dust that tomb which, in a Christian burial-
ground, is a mute but perceptible memorial of Christian hopes; that the
child prayed, haughty man, for you? And you sat by, knowing nought
of this; sat by, amongst the graves, troubled and tortured with ghastly
doubts - vain of a reason that was sceptical of eternity, and yet shaken
like a reed by a moment's marvel. Shall I tell the child to pray for you no
more ? — that you disbelieve in a soul ? If you do so, what is the efficacy
of prayer? Speak, shall I tell her this ? Shall the infant pray for you
never more ?”
I was silent; I was thrilled.
“Has it never occurred to you, who, in denying all innate perceptions
as well as ideas, have passed on to deductions from which poor Locke,
humble Christian that he was, would have shrunk in dismay; has it never
occurred to you as a wonderful fact, that the easiest thing in the world
to teach a child is that which seems to métaphysical schoolmen the ab-
strusest of all problems ? Read all those philosophers wrangling about a
First Cause, deciding on what are miracles, and then again deciding that
such miracles cannot be; and when one has answered another, and left
in the crucible of wisdom a caput mortuum of ignorance, then turn your
eyes, and look at the infant praying to the invisible God at his mother's
knees. This idea, so miraculously abstract, of a Power that the infant
has never seen, that cannot be symbolled forth and explained to him by
the most erudite sage, - a Power, nevertheless, that watches over him,
that hears him, that sees him, that will carry him across the grave, that
will enable him to live on forever; — this double mystery of a Divinity
and of a Soul the infant learns with the most facile readiness, at the first
glimpse of his reasoning faculty. Before you can teach him a rule in
addition, before you can venture to drill him into his hornbook, he leaps,
with one intuitive spring of all his ideas, to the comprehension of the
truths which are only incomprehensible to blundering sages! And you,
as you stand before me, dare not say, “Let the child pray for me no
more!' But will the Creator accept the child's prayer for the man who
refuses prayer for himself? Take my advice — Pray! And in this
counsel I do not overstep my province. I speak not as a preacher,
but as a physician. For health is a word that comprehends our whole
organization, and a just equilibrium of all faculties and functions is the
condition of health. As in your Lilian the equilibrium is deranged by
the over-indulgence of a spiritual mysticism which withdraws from the
nutriment of duty the essential pabulum of sober sense, so in you, the
resolute negation of disciplined spiritual communion between Thought
19


218
A STRANGE STORY.
and Divinity robs imagination of its noblest and safest vent. Thus, from
opposite extremes, you and your Lilian meet in the same region of mist
and cloud, losing sight of each other and of the true ends of life, as her
eyes only gaze on the stars and yours only bend to the earth. Were I
advising her, I should say: 'Your Creator has placed the scene of your
trial below, and not in the stars.' Advising you, I say: But in the trial
below, man should recognize education for heaven.' In a word, I would
draw somewhat more downward her fancy, raise somewhat more upward
your reason. Take my advice then - Pray. Your mental system needs
the support of prayer in order to preserve its balance. In the embarrass-
ment and confusion of your senses, clearness of perception will come
with habitual and tranquil confidence in Him who alike rules the uni-
verse and reads the heart. I only say here what has been said much
better before by a reasoner in whom all students of Nature recognize a
guide. I see on your table the very volume of Bacon which contains the
passage I commend to your reflection. Here it is. Listen : "Take an
example of a dog, and mark what a generosity and courage he wilt put
on when he finds himself maintained by a man who, to him, is instead of
a God, or melior natura, which courage is manifestly such as that crea-
ture, without that confidence of a better nature than his own, could
never attain. So man, when he resteth and assureth himself upon divine
protection and favor, gathereth a force and faith which human nature
could not obtain.'* You are silent, but your gesture tells me your doubt
- a doubt which your heart, so femininely tender, will not speak aloud
lest you should rob the old man of a hope with which your strength of
manhood dispenses — you doubt the efficacy of prayer! Pause and re-
flect, bold but candid inquirer into the laws of that guide you call Nature.
If there were no efficacy in prayer - if prayer were as mere an illusion
of superstitious phantasy as aught against which your reason now strug.
gles - do you think that Nature herself would have made it amongst the
most common and facile of all her dictates? Do you believe that if there
really did not exist that tie between Man and his Maker - that link be-
tween life here and a life hereafter which is found in what we call Soul,
alone — that wherever you look through the universe, you would behold
a child at prayer? Nature inculcates nothing that is superfluous. Na-
ture does not impel the leviathan, or the lion, the eagle or the moth, to
pray; she impels only man. Why? Because man only has soul, and
Soul seeks to commune with the Everlasting, as a fountain struggles up
* Bacon's Essay on Atheism. This quotation is made with admirable felicity
and force by Dr. Whewell, page 378 of Bridgewater Treatise, on Astronomy and
General Physics considered with Reference to Natural Theology.


-
219
A STRANGE STORY.
to its source. Burn your book. It would found you a reputation for
learning and intellect and courage, I allow; but learning and intellect
and courage wasted against a Truth - like spray against a rock! A
Truth valuable to the world, the world will never part with. You will not
injure the truth, but you will mislead and may destroy many, whose best
security is in the Truth which you so eruditely insinuate to be a fable.
Soul and Hereafter are the heritage of all men; the humblest journey-
man in those streets, the pettiest trader behind those counters, have in
those beliefs their prerogatives of royalty. You would dethrone and em-
brute the lords of the earth by your theories. For my part, having given
the greater part of my life to the study and analysis of facts, I would
rather be the author of the tritest homily, of the baldest poem, that incul-
cated that imperishable essence of the soul to which I have neither
scalpel nor probe - than be the founder of the subtlest school, or the
framer of the loftiest verse, that robbed my fellow men of their faith in a
spirit that eludes the dissecting-knife, in a being that escapes the grave-
digger. Burn your book --- Accept This Book instead; Read and
Pray."
He placed his Bible in my hand, embraced me, and, an hour afterwards,
the old man and the child left my hearth solitary oncé more.
CHAPTER XLVII.
That night as I sat in my study, very thoughtful and very mournful,
I revolved all that Julius Faber had said, and the impression. his words
had produced, became gradually weaker and weaker, as my reason, nat-
urally combative, rose up with all the replies which my philosophy sug-
gested. No! if my imagination had really seduced and betrayed me into
monstrous credulities, it was clear that the best remedy to such morbid
tendencies towards the Superstitious was in the severe exercise of the
faculties most opposed to Superstition; in the culture of pure reasoning;
in the science of absolute fact. Accordingly, I placed before me the very
book which Julius Faber had advised me to burn; I forced all my powers
of mind to go again over the passages which contained the doctrines that
his admonition had censured; and, before daybreak, I had stated the sub-
stance of his argument, and the logical reply to it, in an elaborate addition
to my chapter on" Sentimental Philosophers.” While thus rejecting the
purport of his parting counsels, I embodied in another portion of my work,


220
A STRANGE STORY.
his views on my own “illusions,” and as here my common sense was in
concord with his, I disposed of all my own previous doubts in an addition
to my favorite chapter “On the Cheats of the Imagination.” And when
the pen dropped from my hand, and the day-star gleained through the
window, my heart escaped from the labor of my mind, and flew back to
the image of Lilian. The pride of the philosopher died out of me, the
sorrow of the man reigned supreme, and I shrank from the coming of the
sun, despondent.
CHAPTER XLVIII.
Not till the law had completed its proceedings and satisfied the public
mind as to the murder of Sir Philip Derval, were the remains of the de-
ceased consigned to the family mausoleum. The funeral was, as may be
supposed, strictly private, and when it was over, the excitement caused
by an event so tragical and singular, subsided. New topics engaged the
public talk, and -- in my presence, at least — the delicate consideration
due to one whose name had been so painfully mixed up in the dismal
story, forbore a topic which I could not be expected to hear without dis-
tressful emotion. Mrs. Ashleigh I saw frequently at my own house; she
honestly confessed that Lilian had not shown that grief at the cancelling
of our engagement which would alone justify Mrs. Ashleigh in asking me
again to see her daughter, and retract my conclusions against our union.
She said that Lilian was quiet, not uncheerful, never spoke of me nor of
Margrave, but seemed absent and preoccupied as before, taking pleasure
in nothing that had been wont to please her; not in music, nor books, nor
that tranquil pastime which women call work, and in which they find ex-
cuse to meditate, in idleness, their own fancies. She rarely stirred out -
even in the garden -- when she did, her eyes seemed to avoid the house
in which Margrave had lodged, and her steps the old favorite haunt by
the Monks' Well. She would remain silent for long hours together, but
the silence did not appear melancholy. For the rest, her health was more
than usually good. Still, Mrs. Ashleigh persisted in her belief that, sooner
or later, Lilian would return to her former self, her former sentiments for
me, and she entreated me not as yet to let the world know that our en-
gagement was broken off. “For if,” said she, with good sense, “ if it
should prove not to be broken off, only suspended, and afterwards hap-
pily renewed, there will be two stories to tell, when no story is needed.


A STRANGE STORY.
221
Besides, I should dread the effect on Lilian, if offensive gossips babbled to
her on a matter that would excite so much curiosity as the rupture of a
union in which our neighbors have taken so general an interest.”
I had no reason to refuse acquiescence in Mrs. Ashleigh's request, but
I did not share in her hopes; I felt that the fair prospects of my life were
blasted; I could never love another, never wed another; I resigned my-
self to a solitary hearth, rejoiced, at least, that Margrave had not revisited
at Mrs. Ashleigh's; had not, indeed, reappeared in the town. He was
still staying with Strahan, who told me that his guest had ensconced him-
self in Forman’s old study, and amused himself with reading —though not
for long at a time — the curious old books and manuscripts found in the
library, or climbing trees like a schoolboy, and familiarizing himself with
the deer and the cattle, which would group round him quite tame, and
feed from his hand. Was this the description of a criminal ? But if Sir
Philip's assertion were really true; if the criminal were man without
soul; if without squl, man would have no conscience, never be troubled
by repentance, and the vague dread of a future world, - why, then,
should not the criminal be gay despite his crimes, as the white bear gam-
bols as friskily after his meal on human flesh? These questions would
haunt me despite my determination to accept as the right solution of all
marvels the construction put on my narrative by Julius Faber.
Days passed; I saw and heard nothing of Margrave! I began half to
hope that, in the desultory and rapid changes of mood and mind which
characterized his restless nature, he had forgotten my existence.
One morning, I went out early on my rounds, when I met Straban
unexpectedly.
"I was in search of you," he said, “ for more than one person has told
me that you are looking ill and jaded. So you are! And the town now
is hot and unhealthy. You must come to Derval Court for a week or
so. You can ride into town every day to see your patients. Don't re-
fuse. Margrave, who is still with me, sends all kind messages, and bade
me say that he entreats you to come to the house at which he also is a
guest!”
I started. What had the Scin-Læca required of me, and obtained to
that condition my promise ? “ If you are asked to the house at which I
also am a guest, you will come; you will meet and converse with me as
guest speaks to guest in the house of a host !” Was this one of the coin-
cidences which my reason was bound to accept as coincidences and noth-
ing more? Tut, tut! Was I returning again to my “ hallucinations ? "
Granting that Faber and common sense were in the right, what was this
Margrave? A man to whose friendship, acuteness, and energy I was
under the deepest obligations; to whom I was indebted for active services
19*


222
A STRANGE STORY.
that had saved my life from a serious danger, acquitted my honor of a
horrible suspicion. “I thank you,” I said to Strahan, “ I will come; not,
indeed, for a week, but, at all events, for a day or two."
“ That's right; I will call for you in the carriage at six o'clock. You
will have done your day's work by then ?”.
- *« Yes, I will so arrange.”
On our way to Derval Court that evening, Strahan talked much about'
Margrave, of whom, nevertheless, he seemed to be growing weary.
“ His high spirits are too much for one,” said he; and then so restless -
· so incapable of sustained quiet conversation. And clever though he is,
he can't help me in the least about the new house I shall build. He
has no notion of construction. I don't think he could build a barn."
: “I thought you did not like to demolish the old house, and would con-
tent yourself with pulling down the more ancient part of it?"
• True. At first it seemed a pity to destroy so handsome a mansion ;
but you see, since poor Sir Philip's manuscript, on which he set such
store, has been too mutilated, I fear, to allow me to affect his wish with
regard to it, I think I ought, at least, scrupulously to obey his other whims.
And, besides I don't know there are odd noises about the old house.
I don't believe in haunted houses, still there is something dreary in strange
sounds at the dead of night, even if made by rats, or winds through decay-
ing rafters. You, I remember at college, had a taste for architecture,
and can draw plans. I wish to follow out Sir Philip's design, but on a
smaller scale and with more attention to comfort."
Thus he continued to run on, satisfied to find me a silent and attentive
listener. We arrived at the mansion an hour before sunset, the westering
light shining full against the many windows cased in mouldering pilasters,
and making the general dilapidation of the whole place yet more mourn-
fully evident.
It was but a few minutes to the dinner-hour. I went up at once to the
room appropriated to me -- not the one I had before occupied. Strahan
had already got together a new establishment. I was glad to find in the
servant who attended me an old acquaintance. He had been in my own
employ when I first settled at L- , and left me to get married. He
and his wife were now both in Strahan's service. He spoke warmly of
his new master and his contentment with his situation, while he unpacked
my carpet-bag and assisted me to change my dress. But the chief object
of his talk and his praise was Mr. Margrave.
“ Such a bright young gentleman, like the first fine day in May !”
When I entered the drawing-room, Margrave and Stralian were both
there. The former was blithe and genial, as usual, in his welcome. At
dinner, and during the whole evening till we retired severally to our own


A STRANGE STORY.
223
rooms, he was the principal talker; recounting incidents of travel, always
very loosely strung together, jesting, good humoredly enough, at Strahan's
sudden hobby for building, then putting questions to me about mutual
acquaintances, but never waiting for an answer, and every now and then,
as if at random, startling us with some brilliant aphorism or some sugges-
tion drawn from abstract science or unfamiliar erudition. The wholo
effect was sparkling, but I could well understand, that if long continued,
it would become oppressive. The soul has need of pauses of repose-
intervals of escape not only from the flesh, but even from the mind. A
man of the loftiest intellect will experience times when mere intellect not
only fatigues him, but amidst its most original conceptions, amidst its
proudest triumphs, has a something trite and common-place compared
with one of those vague intimations of a spiritual destiny which are not
within the ordinary domain of reason; and, gazing abstractedly into space,
will leave suspended some problem of severest thought, or uncompleted
some golden palace of imperial poetry, to indulge in hazy reveries that
do not differ from those of an innocent quiet child! The soul has a long
road to travel — from time through eternity. It demands its halting hours
of contemplation. Contemplation is serene. But with such wants of an
immortal immaterial spirit, Margrave had no fellowship, no sympathy;
and for myself, I need scarcely add that the lines I have just traced I
should not have written at the date at which my narrative has now ar-
rived.,
CHAPTER XLIX.
I HAD no case that necessitated my return to the following day.
The earlier hours of the forenoon I devoted to Strahan and his building
plans. Margrave flitted in and out of the room fitfully as an April sun-
beam, sometimes flinging himself on a sofa and reading for a few minutes
one of the volumes of the ancient mystics, in which Sir Philip's library
was so rich. I remember it was a volume of Proclus. He read that
crabbed and difficult Greek with a fluency that surprised me. “I picked
up the ancient Greek,” said he, “ years ago, in learning the modern."
But the book soon tired him; then he would come and disturb us, archly
enjoying Strahan's peevishness at interruption; then he would throw open
the window and leap down, chanting one of his wild savage airs; and in
another moment he was half hid under the drooping boughs of a broad
lime-tree, amidst the antlers of deer that gathered fondly round him. In


224
· A STRANGE STORY.
the afternoon my host was called away to attend some visitors of impor-
tance, and I found myself on the sward before the house, right in view of
the mausoleum, and alone with Margrave."
I turned my eyes from that Dumb House of Death wherein rested the
corpse of the last lord of the soil, so strangely murdered, with a strong
desire to speak out to Margrave the doubts respecting himself that tor-
tured me. But, setting aside the promise to the contrary, which I had
given, or dreamed I had given, to the Luminous Shadow — to fulfil that
desire would have been impossible — impossible to any one gazing on that
radiant youthful face !- I think I see him now as I saw him then; a
white doe, that even my presence could not scare away from him, clung
lovingly to his side, looking up at him with her soft eyes. He stood
there like the incarnate principle of mythological sensuous life. I have
before applied to him that illustration ; let the repetition be pardoned.
Impossible, I repeat it, to say to that creature, face to face, “ Art thou
the master of demoniac arts and the instigator of secret murder ?” As
if from redundant happiness within himself, he was humming, or rather
cooing, a strain of music, so sweet, so sweet, so wildly sweet, and so unlike
the music one hears from tutored lips in crowded rooms! I passed my
hand over my forehead in bewilderment and awe.
“ Are there,” I said, unconsciously — " are there, indeed, such prodigies
in Nature ?”
-“Nature !” he cried, catching up the word; “talk to me of Nature!
Talk of her, the wondrous blissful Mother! Mother I may well call her.
I am her spoiled child, her darling But oh, to die, ever to die, ever
to lose sight of Nature ! — to rot, senseless, whether under these turfs or
within those dead walls — "
I could not resist the answer :
“ Like yon murdered man! murdered, and by whom ?”
“ By whom? I thought that was clearly proved ! ”
“ The hand was proved; what influence moved the hand ?”
“ Tush! The poor wretch spoke of a demon! Who can tell ? Nature
herself is a grand destroyer. See that pretty bird, in its beak a writhing
worm! All Nature's children live to take life ; * none, indeed, so lav-
* May I be pardoned, since Allen Fenwick does not confute, in his reply, the
trite fallacy contained in Margrave's remarks on the destroying agency of Nature,
if I earnestly commend to the general reader the careful perasal of chapter xiii.
page 129, of Dr. Buckland's Bridgewater Treatise (Geology and Mineralogy) on
the “Aggregate of animal enjoyment increased, and that of pain diminished, by
the existence of carniverous races.” Nothing to my mind can surpass the terseness
and simplicity with which the truth of that proposition is worked out to the vindi-
cation of the great drama of universal life.


A STRANGE STORY. .
225
ishly as man. What hecatombs slaughtered, not to satisfy the irresistible
sting of hunger, but for the wanton ostentation of a feast, which he may
scarcely taste, or for the mere sport that he finds in destroying. We
speak with dread of the beasts of prey: what beast of prey is so dire å
ravager as man? So cruel and so treacherous ? Look at yon flock of
sheep, bred and fattened for the shambles; and this hind that I caress, –
if I were the park-keeper, and her time for my bullet had come, would
you think her life was the safer because, in my own idle whim, I had
tamed her to trust to the hand raised to slay her?”
“ It is true,” said I, “ a grim truth. Nature, on the surface so loving
and so gentle, is full of terror in her deeps when our thought descends
into their abyss !”
Strahan now joined us with a party of country visitors..
• Margrave is the man to show you the beauties of this park,” said he.
“ Margrave knows every bosk and dingle, twisted old thorn-tree, or open-
ing glade, in its intricate, undulating ground.”
Margrave seemed delighted at this proposition, and as he led us through
the park, though the way..was long, though the sun was fierce, no one
seemed fatigued. For the pleasure he felt in pointing out detached beau-
ties which escaped an ordinary eye was contagious. He did not talk as
talks the poet or the painter; but at some lovely effect of light among
the tremulous leaves, some sudden glimpse of a sportive rivulet below, he
would halt, point it out to us in silence, and with a kind of childlike
ecstasy in his own bright face, that seemed to reflect the life and the bliss
of the blithe summer-day itself.
Thus seen, all my doubts in his dark secret nature faded away; all my
horror, all my hate; it was impossible to resist the charm that breathed
round him, not to feel a tender, affectionate yearning towards him as to
some fair happy child. Well might he call himself the Darling of Nature.
Was he not the mysterious likeness of that awful Mother, beautiful as
Apollo in one aspect, direful as Typhon in another ?
CHAPTER L.
“What a strange looking cane you have, sir,” said a little girl, who
was one of the party, and who had entwined her arm round Margrave's.
" Let me look at it.”
“Yes,” said Strahan; “ that cane, or rather walking-staff, is worth look-
ing at. Margrave bought it in Egypt, and declares that it is very ancient.”.


226
A STRANGE STORY.
This staff seemed constructed from a reed; looked at, it seemed light,
in the hand it felt heavy; it was of a pale, faded yellow, wrought with
black rings at equal distances, and graven with half obliterated charac-
ters that seemed hieroglyphie. I remembered to have seen Margrave
with it before, but I had never noticed it with any attention till now,
when it was passed from hand to hand. At the head of the cane there
was a large unpolished stone of a dark blue.
“ Is this a pebble or a jewel ?” asked one of the party.
“I cannot tell you its name or nature," said Margrave; “but it is said to
cure the bite of serpents,* and has other supposed virtues -a talisman,
in short."
He here placed the staff in my hands, and bade me look at it with care.
Then he changed the conversation, and renewed the way, leaving the
staff with me, till, suddenly, I forced it back on him. I could not have
explained why, but its touch, as it warmed in my clasp, seemed to send
* The following description of a stone at Corfu, celebrated as an antidote to the
venom of the serpent's bite, was given to me by an eminent scholar and legal func-
tionary in that island:
"DESCRIPTION OF THE BLUE STONE. -- This stone is of an oval shape, one inch
and two tenths long, seven tenths broad, three tenths thick, and, having been
broken formerly, is now set in gold.
“When a person is bitten by a poisonous snake, the bite must be opened by a
lancet or razor long ways, and the stone applied within twenty-four hours. The
stone then attaches itself firmly on the wound, and when it has done its office falls
off; the cure is then complete. The stone must then be thrown into milk, where-
upon it vomits the poison it has absorbed, which remains, green on the top of the
milk, and the stone is then again fit for use.
“This stone has been from time immemorial in the family of Ventura, of Corfu,
a house of Italian origin, and is notorious, so that peasants immediately apply for
its aid. Its virtue has not been impaired by the fracture. Its nature or composi-
tion is unknown.
“In a case where two were stung at the same time by serpents, the stone was
applied to one who recovered, but the other, for whom it could not be used, died.
“It never failed but once, and then it was applied after the twenty-four hours.
“Its color is so dark as not to be distinguished from black.
" P. M. COLQUHOUN
“ Corfu, 7th Nov., 1860.”
Sir Emerson Tennent, in his popular and excellent work on Ceylon, gives an
account of snake stones” apparently similar to the one at Corfu, except that they
are “intensely black and highly polished," and which are applied, in much the
same manner, to the wounds inflicted by the cobra capella.
Query – Might it not be worth while to ascertain the chemical properties of these
stones, and, if they be efficacious in the extraction of venom conveyed by a bite,
might they not be as successful if applied to the bite of a mad dog as to that of a
cobra capella ?


A STRANGE STORY.
227
through my whole frame a singular thrill, and a sensation as if I no longer.
felt my own weight - as if I walked on air.
Our rambles came to a close ; the visitors went away; I reentered the
house through the sash-window of Forman’s study; Margrave threw his
hat and staff on the table, and amused himself with examining minutely
the tracery on the mantelpiece. Strahan and myself left him thus occu-
pied, and going into the adjoining library, resumed our task of examining
the plans for the new house. I continued to draw outlines and sketches
of various alterations tending to simplify and contract Sir Philip's general
design. Margrave soon joined us, and, this time, took his seat patiently
beside our table, watching me use ruler and compass with unwonted at-
tention.
“I wish I could draw," he said, “ but I can do nothing useful.”
* Richmen like you,” said Strahan, peevishly, “ can engage others,
and are better employed in rewarding good artists than in making bad
drawings themselves.”
“Yes, I can employ others; and — Fenwick, when you have finished
with Strahan, I will ask permission to employ you, though without reward;
the task I would impose will not take you a minute."
He then threw himself back in his chair, and seemed to fall into a doze.
The dressing-bell rang; Strahan put away the plans — indeed, they
were now pretty well finished and decided on.
Margrave woke up as our host left the room to dress, and drawing me
towards another table in the room, placed before me one of his favorite
mystic books, and, pointing to an old wood-cut, said:
“I will ask you to copy this for me; it pretends to be a fac-simile of
Solomon's famous seal. I have a whimsical desire to have a copy of it.
You observe two triangles interlaced and inserted in a circle? The pen-,
tacle, in short. Yes, just so. You need not add the astrological charac-
ters, they are the senseless superfluous accessories of the dreamer who
wrote the book. But the pentacle itself has an intelligible meaning; it be-
longs to the only universal language, the language of symbol, in which all
races that think — around, and above, and below us -- can establish com-
munion of thought. If in the external universe any one constructive
principle can be detected, it is the geomètrical; and in every part of the
world in which magic pretends to a written character, I find that its
hieroglyphics are geometrical figures. Is it not laughable that the most
positive of all the sciences should thus lend its angles and circles to the
use of — what shall I call it ? -- the ignorance ? - ay, that is the word -
the ignorance of dealers in magic !”
He took up the paper on which I had hastily described the triangles
and the circle, and went out of the room, chanting the serpent-charmer's
song.


228
A STRANGE STORY.
CHAPTER LI.
WHEN we separated for the night, which we did at eleven o'clock,
Margrave said:
“Good night and good-hy. I must leave you to-morrow, Strahan, and
before your usual hour for rising. I took the liberty of requesting one
of your men to order me a chaise from L- Pardon my seeming
abruptness, but I always avoid long leave-takings, and I had fixed the
date of my departure almost as soon as I accepted your invitation.”
“I have no right to complain. The place must be dull, indeed, to a
gay young fellow, like you. It is dull even to me. I am meditating flight
already. Are you going back to L- ?”
“ Not even for such things as I left at my lodging. When I settle
somewhere, and can give an address, I shall direct them to be sent to me.
There are, I hear, beautiful patches of scenery towards the north, only
known to pedestrian tourists. I am a good walker; and you know, Fen-
wick, that I am also a child of Nature. Adieu to you both ; and many
thanks to you, Strahan, for your hospitality."
He left the room.'
“I am not sorry he is going,” said Strahan, after a pause, and with a
quick breath as if of relief. “Do you not think that he exhausts one ?
An excess of oxygen, as you would say in a lecture.”
I was alone in my own chamber; I felt indisposed for bed and for
sleep; the curious conversation I had held with Margrave weighed on
me. In that conversation, we had indirectly touched upon the prodigies
which I had not brought myself to speak of with frank courage, and cer-
tainly nothing in Margrave's manner had betrayed consciousness of my
suspicions; on the contrary, the open frankness with which he evinced
his predilection for mystic speculation, or uttered his more unamiable
sentiments, rather tended to disarm than encourage belief in gloomy
secrets of sinister powers. And he was about to quit the neighborbood,
he would not again see Lilian, not even enter the town of L- Was
I to ascribe this relief from his presence to the promise of the Shadow, or
was I not rather right in battling firmly against any grotesque illusion
and accepting his departure as a simple proof that my jealous fears had
been amongst my other chimeras, and that as he had really only visited
Lilian out of friendship to me, in my peril, so he might, with his charac-
teristic acuteness, have guessed my jealousy, and ceased his visits from a
kindly motive delicately concealed ? And might not the same motive
now have dictated the words which were intended to assure me that L-


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229
.
contained no attractions to tempt him to return to it? Thus gradually
soothed and cheered by the course to which my reflections led me, I con-
tinued to muse for hours. At length, looking at my watch, I was sur-
prised to find it was the second hour after midnight. I was just about to
rise from my chair to undress, and secure some hours of sleep, when the
well-remembered cold wind passed through the room, stirring the roots
of my hair, and before me stood, against the wall, the Luminous Shadow.
“Rise and follow me,” said the voice, sounding much nearer to me
than it had ever done before.
And at those words I rose mechanically, and like a sleep-walker.
“ Take up the light.”
I took it.
· The Scin-Læca glided along the wall towards the threshold, and mo-
tioned to me to open the door. I did so. The Shadow fitted on through
the corridor. I followed, with hushed footsteps, down a small stair into
Forman's study. In all my subsequent proceedings, about to be narrated,
the Shadow guided me, sometimes by voice, sometimes by sign. I obeyed
the guidance not only unresistingly, but without a desire to resist. I was
unconscious either of curiosity or of awe - only of a calm and passive
indifference, neither pleasurable nor painful. In this obedience, from
which all will seemed extracted, I took into my hands the staff which I
had examined the day before, and which lay on the table, just where
Margrave had cast it on reëntering the house. I unclosed the shutter to
the casement, lifted the sash, and, with the light in my left hand, the
staff in my right, stepped forth into the garden. The night was still ;
the flame of the candle scarcely trembled in the air; the Shadow moved
on before me towards the old pavilion described in an earlier part of this
narrative, and of which the mouldering doors stood wide open. I fol-
lowed the Shadow into the pavilion, up the crazy stair to the room above,
with its four great blank, unglazed windows, or rather arcades, north,
south, east, and west. I halted on the middle of the floor. Right before
my eyes, through the vista made by breathless boughs, stood out from
the moonlit air the dreary mausoleum. Then, at the command conveyed
to me, I placed the candle on a wooden settle, touched a spring in the
handle of the staff, a lid flew back, and I drew from the hollow, first a
lump of some dark bituminous substance, next a small slender wand of
polished steel, of which the point was tipped with a translucent material
which appeared to me like crystal. Bending down, still obedient to the
direction conveyed to me, I described on the floor with the lump of bitu-
men (if I may so call it) the figure of the pentacle with the interlaced
*triangles, in a circle nine feet in diameter, just as I had drawn it for
Margrave the evening before. The material used made the figure per-
.
20


230
A STRANGÉ STORY.
:
ceptible, in a dark color of mingled black and red. I applied the fame
of the candle to the circle, and immediately it became lambent with a
low steady splendor that rose about an inch from the floor, and gradually
from this light there emanated a soft gray transparent mist and a faint
but exquisite odor. I stood in the midst of the circle, and within the
circle also, close by my side, stood the Scin-Læca ; no longer reflected
on the wall, but apart from it, erect, rounded into more integral and disa.
tinct form, yet impalpable, and from it there breathed an icy air. Then
lifting the wand the broader end of which rested in the palm of my hand,
the two fore-fingers closing lightly over it in a line parallel with the
point, I directed it towards the wide aperture before me, fronting the
mausoleum. I repeated aloud some words whispered to me in a language
I knew not: those words I would not trace on this paper could I remem-
ber" them. As they came to a close, I heard a howl from the watch-dog
in the yard -- a dismal, lugubrious howl. Other dogs in the distant vil-
lage caught up the sound, and bayed in a dirge-like chorus ; and the
howling went on louder and louder. Again strange words were whis-
pered to me, and I repeated them in mechanical submission ; and when
they, too, were ended, I felt the ground tremble beneath me, and as my
eyes looked straight forward down the vista, that, stretching from the
casement, was bounded by the solitary mausoleum, vague formless shad-
ows seemed to pass across the moonlight - below, along the sward -
above, in the air; and then suddenly a terror, not before conceived, came
upon me.
And a third time words were whispered; but though I knew no more
of their meaning than I did of those that had preceded them, I felt a ré-
pugnance to utter them aloud. Mutely I turned towards the Scin-Læca,
and the expression of its face was menacing and terrible; my will became
yet more compelled to the control imposed upon it, and my lips com-
menced the formula again whispered into my ear, when I heard distinctly
a voice of warning and of anguish, that murmured “Hold !” I knew
the voice ; it was Lilian's. I paused - I turned towards the quarter
from which the voice had come, and in the space afar I saw the features,
the form of Lilian. Her arms were stretched towards me in supplication,
her countenance was deadly pale and anxious with unutterable distress.
The whole image seemed in unison with the voice; - the look, the attitude,
gesture, of one who sees another in deadly peril, and cries “ Beware !."
This apparition vanished in a moment; but that moment sufficed to
free my mind from the constraint which had before enslaved it. I dashed
the wand to the ground, sprang from the circle, rushed from the place.
How I got into my own room I can remember not I know not; I have
a vague reminiscence of some intervening wanderings, of giant trees, of


A STRANGE STORY.
231
shroud-like moonlight, of the Shining Shadow and its angry aspect, of
the blind walls and iron door of the House of the Dead, of spectral
images — a confused and dreary phantasmagoria. But all I can recall
with distinctness is the sight of my own hueless face in the mirror in my
own still room, by the light of the white moon through the window; and
sinking down, I said to myself, “ This, at least, is an hallucination or a
dream !"
. CHAPTER LII.
A HEAVY sleep came over me at daybreak, but I did not undress nor
go to bed. The sun was high in the heavens when, on waking, I saw
the servant, who had attended me, bustling about the room.
“I beg your pardon, sir, I am afraid I disturbed you ; but I have been
three times to see if you were not coming down, and found you so
soundly asleep I did not like to wake you. Mr. Straban has finished
breakfast, and gone out riding; Mr. Margrave has left- left before six
o'clock.”
“ Ah, he said he was going early.” :
“ Yes, sir; and he seemed so cross when he went. I could never
have supposed so pleasant a gentleman could have put himself into such
a passion!”
“What was the matter ? »
.“ Why, his walking-stick could not be found; it was not in the hall.
He said he had left it in the study; we could not find it there. At last
he found it himself in the old summer-house, and said --I beg pardon, he
said he was sure you had taken it there : that some one, at all events,
had been meddling with it. However, I am · very glad it was found,
since he seems to set such store on it.”
- Did Mr. Margrave go himself into the summer-house to look for it?
“ Yes, sir; no one else would have thought of such a place; no one
likes to go there even in the daytime.”
“ Why?”
“ Why, sir, they say it is haunted since poor Sir Philip's death; and,
indeed, there are strange noises in every part of the house. I am afraid
you had a bad night, sir," continued the servant, with evident curiosity
glancing towards the bed, which I had not pressed, and towards the
evening dress, which, while he spoke, I was rapidly changing for that
which I habitually wore in the morning. “I hope you did not feel your-
Belf ill?”


232
A STRANGE STORY.
“No; but it seems I fell asleep in my chair.”
“ Did you hear, sir, how the dogs howled about two o'clock in the
morning? They woke me. Very frightful!”.
“ The moon was at her full. Dogs will bay the moon."
I felt relieved to think that I should not find Strahan in the breakfast-
room, and hastening through the ceremony of a meal which I scarcely
touched, I went out into the park unobserved, and creeping round the
copses and into the neglected garden, made my way to the pavilion. I
mounted the stairs — I looked on the floor of the upper room; yes, there,
still was the black figure of the pentacle — the circle. So, then, it was
not a dream! Till then I had doubted. Or might it not still be so far a
dream, that I had walked in my sleep; and, with an imagination preoccu-
pied by my conversations with Margrave - by the hieroglyphics on the
staff I had handled, by the very figure associated with superstitious
practices which I had copied from some weird book at his request, by all
the strange impressions previously stamped on my mind — might I not,
in truth, have carried thither in sleep the staff, described the circle, and
all the rest been but visionary delusion? Surely — surely, so common
sense and so Julius Faber would interpret the riddles that perplexed me.
Be that as it may, my first thought was to efface the marks on the floor.
I found this easier than I had ventured to hope. I rubbed the circle and
the pentacle away from the boards with the sole of my foot, leaving but
an undistinguishable smudge behind. I know not why, but I felt the
more nervously anxious to remove all such evidences of my nocturnal
visit to that room, because Margrave had so openly gone thither to seek
for the staff, and had so rudely named me to the servant as having med-
dled with it. Might he not awake some suspicion against me? Suspi-
cion, what of? I knew not, but I feared!
The healthful air of day gradually nerved my spirits and relieved my
thoughts. But the place had become hateful to me. I resolved not to
wait for Strahan's return, but to walk back to L- , and leave a mes-
sage for my host. It was sufficient excuse that I could not longer absent
myself from my patients; accordingly, I gave directions to have the few
things which I had brought with me sent to my house by any servant
who might be going to L- , and was soon pleased to find myself outside
the park gates and on the high road.
I had not gone a mile before I met Strahan on horseback. He
received my apologies for not waiting his return to bid him farewell,
without observation, and, dismounting, led his horse and walked beside
me on my road. I saw that there was something on his mind; at last he
said, looking down,
“ Did you hear the dogs howl last night ?”
!


A STRANGE STORY.
233
“Yes! the full moon !” .
“ You were awake, then, at the time. Did you hear any other sound ?
Did you see any thing ?”
“ What should I hear or see?”
Strahan was silent for some moments; then he said, with great serious-
ness,
“ I could not sleep when I went to bed last night; I felt feverish and
restless. Somehow or other, Margrave got into my head, mixed up,
in some strange way, with Sir Philip Derval. I heard the dogs howl, and
at the same time, or rather a few minutes later, I felt the whole house
tremble, as a frail corner-house in London seems to tremble at night
when a carriage is driven past it. The howling had then ceased, and
ceased as suddenly as it had begun. I felt a vague superstitious alarm;
I got up, and went to my window, which was unclosed (it is my habit to
sleep with my windows open) — the moon was very bright — and I saw,
I declare I saw, along the green alley that leads from the old part of the
house to the mausoleum- No, I will not say what I saw or believed I
saw — you would ridicule me, and justly. But, whatever it might be, on
the earth without or in the fancy within my brain, I was so terrified, that
I rushed back to my bed, and buried my face in my pillow. I would
have come to you; but I did not dare to stir. I have been riding hard
all the morning in order to recover my nerves. But I dread sleeping
again under that roof, and now that you and Margrave leave me, I shall
go this very day to London. I hope all that I have told you is no bad
sign of coming disease ; blood to the head, eh?”
“No; but imagination overstrained can produce wondrous effects.
You do right to change the scene. Go to London at once, amuse your-
self, and "
“ Not return till the old house is razed to the ground. That is my re-
solve. You approve ? Thats well. All success to you, Fenwick. I
will canter back, and get my portmanteau ready and the carriage out in
time for the five o'clock train.” .
So, then, he, too, had seen — what? I did not dare and I did not de-
sire to ask him. But he, at least, was not walking in his sleep! Did we
both dream, or neither ?
20 *


234
A STRANGE STORY.
CHAPTER LIII.
THERE is an instance of the absorbing tyranny of every-day life which
must have struck all such of my readers as have ever experienced one of
those portents which are so at variance with every-day life, that the ordi-
nary epithet bestowed on them is “supernatural.”
And be my readers few or many, there will be no small proportion of
them to whom, once, at least, in the course of their existence, a some-
thing strange and eirie has occurred - à something which perplexed and
baffled rational conjecture, and struck on those chords which vibrate to
superstition. It may have been only a dream unaccountably verified, an
undefinable presentiment or forewarning; but up from such slighter and
vaguer tokens of the realm of marvel — up to the portents of ghostly
apparitions or haunted chambers, I believe that the greater number of
persons arrived at middle age, however instructed the class, however civ-
ilized the land, however sceptical the period, to which they belong, have
either in themselves experienced, or heard recorded by intimate asso-
ciates whose veracity they accept as indisputable in all ordinary transac-
tions of life — phenomena which are not to be solved by the wit that
mocks them, nor, perhaps, always and entirely to the contentment of the
reason or the philosophy that explains them away. Such phenomena, I
say, are infinitely more numerous than would appear from the instances
currently quoted and dismissed with a jest, for few of those who have
witnessed them are disposed to own it, and they who only hear of them
through others, however trustworthy, would not impugn their character
for common sense by professing a belief to which common sense is a
merciless persecutor. But he who reads my assertion in the quiet of his
own room will, perhaps, pause, ransack his memory, and find there in
some dark corner which he excludes from “the babbling and remorseless
day" a pale recollection that proves the assertion not untrue.
And it is, I say, an instance of the absorbing tyranny of every-day life
that whenever some such startling incident disturbs its regular tenor of
thought and occupation, that same every-day life hastens to bury in its
sands the object which has troubled its surface; the more unaccountable,
the more prodigious has been the phenomenon which has scared and as-
tounded us; the more, with involuntary effort, the mind seeks to rid
itself of an enigma which might disease the reason that tries to solve it.
We go about our mundane business with renewed avidity; we feel the
necessity of proving to ourselves that we are still sober practical men,


A STRANGE STORY.
235
and refuse to be unfitted for the world which we know, by unsolicited
visitations from worlds into which every glimpse is soon lost amid shadows.
And it amazes us to think how soon such incidents, though not actually
forgotten, though they can be recalled - and recalled too vividly for
health — at our will, are, nevertheless, thrust, as it were, out of the
mind's sight, as we cast into lumber rooms the crutches and splints that
remind us of a broken limb which has recovered its strength and tone.
It is a felicitous peculiarity in our organization, which all members of my
profession will have noticed, how soon, when a bodily pain is once past,
it becomes erased from the recollection, how soon and how invariably the
mind refuses to linger over and recall it. No man freed an hour before
from a raging toothache, the rack of a neuralgia, seats himself in his
arm-chair to recollect and ponder upon the anguish he has undergone.
It is the same with certain afflictions of the mind — not with those that
strike on our affections, or blast our fortunes, overshadowing our whole
future with a sense of loss - but where a trouble or calamity has been an
accident, an episode in our wonted life, where it affects ourselves alone,
where it is attended with a sense of shame and humiliation, where the
pain of recalling it seems idle, and if indulged would almost madden us;
agonies of that kind we do not brood over as we do over the death or
falsehood of beloved friends, or the train of events by which we are
reduced from wealth to penury. No one, for instance, who has escaped
from a shipwreck, from the brink of a precipice, from the jaws of a tiger,
spends his days and nights in reviving bis terrors past, reimagining dan-
gers not to occur again, or, if they do occur, from which the experience
undergone can suggest no additional safeguards. The current of our life,
indeed, like that of the rivers, is most rapid in the midmost channel,
where all streams are alike, comparatively slow in the depth and along
the shores in which each life, as each river has a character peculiar to
itself. And hence, those who would sail with the tide of the world, as
those who sail with the tide of a river, hasten to take the middle of the
stream, as those who sail against the tide are found clinging to the shore.
I returned to my habitual duties and avocations with renewed energy; I
did not suffer my thoughts to dwell on the dreary wonders that had
haunted me, from the evening I first met Sir Philip Derval to the morn-
ing in which I had quitted the house of his heir; whether realities or
hallucinations, no guess of mine could unravel such marvels, and no pru-
dence of mine guard me against their repetition. But I had no fear that
they would be repeated, any more than the man who has gone through
shipwreck, or the hairbreadth escape from a fall down a glacier, fears
again to be found in a similar peril. Margrave had departed, whither I
knew not, and, with his departure, ceased all sense of his influence. A


236
A STRANGE STORY.
certain calm within me, a tranquillizing feeling of relief, seemed to me
like a pledge of permanent delivery.
But that which did accompany and haunt me through all my occupa-
tions and pursuits, was the melancholy remembrance of the love I had
lost in Lilian. I heard from Mrs. Ashleigh, who still frequently visited
me, that her daughter seemed much in the same quiet state of mind -
perfectly reconciled to our separation - seldom mentioning my name
if mentioning it, with indifference; the only thing remarkable in her
state was her aversion to all society, and a kind of lethargy that would
come over her, often in the daytime. She would suddenly fall into sleep,
and so remain for hours, but a sleep that seemed very serene and tran-
quil, and from which she woke of herself. She kept much within her
own room, and always retired to it when visitors were announced.
Mrs. Ashleigh began reluctantly to relinguish the persuasion she had
so long and so obstinately maintained that this state of feeling toward
myself — and, indeed, this general change in Lilian - was but temporary
and abnormal; she began to allow that it was best to drop all thoughts
of a renewed engagement - a future union. I proposed to see Lilian in
her presence and in my professional capacity; perhaps some physical
cause, especially for this lethargy, might be detected and removed. Mrs.
Ashleigh owned to me that the idea occurred to herself; she had sounded
Lilian upon it; but her daughter had so resolutely opposed it ; had said
with so quiet a firmness, “ that all being over between us, a visit from me
would be unwelcome and painful;" that Mrs. Ashleigh felt that an inter-
view thus deprecated would only confirm estrangement. One day, in
calling, she asked my advice whether it would not be better to try the
effect of change of air and scene, and, in some other place, some other
medical opinion might be taken ? I approved of this suggestion with un-
speakable sadness.
“ And,” said Mrs. Ashleigh, shedding tears, “ if that experiment prove
unsuccessful, I will write and let you know; and we must then consider
what to say to the world as a reason why the marriage is broken off. I
can render this more easy by staying away. I will not return to
till the matter has ceased to be the topic of talk, and at a distance any
excuse will be less questioned and seem more natural. But still — still
— let us hope still.”
“ Have you one ground for hope ?”
"Perhaps so; but you will think it very frail and fallacious.”
“ Name it, and let me judge.” .
“ One night, in which you were on a visit to Derval Court -- "
" Ay, that night.”
“Lilian woke me by a loud cry (she sleeps in the next room to me, and


A STRANGE STORY.
237
the door was left open); I hastened to her bedside in alarm; she was
asleep, but appeared extremely agitated and convulsed. She kept call-
ing op your name in a tone of passionate fondness, but as if in great ter-
ror. She cried, 'Do not go, Allen! - do not go ! - you know not what you
brave ! — what you do!” Then she rose in her bed, clasping her hands.
Her face was set and rigid: I tried to awake her, but could not. After
a little time, she breathed a deep sigh, and murmured, “ Allen, Allen!
dear love! did you not hear?- did you not see me? What could thus
baffle matter and traverse space but love and soul? Can you still doubt
me, Allen? Doubt that I love you now, shall love you evermore ? Yon-
der, yonder, as here below ?' She then sank back on her pillow, weep-
ing, and then I woke her.”
“ And what did she say on waking.”
“She did not remember what she had dreamed, except that she had
passed through some great terror— but added with a vague smile, ' It is
over, and I feel happy now. Then she turned round, and fell asleep
again, but quietly as a child, the tears dried, the smile resting.”
“ Go, my dear friend, go; take Lilian away from this place as soon as
you can ; divert her mind with fresh scenes. I hope! - I do hope! Let
me know where you fix yourself. I will seize a holiday - I need one; I
will arrange as to my patients - I will come to the same place; she need
not know of it - but I must be by to watch, to hear your news of her.
Heaven bless you for what you have said! I hope ! - I do hope !"
CHAPTER LIV.
SOME days after, I received a few lines from Mrs. Ashleigh. Her ar-
rangements for departure were made. They were to start the next morn-
ing. She had fixed on going into the north of Devonshire, and staying
some weeks either at Ilfracombe.or Lynton, whichever place Lilian pre-
ferred. She would write as soon as they were settled.
I was up at my usual early hour the next morning. I resolved to go
out towards Mrs. Ashleigh's house, and watch, unnoticed, where I might,
perhaps, catch a glimpse of Lilian as the carriage that would convey her
to the railway passed my hiding-place.
I was looking impatiently at the clock; it was yet two hours before the
train by which Mrs. Ashleigh proposed to leave. A loud ring at my bell!
I opened the door. Mrs. Ashleigh rushed in, falling on my breast.


238
A STRANGE STORY.
“Lilian ! Lilian!”
“ Heavens! What has happened ?” :
“She has left — she is gone - gone away! Oh, Allen! how? —
whither? Advise me. What is to be done ? ”
“Come in-compose yourself — tell me all — clearly, quickly. Lilian
gone ? - gone away? Impossible! She must be hid somewhere in the
house -- the garden ; she, perhaps, did not like the journey. She may
have crept away to some young friend's house. But I talk when you
should talk: tell me all.”
· Little enough to tell! Lilian had seemed unusally cheerful the night
before, and pleased at the thought of the excursion. Mother and daughter
retired to rest early: Mrs. Ashleigh saw Lilian sleeping quietly before
she herself went to bed. She woke betimes in the morning, dressed her-
self, went into the next room to call Lilian Lilian was not there. No
suspicion of fight occurred to her. Perhaps her daughter might be up
already, and gone down stairs, remembering something she might wish to
pack and take with her on the journey. Mrs. Ashleigh was confirmed in
this idea when she noticed that her own room door was left open. She
went down stairs, met a maid-servant in the hall, who told her, with alarm
and surprise, that both the street and garden doors were found unclosed.
No one had seen Lilian. Mrs. Ashleigh now became seriously uneasy.
On remounting to her daughter's room, she missed Lilian's bonnet and
mantle. The house and garden were both searched in vain. There
could be no doubt that Lilian had gone - must have stolen noiselessly at
night through her mother's room, and let herself out of the house and
through the garden...
“Do you think she could have received any letter, any message, any
visitor unknown to you ?”.
“ I cannot think it. Why do you ask? Oh, Allen, you do not believe
there is any accomplice in this disappearance! No, you do not believe
it. But my child's honor. What will the world think ?”
Not for the world cared I at that moment. I could think only for Lil-
ian, and without one suspicion that imputed blame to her.
“Be quiet, be silent; perhaps she has gone on some visit, and will re-
turn. Meanwhile, leave inquiry to me.”


A STRANGE STORY.
239
CHAPTER LV.
It seemed incredible that Lilian could wander far without being ob-
served. I soon ascertained that she had not gone away by railway — by
any public conveyance - had hired no carriage ; she must, therefore, be
still in the town, or have left it on foot. The greater part of the day was
consumed in unsuccessful inquiries, and faint hopes that she would return;
meanwhile, the news of her disappearance had spread; how could such
news fail to do so ?
An acquaintance of mine met me under the archway of Monks' Gate.
He wrung my hand, and looked at me with great compassion.
· "I fear,” said he, “ that we were all deceived in that young Margrave.
He seemed so well conducted in spite of his lively manners. But —
“ But what?”
“Mrs. Ashleigh was, perhaps, imprudent to admit him into her house
so familiarly. "He was certainly very handsome. Young ladies will be
romantic.”
“ How dare you, sir !” I cried, choked with rage. “And without any
coloring to so calumnious a suggestion! Margrave has not been in the
town for many days. No one knows even where he is.”
“Oh yes, it is known where he is. He wrote to order the effects which
he had left here to be sent to Penrith.”
66 When'?”
“ The letter arrived the day before yesterday. I happened to be call-
ing at the house where he last lodged when at L- , the house opposite
Mrs. Ashleigh's garden. No doubt the servants in both houses gossip
with each other. Miss Ashleigh could scarcely fail to hear of Mr. Mar-
grave's address from her maid; and since servants will exchange gossip,
they may also convey letters. Pardon me, you know I am your friend.”.
“ Not from the moment you breathe a word against my betrothed wife,”
said I, fiercely.
I wrenched myself from the clasp of the man's hand, but his words still
rang in my ears. I mounted my horse; I rode into the adjoining suburbs,
the neighboring villages; there, however, I learned nothing till, just at
nightfall, in a hamlet, about ten miles from L- , a laborer declared he
had seen a young lady dressed as I described, who passed by him in a
path through the fields a little before noon; that he was surprised to see
one so young, so well dressed, and a stranger to the neighborhood (for he
knew by sight the ladies of the few families scattered round) walking alone; i
that as he stepped out of the path to make way for her, he looked hard


240
A STRANGE STORY.
into her face, and she did not heed him --- seemed to gaze, right before,
into space. If her expression had been less quiet and gentle, he should
have thought, he could scarcely say why, that she was not quite right in
her mind -- there was a strange unconscious stare in her eyes, as if she
were walking in her sleep. Her pace was very steady — neither quick
nor slow. He had watched her till she passed out of sight, amidst a
wood through which the path wound its way to a village at some distance.
I followed up this clue. I arrived at the village to which my informant
directed me, but night bad set in. Most of the houses were closed, so I
could glean no further information from the cottages or at the inn. But
the police superintendent of the district lived in the village, and to him I
gave instruction, which I had not given, and indeed would have been dis-
inclined to give, to the police at L- He was intelligent and kindly;
he promised to communicate at once with the different police-stations for
miles round, and with all delicacy and privacy. It was not probable that
Lilian could have wandered in one day much further than the place at
which I then was; it was scarcely to be conceived that she could baffle
my pursuit and the practised skill of the police. I rested but a few hours,
at a small public-house, and was on horseback again at dawn. A little
after sunrise, I again heard of the wanderer. At a lonely cottage, by a
brick-kiln, in the midst of a wide common, she had stopped the previous
evening, and asked for a draught of milk. The woman who gave it to
her inquired if she had lost her way? She said, “No;" and only tarry-
ing a few minutes, had gone across the common; and the woman sup-
posed she was a visitor at a gentleman's house which was at the further
end of the waste, for the path she took led to no town, no village. It
occurred to me, then, that Lilian avoided all highroads, all places even
the humblest, where men congregated together. But where could she
have passed the night ? Not to fatigue the reader with the fruitless result
of frequent inquiries, I will but say that at the end of the second day I
had succeeded in ascertaining that I was still on her track: and though I
had ridden to and fro nearly double the distance -- coming back again
to places I had left behind — it was at the distance of forty miles from
L- that I last heard of her that second day. She had been seen sit-
ting alone by a little brook only an hour before. I was led to the very
spot by a'woodman, - it was at the hour of twilight when he beheld her
- she was leaning her face on her hand, and seemed weary. He spoke
to her; she did not answer, but rose, and resumed her way along the
banks of the streamlet. That night I put up at no inn; I followed the
course of the brook for miles, then struck into every path that I could
conceive her to have taken -- in vain. Thus I consumed the night on
foot, tying my horse to a tree, for he was tired out, and returning to him


A STRANGE STORY.
241
at sunrise. At noon, the third day, I again heard of her, and in a remote
savage part of the country. The features of the landscape were changed;
there was little foliage and little culture, but the ground was broken into
mounds and hollows, and covered with patches of heath and stunted
brushwood. She had been seen by a shepherd, and he made the same
observation as the first who had guided me on her track, she looked to
him “ like some one walking in her sleep." An hour or two later, in a
dell, amongst the furze-bushes, I chanced on a knot of ribbon. I recog-
nized the color Lilian habitually wore; I felt certain that the ribbon
was hers. Calculating the utmost speed I could ascribe to her, she
could not be far off, yet still I failed to discover. The scene now was
as solitary as a desert; I met no one on my way. At length, a little
after sunset, I found myself in view of the sea. A small town nestled
below the cliffs, on which I was guiding my weary horse. I entered the
town and while my horse was baiting went in search of the resident
policeman. The information I had directed to be sent round the country
had reached him; he had acted on it, but without result. I was sur-
prised to hear him address me by name, and looking at him more nar-
rowly I recognized him for the policeman Waby. This young man had
always expressed so grateful a sense of my attendance on his sister, and
had, indeed, so notably evinced his gratitude in prosecuting with Mar-
grave the inquiries which terminated in the discovery of Sir Philip Der-
val's murderer, that I confided to him the name of the wanderer of which
he had not been previously informed; but which it would be, indeed, im-
possible to conceal from him should the search in which his aid was asked
prove successful, - as he knew Miss Ashleigh by sight. His face imme-
diately became thoughtful. He paused a minute or two, and then said:
“I think I have it, but I do not like to say ; I may pain you, sir.".
“ Not by confidence; you pain me by concealment.”
The man hesitated still; I encouraged him, and then he spoke out
frankly.
“ Sir, did you never think it strange that Mr. Margrave should move
from his handsome rooms in the hotel to a somewhat uncomfortable lodg-
ing, from the window of which he could look down on Mrs. Ashleigh's
garden? I have seen him at night in the balcony of that window, and
when I noticed him going so frequently into Mrs. Ashleigh's house during
your unjust detention, I own, sir, I felt for you - "
“Nonsense ; Mr. Margrave went to Mrs. Ashleigh's house as my friend.
He has left L- weeks ago. What has all this to do with ".
“Patience, sir ; hear me out. I was sent from L- to this station
(on promotion, sir), a fortnight since last Friday — for there has been a
21


242
A STRANGE STORY.
good deal of crime hereabouts, it is a bad neighborhood, and full of smug-
glers; - some days ago, in watching quietly near a lonely house, of which
the owner is a suspicious character, down in my books, I saw, to my amaze-
ment, Mr. Margrave come out of that house -- come out of a private door
in it, which belongs to a part of the building not inhabited by the owner,
but which used formerly, when the house was a sort of inn, to be let to
night lodgers of the humblest description. I followed him; he went down
to the sea-shore, walked about, singing to himself, then returned to the
house, and reëntered by the same door. I soon learned that he lodged
in the house, had lodged there for several days. The next morning, a
fine yacht arrived at a tolerably convenient creek about a mile from the
house, and there anchored. Sailors came ashore, rambling down to this
town. The yacht belonged to Mr. Margrave, he had purchased it by
commission in London. It is stored for a long voyage. He had directed
it to come to him in this out-of-the-way place, where no gentleman's yacht
ever put in before, though the creek, or bay, is handy enough for such
craft. Well, sir, is it not strange that a rich young gentleman should
come to this unfrequented sea-shore, put up with accommodation that must
be of the rudest kind in the house of a man known as a desperate smug-
gler, suspected to be worse? Order a yacht to meet him here; is not all
this strange? But would it be strange if he were waiting for a young
lady? And if a young lady has filed at night from her home, and has
come secretly along by-paths, which must have been very fully explained
to her beforehand, and is now near that young gentleman's lodging, if not
actually in it, if this be so, why, the affair is not so very strange after all.
And now do you forgive me, sir ?” i
“ Where is this house ? Lead me to it.”.
“ You can hardly get to it except on foot; rough walking, sir, and about
seven miles off by the shortest cut.”
“ Come, at once; come quickly. We must be there before – be-
fore ”
“ Before the young lady can get to the place. Well, from what you
say of the spot in which she was last seen, I think, on reflection, we may
easily do that. I am at your service, sir. But I should warn you that
the owners of the house, man and wife, are both of villanous character
would do any thing for money. Mr. Margrave, no doubt, has money
enough, and if the young lady chooses to go away with Mr. Margrave,
you know, I have no power to help it.”
“Leave all that to me; all I ask of you is to show me the house."
We were soon out of the town; the night had closed in; it was very
dark in spite of a few stars ; the path was rugged and precipitous, some-


A STRANGE STORY.
243
times skirting the very brink of perilous cliffs ; sometimes delving down
to the sea-shore — there stopped by rock or wave - and painfully rewind-
ing up the ascent.
" It is an ugly path, sir, but it saves four miles; and anyhow the road
is a bad one.”
We came, at last, to a few wretched fishermen's huts. The moon had
now risen, and revealed the squalor of poverty-stricken ruinous hovels; a
couple of boats moored to the shore; a moaning, fretful sea ; and at a
distance, a vessel, with lights on board, lying perfectly still at anchor in a
sheltered curve of the bold rude shore. The policeman pointed to the
vessel :
“ The yacht, sir; the wind will be in her favor if she sails to-night.”
We quickened our pace as well as the nature of the path would per-
mit, left the huts behind us, and, about a mile further on, came to a soli-
tary house, larger than from the policeman's description of Margrave's
lodgment, I should have presupposed : a house that in the wilder parts of
Scotland might be almost a laird's; but even in the moonlight it looked
very dilapidated and desolate. Most of the windows were closed, some
with panes broken, stuffed with wisps of straw; there were the remains
of a wall round the house : it was broken in some parts (only its founda-
tion left). On approaching the house, I observed two doors, one on the
side fronting the sea, one on the other side facing a patch of broken
ground that might once have been a garden, and lay waste within the
enclosure of the ruined wall, encumbered with various litter - heaps of
rubbish, a ruined shed, the carcase of a worn-out boat. This latter door
stood wide open — the other was closed. The house was still and dark,
as if either deserted or all within it retired to rest.
"I think that open door leads at once to the rooms Mr. Margrave
hires; he can go in and out without disturbing the other inmates. They
used to keep, on the side which they inhabit, a beer-house, but the magis-
trates shut it up; still it is a resort for bad characters. Now, sir, what
shall we do ?”
“Watch separately. You wait within the enclosure of the wall, hid by
those heaps of rubbish, near the door ; none can enter but what you will
observe them. If you see her, you will accost and stop her, and call aloud
for me; I shall be in hearing. I will go back to the high part of the
ground yonder, it seems to me that she must pass that way; and I would
desire, if possible, to save her from the humiliation, the -- the shame of
coming within the precincts of that man's abode. I feel I may trust you
now and hereafter. It is a great thing for the happiness and honor of this
poor young lady and her mother, that I may be able to declare that I did
not take her from that man, from any man — from that house, from any
.


244
A STRANGE STORY.
1
house. You comprehend me, and will obey? I speak to you as a con-
fidant - a friend.”
" I thank you with my whole heart, sir, for so doing. You saved my
sister's life, and the least I can do is to keep secret all that would pain
your life if blabbed abroad. I know what mischief folks' tongues can
make. I will wait by the door, never fear, and will rather lose my place
than not strain all the legal power I possess to keep the young lady back
from sorrow.”
This dialogue was interchanged in close hurried whisper behind the
broken wall, and out of all hearing. Waby now crept through a wide
gap into the enclosure, and nestled himself silently amidst the wrecks of
the broken boat, not six feet from the open door, and close to the wall of
the house itself. I went back some thirty yards up the road, to the rising
ground which I had pointed out to him. According to the best calculation
I could make — considering the pace at which I had cleared the precip-
itous pathway, and reckoning from the place and time at which Lilian
had been last seen, she could not possibly have yet entered that house —
I might presume it would be more than half an hour before she could
arrive; I was in hopes that, during the interval, Margrave might show
himself, perhaps at the door, or from the windows, or I might even by
some light from the latter be guided to the room in which to find him.
If, after waiting a reasonable time, Lilian should fail to appear, I had
formed my own plan of action ; but it was important for the success of
that plan that I should not lose myself in the strange house, nor bring its
owners to Margrave's aid — that I should surprise him alone and una-
wares. Half an hour, three quarters, a whole hour thus passed — no sign
of my poor wanderer; but signs there were of the enemy, from whom I
resolved, at whatever risk, to free and to save her. A window on the
ground floor to the left of the door, which had long fixed my attention
because I had seen light through the chinks of the shutters, slowly un-
closed, the shutters fell back, the casement opened, and I beheld Mar-
grave distinctly; he held something in his hand that gleamed in the
moonlight, directed not towards the mound on which I stood, nor towards
the path I had taken, but towards an open space beyond the ruined wall,
to the right. Hid by a cluster of stunted shrubs, I watched him with a
heart that beat with rage, not with terror. He seemed so intent in his
own gaze, as to be inattentive or unconscious of all else. I stole round
from my post, and still under cover, sometimes of the broken wall, some-
times of the shaggy ridges that skirted the path, crept on, on till I reached
the side of the house itself; then, there secure from his eyes, should he
turn them, I stepped over the ruined wall, scarcely two feet high in that
place, on — on towards the door. I passed the spot on which the police-


A STRANGE STORY.
:
245
man had shrouded himself; he was seated, his back against the ribs of
the broken boat. I put my hand to his mouth that he might not cry out
in surprise, and whispered in his ear; he stirred not. I shook him by the
arm; still he stirred not. A ray of the moon fell on his face. I saw that
he was in a profound slumber. Persuaded that it was no natural sleep,
and that he had become useless to me, I passed him by. I was at the
threshold of the open door; the light from the window close by falling on
the ground; I was in the passage ; a glimmer came through the chinks
of a door to the left; I turned the handle noiselessly, and the next mo-
ment, Margrave was locked in my grasp.
“ Call out,” I hissed into his ear, “and I strangle you before any one
can come to your help!”
He did not call out; his eye, fixed on mine as he writhed round, saw,
perhaps, his peril if he did. His countenance betrayed fear, but as I
tightened my grasp that expression gave way to one of wrath and fierce-
ness; and as, in turn, I felt the gripe of his hand, I knew that the strug-
gle between us would be that of two strong men, each equally bent on the
mastery of the other.
I was, as I have said before, endowed with an unusual degree of phys-
ical power, disciplined, in early youth, by athletic exercise and contest.
In height and in muscle I had greatly the advantage over my antagonist,
but such was the nervous vigor, the elastic energy of his incomparable
frame, in which sinews seemed springs of steel, that had our encounter
been one in which my strength was less heightened by rage, I believe
that I could no more have coped with him than the bison can cope with
the boa; but I was animated by that passion which trebles for a time all
our forces - which makes even the weak man a match for the strong. I
felt that if I were worsted, disabled, stricken down, Lilian might be lost
in losing her sole protector; and, on the other hand, Margrave had been
taken at the disadvantage of that surprise which will half unnerve the.
fiercest of the wild beasts; while as we grappled, reeling and rocked to
and fro in our struggle, I soon observed that his attention was distracted —
that his eye was turned towards an object which he had drooped invol-
untarily when I first seized him. He sought to drag me towards that
object, and when near it, stooped to seize. It was a bright, slender, short
wand of steel. I remembered when and where I had seen it, whether in
my waking state, or in vision, and as his hand stole down to take it from
the floor I set on the wand my strong foot. I cannot tell by what rapid
process of thought and association I came to the belief that the possession
of a little piece of blunted steel would decide the contest in favor of the
possessor, but the struggle now was concentred in the attainment of that
seemingly idle weapon. I was becoming breathless and exhausted, while
21 *


246
A STRANGE STORY.
Margrave seemed every moment to gather up new force, when, collecting
all my strength for one final effort, I lifted him suddenly high in the air,
and hurled him to the furthest end of the cramped arena to which our
contest was confined. He fell, and with a force by which most men
would have been stunned; but he recovered himself with a quick rebound,
and, as he stood facing me, there was something grand as well as terrible
in his aspect. His eyes literally flamed, as those of a tiger; his rich hair,
fung back from his knitted forehead, seemed to erect itself as an angry
mane ; his lips, slightly parted, showed the glitter of his set teeth; his
whole frame seemed larger in the tension of the muscles, and as gradually
relaxing his first defying and haughty attitude, he crouched as the pan-
ther crouches for its deadly spring, I felt as if it were a wild beast whose
rush was coming upon me - wild beast, but still Man, the king of the ani-
mals, fashioned forth from no mixture of humbler races by the slow revo-
lutions of time, but his royalty stamped on his form when the earth
became fit for his coming.*
At that moment I snatched up the wand, directed it towards him, and,
advancing with a fearless stride, cried,
“ Down to my feet, miserable sorcerer!”
To my own amaze the effect was instantaneous. My terrible antago
nist dropped to the floor as a dog drops at the word of his master. The
muscles of his frowning countenance relaxed, the glare of his wrathful
eyes grew dull and rayless; his limbs lay prostrate and unnerved, his
head resting against the wall, his arms limp and drooping by his side. I
approached him slowly and cautiously; he seemed cast into a profound
slumber.
“You are at my mercy now !”
He moved his head as in sign of deprecating submission..
“ You hear and understand me? Speak!”
His lips faintly muttered " Yes."
“I command you to answer truly the questions I shall address to
you."
“I must, while yet sensible of the power that has passed to your
hand.”
“ Is it by some occult magnetic property in this wand that you have
exercised so demoniac an influence over a creature so-pure as Lilian
Ashleigh ? "
* "And yet, even if we entirely omit the consideration of the soul, that immate-
rial and immortal principle which is for a time united to his body, and view him
only in his merely animal character, man is still the most excellent of animals." —
Dr. Kidd on the Adaptation of Exterual Nature to the Physical Condition of Man
(Sect. iii. page 18).


R
oman that
See
st
u
pila
SEBELUM
SEED
LES
DES
TEAM
HAMU
LLLS
ROW
ESSAAN
A
F EGISTER
TEEMI
AN
SANSES
HU
STRANE
VUOTTA
173

W
TAMIL
MINEN
USPORE
My terrible antagonist dropped to the floor
as a dog drops at the word of lus master"
LE
A DIE





A STRANGE STORY.
247
By that wand and by other arts which you could not comprehend.“
“ And for what infamous object ? - her seduction, her dishonor ?”
“No! I sought in her the aid of a gift which would cease, did she
cease to be pure. At first I but cast my influence upon her that through
her I might influence yourself. I needed your help to discover a secret.
Circumstances steeled your mind against me. I could no longer hope
that you would voluntarily lend yourself to my will. Meanwhile, I had
found in her the light of a loftier knowledge than that of your science;
through that knowledge, duly heeded and cultivated, I hoped to divine
what I cannot of myself discover. Therefore I deepened over her mind
the spells I command — therefore I have drawn her hither as the load-
stone draws the steel, and therefore I would have borne her with me to
the shores to which I was about this night to sail. I had cast the inmates
of the house, and all around it, into slumber, in order that none might
witness her departure; had I not done so, I should have summoned others
to my aid, in spite of your threat."
“ And would Lilian Ashleigh have passively accompanied you, to her
own irretrievable disgrace ?” .
“She could not have helped it; she would have been unconscious of
her acts ; she was, and is, in a trance ; nor, had she gone with me, would
she have waked from that state while she lived ; that would not have
been long."
“ Wretch! and for what object of unhallowed curiosity do you exert
an influence which withers away the life of its victim ? "
“ Not curiosity, but the instinct of self-preservation. I count on no
life beyond the grave. I would defy the grave, and live on.”
“ And was it to learn, through some ghastly agencies, the secret of re-
newing existence that you lured me by the shadow of your own image on
the night when we met last ?”.
The voice of Margrave here became very faint as he answered me,
and his countenance began to exhibit the signs of an exhaustion almost
mortal.
" Be quick,” he murmured, “ or I die. The fluid which emanates from
that wand in the hand of one who en venoms the fluid with his own hatred
and rage will prove fatal to my life. Lower the wand from my forehead;
low-low:- lower still !”
“What was the nature of that rite in which you constrained me to
share ?”
“I cannot say. You are killing me. Enough that you were saved
from a great danger by the apparition of the protecting image vouchsafed
to your eye, otherwise you would you would — Oh, release me!
Away! away!”


248
A STRANGE STORY.
The foam gathered to his lips ; his limbs became fearfully convulsed.
“ One question more: Where is Lilian at this moment ?. Answer that
question, and I depart."
He raised his head, made a visible effort to rally his strength, and
gasped out, .
" Yonder. Pass through the open space, up the cliff, beside a thorn-
tree - you will find her there, where she halted when the wand dropped
from my hand. But — but — beware! Ha! you will serve me yet, and
through her! They said so that night, though you heard them not.
They said it !” Here his face became death-like; he pressed his hand
on his heart, and shrieked out, “ Away. — away! or you are my mur-
derer!”
I retreated to the other end of the room, turning the wand from him,
and when I gained the door, looked back; his convulsions had ceased, but
he seemed locked in a profound swoon. I left the room- the house
paused by Waby; he was still sleeping. “Awake!” I said, and touched
him with the wand. He started up at once, rubbed his eyes, began stam-
mering out excuses. I checked them, and bade him follow me. I took
"the way up the open ground towards which Margrave had pointed the
wand, and there, motionless, beside a gnarled fantastic thorn-tree, stood
Lilian. Her arms were folded across her breast; her face, seen by the
moonlight, looked so innocent and so infantine, that I needed no other
evidence to tell me how unconscious she was of the peril to which her
steps had been drawn. I took her gently by the hand. “ Come with
me," I said, in a whisper; and she obeyed me silently, and with a placid
smile.
Rough though the way, she seemed unconscious of fatigue. I placed
her arm in mine, but she did not lean on it. We got back to the town.
I obtained there an old chaise and a pair of horses. At morning Lilian
was under her mother's roof. About the noon of that day fever seized
her, she became rapidly worse, and, to all appearance, in imminent dan-
ger. Delirium set in; I watched beside her night and day, supported by
an inward conviction of her recovery, but tortured by the sight of her
sufferings. On the third day, a change for the better became visible,
her sleep was calm, her breathing regular.
Shortly afterwards she woke, out of danger. Her eyes fell at once on
me, with all their old ineffable tender sweetness.
“Oh, Allen, beloved, have I not been very ill ? But I am almost well
now. Do not weep; I shall live for you for your sake.” And she
bent forward, drawing my hand from my streaming eyes, and kissing me
with a child's guileless kiss on my burning forehead.


A STRANGE STORY.
249
CHAPTER LVI. .'
LILIAN recovered, but the strange thing was this : all memory of the
weeks that had elapsed since her return from-visiting her aunt was com-
pletely obliterated ; she seemed in profound ignorance of the charge on
which I had been confined; perfectly ignorant even of the existence of
Margrave; she had, indeed, a very vague reminiscence of her conversa-
tion with me in the garden -- the first conversation which had ever been
embittered by a disagreement - but that disagreement itself she did not
recollect. Her belief was that she had been ill and light-headed since
that evening. From that evening to the hour of her waking, conscious
and revived, all was a blank. Her love for me was restored, as if its
thread had never been broken. Some such instances of oblivion after
bodily illness or mental shock are familiar enough to the practice of all
medical men ;* and I was therefore enabled to appease the anxiety and
wonder of Mrs. Ashleigh by quoting various examples of loss, or suspen-
sion, of memory. We agreed that it would be necessary to break to
Lilian, though very cautiously, the story of Sir Philip Derval's murder,
and the charge to which I had been subjected. She could not fail to
hear of those events from others. How shall I express her womanly ter-
ror, her loving sympathizing pity, on hearing the tale, which I softened
as well as I could ?
" And to think that I knew nothing of this !” she cried, clasping my
hand; “ to think that you were in peril, and that I was not by your
side!”
Her mother spoke of Margrave as a visitor -- an agreeable, lively
* Such instances of suspense of memory are recorded in most physiological, and
in some metaphysical, works. Dr. Abercrombie notices some, more or less similar
to that related in the text: “A young lady who was present at a catastrophe in
Scotland, in which many people lost their lives by the fall of the gallery of a
church, escaped without any injury, but with the complete loss of the recollection
of any of the circumstances; and this extended not only to the accident, but to
every thing that had occurred to her for a certain time before going to church. A
lady whom I attended some years ago in a protracted illness, in which her memory
became much impaired, lost the recollection of a period of about ten or twelve
years, but spoke with perfect consistency of things as they stood before that time.”
Dr. Abercrombie adds: “As far as I have been able to trace it, the principle in
such cases seems to be, that when the memory is impaired to a certain degree, the
loss of it extends backward to some event or some period by which a particularly
deep impression had been made upon the mind." -Abercrombie on the Intellectual
Powers, pages 118, 119 (15th edition).


250
A STRANGE STORY.
stranger; Lilian could not even recollect his name, but she seemed
shocked to think that any visitor had been admitted while I was in cir-
cumstances so awful! Need I say that our engagement was renewed ?
Renewed! To her knowledge and to her heart it had never been inter-
rupted for a moment. But oh, the malignity of the wrong world! Oh,
that strange lust of mangling reputations, which seizes on hearts the least
wantonly cruel! Let two idle tongues utter a tale against some third
person, who never offended the babblers, and how the tale spreads, like
fire, lighted none know how, in the herbage of an American prairie?
Who shall put it out ?
What right have we to pry into the secrets of other men's hearths ?
True or false, the tale that is gabbled to us, what concern of ours can it
be? I speak not of cases to which the law has been summoned, which
law has sifted, on which law has pronounced. But how, when the law is
silent, can we assume its verdicts? How be all judges, where there has
been no witness-box, no cross-examination, no jury? Yet, every day we
put on our ermine, and make ourselves judges — judges sure to condemn,
and on what evidence ? That which no court of law will receive.
Somebody has said something to somebody, which somebody repeats to
everybody!
· The gossip of L- had set in full current against Lilian's fair name.
No ladies had called or sent to congratulate Mrs. Ashleigh on her return,
or to inquire after Lilian herself during her struggle between life and
death.
How I missed the Queen of the Hill at this critical moment! How
I longed for aid to crush the slander, with which I knew not how to
grapple-aid, in her knowledge of the world, and her ascendency over
its judgments. I had heard from her once since her absence, briefly but
kindly expressing her amazement at the ineffable stupidity which could
for a moment have subjected me to a suspicion of Sir Philip Derval's
strange murder, and congratulating me heartily on my complete vindica-
tion from so monstrous a charge. To this letter no address was given.
I supposed the omission to be accidental, but on calling at her house to
inquire her direction, I found that her servants did not know it.
What, then, was my joy when, just at this juncture, I received a note
from Mrs. Poyntz, stating that she had returned the night before, and
would be glad to see me. .
I hastened to her house. “Ah,” thought I, as I sprang lightly up the
ascent to the Hill, “ how the tattlers will be silenced by a word from her
imperial lips !” And only just as I approached her door did it strike me
how difficult - nay, how impossible to explain to her - the hard positive
woman, her who had, less ostensibly but more ruthlessly than myself, de-


A STRANGE STORY.
251
stroyed Dr. Lloyd for his belief in the comparatively rational pretensions
of clairvoyance — all the mystical excuses for Lilian's flight from her
home? How speak to her - or, indeed, to any one — about an occult
fascination and a magic wand ? No matter : surely it would be enough
to say that, at the time, Lilian had been light-headed, under the influ-
ence of the fever which had afterwards nearly proved fatal. The early
friend of Anne Ashleigh would not be a severe critic on any tale that
might right the good name of Anne Ashleigh's daughter. So assured,
with light heart and cheerful face, I followed the servant into the great
lady's pleasant but decorous presence-chamber.
CHAPTER LVII.
Mrs. POYNTZ was on her favorite seat by the window, and, for a won-
der, not knitting — that classic task seemed done; but she was smoothing
and folding the completed work with her white comely hand, and smiling
over it, as if in complacent approval, when I entered the room. At the
fireside sat the he-colonel, inspecting a newly-invented barometer; at
another window, in the furthest recess of the room, stood Miss Jane
Poyntz, with a young gentleman whom I had never before seen, but who
turned his eyes full upon me with a haughty look as the servant announced
my name. He was tall, well proportioned, decidedly handsome, but with
that expression of cold and concentred self-esteem in his very attitude, as
well as his countenance, which makes a man of merit unpopular, a man
without merit ridiculous.
The he-colonel, always punctiliously civil, rose from his seat, shook
hands with me cordially, and said, “ Coldish weather to-day ; but we shall
have rain to-morrow. Rainy seasons come in cycles. We are about to
commence a cycle of them with heavy showers.” He sighed, and returned
to his barometer.
Miss Jane bowed to me graciously enough, but was evidently a little
confused, a circumstance which might well attract my notice, for I had
never before seen that high-bred young lady deviate a hair's breadth from
the even tenor of a manner admirable for a cheerful and courteous ease,
which one felt convinced would be unaltered to those around her if an
earthquake swallowed one up an inch before her feet.
The young gentleman continued to eye me loftily, as the heir-apparent
to some celestial planet might eye an inferior creature from a half-formed
nebular suddenly dropped upon his sublime and perfected star.


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A STRANGE STORY.
Mrs. Poyntz extended to me two fingers, and said, frigidly, “ Delighted
to see you again! How kind to attend so soon to my note!” Motion-
ing me to a seat beside her, she here turned to her husband, and said,
“ Poyntz, since a cycle of rain begins to-morrow, better secure your ride
to-day. Take these young people with you. I want to talk with Dr.
Fenwick.”
The colonel carefully put away his barometer, and saying to his daughter,
" Come!” went forth. "Jane followed her father; the young gentleman
followed Jane.
The reception I had met chilled and disappointed me. I felt that Mrs.
Poyntz was changed, and in her change the whole house seemed changed.
The very chairs looked civilly unfriendly, as if preparing to turn their
backs on me. However, I was not in the false position of an intruder; I
had been summoned; it was for Mrs. Poyntz to speak first, and I waited
quietly for her to do so.
She finished the careful folding of her work, and then laid it at rest in
the drawer of the table at which she sat. Having so done, she turned to
me, and said,
"By the way, I ought to have introduced to you my young guest, Mr.
Ashleigh Sumner. You would like him. He has talents — not showy but
solid. He will succeed in public life.”
“ So that young man is Mr. Ashleigh Sumner? I do not wonder that
Miss Ashleigh rejected him.”
I said this, for I was nettled, as well as surprised, at the coolness with
which a lady who had professed a friendship for me mentioned that for-
tunate young gentleman, with so complete an oblivion of all the ante-
cedents that had once made his name painful to my ear.
In turn, my answer seemed to nettle Mrs. Poyntz.
“I am not so sure that she did reject; perhaps she rather misunder-
stood him; gallant compliments are not always proposals of marriage.
However that be, his spirits were not much damped by Miss Ashleigh's
disdain, nor his heart deeply smitten by her charms, for he is now very
happy, very much attached to another young lady, to whom he proposed,
three days ago, at Lady Delafield's, and, not to make a mystery of what
all our little world will know before to-morrow, that young lady is my
daughter Jane.”
“ Were I acquainted with Mr. Sumner, I should offer to him my sin-
cere congratulation.”
Mrs. Poyntz resumed, without heeding a reply more complimentary to
Miss Jane than to the object of her choice:
“ I told you that I meant Jane to marry a rich country gentleman, and
Ashleigh Sumner is the very country gentleman I had then in my thoughts.


A STRANGE STORY.
253
He is cleverer and more ambitious than I could have hoped: he will be
a minister some day, in right of his talents, and a peer if he wishes it, in
right of his lands. So that matter is settled.”
There was a pause, during which my mind passed rapidly through links
of reminiscence and reasoning, which led me to a mingled sentiment of
admiration for Mrs. Poyntz as a diplomatist and of distrust for Mrs. Poyntz
as a friend. It was now clear why Mrs. Poyntz, before so little disposed
to approve my love, had urged me at once to offer my hand to Lilian, in
order that she might depart affianced and engaged to the house in which
she would meet Mr. Ashleigh Sumner. Hence, Mrs. Poyntz's anxiety to
obtain all the information I could afford her of the sayings and doings at
Lady Haughton's; hence, the publicity she had so suddenly given to my
engagement; hence, when Mr. Sumner had gone away, a rejected suitor,
her own departure from L- ; she had seized the very moment when a
vain and proud man, piqued by the mortification received from one lady,
falls the easier prey to the arts which allure his suit to another. All was
so far clear to me. And I — was my self-conceit less egregious and less
readily duped than that of yon gilded popinjay's! How skilfully this
woman had knitted me into her work with the noiseless turn of her white
hands! and yet, forsooth, I must vaunt the superior scope of my intellect,
and plumb all the fountains of Nature - I, who could not fathom the lit-
tle pool of this female schemer's mind !
But that was no time for resentment to her or rebuke for myself. She
was now the woman who could best protect and save from slander my in-
nocent, 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 candor 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 man-
ner 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
22


254
A STRANGE STORY.
distemper of mind; I accounted for it as any intelligent physician, unac-
quainted with all that I could not reveal, would account. Heaven for-
give 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 excite-
ment 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, unsus-
picious 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 first sound of her voice in reply, gave me hope, for it was un-
usually 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 wo-
man to her poor mother, her mind was disordered, and became yet more dan-
gerously 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 be-
lieve 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 at a village within an easy reach of Mr. Mar-
grave'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 Ash-
leigh, 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 for-
eigner.""


A STRANGE STORY.
255
“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 con-
versation and society. Do you blame me for that, or should I blame my-
self ? Condemned to live among brainless puppets, my dull occupation
to pull the strings that moved them, it was a new charm to my life to es-
tablish 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, succor 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 subtract from my
sum of life as I please. What is my duty to yourself? It is plain. It is
to tell you that your honor commands you to abandon all thoughts of
Lilian Ashleigh as your wife. Ungrateful that you are! Do you sup-
pose 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 pro-
moting 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 disap-
pointment 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," said she 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


256
A STRANGE STORY.
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 ambi-
tion, and smiled bitterly to think that in pressing you to propose só 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 Ash-
leigh. 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 Lil-
ian's purity as I have ? Who is so fitted to know the exact truth of every
wbisper against her? Yet when I, whom you admit to have some repu-
tation for shrewd intelligence, - I, who tracked her way,-1, 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 honor to
her keeping, — surely, surely, I confute the scandal which you yourself
do not believe though you refuse to reject and 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-pervasive 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


A STRANGE STORY.
257
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 honor.?”
I sprang, to my feet, with difficulty suppressing my rage, and, remem-
bering it was a woman who spoke to me, " Farewell, madam," said I,
through my grinded teeth. “Were you, indeed, the Personification 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 men-
acing, 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 dar-
ling 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 in-
voluntary, 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 for 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
gudeless -- so sensitive! Could she know what is said, it would kill
22 * '


258
A STRANGE STORY.
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 inde-
pendence - I have amassed large savings - I have my profession and mv
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 the woodland 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 con-
temptuous 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 moun-
tain air Lilian's health would be soon reëstablished; in the church hal-
lowed to me by the graves of my fathers our vows could be plighted.
No calumny had ever cast a shadow over those graves. I felt as if my
bride would be safer in the neighborhood 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


A STRANGE STORY.
259
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 practi-
tioner; 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 ana-
lyzed 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 vapor 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 mes-
senger 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 the-


260
A STRANGE STORY.
ory 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 pur-
poses 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 trav-
elling-trunk with such effects as I selected for use in the excursion that
was to commence with the morrow. I now laid 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 con-
founded 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 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 attri-
butes 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 be-
fore 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;


A STRANGE STORY.
201
that which appals us most in their power over us is our impotence against
them.
But up rose the sun, chasing the shadows from the earth, and brighten-
ing insensibly the thoughts of man. After all, Margrave had been baffled
and defeated, whatever the arts he had practised and the secrets he pos-
sessed. It was, at least, doubtful whether his evil machinations would be
renewed. He had seemed so incapable of long-sustained fixity of pur-
pose, that it was probable he was already in pursuit of some new agent
or victim; and as to this common-place 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 won-
derful 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 sud-
denly we find ourselves transportede 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 amaze how calm a thing it is to be happy.
And so as the night, in deepening, brightened, Lilian and I wandered by


262
A STRANGE STORY.
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 weary-
ing 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 reasonings 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
some 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 itself 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 neighbored by the stir and
hubbub of the busy town, - in much that I had once slighted or con-
temned as the vagaries of undisciplined fancy, I now recognized the spar-
kle 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 mouni-
tain-top we find them interpreters.


A STRANGE STORY.
263
In Lilian, the sympathy with Nature was not, as in Margrave, from the
joy and sense of Nature's lavish vitality, it was refined into exquisite per-
ception 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.
So the days glided by, and brought the eve of our bridal morn. It had
been settled that, after the ceremony (which was to be performed by
license in the village church, at no great distance, which adjoined my
paternal home now passed away to strangers), we should make a short
excursion into Scotland; leaving Mrs. Ashleigh to await our return at
the little inn.
I had retired to my own room to answer some letters from anxious
patients, and having finished these, I looked into my trunk for a Guide-
Book to the North, which I had brought with me. My hand came upon
Margrave's wand, and remembering that strange thrill which had passed
through me when I last handled it, I drew it forth, resolved to examine
calmly if I could detect the cause of the sensation. It was not now the
time of night in which the imagination is most liable to credulous impres-
sions, nor was I now in the anxious and jaded state of mind in which
such impressions may be the more readily conceived. The sun was
slowly setting over the delicious landscape; the air cool and serene; my
thoughts collected; heart and conscience alike at peace. I took, then,
the wand, and adjusted it to the palm of the hand as I had done before.
I felt the slight touch of the delicate wire within, and again the thrill!
I did not this time recoil ; I continued to grasp the wand, and sought de-
liberately to analyze my own sensations in the contact. There came over
me an increased consciousness of vital power; a certain exhilaration,
elasticity, vigor, such as a strong cordial may produce on a fainting man.
All the forces of my frame seemed refreshed, redoubled; and as such
effects on the physical system are ordinarily accompanied by correspond-
ent effects on the mind, so I was sensible of a proud elation of spirits, a
kind of defying, superb self-glorying. All fear seemed blotted out from
my thought, as a weakness impossible to the grandeur and might which
belong to Intellectual Man; I felt as if it were a royal delight to scorn
Earth and its opinions, brave Hades and its spectres. Rapidly this
new-born arrogance enlarged itself into desires vague but daring; my
mind reverting to the wild phenomena associated with its memories of


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À STRANGE STORY.
Margrave, I said, half-aloud, “ If a créature so beneath myself in con-
stancy of will and completion of thought can wrest from Nature favors so
marvellous, what could not be won from her by me, her patient persever-
ing seeker ? What if there be spirits around and about, invisible to the
common eye, but whom we can submit to our control, and what if this rod
be charged with some occult fluid, that runs through all creation, and
can be so disciplined as to establish communication wherever life and
thought can reach to beings that live and think! So would the mystics
of old explain what perplexes me. Am I sure that the mystics of old
duped themselves or their pupils ? This, then, this slight wand, light as
a reed in my grasp, this, then, was the instrument by which Margrave
sent his irresistible will through air and space, and by which I smote him-
self, in the midst of his tiger-like wrath, into the helplessness of a sick
man's swoon! Can the instrument at this distance still control him; if
now meditating evil, disarm and disable his purpose ?” Involuntarily as
I revolved these ideas, I stretched forth the wand, with a concentred
energy of desire that its influence should reach Margrave and command
him. And since I knew not his whereabout, yet was vaguely aware that,
according to any conceivable theory by which the wand could be sup-
posed to carry its imagined virtues to definite goals in distant space, it
should be pointed in the direction of the object it was intended to affect,
so I slowly moved the wand as if describing a circle, and thus, in some
point of the circle-east, west, north, or south - the direction could not
fail to be true. Before I had performed half the circle, the wand of
itself stopped, resisting palpably the movement of my hand to impel it
onward. Had it, then, found the point to which my will was guiding it,
obeying my will by some magnetic sympathy never yet comprehended by
any recognized science ?. I know not; but I had not held it thus fixed
for many seconds, before a cold air, well remembered, passed by me,
stirring the roots of my hair; and, reflected against the opposite wall,
stood the hateful Scin-Læca. The Shadow was dimmer in its light than
when before beheld, and the outline of the features was less distinct, still
it was the unmistakable lemúr, or image of Margrave.
And a voice was conveyed to my senses, saying, as from a great dis-
tance, and in weary yet angry accents,
6 You have summoned me! Wherefore ?”
· I overcame the startled shudder with which, at first, I beheld the
Shadow and heard the Voice.
“ I summoned you not,” said I ; “I sought but to impose upon you my
will, that you should persecute, with your ghastly influences, me and mine
no more. And now, by whatever authority this wand bestows on me, I
so adjure and command you !”


A STRANGE STORY.
265
I thought there was a sneer of disdain on the lip through which the
answer seemed to come:
“ Vain and ignorant; it is but a shadow you command. My body you
have cast into a sleep, and it knows not that the shadow is here ; nor,
when it wakes, will the brain be aware of one reminiscence of the words
that you utter or the words that you hear.”
“ What, then, is this shadow that simulates the body? Is it that
which in popular language is called the soul ?”
" It is not: soul is no shadow ?”
“ What then?”
" Ask not me. Use the wand to invoke Intelligence higher than mine.”
66 And how?”
“I will tell you not. Of yourself you may learn, if you guide the
wand by your own pride of will and desire ; but in the hands of him
who has learned not the art, the wand has its dangers. Again, I say you
have summoned me! Wherefore ?”
“ Lying shade, I summoned thee not.”
“ So wouldst thou say to the demons, did they come in their terrible
wrath, when the bungler, who knows not the springs that he moves, calls
them up unawares, and can neither control nor dispel. Less revengeful
than they, I leave thee unharmed, and depart !”
“ Stay. If, as thou sayest, no command I address to thee — to thee,
who art only the image or shadow — can have effect on the body and
mind of the being whose likeness thou art, still thou canst tell me what
passes now in his brain. Does it now harbor schemes against me through
the woman I love ? Answer truly."
" I reply for the sleeper, of whom I am more than a likeness, though
only the shadow. His thought speaks thus : 'I know, Allen Fenwick,
that in thee is the agent I need for achieving the end that I seek.
Through the woman thou lovest I hope to subject thee. A grief that will
harrow thy heart is at hand : when that grief shall befall, thou wilt wel-
come my coming. In me alone thy hope will be placed — through me
alone wilt thou seek a path out of thy sorrow. I shall ask my conditions:
they will make thee my tool and my slave !'”
The Shadow waned - it was gone. I did not seek to detain it, nor,
had I sought, could I have known by what process. But a new idea now
possessed me. This Shadow, then, that had once so appalled and con-
trolled me, was, by its own confession, nothing more than a Shadow! It
had spoken of higher Intelligences; from them I might learn what the
Shadow could not reveal. As still I held the wand firmer and firmer in
my grasp, my thoughts grew haughtier and bolder. Could the wand,
then, bring those loftier beings thus darkly referred to before me ?. With
23


266
A STRANGE STORY.
that thought, intense and engrossing, I guided the wand towards the
space, opening boundless and blue from the casement that let in the skies.
The wand no longer resisted my hand.
In a few moments I felt the floors of the room vibrate; the air was
darkened; a vaporous hazy cloud seemed to rise from the ground with-
out the casement; an awe, infinitely more deep and solemn than that
which the Scin-Læca had caused in its earliest apparition, curdled through
my veins, and stilled the very beat of my heart.
At that moment, I heard, without, the voice of Lilian, singing a simple
sacred song which I had learned at my mother's knees, and taught to her
the day before: singing low, and as with a warning angel's voice. By
an irresistible impulse I dashed the wand to the ground, and bowed my
head as I had bowed it when my infant mind comprehended, without an
effort, mysteries 'more solemn than those which perplexed me now.
Slowly I raised my eyes, and looked round: the vaporous hazy cloud
had passed away, or melted into the ambient rose tints amidst which the
sun had sunk.
Then, by one of those common reactions from a period of over-strained
excitement, there succeeded to that sentiment of arrogance and daring
with which these wild, half-conscious invocations had been fostered and
sustained, a profound humility, a warning fear.
“ What !” said I, inly, “ have all those sound resolutions, which my
reason founded on the wise talk of Julius Faber, melted away in the
wrack of haggard dissolving fancies ! Is this my boasted intellect, my
vaunted science! 1-1, Allen Fenwick, not only the credulous believer,
but the blundering practitioner, of an evil magic! Grant what may be
possible, however uncomprehended - grant that in this accursed instru-
ment of antique superstition there be some real powers - chemical, mag-
netic, no matter what — by which the imagination can be aroused,
inflamed, deluded, so that it shapes the things I have seen, speaks in the
tones I have heard — grant this, shall I keep ever ready, at the caprice
of will, a constant tempter to steal away my reason and fool my senses ? —
or if, on the other hand, I force my sense to admit what all sober men
must reject — if I unschool myself to believe that in what I have just ex.
perienced, there is no mental illusion, that sorcery is a fact, and a demon
world has gates which open to a key that a mortal can forge — who but a
saint would not shrink from the practice of powers by which each passing
thought of ill might find in a fiend its abettor? In either case – in any
case - while I keep this direful relic of obsolete arts, I am haunted
cheated out of my senses — unfitted for the uses of life. If, as my ear or
my fancy informs me, grief — human grief - is about to befall me, shall
I, in the sting of impatient sorrow, have recourse to an aid which, the


A STRANGE STORY.
267
·
the same voice declares, will reduce me to a tool and a slave ?-tool and
slave to a being I drçad as a foe! Out on these nightmares ! and away
with the thing that bewitches the brain to conceive them!”
I rose; I took up the wand, holding it so that its hollow should not
rest on the palm of the hand. I stole from the house by the back way,
in order to avoid Lilian, whose voice I still heard, singing low, on the
lawn in front. I came to a creek, to the bank of which a boat was moored,
undid its chain, rowed on to a deep part of the lake, and dropped the
wand into its waves. It sank at once: scarcely a ripple furrowed the
surface, not a bubble arose from the deep. And, as the boat glided on,
the star mirrored itself on the spot where the placid waters had closed
over the tempter to evil.
Light at heart I sprang again on the shore, and hastening to Lilian,
where she stood on the silvered shining sward, clasped her to my breast.
“ Spirit of my life !" I murmured," no enchantments for me but thine !
Thine are the spells by which creation is beautified, and, in that beauty,
hallowed. What, though we can see not into the measureless future from
the verge of the moment - what though sorrow may smite us while we
are dreaming of bliss, let the future not rob me of thee, and a balm will
be found for each wound. Love me ever as now, oh my Lilian; troth to
troth, side by side, till the grave!”
“ And beyond the grave,” answered Lilian, softly.
CHAPTER LXII.
OUR vows are exchanged at the altar — the rite which made Lilian my
wife is performed — we are returned from the church, amongst the hills,
in which my fathers had worshipped ; the joy-bells that rang for my mar-
riage had pealed for my birth. Lilian has gone to her room to prepare
for our bridal excursion; while the carriage we have hired is waiting at
the door. I am detaining her mother on the lawn, seeking to cheer and
compose her spirits, painfully affected by that sense of change in the re-
lations of child and parent which makes itself suddenly felt by the pa-
rent's heart on the day that secures to the child another heart on which
to lean.
But Mrs. Ashleigh's was one of those gentle womanly natures which, if
easily afflicted, are easily consoled. And, already smiling through her
tears, she was about to quit me and join her daughter, when one of the


268.
A STRANGE STORY.
inn servants came to me with some letters, which had just been delivered
by the postman. As I took them from the servant, Mrs. Ashleigh asked
if there were any letters for her ? She expected one from her house-
keeper at L- , who had been taken ill in her absence, and about whom
the kind mistress felt anxious. The servant replied that there was no
letter for her, but one directed to Miss Ashleigh, which he had just sent
up to the young lady.
Mrs. Ashleigh did not doubt that her housekeeper had written to Lilian,
whom she had known from the cradle, and to whom she was tenderly at-
tached, instead of to her mistress, and saying something to me to that ef-
fect, quickened her steps towards the house.
I was glancing over my own letters, chiefly from patients, with a rapid
eye, when a cry of agony, a cry as of one suddenly stricken to the heart,
pierced my ear- a cry from within the house. “Heavens! was not that
Lilian's voice?” The same doubt struck Mrs. Ashleigh, who had already
gained the door. She rushed on, disappearing within the threshold, and
calling to me to follow. I bounded forward - passed her on the stairs —
was in Lilian's room before her.
My bride was on the floor, prostrate, insensible. So still, so colorless!
that my first dreadful thought was that life had gone. In her hand was
a letter, crushed, as with a convulsive sudden grasp.
It was long before the color came back to her cheek, before the breath
was perceptible on her lip. She woke, but not to health, not to sense.
Hours were passed in violent convulsions, in which I momently feared
her death. To these succeeded stupor, lethargy, not benignant sleep.
That night, my bridal night, I passed as in some chamber to which I had
been summoned to save youth from the grave. At length, life was
rescued, was assured! Life came back, but the mind was gone. She
knew me not, nor her mother. She spoke little and faintly; in the words
she uttered there was no reason.
I pass hurriedly on; my experience here was in fault, my skill ineffect-
ual. Day followed day, and no ray came back to the darkened brain.
We bore her, by gentle stages, to London. I was sanguine of good re-
sult from skill more consummate than mine, and more specially devoted to
diseases of the mind. I summoned the first advisers. In vain !-- in vain!


A STRANGE STORY.
269
CHAPTER LXIII.
And the cause of this direful shock?. Not this time could it be traced
to some evil spell, some phantasmal influence. The cause was clear, and
might have produced effects as sinister on nerves of stronger fibré if ac-
companied with a heart as delicately sensitive, an honor as exquisitely
pure.
The letter found in her hand was without name; it was dated from
L- , and bore the postmark of that town. It conveyed to Lilian, in
the biting words which female malice can make so sharp, the tale we had
sought sedulously to guard from her ear— her flight, the construction that
scandal put upon it. It affected for my blind infatuation a contemptuous
pity; it asked her to pause before she brought on the name I offered to
her an indelible disgrace. If she so decided, she was warned not to re-
turn to L- , or to prepare there for the sentence that would exclude
her from the society of her own sex. I cannot repeat more, I cannot min-
ute down all that the letter expressed or implied, to wither the orange
blossoms in a bride's wreath. The heart that took in the venom cast its
poison on the brain, and the mind fled before the presence of a thought
so deadly to all the ideas which its innocence had heretofore con-
ceived.
I knew not whom to suspect of the malignity of this mean and misera-
ble outrage, nor did I much care to know. The handwriting, though
evidently disguised, was that of a woman, and, therefore, had I discovered
the author my manhood would have forbidden me the idle solace of re-
venge. Mrs. Poyntz, however resolute and pitiless her hostility when
once aroused, was not without a certain largeness of nature irreconcilable
with the most dastardly of all the weapons that hatred or envy can sup-
ply to the vile. She had too lofty a self-esteem and too decorous a re-
gard for the moral sentiment of the world that she typified, to do, or con-
nive at, an act which degrades the gentlewoman. Putting her aside, what
other female enemy had Lilian provoked ? No matter! What other
woman at L- was worth the condescension of a conjecture!
After listening to all that the ablest of my professional brethren in the
metropolis could suggest to guide me, and trying in vain their remedies,
I brought back my charge to L- Retaining my former residence for
the visits of patients, I engaged, for the privacy of my home, a house two
miles from the town, secluded in its own grounds, and guarded by high
walls.
23 *


270
A STRANGE STORY.
Lilian's mother removed to my mournful dwelling-place. Abbots'
House, in the centre of that tattling coterie, had become distasteful to her,
and to me it was associated with thoughts of anguish and of terror. I
could not, without a shudder, have entered its grounds - could not, with-
out a stab at the heart, have seen again the old fairy land round the
Monk's Well, nor the dark cedar-tree under which Lilian's hand had been
placed in mine. And a superstitious remembrance, banished while Lilian's
angel face had brightened the fatal precincts, now revived in full force.
The dying man's curse — had it not been fulfilled !
A new occupant for the old house was found within a week after Mrs.
Ashleigh had written from London to a house-agent at L- , intimating
her desire to dispose of the lease. Shortly before we had gone to Win-
dermere, Miss Brabazon had become enriched by a liberal life-annuity
bequeathed to her by her uncle, Sir Phelim. Her means thus enabled
her to move, from the comparatively humble lodging she had hitherto oc-
cupied, to Abbots' House ; but just as she had there commenced a series
of ostentatious entertainments, implying an ambitious desire to dispute
with Mrs. Poyntz the sovereignty of the Hill, she was attacked by some
severe malady which appeared complicated with spinal disease, and after
my return to L- I sometimes met her, on the spacious platform of the
Hill, drawn along slowly in a Bath chair, her livid face peering forth
from piles of Indian shawls and Siberian furs, and the gaunt figure of
Dr. Jones stalking by her side, taciturn and gloomy as some sincere
mourner who conducts to the grave the patron on whose life he had con-
veniently lived himself. It was in the dismal month of February that I
returned to L , and I took possession of my blighted nuptial home on
the anniversary of the very day in which I had passed through the dead
dumb world from the naturalist's gloomy death-room.
CHAPTER LXIV.
LILIAN's wondrous gentleness of nature did not desert her in the sus-
pension of her reason. She was habitually calm — very silent; when
she spoke it was rarely on earthly things —on things-familiar to her past
- things one could comprehend. Her thought seemed to have quitted
the earth, seeking refuge in some imaginary heaven. She spoke of war
derings with her father as if he were living still; she did not seem to un-
derstand the meaning we attach to the word Death. She would sit for


A STRANGE STORY.
271
.
hours murmuring to herself; when one sought to catch the words, they
seemed in converse with invisible spirits. We found it cruel to disturb
her at such times, for if left unmolested, her face was serene - more se-
renely beautiful than I had seen it even in our happiest hours; but when
we called her back to the wrecks of her real life, her eye became troubled,
restless, anxious, and she would sigh-oh, so heavily! At times, if we
did not seem to observe her, she would quietly resume her once favorite
accomplishments — drawing, music. And in these, her young excellence
was still apparent, only the drawings were strange and fantastic : they
had a resemblance to those with which the painter Blake, himself a vis-
ionary, illustrated the Poems of the “ Night Thoughts” and “ The Grave."
Faces of exquisite loveliness, forms of ærial grace, coming forth from the
bells of flowers, or floating upwards amidst the spray of fountains, their
outlines melting away in fountain or in flower. So with her music: her
mother could not recognize the airs she played, for a while so sweetly and
with so ineffable a pathos, that one could scarcely hear her without
weeping; and then would come, as if involuntarily, an abrupt discord,
and, starting, she would cease and look around, disquieted, aghast.
And still she did not recognize Mrs. Ashleigh nor myself, as her mother,
her husband; but she had by degrees learned to distinguish us both from
others. To her mother she gave no name, seemed pleased to see her, but
not sensibly to miss her when away; me she called her brother: if longer
absent than usual, me she missed. When, after the toils of the day, I
came to join her, even if she spoke not, her sweet face brightened. When
she sang, she beckoned me to come near to her, and looked at me fixedly,
with eyes ever tender, often tearful; when she drew, she would pause and
glance over her shoulder to see that I was watching her, and point to the
drawings with a smile of strange significance, as if they conveyed, in some
covert allegory, messages meant for me; so, at least, I interpreted her
smile, and taught myself to say, “ Yes, Lilian, I understand !”
And more than once, when I had so answered, she rose and kissed my
forehead. I thought my heart would have broken when I felt that spirit-
like melancholy kiss.
And yet how marvellously the human mind teaches itself to extract
consolation from its sorrows. The least wretched of my hours were
those that I passed in that saddened room, seeking how to establish frag-
ments of intercourse, invent signs, by which each might interpret each,
between the intellect I had so laboriously cultured, so arrogantly vaunted,
and the fancies wandering through the dark, deprived of their guide in
reason. It was something even of joy to feel myself needed for her guar-
dianship, endeared and yearned for still by some unshattered instinct of
her heart; and when, parting from her for the night, I stole the moment.


272
A STRANGE STORY.
in which on her soft face seemed resting least of shadow, ask, in a trem-
bling whisper, “ Lilian, are the angels watching over you ?” and she
would answer, “ Yes,” sometimes in words, sometimes with a mysterious
þappy smile — then — then I went to my lonely room, comforted and
thankful,
CHAPTER LXV.
The blow that had fallen on my hearth effectually, inevitably killed
all the slander that might have troubled me in joy. Before the awe of a
great. calamity the small passions of a mean malignity slink abashed. I
had requested Mrs. Ashleigh not to mention the vile letter which Lilian
had received. I would not give a triumph to the unknown calumniator,
nor wring forth her vain remorse, by the pain of acknowledging an in-
dignity to my darling's honor; yet, somehow or other, the true cause of
Lilian's affliction had crept out — perhaps through the talk of servants —
and the Public shock was universal. By one of those instincts of justice
that lie deep in human hearts, though in ordinary moments overlaid by
many a worldly layer, all felt (all mothers felt, especially) that innocence
alone could have been so unprepared for reproach. The explanation I
had previously given, discredited then, was now accepted without a ques-
tion. Lilian's present state accounted for all that ill nature had before
misconstrued. Her good name was restored to its maiden whiteness by
the fate that had severed the ties of the bride. The formal dwellers on
the Hill vied with the franker, warmer-hearted households of Low Town
in the nameless attentions by which sympathy and respect are rather
delicately indicated than noisily proclaimed. Could Lilian have then
recovered and been sensible of its repentant homage, how reverently
that petty world would have thronged around her. And, ah! could for-
tune and man's esteem have atoned for the blight of hopes that had been
planted and cherished on ground beyond their reach, ambition and pride
might have been well contented with the largeness of the exchange that
courted their acceptance. Patients on patients crowded on me. Sym-
pathy with my sorrow seemed to create and endear a more trustful belief
in my skill. But the profession I had once so enthusiastically loved be-
came to me wearisome, insipid, distasteful; the kindness heaped upon me
gave no comfort, it but brought before me more vividly the conviction that -
it came too late to avail me; it could not restore to me the mind, the love,
the life of my life, which lay dark and shattered in the brain of my guile-


A STRANGE STORY.
273
less Lilian. Secretly I felt a sullen resentment. I knew that to the
crowd the resentment was unjust. The world itself is but an appearance;
who can blame it if appearances guide its laws ? But to those who had
been detached from the crowd by the professions of friendship — those
who, when the slander was yet new, and might have been awed into
silence had they stood by my side, - to the pressure of their hands, now,
I had no response.
Against Mrs. Poyntz, above all others, I bore a remembrance of unre-
laxed, unmitigable indignation. Her schemes for her daughter's mar-
riage had triumphed: Jane was Mrs. Ashleigh Sumner. Her mind was,
perhaps, softened now that the object which had sharpened its worldly.
faculties was accomplished; but in vain, on first hearing of my affliction,
had this she Machiavel owned a humane remorse, and, with all her keen
comprehension of each facility that circumstance gave to her will, availed
herself of the general compassion to strengthen the popular reaction in
favor of Lilian's assaulted honor — in vain had she written to me with a
gentleness of sympathy foreign to her habitual characteristics — in vain
besought me to call on her - in vain waylaid and accosted me with a
: humility that almost implored forgiveness; I vouchsafed no reproach, but
I could imply no pardon. I put between her and my great sorrow the
impenetrable wall of my freezing silence.
One word of hers at the time that I had so pathetically besought her
aid, and the parrot-flock that repeated her very whisper in noisy shrill-
ness, would have been as loud to defend as it had been to defame; that
vile letter might never have been written. Whoever its writer, it surely
was one of the babblers who took their malice itself from the jest or the
nod of their female despot; and the writer might have justified herself in
saying she did but coarsely proclaim what the oracle of worldly opinion,
and the early friend of Lilian's own mother, had authorized her to be-
lieve.
By degrees, the bitterness at my heart diffused itself to the circumfer-
ence of the circle in which my life went its cheerless mechanical round.
That cordial brotherhood with his patients, which is the true physician's
happiest gift and humanest duty, forsook my breast. The warning
words of Mrs. Poyntz had come true. A patient that monopolized my
thoughts awaited me at my own hearth! My conscience became troubled;
I felt that my skill was lessened. I said to myself, “ The physician who,
on entering the sick room, feels, while there, something that distracts
the finest powers of his intellect from the sufferer's case, is unfit for his
calling." A year had scarcely passed since my fatal wedding day, before
I had formed a resolution to quit L , and abandon my profession:


274
A STRANGE STORY.
-
and my resolution was confirmed, and my goal determined, by a letter I
received from Julius Faber.
I had written at length to him, not many days after the blow that had
• fallen on me, stating all circumstances as calmly and clearly as my grief
would allow, for I held his skill at a higher estimate than that of any liv-
ing brother of my art, and I was not without hope in the efficacy of his
advice. The letter I now received from him had been begun, and con-
tinued at some length, before my communication reached him. And this
earlier portion contained animated and cheerful descriptions of his Aus-
tralian life and home, which contrasted with the sorrowful tone of the
supplement written in reply to the tidings with which I had wrung his
friendly and tender heart. In this, the latter, part of his letter, he sug-
gested that if time had wrought no material change for the better, it
might be advisable to try the effect of foreign travel. Scenes entirely •
new might stimulate observation, and the observation of things external
withdraw the sense from that brooding over images delusively formed
within, which characterized the kind of mental alienation I had described.
“Let any intellect create for itself a visionary world, and all reasonings
built on it are fallacious; the visionary world vanishes in proportion as
we can arouse a predominant interest in the actual.”
This grand authority, who owed half his consummate skill as a prac-
titioner to the scope of his knowledge as a philosopher, then proceeded
to give me a hope which I had not dared, of myself, to form. He said,
“I distinguish the case you so minutely detail from that insanity which
is reason lost; here it seems rather to be reason held in suspense. Where
there is hereditary predisposition, where there is organic change of struc-
ture in the brain — nay, where there is that kind of insanity which takes
the epithet of moral, whereby the whole character becomes so transformed
that the prime element of sound understanding, conscience itself, is
either erased or warped into the sanction of what, in a healthful state, it
would most disapprove, it is only charlatans who promise effectual cure.
But here I assume that there is no hereditary taint; here I am convinced,
from my own observation, that the nobility of the organs, all fresh as yet
in the vigor of youth, would rather submit to death than to the perma--
nent overthrow of their equilibrium in reason; here, where you tell me
the character preserves all its moral attributes of gentleness and purity,
and but over-indulges its own early habit of estranged contemplation;
here, without deceiving you in false kindness, I give you the guarantee
of my experience when I bid you hope !' I am persuaded that sooner
or later, the mind, thus for a time affected, will right itself; because here,
in the course of the malady, we do but deal with the nervous system.


A STRANGE STORY.
275
And that, once righted, and the mind once disciplined in those practical
duties which conjugal life necessitates, the malady itself will never re-
turn; never be transmitted to the children, on whom your wife's restora-
tion to health may permit you to count hereafter. If the course of travel
I recommend and the prescriptions I conjoin with that course fail you, let
me know; and though I would fain close my days in this land, I will come
to you. I love you as my son. I will tend your wife as my daughter.”
Foreign travel! The idea smiled on me. Julius Faber's companion-
ship, sympathy, matchless skill! The very thought seemed as a raft to a
drowning mariner. I now read more attentively the earlier portions
of his letter. They described, in glowing colors, the wondrous country
in which he had fixed his home; the joyous elasticity of its atmosphere;
the freshness of its primitive pastoral life; the strangeness of its scenery,
with a Flora and a Fauna which have no similitudes in the ransacked
quarters of the Old World. And the strong impulse seized me to trans-
fer to the solitudes of that blithesome and hardy Nature a spirit no longer
at home in the civilized haunts of men, and household gods that shrunk
from all social eyes, and would fain have found a wilderness for the deso-
late hearth, on which they had ceased to be sacred if unveiled. As if to
give practical excuse and reason for the idea that seized me, Julius Faber
mentioned, incidentally, that the house and property of a wealthy specu-
lator in his immediate neighborhood were on sale at a price which seemed
to me alluringly trivial, and, according to his judgment, far below the
value they would soon reach in the hands of a more patient capitalist.
He wrote at the period of the agricultural panic in the colony which pre-
ceded the discovery of its earliest gold-fields. But his geological science
had convinced him that strata within and around the property now for sale
were auriferous, and his intelligence enabled him to predict how inevitably
man would be attracted toward the gold, and how surely the gold would
fertilize the soil and enrich its owners. He described the house thus to
be sold — in case I might know of a purchaser; it had been built at a
cost unusual in those early times, and by one who clung to English tastes
amidst Australian wilds, so that in this purchase a settler would escape
the hardships he had then ordinarily to encounter: it was, in short, a
home to which a man, more luxurious than I, might bear a bride with
wants less simple than those which now sufficed for my darling Lilian.
This communication dwelt on my mind through the avocations of the
day on which I received it, and in the evening I read all, except the sup-
plement, aloud to Mrs. Ashleigh in her daughter's presence. I desired to
see if Faber's description of the country and its life, which in themselves
were extremely spirited and striking, would arouse Lilian's interest. At
first, she did not seem to heed me while I read, but when I came to Fa-


276
A STRANGE STORY.
ber's loving account of little Amy, Lilian turned her eyes toward me,
and evidently listened with attention. He wrote how the Child had al-
ready become the most useful person in the simple household.' How
watchful the quickness of the heart had made the service of the eye; áll
their associations of comfort had grown round her active noiseless move-
ments; it was she who had contrived to monopolize the management, or
supervision of all that added to Home the nameless interior charm; under
her eyes the rude furniture of the loghouse grew inviting with English
neatness; she took charge of the dairy; she had made the garden gay
with flowers selected from the wild, and suggested the trellised walk, al-
ready covered with hardy vine; she was their confidant in every plan
of improvement, their comforter in every anxious doubt, their nurse in
every passing ailment; her very smile a refreshment in the weariness of
daily toil. “How all that is best in womanhood," wrote the old man,
with the enthusiasm which no time had reft from his hearty healthful
genius, “How all that is best in womanhood is here opening fast into
flower from the bud of the infant's soul! The atmosphere seems to suit
it - the child-woman in the child-world!”
I heard Lilian sigh ; I looked towards her furtively; tears stood in her
softened eyes; her lip was quivering. Presently, she began to rub her
right hand over the left over the wedding-ring — at first, slowly; then
with quicker movement.
“ It is not here,” she said, impatiently; “it is not here !”
“What is not here ?” asked Mrs. Ashleigh, hanging over her..
Lilian leant her head back on her mother's bosom, and answered
faintly:
“ The stain! some one said there was a stain on this hand. I do not
see it- do you?”
“ There is no stain, never was,” said I; “ the hand is white as your
own innocence, or the lily from which you take your name.”
“ Hush! you do not know my name, I will whisper it. Soft!- my
name is Nightshade! Do you want to know where the lily is now,
brother? I will tell you. There, in that letter -- you call her Amy
she is the lily - take her to your breast — hide her. Hist! what are
those bells ? Marriage-bells. Do not let her hear them. For there is a
cruel wind that whispers the bells, and the bells ring out what it whispers,
louder and louder,
*Stain on lily, .
Shame on lily, ,
Wither lily.'
If she hears what the wind whispers to the bells, she will creep away into
the dark, and then she, too, will turn to Nightshade.”


A STRANGE STORY.
277
.
“ Lilian, look up, awake! You have been in a long, long dream : it is
passing away. Lilian, my beloved, my blessed Lilian !”
Never till then had I heard from her even so vague an allusion to the
fatal calumny, and its dreadful effect; and while her words now pierced
my heart, it beat, amongst its pangs, with a thrilling hope.
· But, alas! The idea that had gleamed upon her had vanished already.
She murmured something about Circles of Fire, and a Veiled Woman in
black garments; became restless, agitated, and unconscious of our pres-
ence, and finally sank into a heavy sleep.
That night (my room was next to hers with the intervening door open),
I heard her cry out. I hastened to her side. She was still asleep, but
there was an anxious laboring expression on her young face, and yet not
an expression wholly of pain - for her lips were parted with a smile
that glad yet troubled smile with which one who has been revolving some
subject of perplexity or fear, greets a sudden thought that seems to solve
the riddle, or prompt the escape from danger; and as I softly took her
hand she returned my gentle pressure, and inclining towards me, said,
still in sleep, . '
Let us go.”
“ Whither ?” I answered, under my breath, so as not to awake her;
6 is it to see the child of whom I read, and the land that is blooming out
of the earth's childhood ?” ,
“ Out of the dark into the light; where the leaves do not change ;
where the night is our day, and the winter our summer. Let us go- let
us go !”
“ We will go. Dream on undisturbed, my bride. Oh, that the dream
could tell you that my love has not changed in our sorrow, holier and
deeper than on the day in which our vows were exchanged! In you
still all my hopes fold their wings: where you are, there still I myself
have my drcamland !” .
The sweet face grew bright as I spoke; all trouble left the smile ; softly
she drew her hand from my clasp, and rested it for a moment on my
bended head, as if in blessing.
I rose ; stole back to my own room, closing the door, lest the sob I
could not stifle should mar her sleep.
24
:


278
A STRANGE STORY.
CHAPTER LXVI.
I UNFOLDED my new prospects to Mrs. Ashleigh. She was more
easily reconciled to them than I could have supposed, judging by her
habits, which were naturally indolent, and averse to all that disturbed
their even tenor. But the great grief which had befallen her had roused
up that strength of devotion which lies dormant in all hearts that are
capable of loving another more than self. With her full consent I wrote
to Faber, communicating my intentions, instructing him to purchase the
property he had so commended, and inclosing my banker's order for the
amount, on an Australian firm. I now announced my intention to retire
from my profession; made prompt arrangements with a successor to my
practice; disposed of my two houses at L- ; fixed the day of my de-
parture. Vanity was dead within me, or I might have been gratified by
the sensation which the news of my design created. My faults became
at once forgotten : such good qualities as I might possess were exagger-
ated. The public regret vented and consoled itself in a costly testimo-
nial, to which even the poorest of my patients insisted on the privilege to
contribute, graced with an inscription flattering enough to have served
for the epitaph on some great man's tomb. No one who has served an
art and striven for a name, is a stoic 'to the esteem of others, and sweet
indeed would such honors have been to me had not publicity itself seemed
á wrong to the sanctity of that affliction which set Lilian apart from the
movement and the glories of the world.
The two persons most active in “getting up” this testimonial were,
nominally, Colonel Poyntz - in truth, his wife — and my old disparager,
Mr. Vigors ! It is a long time since my narrative has referred to Mr.
Vigors. It is due to him now to state that, in his capacity of magistrate,
and in his own way, he had been both active and delicate in the inquiries
set on foot for Lilian during the unhappy time in which she had wan-
dered, spellbound, from her home. He, alone of all the more influential
magnates of the town, had upheld her innocence against the gossip that
aspersed it; and during the last trying year of my residence 'at -
he had sought me, with frank and manly confessions of his regret for his
former prejudice against me, and assurances of the respect in which he
had held me ever since my marriage — marriage but in rite — with Lilian.
He had then, strong in his ruling passion, besought me to consult his
clairvoyants as to her case. I declined this invitation, so as not to affront
him - declined it, not as I should once have done, but with no word nor
look of incredulous disdain. The fact was, that I had conceived a sol-


A STRANGE STORY.
279
emn terror of all practices and theories out of the beaten track of sense
and science. Perhaps in my refusal I did wrong. I know not. I was
afraid of my own imagination. He continued not less friendly in spite
of my refusal. And, such are the vicissitudes of human feeling, I parted
from him whom I had regarded as my most bigoted foe, with a warmer
sentiment of kindness than for any of those on whom I had counted on
friendship. He had not deserted Lilian. It was not so with Mrs. Poyntz.
I would have paid tenfold the value of the testimonial to have erased,
from the list of those who subscribed to it, her husband's name.
The day before I quitted L- , and some weeks after I had, in fact,
renounced my practice, I received an urgent entreaty from Miss Braba-
zon to call on her. She wrote in lines so blurred that I could with diffi-
culty decipher them, that she was very ill, given over by Dr. Jones, who
had been attending her. She implored my opinion.
CHAPTER LXVII.
On reaching the house, a formal man-servant, with indifferent face,
transferred me to the guidance of a hired nurse, who led me up the stairs,
and, before I was well aware of it, into the room in which Dr. Lloyd had
died. Widely different indeed, the aspect of the walls, the character of
the furniture. The dingy paper-hangings were replaced by airy muslins,
showing a rose-colored ground through their fanciful open-work; luxu-
rious fauteuils, gilded wardrobes, full-length mirrors, a toilet-table tricked
out with lace and ribbons, and glittering with an array of silver gewgaws
and jewelled trinkets, - all transformed the sick chamber of the simple
man of science to a boudoir of death for the vain coquette. But the
room itself, in its high lattice and heavy ceiling, was the same — as the
coffin itself has the same confines whether it be rich in velvets and bright
with blazoning, or rude as a pauper's shell.
And the bed, with its silken coverlid, and its pillows edged with the
thread-work of Louvain, stood in the same sharp angle as that over which
had flickered the frowning smoke-reek above the dying resentful foe.
As I approached, a man, who was seated beside the sufferer, turned
round his face, and gave me a silent kindly nod of recognition. He was
Mr. C., one of the clergy of the town, the one with whom I had the most
frequently come into contact wherever the physician resigns to the priest
the language that bids man hope. Mr. C., as a preacher, was renowned


280 -
A STRANGE STORY.
for his touching eloquence; as a pastor, revered for his benignant piety;
as friend and neighbor, beloved for a sweetness of nature which seemed
to regulate all the movements of a mind eminently masculine by the beat
of a heart tender as the gentlest woman's.
This good man, then whispering something to the sufferer which I did
not overhear, stole towards me, took me by the hand, and said, also in a
whisper, “ Be merciful as Christians are.” He led me to the bedside,
there left me, went out, and closed the door.
“Do you think I am really dying, Dr. Fenwick ? ” said a feeble voice.
“I fear Dr. Jones has misunderstood my case. I wish I had called
you in at the first, but — but I could not -- I could not! Will you feel
my pulse ? Don't you think you could do me good ?”
I had no need to feel the pulse in that skeleton wrist; the aspect of
the face sufficed to tell me that death was drawing near.
Mechanically, however, I went through the hackneyed formulæ of
professional questions. This vain ceremony done; as gently and deli-
cately as I could, I implied the expediency of concluding, if not yet set-
tled, those affairs which relate to this world.
“ This duty," I said, “in relieving the mind from care for others to
whom we owe the forethought of affection, often relieves the body also
of many a gnawing pain, and sometimes, to the surprise of the most expe-
rienced physician, prolongs life itself.”
“ Ah,” said the old maid, peevishly, “ I understand! But it is not my
will that troubles me. I should not be left to a nurse from a hospital if
my relations did not know that my annuity dies with me; and I fore-
stalled it in furnishing this house, Dr. Fenwick, and all these pretty
things will be sold to pay those horrid tradesmen !-- very hard ! so
hard ! — just as I had got things about me in the way I always said I .
would have them if I could ever afford it. I always said I would have
my bedroom hung with muslin, like dear Lady L.'s;- and the drawing-
room in geranium-colored silk : so pretty. You have not seen it: you
would not know the house, Dr. Fenwick. And just when all is finished,
to be taken away, and thrust into the grave. It is so cruel !” And she
began to weep. Her emotion brought on a violent paroxysm, which,
when she recovered from it, had produced one of those startling changes
of mind that are sometimes witnessed before death : changes whereby
the whole character of a life seems to undergo solemn transformation.
The hard will become gentle, the proud meek, the frivolous earnest.
That awful moment when the things of earth pass away like dissolving
scenes, leaving death visible on the back-ground by the glare that shoots
up in the last flicker of life's lamp.
As when she lifted her haggard face from my shoulder, and heard my.
.


282
A STRANGE STORY.
Ashleigh would come back, and said how much I should like to take this
house if she did not; and again he laughed, and said, “ Birds never stay
in the nest after the young ones are hurt,' and went away singing.
When I got home, his laugh and his song haunted me. I thought I saw
him still in my room, prompting me to write, and I sat down and wrote.
Oh, pardon, pardon me! I have been a foolish poor creature, but never
meant to do such harm. The Evil One tempted me! There he is, near
me now! I see him yonder! there, at the doorway! He comes to claim
me! As you hope for mercy yourself, free me from him!. Forgive
me !"
I made an effort over myself. In naming Margrave as her tempter,
the woman had suggested an excuse echoed from that innermost cell of my
mind, which I recoiled from gazing into, for there I should behold his
image. Inexpiable though the injury she had wrought against me and
mine, still the woman was human — fellow-creature — like myself;-
but he ?
I took in both my hands the hand that still pressed my arm, and said
with firm voice,
“ Be comforted. In the name of Lilian, my wife, I forgive you for her
and for me as freely and as fully as we are enjoined by Him, against
whose precepts the best of us daily sin, to forgive — we children of
wrath - to forgive one another !'
,“ Heaven bless you ! - oh, bless you !” she murmured, sinking back
upon her pillow.
" Ah!” thought I, “what if the pardon I grant for a wrong far deeper
than I inflicted on him whose imprecation smote me in this chamber,
should, indeed, be received as atonement, and this blessing on the lips
of the dying annul the dark curse that the dead has left on my path
through the Valley of the Shadow !”
I left my patient sleeping quietly, — the sleep that precedes the last.
As I went down the stairs into the hall, I saw Mrs. Poyntz standing at
the threshold, speaking to the man-servant and the nurse.
I would have passed her with a formal bow but she stopped me.
. “I came to inquire after poor Miss Brabazon,” said she. “You can tell
me more than the servants can : is there no hope ?”
“Let the nurse go up and watch beside her. She may pass away in
the sleep into which she has fallen.”
: “ Allen Fenwick, I must speak with you — nay, but for a few minutes.
I hear that you leave L- to-morrow. It is scarcely among the chances
of life that we should meet again.” While thus saying, she drew me
along the lawn down the path that led towards her own home. “I
wish,” said she, earnestly, “ that you could part with a kindlier feeling


A STRANGE STORY
283
towards me; but I can scarcely expect it. Could I put myself in your
place, and be moved by your feelings, I know that I should be implacable;
but I. ”
-
“But you, madam, are The World ! and The World governs itself, and
dictates to others, by laws which seem harsh to those who ask from its
favor the services which the World cannot tender, for the World admits
favorites but ignores friends. You did but act to me as the World ever
acts to those who'mistake its favor for its friendship.”
“ It is true," said Mrs. Poyntz, with blunt candor; and we continued to
walk on silently. At length she said, abruptly, “ But do you not rashly
deprive yourself of your only consolation in sorrow? When the heart
suffers, does your skill admit any remedy like occupation to the mind ?
Yet you abandon that occupation to which your mind is most accustomed;
you desert your career; you turn aside, in the midst of the race, from the
fame which awaits at the goal; you go back from civilization itself, and
dream that all your intellectual cravings can find content in the life of a
herdsman, amidst the monotony of a wild! No, you will repent, for you
are untrue to your mind.”
“I am sick of the word “mind!”” said I, bitterly. And therewith I
relapsed into musing.
The enigmas which had foiled my intelligence in the unravelled Sybil
Book of Nature were mysteries strange to every man's normal practice
of thought, even if reducible to the fraudulent impressions of outward
sense. For illusions in a brain otherwise healthy, suggest problems in our
human organization which the colleges that record them rather guess at
than solve. But the blow which had shattered my life had been dealt by
the hand of a fool. Here, there were no mystic enchantments. Motives
the most common-place and paltry, suggested to a brain as trivial and
shallow as ever made the frivolity of woman a theme for the satire of
poets, had sufficed, in devastating the field of my affections, to blast the
uses for which I had cultured my mind; and had my intellect been as
great as Heaven ever gave to man, it would have been as vain a shield as
mine against the shaft that had lodged in my heart. While I had, indeed,
been preparing my reason and my fortitude so meet such perils, weird
and marvellous as those by which tales round the winter hearth scare the
credulous child — a contrivance so vulgar and backneyed that not a day
passes but what some hearth is vexed by an anonymous libel — had wrought
a calamity more dread than aught which my dark guess into the Shadow-
Land, unpierced by Philosophy, could trace to the prompting of malig-
nant witchcraft. So, ever this truth runs through all legends of ghost
and demon - through the uniform records of what wonder accredits and
science rejects as the supernatural - lo! the dread machinery whose


284
.
A STRANGE STORY.
wheels roll through Hades! What need such awful engines for such mean
results? The first blockhead we meet in our walk to our grocers can tell
us more than the ghost tells us; the poorest envy we ever aroused hurts
us more than the demon ! How true an interpreter is Genius to Hell as
to Earth. The Fiend comes to Faust, the tired seeker of knowledge;
Heaven and Hell stake their cause in the Mortal's temptation. And
what does the Fiend to astonish the Mortal ? Turn wine into fire, turn
love into crime. We need no Mephistopheles to accomplish these marvels
every day!
Thus silently thinking, I walked by the side of the world-wise woman;
and when she next spoke, I looked up and saw that we were at the
Monk's Well, where I had first seen Lilian gazing into heaven! ..
Mrs. Poyntz had, as we walked, placed her hand on my arm, and,
turning abruptly from the path into the glade, I found myself standing by
her side in the scene where a new sense of being had first disclosed to my
sight the hues with which Love, the passionate beautifier, turns into pur-
ple and gold the gray of the common air. Thus, when romance has
ended in sorrow, and the Beautiful fades from the landscape, the trite
and positive forms of life, banished for a time, reappear, and deepen our
mournful remembrance of the glory they replace. And the Woman of
the World, finding how little I was induced to respond to her when she
had talked of myself, began to speak in her habitual, clear, ringing
accents of her own social schemes and devices:
“I Shall miss you when you are gone, Allen Fenwick, for though, dur-
ing the last year or so, all actual intercourse between us has ceased, yet
my interest in you gave some occupation to my thoughts when I sat
alone -- having lost my main object of ambition in settling my daughter,
and having no longer any one in the house with whom I could talk of
the future, or for whom I could form a project. It is so wearisome to
count the changes which pass within us, that we take interest in the
changes that pass without. Poyntz still has his weather-glass; I have no
longer my Jane.”
"I cannot linger with you on this spot,” said I, impatiently, turning
back into the path ; she followed, treading over fallen leaves. And
unheeding my interruption, she thus continued her hard talk: SRED
“But I am not sick of my mind as you seem to be of yours; I am only
somewhat tired of the little cage in which, since it has been alone, it
ruffles its plumes against the flimsy wires that confine it from wider space.
I shall take up my home for a time with the new-married couple: they
want me. Ashleigh Sumner has come into Parliament. He means to
attend regularly and work hard, but he does not like Jane to go into the
world by herself, and he wishes her to go into the world, because he


"
285
A STRANGE STORY.
.
1
.
wants a wife to display his wealth for the improvement of his position.
In Ashleigh Sumner's house, I shall have ample scope for my energies,
such as they are. I have a curiosity to see the few that perch on the
wheels of the State, and say, . It is we who move the wheels !! It will
amuse me to learn if I can maintain in a capital the authority I have won
in a country town; if not, I can but return to my small principality.
Wherever I live I must sway, not serve. If I succeed — as I ought, for
in Jane's beauty and Ashleigh's fortune I have materials for the woof
of ambition, wanting which here, I fall asleep over my knitting - if I
succeed, there will be enough to occupy the rest of my life. Ashleigh
Sumner must be a Power; the Power will be represented and enjoyed
by my child, and created and maintained by me! Allen Fenwick, do as
I do. Be world with the world, and it will only be in moments of spleen
and chagrin that you will sigh to think that the heart may be void when
the mind is full. Confess, you envy me while you listen.”...
56 Not so; all that to you seems so great, appears to me so small !
Nature alone is always grand, in her terrors as well as her charms. The
World for you; Nature for me. Farewell!”
i “Nature,” said Mrs. Poyntz, compassionately. “Poor Allen Fenwick!
Nature indeed - intellectual suicide! Nay, shake hands, then, if for
the last time."
So we shook hands and parted, where the wicket-gate and the stone
stairs separated my blighted fairyland from the common thoroughfare.
399
T
CHAPTER LXVIII.
That night, as I was employed in collecting the books and manu-
scripts which I proposed to take with me, including my long-suspended
physiological work, and such standard authorities as I might want to con-
sult or refer to in the portions yet incompleted, my servant entered to
inform me, in answer to the inquiries I had sent him to make, that Miss
Brabazon bad peacefully breathed her last an hour before. Well! my
pardon had perhaps soothed her last moments; but how unavailing her
death-bed repentance to undo the wrong she had done!
I turned from that thought, and glancing at the work into which I had
thrown all my learning, methodized into system with all my art, I recalled
the pity which Mrs. Poyntz had expressed for my meditated waste of
mind. The tone of superiority which this incarnation of common sense

.


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287
ens may only understand the things that are above the height of the
heavens."
I paused at those words, and, closing the Sacred Volume, fell into deep,
unquiet thought.
CHAPTER LXIX.
· I HAD hoped that the voyage would have had some beneficial effect
.upon Lilian; but no effect, good or bad, was perceptible, except, per-
haps, a deeper silence, a gentler calm. She loved to sit on the deck
when the nights were fair, and the stars mirrored on the deep. And
once, thus, as I stood beside her, bending over the rail of the vessel, and
gazing on the long wake of light which the moon made amidst the dark-
ness of an ocean to which no. shore could be seen, I said to myself,
66 Where is my track of light through the measureless future? Would
that I could believe as I did when a child! Woe is me, that all the
reasonings I take from my knowledge should lead me away from the com-
fort which the peasant who mourns finds in faith! Why should riddles
so dark have been thrust upon me? --- me, no fond child of fancy; me,
sober pupil of schools the severest. Yet what marvel - the strangest
my senses haye witnessed or feigned in the fraud they have palmed on
me — is greater than that by which a simple affection, that all men pro-
fess to have known, has changed the courses of life prearranged by my
hopes and confirmed by my judgment? How.calmly before I knew love
I have anatomized its mechanism, as the tyro who dissects the web-work
of tissues and nerves in the dead! Lo ! it lives, lives in me; and, in liv-
ing, escapes from my scalpel and mocks all my knowledge. Can love be
reduced to the realm of the senses ? No! what nun is more barred by
her grate from the realm of the senses than my bride by her solemn
affliction ? Is love, then, the union of kindred, harmonious minds?
No! my beloved one sits by my side, and I guess not her thoughts, and
my mind is to her a sealed fountain. Yet I love her more-oh ineffably
more! for the doom which destroys the two causes philosophy assigns to
love - in the form in the mind! How can I now, in my vain physiology,
say what is love - what is not ? Is it love which must tell me that man
has a soul, and that in soul will be found the solution of problems never
to be solved in body or mind alone ?"
My self-questionings halted here, as Lilian's hand touched my shoul-
der. She had risen from her seat, and come to me.


288
A STRANGE STORY.
“ Are not the stars very far from earth ? " she said.
“ Very far.”
“ Are they seen for the first time to-night ?”
“They were seen, I presume, as we see them, by the fathers of all hue
man races!”
“Yet close below us they shine reflected in the waters; and yet, see,
wave flows on wave before we can count it!”
“Lilian, by what sympathy do you read and answer my thought ?"
Her reply was incoherent and meaningless. If a gleam of intelligence
had mysteriously lighted my heart to her view, it was gone. But draw-
ing her nearer toward me, my eye long followed wistfully the path of
light dividing the darkness on either hand, till it closed in the sloping
horizon.
CHAPTER LXX. i.
The voyage is over. At the seaport at which we landed I found a
letter from Faber. My instructions had reached him in time to effect the
purchase on which his descriptions had fixed my desire. The stock, the
implements of husbandry, the furniture of the house were included in the
purchase. All was prepared for my arrival, and I hastened from the
then miserable village, which may some day rise into one of the might-
iest capitals of the world, to my lodge in the wilderness.
It was the burst of the Australian spring, which commences in our
autumn month of October. The air was loaded with the perfume of the
acacias. Amidst the glades of the open forest land, or climbing the
craggy banks of winding silvery creeks,* creepers and flowers of daz-
zling hue contrasted the olive-green of the surrounding foliage. The
exhilarating effect of the climate in that season heightens the charm of
the strange scenery. In the brilliancy of the sky, in the lightness of the
atmosphere, the sense of life is wondrously quickened. With the very
breath the Adventurer draws in from the racy air, he feels as if inhaling
bope.
We have reached our home — we are settled in it; the early unfamil-
iar impressions are worn away. We have learned to dispense with much
* Creek is the name given by Australian colonists to precarious watercourses
and tributary streams.


A. STRANGE STORY.
289
that we at first missed, and are reconciled to much that at first disap-
pointed or displeased.
The house is built but of logs -- the late proprietor had commenced,
upon a rising ground, a mile distant, a more imposing edifice of stone;
but it is not half finished.
This log-house is commodious, and much has been done, within and
without, to conceal or adorn its primitive rudeness. It is of irregular,
picturesque form, with verandas round three sides of it, to which the grape-
vine has been trained, with glossy leaves that clamber up to the gable
roof. There is a large garden in front, in which many English fruit-trees
have been set, and grow fast among the plants of the tropics, and the
orange-trees of Southern Europe. Beyond, stretch undulous pastures,
studded with flocks and herds; to the left, soar up, in long range, the
many-colored hills; to the right, meanders a creek, belted by feathery
trees; and on its opposite bank a forest opens, through frequent breaks,
into park-like glades and alleys. The territory of which I so suddenly
find myself the lord is vast, even for a colonial capitalist.
· It had been originally purchased as “a special survey," comprising
twenty thousand acres, with the privilege of pasture over forty thousand
more. In very little of this land, though it includes some of the most
fertile districts in the known world, has cultivation been even commenced.
At the time I entered into possession, even sheep were barely profitable;
labor was scarce and costly. Regarded as a speculation, I could not
wonder that my predecessor fled in fear from his domain. Had I invested
the bulk of my capital in this lordly purchase I should have deemed my-
self a ruined man; but a villa near London, with a hundred acres, would
have cost me as much to buy, and thrice as much to keep up. I could
afford the investment I had made. I found a Scotch bailiff already on
the estate, and I was contented to escape from rural occupations, to which
I brought no experience, by making it worth his while to serve me with
zeal. Two domestics of my own, and two who had been for many years
with Mrs. Ashleigh, had accompanied us; they remained faithful, and
seemed contented. So the clock-work of our mere household arrange-
ments went on much the same as in our native homes. Lilian was not
subjected to the ordinary privations and discomforts that await the wife
even of the wealthy emigrant. Alas! would she have heeded them if
she had been ?
The change of scene wrought a decided change for the better in her
health and spirits, but not such as implied a dawn of reviving reason.
But her countenance was now more rarely overcast. Its usual aspect was
glad with a soft mysterious smile. She would murmur snatches of songs,
that were partly borrowed from English Poets, partly gliding away into
25


290
A STRANGE STORY.
what seemed spontaneous additions of her own – wanting intelligible
meaning, but never melody nor rhyme. Strange, that memory and imi-
tation — the two earliest parents of all inventive knowledge -- should still
be so active, and judgment— the after faculty, that combines the rest into
purpose and method — be annulled.
Julius Faber I see continually, though his residence is a few miles dis-
tant. He is sanguine as to Lilian's ultimate recovery; and, to my amaze-
ment and to my envy, he has contrived, by some art which I cannot at-
tain, to establish between her and himself intelligible communion. She
comprehends his questions, when mine, though the simplest, seem to her
in unknown language; and he construes into sense her words, that to me
are meaningless riddles. -
“I was right,” he said to me one day, leaving her seated in the garden
beside her quiet, patient mother, and joining me where I lay — listless
yet fretful — under the shadeless gum-trees, gazing not on the flocks and
fields that I could call my own, but on the far mountain range, from which
the arch of the horizon seemed to spring; —"I was right,” said the great
physician; “this is reason suspended, not reason lost. Your wife will re-
cover; but —”
" But what?”
“Give me your arm as I walk homeward, and I will tell you the con-
clusion to which I have come.”
I rose, the old man leaned on me,' and we went down the valley, along
the craggy ridges of the winding creek. The woodland on the opposite
bank was vocal with the chirp, and croak, and chatter of Australian birds
- all mirthful, all songless, save that sweetest of warblers, which some
early irreverent emigrant degraded to the name of magpie, but whose
note is sweeter than the Nightingale's, and trills through the lucent air
with a distinct ecstatic melody of joy that dominates all the discords ;-SO
ravishing the sense that, while it sings, the ear scarcely heeds the scream
of the parrots.
CHAPTER LXXI.
“You may remember,” said Julius Faber, “Sir Humphrey Davy's
eloquent description of the effect produced on him by the inhalation of
nitrous oxide. He states that he began to lose the perception of exter-
nal things; trains of vivid visible images rapidly passed through his mind,


A STRANGE STORY.
291
and were connected with words in such a manner 'as to produce percep-
tions perfectly novel. “I existed,' he says, in a world of newly-connected
and newly-modified ideas. When he recovered, he exclaimed : Nothing
exists but thoughts; the universe is composed of impressions, ideas, pleas-
ures, and pains!'
"Now observe, that thus, a cultivator of positive science, endowed with
one of the healthiest of human brains, is, by the inhalation of a gas, ab-
stracted from all external life — enters into a new world, which consists
of images he himself creates, and animates so vividly — that, on waking,
he resolves the universe itself into thoughts.”
" Well,” said I, “but what inference do you draw from that voluntary
experiment, applicable to the malady of which you bid me hope the
cure ?"
. “ Simply this: that the effect produced on a healthful brain by the
nitrous oxide may be produced also by moral causes operating on the
blood, or on the nerves. There is a degree of mental excitement in which
ideas are more vivid than sensations, and then the world of external
things gives way to the world within the brain.* But this, though a sus-
pension of that reason which comprehends' accuracy of judgment, is no
more a permanent aberration of reason than was Sir Humphrey Davy's
visionary ecstasies under the influence of the gas. The difference between
the two states of suspension is that of time, and it is but an affair of time
with our beloved patient. Yet prepare yourself. I fear that the mind
will not recover without some critical malady of the body." ..
" Critical! but not dangerous ? - say not dangerous. I can endure the
pause of her reason ; I could not endure the void in the universe if her
life were to fade from the earth.”
“ Poor friend! would not you yourself rather lose life than reason ?” »
"1- yes! But we men are taught to set cheap value on our own
lives; we do not estimate at the same mean rate the lives of those we
love. Did we do so, Humanity would lose its virtues.”
“ What then! Love teaches that there is something of nobler value
than mere mind; yet surely it cannot be the mere body. What is it, if
not that continuance of being which your philosophy declines to acknowl-
edge — namely, soul? If you fear so painfully that your Lilian should
die, is it not that you fear to lose her forever ? ”
“Oh, cease, cease,” I cried, impatiently. “I cannot now argue on
metaphysics. What is it that you anticipate of harm to her life? Her
health has been stronger ever since her affliction. She never seems to
* See, on the theory elaborated from this principle, Dr. Hibbert's interesting and
valuable work on the Philosophy of Apparitions.


292
A STRANGE STORY.
know ailment now. Do you not perceive that her cheek has a more
hardy bloom, her frame a more rounded symmetry, than when you saw
her in England ? ”
“ Unquestionably. Her physical forces have been silently recruiting
themselves in the dreams which half lull, half amuse her imagination.
IMAGINATION, that faculty, the most glorious which is bestowed on the
human mind, because it is the faculty which enables thought to create, is
of all others the most exhausting to life when unduly stimulated, and con-
sciously reasoning on its own creations. I think it probable that, had this
sorrow not befallen you, you would have known a sorrow yet graver
you would have long survived your Lilian. As it is now, when she
recovers, her whole organization, physical and mental, will have under-
gone a beneficent change. But I repeat my prediction; some severe
malady of the body will precede the restoration of the mind; and it is my
hope that the present suspense or aberration of the more wearing powers
of the mind fit the body to endure and surmount the physical crisis.
I remember a case, within my own experience, in many respects similar to
this, but in other respects it was less hopeful. I was consulted by a young
student of the frailest physical conformation, of great mental energies, and
consumed by an intense ambition. He was reading for university honors.
He would not listen to me when I entreated him to rest his mind. I
thought that he was certain to obtain the distinction for which he toiled,
and equally certain to die a few months after obtaining it. He falsified
both my deductions. He so overworked himself that, on the day of exam-
ination, his nerves were agitated, his memory failed him; he passed, not
without a certain credit, but fell far short of the rank among his fellow-
competitors to which he aspired. Here, then, the irritated mind acted on
the disappointed heart, and raised a new train of emotions. He was first
visited by spectral illusions; then he sank into a state in which the exter-
nal world seemed quite blotted-out. He heeded nothing that was said to
him; seemed to see nothing that was placed before his eyes; in a word, sen-
sations became dormant, ideas preconceived usurped their place, and those
ideas gave him.pleasure. He believed that his genius was recognized,
and lived among its supposed creations, enjoying an imaginary fame. So
it went on for two years. During that period his frail form became robust
and vigorous. At the end of that time he was seizēd with a fever, which
would have swept him in three days to the grave had it occurred when I
was first called in to attend him. He conquered the fever, and, in recover-
ing, acquired the full possession of the intellectual faculties so long suspended.
When I last saw him, many years afterward, he was in perfect health, and
the object of his young ambition was realized; the body had supported the
mind — he had achieved distinction. Now what had so, for a time, laid


A STRANGE STORY.
293
this strong intellect into visionary sleep? The most agonizing of human
emotions in a noble spirit --- shame! What has so stricken down your
Lilian ? You have told me the story; shame! -- the shame of a nature
preeminently pure. But observe, that in his case as in hers, the shock in-
flicted does not produce a succession of painful illusions; but, on the con-
trary, in both, the illusions are generally pleasing. Had the illusions been
painful, the body would have suffered — the patient died. Why did a
painful shock produce pleasing illusions ? Because, no matter how, a
shock on the nerves may originate, if it affects the reason, it does but
make more vivid than impressions from actual external objects the ideas
previously most cherished. Such ideas in the young student were ideas
of earthly fame; such ideas in the young maiden are ideas of angel com-
forters and heavenly Edens. You miss her mind on the earth, and,
while we speak, it is in paradise.”
“Much that you say, my friend, is authorized by the speculations of
great writers, with whom I am not unfamiliar; but in none of those
writers, nor in your encouraging words, do I find a solution for much that
has no precedents in my experience – much, indeed, that has analogies
which I have ever before despised as old wives' fables. I have bared to
· your searching eye the weird mysteries of my life. How do you account
for facts which you cannot resolve into illusions ? for the influence which
that strange being, Margrave, exercised over Lilian's mind or fancy, so
that for a time her love for me was as dormant as is her reason how : so
that he could draw her — her whose nature you admit to be singularly
pure and modest -- from her mother's home? The magic wand! the
trance into which that wand threw Margrave himself; the apparition
which it conjured up in my own quiet chamber, when my mind was with- :
out a care and my health without a flaw. How account for all this — as
you endeavored and perhaps successfully, to account for all my impres-
sions of the Visions in the Museum, of the luminous haunting Shadow in
its earlier apparitions, when my fancy was heated, my heart tormented,
and, it might be, even the physical forces of this strong frame disor-
dered ?" .
“ Allen," said the old pathologist,“ here we approach phenomena which
few physicians have dared to examine. Honor to those who, like our
bold contemporary, Elliotson, have braved scoff and sacrificed dross in
seeking to extract what is practical in uses, what can be tested by experi-
ment from those exceptional phenomena on which magic sought to found
a philosophy, and to which philosophy tracks the origin of magic.”
“What! Do I understand you? Is it you, Julius Faber, who attach
faith to the wonders ascribed to animal magnetism and electro-biology, or
subscribe to the doctrines which their practitioners teach ?”
25 *


294
A STRANGE STORY.
"I have not examined into those doctrines, nor seen with my own eyes
the wonders recorded, upon evidence too respectable, nevertheless, to
permit me peremptorily to deny what I have not witnessed.* But wher-
ever I look through the History of Mankind in all ages and all races, I
find a concurrence in certain beliefs which seems to countenance the
theory that there is in some peculiar and rare temperaments a power
over forms of animated organization, with which they establish some un-
* What Faber here says is expressed with more authority by one of the most
accomplished metaphysicians of our time (Sir W. Hamilton):
"Somnambulism is a phenomenon still more astonishing (than dreaming). In
this singular state a person performs a regular series of rational actions, and those
frequently of the most difficult and delicate nature; and what is still more marvel-
lous, with a talent to which he could make no pretensions when awake. (Cr. An-
cillon, Essais Philos. ii. 161.) His memory and reminiscencé supply him with
recollections of words and things which, perhaps, never were at his disposal in the
ordinary state — he speaks more fluently a more refined language. And if we are
to credit what the evidence on which it rests hardly allows us to disbelieve, he has
not only perception of things through other channels than the common organs of
sense, but the sphere of his cognition is amplified to an extent far beyond the limits
to which sensible perception is confined. This subject is one of the most perplex-
ing in the whole compass of philosophy; for, on the one hand, the phenomena are
so remarkable that they cannot be believed, and yet, on the other, they are of so
unambiguous and palpable a character, and the witnesses to their reality are so
numerous, so intelligent, and so high above every suspicion of deceit, that it is
equally impossible to deny credit to what is attested by such ample and unexcep-
tional evidence." - Sir W. Hamilton's Lectures on Metaphysics and Logic, vol. ii.
p. 274.
This perplexity, in which the distinguished philosopher leaves the judgment so
equally balanced that it finds it impossible to believe, and yet impossible to disbe-
lieve, forms the right state of mind in which a candid thinker should come to the
examination of those more extraordinary phenomena which he has not himself vet
witnessed, but the fair inquiry into which may be tendered to him by persons above
the imputation of quackery and fraud. Müller, who is not the least determined,
as he is certainly one of the most distinguished disbelievers of mesmeric phenomena,
does not appear to have witnessed, or at least to have carefully examined them, or
he would, perhaps, have seen that even the more extraordinary of those phe-
nomena confirm, rather than contradict, his own general theories, and may be ex-
plained by the sympathies one sense has with another — “the laws of reflection
through the medium of the brain.” (Physiology of Senses, p. 1311.) And again
by the maxim " that the mental principle, or cause of the mental phenomena, can-
not be confined to the brain, but that it exists in a latent state in every part of the
organism." (Ib. p. 1355.) The “perve power," contended for by Mr. Bain, also,
may suggest a rational solution of much that has seemed incredible to those physi-
ologists who have not condescended to sift the genuine phenomena of mesmerism
from the imposture to which, in all ages, the phenomena exhibited by what may
be called the ecstatic temperament, have been applied.


A STRANGE STORY.
295
accountable affinity; and even, though much more rarely, a power over
inanimate matter. You are familiar with the theory of Descartes, that
those particles of the blood which penetrate to the brain do not only
serve to nourish and sustain its substance, but to produce there a certain
very subtle Aura, or rather a flame very vivid and pure that obtains the
name of the Animal Spirits ;'* and at the close of his great fragment
· upon Man, he asserts that this flame is of no other nature than all the
fires which are in inanimate bodies.'t This notion does but forestall the
more recent doctrine that electricity is more or less in all, or nearly all,
known matter. Now, whether, in the electric fluid or some other fluid
akin to it of which we know still less, thus equally pervading all matter,
there may be a certain magnetic property more active, more operative
upon sympathy in some human constitutions than in others, and which
can account for the mysterious power I have spoken of, is a query I might
suggest, but not an opinion I would hazard. For an opinion I must have
that basis of experience or authority which I do not need when I submit
a query to the experience and authority of others. Still the supposition
conveyed in the query is so far worthy of notice that the ecstatic temper-
ament (in which phrase I comprehend all constitutional mystics) is pecu-
liarly sensitive to electric atmospherie influences. This is a fact which
most medical observers will have remarked in the range of their practice.
Accordingly I was prepared to find Mr. Hare Townshend, in his inter-
esting work,f state that he himself was of the electric temperament,'
sparks flying from his hair when combed in the dark, etc. That accom-
plished writer, whose veracity no one would impugn, affirms tható between
this electrical endowment and whatever mesmeric properties he might
possess, there is a remarkable relationship and parallelism. Whatever
state of the atmosphere tends to accumulate and insulate electricity in
the body, promotes equally (says Mr. Townshend) the power and facility
with which I influence others mesmerically.' What Mr. Townshend thus
observes in himself, American physicians and professors of chemistry de-
pose to have observed in those modern magicians, the mediums of (so
called) .spirit manifestation.' They state that all such mediums are of
the electric temperament, thus everywhere found allied with the ecstatic,
and their power varies in proportion as the state of the atmosphere serves
to depress or augment the electricity stored in themselves. Here, then,
in the midst of vagrant phenomena, either too hastily dismissed as alto-
gether the tricks of fraudful imposture, or too credulously accepted as
* Descartes, L'Homme, vol. iv. p. 345. Cousins's Edition.
| Ibid. p. 428.
| Facts on Mesmerism.


296
A STRANGE STORY.
supernatural portents — here, at least, in one generalized fact, we may,
perhaps, find a starting-point, from which inductive experiment may
arrive soon, or late, at a rational theory. But, however the power of
which we are speaking (a power accorded to special physical tempera-
ment) may or may not be accounted for by some patient student of
nature, I am persuaded that it is in that power we are to seek for what-
ever is not wholly imposture in the attributes assigned to magie or witch-
craft. It is well said by a writer who has gone into the depth of these
subjects, with the research of a scholar and the science of a pathologist,
that if magic had exclusively reposed on credulity and falsehood, its
reign would never have endured so long. But that its art took its origin
in singular phenomena, proper to certain affections of the nerves, or
manifested in the conditions of sleep. These phenomena, the principle
of which was at first unknown, served to root faith in magic, and often
abused even enlightened minds. The enchanters and magicians arrived,
by divers practices, at the faculty of provoking in other brains a deter-
mined order of dreams, of engendering hallucinations of all kinds, of in-
ducing fits of hypnotism, trance, mania, during which the persons so
affected imagined that they saw, heard, touched supernatural beings, con-
versed with them, proved their influences, assisted at prodigies of which
· magic proclaimed itself to possess the secret. The public, the enchanters,
and the enchanted, were equally dupes.'* Accepting this explanation,
unintelligible to no physician of a practice so lengthened as mine has been,
I draw from it the corollary that as these phenomena are exhibited only
by certain special affections, to which only certain special constitutions
are susceptible, so not in any superior faculties of intellect, or of spiritual
endowment, but in peculiar physical temperaments, often strangely dis-
ordered, the power of the sorcerer in affecting the imagination of others, is
to be sought. In the native tribes of Australasia the elders are instructed
in the arts of this so-called sorcery, but only in a very few constitutions
does instruction avail to produce effects in which the savages recognize the
powers of a sorcerer; it is so with the Obi of the negroes. The fascination
of Obi is an unquestionable fact, but the Obi man cannot be trained by for-
mal lessons; he is born a fascinator, as a poet is born a poet. It is so with
the Laplanders, of whom Tornæus reports that of those instructed in the
magical art only a few are capable of it. Some,' he says,'' are natu-
rally magicians. And this fact is emphatically insisted upon by the
mystics of our own middle ages, who state that a man must be born a
magician, in other words, that the gift is constitutional, though developed
* La Magie et l'Astrologie dans l'Antiquité et au Moyen-Age. Par. L. F. Alfred
Maury, Membre de l'Institut. P. 225.


A STRANGE STORY.
297
by practice and art. Now, that this gift and its practice should princi-
pally obtain in imperfect states of civilization, and fade into insignificance
in the busy social enlightenment of cities, may be accounted for by refer-
ence to the known influences of imagination. In the cruder states of social
life not only is imagination more frequently predominant over all other
faculties, but it has not the healthful vents which the intellectual compe-
tition of cities and civilization affords. The man who in a savage tribe,
or in the dark feudal ages, would be a magician, is in our century a poet,
an orator, a daring speculator, an inventive philosopher. In other words,
his imagination is drawn to pursuits congenial to those amongst whom it
works. It is the tendency of all intellect to follow the direction of the
public opinion amidst which it is trained. Where a magician is held in
reverence or awe, there will be more practitioners of magic than where a
magician is despised as an impostor or shut up as a lunatic. In Scandi-
navia, before the introduction of Christianity, all tradition records the
wonderful powers of the Vala, or witch, who was then held in reverence
and honor. Christianity was introduced, and the early Church denounced
the Vala as the instrument of Satan, and from that moment down dropped
the majestic prophetess into a miserable and execrated old hag !”
“ The ideas you broach,” said I, musingly,“ have at moments crossed
me, though I have shrunk from reducing them to a theory which is but
one of pure hypothesis. But this magic, after all, then, you would place
in the imagination of the operator, acting on the imagination of those
whom it affects. Here, at least, I can follow you, to a certain extent, for
here we get back into the legitimate realm of physiology.”.
“ And possibly,” said Faber, " we may find hints to guide us to useful
examination, if not to complete solution, of problems that, once demon-
strated, may lead to discoveries of infinite value — hints, I say, in two
writers of widely opposite genius — Van Helmont and Bacon. Van
Helmont, of all the mediæval mystics, is, in spite of his many extravagant
whims, the one whose intellect is the most suggestive to the disciplined
reasoners of our day. He supposed that the faculty which he calls Phan-
tasy, and which we familiarly call Imagination, is invested with the power
of creating for itself ideas independent of the senses, each idea clothed
in a form fabricated by the imagination, and becoming an operative
entity. This notion is so far favored by modern physiologists, that Lincke
reports a case where the eye itself was extirpated; yet the extirpation
was followed by the appearance of luminous figures before the orbit.
And again, a woman, stone blind, complained of luminous images, with
pale colors before her eyes.' Abercrombie mentions the case “ of a lady
quite blind, her eyes being also disorganized and sunk, who never walked
out without seeing a little old woman' in a red cloak who seemed to walk


298
A STRANGE STORY.
before her.'* Your favorite authority, the illustrious Müller, who was
himself in the habit of seeing different images in the field of vision when
he lay quietly down to sleep,' asserts that these images are not merely
presented to the fancy, but that even the images of dreams are really
seen,' and that any one may satisfy himself of this by accustoming himself
regularly to open his eyes when waking after a dream, the images seen in
the dream are then sometimes visible, and can be observed to disappear
gradually.' He confirms this statement, not only by the result of his own
experience, but by the observations made by Spinoza, and the yet higher
authority of Aristotle, who accounts for spectral appearance as the internal
action of the sense of vision.t And this opinion is favored by Sir David
Brewster, whose experience leads him to suggest that the objects of
mental contemplation may be seen as distinctly as external objects, and
will occupy the same local position in the axis of vision as if they had
been formed by the agency of light. Be this as it may, one fact remains,
that images can be seen even by the blind as distinctly and as vividly as
you and I now see the stream below our feet and the opossums at play
upon yonder boughs. Let us come next to some remarkable suggestions
of Lord Bacon. In his Natural History, treating of the force of the im-
agination, and the help it receives • by one man working by another,' he
cites an instance he had witnessed of a kind of juggler, who could tell a
person what card he thought of. He mentioned this to a pretended
learned man, curious in such things,' and this sage said to him, “ It is not
the knowledge of the man's thought, for that is proper to God, but the
enforcing of a thought upon him, and binding his imagination by a
stronger, so that he could think of no other card. You see this sage an-
ticipated our modern electro-biologists! And the learned man then
shrewdly asked Lord Bacon, 'Did the juggler tell the card to the man
himself who had thought of it, or bid another tell it?' He bade another
tell it,' answered Lord Bacon. 'I thought so,' returned his learned ac-
quaintance, 'for the juggler himself could not have put on so strong an
imagination.; but by telling the card to the other, who believed the jug-
gler was some strange man who could do strange things, – that other man
caught a strong imagination.'! The whole story is worth reading, be-
* She had no illusions when within doors. — Abercrombie on the Intellectual
Powers, p. 277. (15th edition.)
† Müller, Physiology of the Senses, Bayley's translation, pp. 1068-1395, and
elsewhere. Mr. Bain, in his thoughtful and suggestive work on the Senses and
Intellect, makes very powerful use of these statements in support of his proposition,
which Faber advances in other words, namely, “the return of the nervous currents
exactly on their old track in revived sensations."
| Perhaps it is for the reason suggested in the text, namely, that the magician


A STRANGE STORY.
299
cause Lord Bacon evidently thinks it conveys a guess worth examining.
And Lord Bacon, were he now living, would be the man to solve the
mysteries that branch out of mesmerism or (so called) spiritual manifesta-
tion, for he would not pretend to despise their phenomena for fear of
hurting his reputation for good sense. Bacon then goes on to state that
there are three ways to fortify the imagination. First, authority derived
from belief in an art and in the man who exercises it; secondly, means
to quicken and corroborate the imagination; thirdly, means to repeat and
refresh it.' For the second and the third he refers to the practices of
magic; and proceeds afterwards to state on what things imagination has
most force; “ upon things that have the lightest and easiest motions, and,
therefore, above all, upon the spirits of men, and, in them, on such affec-
tions as move lightest — in love, in fear, in irresolution. And, adds
Bacon, earnestly, in a very different spirit from that which dictates to
the sages of our time, the philosophy of rejecting without trial that which
belongs to the Marvellous, and whatsoever is of this kind, should be
thoroughly inquired into.' And this great founder or renovator of the
sober inductive system of investigation, even so far leaves it a mat-
ter of speculative inquiry whether imagination may not be so powerful
that it can actually operate upon a plant, that he says, “This likewise
should be made upon plants, and that diligently, as if you should tell a
man that such a tree would die this year, and will him, at these and these
times, to go unto it and see how it thriveth. I presume that no philoso-
pher has followed such recommendations; had some great philosopher
done so, possibly we should by this time know all the secrets of what is
popularly called witchcraft.” .
And as Faber here paused there came a strange laugh from the fan-
tastic she oak-tree overhanging the stream - a wild, impish laugh.
“ Pooh! it is but the great kingfisher, the laughing bird of the Aus-
tralian bush,” said Julius Faber, amused at my start of superstitious
alarm.
We walked on for some minutes in musing silence, and the rude log
hut in which my wise companion had his home came in view ; the flocks
grazing on undulous pastures, the kine drinking at a watercourse fringed
requires the interposition of a third imagination between his own and that of the
consulting believer, that any learned adept in (so called) magic will invariably
refuse to exhibit without the presence of a third person. Hence the author of
Dogme et Rituel de la Haute Magie, printed at Paris, 1852–53 — a book less re-
markable for its learning than for the earnest belief of a scholar of our own day
in the reality of the art of which he records the history - insists much on the
necessity of rigidly observing Le Ternaire, in the number of persons who assist in
an enchanter's experiments.


300
A STRANGE STORY.
.
by the slender gum-trees; and a few fields, laboriously won from the lux-
uriant grass-land, rippling with the wave of corn.
I halted, and said, “ Rest here for a few moments, till I gather up the
conclusions to which your speculative reasoning seems to invite me.”
We sat down on a rocky crag, half mantled by luxuriant creepers with
vermilion buds.
* From the guesses,” said I,“ which you have drawn from the erudition
of others and your own ingenious and reflective inductions, I collect this
solution of the mysteries, by which the experience I gain from my senses
confounds all the dogmas approved by my judgment. To the rational
conjectures by which, when we first conversed on the marvels that per-
plexed me, you ascribed to my imagination, predisposed by mental ex-
citement, physical fatigue, or derangement, and a concurrence of singular
events tending to strengthen such predisposition, -- the phantasmal im-
pressions produced on my senses; to these conjectures you now add a
new one, more startling and less admitted by sober physiologists. You.
conceive it possible that persons endowed with a rare and peculiar tem-
perament can so operate on the imagination, and, through the imagina-
tion, on the senses of others, as to exceed even the powers ascribed to the
practitioners of mesmerism and electro-biology, and give a certain foun-
dation of truth to the old tales of magic and witchcraft. You imply that
Margrave may be a person thus gifted, and hence the influence he unques-
tionably exercised over Lilian, and over, perhaps, less innocent agents,
charmed or impelled by his will. And not discarding, as I own I should
have been originally induced to do, the queries or suggestions adventured
by Bacon in his discursive speculations on Nature, to witthat there be
many things, some of them inanimate, that operate upon the spirits of men
by secret sympathy and antipathy,' and to which Bacon gave the quaint
name of imaginants; ' so even that wand, of which I have described to
you the magic-like effects, may have had properties communicated to it
by which it performs the work of the magician, as mesmerists pretend
that some substance mesmerized by them can act on the patient as sensi-
bly as if it were the mesmerizer himself. Do I state your suppositions
correctly ?”
“ Yes; always remembering that they are only suppositions, and vol-
unteered with the utmost diffidence. But since, thus seated in the early
wilderness, we permit ourselves the indulgence of child-like guess, may it
not be possible, apart from the doubtful question whether a man can com-
municate to an inanimate material substance a power to act upon the
mind or imagination of another man — may it not, I say, be possible that
such a substance may contain in itself such a virtue or property potent
over certain constitutions, though not over all. For instance, it is in my


ASTRA
A STRANGE STORY.
301
experience that the common hazel-wood will strongly affect some nervous
temperaments, though without effect on others. I remember a young girl
who, having taken up a hazel stick freshly cut, could not relax her hold
of it; and when it was wrenched away from her by force was irresisti-
bly attracted towards it, repossessed herself of it, and, after holding it a
few minutes, was cast into a kind of trance in which she beheld phantas-
mal visions. Mentioning this curious case, which I supposed unique, to a
learned brother of our profession, he told me that he had known other
instances of the effect of the hazel upon nervous temperaments in persons
of both sexes. Possibly it was some such peculiar property in the hazel
that made it the wood selected for the old divining rod. Again, we know
that the bay-tree or laurel was dedicated to the oracular Pythian Apollo.
Now wherever, in the old world, we find that the learning of the priests
enabled them to exhibit exceptional phenomena which imposed upon pop-
ular credulity, there was a something or other which it is worth a philoso-
pher's while to explore. And, accordingly, I always suspected that there
was in the laurel some property favorable to ecstatic vision in highly im-
pressionable temperaments. My suspicion, a few years ago, was justified
by the experience of a German physician who had under his care a cat-
aleptic or ecstatic patient, and who assured me that he found nothing in
this patient so stimulated the state of sleep-waking,' or so disposed that
state to indulge in the hallucinations of prevision, as the berry of the
laurel.* Well, we do not know what this wand that produced a seem-
ingly magical effect upon you was really composed of. You did not
notice the metal employed in the wire which you say communicated a
thrill to the sensitive nerves in the palm of the hand. You cannot tell
how far it might have been the vehicle of some fluid force in nature. Or
still more probably, whether the pores of your hand insensibly imbibed,
and communicated to the brain, some of those powerful narcotics from
which the Boudhists and the Arabs make unguents that induce visionary
hallucinations, and in which substances undetected in the hollow of the
wand, or the handle of the wand itself, might be steeped.t One thing
we do know, namely, that amongst the ancients, and especially in the
East, the construction of wands for magical purposes was no common-
place mechanical craft, but a special and secret art appropriated to men
who cultivated with assiduity all that was then known of natural science
in order to extract from it agencies that might appear supernatural. Pos-
* I may add that Dr. Kerner instances the effect of laurel-berries on the Seeress
of Prevorst, corresponding with that asserted by Julius Faber in the text.
† See for these unguents the work of M. Maury before quoted, La Magie et
l'Astrologie, &c., p. 417.
26


302
A STRANGE STORY.
sibly, then, the rods or wands of the East, and of which Scripture makes
mention, were framed upon some principles of which we in our day are
very naturally ignorant, since we do not ransack science for the same
secrets. And thus in the selection or preparation of the material em-
ployed, mainly consisted, whatever may be referable to natural philosoph-
ical causes, in the antique science of Rhabdomancy, or divination and
enchantment by wandse. The staff or wand of which you tell me, was,
you say, made of iron or steel and tipped with crystal. Possibly iron and
crystal do really contain some properties not hitherto scientifically ana-
lyzed, and only, indeed, potential over exceptional temperaments, which
may account for the fact that iron and crystal have been favorites with
all professed mystics, ancient and modern. The Delphic Pythoness had
her iron tripod, Mesmer, his iron bed; and many persons, indisputably
honest, cannot gaze long upon a ball of crystal but what they begin to see
visions. I suspect that a philosophical cause for such seemingly preter-
natural effects of crystal and iron will be found in connection with the
extreme impressionability to changes in temperature which is the charac-
teristic both of crystal and iron. But if these materials do contain certain
powers over exceptional constitutions, we do not arrive at a supernat-
ural, but at a natural phenomenon.”
“ Still,” said I, “ even granting that your explanatory hypothesis hit or
approach the truth. --- still what a terrible power you would assign to
man's will over men's resignation."
“ Man's will,” answered Faber, “has over men's deeds and reason,
habitual and daily, power infinitely greater, and, when uncounterbalanced,
infinitely more dangerous than that which superstition exaggerates in
magic. Man's will moves a war that decimates a race, and leaves behind
it calamities little less dire than slaughter. Man's will frames, but it also
corrupts laws; exalts, but also demoralizes opinion ; sets the world mad
with fanaticism, as often as it curbs the heart's fierce instincts by the wis-
dom of brotherlike mercy. You revolt at the exceptional, limited sway
over some two or three individuals, which the arts of a sorcerer (if sor-
cerer there be) can effect; and yet, at the very moment in which you
were perplexed and appalled by such sway, or by your reluctant belief
in it, your will was devising an engine to unsettle the reason and wither
the hopes of millions !”
“ My will! What engine ?”
“A book conceived by your intellect, adorned by your learning, and
directed by your will to steal from the minds of other men their persuasion
of the soul's everlasting Hereafter.”
I bowed my head, and felt myself grow pale.
“ And if we accept Bacon's theory of “secret sympathy,' or the plainer


A STRANGE STORY.
303
-physiological maxim that there must be in the imagination, morbidly im-
pressed by the will of another, some trains of idea in affinity with such
influence and preinclined to receive it, no magician could warp you to
evil, except through thoughts that themselves went astray. Grant that
the Margrave, who still haunts your mind, did really, by some occult, sin-
ister magnetism, guide the madman to murder - did influence the servant
woman's vulgar desire to pry into the secrets of her ill-fated master - or
the old maid's covetous wish and envious. malignity — what could this
awful magician do more than any commonplace guilty adviser, to a mind
predisposed to accept the advice ?”
“You forget one example which destroys your argument - the spell
which this mysterious fascinator could cast upon a creature so pure from
all guilt as Lilian!”
“ Will you forgive me if I answer frankly?”
“ Speak.”
“ Your Lilian is spotless and pure, as you deem her, and the fascination,
therefore, attempts no lure through a sinful desire; it blends with its at-
traction no sentiment of affection untrue to yourself. Nay, it is justice to
your Lilian, and may be a melancholy comfort to you, to state my con-
viction, based on the answers my questions have drawn from her, that you
were never more cherished by her love than when that love seemed to ?
forsake you. Her imagination impressed her with the illusion that through
your love for her you were threatened with a great peril. What seemed
the levity of her desertion was the devotion of self-sacrifice. And, in her
strange, dream-led wanderings, do not think that she was conscious of the
fascination you impute to this mysterious Margrave; in her belief, it was
your own guardian angel that-guided her steps, and her pilgrimage was
ordained to disarm the foe that menaced you, and dissolve the spell that
divided her life from yours! But had she not long before this wilfully
prepared herself to be so deceived ? Had not her fancies been delib-
erately encouraged to dwell remote from the duties we are placed on the
earth to perform ? The loftiest faculties in our nature are those that de-
mand the finest poise, not to fall from their height and crush all the walls
that they crown. With exquisite beauty of illustration, Hume says of the
dreamers of bright fancies,” “that they may be compared to those angels
whom the Scriptures represent as covering their eyes with their wings.'
Had you been, like my nephew, a wrestler for bread with the wilderness,
what helpmate would your Lilian have been to you? How often would
you have cried out in justifiable anger, I, son of Adam, am on earth, not
in paradise. Oh, that my Eve were at home on my hearth, and not in
the skies with the seraphs!' No Margrave, I venture to say, could have
suspended the healthful affections, or charmed into danger the wide-awake


304
A STRANGE STORY.
soul, of my Amy. When she rocks in its cradle the babe, the young pa-
rents intrusts to her heed — when she calls the kine to the milking, the
chicks to their corn—when she but fits through my room to renew the
flowers on the stand, or range in neat order the books that I read — no
spell on her fancy could lead her a step from the range of her provident
cares! At day, she is contented to be on the commonplace earth; at
evening, she and I knock together at the one door of heaven, which opes
to thanksgiving and prayer, and thanksgiving and prayer send us back,
calm and hopeful, to the tasks that each morrow renews.”
I looked up as the old man paused, and in the limpid clearness of
the Australian atmosphere, I saw the child he thus praised, standing by
the garden-gate, looking towards us, and, though still distant, she seemed
near. I felt wroth with her. My heart so cherished my harmless, de-
fenceless Lilian, that I was jealous of the praise taken from her to be be-
stowed on another.
“ Each of us," said I, coldly, " has his or her own nature, and the uses
harmonious to that nature's idiosyncrasy. The world, I grant, would get
on very ill, if women were not, more or less, actively useful and quietly
good, like your Amy. But the world would lose standards that exalt and
refine, if no woman were permitted to gain, through the indulgence of
fancy, thoughts exquisite as those which my Lilian conceived, while
thought, alas, flowed out of fancy. I do not wound you by citing your
Amy as a type of the mediocre. I do not claim for Lilian the rank we
accord to the type of genius. But both are alike to such types in
this: namely, that the uses of mediocrity are for every-day life, and the
uses of genius, amidst a thousand mistakes which mediocrity never com-
mits, are to suggest and perpetuate ideas which raise the standard of the
mediocre to a nobler level. There would be fewer Amys in life, if there
were no Lilian! as there would be far fewer good men of sense, if there
were no erring dreamer of genius!”
“You say well, Allen Fenwick. And who should be so indulgent to
the vagaries of the imagination as the philosophers who taught your youth
to doubt every thing in the Maker's plan of creation which could not be
mathematically proved. The human mind,' said Luther, is like a
drunkard on horseback; prop it on one side, and it falls on the other.'
So the man who is much too enlightened to believe in a peasant's religion,
is always sure to set up some inane superstition of his own. Open bio-
graphical volumes wherever you please, and the man who has no faith in
religion, is a man who has faith in a nightmare. See that type of the ele-
gant sceptics — Lord Herbert, of Cherbury. He is writing a book against
Revelation - he asks a sign from heaven to tell him if his book is ap-
proved by his Maker, and the man who cannot believe in the miracles


A STRANGE STORY,
305
performed by his Saviour, gravely tells us of a miracle vouchsafed to him-
self. Take the hardest and strongest intellect which the hardest and
strongest race of mankind ever schooled and accomplished. See the
greatest of great men, the great Julius Cæsar ! Publicly he asserts in the
Senate, that the immortality of the soul is a vain chimera. He professes
the creed which Roman voluptuaries deduced from Epicurus, and denies
all divine interference in the affairs of the earth. A great authority for
the materialists — they have none greater! They can show on their side
no intellect equal to Cæsar's! and yet this magnificent free-thinker, re-
jecting a soul and a Deity, habitually, on entering his chariot, muttered a
charm; crawled on his knees up the steps of a temple to propitiate the
abstraction called · Nemesis ;' and did not cross the Rubicon till he had
consulted the omens. What does all this prove ? - a very simple
truth. Man has some instincts with the brutes; for instance, hunger
and sexual love. Man has one instinct peculiar to himself, found
universally (or with alleged exceptions in savage states so rare, that
they do not affect the general law) * — an instinct of an invisible power
without this earth, and of a life beyond the grave, which that power
vouchsafes to his spirit. But the best of us cannot violate an instinct with
impunity. Resist hunger as long as you can, and, rather than die of
starvation, your instinct will make you a cannibal ; resist love when youth
and nature impel to it, and what pathologist does not track one broad
path into madness or crime? So with the noblest instinct of all. Reject
the internal conviction by which the grandest thinkers have sanctioned
the hope of the humblest Christian, and you are servile at once to some
faith inconceivably more hard to believe. The imagination will not be
withheld from its yearning for vistas beyond the walls of the flesh and the
span of the present hour. Philosophy itself, in rejecting the healthful
creeds by which man finds his safeguards in sober prayer, and his guide
through the wilderness of visionary doubt, invents systems compared to
* It seems extremely doubtful whether the very few instances in which it has
been asserted that a savage race has been found without recognition of a Deity and
a future state would bear searching examination. It is set forth, for example, in
most of the popular works on Australia, that the Australian savages have no no-
tion of a Deity or a Hereafter, that they only worship a devil, or evil spirit. This
assumption, though made more peremptorily, and by a greater number of writers
than any similar one regarding other savages, is, altogether erroneous, and has no
other foundation than the ignorance of the writers. The Australian savages rec-
ognize a Deity, but He is too august for a name in their own language; in Eng-
lish they call Him the Great Master - an expression synonymous with “ The Great
Lord.” They believe in a hereafter of eternal joy, and place it amongst the stars.
- See Strzelecki's Physical Description of New South Wales.
26 *


306
A STRANGE STORY.
· which the mysteries of theology are simple. Suppose any man of strong,
plain understanding had never heard of a Deity like Him whom we
Christians adore, then ask this man whom he can the better comprehend
in his mind, and accept as a natural faith, namely, the simple Christianity
of your shepherd or the Pantheism of Spinoza ? Place before an accom-
plished critic (who comes with a perfectly unprejudiced mind, to either
inquiry), first, the arguments of David Hume against the Gospel miracles,
and then the metaphysical crotchets of David Hume himself. This sub-
tle philosopher, not content, with Berkeley, to get rid of matter — not
content, with Condillac, to get rid of spirit or mind — proceeds to a mir-
acle greater than any his Maker has yet vouchsafed to reveal. He, being
then alive, and in the act of writing, gets rid of himself altogether. Nay,
he confesses he cannot reason with any one who is stupid enough to think
he has a self. His words are: What we call a mind is nothing but a
heap or collection of different perceptions or objects united together by
certain relations, and supposed, though falsely, to be endowed with per-
fect simplicity and identity. If any one upon serious and candid reflec-
tion thinks he has a different notion of himself, I must confess I can rea-
son with him no longer. Certainly I would rather believe all the ghost
stories upon record, than believe that I am not even a ghost, distinct and
apart from the perceptions conveyed to me, no matter how — just as I am
distinct and apart from the furniture in my room, no matter whether I
found it there or whether I bought it. If some old cosmogonist asked you
to believe that the primitive cause of the solar system was not to be traced
to a Divine Intelligence, but to a nebulosity, originally so diffuse that its
existence can with difficulty be conceived, and that the origin of the pres-
ent system of organized beings equally dispensed with the agency of a
Creative Mind, and could be referred to molecules formed in the water
by the power of attraction, till, by modifications of cellular tissue in the
gradual lapse of ages, one monad became an oyster and another a Man
- would you not say this cosmogony could scarcely have misled the hu-
man understanding even in the earliest dawn of speculative inquiry ?
Yet such are the hypotheses to which the desire to philosophize away that
simple proposition of a Divine First Cause, which every child can com-
prehend, led two of the greatest geniuses and profoundest reasoners of
modern times, La Place and La Marck.* Certainly, the more you ex-
amine those arch phantasmagorists, the philosophers, who would leave
nothing in the universe but their own delusions, the more your intellectual
pride may be humbled. The wildest phenomena which have startled you,
are not more extravagant than the grave explanations which intellectual
* See the observations on La Place and La Marck in the introduction to Kirby's
Bridgewater Treatise.


A STRANGE STORY.
307
presumption adventures on the elements of our own organism and the re-
lations between the world of matter and the world of ideas.”
Here our conversation stopped, for Amy had now joined us, and, look-
ing up to reply, I saw the child's innocent face between me and the fur-
rowed brow of the old man.
- CHAPTER LXXII.
I TURNED back alone. The sun was reddening the summits of the
distant mountain range, but dark clouds, that portended rain, were gath-
ering behind my way and deepening the shadows in many a chasm and
hollow which volcanic fires had wrought on the surface of uplands undu-
lating 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 bases
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 volun-
teered 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 the-
orems of Condillac I had built up a system of thought designed to im-
mure 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 gleam-
ing of stars.
And did not those very theorems, when carried out to their strict and


308
A STRANGE STORY.
completing results by the close reasonings of Hume, resolve my own liv-
ing 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 a 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 creep-
ing 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 but-
tresses of primeval wall.
From time to time the lightning darted into the gloom and lingered
among its shadows, and I saw, by the flash, that the floors on which I
stood were strewed with strange bones, some among 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 whirr of the locusts,
the musical boom of the bull-frog, 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 midst
of a block of quartz, half embedded 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 re-
mote from philosophy, quickened the heart to a beat that chimed with no


A STRANGE STORY.
309
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 fea-
tures 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 bounda-
ries. Yes, the land on which I stood — for miles, to the spur of those
further 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 treas-
ure. “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 splendor to the flower ?!"
So muttering, I fung 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, some-
times, the bridge of a felled tree which had been providently left unre-
moved 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 clatter-
ing and whirled: for I was in danger of life. A band of the savage na-
tives 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*
had whirred by me, burying itself among 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
honey-suckles and creepers of blue and vermilion. I walked steadily up
to them; they halted a moment or so in suspense, but perhaps they were
* A missile weapon peculiar to the Australian savages.


310
A STRANGE STORY.
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 aca-
cias, and my house rose 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 pasture-land 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 soli-
tary 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 toward
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 shive


A STRANGE STORY,
311
ering 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 advancedI
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 an-
swered, 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.
CHAPTER LXXIII.
Months upon months have rolled away since the night in which Lil-
lian had watched for my coming amidst the chilling airs under the haunt-
ing 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 celes-
tial 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 inci-
dents 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,


312
A STRANGE STORY.
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, “ Observet 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 ap-
peared 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 language and waste of strength by which it has been suc-
ceeded.”
" 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 ex-
tended practice will perhaps allow that their experience more or less
tends to confirm — no records of the singular coincidences between indi-
vidual impressions which are produced by sympathy? Now, whether
you or your Lilian were first haunted by this Shadow, I know not. Per-
haps before it appeared to you in the wizard's chamber, it had appeared
to her by the Monk's 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
phantasy, 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 con-
jecture I before threw out ? Have certain organizations like that of Mar-
grave, 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


A STRANGE STORY.
813
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
examples, led him, now in the Bush, to healthful, industrious, persevering
labor. Spes fovet agricolas, says the poet; the same Hope which entices
the fish to the hook impels the plough of the husbandman. The young
farmer's young wife was somewhat superior to him; she had more refine-
ment of taste, more culture of mind, but, living in his life, she was inevi-
table levelled to his ends and pursuits. And, next to the babe in the cra-
dle, 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
kinsfolk's 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 labor 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
favor 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
27


314
A STRANGE STORY.
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 Lil-
ian 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 compre-
hended ?"
“ Allen," answered Faber, “ Amy and I believe in spirit, and she, in
whom mind is dormant but spirit awake, feels in that 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 vapors, pro-
ducing 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 dis-
tinct from the light of the Mind. And holding, as I do, that all intellect-
ual 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 prop-
ositions reached 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 com-
prehensive which I can at the moment remember. By the mind of a
man we understand that in him which thinks, remembers, reasons, and
wills.' But this definition only distinguishes the Mind of man from that
of the brute by superiority in the same attributes, and not by attributes


A STRANGE STORY.
• 315
.
denied to the brute. An animal, even an insect, thinks, remembers, rea-
sons, and wills.* 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 become weaker, and his
ideas, formed by experience (namely, his mind), more developed, often to
the conquest of the instincts themselves. Hence, with his usual candor,
Dr. Abercrombie, in contending that every thing mental ceases to exist
after death, when we know that every thing corporeal continues to exist,
is a gratuitous assymption contrary to every rule of philosophical in-
quiry,' — feels compelled, by his reasoning, to admit the probability of a
future life even to the lower animals. His words are: • To this mode 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 phe-
nomena 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 any thing we know
of the properties of matter, which is all that we mean, or can mean, by
being immaterial.'+ 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
i- yonder sky,
My faithful dog should bear me company.'
*" Are intelligence and instinct, thus differing in their relative proportion in
man as compared with all other animals, yet the same in kind and manner of ope-
ration in both ? To this question we must give at once an affirmative answer.
The expression of Cuvier, regarding the faculty of reasoning in lower animals,
Leur intelligence exécute des opérations du même genre,' is true in its full sense.
We can in no manner define reason so as to exclude acts which are at every mo-
ment present to our observation, and which we find in many instances to contra-
vene the natural instincts of the species. The demeanor and acts of the dog in
reference to his master, or the various uses to which he is put by man, are as
strictly logical as those we witness in the ordinary transactions of life.” – (Sir
Henry Holland, Chapters on Mental Physiology, p. 220.) The whole of the chap-
ter on instincts and habits in this work should be read in connection with the
passages just quoted. The work itself, at once cautious and suggestive, is not one
of the least obligations which philosophy and religion alike owe to the lucubrations
of English medical men.
* Abercrombie's Intellectual Powers, p. 26. Fifteenth Edition.


316
A STRANGE STORY.
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,* on
this very subject; in which certainly More has the best of it when Des-
cartes insists on reducing what he calls the soul (l'âme) 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 psy-
chology of the inferior animals, is a proof at least of the all-inquisitive,
redundant spirit of man.t We have almost a literature in itself devoted
to endeavors to interpret the language of brutes. $ 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, chaunt 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 affects the question of an 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.
* Euvres de Descartes, vol. x. p. 178, et seq. (Cousin's edition).
† M. Tissot, the distinguished Professor of Philosophy at Dijon, in his recent
work, La Vie dans l'Homme, p. 255, gives a long and illustrious list of philosophers
who assign a rational soul (âme) to the inferior animals, though he truly adds.
" that they have not always the courage of their opinion.”
Some idea of the extent of research and imagination bestowed on this subject
may be gleaned from the sprightly work of Pierquin de Gembloux, Idiomologie
des Animaux, published at Paris, 1844.


A STRANGE STORY.
317
“But here comes my argument. I care not how ideas are formed, the
material point is how are the capacities to receive ideas formed. The
ideas may all come from experience, but the capacity to receive the ideas
must be inherent. I take the word capacity as a good plain English
word, rather than the more technical word “receptivity, employed by
Kant. And by capacity I mean the passive power* to receive ideas,
whether in man or in any living thing by which ideas are received. A
• man and an elephant is each formed with capacities to receive ideas
suited to the several places in the universe held by, each.
“ The more I look through nature the more I find that on all varieties
of organized life is carefully bestowed the capacity to receive the im-
pressions, be they called perceptions or ideas, which are adapted to the
uses each creature is intended to derive from them. I find, then, that
Man alone is endowed with the capacity to receive the ideas of a God, of
Soul, of Worship, of a Hereafter. I see no trace of such a capacity in
the inferior races; nor, however their intelligence may be refined by cul-
ture, is such capacity ever apparent in them.
“But wherever capacities to receive impressions are sufficiently general
in any given species of creature, to be called universal to that species,
and yet not given to another species, then, from all analogy throughout
Nature, those capacities are surely designed by Providence for the distinct
use and conservation of the species to which they are given.
" It is no answer to me to say that the inherent capacities thus bestowed
on Man do not suffice in themselves to make him form right notions of a
Deity or a Hereafter; because it is plainly the design of Providence that
Man must learn to correct and improve all his notions by his own study
and observation. He must build a hut before he can build a Parthenon;
he must believe with the savage or the heathen before he can believe with
the philosopher or Christian. In a word, in all his capacities, Man has only
given to him, not the immediate knowledge of the Perfect, but the means
to strive toward the Perfect. And thus one of the most accomplished of
modern reasoners, to whose lectures you must have listened with delight
in your college days, says well : “Accordingly, the sciences always stud-
ied with keenest interest are those in a state of progress and uncertainty;
absolute certainty and absolute completion would be the paralysis of any
study, and the last worst calamity that could befall Man, as he is at
present constituted, would be that full and final possession of speculative
truth which he now vainly anticipates as the consummation of his intel-
lectual happiness.*
* Faculty is active power; capacity is passive power.” -- Sir W. Hamilton, Lec-
tures on Metaphysics and Logic, vol. i. p. 178.
* Sir W. Hamilton's Lectures, vol. i. p. 10.
27 *


318.
A STRANGE STORY.
“ Well, then, in all those capacities for the reception of impressions
from external Nature, which are given to Man and not to the brutes, I
see the evidence of Man's Soul. I can understand why the inferior ani-
mal has no capacity to receive the idea of a Deity and of Worship-
simply because the inferior animal, even if graciously admitted to a future
life, may not therein preserve the sense of its identity. I can understand
even why that sympathy with each other which we men possess, and which
constitutes the great virtue we emphatically call Humanity, is not pos-
sessed by the lesser animals (or, at least, in a very rare and exceptional
degree), even where they live in communities, like beavers, or bees, or
ants; because men are destined to meet, to know, and to love each other
in the life to come, and the bond between the brutes ceases here.
“Now the more, then, we examine the inherent capacities bestowed
distinctly and solely on Man, the more they seem to distinguish him from
the other races by their comprehension of objects beyond his life upon
this earth. “Man alone,' says Müller, can conceive abstract notions :'
and it is in abstract notions — such as time, space, matter, spirit, light,
form, quantity, essence — that Man grounds not only all philosophy, all
science, but all that practically improves one generation for the benefit
of the next. And why?. Because all these abstract notions unconsciously
lead the mind away from the material into the immaterial; from the
present into the future. But if Man ceases to exist when he disappears
in the grave, you must be compelled to affirm that he is the only creature
in existence whom Nature or Providence has condescended to deceive
and cheat by capacities for which there are no available objects. How
nobly and how truly has Chalmers said: What inference shall we draw
from this remarkable law in Nature that there is nothing waste and noth-
ing meaningless in the feelings and faculties wherewith living creatures
are endowed ? For each desire there is a counterpart object: for each
faculty there is room and opportunity for exercise either in the present or
in the coming futurity. Now, but for the doctrine of immortality, Man
would be an exception to this law — he would stand forth as an anomaly
in Nature, with aspirations in his heart for which the universe had no
antitype to offer, with capacities of understanding and thought that never
were to be followed by objects of corresponding greatness through the
whole history of his being !
- * * * *
“. With the inferior animals there is a certain squareness of adjustment,
if we may so term it, between each desire and its correspondent gratifica-
tion. The one is evenly met by the other, and there is a fulness and
definiteness of enjoyment up to the capacity of enjoyment. Not so with
Man, who, both from the vastness of his propensities and the vastness of


A STRANGE STORY.
319
his powers, feels himself chained and beset in a field too narrow for him.
He alone labors under the discomfort of an incongruity between his cir-
cumstances and his powers, and unless there be new circumstances await-
ing him in a more advanced state of being, he, the noblest of Nature's
products here, would turn out to be the greatest of her failures.' *
“ This, then, I take to be the proof of Soul in Man, not that he has a
mind — because, as you justly say, inferior animals have that, though in a
lesser degree — but because he has the capacities to comprehend, as soon
as he is capable of any abstract ideas whatsoever, the very truths not
needed for self-conservation on earth, and therefore not given to yonder
ox and opossum, namely, the nature of Deity - Soul — Hereafter. And
in the recognition of these truths the Human society that excels the so-
ciety of beavers, bees, and ants by perpetual and progressive improve-
ment on the notions inherited from its progenitors, rests its basis. Thus,
in fact, this world is benefited for men by their belief in the next, while
the society of brutes remains age after age the same. Neither the bee
nor the beaver has, in all probability, improved since the Deluge.
“But inseparable from the conviction of these truths is the impulse of
prayer and worship. It does not touch my argument when a philosopher
of the school of Bolingbroke or Lucretius says, “that the origin of prayer
is in Man's ignorance of the phenomena of Nature. That it is fear or
ignorance which, when rocked the mountains, or when groaned the
ground, taught the weak to bend, the proud to pray,' my answer is —
the brutes are much more forcibly impressed by natural phenomena than
Man is; the bird and the beast know before you and I do when the
mountain will rock and the ground groan, and their instinct leads them
to shelter; but it does not lead them to prayer. If my theory be right
that Soul is to be sought not in the question whether mental ideas be in-
nate or formed by experience, by the senses, by association or habit, but
in the inherent capacity to receive ideas, — the capacity bestowed on Man
alone, to be impressed by Nature herself with the idea of a Power supe-
rior to Nature, with which Power he can establish commune, is a proof
that to Man alone the Maker has made Nature itself proclaim His exist-
ence — that to Man alone the Deity vouchsafes the communion with
Himself which comes from prayer.” . .
“Even were this so," said I, “is not the Creator omniscient? if all-wise,
all-fore-seeing ? if all-fore-seeing, all-preordaining? Can the prayer of
His creature alter the ways of His will ?”
* Chalmers, Bridgewater Treatise, vol. ii. pp. 28, 30. Perhaps I should observe
that here and elsewhere, in the dialogues between Faber and Fenwick, it has been
generally thought better to substitute the words of the author quoted for the mere
outline or purport of the quotation which memory afforded to the interlocutor.


320
A STRANGE STORY.
“ F'or an answer to that question,” returned Faber, " which is so often
asked by the clever men of the world, I ought to refer you to the skilled
theologians who have so triumphantly carried the reasoner over that ford
of doubt which is crossed every day by the infant. But as we have not
their books in the wilderness, I am contented to draw my reply as a nec-
essary and logical sequence from the propositions I have sought to ground
in the plain observation of Nature. I can only guess at the Deity's Om-
niscience, or His modes of enforcing His power, by the observation of
His general laws, I know of none so general as the impulse which bids men
pray — which makes Nature so act that all the phenomena of Nature we
can conceive, however startling and inexperienced, do not make the brute
pray; but there is not a trouble that can happen to Man but what his
impulse is to pray — always provided, indeed, that he is not a philosopher.
I say not this in scorn of the philosopher, to whose wildest guess our ob-
ligations are infinite, but simply because for all which is impulsive to Man,
there is a reason in Nature which no philosophy can explain away. I
do not, then, bewilder myself by seeking to bind and limit the Omnis
cience of the Deity to my finite ideas. I content myself with believing
that, somehow or other, He has made it quite compatible with His Om-
niscience that Man should obey the impulse that leads him to believe
that, in addressing a Deity, he is addressing a tender, compassionate, be-
nignant Father, and in that obedience shall obtain beneficial results. If
that impulse be an illusion, then we must say that Heaven governs the
earth by a lie ; and that it is impossible, because, reasoning by analogy,
all Nature is truthful - that is, Nature gives to no species instincts or im-
pulses which are not of service to it. Should I not be a shallow physi-
cian if, where I find in the human organization a principle or a property
so general that I must believe it normal to the healthful conditions of
that organization, I should refuse to admit that Nature intended it for
use ? Reasoning by all analogy, must I not say the habitual neglect of
its use must more or less injure the harmonious well-being of the whole
human system ? I could have much to add upon the point in dispute, by
which the creed implied in your question would inthral the Divine mer-
cy by the necessities of its divine wisdom, and substitute for a benignant
Deity a relentless Fate. But here I should exceed my province. I am
no theologian. Enough for me that in all affliction, all perplexity, an im-
pulse that I obey as an instinct moves me at once to prayer. Do I find
by experience that the prayer is heard, that the affliction is removed, the
doubt is solved ? That, indeed, would be presumptuous to say. But it
is not presumptuous to think that by the efficacy of prayer my heart be-
comes more fortified against the sorrow, and my reason more serene
amidst the doubt.”


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321
I listened, and ceased to argue. I felt as if in that solitude, and in the
pause of my wonted mental occupations, my intellect was growing lan-
guid, and its old weapons rusting in disuse. My pride took alarm. I
had so from my boyhood cherished the idea of fame, and so glorified the
search after knowledge, that I recoiled in dismay from the thought that I
had relinquished knowledge, and cut myself off from fame. I resolved
to resume my once favorite philosophical pursuits, reëxamine and com-
plete the Work to which I had once committed my hopes of renown;
and, simultaneously, a restless desire seized me to communicate, though
but at brief intervals, with other minds than those immediately within
my reach — minds fresh from the old world, and reviving the memories
of its vivid civilization. Emigrants frequently passed my doors, but I
had hitherto shrunk from tendering the hospitalities so universally ac-
corded in the colony. I could not endure to expose to such rough
strangers my Lilian's mournful affliction, and that thought was not less
intolerable to Mrs. Ashleigh. I now hastily constructed a log building a
few hundred yards from the house, and near the main track taken by
travellers through the spacious pastures. I transported to this building
my books and scientific instruments. In an upper story I placed my
telescopes and lenses, my crucibles and retorts. I renewed my chemical
experiments — I sought to invigorate my mind by other branches of
science which I had hitherto less cultured – meditated new theories on
Light and Color - collected specimens in Natural History — subjected
animalcules to my microscope - geological fossils to my hammer. With
-all these quickened oceupations of thought, I strove to distract myself
from sorrow, and strengthen my reason against the illusions of my fantasy.
The Luminous Shadow was not seen again on my wall, and the thought
of Margrave himself was banished.
In this building I passed many hours of each day, more and more ear-
nestly plunging my thoughts into the depths of abstract study, as Lilian's
unaccountable dislike to my presence became more and more decided.
When I thus ceased to think that my life cheered and comforted hers,
my heart's occupation was gone. I had annexed to the apartment re-
served for myself in this log-hut a couple of spare rooms, in which I could
accommodate passing strangers. I learned to look forward to their com-
ing with interest, and to see them depart with regret; yet, for the most
part, they were of the ordinary class of colonial adventurers: bankrupt
tradesmen, unlucky farmers, forlorn mechanics, hordes of unskilled labor-
ers, now and then a briefless barrister, or a sporting collegian who had
lost his all on the Derby. One day, however, a young man of educa
tion and manners that unmistakably proclaimed the cultured gentleman
of Europe, stopped at my door. He was a cadet, of a noble Prussian


322
A STRANGE STORY.
family, which for mine political reasons had settled itself in Paris ; there
be had become intimate with young French nobles, and, living the life
of a young French noble, bad soon scandalized his German parents,
forestalled his slender inheritance, and been compelled to fly his father's
frown and his tailors' bills. All this he told me with a lively frankness
which proved how much the wit of a German can be quickened in the
atmosphere of Paris. An old college friend, of birth inferior to his own,
had been as unfortunate in seeking to make money as this young prodigal
had been an adept in spending it. The friend, a few years previously,
had accompanied other Germans in a migration to Australia, and was
already thriving; the spendthrift noble was on his way to join the bankrupt
trader, at a German settlement fifty miles distant from my house. This
young man was unlike any German I ever met. He had all the exquis-
ite levity by which the well-bred Frenchman gives to the doctrines of
the Cynic the grace of the Epicurean. He owned himself to be good for
nothing with an elegance of candor which not only disarmed censure,
but seemed to challenge admiration; and, withal, the happy spendthrift
was so inebriate with hope — sure that he should be rich before he was
thirty. How and wherefore rich ?- he could have no more explained
than I can square the circle. When the grand serious German nature
does Frenchify itself, it can become so extravagantly French!
I listened, almost enviously, to this light-hearted profligate's babble as
we sat by my rude fireside — I, sombre man of science and sorrow, he,
smiling child of idlesse and pleasure, so much one of Nature's courtier-
like nobles, that there, as he smoked his villanous pipe, in his dust-soiled
shabby garments, and with his ruffianly revolver stuck into his belt, I
would defy the daintiest Aristarch who ever presided as critic over the
holiday world not to have said, " There sits the genius beyond my laws,
the born darling of the Graces, who in every circumstance, in every age,
like Aristippus, would have socially charmed — would have been wel.
come to the orgies of a Cæsar or a Claudius, to the boudoirs of a Monte-
span or a Pompadour — have lounged through the Mulberry Gardens
with a Rochester and a Buckingham, or smiled from the death-cart with
a Richelieu and á Lauzun--a gentleman's disdain of a mob!”
I was so thinking as we sat, his light talk frothing up from his careless
lips, when suddenly from the spray and the sparkle of that light talk was
flung forth the name of Margrave.
“ Margrave!” I exclaimed. “Pardon me. What of him?"
“What of him! I asked if, by chance, you knew the only Englishman
I ever had the meanness to envy ?”
“ Perhaps you speak of one person, and I thought of another.”
" Pardieu, my dear host, there can scarcely be two Margraves! The


A STRANGE STORY.
323
.:
one I mean flashed like a meteor upon Paris, bought from a prince of the
Bourse a palace that might have lodged a prince of the blood royal,
eclipsed our Jew bankers in splendor, our jeunesse dorée in good looks
and hair-brain adventures, and, strangest of all, filled his salons with phi-
losophers and charlatans, chemists and spirit-rappers ; insulting the grav-
est dons of the schools by bringing them face to face with the most impu-
dent quacks, the most ridiculous dreamers - and yet, withal, himself so
racy and charming, so bon prince, so bon enfant! For six inonths he was
the rage at Paris; perhaps he might have continued to be the rage for
six years, but all at once the meteor vanished as suddenly as it had
flashed. Is this the Margrave whom you know ? ”
“I should not have thought the Margrave whom I knew could have
reconciled his tastes to the life of cities."
“Nor could this man : cities were too tame for him. He has gone to
some far-remote wilds in the East — some say in search of the philoso-
pher's stone — for he actually maintained in his house a Sicilian adven-
turer, who, when at work on that famous discovery, was stifled by the
fumes of his own crucible. After that misfortune Margrave took Paris in
disgust, and we lost him."
“ So this is the only gentleman whom you envy! Envy him! Why?”
“Because he is the only Englishman I ever met who contrived to be
rich and yet free from the spleen ; I envied him because one had only to
look at his face, and see how thoroughly he enjoyed the life of which
your countrymen seem to be so heartily tired! But now that I have sat-
isfied your curiosity, pray satisfy mine. Who and what is this English-
man?”
“ Who and what was he supposed in Paris to be ?”
“ Conjectures were numberless. One of your countrymen suggested
that which was most generally favored. This gentleman, whose name I
forget, but who was one of those old roués who fancy themselves young
because they live with the young, no sooner set eyes upon Margrave than
he exclaimed, · Louis Grayle come to life again, as I saw him forty-four
years ago! But no - still younger, still handsomer- it must be his
son !""
“ Louis Grayle, who was said to be murdered at Aleppo ?”
“ The same. That strange old man was enormously rich, but it seems
that he hated his lawful heirs, and left behind him a fortune so far below
that which he was known to possess, that he must certainly have disposed
of it secretly before his death. Why so dispose of it, if not to enrich
some natural son, whom, for private reasons, he might not have wished to
acknowledge or point out to the world, by the signal bequest of his will ?
All that Margrave ever said of himself and the source of his wealth con-


324
A STRANGE STORY.
.
firmed his belief. He frankly proclaimed himself a natural son, enriched
by a father whose name he knew not nor cared to know."
“ It is true. And Margrave quitted Paris for the East ? When?"
“I can tell you the date within a day or two, for his flight preceded
mine by a week; and, happily, all Paris was so busy in talking of it that
I slipped away without notice.”
· And the Prussian then named a date which it thrilled me to hear, for it
was in that very month, and about that very day, that the Luminous
Shadow had stood within my threshold.
The young Count now struck off into other subjects of talk; nothing
more was said of Margrave. An hour or two afterward he went on his
way, and I remained long gazing musingly on the embers of the fire
dying low on my hearth.,
CHAPTER LXXIV.
My Work, my Philosophical Work — the ambitious hope of my intel-
leetual life — how eagerly I returned to it again! Far away from my
household grief, far away from my haggard perplexities. Neither a Lil-
ian nor a Margrave there!
As I went over what I had before written, each link in its chain of
reasoning seemed so serried, that to alter one were to derange all: and
the whole reasoning was so opposed to the possibility of the wonders I
myself had experienced, so hostile to the subtle hypotheses of a Faber or
the childlike belief of an Amy, that I must have destroyed the entire
work if I had admitted such contradictions to its design!
But the work was I myself! I, in my solid, sober, healthful mind, be-
fore the brain had been perplexed by a phantom. Were phantoms to be
allowed as testimonies against science ? No; in returning to my Book
I returned to my former Me!
How strange is that contradiction between our being as a man and our
being as an author! Take any writer enamoured of a system - a thou-
sand things may happen to him every day which might shake his faith in
that system; and while he moves about as a mere man, his faith is shaken.
But when he settles himself back into the phase of his being as author, the
mere act of taking pen in hand and smoothing the paper before him
restores his speculations to their ancient mechanical train. The system,
the beloved system, reasserts its tyrannic sway, and he either ignores, or


A STRANGE STORY.
325
moulds into fresh proofs of his theory as author, all which, an hour before,
had given his theory the lie in his living perceptions as man.
I adhered to my system: I continued my work. Here, in the barbar-
ous desert, was a link between me and the Cities of Europe. All else
might break down under me. The love I had dreamed of was blotted
out from the world and might never be restored; my hearth might be
lonely, my life be an exile's. My reason might, at last, give way before
the spectres which awed my senses or the sorrows which stormed my
heart. But here, at least, was a monument of my rational, thoughtful
Me — of my individualized identity in multiform creation. And my
mind, in the noon of its force, would shed its light on the earth when my
form was resolved to its elements. Alas! in this very yearning for the
Hereafter, though but the Hereafter of a Name, could I see only the
craving of Mind, and hear not the whisper of Soul ? -
The avocations of a colonist, usually so active, had little interest for
me. This vast territorial lordship, in which, could I have endeared its
possession by the hopes that animate a Founder, I should have felt all the
zest and the pride of ownership, was but the run of a common to the
passing emigrant, who would leave no sons to inherit the tardy products
of his labor. I was not goaded to industry by the stimulus of need. I
could only be ruined if I risked all my capital in the attempt to improve.
I lived, therefore, among my fertile pastures, as careless of culture as the
English occupant of the Highland moor, which he rents for the range of
its solitudes.
I knew, indeed, that if ever I became avaricious, I might swell my
modest affluence into absolute wealth. I had revisited the spot in which
I had discovered the nugget of gold, and had found the precious metal
in rich abundance just under the first coverings of the alluvial soil. I
concealed my discovery from all. I knew that did I proclaim it, the
charm of my Bush-life would be gone. My fields would be infested by
all the wild adventurers who gather to gold as the vultures of prey round
a carcass; my servants would desert me, my very flocks would be shep-
herdless !
Months again rolled on months. I had just approached the close of
my beloved Work when it was again suspended, and by an anguish
keener than all which I had previously known.
Lilian became alarmingly ill. Her state of health, long gradually de-
clining, had hitherto admitted checkered intervals of improvement, and
exhibited no symptoms of actual danger. But now she was seized with
a kind of chronic fever, attended with absolute privation of sleep, an
aversion to even the lightest nourishment, and an acute nervous suscepti- -
bility to all the outward impressions, of which she had long seemed so
28


326
A STRANGE STORY.
unconscious; morbidly alive to the faintest sound, shrinking from the
light as from a torture. Her previous impatience at my entrance into
her room became aggravated into vehement emotions, convulsive parox-
ysms of distress. So that Faber banished me from her chamber, and,
with a heart bleeding at every fibre, I submitted to the cruel sen-
tence.
Faber had taken up his abode in my house and brought Amy with
him; one or the other never left Lilian, night or day. The great physi-
cian spoke doubtfully of the case, but not despairingly.
“Remember,” he said, “ that, in spite of the want of sleep, the absti-
nence from food, the form has not wasted as it would do were this fever
inevitably mortal. It is upon that phenomenon I build a hope that I
have not been mistaken in the opinion I hazarded from the first. We
are now in the midst of the critical struggle between life and reason; if
she preserve the one, my conviction is that she will regain the other.
That seeming antipathy to yourself is a good omen. You are insepara-
bly associated with her intellectual world ; in proportion as she revives to
it, must become vivid and powerful the reminiscences of the shock
that annulled for a time that world to her. So I welcome, rather than
fear, the over-susceptibility of the awakening senses to external sights and
sounds. A few days will decide if I am right. In this climate the pro-
gress of acute maladies is swift, but the recovery from them is yet more
startlingly rapid. Wait - endure — be prepared to submit to the will of
Heaven; but do not despond of its mercy.”
I rushed away from the consoler - away into the thick of the forests,
the heart of the solitude. All around me, there, was joyous with life; the
locusts sang amidst the herbage; the cranes gambolled on the banks of the
creek ; the squirrel-like opossums frolicked on the feathery boughs.
“ And what,” said I to myself — " what if that which seems so fabulous in
the distant being, whose existence has bewitched my own, be substan-
tially true? What if to some potent medicament Margrave owes his
glorious vitality, his radiant youth? Oh! that I had not so disdainfully
turned away from his hinted solicitations — to what? - to nothing guiltier
than lawful experiment. Had I been less devoted a bigot to this vain
schoolcraft, which we call the Medical Art, and which alone in this age of
science, has made no perceptible progress since the days of its earliest
teachers — had I said in the true humility of genuine knowledge, 'these
alchemists were men of genius and thought; we owe to them nearly all
the grand hints of our chemical science – is it likely that they would have
been wholly drivellers and idiots in the one faith they clung to the
most ?'— had I said that, I might now have no fear of losing my Lilian.
Why, after all, should there not be in Nature one primary essence,


A STRANGE STORY.
: 327
one master substance, in which is stored the specific nutriment of
life ?”
Thus incoherently muttering to the woods what my pride of reason
would not have suffered me gravely to say to my fellow men, 1 fatigued
my tormented spirits into a gloomy calm, and mechanically retraced my
steps at the decline of day. I seated myself at the door of my solitary
log-hut, leaning my cheek upon my hand, and musing. Wearily I looked
up, roused by a discord of clattering hoofs and lumbering wheels on the
hollow-sounding grass track. A crazy, groaning vehicle, drawn by four
horses, emerged from the copse of gum-trees — fast, fast along the road,
which no such pompous vehicle had traversed since that which had borne
me — luxurious satrap for an early colonist — to my lodge in the wilder-
ness. What emigrant rich enough to squander, in the hire of such an
equipage, more than its cost in England, could thus be entering on my
waste domain ? An ominous thrill shot through me.
The driver - perhaps some broken-down son of luxury in the Old
World, fit for nothing in the New World but to ply for hire the task that
might have led to his ruin when plied in sport — stopped at the door of
my hut, and called out, “ Friend, is not this the great Fenwick Section ?
and is not yonder long pile of building the Master's house ?”
Before I could answer I heard a faint voice, within the vehicle, speak-
ing to the driver; the last nodded, descended from his seat, opened the
carriage door, and offered his arm to a man, who, waving aside the prof-
fered aid, descended slowly and feebly; paused a moment as if for breath,
and then, leaning on his staff, walked from the road, across the sward
rank with luxuriant herbage, through the little gate in the new-set fra-
grant wattle-fence, wearily, languidly, halting often, till he stood facing
me, leaning both wan, emaciated hands upon his staff, and his meagre
form shrinking deep within the folds of a cloak lined thick with costly
sables. His face was sharp, his complexion of a livid yellow, his eyes
shone out from their hollowed orbits, unnaturally enlarged and fatally
bright. Thus, in ghastly contrast to his former splendor of youth and
opulence of life, Margrave stood before me.
"I come to you,” said Margrave, in accents hoarse and broken, “from
the shores of the East. Give me shelter and rest. I have that to say
which will more than repay you."
Whatever till that moment my hate and my fear of this unexpected
visitant, hate would have been inhumanity, fear a meanness, conceived
for a creature so awfully stricken down.
Silently, involuntarily, I led him into the house. There he rested a
few minutes with closed eyes and painful gasps for breath. Meanwhile
the driver brought from the carriage a travelling-bag and a small wooden


328
A STRANGE STORY.
chest or coffer, strongly banded with iron clamps. Margrave, looking up
as the man drew near, exclaimed, fiercely, “ Who told you to touch that
chest? How dare you? Take it from that man, Fenwick! Place it
here — here by my side!”
I took the chest from the driver, whose rising anger at being so imperi-
ously rated in the land of democratic equality, was appeased by the gold
which Margrave lavishly flung to him.
“ Take care of the poor gentleman, squire,” he whispered to me, in the
spontaneous impulse of gratitude ; “I fear he will not trouble you long.
He must be monstrous rich. Arrived in a vessel hired all to himself, and
a train of outlandish attendants, whom he has left behind in the town
- yonder! May I bait my horses in your stables? They have come a
long way."
I pointed to the neighboring stables, and the man nodded his thanks,
remounted his box, and drove off.
I returned to Margrave. A faint smile came to his lips as I placed the
chest beside him.
“ Ay, ay !” he muttered. “ Safe, safe! I shall soon be well again —
very soon! And now I can sleep in peace !”
.“ I led him into an inner room, in which there was a bed. He threw
himself on it with a loud sigh of relief. Soon, half raising himself on his
elbow, he exclaimed, “ The chest -- bring it hither! I need it always
beside me! There, there! Now a few hours of sleep; and then, if I can
take food, or some such restoring cordial as your skill may suggest, I shall
be strong enough to talk. We will talk !-- we will talk !”
His eyes closed heavily as his voice fell into a drowsy mutter. A mo-
ment more and he was asleep.
I watched beside him in mingled wonder and compassion. Looking
into that face so altered, yet still so young, I could not sternly question
what had been the evil of that mystic life, which seemed now oozing away
through the last sands in the hour-glass. I placed my hand softly on his
pulse : it scarcely beat. I put my ear to his breast, and involuntarily
sighed as I distinguished in its fluttering heave that dull, dumb sound in
which the heart seems knelling itself to the greedy grave!
Was this indeed the potent magician whom I had so feared ? This
the guide to the Rosicrucian's secret of life's renewal, in whom but an
hour or two ago my fancies gulled my credulous trust ?
But suddenly, even while thus chiding my wild superstitions, - a fear
that to most will seem scarcely less superstitious, shot across me. Could
Lilian be affected by the near neighborhood of one to whose magnetic
influence she had once been so strangely subjected ? I left Margrave
still sleeping, closed and locked the door of the hut, went back to my


A STRANGE STORY.
329
dwelling, and met Amy at the threshold. Her smile was so cheering that
I felt at once relieved.
“ Hush!” said the child, putting her finger to her lips,“ she is so quiet!
I was coming in search of you, with a message from her.”
"From Lilian to me what! to me?”
“ Hush! About an hour ago she beckoned me to draw near to her,
and then said, very softly, · Tell Allen that light is coming back to me,
and it all settles on him - on him. Tell him that I pray to be spared to
walk by his side on earth, hand-in-hand to that heaven which is no dream,
Amy. Tell him that;- no dream.""
While the child spoke my tears gushed, and the strong hands in which
I veiled my face quivered like the leaf of the aspen. And when I could
command my voice, I said, plaintively,
“ May I not, then, see her ? — only for a moment, and answer her mes-
sage, though but by a look ? ” .
“ No, no !”
• “No! Where is Faber?”
“ Gone into the forest, in search of some herbs, but he gave me this
note for you.”
I wiped the blinding tears from my eyes, and read these lines :
“I have, though with hesitation, permitted Amy to tell you the cheer-
ing words, by which our beloved patient confirms my belief that reason is
coming back to her — slowly, laboringly, but, if she survive, for perma-
nent restoration. On no account attempt to precipitate or disturb the
work of Nature. As dangerous as a sudden glare of light to eyes long
blind and newly regaining vision, in the friendly and soothing dark, -
would be the agitation that your presence at this crisis would cause.
Confide in me.”
I remained brooding over these lines and over Lilian's message, long
and silently, while Amy's soothing whispers stole into my ear, soft as the
murmurs of a rill heard in the gloom of forests. Rousing myself at length,
my thoughts returned to Margrave. Doubtless he would soon awake. I
bade Amy bring me such slight nutriment as I thought best suited to his
enfeebled state, telling her it was for a sick traveller resting himself in
my hut. When Amy returned, I took from her the little basket with
which she was charged, and "having, meanwhile, made a careful selection
from the contents of my medicine-chest, went back to the hut. I had not
long resumed my place beside Margrave's pillow before he awoke.
" What o'clock is it?” he asked, with an anxious voice.
66 About seven.”
6. Not later? That is well ; my time is precious.”
6. Compose yourself, and eat.”
28 *


330
A STRANGE STORY.
I placed the food before him, and he partook of it, though sparingly,
and as if with effort. He then dozed for a short time, again woke up,
and impatiently demanded the cordial, which I had prepared in the mean
while. Its effect was greater and more immediate than I could have an-
ticipated, proving, perhaps, how much of youth there was still left in his
system, however undermined and ravaged by disease. Color came back
to his cheek, bis voice grew perceptibly stronger. And as I lighted the
lamp on the table near us - for it was growing dark - he gathered him-
self up, and spoke thus:
“You remember that I once pressed on you certain experiments. My
object then was to discover the materials from which is extracted the
specific that enables the organs of life to expel disease and regain vigor.
In that hope I sought your intimacy. An intimacy you gave, but with-
drew.”
“Dare you complain? Who and what was the being from whose inti-
macy I shrunk appalled ?”
“ Ask what questions you please,” cried Margrave, impatiently,“ later,–
if I have strength left to answer them. But do not interrupt me while I
husband my force to say what alone is important to me and to you. Dis-
appointed in the hopes I had placed in you, I resolved to repair to
Paris, -- that great furnace of all bold ideas. I questioned learned for-
malists; I listened to audacious empirics. The first, with all their boasted
knowledge, were too timid to concede my premises; the second, with all
their speculative daring, too knavish to let me trust to their conclusions.
I found but one man, a Sicilian, who comprehended the secrets that are
called occult, and had the courage to meet Nature and all her agencies
face to face. He believed, and sincerely, that he was approaching the
grand result, at the very moment when he perished from want of the
common precautions which a tyro in chemistry would have taken. At
his death the gaudy city became hateful; all its pretended pleasures only
served to exhaust life the faster. The true joys of youth are those of
the wild bird and wild brute in the healthful enjoyment of Nature. In
cities, youth is but old age with a varnish. I fled to the East; I passed
through the tents of the Arabs ; I was guided — no matter by whom or
by what to the house of a Dervish, who had had for his teacher the most
erudite master of secrets occult, whom I knew years ago at Aleppo –
Why that exclamation ?”
“ Proceed. What I have to say will come -- later.”
“ From this Dervish I half-forced and half-purchased the secret I sought
to obtain. I now know from what peculiar substance the so-called elixir
of life is extracted; I know also the steps of the process through which
that task is accomplished. You smile incredulously? What is your doubt ?


A STRANGE STORY.
331
State it while I rest for a moment. My breath labors ; give me more of
the cordial.”
" Need I tell you my doubt? You have, you say, at your command
the elixir of life of which Cagliostro did not leave his disciples the recipe;
and you stretch out your hand for a vulgar cordial which any village
chemist could give you!”
“I can explain this apparent contradiction. The process by which the
elixir is extracted from the material which hoards its essence is one that
requires a hardihood of courage which few possess. This Dervish, who
had passed through that process once, was deaf to all prayer, and un-
moved by all bribes, to attempt it again. He was poor, for the secret by
which metals may be transmuted is not, as the old alchemists seem to im-
ply, identical with that by which the elixir of life is extracted. He had
only been enabled to discover, in the niggard strata of the lands within
range of his travel, a few scanty morsels of the glorious substance. From
these he had extracted scarcely enough of the elixir to fill a third of that
little glass which I have just drained. He guarded every drop for him-
self. Who that holds bealthful life as the one boon above all price to the
living, would waste upon others, what prolongs and recruits his own be-
ing? Therefore, though he sold me his secret he would not sell me his
treasure.”
“Any quack may sell you the information how to make not only an
elixir, but a sun and a moon, and then scare you from the experiment by
tales of the danger of trying it! How do you know that this essence
which the Dervish possessed was the elixir of life, since it seems you have
not tried on yourself what effect its precious drops could produce ? Poor
wretch! who once seemed to me so awfully potent, do you come to the
Antipodes in search of a drug that only exists in the fables by which a
child is amused ?”
“ The elixir of life is no fable,” cried Margrave, with a kindling of eye,
a power of voice, a dilation of form that startled me in one just before so
feeble. “ That elixir was bright in my veins when we last met. From
that golden draught of the life-spring of joy I took all that can gladden
creation. What sage would not have exchanged his wearisome knowledge
for my lusty revels with Nature? What monarch would not have bar-
tered his crown, with its brain-ache of care, for the radiance that circled
my brows flashing out from the light that was in me? Oh again, oh
again, to enjoy the freedom of air with the bird, and the glow of the sun
with the lizard; to sport through the blooms of the earth, Nature's play-
mate and darling; to face, in the forest and desert, the pard and the lion
- Nature's bravest and fiercest, — her first-born, the heir of her realm,
with the rest of her children for slaves !”


334
A STRANGE STORY.
veyed to Damascus, I languished for weeks between life and death.
But for the virtue of that essence, which lingered yet in my veins, I
could not have survived — even thus feeble and shattered. I need not
say that I now abandoned all thought of discovering the Dervish. I had
at least his secret, if I had failed of the paltry supply he had drawn from
its uses. Such appliances as he had told me were needful are procured
in the East with more ease than in Europe. To sum up, I am here -
instructed in all the knowledge, and supplied with all the aids, which
warrant me in saying, “Do you care for new life in its richest enjoy-
ments, if not for yourself, for one whom you love, and would reprieve
from the grave ?' Then share with me in a task that a single night will
accomplish, and ravish a prize by which the life that you value the most
will be saved from the dust and the worm, to live on, ever young, ever
blooming, 'while each infant -- new-born while I speak -- shall have
passed to the grave. Nay, where is the limit to life while the earth bides
the substance by which life is renewed ? ”
I give as faithfully as I can recall them, the words in which Margrave
addressed me. But who can guess by cold words transcribed, even were
they artfully ranged by a master of languages, the effect words produce
when warm from the breath of the speaker ? Ask one of an audience
which some orator held enthralled why his words do not quicken a beat in
the reader's pulse, and the answer of one who had listened will be,
“ The words took their charm from the voice and the eye, the aspect, the
manner, the man !” So it was with the incomprehensible being before
me. Though his youth was faded, though his beauty was dimmed, though
my fancies clothed him with memories of abhorrent dread, though my
reason opposed his audacious beliefs and assumptions, still he charmed
and spell-bound me; still he was the mystical Fascinator ; still, if the
legends of magic had truth for their basis, he was the born magician;
as genius, in what calling soever, is born with the gift to enchant and
subdue us.
"Constraining myself to answer calmly, I said, “ You have told me
your story; you have defined the object of the experiment in which you
ask me to aid. You do right to bid me postpone my replies or my ques-
tions. Seek to recruit by sleep the strength you have so sorely tasked.
To-morrow
• To-morrow, ere night, you will decide whether the man whom out of
all earth I have selected to aid me, shall be the foe to condemn me to per-
ish! I tell you plainly I need your aid, and your prompt aid. Three
days from this and all aid will be too late ! ”
I had already gained the door of the room, when he called to me to
come back.


A STRANGE STORY.
335
“ You do not live in this hut, but with your family yonder. Do not
tell them that I am here ; let no one but yourself see me as I now am.
Lock the door of the hut when you quit it. I should not close my eyes
if I were not secure from intruders.”
“ There is but one in my house, or in these parts, whom I would except
from the interdict you impose. You are aware of your own imminent
danger; the life which you believe the discovery of a Dervish will indefi-
nitely prolong seems to my eye of physician to hang on a thread. I have
already formed my own conjecture as to the nature of the disease that
cnfeebles you. But I would fain compare that conjecture with the
weightier opinion of one whose experience and skill are superior to mine.
Permit me, then, when I return to you to-morrow, to bring with me the
great physican to whom I refer. His name will not, perhaps, be unknown
to you. I speak of Julius Faber.”
“A physician of the schools ! I can guess well enough how learnedly -
he would prate and how little he could do. But I will not object to his
visit, if it satisfies you that, since I should die under the hands of the doc-
tors, I may be permitted to indulge my own whim in placing my hopes in
a Dervish. Yet stay. You have, doubtless, spoken of me to this Julius
Faber, your fellow-physician and friend ? Promise me, if you bring him
here that you will not name me, that you will not repeat to him the tale
I have told you, or the hope which has led me to these shores. What I
have told to you, no matter whether at this moment you consider me the
dupe of a chimera, is still under the seal of the confidence which a patient
reposes in the physician he himself selects for his confidant. I select you,
and not Julius Faber!”
“ Be it as you will,” said I, after a moment's reflection. “The moment
you make yourself my patient I am bound to consider what is best for
you. And you may more respect and profit by an opinion based upon
your purely physical condition than by one in which you might sup-
pose the advice was directed rather to the disease of the mind than to that
of the body."
“How amazed and indignant your brother physician will be if he ever
see me a second time! How learnedly he will prove that, according to
all correct principles of science and nature, I ought to be dead !”
He uttered this jest with a faint, dreary echo of his old merry, melo-
dious laugh, then turned his face to the wall; and so I left him to repose.


336
A STRANGE STORY.
CHAPTER LXXV.
I FOUND Mrs. Ashleigh waiting for me in our usual sitting-room. She
was in tears. She had begun to despond of Lilian's recovery, and she
infected me with her own alarm. However, I disguised my participation
in her fears, soothed and sustained her as I best could, and persuaded her
to retire to rest. I saw Faber for a few minutes before I sought my own
chamber. He assured me that there was no perceptible change for the
worse in Lilian's physical state since he had last seen me, and that her
mind, even within the last few hours, had become decidedly more clear.
He thought that within the next twenty-four hours the reason would
make a strong and successful effort for complete recovery; but he de-
clined to hazard more than a hope that the effort would not exhaust the
enfeebled powers of the frame. He himself was so in need of a few hours
of rest that I ceased to harass him with questions which he could not an-
swer, and fears which he could not appease. Before leaving him for the
night, I told him briefly that there was a traveller in my hut smitten by
a disease that seemed to me so grave that I would ask his opinion of the
case, if he could accompany me to the hut the next morning.
My own thoughts that night were not such as would suffer me to sleep.
Before Margrave's melancholy state much of my former fear and ab-
horrence faded away. This being, so exceptional that fancy might well
invest him with preternatural attributes, was now reduced by human suf-
fering to human sympathy and comprehension. Yet his utier want of
conscience was still as apparent as in his day of joyous animal spirits.
With what hideous candor he had related his perfidy and ingratitude to
the man to whom, in his belief, he owed an inestimable obligation, and
with what insensibility to the signal retribution which in most natures
would have awakened remorse!
And by what dark hints and confessions did he seem to confirm the
incredible memoir of Sir Philip Derval! He owned that he had borne
from the corpse of Haroun the medicament to which he ascribed his re-
covery from a state yet more hopeless than that under which he now
labored! He had alluded rapidly, obscurely, to some knowledge at his
command “surer than man's !” And now, even now, the mere wreck
of his former existence, by what strange charm did he still control and
confuse my reason! And how was it that I felt myself murmuring, again
and again, “ But what, after all, if his hope be no chimera, and if: Nature
do hide a secret by which I could save the life of my beloved Lilian ?”


A STRANGE STORY.
337
And again and again, as that thought would force itself on me, I rose
and crept to Lilian's threshold, listening to catch the faintest sound of
her breathing. All still, all dark! and the great physician doubts whether
recognized science can turn aside from her couch the stealthy tread of
death, while in yon. log-hut one whose malady recognized science could
not doubt to be mortal has composed himself to sleep confident of life!
Recognized science ! recognized ignorance! The science of to-day is the
ignorance of to-morrow! Every year some bold guess lights up a truth to
which -but the year before the school-men of science were as blinded as
moles.
“ What then,” my lips kept repeating — "what if Nature do hide a
secret by which the life of my life can be saved ? What do we know of.
the secrets of Nature ? What said Newton himself of his knowledge ?
“I am like a child picking up pebbles and shells on the sand, while the
great ocean of Truth lies all undiscovered around me!' And did New-
ton himself, in the ripest growth of his matchless intellect, hold the creed
of the alchemists in scorn ? Had he not given to one object of their re-
search, in the transmutation of metals, his days and his nights ? Is there
proof that he ever convinced himself that the research was the dream
which we, who are not Newtons, call it ? * And that other great sage,
inferior only to Newton -- the calculating doubt-weigher, Descartes - had
he not believed in the yet nobler hope of the alchemists - believed in
some occult nostrum or process by which human life could attain to the
age of the Patriarchs ? ”f.
* “Besides the three great subjects of Newton's labors — the fluxional calculus,
physical astronomy, and optics — a very large portion of his time, while resident
in his college, was devoted to researches of which scarcely a trace remains. Al-
chemy, which had fascinated so many eager and ambitious minds, seems to have
tempted Newton with an overwhelming force. What theories he formed, what
experiments he tried, in that laboratory where, it is said, the fire was scarcely ex-
tinguished for weeks together, will never be known. It is certain that no success
attended his labors; and Newton was not a man — like Kepler — to detail to the
world all the hopes and disappointments, all the crude and mystical fancies, which
mixed themselves up with his career of philosophy. . . . . Many years later we
find Newton in correspondence with Locke, with reference to a mysterious red
earth by which Boyle, who was then recently dead, had asserted that he could ef-
fect the grand desideratum of multiplying gold. By this time, however, Newton's
faith had become somewhat shaken by the unsatisfactory communications which
he had himself received from Boyle on the subject of the golden recipe, though he
did not abandon the idea of giving the experiment a further trial as soon as the
weather should become suitable for furnace experiments.” - Quarterly Review, No.
220, pp. 125-6.
† Southey, in his Doctor, vol. vi. p. 2, reports the conversation of Sir Kenelm
Digby with Descartes, in which the great geometrician said, “That as for rendering
29


338
A STRANGE STORY.
· In thoughts like these the night wore away, the moonbeams that
streamed through my window lighting up the spacious solitudes beyond —
men immortal, it was what he could not venture to promise, but that he was very
sure he could prolong his life to the standard of the patriarchs.” And Southey
adds, “ that St. Evremond, to whom Digby repeated this, says that this opinion of
Descartes was well known both to his friends in Holland and in France." By the
stress Southey lays on this hearsay evidence, it is clear that he was not acquainted
with the works and biography of Descartes, or he would have gone to the fountain-
head for authority on Descartes's opinions — namely, Descartes himself. It is to be
wished that Southey had done so, for no one more than he would have appreciated
the exquisitely candid and lovable nature of the illustrious Frenchman, and the
sincerity with which he cherished in his heart whatever doctrine he conceived in
his understanding. Descartes, whose knowledge of anatomy was considerable, had
that passion for the art of medicine which is almost inseparable from the pursuit of
natural philosophy. At the age of twenty-four he had sought (in Germany) to
obtain initiation into the brotherhood of the Rosicrucians, but unluckily could not
discover any member of the society to introduce him. “He desired," says Cousin,
" to assure the health of man, diminish his ills, extend his existence. He was ter-
rified by the rapid and almost momentary passage of man upon earth. He believed
it was not, perhaps, impossible to prolong its duration.” There is a hidden recess
of grandeur in this idea, and the means proposed by Descartes for the execution of
his project were not less grand. In his Discourse on Method, Descartes says,
"If it is possible to find some means to render generally men more wise and more
able than they have been till now, it is, I believe, in medicine that those means
must be sought. ... I am sure that there is no one, even in the medical profes-
sion, who will not avow that all which one knows of the medical art is almost noth-
ing in comparison to that which remains to learn, and that one could be exempted
from an infinity of maladies, both of body and mind, and even, perhaps, from the
decrepitude of old age, if one had sufficient lore of their causes and of all the rem-
edies which nature provides for them. Therefore, having design to employ all my life
in the research of a science so necessary, and having discovered a path which appears
to me such that one ought infallibly, in following to find it, if one is not hindered
prematurely by the brevity of life or by the defects of experience, I consider that
there is no better remedy against those two hindrances than to communicate faith-
fully to the public the little I have found,” etc. (Discours de la Méthode, vol.
i. Euvres de Descartes, Cousin's edition.) And again, in his Correspondence
(vol. ix. p. 341), he says, “ The conservation of health has been always the prin-
cipal object of my studies, and I have no doubt that there is a means of acquiring
much knowledge touching medicine which, up to this time, is ignored.” He then
refers to his meditated Treatise on Animals as only an entrance upon that knowl-
edge. But whatever secrets Descartes may have thought to discover, they are not
made known to the public according to his promise. And in a letter to M. Chanut,
written 1646 (four years before he died), he says ingenuously, “I will tell you in
confidence that the notion, such as it is, which I have endeavored to acquire in
physical philosophy, has greatly assisted me to establish certain foundations for
moral philosophy; and that I am more easily satisfied upon this point than I am
on many others touching medicine, to which I have, nevertheless, devoted much
more time. So that” (adds the grand thinker with a pathetic nobleness) .


A STRANGE STORY.
339
mead and creek, forest land, mountain top— and the silence without
broken by the wild cry of the night-hawk and the sibilant melancholy
dirge of the shining chrysococyx;* bird that never sings but at night,
and obstinately haunts the roofs of the sick and dying, ominous of woe
and death.
But up sprang the sun, and, chasing these gloomy sounds, out burst the
wonderful chorus of Australian groves, the great kingfisher opening the
jocund melodious babble with the glee of his social laugh.
And now I heard Faber's step in Lilian's room — heard, through the .
door, her soft voice, though I could not distinguish the words. It was
not long before I saw the kind physician standing at the threshold of my
chamber. He pressed his finger to his lip, and made me a sign to follow
him. I obeyed, with noiseless tread and stifled breathing. He waited
me in the garden under the flowering acacias, passed his arm in mine, :
and drew me into the open pasture-land.
“Compose yourself,” he then said; “I bring you tidings both of glad-
ness and of fear. Your Lilian's mind is restored : even the memories
which had been swept away by the fever that followed her return to her
home in L- are returning, though as yet indistinct. She yearns to
see you, to bless you for all your noble devotion, your generous, great-
hearted love; but I forbid such interview now. If in a few hours she
become either decidedly stronger or decidedly more enfeebled, you shall
be summoned to her side. Even if you are condemned to a loss for
which the sole consolation must be placed in the life hereafter, you shall
have at least the last mortal commune of soul with soul. Courage -
courage! You are man! Bear as man what you have so often bid other
men submit to endure."
I had fung myself on the ground — writhing worm that had no home
but on earth! Man, indeed! Man! All at that moment I took from
manhood was its acute sensibility to love and to anguish!
But after all such paroxysms of mortal pain there comes a strange lull.
Thought itself halts, like the still hush of water between two descending
torrents. I rose in a calm, which Faber might well mistake for fortitude.
“Well,” I said, quietly, “fulfil your promise. If Lilian is to pass away
“so that, instead of finding the means to preserve life, I have found another good,
more easy and more sure, which is -- not to fear death."
* Chrysococyx lucidus-namely, the bird popularly called the shining or bronzed
cuckoo. “ Its note is an exceedingly melancholy whistle, heard at night, when it
is very annoying to any sick or nervous person who may be inclined to sleep. I
have known many instances where the bird has been perched on a tree in the vi-
cinity of the room of an invalid uttering its mournful notes, and it was only with
the greatest difficulty that it could be dislodged from its position," -- Dr. Bennett's
Gatherings of a Naturalist in Australasia.


340
A STRANGE STORY..
from me, I shall see her, at least, again; no wall, you tell me, between
our minds : mind to mind once more — once more !"
“ Allen,” said Faber, mournfully and softly, “why do you shun to re-
peat my words — soul to soul ?”
“Ay, ay-I understand. Those words mean that you have resigned
all hope that Lilian's life will linger here when her mind comes back in
full consciousness. I know well thát last lightning flash and the darkness
which swallows it up!”
“ You exaggerate my fears. I have not resigned the hope that Lilian
will survive the struggle through which she is passing; but it would be
cruel to deceive you — my hope is weaker than it was.”
“Ay, ay — again I understand! Your science is in fault - it de-
sponds. Its last trust is in the wonderful resources of Nature — the vi-
tality stored in the young ?”.
“ You have said. Those resources of nature are wondrous. The
vitality of youth is a fountain springing up from the deeps out of sight,
when, a moment before, we had measured the drops oozing out from the
sands, and thought that the well was exhausted.”
“ Come with me — come. I told you of another sufferer yonder. I
want your opinion of his case. But can you be spared a few minutes
from Lilian's side ? ”
“ Yes; I left her asleep. What is the case that perplexes your eye of
physician, which is usually keener than mine, despite all the length of my
practice ?"
“ The sufferer is young -- his organization rare in its vigor. He has
gone through and survived assaults upon life that are commonly fatal.
His system has been poisoned by the fangs of a venomous asp, and shat-
tered by the blast of the plague. These alone, I believe, would not suf-
fice to destroy him. But he is one who has a strong dread of death.
And while the heart was thus languid and feeble, it has been gnawed by
emotions of hope or of fear. I suspect that he is dying, not from the bite
of the reptile, not from the taint of the pestilence, but from the hope and
the fear that have overtasked the heart's functions. Judge for yourself.”
We were now at the door of the hut. I unlocked it: we entered.
Margrave had quitted his bed, and was pacing the room slowly. His step
was less feeble, his countenance less haggard than on the previous even-
ing.
Ile submitted himself to Faber's questioning with a quiet indifference,
and evidently cared nothing for any opinion which the great physician
might found on his replies.
When Faber had learned all he could, he said, with a grave smile, “ I
see that my advice will have little weight with you ; such as it is, at least







You cyong Would you live on
st live as the old
you


A STRANGE STORY.
341
reflect on it. The conclusions to which your host arrived in his view of
your case, and which he confided to me, are, in my humble judgment,
correct. I have no doubt that the great organ of the heart is involved
in the cause of your sufferings; but the heart is a noble and much-endur-
ing organ. I have known men in whom it has been more severely and
unequivocally affected with disease than it is in you, live on for many
years, and ultimately die of some other disorder. But then life was held,
as yours must be held, upon one condition repose. I enjoin you to ab-
stain from all violent action; to shun all excitements that cause moral
disturbance. You are' young: would you live on, you must live as the
old. More than this — it is my duty to warn you that your tenure on
earth is very precarious; you may attain to many years; you may be
suddenly called hence to-morrow. The best mode to regard this uncer-
tainty, with the calm in which is your only chance of long life, is so 'to
arrange all your worldly affairs, and so to discipline all your human anx-
ieties, as to feel always prepared for the summons that may come without
warning. For the rest, quit this climate as soon as you can — it is the cli-
mate in which the blood courses too quickly for one who should shun all
excitement. Seek the most equable atmosphere -- choose the most tran-
quil pursuits — and Fenwick himself, in his magnificent pride of stature
and strength, may be nearer the grave than you are.”
“Your opinion coincides with that I have just heard ? " asked Mar-
grave, turning to me.
"In much — yes.”
"It is more favorable than I should have supposed. I am far from
disdaining the advice so kindly offered. Permit me, in turn, two or three
questions, Dr. Faber. Do you prescribe to me no drugs from your phar-
macopæia ?”
“Drugs may palliate many sufferings incidental to organic disease; but
drugs cannot reach organic disease itself.”
“Do you believe that even where disease is plainly organic, Nature
herself has no alterative and reparative powers by which the organ as-
sailed may recover itself?”
"A few exceptional instances of such forces in nature are upon record;
but we must go by general laws, and not by exceptions." .
“ Have you never known instances, do you not at this moment know
one, in which a patient whose malady baffles the doctor's skill, imagines
or dreams of a remedy ? Call it a whim, if you please, learned sir; do
you not listen to the whim, and, in despair of your own prescriptions, com-
ply with those of the patient ?”
Faber changed countenance, and even started. Margrave watched
him, and laughed.
29 *


344
STRANGE STORY.
Is there some prophet-hint of Nature there also, directing me not to scorn
the secret which a wanderer, so suddenly dropped on my solitude, assures
me that Nature will sometimes reveal to her seeker? And oh, that dark
wanderer ; has Nature a marvel more weird than himself !”
CHAPTER LXXVI.
I STRAYED through the forest till noon, in debate with myself, and
strove to shape my wild doubts into purpose before I could nerve and
compose myself again to face Margrave alone.
I reëntered the hut. To my surprise, Margrave was not in the room
in which I had left him, nor in that which adjoined it. I ascended the
stairs to the kind of loft in which I had been accustomed to pursue my
studies, but in which I had not set foot since my alarm for Lilian had sus-
pended my labors. There I saw Margrave quietly seated before the
manuscript of my Ambitious Work, which lay open on the rude table
just as I had left it in the midst of its concluding summary.
“I have taken the license of former days, you see,” said Margrare,
smiling, “and have hit by chance on a passage I can understand without
effort. But why such a waste of argument to prove a fact so simple ?
In man, as in brute, life once lost, is lost forever; and that is why life is
so precious to man.”
I took the book from his hand and flung it aside in wrath. His approval
revolted me more with my own theories than all the argumentative rebukes
of Faber.
“And now," I said, sternly," the time has come for the explanation you
promised. Before I can aid you in any experiment that may serve to
prolong your life, I must know how far that life has been a baleful and
destroying influence ?”
“ I have some faint recollection of having saved your life from an im-
minent danger, and if gratitude were the attribute of man, as it is of the
dog, I should claim your aid to save mine as a right. Ask me what you will. -
You must have seen enough of me to know that I do not affect either the
virtues or vices of others. I regard both with so supreme an indifference
that I believe I am vicious or virtuous unawares. I know not if I can ex-
plain what seems to have perplexed you, but if I cannot explain I have
no intention to lie. Speak; I listen? We have time enough now be-
fore us."


A STRANGE STORY.
345
So saying, he reclined back in the chair, stretching out his limbs wearily.
All round this spoiled darling of Material Nature, the aids and appliances
of Intellectual Science! Books, and telescopes, and crucibles, with the
light of day coming through a small circular aperture in the boarded case-
ment as I had constructed the opening for my experimental observation
of the prismal rays.
While I write, his image is as visible before my remembrance as if be-
fore the actual eye — beautiful even in its decay, awful even in its weak-
ness, mysterious as is Nature herself amidst all the mechanism by which
our fancied knowledge attempts to measure her laws and analyze her
light.
- But at that moment no such subtle reflections delayed my inquisitive,
eager mind from its immediate purpose — who and what was this creature
boasting of a secret through which I might rescue from death, the life of
her who was my all upon the earth ?
I gathered rapidly and succinctly together all that I knew and all that
I guessed of Margrave's existence and arts. I commenced from my
Vision in that mimic Golgotha of creatures inferior to man, close by the
scene of man's most trivial and meaningless pastime. I went on : Der-
val's murder; the missing contents of the casket; the apparition seen by
the maniac assassin guiding him to the horrid deed; the luminous haunt-
ing Shadow; the positive charge in the murdered man's memoir connect-
ing Margrave with Louis Grayle, and accusing him of the murder of
Haroun; the night in the moonlit pavilion at Derval Court; the baneful
influence on Lilian; the struggle between me and himself in the house
by the sea-shore - The strange, All that is told in this. Strange Story.
But warming as I spoke, and in a kind of fierce joy to be enabled thus
to free my own heart of the doubts that had burdened it, now that I was
fairly face to face with the being by whom my reason had been so per-
plexed and my life so tortured, I was restrained by none of the fears lest
my own fancy deceived me, with which in his absence I had striven to
reduce to natural causes the portents of terror and wonder. I stated
plainly, directly, the beliefs, the impressions which I had never dared even
to myself to own without seeking to explain them away. And coming at
last to a close, I said: “ Such are the evidences that seem to me to justify
abhorrence of the life that you ask me to aid in prolonging. Your own
tale of last night but confirms them. And why to me - to me - do you
come with wild entreaties to lengthen the life that has blighted my own?
How did you even learn the home in which I sought unavailing refuge ?
How--as your hint to Faber clearly revealed — were you aware that,
in yon house, where the sorrow is veiled, where the groan is suppressed,
where the foot-tread falls ghostlike, there struggles now between life and


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A STRANGE STORY.
death my heart's twin, my world's sunshine ? Ah! through my terror for
her, is it a demon that tells you how to bribe my abhorrence into submis-
sion, and supple my reason into use to your ends ?”
Margrave had listened to me throughout with a fixed attention, at times
with a bewildered stare, at times with exclamations of surprise, but not
of denial. And when I had done he remained for some moments silent,
seemingly, stupefied, passing his hand repeatedly over his brow, in the
gesture so familiar to him in former days.
At length he said, quietly, without evincing any sign either of resent-
ment or humiliation:
“ In much that you tell me I recognize myself; in much I am as lost
in amazement as you in wild doubt or fierce wrath. Of the effect that
you say Philip Derval produced on me I have no recollection. Of him-
self I have only this: that he was my foe, that he came to England intent
on schemes to shorten my life or destroy its enjoyments. All my facul-
ties tend to self-preservation ; there they converge as rays in a focus; in
that focus they illume and — they burn. I willed to destroy my intended
destroyer. Did my will enforce itself on the agent to which it was guided ?
Likely enough. Be it so. Would you blame me for slaying the tiger or
serpent — not by the naked hand, but by weapons that arm it? But
what could tiger and serpent do more against me than the man who
would rob me of life? He had his arts for assault, I had mine for self-
defence. He was to me as the tiger that creeps through the jungle, or
the serpent uncoiling his folds for the spring. Death to those whose life
is destruction to mine, be they serpent, or tiger, or man! Derval per-
ished. Yes! the spot in which the maniac had buried the casket was re-
vealed to me — no matter how; the contents of the casket passed into
my hands. I coveted that possession because I believed that Derval had
learned from Haroun of Aleppo the secret by which the elixir of life is
prepared, and I supposed that some stores of the essence would be found
in his casket. I was deceived; not a drop! What I there found I knew
not how to use or apply, nor did I care to learn. What I sought was
not there. You see a luminous shadow of myself; it haunts, it accosts, it
compels you. Of this I know nothing. Was it the emanation of my in-
tense will really producing this spectre of myself? or was it the thing of
your own imagination — an imagination which my will impressed and
. subjugated ? I know not. At the hours when my shadow, real or sup-
posed, was with you, my senses would have been locked in sleep. It is
true, however, that I intensely desired to learn from races always near to
man, but concealed from his everyday vision, the secret that I believed
Philip Derval had carried with him to the tomb; and from some cause
or another I cannot now of myself alone, as I could years ago, subject


A STRANGE STORY.
347
those races to my command. I must in that act through or with the mind
of another. It is true that I sought to impress upon your waking
thoughts the images of the circle, the powers of the wand, which, in your
trance or sleep-walking, made you the involuntary agent of my will. I
knew by a dream — for by dreams, more or less vivid, are the results of
my waking will sometimes divulged to myself — that the spell had
been broken, the discovery I sought not effected. All my hopes were
then transferred from yourself, the dull votary of science, to the girl
whom I charmed to my thraldom through her love for you, and through
her dreams of a realm which the science of schools never enters. In her
imagination was all pure and all potent, and tell me, oh, practical rea-
soner! if reason has ever advanced one step into knowledge except
through that imaginative faculty which is strongest in the wisdom of igno-
rance, and weakest in the ignorance of the wise. Ponder this, and those
marvels that perplex you will cease to be marvellous. I pass on to the
riddle that puzzles you most. By Philip Derval's account I am, in truth,
Louis Grayle restored to youth by the elixir, and while yet infirm, de-
crepit, murdered Haroun — a man of a frame as athletic as yours! By
accepting this notion you seem to yourself alone to unravel the mysteries
you ascribe to my life and my powers. Oh, wise philosopher! oh, pro-
found logician! you accept that notion, yet hold my belief in the Der-
vish's tale a chimera! I am Grayle made young by the elixir, and yet
the elixir itself is a fable!”
He paused and laughed, but the laugh was no longer even an echo of.
its former merriment or playfulness - a sinister and terrible laugh, mock-
ing, threatening, malignant.
Again he swept his hand over his brows, and resumed :
“Is it not easier to so accomplished a sage as you to believe that the
idlers of Paris have guessed the true solution of that problem - my place
on this earth ? May I not be the love son of Louis Grayle ? And when
Haroun refused the elixir to him, or he found that his frame was too far
exhausted for even the elixir to repair organic lesions of structure in the
worn frame of old age, may he not have indulged the common illusion of
fathers, and soothed his death pangs with the thought that he should live
again in his son ? Haroun is found dead on his .carpet - rumor said
strangled. What proof of the truth of that rumor? Might he not have
passed away in a fit? Will it lessen your perplexity if I state recollec-
tions ? They are vague — they often perplex myself; but so far from a
wish to deceive you, my desire is to relate them so truthfully that you
may aid me to reduce them into more definite form."
His face now became very troubled, the tone of his voice very irreso-
lute -- the face and the voice of a man who is either blundering his way
through an intricate falsehood or through obscure reminiscences.


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A STRANGE STORY.
“ This Louis Grayle ! this Louis Grayle! I remember him well, as
one remembers a nightmare. Whenever I look back, before the illness
of which I will presently speak, the image of Louis Grayle returns to me.
I see myself with him in African wilds, commanding the fierce Abyssini-
ans. I see myself with him in the fair Persian valley - lofty, snow-cov-
ered mountains encircling the garden of roses. I see myself with him in
the hush of the golden noon, reclined by the spray of cool fountains; now
listening to cymbals and lutes; now arguing with gray-beards on secrets
bequeathed by the Chaldees. With him, with him in moonlit nights,
stealing into the sepulchres of mythical kings. I see myself with him in
the aisles of dark caverns, surrounded by awful shapes, which have no
likeness among the creatures of earth. Louis Grayle! Louis Grayle! all
my earlier memories go back to Louis Grayle! All my arts and powers,
all that I have learned of the languages spoken in Europe, of the sciences
taught in her schools, I owe to Louis Grayle. But am I one and the
same with him? No. I am but a pale reflection of his giant intellect.
I have not even a reflection of his childlike agonies of sorrow. Louis
Grayle! He stands apart from me, as a rock from the tree that grows
out from its chasms. Yes, the gossip was right; I must be his son.”
He leaned his face on both hands, rocking himself to and fro. At
length, with a sigh, he resumed :
“I remember, too, a long and oppressive illness, attended with rack-
ing pains; a dismal journey in a wearisome litter, the light hand of the
woman Ayesha, so sad and so stately, smoothing my pillow or fanning
my brows. I remember the evening on which my nurse drew the folds
of the litter aside, and said, ' See Aleppo! and the star of thy birth shin-
ing over its walls !
“I remember a face inexpressibly solemn and mournful. I remember
the chill that the calm of its ominous eye sent through my veins — the
face of Haroun, the Sage of Aleppo. I remember the vessel of crystal
he bore in his hand, and the blessed relief from my pains that a drop
from the essence which flashed through the crystal bestowed! And then
- and then I remember no more till the night on which Ayesha came
to my couch and said, 'Rise.'
"And I rose, leaning on her, supported by her. We went through
dim, narrow streets, faintly lit by wan stars, disturbing the prowl of the
dogs, that slunk from the look of that woman. We came to a solitary
house, small and low, and my nurse said, · Wait.'
“She opened the door and went in; I seated myself on the threshold.
And after a time she came out from the house, and led me, still leaning
on her, into a chamber.
“A man lay, as in sleep, on the carpet, and beside him stood another


A STRANGE STORY.
351
to false youth in the person of Margrave, such might have been his laugh
and such. his words. The whole mind of Margrave seemed to have un;
dergone change since I last saw him; more rich in idea, more crafty
even in candor, more powerful, more concentred. As we see in our
ordinary experience that some infirmity, threatening dissolution, brings
forth more vividly the reminiscences of early years, when impressions were
vigorously stamped, so I might have thought that, as Margrave neared
the tomb, the memories he had retained from his former existence in a
being more amply endowed, more formidably potent, struggled back
to the brain, and the mind that had lived in Louis Grayle moved the lips
: of the dying Margrave.
i “ For the powers and the arts that it equally puzzles your reason to
assign or deny to me,” resumed my terrible guest, “ I will say briefly but
this : they come from faculties stored within myself, and doubtless con-
duce to my self-preservation — faculties more or less, perhaps (so Van
Helmont asserts), given to all men, though dormant in most — vivid and
active in me, because in me self-preservation has been and yet is the strong
master-passion or instinct; and because I have been taught how to use and
direct such faculties by disciplined teachers; some by Louis Grayle, the
enchanter; some by my nurse, the singer of charmed songs. But in much
that I will to have done I know no more than yourself how the agency acts.
Enough for me to will what I wished, and sink calmly in slumber, sure
that the will would work somehow its way. But when I have willed to
know what, when known, should shape my own courses, I could see,
without aid from your pitiful telescopes, all objects howsoever afar. What
wonder in that? Have you no learned, puzzle-brain metaphysicians, who
tell you that space is but an idea, all this palpable universe an idea in the
mind, and no more! Why am I an enigma as dark as the Sibyl's, and
your metaphysicians as plain as a horn-book ?" Again the sardonic
laugh. “Enough: let what I have said obscure or enlighten your guesses,
we come back to the same link of union, which binds man to man, bids
states arise from the desert, and foemen embrace as brothers. I need
you, and you need me; without your aid my life is doomed; without my
secret the breath will have gone from the lips of your Lilian before the.
sun of to-morrow is red on yon hill-tops."
“ Fiend or juggler!” I cried, in rage, “ you shall not so enslave and
enthral me by this mystic farrago and jargon! Make your fantastic ex-
periment on yourself, if you will: trust to your arts and your powers.
My Lilian's life shall not hang on your fiat. I trust it — to—”
" To what – to man's skill? Hear what the sage of the college shall
tell you, before I ask you again for your aid. Do you trust to God's
saving mercy ? Ah, of course you believe in a God? Who except a


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A STRANGE STORY.
philosopher can reason a Maker away? But that the Maker will alter
His courses to hear you; that, whether or not you trust in Him or in
your doctor, it will change by a hair-breadth the thing that must be
do you believe this, Allen Fenwick ?”
And there sat this reader of hearts! a boy in his aspect, mocking me
and the gray-beards of schools.
I could listen no more; I turned to the door and fled down the stairs,
and heard as I fled a low chant; feeble and faint, it was still the old
barbaric chant by which the serpent is drawn from its hole by the
charmer.
CHAPTER LXXVII.
To those of my readers who may seek with Julius Faber to explore,
through intelligible causes, solutions of the marvels I narrate, Margrave's
confession may serve to explain away much that my own superstitious be-
liefs had obscured. To them Margrave is evidently the son of Louis
Grayle. The elixir of life is reduced to some simple restorative, owing
much of its effect to the faith of a credulous patient; youth is so soon re-
stored to its joy in the sun, with or without an elixir. To them, Mar-
grave's arts of enchantment are reduced to those idiosyncrasies of tem-
perament on which the disciples of Mesmer build up their theories;
exaggerated, in much, by my own superstitions; aided, in part, by such
natural, purely physical magic as, explored by the ancient priestcrafts, is
despised by the modern philosophies, and only remains occult because
Science delights no more in the slides of the lantern which fascinated
her childhood with simulated phantoms. To them, Margrave is, per-
haps, an enthusiast, but, because an enthusiast, not less an impostor.
“ L'Homme se pique,” says Charron. Man cogs the dice for himself ere
he rattles the box for his dupes. Was there ever successful impostor
, who did not commence by a fraud on his own understanding ? Cradled
in Orient Fable-land, what though Margrave believes in its legends; in
a wand, an elixir; in sorcerers or Afrites ? that belief in itself makes
him keen to detect, and skilful to profit by, the latent but kindred cre-
dulities of others. In all illustrations of Duper and Duped through the
records of superstition from the guile of a Cromwell, a Mahomet,
down to the cheats of a gipsy - professional visionaries are amongst the
astutest observers. The knowledge that Margrave had gained of my
abode, of my affliction, or of the innermost thoughts in my mind, it


A STRANGE STORY.
353
surely demanded no preternatural aids to acquire. An Old Bailey
attorney could have got at the one, and any quick student of human
hearts have readily mastered the other. In fine, Margrave, thus ration-
ally criticized, is no other prodigy (save in degree and concurrence of
attributes simple, though not very common) than may be found in each
alley that harbors a fortune-teller who has just faith enough in the stars
or the cards to bubble himself while he swindles his victims; earnest,
indeed, in the self-conviction that he is really a seer, but reading the
looks of his listeners, divining the thoughts that induce them to listen,
and acquiring by practice a startling ability to judge what the listeners.
will deem it most seer-like to read in the cards or divine from the stars.
I leave this interpretation unassailed. It is that which is the most
probable, it is clearly that which, in a case not my own I should have
accepted; and yet I revolved and dismissed it. The moment we deal
with things beyond our comprehension, and in which our own senses are
appealed to and baffled, we revolt from the Probable, as it seems to the
senses of those who have not experienced what we have. And the same
Principle of Wonder that led our philosophy up from inert ignorance
into restless knowledge, now winding back into Shadow-land reverses its
rule by the way, and, at last, leaves us lost in the maze, our knowledge
inert, and our ignorance restless.
And putting aside all other reasons for hesitating to believe that Mar-
grave was the son of Louis Grayle - reasons which his own narrative
might suggest - was it not strange that Sir Philip Derval, who had
instituted inquiries so minute, and reported them in his memoir with so
faithful a care, should not have discovered that a youth, attended by the
same woman who had attended Grayle, had disappeared from the town
on the same night as Grayle himself disappeared ? But Derval had re-
lated truthfully, according to Margrave's account, the flight of Ayesha
and her Indian servant, yet not even alluded to the flight, not even
to the existence, of the boy, who must have been of no mean importance -
in the suite of Louis Grayle, if he were, indeed, the son whom Grayle
had made his constant companion, and constituted his principal heir.
Not many minutes did I give myself up to the cloud of reflections
through which no sunbeam of light forced its way. One thought over-
mastered all: Margrave had threatened death to my Lilian, and warned
me of what I should learn from the lips of Faber," the sage of the college.”
I stood, shuddering, at the door of my home; I did not dare to enter.
"Allen," said a voice, in which my ear detected an unwonted tremu-
lous faltering, “ be firm — be calm. I keep my promise. The hour is
come in which you may again see the Lilian of old — mind to mind, soul
to soul.”
30*


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A STRANGE STORY.
Faber's hand took mine, and led me into the house.
“ You do, then, fear that this interview will be too much for her
strength ? ” said I, whisperingly.
“I cannot say; but she demands the interview, and I dare not refuse
it.”
CHAPTER LXXVIII.
I Left Faber on the stairs, and paused at the door of Lilian's room.
The door opened suddenly, noiselessly, and her mother came out with
one hand before her face and the other locked in Amy's, who was leading
her as a child leads the blind. Mrs. Ashleigh looked up, as I touched
her, with a vacant, dreary stare. She was not weeping, as was her
womanly wont in every pettier grief, but Amy was. No word was ex-
changed between us. I entered, and closed the door; my eyes turned
mechanically to the corner in which was placed the small virgin bed, with
its curtains white as a shroud. Lilian was not there. I looked round,
and saw her half-reclined on a couch near the window. She was dressed,
and with care. Was not that her bridal robe ?
“ Allen — Allen,” she murmured. “ Again, again my Allen — again,
again your Lilian !” And, striving in vain to rise, she stretched out her
arms in the yearning of reunited love. And as I knelt beside her, those
arms closed round me for the first time, in the frank, chaste, holy tender-
ness of a wife's embrace.
“Ah!” she said, in her low voice (her voice like Cordelia’s was ever
low), “ all has come back to me - all that I owe to your protecting, no-
ble, trustful, guardian love!”
“Hush! hush! the gratitude rests with me - it is so sweet to love, to
trust, to guard ! - my own, my beautiful, still my beautiful! Suffering
has not dimmed the light of those dear eyes to me! Put your lips to my
ear. Whisper but these words : 'I love you, and for your sake I wish to
live!'”
“For your sake I pray — with my whole weak human heart -- I pray
to live. Listen. Some day hereafter, if I am spared, under the purple
blossoms of yonder waving trees, I shall tell you all, as I see it now, all
that darkened or shone on me in my long dream, and before the dream
closed around me, like a night in which cloud and star chase each other!
Some day hereafter, some quiet, sunlit, happy, happy day. But now all
I would say is this : Before that dreadful morning.” Here she paused,


A STRANGE STORY.
355
.
shuddered, and passionately burst forth, “ Allen, Allen! you did not be-
lieve that slanderous letter! God bless you! God bless you! Great-
hearted, high-souled -- God bless you, my darling! my husband! And
He will! Pray to him humbly as I do, and He will bless you." She
stooped and kissed away my tears, then she resumed, feebly, meekly, ..
sorrowfully :
“ Before that morning I was not worthy of such a heart, such a love as
yours. No, no; hear me. Not that a thought of love for another ever
crossed me! Never, when conscious and reasoning, was I untrue to you
- even in fancy. But I was a child — wayward as the child who pines
for what earth cannot give, and covets the moon for a toy. Heaven had
been so kind to my lot on earth, and yet with my lot on earth I was
secretly discontented. When I felt that you loved me, and my heart
told me that I loved again, I said to myself, Now the void that my soul
finds on earth will be filled.' I longed for your coming, and yet when
you went I murmured, · But is this the ideal of which I had dreamed ?'
I asked for an impossible sympathy. Sympathy with what? Nay,
smile on me, dearest ! — sympathy with what? I could not have said.
Ah! Allen, then, then I was not worthy of you, infant that I was, I
asked you to understand me. Now I know that I am woman, and my
task is to study you! Do I make myself clear ? do you forgive me ? I
was not untrue to you; I was untrue to my own duties in life. I be-
lieved, in my vain conceit, that a mortal's dim vision of heaven raised
me above the earth; I did not perceive the truth that earth is a part of
the same universe as heaven! Now, perhaps in the awful affliction that
darkened my reason, my soul has been made more clear. As if to chas-
tise but to teach me, my soul has been permitted to indulge its own pre-
sumptuous desire ; it has wandered forth from the trammels of mortal
duties and destinies; it comes back, alarmed by the dangers of its own
rash and presumptuous escape from the tasks which it should desire on
earth to perform Allen, Allen, I am less unworthy of you now! Per-
haps in my darkness one rapid glimpse of the true world of spirit has
been vouchsafed to me. If so, how unlike to the visions my childhood
indulged as divine! Now, while I know still more deeply that there is
a world for the angels, I know also that the mortal must pass through
probation in the world of mortals. Oh, may I pass through it with you
- grieving in your griefs, rejoicing in your joys !”
Here language failed her. Again the dear arms embraced me, and
the dear face, eloquent with love, hid itself on my human breast.


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A STRANGE STORY.
CHAPTER LXXIX.
That interview is over! Again I am banished from Lilian's room;
the agitation, the joy of that meeting has overstrained her enfeebled
nerves. Convulsive tremblings of the whole frame, accompanied with
vehement sobs, succeeded our brief interchange of sweet and bitter
thoughts. Faber, in tearing me from her side, imperiously and sternly
warned me that the sole chance yet left of preserving her life was in the
merciful suspense of the emotions that my presence excited. He and
Amy resumed their place in her chamber. Even her mother shared my
sentence of banishment. So Mrs. Ashleigh and I sat facing each other
in the room below; over me a leaden stupor had fallen, and I heard, as
a voice from afar or in a dream, the mother's murmured wailings.
“ She will die — she will die! Her eyes have the same beavenly look
as my Gilbert's on the day on which his closed forever. Her very words
are his last words -- Forgive me all my faults to you.' She will die
she will die!”
Ilours thus passed away. At length Faber entered the room; he spoke
first to Mrs. Ashleigh - meaningless soothings, familiar to the lips of all
who pass from the chamber of the dying to the presence of mourners,
and know that it is a falsehood to say “ hope,” and a mockery, as yet, to
say “ endure.”
But he led her away to her own room docile as a wearied child led to
sleep, stayed with her some time, and then returned to me, pressing me to
his breast, father-like.
“No hope -- no hope !” said I, recoiling from his embrace. “You are
silent. Speak! speak! Let me know the worst.”
“I have a hope, yet I scarcely dare to bid you share it, for it grows
rather out of my heart as man than my experience as physician. I cannot
think that her soul would be now so reconciled to earth — so fondly, so
earnestly cling to this mortal life - if it were about to be summoned
away. You know how commonly even the sufferers who have dreaded
Death the most become calmly resigned to its coming, when Death visibly
reveals itself out from the shadows in which its shape has been guessed
and not seen. As it is a bad sign for life when the patient has lost all
will to live on, so there is hope while the patient yet young and with no
perceptible breach in the great centres of life (however violently their
forts may be stormed), has still intense faith in recovery, perhaps drawn
(who can say ?) from the whispers conveyed from above to the soul.
“ I cannot bring myself to think that all the uses for which a reason,


A STRANGE STORY.
357
always so lovely even in its errors, has been restored, are yet fulfilled.
It seems to me as if your union, as yet so imperfect, has still for its end
that holy life on earth by which two mortal beings strengthen each other
for a sphere of existence to which this is the spiritual ladder. Through
yourself I have hope yet for her. Gifted with powers that rank you high
in the manifold orders of man — thoughtful, laborious, and brave; with
a heart that makes intellect vibrate to every fine touch of humanity;
in error itself conscientious, in delusions still eager for truth; in anger,
forgiving; in wrong, seeking how to repair; and best of all, strong in
a love which the mean would have shrunk to defend from the fangs of the
slanderer — a love, raising passion itself out of the realm of the senses,
made sublime by the sorrows that tried its devotion ; with all these noble
proofs in yourself of a being not meant to end here — your life has stopped
short in its uses, your mind itself has been drifted, a bark without rud-
der or pilot, over seas without shore, under skies without stars. And
wherefore ? Because the Mind you so haughtily vaunted has refused its
companion and teacher in Soul.
“And therefore, through you, I hope that she will be spared yet to
live on. She; in whom soul has been led dimly astray, by unheeding
the checks and the definite goals which the mind is ordained to prescribe
to its wanderings while bere; the mind taking thoughts from the actual
and visible world, and the soul but vague glimpses and hints from the
instinct of its ultimate heritage. Each of you two seems to me as yet
incomplete, and your destinies yet uncompleted. Through the bonds of
the heart, through the trials of time, ye have-both to consummate your
marriage. I do not — believe me - I do not say this in the fanciful wis-
dom of allegory and type, save that, wherever deeply examined, allegory
and type run through all the most commonplace phases of outward and
material life. I hope, then, that she may yet be spared to you — hope
it, not from my skill as physician, but my inward belief as a Christian.
To perfect your own being and end, each of you has need of the other !”
I started — the very words that Lilian had heard in her vision.!
“ But,” resumed Faber, “ how can I presume to trace the numberless
links of effects up to the First Cause, far off — oh, far off — out of the
scope of my reason. I leave that to philosophers, who would laugh my
meek hope to scorn.
“ Possibly, probably, where I, whose calling has been but to save flesh
from the worm, deem that the life of your Lilian is needed yet, to de-
velop and train your own convictions of soul, Heaven in its wisdom may
see that her death would instruct you far more than her life. I have
said: Be prepared for either ; wisdom through joy, or wisdom through
grief. Enough that, looking only through the mechanism by which this


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moral world is impelled and improved, you know that cruelty is impossi-
ble to wisdom. Even a man, or man's law, is never wise but when it is
merciful. But mercy has general conditions; and that which is mercy to
the myriads may seem hard to the one; and that which seems hard to the
one in the pang of a moment may be mercy when viewed by the eye
that looks on through eternity.”
And from all this discourse - of which I now, at calm distance of time,
recall every word — my human, loving heart bore away for the moment
but this sentence, “ Each hás need of the other;” so that I cried out,
“ Life, life, life! Is there no hope for her life? Have you no hope as
physician ? I am physician too; I will see her. I will judge. I will
not be banished from my post.”
“ Judge then, as physician, and let the responsibility rest with you.
At this moment all convulsion, all struggle has ceased, the frame is at
rest. Look on her, and perhaps only the physician's eye could distin-
guish her state from death. It is not sleep, it is not trance, it is not the
dooming coma from which there is no awaking. Shall I call it by the
name received in our schools ? Is it the catalepsy in which life is sus-
pended, but consciousness acute ? She is motionless, rigid ; it is but
with a strain of my own sense that I know that the breath still breathes,
and the heart still beats. But I am convinced that though she can
neither speak nor stir, nor give sign, that she is fully, sensitively con-
scious of all that passes around her. She is like those who have seen the
very coffin carried into their chamber, and been unable to cry out, . Do
not bury me alive!' Judge then for yourself, with this intense con-
sciousness and this impotence to evince it, what might be the effect of
your presence — first an agony of despair, and then the complete extinc-
tion of life!” :
"I have known but one such case. A mother whose heart was wrapped
up in a suffering infant. She had lain for two days and two nights, still,
as if in her shroud. All, save myself, said, “Life is gone. I said, Life
still is there. They brought in the infant, to try what effect its presence
would produce; then her lips moved, and the hands crossed upon her
bosom trembled.”
“ And the result ?” exclaimed Faber, eagerly. “If the result of
your experience sanction your presence, come; the sight of the babe re-
kindled life ?”
“ No; extinguished its last spark! I will not enter Lilian's room. I
will go away- away from the house itselt. That acute consciousness !
I know it well! She may even hear me move in the room below, hear
me speak at this moment. Go back to her, go back! But if hers be the
state which I have known in another, which may be yet more familiar to


A STRANGE STORY.
359
persons of far ampler experience than mine, there is no immediate danger
of death. The state will last through to-day, through to-night; perhaps
for days to come. Is it so ?”
“I believe that for at least twelve hours there will be no change in her
state. I believe also that if she recover from it calm and refreshed, as
from a sleep, the danger of death will have passed away.”
“ And for twelve hours my presence would be hurtful ? ”
“ Rather say fatal, if my diagnosis be right.”
I wrung my friend's hand, and we parted.
« Oh, to lose her now !-- now that her love and her reason had both
returned, each more vivid than before! Futile, indeed, might be Mar-
grave's boasted secret; but at least in that secret was hope. In recog-
nized science I saw only despair.
And at that thought all dread of this mysterious visitor vanished - all
anxiety to question more of his attributes or his history. His life itself
became to me dear and precious. What if it should fail me in the steps
of the process, whatever that was, by which the life of my Lilian might
be saved !
The shades of evening were now closing in. I remembered that I had
left Margrave without even food for many hours. I stole round to the
back of the house, filled a basket with aliments, more generous than those
of the former day; extracted fresh drugs from my stores, and, thus laden,
hurried back to the hut. I found Margrave in the room below, seated
on his mysterious coffer, leaning his face on his hand. When I entered,
he looked up and said:
“ You have neglected me. My strength is waning. Give me more of
the cordial, for we have work before us to-night, and I need support.”
He took for granted my assent to his wild experiment; and he was
right.
I administered the cordial. I placed food before him, and this time he
did not eat, with repugnance. I poured out wine, and he drank it
sparingly, but with ready compliance, saying, “In perfect health I
looked upon wine as poison, now it is like a foretaste of the glorious
elixir."
After 'he had thus recruited himself, he seemed to acquire an energy
that startlingly contrasted his languor the day before; the effort of breath-
ing was scarcely perceptible; the color came back to his cheeks; his
bended frame rose elastic and erect.
“ If I understood you rightly,” said I, “ the experiment you ask me to
aid can be accomplished in a single night?”
“In a single night - this night!”


360
A STRANGE STORY,
“ Command me. Why not begin at once? What apparatus or chem-
ical agencies do you need ? ”
“Ah,” said Margrave; “ formerly, how I was misled! Formerly, how -
my conjectures blundered! I thought, when I asked you to give a
month to the experiment I wished to make, that I should need the subt-
lest skill of the chemist. I then believed, with Van Helmont, that the
principle of life is a gas, and that the secret was but in the mode by
which the gas might be rightly administered. But now all that I need
is contained in this coffer, save one very simple material — fuel suffi-
cient for a steady fire for six hours. I see even that is at hand, piled
up in your outhouse. And now for the substance itself — to that you
must guide me.”
6 Explain.”
“ Near this very spot is there not gold — in mines yet undiscovered ?
- and gold of the purest metal ?”
“ There is. What then? Do you, with the alchemists, blend in one
discovery — gold and life ?” .
“ No. But it is only where the chemistry of earth or of man produces
gold that the substance from which the great pabulum of life, extracted
by ferment, is found. Possibly, in the attempts at that transmutation of
metals, which I think your own great chemist — Sir Humphrey Davy -
allowed might be possible, but held to be not worth the cost of the pro-
cess — possibly, in those attempts, some scanty grains of this substance
were found by the alchemists in the crucible, with grains of the metal as
niggardly yielded by pitiful mimicry of Nature's stupendous laboratory;
and from such grains enough of the essence might, perhaps, have been
drawn forth to add a few years of existence to some feeble graybeard —
granting, what rests on no proofs, that some of the alchemists reached an
age rarely given to man. But it is not in the miserly crucible, it is in
the matrix of Nature herself that we must seek in prolific abundance
Nature's grand principle — life. As the loadstone is rife with the mag-
netic virtue, as amber contains the electric, so in this substance, to which
we yet want a name, is found the bright life-giving fluid. In the old
gold mines of Asia and Europe the substance exists, but can rarely be
met with. The soil for its nutriment may there be well-nigh exhausted.
It is here, where Nature herself is all vital with youth, that the nutriment
of youth must be sought. Near this spot is gold — guide me to it.”
“You cannot come with me. The place which I know as auriferous is
some miles distant; the way rugged. You cannot walk to it. It is true
I have horses, but "
“ Do you think I have come this distance, and not foreseen and fore-


A STRANGE STORY.
361
stalled all that I want for my object? Trouble yourself not with con-
jectures how I can arrive at the place. I have provided the means to
arrive at, and leave it. My litter and its bearers are in reach of my
call. Give me your arm to the rising ground fifty yards from your door."
I obeyed mechanically, stifling all surprise. I had made my resolve,
and admitted no thought that could shake it.
When we reached the summit of the grassy hillock, which sloped from
the road that led to the sea-port, Margrave, after pausing to recover
breath, lifted up his voice in a key not loud, but shrill and slow and pro-
longed, half cry and half chant, like the night-hawk's. Through that air,
so limpid and still, bringing near far objects, far sounds, the voice pierced
its way, artfully pausing, till wave after wave of the atmosphere bore and
transmitted it on.
In a few minutes the call seemed reëchoed, so exactly, so cheerily,
that for the moment I thought that the note was the mimicry of the shy
mocking Lyre-Bird, which mimics so merrily all that it hears in the cov-
erts, from the whirr of the locust to the howl of the wild dog.
“What king,” said the mystic charmer, and as he spoke he carelessly
rested his hand on my shoulder, so that I trembled to feel that this dread
son of Nature, Godless and soulless, who had been — and my heart whis-
pered, who still could be — my bane and mind-darkener, leaned upon
me for support, as the spoiled younger born on his brother — "what
king,” said this cynical mocker, with his beautiful boyish face — " what
king in your civilized Europe has the sway of a chief of the East ? What
link is so strong between mortal and mortal as that between lord and
slave? I transport yon poor fools from the land of their birth ; they
preserve here their old habits - obedience and awe. They would wait
till they starved in the solitude — wait to hearken and answer my call.
And I, who thus rule them or charm them — I use and despise them.
They know that and yet serve me! Between you and me, my philoso-
pher, there is but one thing worth living for – life for one's self.”.
Is it age, is it youth, that thus shocks all my sense, in my solemn com-
pleteness of man? Perhaps, in great capitals, young men of pleasure
will answer, “It is youth; and we think what he says !” Young friends,
I do not believe you.
.. 31


802
A STRANGE STORY.
CHAPTER LXXX.
ALONG the grass track I saw now, under the moon, just risen, a
strange procession - never seen before in Australian pastures. It moved
on, noiselessly but quickly. We descended the billock, and met it on the
way. A sable litter, borne by four men, in unfamiliar Eastern garments;
two other swarthy servitors, more bravely dressed, yataghans and silver-
hilted pistols in their belts, preceding this sombre equipage. Perhaps
Margrave divined the disdainful thought that passed through my mind,
vaguely and half consciously; for he said, with the hollow, bitter laugh
that had replaced the lively peal of his once melodious mirth:
“ A little leisure and a little gold, and your raw colonist, too, will have
the tastes of a pashaw.”
I made no answer. I had ceased to care who and what was my
tempter. To me his whole being was resolved into one problem. Had
he a secret by which Death could be turned from Lilian ?
But now, as the litter halted, from the long dark shadow which it cast
upon the turf, the figure of a woman emerged, and stood before us.
The outlines of her shape were lost in the loose folds of a black mantle,
and the features of her face were hidden by a black veil, except only the
dark, bright, solemn eyes. Her stature was lofty, her bearing majestic,
whether in movement or repose.
Margrave accosted her in some language unknown to me. She replied
in what seemed to my ear the same tongue. The tones of her voice were
sweet, but inexpressibly mournful. The words that they uttered appeared
intended to warn, or deprecate, or dissuade, for they called to Margrave's
brow a lowering frown, and drew from his lips a burst of unmistakable
anger. The woman rejoined, in the same melancholy music of voice.
And Margrave then, leaning his arm upon her shoulder, as he had leaned
it on mine, drew her away from the group into a neighboring copse of
the flowering eucalypti — mystic trees, never changing the hues of their
pale-green leaves, ever shifting the tints of their ash-gray, shedding bark.
For some moments I gazed on the two human forms, dimly seen by the
glinting moonlight through the gaps in the foliage. Then, turning away
my eyes, I saw, standing close at my side, a man whom I had not noticed
before. His footstep, as it stole to me, had fallen on the sward without
sound. His dress, though Oriental, differed from that of his companions,
both in shape and color; fitting close to the breast, leaving the arms bare
to the elbow, and of a uniform, ghastly white, as, are the cerements of


A STRANGE STORY. :
363
the grave. His visage was even darker than those of the Syrians or
Arabs behind him, and his features were those of a bird of prey -- the
beak of the eagle, but the eye of the vulture. His cheeks were hollow;
the arms, crossed on his breast, were long and fleshless. Yet in that
skeleton form there was a something which conveyed the idea of a ser-
pent's suppleness and strength; and as the hungry, watchful eyes met
my own startled gaze, I recoiled impulsively with that inward warning of
danger which is conveyed to man, as to inferior animals, in the very as-
pect of the creatures that sting or devour. At my movement the man
inclined his head in the submissive Eastern salutation, and spoke in his
foreign tongue, softly, humbly, fawningly, to judge by his tone and his
gesture.
I moved yet further away from him with loathing, and now the liuman
thought flashed upon me: was I in truth exposed to no danger in trust-
ing myself to the mercy of the weird and remorseless master of those
hirelings from the East ? — seven men in number, two at least of them
formidably armed, and docile as bloodhounds to the hunter, who has only
to show them their prey. But fear of man like myself is not my weak-
ness; where fear found its way to my heart it was through the doubts or
the fancies in which man like myself disappeared in the attributes, dark
and unknown, which we give to a fiend or a spectre. And perhaps, if I
could have paused to analyze my own sensations, the very presence of
this escort — creatures of flesh and blood -- lessened the dread of my
incomprehensible tempter. Rather, a hundred times, front and defy
those seven Eastern slaves — I, haughty son of the Anglo-Saxon who
conquers all races because he fears no odds - than have seen again on
the walls of my threshold the luminous, bodiless Shadow! Besides,
Lilian — Lilian! for one chance of saving her life, however wild and
chimerical that chance might be, I would have shrunk not a foot from the
march of an army.
Thus reassured and thus resolved, I advanced, with a smile of disdain,
to meet Margrave and his veiled companion, as they now came from the
moonlit copse.
“Well,” I said to him, with an irony that unconsciously mimicked his
own,“ have you taken advice with your nurse? I assume that the dark
form by your side is that of Ayesha!”
The woman looked at me from her sable veil, with her steadfast, sol-
emn eyes, and said, in English, though with a foreign accent, “ The
nurse, born in Asia, is but wise through her love; the pale son of
Europe is wise through his art. The nurse says, “Forbear!' Do you
say · Adventure ?'”
“Peace!” exclaimed Margrave, stamping his foot on the ground, “I


.
365
.
A STRANGE STORY.
Hitherto the Veiled Woman had remained in the rear, with the white-
robed, skeleton-like image that had crept to my side unawares, with its
noiseless step. Thus, in each winding turn of the difficult path at which
the convoy, following behind me, came into sight, I had seen first the two
gayly-dressed armed men, next the black bier-like litter, and last the
Black-veiled Woman and the White-robed Skeleton.
But now, as I halted on the table-land, backed by the mountain and
fronting the valley, the woman left her companion, passed by the litter
and the armed men, and paused by my side, at the mouth of the moonlit
cavern. "
There for a moment she stood, silent, the procession below mounting
upward laboriously and slow; then she turned to me, and her veil was
withdrawn.
The face on which I gazed was wondrously beautiful, and severely
awful. There was neither youth nor age — a beauty mature and majes-
tic as that of a marble Demeter.
“Do you believe in that which you seek ?" she asked, in her foreign,
melodious, melancholy accents.
“I have no belief,” was my answer. " True science has none. True
science questions all things, takes nothing upon credit. It knows but
three states of mind — Denial, Conviction, and that vast interval between
the two which is not belief, but suspense of judgment.”
The woman let fall her veil, moved from me, and seated herself on a
crag above that cleft between mountain and creek, to which, when I
had first discovered the gold that the land nourished, the rain from the
·clouds had given the rushing life of the cataract, but which now, in the
drought and hush of the skies, was but a dead pile of stones.
The litter now ascended the height; its bearers halted; a lean hand
tore the curtains aside, and Margrave descended, leaning, this time, not
on the black-veiled woman, but on the white-robed skeleton.
There, as he stood, the moon shone full on his wasted form; on his
face, resolute, cheerful, and proud, despite its hollowed outlines and sick-
lied hues. He raised his head, spoke in the language unknown to me,
and the armed men and the litter-bearers grouped round him, bending
low, their eyes fixed on the ground. The Veiled Woman rose slowly
and came to his side, motioning away with a mute sign the ghastly form
on which he leaned, and passing round him silently instead her own sus-
taining arm. Margrave spoke again a few sentences, of which I could
not even guess the meaning. When he had concluded, the armed men
and the litter-bearers came nearer to his feet, knelt down, and kissed his
hand. They then rose and took from the bier-like vehicle the coffer and
the fuel. This done, they lifted again the litter, and again, preceded by
31 *


366
A STRANGE STORY.
the armed men, the procession descended down the sloping hill-side, down
into the valley below.
Margrave now whispered for some moments into the ear of the hideous
creature who had made way for the Veiled Woman. The grim skeleton
bowed his head submissively, and strode noiselessly away through the long
grasses; the slender stems, trampled under his 'stealthy feet, relifting
themselves, as after a passing wind. And thus he too sank out of sight
down into the valley below. On the table-land of the hill remained only
we three — Margrave, myself, and the Veiled Woman.
She had reseated herself apart; on the gray crag above the dried tor-
rent. He stood at the entrance of the cavern round the sides of which
clustered parasital plants, with flowers of all colors, some among them
opening their petals and exhaling their fragrance only in the hours of
night; so that, as his form filled up the jaws of the dull arch, obscuring
the moonbeam that strove to pierce the shadows that slept within, it stood
now — wan and blighted — as I had seen it first, radiant and joyous,“ lit-
erally framed in blooms.”
CHAPTER LXXXII. .
“ So," said Margrave, turning to me, “under the soil that spreads
around us lies the gold, which to you and to me is at this moment of no
value, except as a guide to its twin-born — the regenerator of life!”
“You have not yet described to me the nature of the substance which
we are to explore, nor of the process by which the virtues you impute to
it are to be extracted.”
“Let us first find the gold, and instead of describing the life-amber, so
let me call it, I will point it out to your own eyes. As to the process,
your share in it is so simple, that you will ask me why I seek aid from a
chemist. The life-amber, when found, has but to be subjected to heat
and fermentation for six hours; it will be placed in a small caldron which
'that coffer contains, over the fire which that fuel will feed. To give
effect to the process, certain alkalis and other ingredients are required.
But these are prepared, and mine is the task to commingle them. From
your science as a chemist I need and ask naught. In you I have sought
only the aid of a Man."
“ If that be so, why, indeed, seek me at all ?” why not confide in those
swarthy attendants who doubtless are slaves to your orders ? ”


A STRANGE STORY.
367
“ Confide in slaves! when the first task enjoined to them would be to
discover, and refrain from purloining gold. Seven such unscrupulous
knaves, or even one such, and I thus defenceless and feeble! Such is
not the work that wise masters confide to fierce slaves. But that is the
least of the reasons which exclude them from my choice, and fix my
choice of assistant on you. Do you forget what I told you of the danger
which the Dervish declared no bribe I could offer could tempt him a sec-
ond time to brave?”
“I remember now; those words had passed away from my mind.” .
“ And because they had passed away from your mind, I chose you for
my comrade. I need a man by whom danger is scorned.”
“But in the process of which you tell me I see no possible danger un-
less the ingredients you mix in your caldron have poisonous fumes."
“ It is not that. The ingredients I use are not poisons.”
" What other danger except you dread your own Eastern slaves ?
But if so, why lead them to these solitudes ? and if so, why not bid me
be armed ? ”
“ The Eastern slaves, fulfilling my commands, will wait for my sum-
mons where their eyes cannot see what we do. The danger is of a kind
in which the boldest son of the East would be more craven perhaps than
the daintiest Sybarite of Europe, who would shrink from a panther and
laugh at a ghost. In the creed of the Dervish, and of all who adven-
ture into that realm of nature which is closed to philosophy and open
to magic, there are races in the magnitude of space unseen as animal-
cules in the world of a drop. For the tribes of the drop science has
its microscope. Of the hosts of yon azure Infinite, magic gains sight,
and through them gains command over fluid conductors that link all
the parts of creation. Of these races some are wholly indifferent to
man,-some benign to him, and some dreadly hostile. In all the regular
and prescribed conditions of mortal being this magic realm seems as
blank and tenantless as yon vacant air. But when a seeker of powers
beyond the rude functions by which man plies the clock-work, that
measures his hours and stops when its chain reaches the end of its coil,
strives to pass over those boundaries at which philosophy says, “ Knowl-
edge ends,' then he is like all other travellers in regions unknown;
he must propitiate or brave the tribes that are hostile, must depend
for his life on the tribes that are friendly. Though your science dis-
credits the alchemist's dogmas, your learning informs you that all al-
chemists were not ignorant impostors; yet those whose discoveries prove
them to have been the nearest allies to your practical knowledge, ever
hint in their mystical works at the reality of that realm which is open to
magic — ever hint that some means less familiar than furnace and bellows


368
A STRANGE STORY.
are essential to him who explores the elixir of life. He who once quaffs
that elixir obtains in his very veins the bright fluid by which he trans-
mits the force of his will to agencies dormant in nature, to giants unseen
in the space. And here, as he passes the boundary which divides his al- .
lotted and normal mortality from the regions and races that magic alone
can explore, so here he breaks down the safeguard between himself and
the tribes that are hostile. Is it not ever thus between man and man?
Let a race, the most gentle and timid and civilized, dwell on one side a
river or mountain, and another have home in the region beyond, each, if
it pass not the intervening barrier between them, may with each live in
peace. But if ambitious adventurers scale the mountain, or cross the river,
with design to subdue and enslave the populations they boldly invade, then
all the invaded rise in wrath and defiance — the neighbors are changed
into foes. And, therefore, this process, by which a simple though rare mate-
rial of nature is made to yield to a mortal the boon of a life which brings
with its glorious resistance to Time, desires, and faculties to subject to its
service beings that dwell in the earth, and the air, and the deep, has ever
been one of the same peril which an invader must brave when he crosses
the bounds of his nation. By this key alone you unlock all the cells of
the alchemist's lore; by this alone understand how a labor, which a
chemist's crudest apprentice could perform, has baffled the giant fathers
of all your dwarfed children of science. Nature, that stores this price-
less boon, seems to shrink from conceding it to man — the invisible tribes
that abhor him oppose themselves to the gain that might give them
a master. The duller of those, who were the life-seekers of old, would
have told you how some chance, trivial, unlooked for, foiled their grand
hope at the very point of fruition; some doltish mistake, some improv-
ident oversight; a defect in the sulphur, a wild overflow in the quick-
silver, or a flaw in the bellows, or a pupil, who had but to replenish the
fuel, fell asleep by the furnace.. The invisible foes seldom vouchsafe to
make themselves visible where they can frustrate the bungler, as they
mock at his toils from their ambush. But the mightier adventurers,
equally foiled in despite of their patience and skill, would have said, “ Not
with us rests the fault; we neglected no caution, we failed from no over-
sight. But out from the caldron dread faces arose, and spectres or de-
mons dismayed and baffled us. Such, then, is the danger which seems
so appalling to a son of the East, as it seemed to a seer in the dark age
of Europe. But we can deride all its threats, you and I. For myself, I
own frankly I take all the safety that the charms and resources of magic
bestow. You, for your safety, have the cultured and disciplined reason
which reduces all phantasies to nervous impressions, and I rely on the
courage of one who has questioned unquailing the Luminous Shadow, oud


A STRANGE STORY.
369
wrested from the hand of the magician himself the wand which concen-
tred the wonders of will !”
To this strange and long discourse I listened without interruption, and
now quietly answered,
" I do not merit the trust you affect in my courage; but I am now on
my guard against the cheats of the fancy, and the fumes of a vapor can
scarcely bewilder the brain in the open air of this mountain-land. I
believe in no races like those which you tell me lie viewless in space, as
do gases. I believe not in magic; I ask not its aids, and I dread not its
terrors, for the rest I am confident of one mournful courage — the cour-
age that comes from despair. I submit to your guidance, whatever it be,
as a sufferer whom colleges doom to the grave submits to the quack, who
says, " Take my specific and live!' My life is naught in itself; my life
lives in another. You and I are both brave from despair; you would
turn death from yourself, I would turn death from one I love more than
myself. Both know how little aid we can win from the colleges, and
both, therefore, turn to the promises most audaciously cheering: Dervish
or magician, alchemist or phantom, what care you and 1? And if they
fail us, what then? They cannot fail us more than the colleges do!”
CHAPTER LXXXIII.
The gold has been gained with an easy labor. I knew where to seek
for it, whether under the turf or in the bed of the creek. But Mar-
grave's eyes, hungrily gazing round every spot. from which the ore was
disburied, could not detect the substance of which he alone knew the
outward appearance. I had begun to believe that even in the descrip-
tion given to him of this material he had been credulously duped, and
that no such material existed; when coming back from the bed of the
watercourse, I saw a faint yellow gleam amidst the roots of a giant para-
site plant, the leaves and blossoms of which climbed up the sides of the
cave with its antediluvian relics. The gleam was the gleam of gold, and
on removing the loose earth round the roots of the plant we came on -
No, I will not - I dare not describe it. The gold-digger would cast it
aside, the naturalist would pause not to heed it, and did I describe it, and
chemistry deign to subject it to analysis, could chemistry alone detach or
discover its boasted virtues ?
Its particles, indeed, are very minute, not seeming readily to crystal-


370
A STRANGE STORY.
lize with each other, each in itself of uniform shape and size, spherical
: as the egg which contains the germ of life, and small as the egg from
which the life of an insect may quicken.
But Margrave's keen eye caught sight of the atoms upcast by the light
of the moon. He exclaimed to me,“ Found! I shall live!” And then,
as he gathered up the grains with tremulous hands, he called out to the
Veiled Woman, hitherto still seated motionless on the crag. At his word
she rose and went to the place hard by, where the fuel was piled, busy-
ing herself there. I had no leisure to heed her. I continued my search
in the soft and yielding soil that time and the decay of vegetable life had
accumulated over the Pre-Adamite strata on which the arch of the cave
rested its mighty keystones.
When we had collected of these particles about thrice as much as a
man might hold in his hand, we seemed to have exhausted their bed.
We continued still to find gold, but no more of the delicate substance to
which, in our sight, gold was as dross.
“Enough,” then said Margrave, reluctantly desisting. “What we
have gained already will suffice for a life thrice as long as legend attrib-
utes to Haroun. I shall live-I shall live through the centuries.”
“Forget not that I claim my share.”.
“ Your share-yours! True — your half of my life ! - it is true.”
He paused with a low, ironical, malignant laugh, and then added, as he
rose and turned away, “But the work is yet to be done.”
CHAPTER LXXXIV. .
While we had thus labored and found, Ayesha had placed the fuel
where the moonlight fell fullest on the sward of the table-land — a part
of it already piled as for a fire, the rest of it heaped confusedly close at
hand - and by the pile she had placed the coffer. And there she stood,
her arms folded under her mantle, her dark image seeming darker still as
the moonlight whiteņed all the ground from which the image arose mo-
tionless. Margrave opened his coffer, the Veiled Woman did not aid
him, and I watched in silence, while he as silently made his weird and
· wizard-like preparations.


372
A STRANGE STORY.
and on the ring. Observe, the contents of the vessel must be thriftily
husbanded; there is enough, but not more than enough to sustain the
light in the lamps, on the lines traced round the caldron and on the fur-
ther ring for six hours. The compounds dissolved in this fluid are scarce
- only obtainable in the East, and even in the East months might have
passed before I could have increased my supply. I had no months to
waste. Replenish, then, the light only when it begins to flicker or fade.
Take heed, above all, that no part of the outer ring — no, not an inch
and no lamp of the twelve, that are to its zodiac like stars, fade for one
moment in darkness.”
I took the crystal vessel from his hand.
“ The vessel is small,” said I, “and what is yet left of its contents is
but scanty; whether its drops suffice to replenish the lights I cannot guess,
I can but obey your instructions. But more important by far than the
light to the lamps and the circle, which in Asia or Africa might scare
away the wild beasts unknown to this land - more important than light
to a lamp is the strength to your frame, weak magician! What will sup-
port you through six weary hours of night-watch?”
" Hope!” answered Margrave, with a ray of his old dazzling smile.
.“ Hope! I shall live — I shall live through the centuries !”
CHAPTER LXXXVI.
One hour passed away; the fagots under the caldron burned clear in
the sullen sultry air. The materials within began to seethe, and their
color, at first dull and turbid, changed into a pale rose hue; from time
to time the Veiled Woman replenished the fire, after she had done so
reseating herself close by the pyre, with her head bowed over her knees
and her face hid under her veil.
The lights in the lamps and along the ring and the triangles now began
to pale. I resupplied their nutriment from the crystal vessel. As yet noth-
ing strange startled my eye or my ear beyond the rim of the circle. Noth-
ing audible save, at a distance, the musical, wheel-like click of the locusts,
and, further still in the forest, the howl of the wild dogs that never bark.
Nothing visible but the trees and the mountain range girding the plains
silvered by the moon, and the arch of the cavern, the flush of wild
blooms on its sides, and the gleam of dry bones on its floor where the
moonlight shot into the gloom.


A STRANGE STORY.
373
The second hour passed like the first. I had taken my stand by the
side of Margrave, watching with him the process at work in the caldron,
when I felt the ground slightly vibrate beneath my feet, and, looking up,
it seemed as if all the plains beyond the circle were heaving like the
swell of the sea, and as if in the air itself there was a perceptible
tremor.
I placed my hand on Margrave's shoulder and whispered, “ To me
earth and air seem to vibrate. Do they seem to vibrate to you?”
“I know not, I care not,” he answered, impetuously. “ The essence is
bursting the shell that confined it. Here are my air and my earth!
Trouble me not. Look to the circle — feed the lamps if they fail.”
. I passed by the Veiled Woman as I walked toward a place in the ring
in which the flame was waning dim. And I whispered to her the same
question which I had whispered to Margrave. She looked slowly around,
and answered, “ So it is before the Invisible make themselves visible!
Did I not bid him forbear?” Her head again drooped on her breast,
and her watch was again fixed on the fire.
I advanced to the circle, and stooped to replenish the light where it
waned. As I did so, on my arm, which stretched somewhat beyond the
line of the ring, I felt a shock like that of electricity. The arm fell to ..
my side numbed and nerveless, and from my hand dropped, but within
the ring, the vessel that contained the fluid. Recovering my surprise or
my stun, hastily with the other hand I caught up the vessel, but some of
the scanty liquid was already spilled on the sward ; and I saw with a
thrill of dismay that contrasted, indeed, the tranquil indifference with
which I had first undertaken my charge, how small a supply was now
left.
I went back to Margrave and told him of the shock, and of its conse-
quence in the waste of the liquid.
“Beware,” said he, “ that not a motion of the arm, not an inch of the
foot passes the verge of the ring; and if the fluid be thus unhappily
stinted, reserve all that is left for the protecting circle and the twelve
outer lamps. See how the Grand Work advances ! how the hues in the
caldron are glowing blood-red through the film on the surface !” :
And now four hours of the six were gone; my arm had gradually re-
covered its strength. Neither the ring nor the lamps had again required
replenishing; perhaps their light was exhausted less quickly, as it was no
longer to be exposed to the rays of the intense Australian moon. Clouds
had gathered over the sky, and though the moon gleamed at times in the
gaps that they left in the blue air, her beam was more hazy and dulled.
The locusts no longer were heard in the grass, nor the howl of the dogs
in the forest. Out of the circle the stillness was profound.
32


374
A STRANGE STORY.
And about this time I saw distinctly in the distance a vast Eye! It
drew nearer and nearer, seeming to move from the ground at the height
of some lofty giant. Its gaze riveted mine; my blood curdled in the
blaze from its angry ball; and now as it advanced, larger and larger,
other Eyes, as if of giants in its train, grew out from the space in its
rear: numbers on numbers, like the spear-heads of some Eastern army,
seen afar by pale warders of battlements doomed to the dust. My voice
long refused an utterance to my awe; at length it burst forth, shrill and
lond :
“Look - look! Those terrible Eyes! Legions on legions. And
hark! that tramp of numberless feet; they are not seen, but the hollows
of earth echo the sound of their march !”
Margrave, more than ever intent on the caldron, in which, from time
to time, he kept dropping powders or essences drawn forth from his cof-
fer, looked up, defyingly, fiercely:
“Ye come,” he said in a low mutter, his once mighty voice sounding
hollow and laboring, but fearless and firm — ye come, not to conquer,
vain rebels !-- ye, whose dark chief I struck down at my feet in the tomb
where my spell had raised up the ghost of your first human master, the
Chaldee! Earth and air have their armies still faithful to me, and still I
remember the war-song that summons them up to confront you! Ayesha
- Ayesha! recall the wild troth that we pledged among the roses; recall
the dread bond by which we united our sway over hosts that yet own
thee as queen, though my sceptre is broken, my diadem reft from my
brows!”
The Veiled Woman rose at this adjuration. Her veil was now with-
drawn, and the blaze of the fire between Margrave and herself Alushed,
as with the rosy bloom of youth, the grand beauty of her softened face.
It was seen, detached, as it were, from her dark-mantled form ; seen
through the mist of the vapors which rose from the caldron, framing it
round like the clouds that are yieldingly pierced by the light of the
evening star.
Through the haze of the vapor came her voice, more musical, more
plaintive than I had heard it before, but far softer, more tender; still in
her foreign tongue; the words unknown to me, and yet their sense, per-
.haps made intelligible by the love, which has one common language and
one common look to all who have loved — the love unmistakably heard
in the loving tone, unmistakably seen in the loving face.
A moment or so more, and she had come round from the opposite side.
of the fire pile, and, bending over Margrave's upturned brow, kissed it,
quietly, solemnly; and then her countenance grew fierce, her crest rose
erect: it was the lioness protecting her young. She stretched forth her


A STRANGE STORY.
375
/
arm from the black mantle, athwart the pale front that now again bent
over the caldron ; stretched it toward the haunted and hollow-sounding
space beyond, in the gesture of one whose right hand has the sway of the
sceptre! And then her voice stole on the air in the music of a chant not
loud, yet far-reaching; so thrilling, so sweet, and yet so solemn, that I
could at once comprehend how legend united of old the spell of enchant-
ment with the power of song. All that I recalled of the effects which in
the former tine Margrave's strange chants had produced on the ear that
they ravished and the thoughts they confused was but as the wild bird's
imitative carol compared to the depth, and the art, and the soul of the
singer, whose voice seemed endowed with a charm to enthrall all the tribes
of creation, though the language it used for that charm might to them, as
to me, be unknown. As the song ceased I heard from behind sounds
like those I had heard in the spaces before me: the tramp of invisible
feet, the whirr of invisible wings, as if armies were marching to aid
against armies in march to destroy
“Look not in front nor around,” said Ayesha. “Look, like him, on
the caldron below. The circle and the lamps are yet bright; I will tell
thee when their light again fails.”
I dropped my eyes on the caldron.
" See,” whispered Margrave, “the sparkles at last begin to arise, and
the rose-hues to deepen; signs that we near the last process.”
CHAPTER LXXXVII.
The fifth hour had passed away, when Ayesha said to me, “Lo! the
circle is fading; the lamps grow dim. Look now without fear on the
space beyond ; the Eyes that appalled thee are again lost in air, as light-
nings that fleet back into cloud.”
I looked up, and the spectres had vanished. The sky was tinged with
sulphureous hues, the red and the black intermixed. I replenished the
lamps and the ring in front, thriftily, heedfully; but when I came to the
sixth lamp, not a drop in the vessel that fed them was left. In a vague
dismay I now looked round the half of the wide circle in rear of the
two bended figures intent on the caldron. All along that disk the light
was already broken, here and there flickering up, here and there dying
down; the six lamps in that half of the circle still twinkled, but faintly,
as stars shrinking fast from the dawn of day. But it was not the fading


376
A STRANGE STORY.
shine in that lialf of the magical ring which daunted my eye and quick-
ened with terror the pulse of my heart; the Bush-land beyond was on
fire. From the back-ground of the forest rose the flame and the smoke;
the smoke there still half-smothering the flame. But along the width of
the grasses and herbage, between the verge of the forest and the bed of
the water creek just below the raised platform from which I beheld the
dread conflagration, the fire was advancing; wave upon wave, clear and
red against the columns of rock behind; as the rush of a flood through
the mists of some Alp crowned with lightnings.
Roused from my stun at the first sight of a danger not foreseen by the
mind I had steeled against far rarer portents of nature, I cared no more
for the lamps and the circle. Hurrying back to Ayesha, I exclaimed, “ The
phantoms have gone from the spaces in front; but what incantation or
spell can arrest the red march of the foe, speeding on in the rear?
While we gazed on the Caldron of Life, behind us, unheeded, behold the
Destroyer!”
Ayesha looked and made no reply, but, as by involuntary instinct,
- bowed her majestic head, then rearing it erect, placed herself yet more
immediately before the wasted form of the young magician (he still
bending over the caldron, and hearing me not in the absorption and hope
of his watch): placed herself before him, as the bird whose first care is
her fledgling.
As we two there stood, fronting the deluge of fire, we heard Margrave
behind us, murmuring low, “ See the bubbles of light, how they sparkle
and dance — I shall live, I shall live!” And his words scarcely died on
our ears before, crash upon crash, came the fall of the age-long trees in
the forest; and nearer, all near us through the blazing grasses, the hiss
of the serpents, the scream of the birds, and the bellow and tramp of the
herds plunging wild through the billowy red of their pastures.
Ayesha now wound her arms around Margrave, and wrenched him,
reluctant and struggling, from his watch over the seething caldron. In
rebuke of his angry exclamations, she pointed to the march of the fire,
spoke in sorrowful tones a few words in her own language, and then, ap-
pealing to me in English, said:
“ I tell him that here the Spirits who oppose us have summoned a foe
that is deaf to my voice, and —"
“ And,” exclaimed Margrave, no longer with gasp and effort, but with
the swell of a voice which drowned all the discords of terror and of ag-
ony sent forth from the Phlegethon burning below — "and this witch,
whom I trusted, is a vile slave and impostor, more desiring my death
than my life. She thinks that in life I should scorn and forsake her, that
in death I should die in her arins! Sorceress, avaunt! Art thou useless


· A STRANGE STORY.
377
and powerless now when I need thee most? Go! Let the world be
one funeral pyre! What to me is the world if I perish? My world is
my life. Thou knowest that my last hope is here, that all the strength
left me this night will die down, like the lamps in the circle, unless the
elixir restore it. Bold friend, spurn that sorceress away. Hours yet ere
those flames can assail us! A few minutes more, and life to your Lilian
and me!”
Thus having said, Margrave turned from us, and cast into the caldron
the last essence yet left in his emptied coffer.
Ayesha silently drew her black veil over her face, and turned, with the
being she loved, from the terror he scorned, to share in the hope that he
cherished.
Thus left alone, with my reason disenthralled, disenchanted, I surveyed
more calmly the extent of the actual peril with which we were threat-
ened, and the peril seemed less, so surveyed.
It is true, all the Bush-land behind, almost up to the bed of the creek,
was on fire; but the grasses, through which the flame spread so rapidly,
ceased at the opposite marge of the creek. Watery pools were still, at
intervals, left in the bed of the creek, shining tremulous, like waves of
fire, in the glare reflected from the burning land; and even where the
water failed, the stony course of the exhausted rivulet was a barrier
against the march of the conflagration. Thus, unless the wind, now still,
should rise, and waft some sparks to the parched combustible herbage
immediately around us, we were saved from the fire, and our work might
yet be achieved.
I whispered to Ayesha the conclusion to which I came.
" Thinkest thou,” she answered, without raising her mournful head,
“that the agencies of Nature are the movements of chance. The Spirits
I invoked to his aid are leagued with the hosts that assail. A Mightier
than I am has doomed him!”
Scarcely had she uttered these words before Margrave exclaimed,
“Behold how the Rose of the alchemist's dream enlarges its bloom from
the folds of its petals! I shall live, I shall live!”
I looked, and the liquid which glowed in the caldron had now taken a
splendor that mocked all comparisons borrowed from the lustre of gems. In ·
its prevalent color it had, indeed, the dazzle and flash of the ruby; but out
from the mass of the molten red broke coruscations of all prismal hues,
shooting, shifting, in a play that made the wavelets themselves seem living
things sensible of their joy. No longer was there scum or film upon the
surface; only ever and anon a light rosy vapor floating up, and quick lost
in the haggard, heavy, sulphurous air, hot with the conflagration rushing
toward us from behind. And these coruscations formed on the surface
32 *


378
A STRANGE STORY
of the molten ruby literally the shape of a Rose, its leaves made distinct
in their outlines by sparks of emerald, and diamond, and sapphire.
Even while gazing on this animate liquid lustre a buoyant delight
seemed infused into my senses; all terrors conceived before were an-
nulled; the phantoms, whose armies had filled the wide spaces in front,
were forgotten; the crash of the forest behind was unheard. In the re-
Alection of that glory Margrave's wan cheek seemed already restored to
the radiance it wore when I saw it first in the frame-work of bloom.
As I gazed, thus enchanted, a cold hand touched my own.
“Hush!” whispered Ayesha, from the black veil, against which the
rays from the caldron fell blunt and absorbed into Dark. “Behind
us the light of the circle is extinct, but there we are guarded from all
save the brutal and soulless destroyers. But, before !— but, before !
see! two of the lamps have died out!- see the blank of the gap in the
ring! Guard that breach — there, the demons will enter !”
“Not a drop is there left in this vessel by which to replenish the lamps
on the ring."
“ Advance, then; thou hast still the light of the soul, and the demons
may recoil before a soul that is dauntless and guiltless. If not, Three
are lost! - as it is, One is doomed.”
· Thus adjured, silently, involuntarily, I passed from the Veiled
Woman's side, over the sere lines on the turf which had been traced by
the triangles of light long since extinguished, and toward the verge of the
circle. As I advanced, overhead rushed a dark cloud of wings, birds
dislodged from the forest on fire, and screaming, in dissonant terror, as
they flew towards the furthermost mountains : close by my feet hissed
and glided the snakes, driven forth from their blazing coverts, and
glancing through the ring, unscared by its waning lamps; all undulating
by me, bright-eyed and hissing; all made inocuous by fear: even the
terrible Death-adder, which I trampled on as I halted at the verge of the
circle, did not turn to bite, but crept harmless away. I halted at the gap
between the two dead lamps, and bowed my head to look again into the
crystal vessel. Were there, indeed, no lingering drops yet left, if but to
recruit the lamps for some priceless minutes more? As I thus stood,
right into the gap between the two dead lamps, strode a gigantic Foot.
All the rest of the form was unseen; only, as volume after volume of
smoke poured on from the burning land behind, it seemed as if one great
column of vapor, eddying round, settled itself aloft from the circle, and
that out from that column strode the giant Foot. And as strode the
Foot, so with it came, like the sound of its tread, a roll of muttered
thunder.
I recoiled, with a cry that rang loud through the lurid air.


A STRANGE STORY.
379
“ Courage !” said the voice of Ayesha. “Trembling soul, yield not an
inch to the demon !”
At the charm, the wonderful charm in the tone of the Veiled Woman's
voice, my will seemed to take a force more sublime than its own. I
folded my arms on my breast, and stood as if rooted to the spot, con-
fronting the column of smoke and the stride of the giant Foot. And the
Foot halted, mute.
Again, in the momentary hush of that suspense, I heard a voice — it
was Margrave's.
“ The last hour expires -- the work is accomplished! Come! come !--
aid me to take the caldron from the fire — and quick! or a drop may be
wasted in vapor, the Elixir of Life, from the caldron !”
At that cry I receded, and the Foot advanced.
And at that moment, suddenly, unawares, from behind, I was stricken
down. Over me, as I lay, swept a whirlwind of trampling hoofs and
glancing horns. The herds, in their flight from the burning pastures, had
rushed over the bed of the watercourse --- scaled the slopes of the banks.
Snorting and bellowing, they plunged their blind way to the mountains.
One cry alone more wild than their own savage blare pierced the reek
through which the Brute Hurricane swept. At that cry of wrath and
despair I struggled to rise, again dashed to the earth by the hoofs and
the horns. But was it the dream-like deceit of my reeling senses, or did
I see that giant Foot stride past through the close-serried ranks of the
maddening herds ? Did I hear, distinct through all the huge uproar of
animal terror, the roll of low thunder which followed the stride of that
Foot?
CHAPTER LXXXVIII.
When my sense had recovered its shock, and my eyes looked diz-
zily round, the charge of the beasts had swept by; and of all the wild
tribes which had invaded the magical circle, the only lingerer was the
brown Death-adder, coiled close by the spot where my head had rested.
Beside the extinguished lamps which the hoofs had confusedly scattered,
the fire, arrested by the watercourse, had consumed the grasses that fed
it, and there the plains stretched black and desert as the Phlegræan
field of the Poet's Hell. But the fire still raged in the forest beyond -
white flames, soaring up from the trunks of the tallest trees, and forining,
through the sullen dark of the smoke-reek, innumerable pillars of fire,
like the halls in the City of Fiends.


380
A STRANGE STORY.
Gathering myself up, I turned my eyes from the terrible pomp of the
lurid forest, and looked fearfully down on the hoof-trampled sward for my
two companions.
I saw the dark image of Ayesha still seated, still bending, as I had seen
it last. I saw a pale hand feebly grasping the rim of the magical caldron,
which lay, hurled down from its tripod by the rush of the beasts, yards
away from the dim fading embers of the scattered wood pyre. I saw the
faint writhings of a frail, wasted frame, over which the Veiled Woman
was bending. I saw, as I moved with bruised limbs to the place, close
by the lips of the dying magician, the flash of the ruby-like essence
spilled on the sward, and, meteor-like, sparkling up from the torn tufts of
herbage.
I now reached Margrave's side, bending over him as the Veiled Woman
bent; and as I sought gently to raise him, he turned his face, fiercely,
faltering out, “ Touch me not, rob me not. You share with me! Never
-- never. These glorious drops are all mine!” Die all else! I will
live – I will live!” Writhing himself from my pitying arms, he
plunged his face amidst the beautiful, playful flame of the essence, as if
to lap the elixir with lips scorched away from its intolerable burning.
Suddenly, with a low shriek, he fell back, his face upturned to mine, and
on that face unmistakably reigned Death.
Then Ayesha tenderly, silently drew the young head to her lap, and it
vanished from my sight behind her black veil.
I knelt beside her, murmuring some trite words of comfort; but she
heeded me not, rocking herself to and fro as the mother who cradles a
child to sleep. Soon the fast flickering sparkles of the lost elixir died out
on the grass, and with their last sportive diamond-like tremble of light,
up, in all the suddenness of Australian day, rose the sun, lifting himself
royally above the mountain-tops, and fronting the meaner blaze of the
forest as a young king fronts his rebels. And as there, where the bush
fires had ravaged, all was a desert, so there, where their fury had not
spread, all was a garden. Afar, at the foot of the mountains, the fugitive
herds were grazing; the cranes, flocking back to the pools, renewed the
strange grace of their gambols; and the great kingfisher, whose laugh,
half in mirth, half in mockery, leads the choir that welcome the morn -
which in Europe is night — alighted bold on the roof of the cavern,
whose floors were still white with the bones of races extinct before,
formed to " walk erect and to gaze upon the stars," rose-so helpless
through instincts, so royal through Soul — rose Man!
But there, on the ground where the dazzling elixir had wasted its vir-
tues, there the herbage already had a freshness of verdure which, amidst
the duller sward around it, was like an oasis of green in a desert. And


A STRANGE STORY.
381
there wild flowers, whose chill hues the eye would have scarcely distin-
guished the day before, now glittered forth in blooms of unfamiliar
beauty. Toward that spot were attracted myriads of happy insects,
whose hum of intense joy was musically loud. But the form of the life-
seeking sorcerer lay rigid and stark; blind to the bloom of the wild flow-
ers, deaf to the glee of the insects; one hand still resting heavily on the
rim of the emptied caldron, and the face still hid behind the Black Veil.
What! the wondrous elixir, sought with such hope and well-nigh
achieved through such dread, fleeting back to the earth from which its
material was drawn, to give bloom, indeed, but to herbs, - joy, indeed,
but to insects !
And now in the flash of the sun slowly wound up the slopes that led
to the circle the same barbaric procession which had sunk into the valley
under the ray of the moon. The armed men came first, stalwart and
tall, their vests brave with crimson and golden lace, their weapons gayly
gleaming with holiday silver. After them, the Black Litter. As they
came to the place, Ayesha, not raising her head, spoke to them in their
own Eastern tongue. A wail was their answer. The armed men
bounded forward, and the bearers left the litter.
All gathered round the dead form with the face concealed under the
black veil; all knelt, and all wept. Far in the distance, at the foot of
the blue mountains, a crowd of the savage natives had risen up as if
from the earth; they stood motionless, leaning on their clubs and spears,
and looking toward the spot on which we were – strangely thus brought
into the landscape, as if they, too, the wild dwellers on the verge which
Humanity guards from the Brute, were among the mourners for the mys-
terious Child of mysterious Nature! And still in the herbage hummed
the small insects, and still from the cavern laughed the great kingfisher.
I said to Ayesha, “ Farewell, your love mourns the dead; mine calls me
to the living. You are now with your own people; they may console
you; say if I can assist.”
“ There is no consolation for me! What mourner can be consoled if
the dead die forever? Nothing for him is left but a grave; that grave
shall be in the land where the song of Ayesha first lulled him to sleep!
Thou assist ME— thou - the wise man of Europe! From me ask assist-
ance. What road wilt thou take to thy home?”
“ There is but one road known to me through the maze of the solitude,
that which we took to this upland.”
“On that road Death lurks and awaits thee! Blind dupe, couldst
thou think that if the grand secret of life had been won, he whose head
rests on my lap would have yielded thee one petty drop of the essence
which had filched from his store of life but a moment? Me, who so


382
A STRANGE STORY.
loved and so cherished him— me, he would have doomed to the pitiless
cord of my servant, the Strangler, if my death could have lengthened a
hairbreadth the span of his being. But what matters to me his crime or
his madness? I loved him - I loved him!”
She bowed her veiled head lower and lower; perhaps, under the veil,
her lips kissed the lips of the dead. Then she said, whisperingly :
* Juma, the Strangler, whose word never failed to his master, whose
prey never slipped from his snare, waits thy step on the road to thy
home! But thy death cannot now profit the dead, the beloved. And
thou hast had pity for him who took but thine aid to design thy destruc-
tion. His life is lost, thine is saved !”.
She spoke no more in the tongue that I could interpret. She spoke,
in the language unknown, a few murmured words to her swarthy attend-
ants; then the armed men, still weeping, rose, and made a dumb sign to
me to go with them. I understood by the sign that Ayesha had told them
to guard me on my way; but she gave no reply to my parting thanks
CHAPTER LXXXIX.
I DESCENDED into the valley; the armed men followed. The path,
on that side of the watercourse not reached by the flames, wound
through meadows still green, or amidst groves still unscathed. As a
turning in the way brought in front of my sight the place I had left be-
hind, I beheld the black litter creeping down the descent, with its cur-
tains closed, and the Veiled Woman walking by its side. But soon the
funeral procession was lost to my eyes, and the thoughts that it roused
were erased. The waves in man's brain are like those of the sea, rush-
ing on, rushing over the wrecks of the vessels that rode on their surface
to sink, after storm, in their deeps. One thought cast forth into the fu-
ture now mastered all in the past. “Was Lilian living still ?” Absorbed
in the gloom of that thought, hurried on by the goad that my heart, in its
tortured impatience, gave to my footstep, I outstripped the slow stride of
the armed men, and, midway between the place I had left and the home
which I sped to, came, far in advance of my guards, into the thicket in
which the bushmen had started up in my path on the night that Lilian
had watched for my coming. The earth at my feet was rife with creep-
ing plants and many-colored flowers, the sky overhead was half hid by
motionless pines. Suddenly, whether crawling out from the herbage or


A STRANGE STORY.
383
dropping down from the trees, by my side stood the white-robed and
skeleton form — Ayesha's attendant, the Strangler. '
I sprang from him in shuddering, then halted and faced him. The
hideous creature crept toward me, cringing and fawning, making signs. of
humble good-will and servile obeisance. Again I recoiled — wrathfully,
loathingly; turned my face homeward and fled on. I thought I had baf-
fied his chase, when, just at the mouth of the thicket, he dropped from a
bough in my path close behind me. Before I could turn, some dark
muffing substance fell between my sight and the sun, and I felt a fierce
strain at my throat. But the words of Ayesha had warned me; with
one rapid hand I seized the noose before it could tighten too closely, with
the other I tore the bandage away from my eyes, and, wheeling round on
the dastardly foe, struck him down with one spurn of my foot. His
hand, as he fell, relaxed its hold on the noose; I freed my throat from
the knot, and sprang from the copse into the broad sunlit plain. I saw
no more of the armed men or the Strangler. Panting and breathless I
paused at last before the fence, fragrant with blossoms, that divided my
home from the solitude.
The windows of Lilian's room were darkened — all within the house
seemed still.
Darkened and silenced Home! with the light and sounds of the jocund
day all around it. Was there yet Hope in the Universe for me? All
to which I had trusted Hope, had broken down; the anchors I had
forged for her hold in the beds of the ocean, her stay from the drifts of
the storm, had snapped like the reeds which pierce the side that leans on
the barb of their points and confides in the strength of their stems. No
hope in the baffled resources of recognized knowledge! No hope in the
daring adventures of Mind into regions unknown; vain alike the calm
lore of the practised physician and the magical arts of the fated
Enchanter! I had fled from the commonplace teachings of Nature to
explore in her Shadow-land marvels at variance with reason. Made
brave by the grandeur of love, I had opposed without quailing the stride
of the Demon, and my hope, when fruition seemed nearest, had been
trodden into dust by the hoofs of the beast! And yet, all the while, I
had scorned, as a dream more wild than the word of a sorcerer, the hope
that the old man and child, the wise and the ignorant, took from their
souls as inborn! Man and fiend had alike failed a Mind not ignoble, not
skilless, not abjectly craven; alike failed a heart not feeble and selfish,
not dead to the hero's devotion, willing to shed every drop of its blood
for a something more dear than an animal's life for itself! What
remained — what remained for man's hope ? – man's mind and man's
heart thus exhausting their all with no other result but despair? What


384 .
A STRANGE STORY.
remained but the mystery of mysteries, so clear to the sunrise of child-
hood, the sunset of age, only dimmed by the clouds which collect round
the noon of our manhood? Where yet was Hope found ? In the soul;
in its everyday impulse to supplicate comfort and light from the Giver of
soul, wherever the heart is afflicted, the mind is obscured.
Then the words of Ayesha rushed over me: “ What mourner can be
consoled if the Dead die forever ?” Through every pulse of my frame
throbbed that dread question. All Nature around seened to murmur it.
And suddenly, as by a flash from Heaven, the grand truth in Faber's
grand reasoning shone on me, and lighted up all within and without.
Man alone, of all earthly creatures, asks, “ Can the Dead die forever?”
and the instinct that urges the question itself is God's answer to man !
No instinct is given in vain.
And, born with the instinct of soul is the instinct that leads the soul
from the seen to the unseen, from time to eternity, from the torrent that
foams toward the Ocean of Death, to the source of its stream, far aloft
from the Ocean.
“ Know thyself,” said the Pythian of old. “That precept descended
from Heaven.” Know thyself! is that maxim wise? If so, know thy
soul. But never yet did man come to the thorough conviction of soul
but what he acknowledged the sovereign necessity of prayer. In my
awe, in my rapture, all my thoughts seemed enlarged and illumed and
exalted. I prayed — all my soul seemed one prayer. All my past, with
its pride and presumption and folly, grew distinct as the form of a peni-
tent kneeling for pardon before setting forth on the pilgrimage vowed to
a shrine. And, sure now, in the deeps of a soul first revealed to myself,
that the Dead do not die forever, my human love soared beyond its brief
trial of terror and sorrow. Daring not to ask from heaven's wisdom that
Lilian, for my sake, might not yet pass away from the earth, I prayed
that my soul might be fitted to bear with submission whatever my Maker
might ordain. And if, surviving her, without whom no beam from yon
material sun could ever warm into joy a morrow in human life — so to
guide my steps that they might rejoin her at last, and, in rejoining, re-
gain forever!
How trivial now became the weird riddles that, a little while before,
had been clothed in so solemn an awe. What mattered it to the vast
interests involved in the clear recognition of Soul and Hereafter,
whether or not my bodily sense, for a moment, obscured the face of the
Nature, I should one day behold as a spirit ? Doubtless the sights and
the sounds which had haunted the last gloomy night, the calm reason of
Faber would strip of their magical seemings; — the Eyes in the space
and the Foot in the circle might be those of no terrible Demons, but of


A STRANGE STORY.
385
the Wild's savage children whom I had seen, balting, curious and mute,
in the light of the morning. The tremor of the ground (if not, as here-
tofore, explicable by the illusory impression of my own treacherous
senses) might be but the natural effect of elements struggling yet under
a soil unmistakably charred by volcanoes. The luminous atoms dissolved
in the caldron might as little be fraught with a vital elixir as are the
splendors of naphtha or phosphor. As it was, the weird rite had no
magic result. The magician was not rent limb from limb by the fiends.
By causes as natural as ever extinguished life's spark in the frail lamp of
clay, he had died out of sight - under the black veil.
What mattered henceforth to Faith, in its far grander questions and
answers, whether Reason, in Faber, or Fancy, in me, supplied the more
probable guess at a hieroglyph which, if construed aright, was but a
word of small mark in the mystical language of Nature? If all the arts
of enchantment recorded by Fable were attested by facts which Sages
were forced to acknowledge, Sages would sooner or later find some cause
for such portents-- not supernatural. But what Sage, without cause
supernatural, both without and within him, can guess at the wonders he
views in the growth of a blade of grass, or the tints on an insect's wing?
Whatever art Man can achieve in his progress through time, Man's
월
​reason, in time, can suffice to explain." But the wonders of God? These
belong to the Infinite ; and these, O Immortal ! will but develop new
wonder on wonder, though thy sight be a spirit's, and thy leisure to track
and to solve, an eternity.
As I raised my face from my clasped hands my eyes fell full upon a
form standing in the open door-way. There, where on the night in
which Lilian's long struggle for reason and life had begun, the Luminous
Shadow had been beheld in the doubtful light of a dying moon and a
yet hazy dawn; there, on the threshold, gathering round her bright
locks the aureole of the glorious sun, stood Amy, the blessed child !
And as I gazed, drawing nearer and nearer to the silenced house, and
that Image of Peace on its threshold, I felt that Hope met me at the
door — Hope in the child's steadfast eyes — Hope in the child's welcom-
ing smile!
“I was at watch for you,” whispered Amy. “ All is well!”
“ She lives still — she lives! Thank God — thank God!”
“She lives — she will recover!” said another voice, as my head sunk
on Faber's shoulder. “For some hours in the night her sleep was dis-
turbed — convulsed. I feared then the worst. Suddenly, just before the
dawn, she called out aloud, still in sleep,
6. The cold and dark shadow has passed away from me and from Allen
- passed away from us both forever!'
33


386
A STRANGE STORY.
“ And from that moment the fever left her; the breathing became soft,
the pulse steady, and the color stole gradually back to her cheek. The
crisis is past. Nature's benign Disposer has permitted Nature to restore
your life's gentle partner, heart to heart, mind to mind — "
" And soul to soul!” I cried, in my solemn joy. " Above as below,
soul to soul !” Then, at a sign from Faber, the Child took me by the
hand and led me up the stairs into Lilian's room.
Again those dear arms closed round me in wife-like and holy love, and
those true lips kissed away my tears ; - even as now, at the distance of
years from that happy morn, while I write the last words of this Strange
Story, the same faithful arms close around me, the same tender lips kiss
away my tears.
THE END.


ature to
.
.
AUTHOR'S NOTE.
Dove as
ender Ip de
The reader will here observe a discrepancy between Mrs. Poyntz's account and
Sir Philip Derval's narrative. According to the former, Louis Grayle was tried in
his absence from England, and sentenced to three years' imprisonment, which his
flight enabled him to evade. According to the latter, Louis Grayle stood his trial,
and obtained an acquittal. Sir Philip's account must, at least, be nearer the truth
than the lady's, because Louis Grayle could not, according to English law, have
been tried on a capital charge without being present in court. Mrs. Poyntz tells
her story as a woman generally does tell a story - sure to make a mistake where
she touches on a question of law; and - unconsciously perhaps to herself - the
Woman of the World warps the facts in her narrative so as to save the personal
dignity of the hero who has captivated her interest, not from the moral odium of
a great crime, but the debasing position of a prisoner at the bar. Allen Fenwick,
no doubt, purposely omits to notice the discrepancy between these two statements,
or to animadvert on the mistake which, in the eyes of a lawyer, would discredit
Mrs. Poyntz’s. It is consistent with some of the objects for which Allen Fenwick
makes public his Strange Story, to invite the reader to draw his own inferences
from the contradictions by which, even in the most commonplace matters (and
how much more in any tale of wonder!), a fact stated by one person is made to
differ from the same fact stated by another. The rapidity with which a truth be-
comes transformed into fable, when it is once sent on its travels from lip to lip, is
illustrated by an amusement at this moment in fashion. The amusement is this.
In a party of eight or ten persons, let one whisper to another an account of some
supposed transaction, or a piece of invented gossip relating to absent persons, dead
or alive; let the person, who thus first hears the story, proceed to whisper it, as
exactly as he can remember what he has just heard, to the next; the next does
the same to his neighbor, and so on, till the tale has run the round of the party.
Each narrator, as soon as he has whispered his version of the tale, writes down
what he has whispered. And though, in this game, no one has any interest to
misrepresent, but, on the contrary, each, for his own credit's sake, strives to repeat
what he has heard as faithfully as he can, it will be almost invariably found that
the story told by the first person has received the most material alterations before
it has reached the eighth or the tenth. Sometimes, the most important feature of
the whole narrative is altogether omitted; sometimes, a feature altogether new,
and preposterously absurd, has been added. At the close of the experiment one
is tempted to exclaim, “How, after this, can any of those portions of history
which the chronicler took from hearsay, be believed ?" But, above all, does not
every anecdote of scandal which has passed, not through ten lips, but perhaps
through ten thousand, before it has reached us, become quite as perplexing to him
who would get at the truth, as the marvels he recounts are to the bewildered rea'
son of. Fenwick the Sceptic?
E. BOLWER LYTTON.





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BIG ABEL,
AND
THE LITTLE MANHATTAN.





BIG A BEL,
AND
THE LITTLE MANHATTAN:
BY
CORNELIUS MATHEWS.
NEW YORK:
WILEY AND PUTNAM, 161 BROADWAY.
MDCCCXLV.


176.7, co's
ENTERED according to Act of Congress, in the year 1845, by
WILEY & PUTNAM,
in the Clerk's Office of the District Court for the Southern District of New-York.
Stereotyped by T. B. SMITE
216 William Street


TO
JEDEDIAH B. AULD,
MY
TRUE FRIEND
AND
EARLY SCHOOL-FELLOW:
ONE OF THE SIX HUNDRED SCAMPERING BOYS OF THE OLD CROSBY-
STREET HIGH-SCHOOL :
I DEDICATE THIS LITTLE BOOK,
WITH
SINCERE AFFECTION AND REGARD.
C. M.
New-YORK, March 3d, 1845.





CONTENTS.
CHAP.
I. THE GHOST OF NEW-YORK .
.
.
.
.
.
I
“
II. Big ABEL AND THE LITTLE MANHATTAN COME TO
TERMS, AND GET A NIGHT-VIEW OF THE CITY .
9
“
III. How IT GOES THE FIRST DAY, WITH THE CITY
WAKING UP . . . . . . .
18
"
IV. THE CITY HEAD-FOREMOST IN BUSINESS; AND THE
SECOND DAY'S WORK . . . . . . 27
“
V. IT STRIKES THREE; AND THE CITY TAKES HIS Com
FORT . . . . . . . . .
38
«
VI. THE CITY AT HIS CRIMES; THE LITTLE MANHATTAN
AND BIG ABEL STILL BUSY. . . . . 46
THE FIFTH DAY OF IT; AND THE CITY DISPORTING
HIMSELF IN A VERY LOW WAY. . . . 56
“ VIII. BIG ABEL AND THE LITTLE MANHATTAN BUSY AS
EVER. THE CITY IN HIS WORKING-JACKET . 66
6
IX. THEY ARE IN THE SEVENTH DAY; AND WHERE THE
CITY FINDS HIS CHILDREN . . . . . 74
.
u
X. IT ALL WINDS UP WITH AN ENTERTAINMENT: A
Bird's-EYE VIEW OF THE WHOLE, AND WHERE
THE CITY's MOVING TO . . . . . 86





BIG A BEL,
AND THE
LITTLE MANHATTAN.
CHAPTER I.
The Ghost of New York.
WHOEVER has sailed up or down the East River in a fog, or
driven to Hallet's Cove, Long Island, on a dusty day, or walked
the Third Avenue in the moonlight, has been beset by the vision
of a great white tower, rising, ghost-like, in the air, and holding
all the neighborhood in subjection to its repose and supernatural
port. The Shot-Tower is a strange old fellow, to be sure ! 'Spite
of that incessant buzzing in his head, he holds himself as high
and grandly, as though he hadn't the trouble of making shot for
the six-and-twenty United States. He never dozes or nods, even
in the summer noon; nor does he fall asleep in the most crickety
nights, but winks, with that iron top of his, at all the stars, as they
come up, one by one ; and outwatches them all. There he is,
gaunt and clean, as a ghost in a new shroud, every day in the
year. Build as you may, old Gotham! Hammer and ding and
trowel on all sides of him, if you choose,—you cannot stir him an
inch, nor sully the whiteness in which he sees himself clothed, in
that pure glass of his of Kipp's Bay! If you have seen him once,
you know him always. A sturdy Shot-Tower to be sure !_and
go where you will, you carry him with you. He is the Ghost of
.


BIG ABEL, AND
[CHAP. I.
New York, gone into the suburbs to meditate on the wickedness
of mankind, and haunt the Big City, in many a dream of war, and
gun-shot wounds, and pattering carnage, when he falls asleep.
And can you see him from the back steps of the City Hall ?
Not with the naked eye: but Lankey Fogle standing there, once
on a time, had him present to him, and shook at the very thought.
He had just come down from the witness-stand, within, and was
pausing at the porch, when he was of a sudden smitten on the
shoulder, and he heard, audibly, a voice say to him:
“ Meet me by the Shot-Tower, at twelve to-night !”
A voice, but nobody ; for he looked about promptly, and down
the steps, and back through the Hall. No one visible; but he
knew the voice, and had a mind-yes, he was forced to have a
mind, to obey it. Lankey Fogle had the Shot-Tower in fear; but
he must go. His hat pressed close upon his eyes-eye-brow and
brim were part each of the other; a faded blue coat, out at
elbows, the broad wrists hanging over his hand ; shuffling shoes ;
and Lankey, a little man, withal : he descended the steps slowly,
struck across the Park, by the angle of the Rotunda, and stood on
the brow of Chatham street, towards the square. The Jews were
as thick, with their gloomy whiskers, as blackberries; the air
smelt of old coats and hats, and the side ways were glutted with
dresses and over-coats and little, fat, greasy children. There
were countrymen moving up and down the street, horribly
harassed and perplexed, and every now and then falling into the
hands of one of these fierce-whiskered Jews, carried into a gloomy
cavern, and presently sent forth again, in a garment, coat or hat
or breeches, in which he might dance and turn his partner, to-
boot.
Lankey Fogle plunged down the declivity.
“A coat, sir ?”
“Wont you, now, a new under-tog ?”
" That 'ere hat !"
“This way, sir, we're the No Mistake !"


THE GHOST.]
THE LITTLE MANHATTAN.
And as he slipped out of their hands-
“Cotton-baggin', sir, to fill out ?”
“My eyes! there's holes for a ratter!”
“ He'll be a wreck, I say, 'fore he reaches the square—he'll
never live past Roosevelt—my 'ord for it!"
A soft strain of the flute floated from a back-room, as his figure
passed the door, joined by a mellow, low whistle, which are, it is
supposed, integral parts of speech in the dialect of Jewry.
Lankey glided along, wrapped up in his coat and inner medita-
tions, for it was nearing night; but it was of a truth as much as
he was worth to get himself clear of the young barbarians who
hung upon his skirts, as he passed along, and nearly brought them
away. It was a bad case certainly, for the sun getting toward a
level, shot through and through his apparel, passing in at an
elbow and coming out at the hand; or piercing him through, from
back to breast, as he turned ; till every dusty corner of Lankey
was lighted up with a sort of dim splendor.
And when he came by the theatre (the Chatham), the case was
worse than all, for he was set upon from the area of the theatre
by a swarm of fly-away boys, with—
“ Lankey! which way, now ?”
“ I say, Lankey Fogle, where are you larking to ?”,
“Come in, will you ? Kirby on the top round.”
“ Yes, yes, he's in the big bellows to-night. We'll treat you
to a go!”
“ And peanuts besides !”
“Keep off, will you, you young serpents !” And he glanced
from under his rim.
“Why, what on earth’s the matter, now ? Lankey in a huff!"
“ Three cheers for Lankey in a huff!"
The air was cracked with a small storm of cheers, which, blow-
ing over, they renewed their game; but Lankey stood firm ;
and when they had all run up to him with a question and a close
look in his face, and twisted him round on his heels by the arm,


BIG ABEL, AND
[CHAP. I.
he passed on, and reached the square, thinking of the old white
Shot-Tower, and the figure it would make by the time he go
there, toward the round hour of night.
He was in the elbow, turning to cross the long walk, when he
was called by name. He looked up; it was the little Franklin
Theatre, abutting the burying-ground, you know, with all its
golden letters blotted out, its balcony for the pretty actresses to
stand in razed away, its little snug box-office crushed, and the
heart and soul of it, in the shape of foot-lights and curtains, taken
out; it was a second-hand shop, when Lankey looked up at it,
and a mysterious little man standing in an upper window winked
at Lankey, and uttered in a low voice :
“ All right!"
Lankey looked at him with astonishment written out on his
countenance in magnificent large text.
“I say, it's all right!”
The devil it is, thought Lankey; and looked again.
“I say, it's all right," a third time; this time with a knock
on the crown of his hat.
Lankey smiled scornfully on the mysterious man and moved
on; he had a new motive for speed.
There was Doyer street, yet; a war-path to the west, once,
it is said, in Indian times; and if he could get past that once,
all would be well. But Doyer street is a queer street, we all
know; so crooked and gad-about and whimsical. Ten chances
to one if a man enter it at one end with his head on his shoulders
it be not turned about by the time he is fairly out at the other.
Doyer street was not born, like other streets, in the commission.
er's office, but was laid, so to speak, at the door of the square,
exposed to the tender mercies, dependant on the charities of
chance-comers (for every man is father to this disinterested little
by-way), to give it a stone or a touch of a kerb! The eye of
the druggist's red bottle was bloodshot, at the corner, for one
thing; and there was a melancholy old woman carrying in a


THE GHOST.)
THE LITTLE MANHATTAN.
bunch of eels with their heads down for another! But Lankey
Fogle had a hope, and as sure as there's white light from the
moon, he cleared it at a moderate run.
When Lankey stood fairly at the mouth of the Bowery, he
looked far away up its broad path as if he could see, looming
up on its line, that ugly old Shot-Tower; that everlasting ghost
of a tower that, go where he would, was in Lankey Fogle's eye,
without an eye-stone to take it out. But he saw instead, this
time, how, moved by a patriotism out of bounds, the whole air
about this other theatre was indescribably hung with flags; a
general hanging out, there seemed to be, of all the bunting of
the country. The rope was strong; the flags were thick ; and
they waved away, shutting out the sky and making a better
heaven for the East Bowery gazers to look up at and live under.
And black Vulture, that marvellous steed, how he came down
the great, black, gaping precipice, upon the bills, striking the
printer's ink from his heels, like fire! And the patriotic Putnam,
how he held on and clinched his teeth and set his hat fiercely
a-cock! The bills were huge and yellow, and the type fear-
fully large; and how the ragamuffins plunged down the steps,
and the muffin-eaters rushed up! Lankey Fogle's resolution
shook within him ; his feet quivered in his shoes with doubt;
and he was on the eve of throwing himself in the wake of a
chimney-sweeper down the pit-entrance, when, looking straight
before him, at the bill, his eye, in spite of itself, fell upon a por.
tentous “ Beware !"
It was enough: he hurried on as though the devil were at his
back. And although now and then accosted by a Bowery Boy
with a rough hand, and run against in token of affectionate recog-
nition by a big vagabond, Lankey, all things considered, made
good speed; and, before he well knew it, was out upon the
Avenue ; and then he began to quake.
He had not gone many steps in this direction when an arm
was quietly thrust into his own; and he found himself march.


BIG ABEL, AND
[CHAP. I.
ing abreast of a stranger. He looked around. The stranger
was a short man in a dusty coat, with a red, blossomy nose.
What was the stranger's business with Lankey Fogle?
There was a mighty din upon the Avenue, and it was not easy
to tell. The hard riders were coming in from Harlem, and the
road roared with the spinning of wheels, and the air was thick with
flying dust. There were men, solitary, in little gossamer-built
sulkies, who seemed borne along on the air itself: and men in
couples in light waggons; and hard-drinking parties of four in
barouches; and gentlemen far gone in close coaches; all in
tremendous speed as if some great event were coming off imme-
diately, a mile or two ahead, and they bound to be there at the
peril of their lives. Then they were mightily bothered by men
on horseback, who, taking each the footpath at the side of the
road, laid themselves out on their horses and swept everything
clean before them. Then by great lumbering butcher-boys,
who, on shambling cart-horses, came down the Avenue in
troops, allowing themselves to be tossed about the road like so
many hulks fallen into an eddy they could not manage ; scram-
bling hay-carts, with the hay off, returning, and running their
scraggy poles and shelving into the ribs of travellers, without
the slightest reference to utility or ornament.
So, with all they had a hard time of it, Lankey and the
stranger. But they had got by this time at the cross-road that
strikes off to Cato's; and there began to be prospect of conver-
sation ; and happy that there was, for Lankey Fogle was smart-
ing for it.
“Sir !” said the stranger, turning full upon Lankey at a point
where they began to have a glimpse of the Tower, “this is the
most important event of your life !”.
Lankey did not deny it.
“It involves the destiny," continued the stranger, “the desti-
ny, I say, of you and your posterity to the latest generation."
The proposition was laid down and no one opposed it.


THE GHOST.)
THE LITTLE MANHATTAN.
“Whether the hopes of mankind are to be blighted by the
course you shall adopt to-night, remains to be seen!”
It did.
“Remains to be seen,” he resumed ; “ And how far you are
worthy of the trust reposed in you—"
Their noses were close together; and they watched each
other like dogs.
“By the confiding and generous Henry.”
Lankey Fogle seized his hand.
“I understand you,” said Lankey—“enough said !" *
The stranger buttoned his coat and went into a small pot-
house by the road-side. Lankey Fogle took the road again, as
far as Cato's, and was forced to go in : it was not the Cato's of
infancy, the Cato's governed by that venerable and worthy and
dusky man, in his little cropped pate and clean apron: when
stages from far countries (Rye, and Saw pitts, and Danbury, and
Cross River) came jingling, with their merry chains, to the
door ; the driver dismounted, and the inside gentlemen dis-
mounted, and there was a mighty bringing out of lemonade and
crackers and sugar-biscuit to be tendered in the most gallant
style to the green-veiled beauties within. No, no, that Cato's
was gone away; a great grave had been digged for that, a clean
white cloth had been spread over it, and it was buried beyond
resurrection. That Cato's had been launched on the stream of
time, and had gone backward, like an ark of peace and comfort,
and true jollity, sailing to whence it could not return. But there
stood the great white Tower over the way ; reproaching it
silently for parting company: for tavern and tower they had
known each other from the corner-stone: and Lankey Fogle
hurried in, for he thought the old Tower some how or other
stooped his back to the very door of the new Cato's, to see what
kind of nonsense could be going on there now that the old soul
was gone.
Lankey called for a Monongahela, hot-and-hot.


BIG ABEL, AND
[CHAP. I.
The landlord brought it himself.
“A queer night this,” said the landlord.
Lankey Fogle took a long pull.
“A skimmery shimmery night, sir,” pursued the landlord.
Another pull toward the bottom.
“ The Shot-Tower has been busy as a bee all day to-day ;
and such a singing as he's kept up !"
Lankey Fogle admitted it by his manner of setting down the
glass.
He went out very quietly, winking at the landlord in a sleepy
way; at which the landlord, in turn, shook his head. As he
got into the road again, a great hay-cart was passing, so high
piled up, that the moon now abroad, seemed to be sleeping in its top
among the fresh-mown blades. His heart sunk within him. He
entered the wide gate at the Mount Vernon school, where the trot-
ting-course used to be. He passed through the orchard. There
was a shout behind him ; it was the city leaving off its work,
with a cheer. There was a mighty blaze in the sky; the city
lighted up for the night. How green the grass was !-how it
sparkled and winked and laughed in the clear moonshine! But
there was a shadow on it now-a huge shadow, made neither
by man, nor house, nor tree; it was the dark side of the old
Shot-Tower; and when Lankey looked up, how wickedly and
wilfully, cool and self-possessed, that old white ghost of a Tower
held himself! Not inquisitive, nor overbearing, but scandalously
calm and indifferent. Lankey Fogle was alarmed, much more
than if he had pitched himself head-foremost into Lankey's waist-
coat, and offered downright fight; and when he saw in its shadow
a figure leaning down and delving the earth—he leaped the
fence! Was it to keep his appointment, or fly from it ?


TH. NIGHT-VIEW.] THE LITTLE MANHATTAN.
CHAPTER II.
Big Abel and the Little Manhattan come to terms; and get a Night-View of
the City.
“ Hillo !"
A voice again as at the City Hall porch : and this time a body.
It wasn't the Shot-Tower that spoke, as you might suppose ; but
the figure that delved the ground rose up, slowly, bringing with
it out of the earth, some burthen or other in its hand (that was
clear); and leaning his spade against the Tower came forward,
now, getting towards the light, bearing by a ring an oblong iron
box.
“ Hillo—I say !"
Lankey Fogle hadn't said a word as yet : and the other step-
ped out into the moonlight. He was a goodly figure to look on :
a tall square person : a new hat-it shone like a cat's back in
the clear light-straight out at the rim: a new blue coat, brass.
buttoned : pantaloons of a drab tint: and in boots that as he
walked whispered in a pleasant creak of the shop they had
lately left: he stood, as I said, a goodly figure to look at, square
upon the ground; with the small oblong iron box in his hand.
Lankey Fogle paused in contemplation a second or so: and
then went forward and took this other by the hand.
“I'm glad you've come,” said the holder of the box. “I be-
gan to have a doubt.”
Lankey Fogle looked up at the moon. There was something
that glistened, like dew, creeping down his cheek.
" It's hard,” said the other. “No doubt of that.” And he
wrung Lankey again by the hand. “But it's the best we can


BIG ABEL, AND
[CHAP. II.
do, I believe. The Island is clearly ours,” he went on to say.
“ Yours or mine : from his snout at the Battery to where he
flanks off at Kingsbridge and Harlæm. One of us knows that:
whichever of the two it is: and if that Supreme Court of Judi-
cature, as they call it, had its due—it would sit in that nice
building over there, and never have leave to adjourn."
Lankey's eyes glowed in the dark and looked toward the
Prison, off the shore: where it sate in the clear night, a great
square cold block, locking in, like a stone with a toad at its
heart, as it did, so many pale men and women, drearily.
“I've had enough of this,” pursued the other. “Loitering
about the courts : opening attorneys' doors, softly on their
hinges : and taking off my hat to the judges, going in and out.
Ten years is enough, I think ; with getting called up (they had
you to-day) to testify to all the rumpuses about the door.”
It was enough. Lankey acknowledged that by being there.
“ Isn't it wonderful, now, there never was a lawyer to be
found among all them hungry, starving, trotting, dancing fellows,
to take up our cases—cases involving the Property and Buildings
of all this City—there was a chance for 'em, I should say, to
make a figure in! Nobody for Plaintiff, in Fogle versus the
Corporation ; or, as I thought it ought to run, Corporation at the
suit of Abel Henry Hudson. The Bar has been in fits ever
since our case was first opened in the offices. That's clear:
and they'll never wake up or come to, I'm afraid. We are to
make a verdict for ourselves. Is that it ?”
Lankey Fogle took his hand again. That was it.
“We are friends ?”
“I hope so," Lankey made answer. “Big Abel-we are !"
This was Big Abel, then! as hearty a person as you'd see in
many a day: with his fair blue eyes and sturdy girth.
“And we'll do—as we talked of!" said Big Abel..Little
Manhattan (as you think your title rightly runs)—are we
agreed ?"


THE NIGHT-VIEW.] THE LITTLE MANHATTAN.
11
The Little Manhattan was silent at the question. So silent
that he seemed to be a part of Nature there : as one of the
dark, old, slumbering, silent trees: and not a man of speech.
Hard, hard it was to him to come to any terms by which
his Great Inheritance, as he in his poor visionary way account-
ed it, should pass away; to part with any share the least or
greatest of all that wide domain the City held. It was the best
(Big Abel said): and so it was. The Bay rippled gently: as
in counsel to the act: softly the old oak trees whispered, far on
high, holding council thereabout themselves : and toward the
moon the old Tower held up its head, and white as she and fair
to look on, might have agreed with her that this of Big Abel
and Lankey was well done. Done it was: and, out at the
Mount Vernon gate again, they struck across the country.
There is a little hill there, and climbing that by winding paths,
through an orchard, they got upon the road. Beyond, descend-
ing now, they come upon the sunken meadows, with little rills
running, creeping rather, here and there, and glittering in the
moon. About, a few late fellows, the frogs were piping, in a revel
of their own; and now and then, as Lankey and Big Abel glide
along, some little birds, troubled in their dreams, stirring in the
bushes. In the midst of all this stillness or calm motion of the
night, a figure passed them : in the very middle of the field : a
figure, singing.
It was quite clear who this was ; without a question. A
Poor Scholar—who had wandered out into the open country,
and the clear night, to coax away certain cares that pressed at
his heart: to think over a past full of gloom and sadness and
hard perplexities; and to call up as he wandered on a fair
shape whose shadowy hand he sought in vain, for it flew away
ever as he stretched his own toward it. Pale he was, indeed,
but with eyes lit as the night was with a more than common and
day-time lustre. His apparel-one could see—was plain and
darkened into a better black than belonged to it in broad day-


THE NIGHT-VIEW.] THE LITTLE MANHATTAN.
the wild flying horses and their driver, and the two within, the
brother and the mistress of the suicide. Pry keenly as they
would into the wide domain they discerned that, and nothing
more. When by and by Lankey Fogle, listening, in the dead
stillness heard the beating of a doleful bell, and then what
seemed to his ear like the drumming of the partridge in the
woods, from down the city; a Phenix rather ; for present-
ly there sprung a mighty flame (how grimly Lankey Fogle
smiled at that!) which swallowed in an instant all the dusky
light: put out the lamps: and brought up swifter than in a
goblin dream the shining house-tops far away, and glittering
vanes, and yellow caps :-in which Lankey Fogle and Big Abel
stood out upon Murray's Hill, that you might have seen them
many a mile around. And then it fell: a great shouting that
kept it company falling with it: and all was dark again.
Big Abel and Lankey came down the hill, by the way of the
old road, and met going toward the city a countryman in a felt
hat, with a herd of cattle. Nothing passed, except that Big
Abel asked how many head he drove. Lankey Fogle spoke not
a word. He had another thought, moving among the great,
green trees, that huddle together and make a wood of them.
selves, just there. They were aiming for the Reservoir : the
one off Bloomingdale : and crossing a few meadows: then a
road: then the rail-track that hurries forward here, with a
spring to clear the gloomy Tunnel, not more than three miles
away, they were under its very wall. It was Lankey that led
this time : and climbing the steps, Big Abel close after, they
came upon the wall. A goodly Mug, in truth, for the city to
drink from. But that wasn't it. A gloomy face, with all sorts
of strange, fantastic eyes, shining in it-everywhere. Nor
that. It was here, as Lankey made known to Big Abel, where
the old Manhattan in the Indian time stopped pursuing his
'game : and well he might, for at that day 'twas all a wide, waste,
dreary flood beyond, so it is said. He claimed beyond this v?"


14
[CHAP. II.
BIG ABEL, AND
no right-and made it over, to Big Abel, once and for ever. In.
side this line, he set his claim.
With their backs against the city-as they looked abroad to-
ward the unhoused country—a man in a woollen cap, and lame
withal, hobbled out of the little box at the middle of the wall,
and shouted after them
“Ay—ay—there—what do you want ?”
It was a gruff voice; and Big Abel and Lankey halted.
“ What do you want, I say ?”
Big Abel looked into the Reservoir, then down the wall, fifty
feet or so, and made answer
“We're here to look after our property !!!
The woollen cap went away with great speed, and closing
the door of the box, mounted a chair inside and looked through
a window over the door.
“ Madmen no doubt, got away !” he said.
He watched till he was quite weary in the leg: and nothing
came of it: except that Lankey and Big Abel rambled the
wall :—then he unchaired himself and went to bed, making up
his mind as well as he could to have to drag the Reservoir in
the morning.
Without reference to the woollen cap they got to the ground,
and made for a little public house they knew of in that suburb;
catching far-off glimpses down side-streets of the river, with a
watchman now and then ; or what they supposed to be a watch.
man; a something silent and monumental with a leathern top,
and lifeless stick hanging at the side. And, now they had a
view of the little public house they were glad, by his windows,
to see him yet awake. The city all about there looked so stark
and deep in slumber; the little public house the only soul astir
all round; and going in, Big Abel and Lankey found there
was work there, and plenty of it, without anything from them,
for about a table with a speckled, oil-cloth top, four boys were
hard at play with cards. One of these was a little fellow,


THE NIGHT-VIEW.] THE LITTLE MANHATTAN.
15
with a thin, pale face, and eyes so broad and dark and mourn-
ful, they seemed always on the very edge of tears. With
cards, but in a game of their own devising, the process and
order of which (it was called Newspaper) seemed to be this:
That the two and fifty cards were inscribed each on its face
with the name of a city journal : Morning, Evening, Semi-
Weekly, Weekly: with an ironical reference, by the way, in
some cases, for these gentlemen have a turn for that: and dis-
tributed to the four young gentlemen equally. Now, the forfeit
lay here, that at each round the holder accounted on the table
with a chalk, for the value, at news-boy rates, of the thirteen
journals in his hand, and the difference between the two lowest
was the penalty against the lowest, payable in meat and drink.
It so happened (as it came out in the course of time), that the
luck, shape the dealing as they would, fell against the little
pale-faced boy. The games to play, were three.
“Now for the Albany-brewed !” This was the cry at the
end of the first round, raised by a pock-pitted player, with a
frayed black neck-cloth raking the table as he bent over his
cards.
The Albany-brewed came in, in four glazed mugs.
Another game : the little, pale-faced boy fishing in his pocket
again, short of a penny to pay for the poached eggs.
“ Broke!” said the pock-pitted player.
“He must go out !” said another over-grown fellow, who
was disposing of the eggs with his eyes as fast as he could.
“ To be sure, he must!" returned the pock-pitted player:
and without further ado, they proceeded—this was strictly
according to the rule and usage of the game—to hustle him.
He resisted a little : not much. One of the players spoke for
him, but it was of no use ; and when the scrambling was over on
the outside they came back presently, bringing with them a new
boy: re-opened the game : and on the third hand (going against
the new-comer, with a rush) they ordered oysters, and clearing


BIG ABEL, AND
[CHAP. IT.
off the cards, set in for a regular time. Somebody was crying
at the door: but this was nothing : and, through oysters and
poached eggs, by comfortable stages they came upon the beer.
Three games more : all for beer this time: and if the house
had been a mile wide, and a couple or so high, it would have
been hardly big enough to hold them. Lòng ago, though, Big
Abel and Lankey Fogle had seen the way through their busi-
ness; for at the very coming into the little stall they had enter-
ed upon it, by Big Abel's clapping his oblong box, with the ring
towards him, on the table, swinging up its lid, and saying,
“ There's my proofs !" called for Lankey's.
All that Lankey Fogle did, was to call out to the landlord to
put more light on, which being done, he threw off his hat,
turned about and looked calmly on Big Abel. There was the
straight black hair, the swarthy skin, the slumberous and au-
tumnal eye. There was no mistaking these. The Little Man.
hattan, beyond a doubt! And now Big Abel—where are you?
A little musty scrap, out of the box, another, and still another.
It seems so. In truth it does. Old Henry Hudson's lineal
heir : great-grandson, it would seem. Lankey Fogle (this was
a name he got from idle boys, and not by birth), great-grandson
to that fierce old chief, who swayed with iron, this Island once,
heading his red Manhattanese! Big Abel, great grandson to
the old navigator-trader, of brave English blood. By right of
Nature this city, built it who did, is the Little Manhattan's
clearly, all. Big Abel claims, as first discoverer (Lankey
Fogle glares on this); but, better still, purchase of some old
chief or other. He thinks it was the same chief that Lankey
claims from : but this he can't make out so well. The oblong
box is shut again: the city is between them, but whose, who
can tell ? To-morrow they will set forth, dividing it for them.
selves : each taking what he can, in fairness and good will.
For they are friends now. Perfect confidence : perfect confi..
dence between them. The long mistrust with which they have


THE NIGHT-VIEW.] THE LITTLE MANHATTAN,
17
lowered at each other through the courts is ended now; melted
into a fine, twilight mist; in which each seems magnified
and gentle to the other. To-bed, now, not as for many years,
but hopeful of their own. Yes—these, so far apart in many
things, so close together in their fortunes now—are whimsical
enough to make belief that the old merchant-navigator and the old
Indian chief are still abroad through all these streets, in spirit;
that, somehow or other, as the color of the soil shows itself in
the tree, they are still out of their very graves, holding to the
city as their own. Well! we shall see what came of it.


BIG ABEL, AND
[CHAP. III
CHAPTER III.
How it goes the First Day: with the City Waking up.
BREAKFAST for the Little Manhattan and Abel Henry Hud.
son (known as Big Abel everywhere)! Spread in an upper
chamber, with a cheerful look out at the window, on the river:
a snowy cloth: a roasted duck, shot on the river, not far away:
a steak of savory deer: a pile of honest buckwheat cakes.
Big Abel fell to, as became his girth; but Lankey, quietly,
and thoughtful of other viands that came into his mind and
offered themselves.
Then, brightening up after a while, how pleasant they were:
talking over plans and routes through the city; which course
now, which now.
“I shall claim all I can!” said Big Abel.
Lankey made no objection.
“ He was a navigator, you know, my great-grandfather ?”
Very well.
“A trader ?”
Well again.
“A builder, with a touch of carpenter's craft in his day ?"
Very well, too.
“ And now, what are you going to claim ?"
“ We shall see !” said Lankey. He said nothing more, and
they set out. Big Abel paying the bill, by the way, to start.
It was a bright and cheerful morning, this, on which the
Little Manhattan and Big Abel set forth to divide the City :
Pilgrims both, of good heart, and bent to seize, each what he
could, in fairness, to himself. A clear day before them, as
ever lit the Island from its first day down; so clear, the


20
[CHAP. III.
BIG ABEL, AND
“ He was to have driv' twenty in hand, on a wager, next
week,” spoke up one from the walk, a little man, “and he'd have
done it !"
He was a little man, this speaker; but how their eyes sharp-
ened and their ears grew when he spoke. He was stoop-shoul.
dered, too, and hardier of aspect than the others: a hard-headed
little fellow: and he held all these rugged drivers in his hand
like so many hackneys. What an Authority that little man
was! and when he said, “ He'd have done it !” it was settled
for ever.
There was no doubt he would: they all allowed it, in chorus.
Then it came out, in further discourse, that the gentleman in
question had made the quickest trip, from the Village to White
Hall, anywhere on record, since the first stage was set on
the route-in too few minutes to speak of. But there was
another gentleman mentioned, he was present, the little driver
himself, in person, who had carried a heavier fare. Fourteen
inside, I think it was, two with him on the seat, a cradle a-top,
with a family market-basket, a boy ; in fact, there was no end
to the load ; and he might as well have moved the village
down into the city, come to that, churches and all, while he was
about it.
This omnibus-life, the Little Manhattan's or Big Abel's ?
For the build (Henry Hudson having, it is said, brought the
first wheeled carriage into the Island), Big Abel's; but then for
horse-speed, that being at the pace and a good deal after the
manner, of the wild-horse Indian scampers, Lankey's. This
being the case, they hurried on, leaving them to run without
jurisdiction, as they always will, I guess.
Further on, they were passed by great swarthy charcoal
waggons, leaping along, with a tinkling twang from underneath,
as though they had been great grasshoppers with iron lungs.
Then they encountered, coming out, masons in green baize jack-
ets, bearing stone-hammers in their hands, and full of speed.


22
[CHAP. III.
BIG ABEL, AND
.
There stood before them on a little pedestal, a panther's skin
about his loins, a feather in his raven hair, in one hand a bow,
tawny too in every limb, a figure that seemed to have posses-
sion of the spot by right. A tobacconist's ; this a dumb Indian;
proffering to all comers, with the other hand, cigars. Yet, sim-
ple as it is, and cheap, Big Abel staggers at recollection that
the town is held in every part by such as these.
The iron box he bore began to grow heavy enough: the
thought even came into his mind of dashing it in pieces on the
ground: how could his title hold against these swarming figures
everywhere ? But Lankey claimed; this was a great comfort to
Big Abel; the shops alone—and did not say these Indians held
the city, as he might, in trust for him.
Presently Big Abel took possession of a great range of mer.
chants' shops (the seeds of which were sown, no doubt, by trader
Captain Hudson, long ago); and they went on more cheerfully
than ever. Cheerfully ? Aye-proudly, and more than that.
Looking at the majestic style in which he walked that street,
only, you'd have certainly thought Big Abel owned the city,
without any reference whatever to his iron box!
Big Abel began to see his way clearly ; for wherever they
went he saw, shops, shops; the trade that first set foot upon the
soil with Henry Hudson, carrying all before it in a flood.
Wigwams! He scorned (in his soul, that is to say) the thought !
What were bare tents, with little dusky old women and pa-
pooses, diving in and out, to these gay rows with ladies, fair to
see as day, gliding in and forth again, the many-colored show
about the doors, the smiling clerks within ; this was fairy-land
to him, the other heathendom and worse.
There went tumbling before them just then, before swarthy
Lankey, fair-complexioned Abel, in the sunshine a little negro.
boy. His garments, coarse and clean, were blotched with patch-
es :—no doubt of that. A rainbow would have faded before
him, and made a leap into the sky for another set of colors at


FRIDAY.]
THE LITTLE MANHATTAN.
the very sight. He was black: very black. His hair was
woolly as the old ram's fleece. His foot, flat as the ground it
stood on. And yet was there ever such a great black earthen
jar-full, with its two wide ears, of genuine jollity, the very ex-
tract and oil of gladness, such a bounding, rolling, laughing
piece of broad mirth ? A great green bag, plethoric with
morning lessons, slung over his shoulder: sometimes on the side-
walk, then over the gutter into the very middle of the street,
at the tail of an omnibus, on his own account: then back again
with a cry for the shoulder's sake of some other : then zigzag.
ing his way along the stoops, making the most, with his great
broad eyes, of the shop windows ('specially of that everlasting
white lady in the pinched-up waist, seated by the side of the
gentleman in superhuman blue pantaloons) : the day was bright-
er, and bluer, and happier altogether, for that cheerful negro.
boy, depend upon it!
As he rushed between the two, carolling and capering like a
colt, Big Abel dropped, unseen, a piece of silver in his gaping
bag; and Lankey Fogle dropped not money, for money he had
none, but a look so kind and magical after it, it must have
changed the coin to yellow gold before it slided to the bottom.
Another dumb Indian! Under the same circumstances as
before, only this one wore a short blue frock, and carried a box
in his hand as though he was setting out on a journey in a
great hurry, but not forgetting to take his cigars with him.
Farther down there stands a Half-Way House ; the Hurrah
House, the neighbors call it; where the omnibus-drivers halt in
hot summer days, and resort of nights; with heavy streaked and
dabbled columns; a mighty lamp of many colors above its
porch (a mere child though, like the boot, to a lantern on the
- East side), great enough to entertain a small drinking party in.
But as there was no ladder, just then, to get in by, Big Abel
and Lankey passed into the house himself. Now this house is a
noisy house, and a dirty-waitered house, and badly.watered,


FRIDAY.]
25
THE LITTLE MANHATTAN.
Useful Knowledge came over passengers, you know, with
Captain Hudson), and on great squares of stately houses all
around.
The Little Manhattan saw none of these, nor cared to see
them; for out of the dark there sprung to him, dusky men who
bore to grassy hillocks there, a warrior with his bow, a maiden
in her long black tress, a prophet in his cunning robe, and laid
them down ; and though they turned their back on these now
for a time, and went away, they came again, and still again,
and never, through all time and change of place, forgot to come,
and think in peace and kindliness that here their wise man,
warrior, maiden lay. Willingly and cheerfully, so to speak of
it, the Little Manhattan took this sacred field, and yielded up the
church without a stint!
Long lingering, at length they rose ; wondering at each
other not a little, and trying in the dark to guess each other's
thoughts.
They passed an open window, and out of it came a voice
whose sadness and sweet tarrying on the tones it poured out
checked them, as though they had some part in its gentle sor-
row.
They had listened for a minute, when the Little Manhattan
turned on his friend, and said
“ This is part of the song sung in the open fields by that Poor
Scholar!"
“ It is,” he answered ; "and this is William's mistress. You
see her, crossing the light now !"
Lankey did : a fair gentle shape that might have lived in the
sun-beam or moon-beam for ever, and fallen by no act or seek.
ing of its own, to earth, among the shadows and gross cares of
common clay.
But she was clearly not at ease. She moved about, singing
sometimes as before, then silent, glad, pensive, hopeful, despair.
ing, as a scholar's mistress, in this land of ours, well may be.


26
[CHAP. III.
BIG ABEL, AND
Then she came to the window and looked abroad ; counting
no doubt, from afar, each step that echoed through the street ;
and then falling back into the shadow of the room, was lost in
gloom.
Big Abel and the Little Manhattan passed on.
There is a yellow house, not far from the Parade Ground,
famous for the cider that he draws; Newark cider, fresh and
latest, a full supply; and you may go there and drink when
you choose, and that little public-house is always at home, with
a glass for you. Thither Lankey and Big Abel repaired; and
there they supped, with many a draught, now that they were in
for work, of that same golden drink; and then they chambered
themselves up stairs. But not asleep quite so soon as you might
think, for this was a cart-street in which they lodged; in other
words, an avenue patronized by those lay-bishops, the carting
gentry, in their morning and evening trips up and down town;
and, returning now from the day's work, they kept up a buzz of
wheels for hours. Sometimes a slow cart, they could tell each
one by his sound, sauntering along with a tired horse; then a
fast cart, heard in his approach far off, thundering by the door,
and rattling away, for whole squares. Then three or four carts
in company, with a talk of cartmen; these were moderate
movers; to each other as they jogged along. Then a couple
of racers; full speed after each other; tearing up the street,
and shaking the windows, nay, the very houses to the founda-
tion. Then long, long after these, a cart going home late (there
was a ship in down town somewhere, that night, I know), having
the whole street to himself, and keeping up his melancholy song
till the ear ached, and would not believe he could ever go out of
hearing. And by that time (whenever it came), the Little
Manhattan and Big Abel were asleep.


28
BIG ABEL, AND
[CHAP. IV.
court as having some knowledge, got up the river, of his old
Indian title).
" It's all settled !” said Lankey, when he had gone near to
the boatman.
" It is ?” said the boatman. This was evidently a matter of
considerable wonderment to Mr. Barskin, and he denoted by his
manner a vehement desire to know the particulars, it having
occurred to him that it might not be so very easy a case to dis-
pose of, as it involved the proprietorship of all New York.
And when Lankey made known to him, with the aid of Big
Abel, the manner of the adjustment, he kept his surprise and
astonishment at the same point.
“Really, now!” This was what the boatman said. “You
don't say so.”
What was better still; this was Big Abel speaking ; they
were going to celebrate the settlement on Thursday evening
next, at the old Banking-House, at the head of the city, and
would be glad to see Mr. Barskin there. He'd be there.
Big Abel and Lankey hurried on, passing now great numbers
of old boilers, rusty dogs, and long gone out of use, lying along-
side of the river (with a very uncomfortable feeling, one would
think, towards all that good water): a Dutch woman in a door-
way mending a sail : coils of tarred rope at chandlers' shops :
when, farther down, the little negro-boy coming out of a side
street with plenty of kite tackle in his arms, and at his side a
little white, a delicate, fair-eyed little fellow, bearing kite tackle
too.
Pompey Smith (that was his name), and his white young
friend come over from the east side to catch a breeze; and if
you would but look that way, how still the city lay. No
breath among the steeple-vanes; no fluttering of the rosy flags;
and the long straight streets, with houses stretching on and on
in calm upright lines, suggested to the mind not a thought of
shouting masons, clattering bricks, or ringing trowels; but stood
. .
.


SATURDAY.]
THE LITTLE MANHATTAN.
there, as if there they had stood for ever. The wind brought no
mention of the far-off carts or jolting stages, but they passed as
pictures to the eye, and nothing more. But here where Pom-
pey and the white boy had come, a little gust, just an infant in
his modest way of drawing on, crept in from the sea; and the
white boy, as being readiest, set his kite on end, in Pompey's
hand, who running back a score of yards, gave her a slide up
into the air; the white boy sped away, and up she flew! The
house-top first; that was no feat at all; then, with another gentle
leap, over the liberty-cap, near by ; then, with her tail raking
the very steeple's point; and off she shot, beyond all city
heights, away! Then Pompey, planting his on end, against a
post; to go by herself; pulled such a foot, that, ere a minute
could be born to follow it from earth, she elbowed white
boy's in the very bend of heaven; and now a gallant show it
was; what coaxing of the string, what humoring of the tail,
what paying out. A flight of pigeons, set forth from an old
brewery some quarter of an hour before, hanging, like motes
against the sun,' were children to these two eager kites.
Who has it ? Pompey now—and now the other: and now no
mortal eye can tell, for both are gone from sight. A twanging
snap, a wriggling of the skirt (a snake dropped out of heaven!),
a mad plunge, twenty yards or so, and down she goes: Pom-
pey's: and all through the neighborhood there springs a count-
less cry of boys, “ Broke loose-kite loose !” and quick eyes
having gauged her falling-place, quick feet make after ; boys,
short and tall, great and little, from all streets about ; but Pom-
pey's friend, his kite put in hand of a stander-by, swiftest and
foremost of all.
Below this, a great number of people in gay dresses, many
with ribbons about them, and children at their side, came pour-
ing down the street, their eyes shifting from a little house at
the river-side to a green walk beyond the river. They made
for the little house first, which kept up, by aid of a bell hung


30
[CHAP. IV.
BIG ABEL, AND
in a cover to shield his precious voice from the weather, and a
red-faced, bulky body of a man at the end of it, a great racket;
and the more desperate grew the red-faced man, the more they
rushed upon him, and the more he begged them, through the
bell, to keep rushing. Now, among these there came down
two you would have known in a thousand, or in ten thousand,
because they were beautiful in person to begin with ; but that
was nothing ; because they were making for the red-faced
gate-man with great speed, that wasn't much; because they
were young and pure of heart, clearly : but let us hope there
were many such seeking the free air of the green fields beyond
the river: but most of all, and all in all, because they were
evidently bound for pleasure, as two spirits in one, making up
into a little bank all the hopes and fears and joys of two, as a
common fund to draw upon when days should grow dark and
hours creep wearily, and the pale trouble should run upon and
try to break them some bleak November afternoon, far on in
time.
William and Mary! It was they, and no other !
The Poor Scholar, with his inky finger, white for once; and
his mistress, with nothing but angels sitting in her eyes, or
dancing about there whenever she turned on him.
The book was written! That was it. That little rounded
Life which he had discerned lying in the midst of many things;
that plan of a Book unborn, which might grow to beauty in his
brain ; which had risen as by magic day by day out of nothing;
which had borrowed a color of the morning light, and a whisper
from the wind, and a golden substance from the very stones un.
der foot. It was done. Ah, happiness, who knows its like ?
The child is born; womb, cradle, mother's arms and father's
smiling, all in one. The book was done! Old Trepidation, that
said it could not be written, thou’rt a weazen, shivering, good-for-
nothing fool! And friendly Doubt, that picked a blemish in you
at the very thought of your conceiving, sit with cripples ever.


SATURDAY.]
31
THE LITTLE MANHATTAN.
more, and go not, thou, henceforth among true-shapen men !
The book was writ! And what an afternoon was that to Mary
and the Poor Scholar. Was there ever such a sun sent to shine
of an afternoon before! And such a ferry-master to take the
pay ; the jolliest of all tax-gatherers, depend upon it! And
such a charm of a boat; and the Fields; that afternoon they
took the name, Elysian, and rightfully have held it ever since !
That book was doing wonders this very afternoon; and these
were nothing to the miracles it was going to do in the way of
wedding-garments, and parson's fee, and housekeeping, down
an everlasting perspective of purest domesticity. There was
a cloud came flying across the sun just then, and they stepped
upon the boat.
Lankey Fogle might have set up a claim here, as being a
cove or creek, which in old time the Indians used to make with
their canoes in crossing, to and fro, the river; but he had his
glimmering eye elsewhere.
The afternoon steamboats were coming out; with the bridle off,
it was quite clear at the first view; a herd of them. The
Arrow first; darting like a ray along the water; the Troy, the
brave old Albany. What fellows they were for speed! And
all so easily swinging their long walking-beams as a gentleman
swings his cane in an easy promenade, when the world goes
well with him after dinner. Flags in great plenty flying from
long staves : music too (two or three bands on their way to the
Springs) : and how cheerfully packed they seem in the bows,
at the stern, on the upper deck: with people too who are, to
innocent lookers-on from shore, all bent-for a vague wonder
and curiosity hangs, even yet, about the people that go a
voyage-for pleasure-land, somewhere ahead, without a thought
of care to cross their track. Here and away with a breath,
these swiftsure steamers flew ; each cheered, from the pier-
heads, by swarming boys; they are at the pains to execute this
piece of goodness every sunny afternoon ; with a whirl of caps


32
[CHAP. 1.
BIG ABEL, AND
and a piping shout. Seen for an instant; then out of sight.
After these, with flags too (hinting at nothing), came boats for
Dobb's Ferry, Hastings, Sing-Sing; slow coaches creeping on,
with twilight at their backs before they're out of sight. Then
a staggering old hulk that aims for somewhere over the river,
and has been this many years; but whether he ever gets there,
no traveller has ever come back that way to tell. And now,
with quite another look, though built the same; down the river,
with a racer's leap between them—the people all aghast on
board, and quite awe-stricken at coming on the city at his even.
ing meal—three others; and sweltering the river with glowing
coals let drop in haste, they round upon him, and hug-to with
panting breath. By the fiery light he makes in wheeling round
Lankey espies on one an Indian, all of paint, upon his side ;
the old canoes come back upon his thought, the dusky oars.
men, and their early rule along this water. Lankey! These
are yours !
A mighty street now they came to, running back with a start
at the river as though he'd carry the city all before him!
As they passed across this, both Lankey Fogle and Big Abel
had a vision; of a sudden. It was of an endless series of deep-
down cellars, with gloomy small-coal fires alight therein, tended
by men in sleeves, each with the handle of a black iron noggin
in one hand, and with the other feeding them from time to time,
from countless streaked bowls. The Canal-street plan of
oyster-stewing—that was it! And there swung, as far as eye
could see, high in air, rising one upon the other, the red.
white oyster-moons; to light the seeker down, and look shrewd.
ly after what goes on below. Many a revel has he seen that
faded, swinging, half-extinguished oyster-moon! The tales he
has to tell, up there rolling to and fro, about his pole ; of wil.
ful, wicked men who sell their souls, almost, to keep his com-
pany from night to night; of watchmen off the guard to pass
their hours, with no upbraiding from the bitter wind and pelting


SATURDAY.]
33
THE LITTLE MANHATTAN.
rain ; of jolly players there carousing, wet and dry; of par-
sons even who have changed their stocks from white to black to
get an interview of these white-armed ministers below; of alder-
men, and magistrates of high degree: ah, who has seen the half,
or who can tell the third of what he knows, that wicked, staring
oyster-moon!
These are the Little Manhattan's all of these the only
planets he can see shining in his faded firmament!
But there's more business forward, beyond; waggons of
every order; garden-carts; barrows; all full, all tending one
way, and pressing upon the great market on the river as though
they would smother him. Every variety of driver, too ; dusty
men, with hats apparently dug out of the earth; boys; women, in
rusty bombazines and dirty strings about their waists. A wild,
tumultuous rush of eager men bearing hats, of a second-hand,
you might say a twenty-second hand, complexion, in long crates,
with which they push in and out among the crowd of people
who fill up all the intervals between the carts. .
And now the market himself; a low, broad-backed spread
with alleys, running hither and thither, and little platforms up
and down, and swarms of dealers of every kind, borne down,
too great for any mortal market to get along with, by great ribs
and haunches and slabs of bright red beef; and hung all
about, till he almost stooped in the shoulders, with poultry,
chicken, duck, turkey. Then upon the floor great heaps of
apples, and baskets of melons; and again upon the walls rab-
bits dangling by their legs; and deer; and strings of pigeons ;
and bird.cages, all alive with bobolinks and blackbirds and
quails and canaries.
That market had as much on his mind as he could carry, I
know; and seeing all he owned came fresh, with scarce a hand
between, out of the old dark mould of the very earth his fathers
were laid in, the Little Manhattan would have claimed it for
himself. But Big Abel had a word to say. Leading Lankey


BIG ABEL, AND
[CHAP. IV.
to a pier-head before the market, he drew from his box, which
he planted on a spile, a part of his documents, and would have
it that his great-grandfather Hudson had made a landing there,
and had an understanding with the tribe by which it became
his fee. It didn't appear very clearly, but there was an old
parchment for it, which (to tell the truth plainly) Lankey Fogle
couldn't read, and Big Abel took it, one might say, by default.
But going back, on an errand they had there, when the Little
Manhattan saw how weather-beaten this poor market was, and
tumbling and moss-covered, and what noble promise it gave of
returning, so to speak, to the very grass that grew there once,
again, he went aside and chuckled like a very Indian, at the
thought. The errand was yet to do, and going to the very
heart of the place, they came upon a mighty huckster-woman,
Mrs. Saltus by name, the mightiest of her tribe.
She sate in the very lap of the deep shade cast by the market
-her back to it, her face toward the river-at that hour ; with-
in a world of greens, dewy from the fields, in baskets, in bunch-
es, spread on a table before her, heaped about her on the
ground. And how she glowed upon that cheery summer's
afternoon, with her broad, happy face, as though she it was that
ripened all with her beaming look; she had: they got from her
the ripeness and the flavor (touches of good heart) dearest to the
buyers, I am sure. How she talked on, savoring in her rust-
ling speech, and sparkling eyes and waving motion, of the
corn-field, the brook, and garden-life, where all these things
took their growth. She was waiting on a bachelor of the old
school, who always bought of her; silver-buckled at the knee,
clean-hosed, and with a maple cane upon the ground.
“Your turn next, Sonny!” to a little. white-headed fellow,
lingering bashfully near the table's edge, with a couple of
coppers in his fingers. “What'll you have this afternoon. Now,
my dear. Well, Dick.” This was a serving-man with a


SATURDAY.]
THE LITTLE MANHATTAN.
basket. “ Lankey! Bless me, this is a cure for sore eyes.
Chickweed ?" This was the white-headed little fellow's order.
“ Well. What can you want? Canary-seed: ah, my Beauty,
there's trouble in your eye; one of them is gone, I see. Sweet
Jack or Bob—which was it ?”
It was Bob, Mrs. Saltus; that died upon his perch this morn-
ing: he came out of this corner of the market, you know !
Diving to her pocket-bottom, in her gown, from time to time;
a strange cavern, that! what merry music of the little coin
crept out upon the air.
Mrs. Saltus! That market knew well his place, and held
his breath each morning 'till she came in. Then off at the
very top of his speed! Who knew the bills, the ragged, tat-
tered, dingy bills so well as she; when butchers rushed, white-
aproned, on her, these flying in their hands? Who kept the
news so well from all the country, east, north, south, west, as
she? Whose bank of change so deep ? Whose pitcher dewy
always, with draughts so clear and cold ? Stories, too! In all
the pauses of the market, aye, over all its din as well, at times,
the murmur of the water-wheel that throws off brightness at
his every bound, could fill the air about not half so freshly !
The great snow-storm she loved to dwell on in these glowing
summer-days, when bells did all the talking of the town, and
people glided to and fro like magic to the eye! The season
short of greens! The famous wild-pigeon flights over the city,
that played the mischief with the sun and moon!
Would she come to Big Abel's, Lankey Fogle's entertain-
ment (she was friend of both) ?
Bless their dear hearts, wouldn't she ! 'Zekiel, that was her
grandson, should bring her in the garden waggon. Be there!
If there were stairs to the house (she hoped there was), and the
walls could hold her up. Good-bye, my son (to Big Abel);
good-bye, dear old Indian.


36
[CHAP. IV.
BIG ABEL, AND
With which god-speed they proceeded to a little cabinet or
tin, about the size of a bird's cage, standing on four thin legs,
in the skirts of the market, where coffee was served in white
cups, out of the tin kept a-glow by the coals under him, and
cakes out of his top, along with it.
While they were busy at the tin, there came to them from
Mrs. Saltus—by a little boy, a hanger-on of the place—a cou-
ple of dainty pot-cheeses ; taking which in hand, they looked
towards her gratefully, and were met; she was evidently wait-
ing for it; with a broad, kindly smile, that said plainly enough,
“ There's something nice for you !" which acted as a delicious
ġrace before cheese, and answered in the place of small gold
dishes, and knife and fork of solid silver.
Now, what a time there was, a little below this ! How they
howl! Men with whips and sticks, and long eager arms,
stretched through the steam-boat gates ; raging like evil spirits
kept out of Paradise. And all for the sake of certain little
leathern rolls and square boxes, borne in hand or guarded by
well-dressed persons within, as though they had come long
journeys just to vex and torment and hideously agitate the gen.
tlemen outside, by the sight of them! The afternoon boats, in!
When that shout goes up, what a din fills all the streets about ;
how they run, rush, scamper, tattered fellows, white, black, dingy
(chiefly), boys, men. And if they fail to make a meal, by their
manner, of these evil-disposed men who unrighteously and
cruelly keep them out of their own, in the way of trunks and
carpet-bags, they're more Christian than I am willing to allow
them to be, just now.
But the day settles by degrees over even so fierce a tumult
as this, and night comes on, bringing out lights upon the water,
twinkling ; lights on land, streaking the water far away; a
gloomy sound of plashing boats along the shore, coming to or
scudding along close in. One sound after another, of all the


BIG ABEL, AND
[CHAP. V.
CHAPTER V.
It strikes Three; and the City takes his Comfort.
LANKEY! Big Abel! Awake! awake!
See! see! the Day creeps through the windows, and filling
all the chamber, gently tells you to arise.
They sleep; Lankey like a dark old wood, whose leaves are
still, and all at once! Big Abel, as a giant boat who takes in
slumber for a week to come, against the river-shore! There is
no sound astir ; the silence walks about and wears his cloak of
Sabbath air, that no man knows or sees or feels he is abroad.
There's something moving through this house at least : enter.
ing now where Lankey and Big Abel lie : not silence, but his
twin, a sleek, calm, white-coated man (civil as the dawn itself).
“Will the gentlemen be good enough to take breakfast ?".
To be sure they will ; in the little room, next. Breakfast
served. Each has a window to himself; and now the Battery
begins to rouse a little, slowly, and, clearly with a will against
it. But he hears some bells far up the city, and there enters
at his upper gate ; first faint sign of coming life ! a little man,
quite a little man, with a cane, and gaiters and small whiskers,
evidently out of health all round, who creeps along the railing
by the water; ah, how his constitution pines for salt! and gets
to a bench half way along, and there stops to smell the sea.
After him, a couple of stouter gentlemen, in gaiters too, and
checkered pantaloons, arm in arm, up and down with rapid
pace, taking in the fresh air, and using it as a delicate steam to
keep them in this good motion. Then an old gentleman, ques-
tionable as to legs, wheeled in, in a red sulky, by a servant, and


SUNDAY.]
39
THE LITTLE MANHATTAN.
run up and down briskly for ten minutes or so, and then left by
the servant, with his face towards the water, looking quite com-
fortable, but a little out of breath. Several other whiskered
gentlemen hurrying in, a drove of them, and getting under way
very promptly, and losing no time on the course.
That Battery ; near as you may think it; was a great way
off to Big Abel and Lankey that day: and it was by slow de-
grees alone they ever reached it. Beginning with a look out
taken at the windows, sleepily and at full length, by both ; then,
after a long while, chairs in the little balcony (he was getting
nearer, clearly); then a descent to the ground, a long pause in
the door-way, taking minutes idly of the people going up and
down; with a very confused notion, however, of their number
and destination ; an actual passage of the street, opening of the
gate, and inside they are! Not so fast, either. When the gate
is closed behind them, they stop to take in the Battery for him-
self; all round, up and down. Well : that's quite to their
mind. Then a little way up the right walk, to see what comes
of that part (this is lazy work for you, Big Abel, with your iron
Safe at home; and Lankey—but Little Manhattan, I believe,
is in a dream or maze, and Big Abel has caught it of him);
a turn back again, over toward the water; against the rail,
looking into that element, after an idle sort, and not making
much out of it either. Then sitting on a bench, under a broad
tree, at about the Battery's heart, the better part of an hour;
perhaps two, or three ; for time doesn't count with them to-day.
People pass quietly about them; there are more now; the fast
walkers have all gone away, and everybody takes the day for
what he finds him.
And a lazy summer's day was that (as you have found by
this time); so lazy and sleepy in his look, the wonder is that
he got abroad at all, and hadn't lain behind the clouds for ever.
There was the old fort, sitting as settled and solid on his base
as if he'd never speak a word again, though twenty thousand


40
[CHAP. V.
BIG ABEL, AND
British ships should run their beaks directly in his face; and
far away other forts on Governor's Island, and Bedloe's, and
Gibbet’s, quite as sleepy as he. And farther still, high in the
soft haze, Staten Island dozing as though he belonged to another
world, beyond the cares and tribulation of this; and the soft,
broad, slumibrous Bay, stretching like an idle Leviathan off
toward the · Narrows. "Nearer by, Jersey City, low-lying and
humbled under the rule of a single great chimney that peers
about, high up in the air, as if he were specially delegated to
stretch his neck for a view of New York. And on the other
hand, Gowanus, moving lazily along the road toward Bath and
Rockaway. S
And how bore the old Battery this far-and-wide repose ?
Settled in the midst of it like a smooth-backed duck in
the water! He held his breath and listened for the Bay
to speak, and the ships, and the islands. The great trees;
not a whisper from them! The grass ; not the rustling of a
blade! And up and down the paths there moved stout old
gentlemen, and thin young gentlemen with canes under their
arms, and masters and 'prentices, and shop-keepers and shop-
boys, throngs of them; and, the very Spirit of the whole thing,
there went along, close to the railing, as near the water as he
could, an old sea-dog of a grizzled captain, who snuffed the salt
air and caught a flavor of the oakum and the tar that lingers
round about, and seemed to hush within himself the thousand
storms he knew of, off Bahamas and the Capes, and down the hot
Gulf Stream. There was a packet-captain for you! Not a word
of the sea, nor of fine company on ship-board, nor wrecks, nor
great north-westerners, nor strange appearances far from shore,
nor spouting whales, cutting voyages, men overboard. But all
about a little. plot of ground, he mentioned, in Westchester : a
few acres only: the soil was good, the plough went always
twenty inches in the mould ; sufficient for a horse and cow. So
much for land. The house (this was his vision of a house),


SUNDAY.]
THE LITTLE MANHATTAN.
red-roofed, one-storied, with a dainty balcony before (for
smokers in long summer afternoons); à grassy green; some
sea-thought there, no doubt! and then, roving there, as easy
and as kind and soft in glossy beauty for the eye to dwell on as :
the summer's day itself, a smooth, snug, cobby horse. Not far
off, a gig; at rest now; but out upon the road once with that
cobby horse, they'll play the mischief all the country round !
And, as for drivers, where's to match that grizzled seaman
with his cunning hand! Climbing far away the winding roads ;
there are such roads there; they get, a truth to tell, a look-out
to the sea. Ah, there it is again, old sea-dog ; all the salt is in
you still, and keeps fresh that stormy heart, though beating in :
the very bloom of silent fields !
The Packet-Captain took Big Abel by the hand as he passed,
and was asked to the old Banking-House. Nothing better for
him than a walk the city's length. He'd bring his telescope
along. Very good, Mr. Captain. You shall have a welcome,
with a jolly company !
Big Abel and Lankey had no thought of going in-doors to
dinner, but made their meal at a stand at the east gate. Quite
a number were doing the same thing. And about this time
there came a pause, when the Battery was clear of everybody
but Lankey and Big Abel, who loitered up and down the ways;
and getting towards the lower side, looked off into the great
business streets. How still they were! The stillness, too, of
mere idiots and fools, with no business in the world whatever :
you laughed at them they seemed so simple-witted and purpose-
less, on this quiet Sabbath-day; and all their properties partook
of this. The boxes lying there, heaped on each other, sheer
absurdities! the hogsheads, great-bodied nothings! and as for
the coils of chain, they lay so heavy on the ground you would have
thought no soul nor circumstance nor chance could ever, by
possibility, put the breath of life in them again. And the great
stores stood there, long-sided gawkies, looking about as though


BIG ABEL, AND
[CHAP. V.
themselves. An old patron of these entertainments gave it
as his opinion (he had seen it burned to the ground nine-and-
twenty times during the season), that Moscow would not be
fired that night. He took occasion to remind them—they were
at a point of expectation where it was hard to bring it home to
them—that this was Sunday night. As for the rockets, they
saw how softly they went up: but as for Moscow that would
never do, and they'd better make up their minds to it. After a
time they came to the steady patron's view of the matter : the
twinkling haze of the Garden-lamps fell down : the Garden
grew dark and gloomy, taking his station for the night in a
settled melancholy way, and the crowd went off, without even a
cheer in behalf of the spirited proprietors.
A foolish crowd! For by the time they had got well away,
there crept over the water from down the Bay, a sound, with
music in it; faint at first, then rising, rising, and coming on
towards the green old Battery, that Lankey Fogle seemed to
hear the voices of another land, and deluded himself for a little
while with the belief that the islands, showing now like shadows
in the far-off water, had gone from this, and were the mansions,
in another world, of spirits akin to his. A boat moved through
the distance, not far from these, plashing with her wheel as
gently as she could ; and in her breast she seemed to bear the
magic harmony that troubled Lankey so. A singing-school
made nest within her decks; and that it was that on this peace-
ful evening blessed the waters with the shower of cheerful notes
they scattered as the wheel went round.
A pause now! And now again it springs afresh, that tuneful
tempest on the Bay, bearing into the heart of lonesome night
such sounds, that he must grow like day, and smile at thinking
that so sweet a comfort may be his! And now it has gone away
so far, no mortal ear from shore may follow it. ' Nothing comes
to fill this dreary blank, which seems to hold the very world.
What was the Little Manhattan claiming, that he sate so


SUNDAY.] THE LITTLE MANHATTAN.
45
silent? Was it the Bay—the Islands—the Battery himself,
perhaps ? He kept his eye long fixed upon a spot toward the
point, and there sprung up after a while to his fancy, in its
visionary way, a red blaze; and, gathering round it, in its dusky
light, there sate a score of men who seemed to have come out
of the darkness, and brought a tinge of it upon their cheeks,
and in their soft black eyes and sombre brows. They inclined
their eyes upon the ground; or, lifting them, peered within the
blaze.
Big Abel felt how it was going with poor Lankey's heart.
“ This is yours, of course!” he said. “And must be yours
for ever. No street shall cross : no shop shall sit upon this
ground. The trees are speaking for you, Lankey ; and are
always telling Heaven of the council-fires that used to burnish
up their leaves. Yours, Lankey ; yours for ever !”
The Little Manhattan smiled at that; the bay-girt Battery
thus made forever Lankey Fogle's Ground; and rising up, they
made for rest.


BIG ABEL, AND
[CHAP. VI.
CHAPTER VI.
The City at his Crimes; the Little Manhattan and Big Abel still busy.
The city wide awake again! Nimble, serpent-eyed, fresh,
· how he bears his crest this Monday morning, as though he had
got back somehow to his prime, without a thought of all his
cares and crosses and riots! Clear and wide awake! Every.
body abroad, with a new face born of Sunday! Everybody
with a sprightly good-morrow! Everybody at a higher rate of
speed ! People coming in from the Islands, from Jersey, from
down the Bay, ripe for new traffic on the keenest edge! The
cartmen hurrying to the wharves in clean frocks; collars even,
snow-white, twinkling among the whiskers of omnibus-drivers !
“Up Broadway ? Right-up! Right-up !" This was the
cry, passing the Bowling-Green.
Presently a gouty old gentleman, from one of the hotels, is
got in.
“Up Broadway ? Right-up! Right-up!"
How the great square stage rolls about, like a heavy fellow
as he is, upon his wheels. He's in no hurry—you may be sure
of that.
A confused grumbling in his bowels, and the gouty old gen-
tleman seen, through the windows, to be growing red in the face.
A voice down the money-hole, and silence; followed by a mo-
tion, on the part of the stage, of six paces; a pause ; and still
the cry goes on-
“Right-up! Up Broadway! Right-up !"
Wall-street, now. Plenty pouring down, neat-dressed, trim-
whiskered, but none coming out; a fine full flow of smoothly.
-
-


MONDAY.]
47
THE LITTLE MANHATTAN.
shaven, well broad-clothed, sprightly gentlemen as eye can
light upon. Not frightful, and blood-seeking, and cruel-eyed
as the story goes out of doors; but nice, comfortable persons,
as ready for a good turn, when their hand is in, as though their
business lay in Rose-street, where the Quakers live!
Big Abel and Lankey came to a pause here, too, and pitched
their eye against the very head of the street. "Big Abel saw
rising there a massy house, stone upon stone, high in the air,
with carvings and crosses, and doors and niches. The Little
Manhattan, not one of these ; but a great mound of earth swell.
ing in the sun, green at the top, and prouder, in his rugged
look, than the massy house itself. Big Abel looked upon New
Trinity: the old earth that stood there, many a year before, as
high as he, that was what Lankey (wicked Lankey!) saw.
The cheerful chirrup of the drivers still kept up; the
pale, quick men, whose fingers change all to gold they touch,
still poured down the street. The flood of porters, clerks, and
masters, increased and deepened as they went on; but, a little
further on, the stream was ruffled with a sudden cry, and there
came tearing through it, as for life or death, a line of ragged
boys. With what watchful faces everybody listened : with
eager hands clutched out from underneath the arms of these,
the sheets they bore: and on they sped, more furious' in their
cry as they neared Wall-street.
Extra Sun! Extra Tribune! Extra Herald !
The Great Western steamship was in, of a Sunday (always
of a Sunday !); and the news-boys laid themselves out in a big
hour's work to make it known.
Barnum's now ; Barnum's Museum, with the Giant, full-
length upon his canvass, going to take the dwarf: you see the
little fellow quite well if you carry a spy-glass : by way of a
pinch of snuff. The band hard at work in the balcony; that
patriotic band, whose wind will blow nothing but “ Hail Colum-
bia" and " The Star-Spangled Flag" for a hundred years, if


BIG ABEL, AND
[CHAP. VI.
they hold out so long. The moose, the elk, the buffalo; these
were all up stairs; almost as good as life.
Barnum's was Lankey's—that was clear!
Then there rolled past the fork of the Park, in a good deal of
dust which it was at the pains to raise for itself, by help of two
great coach-horses, fed up to the last oat, a carriage all in blue,
a crown all of gold (no doubt some near kinsman of good
Queen Victoria within !) upon the panel, a couple of live boys
holding on behind, in blue too. Lankey Fogle was taken
strongly with the paint, although he had a notion that pure red ;
as being more according to his honest Indian taste; would have
been a shade or two nearer the thing. Big Abel-a strange
fellow, he! burst out with a laugh so quick, so hearty and tem-
pestuous, one would have thought dashing against its side it
must have shattered blue-coach all to naught, but blue-coach
rolled away, and Big Abel, with Lankey, recollecting dinner,
stepped back a square or two, and were at a door where, at
this hour, a broad stream of busy-looking men poured in and
out, without a pause.
And well they might! There was a Saloon for you!
Where the eagle that spreads his wings above it, whets his beak
every morning (it is said) upon a carving-knife ; where flags fly
at the house-top to make known to all the town about that Dinner's
ready ; where, without end, along the floor small tables stand and
call for company, with salt-cellar, pepper-box, and black-bottle,
with his quill, for pepper-sauce (or some such thing); where
young gentlemen, all alike as twins, in white jackets and aprons
(white once, it is said, and since the Flood), run to and fro, in
answer to a hubbub on every side, from every one and all at
once, interpretable by them alone ; where strange dishes float
along the air, sometimes a bowl, steaming high with nothing to
prompt him, inside ; then a yellow ball (pudding, it is said)
upon a plate; then a cup, with a faded spoon upright therein,
waxing sadder day by day, till some day or other he will go off,


50
[CHAP. vi.
BIG ABEL, AND
up town, where they had set themselves in an attitude, proceed.
ed now at the gentlemanliest pace in the world ; tapping the
ground daintily with the point of a light stick; ranging their
eyes about in a smooth semi-circle; or greeting, occasionally,
the blue sky overhead, with a look of complacent regard.
A better gentleman, in his way, by far, than these ; with
twenty tricks, to one of all Park Row; who is it now that shows
himself? A bubbling smack, as when a genial cork is drawn;
then out of water with his smooth bald head, the Fountain !
Coming slowly out—not tired, not he, with eight-and-thirty miles
of travel on this hot summer's day; but modest, and proud, too,
for he knows his worth. Now another spring, and head and
shoulders out. Now-how swift he grows—tall as any alder-
· man: now as Barnum's Giant, there : and now a grenadier,
his feather flying high, beyond all mortal measurement! He's
not on the treadmill, I am sure, for any sins of his; but how
he seems to climb the air. And what a frizzled pate he shakes
to every passer-by, beyond the rail! He has their confidence,
each man's; and whispers something to him, going up or down
the street. Be of good heart! Be of good heart! He always
says that; this cheerful, unfeed city Counsellor.
“A good thing for health,” Big Abel says, “ to have such
fountains at the city's core.”
But Lankey thinks of dark old trees; of shadowy deer be.
tween; and cataracts falling, falling, not ascending like this
idle youngster here, down the air. The Park is his, though
railed with twenty tons of iron ; a hunting-ground of old ; and
Lankey's eyes are wild and far away, pursuing game about its
walks.
Big Abel seizes on all the squares of houses round about, as
before, preferring them by great odds to trees.
There were two looking at the fountain beside Big Abel and
Lankey ; looking at it keenly ; reading it to the very heart;
following it with their eyes up and down again ; up, always


MONDAY.]
THE LITTLE MANHATTAN.
with a hope ; and down with something, why was this ? some-
thing of a sinking spirit.
The Poor Scholar and his mistress! There by accident, or
by choice ? By accident, no doubt; and when their eyes glanc-
ed once past the leaping stream, they smile, by chance again ;
and then when they meet, why does Mary chirrup so ?
“I'm sure of you, now !” she said, at once. Sure of what ?
“ There it is !!
Mary listened; it was a little while before she could make
anything out of a news-boy uproar which raged about the fork
of the Park, and spread itself on either hand through the two
great thoroughfares.
“ That's not it!"
“Why-yes it is-step, a little way, from the fountain, and
you won't fail to make it out!”
“I do make it out; but it's not your book !"
“Bless you! Had you that in your head. How could you
have that in your head ? No, to be sure—that's a great book
just come in from—”.
“ Not from England, again !”
“No, no. This is from France; by a very great writer.
What hearts must beat in men, in those elder lands, where great
books grow like precious weeds !"
“ And perish, too!” How scornful Mary was in saying that.
“Don't say that! I feel that I am but—".
It wouldn't be easy to state nicely what the Poor Scholar's
feeling was, for at that moment there was a horrible outcry
with the news-boys, a fresh detachment having broken out by
way of Ann-street; and what with this, and the altogether
gratuitous dinner-summons at the hotel over the way, there was
nothing left for the Poor Scholar and his mistress but to hang
their heads and take their way, whithersoever they would, in
silence.
Full to the door the stages all went by, now; rolling off on


59
[CHAP. VI.
BIG ABEL, AND
either hand, as fast as they could ; clambering the far declivi-
ties, toward a world of dust which they pierced, like so many
toiling bugs, and disappeared. And yet the old City Hall stood
there, elbowing Broadway on one hand, and on the other nudg-
ing the Records' Office, to bring him books and papers (for
a claim of title that's always going on within), with all his
might and main. Sleep or banquet as all others will, he's wide
awake, at least, and will not go to dinner till somewhere to-
ward midnight. Lawyers—a great many of them knew Big
Abel and Lankey, and smiled sideways on them as they
passed-climbing in, with clients at their heels; officers; wit.
nesses, jaded and worn down, coming out; a pale clerk toiling
up with two arms-full of law.calf-bound books, making such a
face over them, as no doubt the suitors will when, one day, they
come to eye the costs; and, by and by, crossing the Park, towards
a small court beyond, a little old man, withered with breathing
many a year the close air of the ward courts. He was grizzled,
and wrinkle-eyed, and bent—not with carrying too many cases,
I will warrant !—and wore his coat buttoned by way of waist-
coat. This gentleman would have undertaken Lankey Fogle's
suit, but he hadn't the seven-and-sixpence wherewith to pay the
opening fees. A few words passed with him and Lankey, and
he was asked to come to the entertainment.
Spreading his hand upon his breast in act of executing a sort
of gentlemen-of-the-jury cough he had, he said he would; by
all means; and went away very feebly to the small court.
They were now setting toward the Tombs, and passed on their
way a rusty, full-chopped fellow, in charge of an officer, whose
story it was, over and over again—as he was borne along-that
a man, unknown to him, had met him in a certain street, and
placed the little bits of hardware, in question as of a larceny, .
in his hands. The officer, when he had told this a dozen times or
so, turned his eye upon him; and the great fellow turned his,
but not quite so boldly, too. All in the eye. That was all that


MONDAY.]
X
THE LITTLE MANHATTAN.
passed, and they went on after that with a better understanding.
The shadow of a cloud was flying up the city, leaping streets,
houses, steeples, every barrier that man builds to make secure
community ; but not swifter than the spirit of a man they led
in irons toward the Tombs, hurried on to where no shadow of
his should ever fall upon the sunny street again.
Another officer came in from a bye-way. That was a wicked
devil he had in charge-make up your mind to that. A mur.
derer ? Why, no. A wronger of orphans in their pale and
tender youth? Not that either. A cutter to the quick of
honest fame? I can't say that. Suspected—that's all. A
wicked devil, you see. His coat shows that, by its thin, shiver-
ing way of sitting about the shoulders. His spindle limbs that
just keep him up; his face, colored with no memory of a suffi-
cient meal, even a long way off. Suspected ? Who better or
more than he ? Of all the men that run or walk or ride within
the city bounds, he is the guiltiest-suspected wretch. Thrust
him in a cell: the ground must be damp: on bread and water;
where rats, if any are to be had thereabout, may have free
resort to him; and in a few days—a very few days—Suspicion,
at a touch almost, will become fearful certainty. He will be
dead! Lawgivers and magistrates-you know-he will be
dead!
Big Abel would have passed the Tombs, in something of a
hurry, I believe; but the Little Manhattan, from a whim he
had, halted and went in.
The Sessions were packed close that afternoon. It was a case
of life and death, or near that, that was up; or meant to be. .
But it had very little chance just then, for the two lawyers were
setting to at each other over a reporter's table; the three judges
were on their feet, on the bench, bending down to appease the
fray; the clerk had put his hat on in the confusion; and all
the officers of the court, busy as they could be, thrusting their
staves at the combatants. This was at its height when Lankey


MONDAY.]
55
THE LITTLE MANHATTAN.
and who shook the house every time he winked. His bob-tailed
coat, when he turned about, was too much for several gentle-
men in the first tier, and they went out and came back regularly
as long as he kept doing it.
To close the day, they resorted to a refectory, hard by: a
spruce, elegant, fashionable, that's-your-sorts, refectory : where
they were allowed, at tip-top prices, to embower themselves in
a genteel stall, and to be shut in by gorgeous blue curtains, in
company with a castor all of silver; when there came to them,
at tip-top prices, a gentlemanly man of a mulatto aspect, who
was good enough (still on the same terms) to request their plea-
sure ; which, being known, he returned presently at tip-top
speed, to answer to the prices, with a dish of birds (quails, he
called them; that was the dialect of the place), very much
crisped up, very much be-saged and be-seasoned and be-condi-
mented; and the quails flew away presently—for there was a
good appetite between them-tip-top, from the first moment to
the last. Then wine of the same family. Then the genteel
stall fell in and lost compass, and was altogether too narrow for
Big Abel and Lankey, who, putting their heads forth from time
to time, made discovery of numbers of elegant young gentle-
men coming in, bringing with them little black smutches upon
the lip, and cocked hats, and small canes, which all together
proceeded to a white marble bar, and were impertinent. But,
still, at tip-top prices, everything being allowed, on these terms,
at that shop.
Neither Lankey Fogle nor Big Abel went out, as you may
guess, to find lodgings that night, but made the best of the
refectory, picking out a downy spot, and dreaming, one of them,
all night long of a hideous man (the civilest man in the world !)
with a bill, bearing a strong family likeness to the silent man in
the bar.


TUESDAY.)
57
THE LITTLE MANHATTAN.
and arm-as though they stood in the very glow and focus of
some fiery furnace that blared in the neighborhood, and would
in due time, perhaps, have them for creatures of his hungry
element. Yet women still (the men no longer men !); for who
ever looked upon them kindly—not in bending pride, but pure,
true love of heart—they did not make it known to him there
lived in every ruin of them all a woman still ? Black, portly,
little jugs in the windows now. Two or three men sallying
forth, one of these was black, with round rings in his ears; a little
fellow in a door-way, with uncombed hair, in his bare feet,
one trouser's leg hoisted, one arm in his pocket, the other
swinging by its loops a boot. And they stood at the Points, the
very Five ; and when they looked back, they saw how on the
crown they had come down from, a waggon, passing, stood out,
so high it was above this flat, in every spoke and line of har.
ness and button almost of the driver's coat, against the sky.
At the Five Points; for, toward the spot they stood upon,
opposite the little park, Cross-street came down his hill with a
sharp, quick trot, bringing a great church with him, some scaly
tenements of brick, and some of wood, these being shaken no
little by the way; and Anthony, with a long rolling gallop,
which gave his houses more leisure to keep their place (but
they were all tipsy, and none the better for his considerate
speed); and Orange-street creeping lazily along the mud, taking
his own time too, and miring himself dreadfully by the way.
And there you had the Points! Who claims them now?
Lankey, looking off, espied swinging at his ease, as if he felt
the torture not the least, a tawny Indian on a sign, with a store
of herbs at the window just under his nose, for him to cheer
himself with at glaring noon-time; standing out with his bow in
hand, an end touching the ground, as calmly as you please. And
then he recollects that once in this hollow was kept a famous
Indian revel, with dances wild and strange, outcries through all
the moonlight night, and many games, where the rough hand


58
[CHAP. VII.
BIG ABEL, AND
bore the sway. Lankey's it was, no doubt; and still his title
holds, for still that revel rules the spot, although the dark faces
are all in the ground, and the white above it. Big Abel, seek.
ing privilege of Lankey Fogle first, looking sternly on the little
park, there at its very heart; for the souls' sake of the poor
wretches swarming round it, ordered, it is said, a chapel there,
but I guess nobody heard him, for the chapel isn't there to this
day.
The Little Manhattan, for himself, thought the Points might
yet go back to the swamp they grew from—how his dark, sleepy
eye lighted up at that !—and that fixed his claim like iron.
And now the rain fell finely; pattering and splashing, spout-
ing from the gutters, settling in pools, and having everything
his own way with these; but then nobody went in doors, or
stopped business, or hurried in their talk. It was as com-
fortable as heart could wish-the good understanding of the
shower and the Points. There was one, an unshaven man,
standing in a cellar-way, one step down, who seemed to think it
the best thing the shower could do, to pour away (this, it should
be known, was a gentleman that entertained a mean opinion of
mankind as well, oysters being out of season); and he curled
his lip and looked upon the pattering pools with quite a sullen
eye.
There was a man, too, in a glazed hat and roundabout,
who crossed the Points at the head of a vagabond black
horse ; having given him the reins upon his back to carry for
himself; with a low cart, heaped in a corner with glossy wet
apples, whistling a martial air which he had imported on ship-
board, from the southern country; being a sailor once on a
time ; making a pleasure of the drizzling shower and the wet
middle of the street.
Passing on, they came to the Sign, where they found standing
at the door, a sort of gentle twin to the chieftain, a meek man,
the Indian doctor himself, with less of dusk in his aspect, less of


TUESDAY.]
THE LITTLE MANHATTAN.
autumn in his slumbrous eyes, than the Little Manhattan, by
far. This was a friend of Lankey's; and being bidden to the
Thursday evening's entertainment, promised to be there (hav-
ing a patient, an aged lady, of a nervous turn, in that neigh-
borhood, whom he was carrying, softly, through a course of
herbs, with great advantage, he thought).
From the hill-top toward the east, there rose a sound the
sweetest in all nature's many melodies, save one, of little
voices, children's voices, in farewell of their day's tasks; sup-
pliant, tiny, clear as thoughts that know no taint of earth, and
floating out at the windows over that dark valley of the Points,
they seemed to bear a blessing that made it less dreary to the
eye. And all the wonder is they do not, by a heavenly magic
in them, raise these sad creatures to be Blest Spirits, and leave
the darkling path they walk, for ever.
As they climbed the street now, they came upon little Neddy
Mellish (that was the little white-boy's name) again, at the
corner; his hands in his pocket, a green school-bag over his
shoulder; looking about, from minute to minute, through the
street the other way. .
Little Neddy Mellish was not at ease, that was clear. What
was he lingering for in that strange way? 'They passed a little
farther on—Big Abel and Lankey-and when, presently, they
came to the Public School ; the nest of all these happy voices;
they were overpowered by two streams of boys that poured out
of the two gates, and nearly took them off their feet. It was
Public School No. 7, and all black; all but the teeth and the
wide-awake eyes, and they flashed as so many ripples or
whirlpools in the current. They shook their ears in the rain,
and spread themselves through the streets all about, coloring
them with a dingy streak as far as the eye could follow. Wild
laughers, and boisterous as the wind that whistled in the school-
house eaves, all ! till one came, slower than the rest, and about
him there fell a silence. They couldn't have much heart for


TUESDAY.]
61
THE LITTLE MANHATTAN.
Was ever a Poor Scholar's mistress in such spirits before !
And then the way in which she took possession of the bower;
if the green chair had been of solid gold she couldn't have
treated it more grandly. Three raps of the knuckles, and
there was a banquet—not much of a one, to be sure—but what
of that! William had something to say, that was clear; but
such spirits as Mary's—why the stoutest man living would have
quailed before them, much less a poor scholar.
“ The Book's to be printed, Will? I believe you admit that
at last !"
“To be sure it is—they've accepted it.”
“ A happy time of it for the printers, now! turning all your
gentle fancies out upon the page; making your mirth laugh, your
sorrow weep; your little men and women grow again in light,
and take a shape to every human eye, all the wide world over!
Oh what dreams they'll have the first night. They'll not sleep
a wink, I fear, with thinking all your magic over !"
Foolish Mary !
“ And then the binder's girls, who have the folding of them
daintily! Many a clipping of wages will they lose this very
week, lingering, as they should not, naughtily about that wicked
Book !"
Mary, too fanciful by half.
“Tuesday, now! By Friday, at the latest, that little bright-
eyed, clean-apparelled gentleman (your Book, I mean, Will)
must come down stairs, and begin to see company! Oh for the
first look at his sweet and cheerful face !"
In the young Scholar's heart that was settled long ago.
“The show-bills, now! All over town, speaking up, with
fresh, clean looks! Coaxing every one to stop and read !
Every one to hurry in and buy! and then away to taste the
dainty to his core !"
Was there ever such a foolish, thoughtless mistress to a Poor
Scholar, all the world over ?


BIG ABEL, AND
[CHAP. VII.
She stopped, and looked at Will as though she saw a Blessed
Spirit, stepped out from the sun, and not a mortal man. But
he was very pale, and still had something to say, and now could
say it.
“You forget Germany, Mary!” That was what he had to
say.
No: she didn't. She recollected it perfectly well; it was
in all the maps, upon the globes, and hung up in the windows.
But in this connexion she didn't recollect it, she confessed.
What was Germany to this ?
She hadn't heard of a famous Rendering or Translation out of
that country, that was talked about, a mighty book, with such a
power of chains, by way of binding up and riveting the
reader; such a thrilling, enchanting, wonderful and miraculous
book ? Strange, she hadn't heard of that! That was the Book !
What, to come betwixt this Book of William's and the light
of day ?
William was pale, I said, and Mary now, too. Had those men
who played these changeful tricks stood there, or sate within
that bower, they must have been torn piece-meal, limb by limb,
by little angry devils, leaping out of Mary's eyes, a score at
once, and many score !
When they had got forth, Big Abel and Lankey (how
Poor William and his mistress got away, heaven, whence it
came from, knows !), the shower was deepening, and they made
quickly for a house not far away. And there it was. That
little, tidy, shining palace; palace it is in all the spirit within ;
of brick; sitting by itself, in cleanliness and purity, and through
all the falling rain eyeing calmly all passers-by with his little
winking knob and bell-pull. .
At home? The ladies of this mansion are always at home,
and have been any time these fifty years. A snug parlor,
everything tidy, everything in a high state of polish, everything
demure and settled calmly in his place. The plaster-rabbits


TUESDAY
63
THE LITTLE MANHATTAN.
on the mantel, not zoologically perfect, inasmuch as the necks
are movable, and have no visible appurtenance to the bodies;
and yet, to the mind, all that could be reasonably expected
of rabbits under such circumstances. A little door is slided
open, and out of a back room a nice, comfortable, smiling body-
Seventy! Yes; this was the youngest of the two maiden sisters,
Big Abel's friends, living here. Pretty good, for Seventy!
Cheerful, quick of speech and gait, and cordial, too, as the days
of hearty June are long. Another appearance out of the back
room-Eighty! Not so tall, nor quite so stout, but more
cheerful, quicker of motion, decidedly more cordial. There
was a great shaking of hands, I tell you, there! No difference
made between fair-looking Abel and the swarthy Lankey-not
the least! Talk! Plenty of it; and after that there came, out
of the back room, too, a little square table, which was suddenly
clothed (by Eighty) with a snowy cloth, and put in possession
(by Seventy) of a little family of cups and saucers, then of a
dainty pile of toast, then of a cold ham, then of a steaming
pot, and the little table was set up in the world, and ready to do
business. .
The two sisters and Big Abel had the table to themselves, the
Little Manhattan declining tea, being furnished out of a closet
with a small bag of delicate Indian corn, his hat thrown off,
and shoes, sate with his bare feet on the red brick hearth, and
by aid of a brazier, with a furnace, parched it to his heart's
content.
Then when the tea was fairly flowing, the toast a-wing, what
stories they had to tell of this shrewd city's early day, how
small he was. (How out of his dusky corner, like an ember,
glowed Lankey Fogle's eye at this !)
Seventy had to tell of that old Negro Plot, when all the
blackness of the city roused, and like an angry tempest rising from
the earth-not now, from heaven !-threatened every life. Then,
that other, of the Doctor's Riot. It was clear that in the Little


64
CHAP. VII.
BIG ABEL, AND
Manhattan's heart there grew a thought or wish that riot even
yet—the city not grown too great for him—might strangle
him one day, and make it all his lair. Then of huge fires that
came upon him in his youth, and singed him to the ground like
straw.
The longest tales were Seventy's, by far. Eighty's were the
best, for memory in her was a quick furnace-light in which all
these past old things lived, like sacred children, moving there in
brighter glow, and losing not a hair of all their precious heads.
And now to-bed; up-stairs, with candles, one to lead and one
to follow, they wait on Lankey and Big Abel. Tidy chambers,
and in half a minute Big Abel sound asleep. But still the rain
kept pattering down, and stirred poor Lankey's Indian heart
with strange effect. In this humor, as he lay awake, he heard
in a far-off street the doleful cry from some late-tarrying man,
“Oysters !”—on a wet drizzly summer's night the melancholiest
sound,-delivered to his ear as though it was sung in a far-off
world.
Then, as Lankey thought of turbulent rivers, swelled by this
heavy fall of rain, and the roar of the angry Bay stretching
far out to sea, there sprung upon the air, from down the dreary
hollow they had rambled through that day, a quick, sharp cry
for life; a woman's voice; a fearful cry for dead midnight !
Lankey was troubled. He could not sleep; and going to the
window, he bent himself upon his hands, and looked abroad.
While yet his eyes glowed strangely upon the dark, there came
gliding along a woman's shape, with hair streaming back with
the little light that was abroad from lamps about, and eyes glis-
tening-wet with sadness or joy too great to keep its fountain in
the heart. Ah, what a cry shot up just then against the sky!
She spread her hands. There was no one near to see her, save
Lankey, none besides, nor far away; all the wide city's eyes
were shut; and she possessed the night alone, with sorrow, for
another night, within her breast. For ever so! The keenest


TUESDAY.]
65
THE LITTLE MANHATTAN.
hurts, the deadliest wrongs life lays on human souls, have
none, save God and the poor heart, to know of them!
Following this dim figure through the perilous night along
the winding way, the Little Manhattan called to mind how
once an ancient path that led into the hills ran there before
it, and how in sadness deep as this the dusky maiden took her
way, so long ago, up towards the calm, blue heaven, and sought
to soothe her spirit with the silence of the woods, the sight of
stars, and whispering of the winds of night!
When he sought sleep again, he had a troubled dream in
which, by some strange magic in his thoughts, the city passed
back out of all his squares and streets and stony flats into his
fresh, fair, lovely island-youth ; of hill, stream, valley, wood.
Ah, how he pined to have them by the hand, his kinsmen, as he
saw them now, silent in the lodge, or swift at chase, or shining
from the ruddy fight! But morning came, and took them all
away.
6


66
(CHAP. VIII.
BIG ABEL, AND
CHAPTER VIII.
Big Abel and the Little Manhattan busy as ever : the City in his Working
Jacket.
Up with the light; and forth before the two good sisters could
know it, they crossed the city; tarrying for breakfast by the
way; and entered a long, winding, narrow way (Pearl street,
I guess), choked with bald, high-headed stores--that kept
tumbling great square boxes out, as though they had a hundred
hands a.piece: or swallowing them with throats that gulped
them up, like giants. (Big Abel, as they went along, kept seizing
up stores, streets, squares, by the score.) Men hurrying up
and down: some reading signs to help them on their journey ;
others dashing in and out as though they had the whole
street at their fingers' ends. Then, at about one o'clock
of the day, the street gave a great roar; this was the
Auction-Stores going off into a large sale, with a number of
deep-chested gentlemen to encourage them by shouting at the
top of their lungs; and how he packed 'em, close and hot and
plenty of 'em, up-town merchants, and country merchants, and
Brooklyn merchants, and Jersey City merchants; the sight of
a green vine at the back window was decidedly refreshing :
and if that breeze, that was idling his time away with a
church-vane, had only looked in, he'd have been received with
a cheer, I know. Then, from time to time, as noon was turning
down towards three; young gentlemen in shoals, coming abroad
with flying skirts, and rushing to and fro, with soiled leather-
books crushed in the hand ; and then, again, a portly man, this
was the silent partner, no doubt, coming out from a very thrifty


68
[CHAP. VIII.
.
BIG ABEL, AND
sloop, perogue, long-boat, cock-boat, jolly-boat; English,
French, Dutch, Russian, Norwegian, Kamschatkan—I'm ready.
I've looked into the matter a little, and know the state of this
harbor pretty well. There's a great variety of tonnage, I can
tell you; and you may lay as deep as you please without going
to China. Come along !" And then he cocks his eye toward
the Narrows, on a sharp lookout for more sail : and how he
rattles his cordage and waves his streamers when a spanking
wind comes in! All the ships in harbor with their noisy can.
vass talking at once; and he listening to every one ; and under-
standing them all. Now they're still again! And the old
Street, as he measures himself in the river before him, takes
on a grave and earnest look, with such a weight of thought
about his head and ears, it makes one tremble almost to look at
him! Just then he lets out from one of his sumptuous houses,
a smooth man, of a wholesome and a hearty look,with a touch or
two of care about the eye when he looks on the water : alto-
gether a very pleasant and well-seeming gentleman ; who comes
to where Big Abel (who has seized the shipping to half a ton,
with a boastful reference, I can tell you, to old Captain Hudson,
who first of all the many ships lay in this port, you know), and
Lankey stand: a South street merchant of the highest grade ;
a tip-top merchant of South street; and better than that, an old
friend of Big Abel's.
“Well, Abel,” the South street merchant said : this was his
friendly way—“How goes the lawsuit ?'!
Big Abel smiled; and looked majestically about upon the
ships, the stores, the wharves.
“We've taken the matter into our own hands,” that was Big
Abel's answer. “ The Little Manhattan and I ; you see him
here, and are now dividing the property.”
The merchant being an upright and well-intentioned man,
was evidently pleased that it had been got along with so easily.
“We shall be through by to-morrow night; and then we


WEDNESDAY.]
69
THE LITTLE MANHATTAN.
wind up with a little celebration with our friends: You'll come,
will you not ? At the Old Banking-House ; you ’ll come ?"
The merchant knew the Old Banking-House well; he had
business there many a day gone by. He would come, certainly,
with great pleasure : and shaking Big Abel and Lankey warmly
by the hand, he went away to help in naming a bran-new ship,
just put in water. But Lankey Fogle and Big Able tarry-
ing still about the spot, espied, standing out upon a pier-head,
a figure; that drew their look upon him as though he had been
a beacon-light. Comely and young, and fair; but pale as
water at his greatest trouble: standing there, his hair in motion
by the wind—that grew now to a gale—as conscious more of
something far away and suffering, than of the cheerful vessels
safely harbored round him.
Sometimes he cast his eyes upon the ground: and when, in
some other motion of his spirit, he looked up again, his eye flew
off with eager fearful speed to the far, endless fading of the
Narrows, toward the sea.
He was not one who feared a ship would never come : who
lingered long upon the farthest sky to see her smoke or sail
ascending. No, no; this was the Poor Scholar, who trembled
lest too happy speed in her should bring some fatal ship to blight
his hope ; bearing from far lands some other book to take the
place of his. She was not due ; but he leaped in spirit, through
the waves before her prow: and saw her cut the sea like light,
in speed no ship had ever made, could ever make. Oh, blame
him not ; that he in thought would cast a chain about her way,
and hold her back a day or so. Play other tunes than those
you pipe on now, good Wind, for that Poor Scholar's sake—two
days. A day is all he asks. Another day, and he will have
his little hope embarked; then come, as sharply as you will!
Good Wind-another day!
Going on, Big Abel and Lankey came to a street which op-
pressed them ; with mighty leaden hats; copper serpents coiling


BIG ABEL, AND
[CHAP. VIII.
about at the doors ; cauldrons ; bells; but chiefly stoves :
wherever the eye went, up or down, it was troubled with the
sight of cones, and squares, and columns, and pyramids, but all
with a trick in them, stoves. Patent too! To cook with, to
sleep with, to sit with, to travel with —you could do anything in
that street, in the way of stoves! And, if it should so come
about at night, when a few old fellows, rusty dogs, are left with-
out in the lonesome street, with no one to watch or check their
gambols (the young ones being all fast-locked in inside), what a
frolic and a tussle they must have among themselves—these
Patent Stoves! How they must, with all the wit that's in them,
fight and quarrel with each other for the upper hand! There's
high work, late at night, I'll warrant, in that street!
Now Big Abel, prompted by the striking of two o'clock at a
watchmaker's, recollected an Old House (a house of his:
having clearly the very heart and soul of the Old English
Captain in it) not far away. Trotting up a hilly street ; out
upon Franklin-Square ; and there he was. Old Walton House ! ,
Not quite so grand as when he had his scores of waiters pouring
in and out; liveried footmen mounting and dismounting at the
door ; fine gentlemen and fine ladies alighting or taking car.
riage; and that Great Man, whom all men love and honor, now,
walking the long garden down to the very river's edge. -
Not grandly: but soberly: and with a decent gravity as
conscious of what he was once. Not in so high a line of life
as then : for now he furnishes drinks at his bar; and sends out
stages (ignominious, this) to Oyster Bay, Cold Spring, and
Hempstead. And yet, through all, he carries the same old
front with his heavy eye-brows, iron-pitted doors, and a
knocker that speaks out in as high a key as ever. Here Big Abel
and Lankey sought to dine. There was no table spread in the
cellar, as is the usage in some houses: nor in the parlor: nor
the drawing-room: nor bed-room: nor garret: but going to the
great hall of the second floor, you found a goodly banquet


WEDNESDAY.)
71
THE LITTLE MANHATTAN.
stretched out: disdaining the rooms all about : up stairs and
below. What a company the Old House has to meals! As
though his sturdy old heart, by some magic in it, could draw
them out wherever they lurked, all through the city: whoever
has a touch of his quaint humor in them. These were old
men and old women; faded bachelors; faded spinsters; not in
one costume by any means: but all with a whim in their bear.
ing; and a trick in the fashion of a cap, or neck-cloth, or shoe-
buckle, or wristband—that told plainly enough these were the
Old House's friends; and that they stood by him to the last.
They knew the Little Manhattan and Big Abel well: this
strange old company: and gave place to them; and entertained
them, to the end of the feast, with ancient courtesy. In the
midst of an antic, hobnobbing or philandering, or some such
whim, Big Abel and the Little Manhattan took their leave; car.
rying their hats in hand till they reached the door.
Returning toward the river, they passed numbers of Bars or
lodging-houses: with green or yellow doors: with red curtains
sometimes in the windows, with tall pale bottles or small portly
glass decanters, crowned with lemons : sometimes a coil of
close tobacco in one corner: and, hanging at the door (this was
regular), a green parrot in a cage. The doors were all open ;
and about them stood women, chiefly in plain bombazine, with
some ribbon or other about the waist, and men, duck-trowsered,
in low tarpaulin hats. Big Abel's heart leaped up to these.
They all seemed to know him there, too; and well they might,
for, in the very midst of all, there stood upon a board, Henry
Hudson, the brave old navigator himself: couldn't you catch a
trick of Big Abel in his look and bearing?
Then the signs that swung above these Bars. Oftenest, a
maiden lady, in a new white gown, smiling: always smiling :
and leaning on an anchor, as though it had been a divan. And
about the Bars, keeping as close to them as they could, great
swarms of red-shirts, and pea-jackets, and glazed hats, at cor-


THURSI
73
THE LITTLE MANHATTAN.
CHAPTER IX.
They are in the Seventh Day; and where the City finds his Children.
When, at morning, Big Abel and the Little Manhattan set forth
from their lodging-house, there was a great turmoil of waggons
about the Ferry; a long, lazy man taking money at the gate,
at his leisure, with incidental pulls at a bell; an array of horses,
with their heads in the street, and their carts against the mar-
ket-a piebald range of heads: they were, in a word, entering
the wild and wonderful region of East Bowery; of which
Catharine-street makes the southern boundary, and the Great
Bowery the western line. People who live in the West and
the South have strange notions, I am told, of all this vicinage :
and have more than once made it over in fee to the Little Man-
hattan as a land of Savages. Dark rumors prevail as to the
diet, dress, and habitation of its denizens: children are seen
there—not sparely, too—and grown men and women. This is
the report: and when, from time to time, some wild, adventurous
Broadway gentleman takes cab, and allows himself to be carried
by a most desperate driver, thither: he comes back, it is said,
with hair on end, and talks in such a way of plain, simple-witted,
honest Republican folks, that listeners lift their hands on high,
and coming down, take toddies all around, and lifting them again,
find comfort in their horror. A perilous day was this, then, on
which Little Lankey and Big Abel now were bound: the last :
and when they looked along the street, the very air they saw
was red, and blue, and yellow, with long stripes shot from
housetop to walk, from windows to awning-posts, up out of cel.


74
[CHAP. IX.
BIG ABEL, AND
lars, and across the way: so that you would have said a devil's
darning-needle must have lost his wings in any attempt to fly
through. And yet through all there was a steady rush of butch-
ers' carts, lively and frisky as young lambs: and market-
wagons, driven up and down by strange old women, who were
tossed about, with their faded black bonnets tumbling about their
ears, in a manner you would suppose no old woman would ever
submit to: a constant scamper of people to the Ferry: shoppers,
cheapening from shop to shop: and altogether a street as full as
it could hold, and wonderfully gloomy and dispirited in his look,
'spite of all the good company he kept, and all the business he
was doing. Nevertheless, Lankey Fogle and Big Abel made
their way to a part towards the head, where they heard a tradition
of a great kite that had been once sent up, swinging a man at
his tail, over the roofs : also of an Indian squaw, who had
sojourned thereabout, to a marvellous old age: and then they
were at Division-street, setting due eastward.
Here was a cheerful street for men to walk !
The dainty milliners! What tidy caps, enticing little hats
and bonnets (of no kin to those the market-women wore, I war.
rant you !) perched on sticks. Inside, the gentle milliners them.
selves—their clerks in little rooms beyond and keeping up
through all the neighborhood a pleasant sound of ribbons drawn
through the hand and clicking scissors; keeping time with the
dainty minutes as they hopped over the garden fence, just at the
back-door, you see !-at the invitation of the young gentlemen in
the study-windows-they all have studies, there of East Broad.
way. Brim-full of little shops! Everybody taking breakfast
one step up in the world : with a glass door by way of provoca-
tion to strange gentlemen passing by—without privilege of stop-
ping to say good morning. Well: this was Big Abel's, if you
could believe the story that he told of just such a dainty body
as one of these sent up into the Island from the Captain's ship
two hundred years before and settling hereabout, had fixed


THURSDAY.]
75
THE LITTLE MANHATTAN.
the fashions, downward from that time. But then no one
claimed certain tall, spare, grizzled, useless old gentlemen,
who are always seen lounging about these shops ; making be-
lieve keep the accounts; and going forth from day to day, and
coming back too, with baskets on their arms. These are said
to be husbands to the dainty milliners; but don't believe a word
of it; they're evil spirits appointed, for some wicked deeds in
youth, to pass their grey old days in tending on these milliners :
in sight of Beauty ever, no nearer, though they linger there as
long as old Methusalem! When they had got beyond this
pleasant pass; and reached the little square where Hester
street, I think it is, shakes hands with him (a trick the side.
ways all about here play)—the Little Manhattan, being put
in countenance by a fierce and gloomy little Indian, in autumnal
costume-every color in the rainbow and some not in that pat-
tern—who watches that neighborhood from his pedestal ; came to
a dead pause and set up peremptorily, quite peremptorily for
Lankey, a claim to all East Bowery without reservation.
i Big Abel came to a halt, too: and demanded proofs. It was
then that Lankey Fogle, with an emphasis of manner unknown
in all their past rambles, called Big Abel's attention, distinctly
and pointedly, to what was going on around them. All over
the neighborhood, up street, down street, on the long walk of
the square, in doorways, windows—there was but one business
forward: every man of them pulling away, with a face of in-
tense employment, at a little dark roll he carried in his mouth :
men passing in carts, in waggons, on horseback, all smoking for
life.
The Little Manhattan thought there was evidence for him :
they both knew whose Weed it was they wore. Big Abel, to
tell the simple truth, was staggered at the sight: but recovering
as soon as ever he could, he moved forward a 'pace or two,
to where, at the very heart of the Square, there springs a tall
and stately Pole; bearing high upon his top a golden cap.


BIG ABEL, AND
[CHAP. IX.
march about the world, they measured now their grateful steps.
Abel : Lankey : lingered-how could they fail to ? And pre-
sently there rose from out the bosom of that little house: a
song : a simple, sacred song. Hearts in it, too. But over all,
the old, the young: whatever voices strive to plead thanksgiv-
ingly: the two went up, with tears, it seemed almost in every
thrill. Poor little Roof, you could not stay these praises from
the place they sought. Heaven had them ere they were a min-
nute-old!
Hurrying along, they caught some pickled garlics in their
hands (popular and prevailing everywhere in East Bowery, I
am told): and with a rusk or two, made meal as on they sped.
And now they were fairly in East Bowery; at its very heart ;
and there Big Abel, making with the Little Manhattan great
speed to accomplish their work by night-fall, were hailed from a
distance.
“Hallo, my worthy !"
And there came down the street two broad-shouldered, broad-
chested, flushed men carrying pinkeys each in his little finger
the little finger of the other-a custom believed to be endemical
in East Bowery; each man being, by a figure of speech, the
Pinkey of the other. They were both in light-colored coats,
with great, round, staring white metal buttons, pantaloons intensely
striped, round, flat-rimmed hats, and oily locks dashed in little
patches on either side of the head. One was at least a head
higher than the other in person, and in bearing and deport-
ment several heads. This one it was that cried out: and as he
drew nearer, he renewed the cry,
“Well, old boy-how goes that 'ere suit ?"
Big Abel took him warmly by the hand as a friend of his,
and made known the terms he had come to with the Little Man.
hattan.
“What do you say to that ?" he asked, turning to the lesser
gentleman at his side.


THURSDAY.)
19
THE LITTLE MANHATTAN.
“ That's the feature !” he made answer.
Big Abel mentioned the entertainment and hoped to see him
there: nobody but friends to be on hand.
Be there, to be sure, and he'd bring somebody with him to
shove it along; to wit the interesting gentleman at his side-
who again remarked that, that was the Feature.
A sweltering day was this; and the two Pinkeys, who never
uncover to anything, having taken off their hats to the sun-
quite civilly to the sun—to stand aside in the shade and hold this
talk with Big Abel, clapped them back again, with a knock on
the top, and moved off.
Now, down again towards the East River, they came to a
cemetery; and along its walls of brick a choice company of
boys were met, some at play, throwing somersets against its
side ; some at marbles; some hop-scotching : among them all
was one who, standing near the iron gate, wrought out with
chalk, a name, letter by letter, slowly. Big Abel and Lankey
fell back and watched him as he worked. He stood close up
against the wall and holding in one hand with which he partly
scratched his head, by the leather front, a cap that fell down
behind, worked with the other, in a slow and troubled way. He
wrote it down, then rubbed it out again-then down and out
again: and down and out again, and every time 'twas Pompey
Smith, or Pomp'.
This was little Neddy Mellish, no doubt.
“Why, what's the matter, little Neddy ?" said Big Abel, as
he paused and looked about upon the other boys.
“ It's all up, sir, I'm afraid !" answered Neddy, whose face, to
tell the truth, was very white.
“What, with him ?" pointing to the name upon the wall.
“ He'll not hold out till morning, they say !" and little Neddy
took Big Abel's hand and wrung it hard, as though some com.
fort was to be got that way.


SO
[CHAP. IX.
BIG ABEL, AND
“Dear heart!” Neddy spoke up again, “I wish the doctors
would let him stay, and send me off.”
The doctors ! they knew little Neddy Mellish well; for now,
for many days, while this pale trouble followed Pomp’-he had
followed them to the sick boy's door, and from the door, ques-
tioning their calm faces for a hope-aye, even leaping to the
stirrups of their gigs as on they sped, to get a word from them,
for Pompey's sake. Believe it whether you will or no, white
Neddy Mellish watched, for many days, and nights too, come to
that, nor would be driven off-beside black Pompey's bed!
But now he was not there. He hung his head and looked up
with a fear to Big Abel's face.
“I couldn't stay to see him die !” said little Neddy, with bitter
self-reproach. “Oh, what a cruel wretch I am–I couldn't
though. To see him writhing in his bed, when they told me that
he fought for life, was hard enough. Play-fellow ! I've seen you
work at many games.” Pompey was before him in spirit even
then. “But this was one, where all your skill and mirth and
speedy foot would go for nothing, once for all! Pomp’, Pomp',
by this time poor Pomp’ is dead !”
What could Big Abel say? What Lankey ?—To that little
wounded, heart-sore child ? Not a word. They looked through
the grated gate, upon the grave-yard within. Clearly there was
no property of theirs. The dead had it to themselves. A few
white stones; a little grassy green; a few mouldering bodies.
Nothing more. Nothing to claim—and Big Abel and Lankey
Fogle walked in silence many streets (little Neddy Mellish was
fading at a swift pace, like a ghost, far, far away), until they came
to the river himself; and there they found a little old ferry;
faded as to his house ; with a broken bell ; a gate-keeper gone
to seed long, long ago; and, altogether, keeping the breath in his
body by being very humble, and obsequious and obliging to a
number of old, Long-Island market-women, for the sake of the
baskets they had to carry. But now, what magic sweetened all


THURSDAY.]
81
THE LITTLE MANHATTAN.
the air to Big Abel, who grew in bulk, his bright, blue eye,
brighter, his foot more firm upon the ground. A sound of
hammers, all in chorus ! a cheery shout! and, how they heave
in sight and cut great hollows in the air-ships on stocks! And
busy under them, as moles, what brisk and sturdy men! A
whole company of ships on stocks; but one had the heart, that
afternoon, of all about. By some wonder in him drew the eye
of men and boys who, gathered in a swarm near by, looked on
with curious eyes. Some sought to know him better, mounted
to his back, and rode him as a gentle beast astride; but how
they toiled, the brisk and sturdy men, to knock away his pins,
and let him take the water as he should.
In the very glow and zenith of their work, Big Abel stood
there; tall and stout you know he was; and when they caught
a sight of him, they came and put within his hand the launch.
ing-sledge (she now was near her time); with a stroke he
brushed away the lingering prop, and with a leap she took the
stream. A shout!
And back through all the streets the city took it up! A
shout that had the city's heart and soul in it! A shout that al-
ways goes with that stout ship through every sea, to every land !
Lives in her timbers, fills her sails, and keeps her keel aright!
Big Abel shook his ears as though he too had taken water;
and crowed in spirit at the sight. All Henry Hudson in him
stirred to life; and with a voice he claimed those mighty yards,
and who gainsayed him ?
Fine ships, no doubt (this was what came into the Little Man.
hattan's head); clear in the hull; oak-ribbed; arrows for speed.
But when he cast back an eye, although the liberty-pole was
still like a great splinter in his head ; and though he claimed no
more that day; how his look brightened, too, on all around—at
sight of tumbling houses, tumbling fast; poor broken ways; and
in some pier heads, falling off, he even saw or thought he saw,


THURSDAY.]
83
THE LITTLE MANHATTAN.
that minute the old Banking House became a piece of fairy-
land, and Big Abel took the part of first fairy at a bound.
Why, what a spot is this they've come upon ? Far as the
eye can reach on every side, the stoops, the walks, the area-
steps, are pattered thick with children, as though they had been
sprinkled there, in some strange freak, out of a boundless water-
ing pot; a little shower on every side. When the old city looks
for children, he comes here I know. Out at windows idle women
lean, and talk to neighbors near at hand, or hail across the way.
Men, heavy in their walk and fat of look, plunge down;
ducking beneath blue signs; and in the beer shops, everywhere,
quench and put out the glowing day. The sturdy foundries by
the river, too, are tired at last, and make it known to all the
world by ringing out a peal upon their bells. Through all that
world of Eastern Bowery, work is done ; and everything, till
daylight come again, is sport, in name, whatever it may be. And
moving on, there approached Big Abel and Lankey, what seem-
ed a small swarm of glowing fire-flies, burning their way through
the dusk with an even wing, which always kept them at a cer-
tain height above the earth. But, drawing nearer, these lights
helped them to see behind them the sallow faces of a body of
fire-boys, smoking their path through the street. Presently a
watchman's rattle was sprung; the constellation knew it at
once; broke up chaotically, and went round the neighboring
corners in several pieces. Shortly after this, an overwhelming
shout in a neighboring street; and in less than a minute there
came tumbling back, a square box on wheels (a fire-engine, no
doubt); and tore away, in the very teeth of the sturdy watch,
and made merry, in its rough way, for miles.
And now, in Tompkins' Square; the trees sickly, and thin;
the benches rude; the walks, ill-tended—but what a sight, off
toward the East! The river, with its smoothest bay, and all it had
of gentleness and calm, in that fair summer hour, seemed
floating to the eye on towards this silent Square, and blessing it.


84
[CHAP. X.
BIG ABEL, AND
Serene! The children stopped, in all their frolics stopped, to
look at it, as on a picture in a pleasant book; old men thought
over all their lives gone by, however dark and rough, with
something of a holy calm; and women drew into their
gentle hearts the spell of all it showed, to nurse their gentle.
ness yet more. That Square, abuse him as you may, and treat
him to as poor a culture as you will, can never grow a base, or
low, or worthless square, while he may look out on the River,
as now he looks. The Prison, too, upon the Island (Lankey and
Big Abel knew him well), no more a Prison, but softened to a
palace and an ark of rest, lingering there some fairy changes of
the tide, to glide away; or silently go off in silver mist, up
into the sky! They cannot loiter now—for company is for-
ward at the old Banking House, and Big Abel, with Lankey,
make new speed out at a gate on the west; and crossing a nim-
ble thoroughfare, they come upon a street that makes them pause
again.
The heart of little Neddy Mellish guessed aright. Poor
Pomp’ was dead! Who else could be so calmly borne away:
this was his procession passing now !-No heatse, no horse, no
coach; a little coffin borne by men; and after it a line of poor
black women in kerchiefs crossed upon the breast. How silently
they moved !-was death nearer in the thought of these poor
women, now that little Pomp' was borne away with quiet tread,
than when there is a tramp of hoofs, and rolling wheels, and
talkers scaring him ? One white mourner only. Gliding on-oh
what a peace there is about that little coffin borne by friendly
hands; as like to life as death may be in all the gentle, tender
bearing of it up. One white mourner! The street is still-
there is a hope of human hearts as yet-and children hang
about its path; and wonder with their little simple eyes what
gentle show this is that moves so deftly on. But little Neddy
Mellish. He is in the line, as calm, as orderly as any. Behind
them all alone! Although they speak to him—the poor black


THURSDAY.)
85
THE LITTLE MANHATTAN.
women-with their looks, and tell him softly to bear up. Away
from that—he must be nearer to his old, dear, little friend !
Nearer? He ought to lie, now, by his very side. Close to the
coffin, helping in his feeble way to hold it up; although he weeps,
there's comfort in the burthen that he bears. Who thought that
he should ever carry Pompey so! And once or twice the fancy
came into his little foolish head to knock upon the coffin lid as
though poor Pomp’, so summoned, might arise and come again
to play with little Neddy. Not to the churchyard where little
Neddy Mellish wrought his name (no, not there—for there white
people lie alone in all their ashen splendor !:) but toward a
country-field they're moving with poor Pomp’: good-bye—thou
little negro-boy ; perhaps there is a Heaven for thee after all-
who knows? And at the suburb, Lankey and Big Abel (who
had kept it company all along) part with it, and take their way
-how pale they saw that little Neddy was !
little negro-boy And at the subupart with it, an


CELEBRATION.]
87
THE LITTLE MANHATTAN.
shell, a lawyer of the least degree. The poor Attorney took his
seat humbly though; and had no motion to make at all; none
whatever. Presently, a gush of mint (it wasn't the Indian
Doctor with his herbs !) came up the scuttle ; a playful scuffling
by the way; followed by the two Pinkeys (Great Pinkey and
Small Pinkey, Lankey in his humor called them): who executed
impromptu, on arriving on the roof, an Oriental Saraband (out
of East Bowery); in which they went off, impromptu again, into
the two sexes; turning each other; forwarding; and deporting
altogether as though this was a regular thing, in the way of a
dance, and no mistake. To the huge delight of Mrs. Saltus, who
rolled in her chair; and put them in countenance whenever the
course of their proceedings brought them that way. By the
time they had subsided into a playful fist-fight, in a corner;
with a solid tread, but gentlemanly withal, and self-sustain-
ed, there came along—the South Street Merchant; the South
Street Merchant of the highest grade; the tip-top Merchant of
South Street; and better than that, an old friend of Big Abel's.
And now the Indian Doctor! A quiet man, with not a word to
say; who settled like a piece of shadow, far over on the roof,
under a corner of the canvass; by a pole, as though he had
some faint notion of a wigwam, in his head, and meant to stand
by it, that night. As one who ascends a companion ladder, as
the best of stairs; bearing in his hand, as having worlds within
it, his great glass ; out came the good old Packet Captain ; and
shook himself, once on the Roof, as though he stood upon the
deck of some brave ship, and saw far out to sea. A proud man
was the old Packet Captain; but when he saw quite close at
hand, green fields and trees, he softened down, and talked with
his old crony, the great merchant of South Street; of many
things, born under both their eyes, far in the past. What a
scrambling fellow he is, that Boatman, Barskin, by name !
He's used to sloops, and their way of coming on deck, you may
see at once. The great company on the roof, they're apple deal.


yo
[CHAP. X.
BIG ABEL, AND
ers to Barskin, and country people with firkins to freight down
the river, that's all they are to him ; or can ever be. But like
a streak of gentle light, coming not from Heaven, as it should ;
one who meant to be the first of all that company ; but who was
crossed, most sadly crossed in an iron she had to deal with (a
little, wicked, perverse, over-fiery iron !) the young Semp-
stress! There was a blessing for Big Abel he could never out-
go (in all his thousand, thousand city friends) when that
young sempstress took his hand, in what a grasp for one so
young and pale; and smiled on him. She had brought—this
kept her back a little, too,-a favor—a bright red ribbon of the
color of true heart's blood-with a quaint device ; for Big Abel
to wear.
The company all assembled ; and what have we here ?
A table spread (Big Abel had this in his mind as long ago as
when he met Lankey at the Tower) with every city growth,
with every city dainty ; piled high, stretched out, and deep
with row on row. Take to ! take to ! you are all welcome.
Big Abel has a good heart for you all (for it is he that gives the
feast ; though the Little Manhattan in his poor way is one
of the entertainers). A joyous time, a cheerful time; for, though
unlike, how Big Abel drew them all together, and had them move,
through that good feast, as one. You don't know the half as yet,
though! For there was Big Abel's health to drink; and a
speech from Big Abel.
Big Abel was very grateful (this was his speech as I have
been told): that his friends were with him there that night. He
loved them ; every one. For many a day he had known them,
every one ; and watched them grow out of the very city's heart.
They had a soul in them, all of them, that would never die.
(He meant this in a way of his own.) The time could never
come, in this great city, when Mrs. Saltus should cease to be, for
one : the great Packet Captain for another: the two Pinkeys for


92
[CHAP. I.
BIG ABEL, AND
and caught them in his vasty net. What wonder then, there
grew in Lankey Fogle's heart (poor sad Manhattan); a hope that
downfall yet would come upon the city's head; that yet he
would be led against his will, oh sorely now against his will, back
to his old drear wilderness; and lose himself in dusky lodges and
by silent paths as though never he had been. It cannot be, I
fear as yet, poor Lankey! No, No. The city grows; but you
decline, I fear. (They never thought to drink your health !)
You still will wander as a shade, the city-hills, the city-slopes;
sit sadly down by mile-stones as the city grows; stand by the
river's side, seeing there, what no other eye may see; dwin-
dling like a spirit to the city's eye, while he, Big Abel, waxes on
sturdier by every street he walks; by every square he builds.
They say that you it is (but I for one will not believe it),
that through the city light, unseen, great fires at night: and
threaten with red overthrow the town from end to end. I know
you love the grass that grows at times (by chance only, Lan.
key !) under horses' hoofs in swift thoroughfares. That often
in the market-house, you sleep alone; or in a rolling boat upon
the river; or underneath a tree out of the city's hateful breath,
where you may get a sight of ancient stars. Often withdraw.
ing too, into that little village of Manhattanville at the Island's
farthest point—it is said—for long, long spells.
Happiest, perchance, in that calm season of your own, the In.
dian summer-time, when air and earth, and all things in and
on them, share the gentle melancholy of your spirit, and nature
shades her beauty and the brightness of her eye, in sympathy
with you. Then Little Manhattan walks about, more master
of the city for a little while, than sturdy Abel, even.
There is a light; of all the lights that burned that night; wink-
ing near by at this high revel; a cheerful light; not star-light, ,
nor moon-light, nor sun-light, nor candle-light altogether; but
wedding-light; made up of the best, choicest beams of all the
other. You see them moving in its broad ray as though it








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AN ESSAY ON THUNDER AND SMALL BEER.
Any reader who may have a fancy to purchase a copy of this
present second edition of the History of the Kickleburys Abroad,
had best be warned in time, that the Times newspaper does not i
approve of the work, and has but a bad opinion both of the
author and his readers. Nothing can be fairer than this state-
ment; if you happen to take up the poor little volume at a
railroad station, and read this sentence, lay the book down and
buy something else. You are warned. What more can the
author say? If after this you will buy—amen! Pay your
money, take your book, and fall to. Between ourselves, honest
reader, it is no very strong potation which the present purveyor
offers to you. It will not trouble your head much in the drink-
ing.' It was intended for that sort of negus which is offered at
Christmas parties; and of which ladies and children may par-
take with refreshment and cheerfulness. Last year I tried a
brew which was old, bitter, and strong ; and scarce any one
would drink it. This year we send round a milder tap, and it
is liked by customers : though the critics (who like strony ale,
the rogues !) turn up their noses. In heaven's name, Mr.
Sinith, serve round the liquor to the gentlefolks. Pray, dear
madam, another glass ; it is Christmas time, it will do you no
harm. It is not intended to keep long, this sort of drink.
( Come, froth up, Mr. Publisher, and pass quickly round!)
And, as for the professional gentlemen, we must get a stronger
sort for them some day.
The Times gentleman (a very difficult gent. to please) is the
loudest and noisiest of all, and has made more hideous faces


.
Ai Essai UN THUNDER AND SMALL BEER.
over the refreshment offered to him than any other critic. There
is no use shirking this statement: when a man has been abused
in the Times he can't hide it, any more than he could hide the
knowledge of his having been committed to prison by Mr.
Henry, or publicly caned in Pall-Mall. You see it in your
friends' eyes when they meet you. They know it. They have
chuckled over it to a man. They whisper about it at the club,
and look over the paper at you. My next door neighbor came
to sec me this morning, and I saw by his face that he had the
whole story pat. “Hem !” says he, “ well, I have heard of it ;
and the fact is they were a talking about you at dinner last
night, and mentioning that the Times had—ahem !—'walked
into you.""
My good M- , (I say, and M— will corroborate, if
need be, the statement I make here,) here is the Times article,
dated January 4th, which states so and so, and here is a letter
from the publisher, likewise, dated January 4th, and which
says :
“My dear Sir-Having this day sold the last copy of the
first edition (of x thousand) of the Kickleburys Abroad, and
having orders for more, had we not better proceed to a second
edition ? and will you permit me to inclose an order on," &c. ?
Singular coincidence ! And if every author who was so
abused by a critic had a similar pote from a publisher, good
Lord ! how easily would we take the critics' censure !
“Yes, yes," you say ; “it is all very well for a writer to
affect to be indifferent to a critique from the Times. You bear
it as a boy bears a flogging at school, without crying out; but
don't swagger and brag as if you liked it.”
Let us have truth before all. I would rather have a good
word than a bad one from any person ; but if a critic abuses me
from a high place, and it is worth my while, I will appeal. If
I can show that the judge who is delivering sentence against me,
and laying down the law, and making a pretence of learning, has
'no learning and no law, and is neither more por less than a pom-


AN ESSAY ON THUNDER AND SMALL BEER.
5
pous noodle, who ought not to be heard in any respectable
court, I will do so; and then, dear friends, perhaps you will
bave something to laugh at in this book.
THE KICKLEBURYS ON THE RHINE.
It has been customary of late years for the purveyors of amusing
literature-the popular authors of the day-to put forth certain
opuscules, denominated “ Christmas books," with the ostensible in-
tention of swelling the tide of exhilaration or other expansive emo-
tions incident upon the exodus of the old and the inauguration of
the new year. We have said that their ostensible intention was
such, because there is another motive for these productions, locked
up (as the popular author deems) in his own breast, but which be-
trays itself, in the quality of the work, as his principal incentive. O,
that any muse should be set upon a 'high stool to cast up accounts
and balance a ledger! Yet so it is; and the popular author finds it
convenient to fill up the declared deficit, and place himself in a posi-
tion the more effectually to encounter those liabilities which sternly
assert themselves contemporaneously and in contrast with the care-
less and freehanded tendencies of the season, by the emission of
Christmas books—a kind of literary assignats, representing to the
emitter expunged debts, to the receiver an investment of enigmatical
value. For the most part bearing the stamp of their origin in the
vacuity of the writer's exchequer rather than in the fullness of his
genius, they suggest by their feeble flavor the rinsings of a void
brain after the more important concoctions of the expired year.
Indeed, we should as little think of taking these compositions as
examples of the merits of their authors as we should think of mea-
suring the valuable services of Mr. Walker, the postman, or Mr.
Bell the dust-collector, by the copy of verses they leave at our doors
as a provocative of the expected annual gratuity-effusions with
which they may fairly be classed for their intrinsic worth no less
than their ultimate purport.
In the Christmas book presently under notice Mr. Thackeray
appears (under the thin disguise of Mr. Michael Angelo Titmarsh) in
propriâ personâ, as the popular author, the contributor to Punch, the
remorseless pursuer of unconscious vulgarity and feeblemindedness,
launched upon a tour of relaxation to the Rhine. But though exer.


6
AN ESSAY ON THUNDER AND SMALL BEER.
cising, as is the wont of popular authors in their moments of leisure,
a plentiful reserve of those higher qualities to which they are
indebted for their fame, his professional instincts are not altogether
in abeyance. From the moment his eye lights upon a luckless
family group embarked on the same steamer with himself, the sight
of his accustomed quarry--vulgarity, imbecility, and affectation-
reänimates his relaxed sinews, and, playfully fastening his satiric
fangs upon the familiar prey, he dallies with it in mimic ferocity
like a satiated mouser.
Though faintly and carelessly indicated, the characters are those
with which the author loves to surround himself. A tuft-hunting
county baronet's widow, an inane captain of dragoons, a graceless
young baronet, a lady with groundless pretensions to feeble health
and poetry, an obsequious nonentity, her husband, and a flimsy and
artificial young lady, are the personages in whom we are expected
to find amusement. Two individuals alone form an exception to
the above category, and are offered to the respectful admiration of
the reader-the one, a shadowy serjeant-at-law, Mr. Titmarsh's
traveling companion, who escapes with a few side puffs of flattery,
which the author struggles not to render ironical, and a myste-
rious countess, spoken of in a tone of religious reverence, and appa-
rently introduced that we may learn by what delicate discrimina-
tions our adoration of rank should be regulated.
To those who love to hug themselves in a sense of superiority by
admeasurement with the most worthless of their species, in their
most worthless aspects, the Kickleburys on the Rhine will afford an
agreeable treat, especially as the purveyor of the feast offers bis
own moments of human weakness as a modest entrée in this ban-
quet of erring mortality. To our own perhaps unphilosophical
taste--the aspirations towards sentimental perfection of another
popular author are infinitely preferable to these sardonic divings
after the pearl of truth, whose luster is eclipsed in the display of
the diseased oyster. Much, in the present instance, perhaps all the
disagreeable effect of his subject, is no doubt attributable to the
absence of Mr. Thackeray's usual brilliancy of style. A few flashes,
however, occur, such as the description of M. Lenoir's gaming
establishment, with the momentous crisis to which it was subjected,
and the quaint and imaginative sallies evoked by the old town of
Rougetnoirbourg and its lawful prince. These, with the illustra-


AN ESSAY ON THUNDER AND SMALL BEER.
7
tions, which are spirited enough, redeem the book from an abso-
lute ban. Mr. Thuckeray's pencil is more congenial than his pen.
He cannot draw his men and women with their skins off, and
therefore, the effigies of his characters are pleasanter to contem-
plate than the flayed anatomies of the letter-press.
There is the whole article. And the reader will see (in the
paragraph preceding that memorable one which winds up with
the diseased oyster) that he must be a worthless creature for
daring to like the book, as he could only do so from a desire
to hug himself in a sense of superiority by admeasurement with
the most worthless of his fellow-creatures !
The reader is worthless for liking a book of which the cha-
racters are worthless, except two which are offered to his respect-
ful admiration; and of these two the author does not respect
one, but struggles not to laugh in his face; whilst he apparently
speaks of another in a tone of religious reverence, because the
lady is a countess, and because he (the author) is a sneak. So
reader, author, characters, are rogues all. Be there any honest
men left, Hal ? About Printing-house square, maybap you may
light on an honest man, a squeamish man, a proper moral man,
a man that shall talk you Latin by the half column if you will
but hear him.
And what a style it is, that great man's! What heighth of
fioine language entoirely! How he can discourse you in Eng-
lish for all the world as if it was Latin ! For instance, sup-
pose you and I had to announce the important news that some
writers published what are called Christmas books; that Christ-
mas books are so called because they are published at Christmas;
and that the purpose of the authors is to try and amuse people.
Suppose, I say, we had by the sheer force of intellect, or by
other means of observation or information, discovered these great
truths, we should have announced them in so many words. And
there it is that the difference lies between a great writer and a
poor onc; and we may see how an inferior man may fling &


AN ESSAY ON THUNDER AND SMALL BEER.
.
it convenient to fill up the declared deficit by the emission of
Christmas books—a kind of assignats that bear the stamp of
their origin in the vacuity of the writer's exchequer.” There
is a trope for you! You rascal, you wrote because you wanted
money! His lordship has found out what you were at, and
that there is a deficit in your till. But he goes on to say that
we poor devils are to be pitied in our necessity, and that these
compositions are no more to be taken as examples of our mer-
its than the verses which the dustman leaves at his lordship's
door, “as a provocative of the expected annual gratuity,"
are to be considered as measuring his, the scavenger's, valu-
able services-nevertheless the author's and the scavenger's
“effusions may fairly be classed, for their intrinsic worth, no
less than their ultimate purport.”
Heaven bless his lordship on the bench-What a gentleman-
like badinage he has, and what a charming and playful wit al-
ways at hand! What a sense he has for a simile, or what Mrs.
Malaprop calls an odorous comparison, and how gracefully he
conducts it to “its ultimate purport !” A gentleman writing a
poor little book is a scavenger asking for a Christmas-box !
As I try this small-beer which has called down such a deal of
thunder, I can't help thinking that it is not Jove who has inter-
fered (the case was scarce worthy of his divine vindictiveness) ;
but the Thunderer's man, Jupiter Jeames, taking his master's
place, adopting his manner and trying to dazzle and roar like his
awful employer. The figure of the dustman has hardly been
filung from heaven : that “ ultimate purport” is a subject which
the Immortal would hardly handle. Well, well ; let us allow
that the book is not worthy of such a polite critic--that the beer
is not strong enough for a gentleman who has taste and experi-
ence in beer.
That opinion no man can ask his honor to alter ; but (the beer
being the question) why make unpleasant allusions to the Gazette,
and hint at the probable bankruptcy of the brewer? Why twit


AN ESSAY ON THUNDER AND SMALL BEER.
11
who leaves a copy of verses at his door, and begs for a Christmas-
box, I must again cry out, and say, “ My dear sir, it is true
your simile is offensive, but can you make it out? Are you not
hasty in your figures and allusions ?" If I might give a hint to
So. consummate a rhetorician, you should be more careful in mak-
ing your figures figures, and similes like : for instance, when you
talk of a book “ swelling the tide of exhilaration incident to the
inauguration of the New Year,” or of a book “bearing the stamp
of its origin in vacuity,” &c.,-or of a man diving sardonically ;
or of a pearl eclipsed in the display of a diseased oyster—there
are some people who will not apprehend your meaning : some
will doubt whether you had a meaning : some even will question
your great powers, and say, “ Is this man to be a critic in a news-
paper, which knows what English, and Latin too, and what sense
and scholarship are ?” I don't quarrel with you—I take for
granted your wit and learning, your modesty and benevolence-
but why scavenger-Jupiter Jeames-why scavenger? A gen-
tleman, whose biography the Examiner was fond of quoting, be-
fore he took his present serious and orthodox turn, was pursued
by an outraged wife to the very last stage of his existence with
an appeal almost as pathetic_" Ah, sir, why scavenger ?”
How can I be like a dustman that rings for a Christmas-box
at your hall-door? I never was there in my life. I never left at
your door a copy of verses provocative of an annual gratuity, as
your noble honor styles it. Who are you? If you are the man
I take you to be, it was you who asked the publisher for my book,
and not I who sent it in, and begged a gratuity of your worship.
You abused me out of the Times' window ; but if ever your no-
ble honor sent me a gratuity out of your own door, may I never
drive another dust-cart. “Provocative of a gratuity !" O splen-
did swell! How much was it your worship sent out to me by the
footman ? Every farthing you have paid I will restore to your
lordship, and I swear I shall not be a halfpenny the poorer.
As before, and on similar seasons and occasions, I bave com-


12 AN ESSAY ON THUNDER AND SMALL BEER.
· pared myself to a person following a not dissimilar calling, let me
suppose, now, for a minute, that I am a writer of a Christmas
farce, who sits in the pit, and sees the performance of his own
piece. There comes applause, hissing, yawning, laughter, as
may be ; but the loudest critic of all is our friend the cheap buck,
who sits yonder and makes bis remarks, so that all the audience
may hear. “This a farce !” says Beau Tibbs, “ demmy! it's
the work of a poor devil who writes for money,-confound bis
vulgarity! This a farce! Why isn't it a tragedy, or a comedy,
or an epic poem, stap my vitals ? This a farce, indeed ? It's a
feller as sends round his 'at, and appeals to charity. Let's 'ave
our money back again, I say.” And he swaggers off; and you
find the fellow came in with an author's order.
But if, in spite of Tibbs, our“kyind friends,” &c., &c., &c.—
if the little farce, which was meant to amuse Christmas (or what
my classical friend calls Exodus) is asked for, even up to Twelfth
Night-shall the publishers stop because Tibbs is dissatisfied ?
Whenever that capitalist calls to get bis money back, he may see
the letter from the respected publisher, informing the author that
all the copies are sold, and that there are demands for a new
edition. Up with the curtain, then! Vivat Regina ! and no
money returned, except the Times” “gratuity !!
Jan. 5, 1851.
M. A. TITMARSH.


THE KICKLEBURYS ON THE RHINE.
-
The cabman, when he brought us to the wharf, and made his
usual charge of six times his legal fare, before the settlement of
which he pretended to refuse the privilege of an exeat regno to
our luggage; glared like a disappointed fiend, when Lankin, call-
ing up the faithful Hutchison, his clerk, who was in attendance,
said to him, “Hutchison, you will pay this man. My name is
Sergeant Lankin, my chambers are in Pump Court. My clerk
will settle with you, sir.” The cabman trembled ; we stepped
on board ; our lightsome luggage was speedily whisked away by
the crew ; our berths had been secured by the previous agency
of Hutchison; and a couple of tickets, on which were written,
“ Mr. Sergeant Lankin,” “ Mr. Titmarsh,” (Lankin's, by the
way, incomparably the best, and comfortablest sleeping place,)
were pinned on to two of the curtains of the beds in a side cabin
when we descended.
Who was on board ? There were Jews with Sunday papers,
and fruit; there were couriers and servants struggling about;
there were those bearded foreign visitors of England, who always
seem to decline to shave or to wash themselves on the day of a
voyage, and, on the eve of quitting our country, appear inclined
to carry away as much as possible of its soil on their hands and
linen : there were parties already cozily established on deck
under the awning; and steady-going travelers, for’ard, smoking,
already, the pleasant morning segar, and watching the phenom.
ena of departure.



. THE KICKLEBURYS ON THE RHINE.
15
fancy, both red and angry, and strutting off with his great cavalry
lurch and swagger; whilst my friend, the sergeant, looks at him
lost in admiration, and surveys his shining little boots, his chains
and breloques, his whiskers and ambrosial mustaches, his gloves,
and other dandifications with a pleased wonder-as the ladies of
the Sultan's harem surveyed the great lady from Park Lane who
paid them a visit ; or the simple subjects of Montezuma looked
at one of Cortez's heavy dragoons.
"That must be a marquis, at least, whispers Lankin, who
consults me on points of society, and is pleased to have a great
opinion of my experience.
I burst out in a scorntal laugh; “ That!" I say, “ He is a
captain of dragoons, and his father is an attorney in Bedford
Row. The whiskers of a rotuirer, my good Lankin, grow as
long as the beard of a Plantagenet. It don't require much noble
blood to learn the Polka. If you were younger, Lankin, we
might go for a shilling a-night, and dance every evening at M.
Laurent's Casino, and skip about in a little time as well as that
fellow.—Only we despise the kind of thing, you know—only
We're too grave and too steady.”
" And too fat,” whispers Lankin with a laugh.
“ Speak for yourself, you maypole,” says I. " If you can't
dance yourself, people can dance round you—put a wreathe of
flowers upon your old poll, put you up in a village green, and so
make use of you."
"I should gladly be turned into anything so pleasant,2 Lan-
kin answers ; "and so, at least, get a chance of seeing a pretty
girl now and then. They don't show in Pump Court, or at the
University Club, where I dine. You are a lucky fellow, Tit-
marsh, and go about in the world—as for me, I never —
“And the judge's wives, you rogue ?” I say. “Well, no
man is satisfied ; and the only reason I have to be angry with
the captain yonder is, that the other night at Mrs. Perkins, be-
ing in conversation with a charming young creature, who knows
all my favorite passages in the Church controversy, just as we



THE KICKLEBURYS ON THE RHINE.
were in the very closest, dearest, pleasantest part of the talk,
comes up young Hotspur yonder, and whisks her away in a
polka. What have you and I to do with polkas, Lankin ? He
took her down to supper—what have you and I to do with
suppers ?"
"Our duty is to leave them alone,” said the philosophical
sergeant; and now about breakfast-shall we have some ?"
And as we spoke, a savory little procession of stewards and stew-
ards' boys, with drab tin dish-covers, passed from the caboose,
and descended the stairs to the cabin. The vessel had passed
Greenwich by this time, and had worked its way out of the
mast-forest which guards the approaches of our city.
The owners of those innumerable boxes, bags, oil-skins, guitar-
cases, whereon the letter K was engraven, appeared to be three
ladies, with a slim gentleman of two or three and thirty, who
was probably the husband of one of them. He had numberless
shawls under his arm and guardianship. He had a strap full of
Murray's Handbooks and Continental Guides in his keeping;
and a little collection of parasols and umbrellas, bound together,
and to be carried in state before the chief of the party, like the
lictors' fasces before the consul.
The chief of the party was evidently the stout lady. One
parasol being left free, she waved it about, and commanded the
luggage and the menials to and fro. “Horace, we will sit there,”
she exclaimed, pointing to a comfortable place on the deck.
Horace went and placed the shawls and the Guidebooks.
"Hirsch, avy vou conty les baggages ? tront sett morso ong
too ?” The German courier said, “ Oui, Miladi,” and bowed
a rather sulky assent. “Bowman, you will see that Finch is
comfortable, and send her to me.” The gigantic Bowman, a
gentlemen in an undress uniform, with very large and splendid
armorial buttons, and with traces of the powder of the season still
lingering on his hair, bows, and speeds upon my lady's errand.
Precognize Hirsch, a well known face upon the European
high road, where he has traveled with many acquaintances.
1



THE KICKLEBURYS ON THE RHINE.
17
With whom is he making the tour now ? Mr. Hirsch is acting
as courier to Mr. and Mrs. Horace Milliken. They have not
been married many months, and they are traveling, Hirsch
says, with a contraction of his bushy eyebrows, with Miladi, Mrs.
Milliken's mamma. And who is her ladyship? Hirsch's brow
contracts into deeper furrows. “It is Miladi Gigglebury," he
-says, “ Mr. Didmarsh. Berhaps you know her.” He scowls
round at her, as she calls out loudly, “Hirsch, Hirsch," and
obeys that summons.
It is the great lady Kicklebury, of Pocklington Square, about
whom I remember Mrs. Perkins made so much ado at her last
ball, and whom old Perkin conducted to supper. When Sir
Thomas Kicklebury died (he was one of the first tenants of the
square,) who does not remember the scutcheon with the coronet
with two balls, that flamed over No 36 ? Her son was at Eton
then, and has subsequently taken an honorary degree at Oxford,
and been an ornament of Platt’s and the Owestry Club. He
fled into St. James' from the great house in Pocklington Square,
and from St. James' to Italy and the Mediterranean, where he
has been for some time in a wholesome exile. Her eldest daugh-
ter's marriage with Lord Roughhead was talked about last year ;
but Lord Rough head, it is known, married Miss Brent; and
Horace Milliken, very much to his surprise, found himself the
affianced husband of Miss Lavinia Kicklebury, after an agitating
evening at Lady Polkimore's, when Miss Lavinia, feeling her-
self faint, went out on to the leads (the terrace, Lady Polki-
more will call it,) on the arm of Mr. Milliken. They were
married in January—it's not a bad match for Miss K. Lady
Kicklebury goes and stops for six months of the year at Pigeon-
cot with her daughter and son-in-law; and now that they are
come abroad, she comes too. She must be with Lavinia under
the present circumstances.
When I am arm-in-arm, I tell this story glibly off to Lankia,


THE KICKLEBURYS ON THE RHINE. 19
those two damp black mutton chops which nobody else will take,
will fall to our cold share..
At this minute a voice clear and sweet, from a tall lady in a
black veil, says, “Mr. Titmarsh,” and I start and murmur an
ejaculation of respectful surprise, as I recognize no less a person
than the Right Honorable the Countess of Knightsbridge, taking
her tea, breaking ap little bits of toast with her slim fingers, and
sitting between a Belgian horse-dealer and a German violoncello
player, who has a conge after the opera—like any other mortal.
I whisper her ladyship's name to Lankin. The sergeant looks
toward her with curiosity and awe. Even he, in his Pump
Court solitudes, has heard of that star of fashion—that Diana
severe yet simple, the accomplished Aurelia of Knightsbridge.
Her husband has but a small share of her qualities, How should
he? The turf and the fox-chase are his delights—the smoking-
room at the Traveler's—nay, shall we say it ?—the illuminated
arcades of Vauxhall, and the gambols of the dishevelled Terpsi-
chore. Knightsbridge has his faults—ah! even the peerage of
England is not exempt from them. With Diana for his wife, he
flies the halls where she sits severe and serene, and is to be
found (shrouded in smoke, 'tis true), in those caves where the
contrite Chimney-sweep sings his terrible death-chaunt, or the
Bacchanalian judge administers a satyric law. Lord Knights-
bridge has his faults then, but he has the gout at Rougetnoirbourg,
near the Rhine, and thither his wife is hastening to minister to
him.
“I have done,” says Lady Knightsbridge, with a gentle bow,
as she rises ; “ you may have this place Mr. Titmarsh ; and I am
sorry my breakfast is over, I should have prolonged it had I
thought that you were coming to sit by me. Thank you—my
glove;" (such an absurd little glove, by the way ;) “ we shall
meet on the deck when you have done.”
And she moves away with an august courtesy. I can't tell
how it is, or what it is, in that lady ; but she says “How do you
do ?” as nobody else knows how to say it. In all her actions,


THE KICKLEBURYS ON THE RHINE.
21
joining them ; and Miss P. went away presently, to look to her
guests)—that is Miss Fanny Kicklebury.
A sudden pang shot athwart my bosom. Lankin might have
perceived it, but the honest sergeant was so awe-stricken by his
late interview with the Countess of Knightsbridge, that his mind
was unfit to grapple with other subjects—a pang of feeling (which
I concealed under the grin and graceful bow wherewith Miss
Fanny's salutations were acknowledged) tore my heart-strings
-as I thought of—I need not say—of Hicks.
He had danced with her, he had supped with her—he was
here, on board the boat. Where was that dragoon? I looked
round for him. In quite a far corner,—but so as he could com-
mand the Kicklebury party, I thought-he was eating his break-
fast, the great healthy oaf, and consuming one boiled egg after
another.
In the course of the afternoon, all parties, as it may be sup-
posed, emerged upon deck again, and Miss Fanny and her
mamma began walking the quarter-deck with a quick pace, like
a couple of post-captains. When Miss Fanny saw me she
stopped and smiled, and recognized the gentleman who had
amused her so at Mrs. Perkins'. What a dear sweet creature
Eliza Perkins was ! They had been at school together. She
was going to write to Eliza everything that happened in the
voyage.
" Everything ?" I said, in my particular sarcastic manner.
“Well, everything that was worth telling. There was a
great number of things that were very stupid, and of people
that were very stupid. Everything that you say, Mr. Titmarsh,
I am sure I may put down. Yoù have seen Mr. Titmarsh's
funny books, mamma ?”
Mamma said, she had heard, she had no doubt they were very
amusing. “Was not that—ahem-Lady Knightsbridge to whom
I saw you speaking, sir ?”
“ Yes ; she is going to nurse Lord Knightsbridge, who has the
gout at Rougetnoirbourg.".


22
THE KICKLEBURYS ON THE RHINE.
“ Indeed! how very fortunate ! what an extraordinary coin-
cidence! We are going too,” said Lady Kicklebury.
I remarked, “ that everybody was going to Rougetnoirbourg
this year; and I heard of two gentlemen-Count Carambole and
Colonel Cannon—who had been obliged to sleep there on a bill-
iard-table, for want of a bed.”
“My son Kicklebury—are you acquainted with Sir Thomas
Kicklebury ?” her ladyship said, with great stateliness—" is at
Noirbourg, and will take lodgings for us. The springs are parti-
cularly recommended for my daughter, Mrs. Milliken ; and, at
great personal sacrifice, I am going thither myself; but what
will not a mother do, Mr. Titmarsh? Did I understand you
to say that you have the—the entree at Knightsbridge House ?
The parties are not what they used to be, I am told. Not that
I have any knowledge. I am but a poor country baronet's wi-
dow, Mr. Titmarsh; though the Kicklebury's date from Henry
III., and my family is not of the most modern in the country.
You have heard of General Guff, my father, perhaps ? Aide-
de-camp to the Duke of York, and wounded by his Royal High-
ness' side at the bombardment of Valenciennes. We move in
our own sphere."
“ Mrs. Perkins is a very kind creature," I said, “and it was a
very pleasant ball ; did you not think it so, Miss Kicklebury ?”
“ I thought it odious,” said Miss Fanny. “I mean it was
pleasant until that~that stupid man—what was his name?
came and took me away to dance with him."
“What, don't you care for a red coat and mustaches ?” I
asked.
“ I adore genius, Mr. Titmarsh,” said the young lady, with
a most thrilling look of her beautiful blue eyes, " and I have
every one of your works by heart—all except the last, which I
can't endure. I think it's wicked, positively wicked-my dar-
ling Scott! How can you. And are you going to make a
Christmas-book this year ?"
“Shall I tell you about it?"


THE KICKLEBURYS ON THE RHINE.
29
looked up under the blue hood, so archly and gaily ; ever so
many dimples began playing about her face; her little voice rang
so fresh and sweet, that a heart which has never loved a tree or
flower, but the vegetable in question, was sure to perish—a heart
worn down and sickened by repeated disappointment, mockery,
faithlessness—a heart whereof despair is an accustomed tenant,
and in whose desolate and lonely depths dwells an abiding gloom,
began to throb once more-began to beckon Hope from the win-
dow—began to admit sunshine-began to-O Folly, Folly ! O,
Fanny ! O Miss K., how lovely you looked as you said, “ we
call those hoods Uglies.” Ugly, indeed !
This is a chronicle of feelings and characters, not of events and
places so much. All this time our vessel was making rapid way
up the riyer, and we saw before us the slim towers of the noble
cathedral of Antwerp soaring in the rosy sunshine. Lankin and
I had agreed to go to the Grand Laboureur on the Place de Meir.
They give you a particular kind of jam tarts there, called Nun's
tarts ; I think that I remember, these twenty years, as the very
best tarts—as good as the tarts which we ate when we were boys.
The Laboureur is a dear old quiet comfortable hotel ; and there
is no man in England who likes a good dinner better than
Lankin.
“What hotel do you go to ?" I asked of Lady Kicklebury,
“We go to the Saint Antoine, of course. Everybody goes
to the Saint Antoine,” her ladyship said. “We propose to rest
here ; to do the Rubens and to proceed to Cologne to-morrow.
Horace, call Finch and Bowinan ; and your courier, if he will
have the condescension to wait upon me, will perhaps look to the
baggage.”
“ I think, Lankin,” said I, “as everybody seems going to the
Saint Antoine, we may as well go, and not spoil the party.”
“ I think I'll go too,” says Hicks; as if he belonged to the
party.
And 0, it was a great sight when we landed, and at every


THE KICKLEBURYS ON THE RHINE.
31
her and this poor Hicks there could be nothing serious, for she
had laughed at him and mimicked him to me half-a-dozen times
in the course of the day.
We “do the Rubens?” as Lady Kicklebury says ; we trudge
from cathedral to picture-gallery, from church to church. We
see the calm old city, with its towers and gables, the bourse, and
the vast town-ball; and I have the honor to give Lady Kickle-
bury my arm during these peregrinations, and to hear a hun-
dred particulars regarding her ladyship’s life and family. How
Milliken has been recently building at Pigeoncot; how he will
have two thousand a year more when his uncle dies ; how she
had peremptorily to put a stop to the assiduities of that unprin-
cipled young man, Lord Roughhead, whom Lavinia always
detested, and who married Miss Brent out of sheer pique. It
was a great escape for her darling Lavinia. Roughhead is a
most wild and dissipated young man, one of Kicklebury's
Christchurch friends, of whom her son has too many, alas! and
she enters into many particulars respecting the conduct of Kick-
lebury—the unhappy boy's smoking, his love of billiards, his
fondness for the turf; she fears he has already injured his in-
come, she fears he is even now playing at Noirburg ; she is
going thither to wear him if possible, from his companions and
his gayeties—what may not a mother effect? She only wrote to
him the day before they left London to announce that she was
marching on him with her family.-He is in many respects like
his poor father—the same openness and frankness, the same easy
disposition, alas! the same love of pleasure. But she had re-
formed the father, and will do her utmost to call back her dear
misguided boy. She had an advantageous match for him in
view—a lady not beautiful in person, it is true, but possessed of
every good principle, and a very, very handsome fortune. It
was under pretence of flying from this lady that Kicklebury left
town. But she knew better.
I say young men will be young men, and sow their wild oats ;


32
THE KICKLEBURYS ON THE RHINE.
and think to myself that the invasion of bis mamma will be per-
haps more surprising than pleasant to young Sir Thomas Kickle-
bury, and that she possibly talks about herself and her family,
and her virtues, and her daughters a little too much ; but she
will make a confidant of me, and all the time we are going to
the Rubens' she is talking of the pictures at Kicklebury, of her
portrait by Lawrence, pronounced to be his finest work, of La-
vinia's talent for drawing, and the expense of Fanny's music-
masters; of her house in town, (where she hopes to see me ;)
of her parties which were stopped by the illness of her butler.
She talks Kicklebury until I am sick. And O, Miss Fanny, all
this I endure, like an old fool, for an occasional sight of your
bright eyes and rosy face !
[Another parenthesis. “We hope to see you in town, Mr.
Titmarsh.” Foolish mockery! If all the people whom one has
met abroad, and who have said “We hope to meet you often in
town,” bad but made any the slightest efforts to realize their
hopes by sending a simple line of invitation through the penny
post, what an enormous dinner acquaintance one would have
had! But I mistrust people who say “ We hope to see you in
town.”]
Lankin comes in at the end of the day, just before dinner
time. He has paced the whole town by himself-church, tower,
and fortifications, and Rubens, and all. He is full of Egmont
and Alva. He is up to all the history of the siege, when Chas-
see defended and the French attacked the place. After dinner
we stroll along the quays; and, over the quiet segar in the hotel
court, Monsieur Lankin discourses about the Rubens pictures, in
a way which shows that the learned sergeant has an eye for pic-
torial beauty, as well as other beauties in this world, and can
rightly admire the vast energy, the prodigal genius, the royal
splendor of the King of Antwerp. In the most modest way in
the world he has remarked a student making clever sketches at
the Museum, and has ordered a couple of copies from him, of the


34
THE KICKLEBURYS ON THE RHINE.
you have such a bad dinner ?” Hearken to Hirsch's commina-
tions over the luggage. Look at the honest soldiers and that fat
Freyschutz on guard, bis rifle in one hand, and the other hand
in his pocket. Captain Hicks burst into a laugh at the sight of
the fat Freyschutz, and says, “ By Jove, Titmarsh, you must
cawickachaw him.” And we take our seats at length and at
leisure, and the railway trumpets blow, and, (save a brief halt,)
we never stop till night, trumpeting by green flats and pastures,
by broad canals and old towns, through Liege and Verviers,
through Aix and Cologne, till we are landed at Bonn at night-
fall.
We have all supper, or tea-we have become pretty inti-
mate—we look at the stranger's book, as a matter of course, in
the great room of the Star Hotel. Why, everybody is on the
Rhine! Here are the names of half one's acquaintances.
“ I see Lord and Lady Exborough are gone on," says Lady
Kicklebury, whose eye fastens naturally on her kindred aristoc-
racy. “Lord and Lady Wyebridge and suite, Lady Zedland
and her family.”
“Hallo ! bere's Cutler of the Onety-oneth, and MacMull, of
the Greens, en route to Noirbourg,” says Hicks, confidentially.
“Know MacMull ?-devilish good fellow-such a fellow to
smoke.”
Lankin, too, reads and grins. “Why, are they going the
Rhenish circuit ?” he says and reads :- .
Sir Thomas Minos, Lady Minos, nebst Begleitung aus Eng-
land.
Sir John Eachus, mit familie und Dienerschaft aus England.
Sir Roger Rhadamanthus.
Thomas Smith, sergeant.
Sergeant Brown and Mrs. Brown, aus England.
Sergeant Tomkins, Anglais. Madame Tomkins, Mesdemoi-
selle Tomkins.


36
THE KICKLEBURYS ON THE RHINE.
at Oxford. There are few characters more amiable, and delightful
to watch, and contemplate, than some of those middle aged Oxford
bucks, who hang about the University, and live with the young
tufts. Leader can talk racing and boating with the fastest young
Christchurch gentleman. Leader occasionally rides to cover
with Lord Talboys; is a good shot, and seldom walks out with-
out a setter or a spaniel at his heels. Leader knows the peerage,
and the racing calendar, as well as the Oxford cram books. Lead-
er comes up to town, and dines with Lord Grimsby. Leader
goes to Court every two years. He is the greatest swell in bis
common room. He drinks claret, and can't stand port wine any
longer ; and the old fellows of his College admire him, and pet
him, and get all their knowledge of the world and the aristocracy
from him. I admire those kind old dons, when they appear, af-
fable and jaunty men of the world, members of the Camford and
Oxbridge Club, upon the London pavement. I like to see them
over the Morning Post in the Common Room ; with a “Ha, I
see Lady Rackstraw has another daughter.”. “Poppleton, there
has been another party at X— House, and you we. 't asked,
my boy.” “Lord Coverdale has got a large party siaying at
Coverdale. Did you know him at Christchurch? He was a
very handsome man before he broke his nose, fighting the barge-
men at Ifily ; a light weight, but a beautiful sparrer,”' &c. Let
me add, that Leader, although he does love a tuft, has a kind
heart; as his mother and sisters in Yorkshire, know; as all the
village knows too—which is proved of his position in the great
world—and welcoines him very kindly when he comes down and
takes the duty at Christmas, and preaches to them one or two of
“the very sermons which Lord Grimsbury was good enough to
like, when I delivered them at Talboys."
“ You are not acquainted with Lord Talboys ?" Leader asks,
with a degage air, “ I shall have much pleasure in introducing
you to him. Talboys, let me introduce you to Lady Kicklebury,
Sir Thomas Kicklebury was not at Christchurch in your time;


THE KICKLEBURYS ON THE RHINE.
37
but you have heard of him, I dare say.-Your son has left a re-
putation at Oxford.”
" I should think I have, too. He walked a hundred miles in
a hundred hours. They said he bet that he'd drink a hundred
pints of beer in a hundred hours: but I don't think he could do
it, not strong beer ; don't think any man could., The beer here
isn't worth a—"
“My dear Talboys,” says Leader, with a winning smile. “I
suppose Lady Kicklebury is not a judge of beer—and what an un-
romantic subject of conversation, here, under the castled crag im-
mortalized by Byron."
"What the deuce does it mean about peasant girls with dark
blue eyes, and hands that offer corn and wine,” asks Talboys;
“ I've never seen any peasant girls, except the-ugly set of women
I ever looked at.”
“ The poet's license. I see, Milliken, you are making a charm-
ing sketch. You used to draw when you were at Brazennose,
Milliken ; and play-yes, you played the violoncello.”
Mr. Milyen still possessed these accomplishments. He was
taken up that very evening, by a soldier, at Coblentz, for making
a sketch of Ehrenbreitstein. Mrs. Milliken sketches, immensely
too, and writes poetry; such dreary pictures, such dreary poems !
but professional people are proverbially jealous; and I doubt
whether our fellow passenger, the German, would even allow that
Milliken could play the violoncello. .
Lady Kicklebury gives Miss Fanny a nudge when Lord Tal-
boys appears, and orders her to exert all her fascinations. . How
the old lady coaxes, and she wheedles! She pours out the Tal-
boys pedigree upon him ; and asks after his aunt, and his mother's
family. Is he going to Noirburg ?-How delightful. There is
nothing like British spirit; and to see an English matron well
set upon a man of large fortune, and high rank, is a great and cu-
rious sight.
And yet, somehow, the British doggedness does not always
answer. “Do you know that old woman in the drab jacket,
14
Dej


38
THE KICKLEBURYS ON THE RHINE.
Titmarsh ?” my hereditary legislator asks of me. “What the
devil is she bothering me for, about my aunts, and setting her
daughter at me? I aint such a fool as that. I aint clever, Tit-
marsh; I never said I was. I never pretend to be clever, and
that-but why does that old fool bother me, hay ? Heigho ? I'm
devilish thirsty.. I was devilish cut last night. I think I must
have another go off. Hallo you! Kellner! Garsong ; Ody Soda,
Oter petty vare do dyvee de Conac. That's your sort; isn't it,
Leader ?"
“You will speak French well enough if you practice,” says
Leader with a tender voice, “practice is everything. Shall we
dine at the table d'hote ? Waiter, put down the name of Viscount
Talboys, and Mr. Leader if you please.”
The boat is full of all sorts and conditions of men. For’ard,
there are peasants and soldiers ; stumpy, placid-looking little
warriors for the most part, smoking feeble segars, and looking
quite harmless under their enormous helmets. A poor, stunted,
dull-looking boy of sixteen, staggering before a black-striped
sentry-box, with an enormous musket on his shoulder, does not
seem to be a martial, or awe-inspiring object. Has it not been
said that we carry our prejudices everywhere; and only admire
what we are accustomed to admire in our own country?
Yonder walks a handsome young soldier who has just been
marrying a wife. How happy they seem ! and how pleased that
everybody should remark their happiness. It is a fact that in the
full sunshine, and before a couple of hundred people on board the
Joseph Miller steamer, the soldier absolutely kissed Mrs. Soldier,
at which the sweet Fanny Kicklebury was made to blush.
We were standing together looking at the various groups, the
pretty peasant woman, (really pretty for once,) with the red
head-dress and fluttering ribbons, and the child in her arms; the
jolly fat old gentleman, (who little thought he would ever be a
frontispiece in this life,) and who was drinking Rhine wine before
noon, and turning his back upon all the castles, towers and ruins,
which reflected their crumbling peaks in the water, npon the


40
THE KICKLEBURYS ON THE RHINE.
then, upon his sardonic countenance, comes up, and says, “ Tit-
marsh, how can you be so impertinent ?”
“ Impertinent! as how?"
“ The girl must understand what you mean ; and you should
not laugh at her own mother to her. Did you ever see anything
like the way in which that horrible woman is following the young
lord about?"
“ See! You see it every day, my dear fellow ; only the
trick is better done, and Lady Kicklebury is rather a clumsy
practitioner-See! why nobody is better aware of the sprinys
which are set to catch him, than that young fellow himself, who
is as knowing as any veteran in May fair. And you don't sup-
pose that Lady Kicklebury fancies that she is doing anything
mean, or anything wrong? Heaven bless you! She never did
anything wrong in her life. She has no idea but that every-
thing she says, and thinks, and does, is right. And no doubt
she never did rob a church ; and was a faithful wife to Sir
Thomas, and pays her tradesmen. Confound her virtue! It
is that which makes her so wonderful—that brass armor in which
she walks so impenetrable—not knowing what pity is or charity;
crying sometimes when she is vexed, or thwarted, but laughing
never-crying and domineering by the same natural instinct,
never doubting about herself above all. Let us rise, and revolt
against those people, Lankin. Let us war with them, and smite
them utterly. It is to use against these, especially, that Scorn
and Satire were invented.”
“ And the animal you attack,” says Lankin, “is provided
with a hide to defend him—it is a common ordinance of nature.”
And so we pass by tower and town, and float up the Rhine.
We don't describe the river. Who does not know it! How
you see people asleep in the cabins at the most picturesque parts,
and angry to be awakened when they fire off those stupid guns
for the echoes! It is as familiar to numbers of people as Green-
wich; and we know the merits of the inns along the road as if
they were the Trafalgar or the Star and Garter. How stale


THE KICKLEBURYS ON THE RHINE.
41
everything grows! If we were to live in a garden of Eden now,
and the gate were open, we should go out, and tramp forward,
and push on, and get up early in the morning, and push on
again—anything to keep moving, anything to get a change, any-
thing but quiet for the restless children of Cain.
So many thousands of English folks have been at Rougetnoir.
bourg in this and past seasons, that it is scarcely needful to alter
the name of that pretty little gay wicked place. There were se
many British barristers there this year that they called the Hotel
des Quatre Saisons, the Hotel of Quarter Sessions. There were
judges and their wives, sergeants and their ladies, Queen's
counsel learned in the law, the northern circuit and the western
circuit—there were officers of half-pay and full-pay, military
officers, naval officers, and sheriffs' officers. There were people
of high fashion and rank, and people of no rank at all—there
were men and women of reputation, and of the two kinds of
reputation—there were English boys playing cricket; English
pointers putting up the German partridges, and English guns
knocking them down-there were women whose husbands, and
men whose wives were at home—there was high church and low
church-England turned out for a holiday, in a word. How
much farther shall we extend our holiday ground, and where shall
we camp next? A winter at Cairo is nothing now. Perhaps
ere long we shall be going to Saratoga Springs, and the Ameri-
cans coming to Margate for the summer.
Apartments befitting her dignity and the number of her family,
had been secured for Lady Kicklebury by her dutiful son, in the
same house in which one of Lankin's friends had secured for us
much humbler lodgings. Kicklebury received his mother's ad-
vent with a great deal of good humor; and a wonderful figure
the good-natured little baronet was when he presented himself to
his astonished friends scarcely recognizable by his own parent
and sisters, and the staring retainers of their house.
“Mercy, Kicklebury ! have you become a Red Republican ?”
his mother asked.


42
THE KICKLEBURYS ON THE RHINE.
“I can't find a place to kiss you,” said Miss Fanny, laughing
at her brother, and he gave her pretty cheek such a scrub with
his red beard as made some folks think it would be very pleasant
to be Miss Fanny's brother.
In the course of his travels, one of Sir Thomas Kicklebury's
chief amusements and cares had been to cultivate this bushy
· auburn ornament. He said that no man could pronounce Ger-
man properly without a beard to his jaws; but he did not appear
to have got much beyond the preliminary step to learning ; and,
in spite of his beard, his honest English accent came out, as his
jolly English face looked forth from behind that fierce and bristly
decoration, perfectly good-humored and unmistakable. We
try our best to look like foreigners, but we can't. Every Italian
mendicant or Pont Neuf beggar knows his Englishman, in
spite of blouse, and beard, and slouched hat. “There is a pe-
culiar high-bred grace about us," I whisper to Lady Kicklebury,
"an aristocratic Je ne sais quoi, which is not to be found in any
but Englishmen; and it is that which makes us so immensely
liked and admired all over the Continent.” Well, this may be
truth or joke—this may be a sneer or a simple assertion; our
vulgarities and our insolences may, perhaps, make us as remark-
able, as that high-breeding which we assume to possess. It may
be that the continental society ridicules and detests us as we walk
domineering over Europe-but, after all, which of us would de-
nationalize himself? who wouldn't be an Englishman? Come,
sir, cosmopolite as you are, passing all your winters at Rome or
at Paris; exile by choice, or poverty, from your own country; -
preferring easier manners, cheaper pleasures, a simple life ; are
you not still proud of your British citizenship, and would you
like to be a Frenchman ?
Kicklebury has a great acquaintance at Noirbourg, and as he
walks into the great concert room at night, introducing his mo-
ther and sisters there, he seems to look about with a little anxiety
lest all of his acquaintance should recognize him. There are
some in that most strange and motley company with whom he


46
THE KICKLEBURYS ON THE RHINE.
balls and music, and all the newspaper-rooms and parks, all the
feasting and pleasures of this delightful Rougetnoirbourg would
bave been at an end.
For though he is a wicked gambling Prince Lenoir, he is be-
loved in all these regions; his establishment gives life to the
town, to the lodging-house and hotel-keepers, to the milliners,
and hackney-coachmen, to the letters of horse-filesh, to the
huntsmen and gardes-de-chasse ; to all these honest fiddlers and
trumpeters who play so delectably. Were Lenoir's bank to
break, the whole little city would shut up, and all the Noir
bourgers wish him prosperity, and benefit by his good fortune.
Three years since, the Noirbourgers underwent a mighty
panic. There came, at a time when the chief Lenoir was at
Paris, and the reins of government were in the hands of his
younger brother, a company of adventurers from Belgium, with a
capital of three hundred thousand francs, and an infallible system
for playing rouge et noir, and they boldly challenged the bank of
Lenoir, and sat down before his croupiers and defied bim. They
called themselves, in their pride, the Contre-banque de Noirbourg :
they had their croupiers and punters, even as Lenoir had his :
they had their rouleaux of Napoleons, stamped with their Contre-
banquish seal :—and they began to play.
As, when two mighty giants step out of a host and engage,
the armies stand still in expectation, and the puny privates and
commonalty remain quiet to witness the tremendous cham-
pions of the war, so, it is said, that when the Contrebanque ar-
rived, and ranged itself before the officers of Lenoir-rouleau to
rouleau, bank note to bank note, war for war, controlment for
controlment, all the minor punters and gamblers ceased their
peddling play, and looked on in silence round the verdant plain,
where the great combat was to be decided.
Not used to the vast operations of war, like his elder brother,
Lenoir Junior, the lieutenant, telegraphed to bis absent chief the
news of the mighty enemy who had come down upon him, asked


THE KICKLEBURYS ON THE RHINE.
49
music, and rejoice in his victory ; I am glad he beat those Con-
trebanquists. Dissipati sunt. The game is up with them.
The instances of this man's magnanimity are numerous, and
worthy of Alexander the Great, or Harry the Fifth, or Robin
Hood. Most gentle is he, and thoughtful to the poor, and mer-
ciful to the vanquished. When Jeremy Diddler, who had lost
twenty pounds at his table, lay in inglorious pawn at his inn ;
when O'Toole could not leave Noirbourg until he had received
his remittances from Ireland, the noble Lenoir paid Diddler's inn
bill, advanced O'Toole money upon his well known signature,
franked both of them back to their native country again ; and
has never, wonderful to state, been paid from that day to this.
If you will go play at his table, you may; but nobody forces
you. If you lose, pay with a cheerful heart. Dulce est desipere
in loco. This is not a treaty of morals. Friar Tuck was not
an exemplary ccclesiastic, nor Robin Hood a model man; but
he was a jolly outlaw ; and, I dare say, the Sheriff of Notting- .
ham, whose money he took, rather relished his feast at Robin's
green table.
And if you lose, worthy friend, as possibly you will, at Le-
noir's pretty games, console yourself by thinking that it is much
better for you in the end that you should lose, than that you
should win. Let me, for my part, make a clean breast of it, and
own that your humble servant did, on one occasion, win a score of
Napoleons, and beginning with a sum of no less than five shil-
lings. But until I had lost them again I was so feverish, excited,
and uneasy, that I had neither delectation in reading the most
exciting French novels, nor pleasure in seeing pretty landscapes,
nor appetite for dinner. The moment, however, that graceless
money was gone, equanimity was restored, Paul Feval and
Eugene Sue began to be terrifically interesting again ; and the
dinners at Noirbourg, though by no means good culinary speci-
mens, were perfectly sufficient for my easy and tranquil mind.
Lankin, who played only a lawyer's rubber at whist, marked the
salutary change in his friend's condition ; and, for my part, I
3


50
THE KICKLEBURYS ON THE RHINE.
hope and pray that every honest reader of this volume, who
plays at M. Lenoir's table, will lose every shilling of his win-
nings before he goes away. Where are the gamblers whom we
have read of? Where are the card-players whom we can re-
member in our early days ? At one time almost every gentle-
man played, and there were whist tables in every lady's draw-
ing-room. But trumps are going out along with numbers of
old world institutions; and, before very long, a blackleg will
be as rare an animal as a knight in armor.
There was a little dwarfish, abortive, counterbank set up at
Noirbourg this year, but the gentlemen soon disagreed among
themselves; and, let us hope, were cut off in detail by the great
Lenoir. And there was a Frenchman at our inn who had won
two Napoleons per day for the last six weeks, and who had an
infallible system, whereof he kindly consented to communicate
the secret for the consideration of a hundred Louis; but there
came one fatal night when the poor Frenchman's system could
not make head against fortune, and her wheel went over him,
and he disappeared utterly.
With the early morning everybody rises and makes his or her
appearance at the Springs, where they partake of water with a
wonderful energy and perseverance. They say that people get
to be fond of this water at last ; as to what tastes cannot men
accustom themselves ? I drank a couple of an abominable sort
of feeble salts in a state of very gentle effervescence, but though
there was a very pretty girl who served it, the drink was
abominable, and it was a marvel to see the various topers, who
tossed off glass after glass, which the fair-haired little Hebe de-
livered sparkling from the well.
Seeing my wry faces, old Captain Carver expostulated, with
a jolly twinkle of his eye, as he absorbed the contents of a spark-
ling crystal beaker. “ Pooh! take another glass, sir : you'll
like it better and better every day. It refreshes you, sir : it
fortifies you: and as for liking it-gad! I remember the time
when I didn't like claret. Times are altered now, ha! ha!


THE KICKLEBURYS ON THE RHINE.
55
how rich they are. “Who is that very stylish-looking woman,
to whom Mr. Washington Walker spoke just now ?" she asks of
Kicklebury.
Kicklebury gives a twinkle of his eye. “O, that, mother!
that is Madame La Princess de Mogador—it's a French title.”
“She danced last night, and danced exceedingly well, I re-
marked her. There's a very high-bred grace about the prin-
cess.”
“Yes, exceedingly. We'd better come on," says Kickle-
bury, blushing rather as he returns the princess's nod.
It is wonderful how large Kicklebury's acquaintance is. He
has a word and a joke in the best German he can muster for
everybody-for the high well-born lady, as for the German peas-
ant maiden, who stood for the lovely portrait which faces this
page, as for the pretty little washerwoman, who comes full sail
down the streets, a basket on her head, and one of Mrs. Fan-
tail's wonderful gowns swelling on each arm. As we were going
to the Schloss-Garten I caught a sight of the rogue’s grinning
face yesterday, close at little Gretal's ear, under her basket, but
spying out his mother advancing, he dashed down a by street,
and when we came up with her, Gretal was alone.
One but seldom sees the English and the holiday visitors in
the ancient parts of Noirbourg ; they keep to the streets of new
buildings and garden villas which have sprung up under the ma-
gic influence of M. Lenoir, under the white towers and gables
of the old German town. The Prince of Trente et Quarante
has quite overcome the old serene sovereign of Noirbourg, whom
one cannot help fancying a prince like a prince in a Christmas
pantomime—a burlesque prince with twopence-halfpenny for a
revenue, jolly and irascible, a prime minister-kicking prince, fed
upon fabulous plum-puddings and enormous pasteboard joints, by
cooks and valets with large heads which never alter their grin.
Not that this portrait is from the life. Perhaps he has no life.
Perhaps there is no prince in the great white tower that we see
for miles before we enter the little town. Perhaps he has been


58
THE KICKLEBURYS ON THE RHINE.
the stalwart brothers of the now all but extinct generation are
there; their quarrels and their pleasures, their glories and dis-
graces, enemies, flatterers, detractors, admirers—all now buried.
Is it not curious to think, that the King of Trumps now virtually
reigas in this place, and has deposed the other dynasty ?
Very early one morning, wishing to have a sketch of the
White Tower in which our English princess had been imprisoned,
I repaired to the gardens, and set about a work, which, when
completed, will no doubt have the honor of a place on the line,
at the exhibition ; and, returning homeward to breakfast, musing
upon the strange fortunes and inhabitants of the queer, fantastic,
melancholy place, behold, I came suddenly upon a couple of
persons, a male and a female; the latter of whom wore a blue
hood or “ ugly,” and blushed very much on seeing me. The
man began to laugh behind his mustaches, the which cacchination
was checked by an appealing look from the young lady ; and
he held out his hand, and said, “ How d’ye do, Titmarsh. Been
out making some cawickachaws, Hay?”
I need not say that the youth before me was the heavy dra-
goon, and the maiden was Miss Fanny Kicklebury. Or need I
repeat that in the course of my blighted being, I never loved
a young gazelle to glad me with its dark blue eye, but when it
came to, &c., the usual disappointment was sure to ensue?
There is no necessity why I should allude to my feelings at this
most manifest and outrageous case. I gave a withering glance of
scorn at the pair, and with a stately salutation, passed on.
Miss Fanny came tripping after me. She held out her little
hand with such a pretty look of deprecation, that I could not but
take it; and she said, “ Mr. Titmarsh, if you please, I want to
speak to you if you please ;' and choking with emotion, I bade
her speak on.
“My brother knows all about, and highly approves of Captain
Hicks,” she said with her head banging down ; "and O, he's


THE KICKLEBURYS ON THE RHINE.
59
very good and kind ; and I know him much better now, than I
did when I came on board the steamer."
I thought I had mimicked him, and what an ass I had
been.
“ And you know,” she continued, “ that you have quito
deserted me for the last ten days for your great acquaintances.”
.“ I have been to play chess with Lord Knightsbridge, who
has the gout.”
“ And to drink tea constantly with that American lady ; and
you have written verses in her album, and in Lavinia’s album ;
and as I saw that you had quite thrown me off, why my bro-
ther approves of it highly; and—as Captain Hicks likes you very
much, and says you amuse him very much—indeed he does,”
says the arch little wretch. And then she added a postscript, as
it were, to her letter, which contained, as usual, the point which
she wished to urge :-
“You—won't break it to mamma—will you be so kind? My
brother will do that”—and I promised her; and she ran away
kissing her hand to me. And I did not say a word to Lady
Kicklebury, and not above a thousand people at Noirbourg knew
that Miss Kicklebury and Captain Hicks were engaged.
And now let those who are too confident of their virtue listen
to the truthful and melancholy story which I have to relate, and
humble themselves, and bear in mind that the most perfect among
us are liable to fall. Kicklebury was not perfect. I do not de-
fend his practice. He spent a great deal more time and money
than was good for bim at M. Lenoir's gaming-table, and the only
thing which the young fellow never lost was his good humor. If
Fortune shook her swift wings and fled away from him, he
laughed at the retreating pinions, and you saw him dancing and
laughing as gaily after losing a rouleau, as if he was made of
money, and really had the five thousand a-year which his mo-
ther said was the amount of the Kicklebury property. But when
bor ladyship’s jointure, and the young ladies' allowances, and


06
THE KICKLEBURYS ON THE RHINE.
as the son of an English earl, heir to many thousands per annum,
Lady Kicklebury permitted him to do. And she introduced her-
sélf to Madame la Princesse de Mogador, mentioning to her
Highness that she had the pleasure of meeting Madame la Prin-
cesse at Rougetnoirbourg ; that she, Lady K., was the mother
of the Chevalier de Kicklebury, who had the advantage of the
acquaintance of Madame la Princesse ; and that she hoped Ma-
dame la Princesse had enjoyed her stay at the waters. To these
advances the Princess of Mogador returned a gracious and affable
salutation, exchanging glances of peculiar meaning with two highly
respectable bearded gentlemen who traveled in her suite ; and,
when asked by milady whereabouts her Highness' residence was
at Paris, said that her hotel was in the Rue Notre Dame de Lo-
rette, where Lady Kicklebury hoped to have the honor of wait-
ing upon Madame la Princesse de Mogador.
But when one of the bearded gentlemen called the Princess by
the familiar name of Fifine, and the other said, “Veux tu fumer,
Mogador,” and the Princess actually took a segar and began to
smoke, Lady Kicklebury was aghast, and trembled; and pre-
sently Lord Talboys burst into a loud fit of laughter.
" What is the cause of your lordship’s amusement ?” asked
the dowager, looking very much frightened, and blushing like a
maiden of sixteen.
"Excuse me, Lady Kicklebury, but I can't help it,” he said.
“ You've been talking to your opposite neighbor. She don't
understand a word of English, and calling her princess, and high-
ness, and she's no more a princess than you or I. She is a little
milliner in the street she mentioned, and she dances at Mabille
and Chateau Rouge.”
Hearing these two familiar names, the princess looked hard at
Lord Talboys, but he never lost countenance ; and at the next
station Lady Kicklebury rushed out of the smoking carriage, and
returned to her own place ; where, I dare say, Captain Hicks
and Miss Fanny were delighted once more to have the advantage


THE KICKLEBURYS ON THE RHINE.
69
the carts begin to creak and rattle, and wake the sleeping
echoes. Ding, ding, ding, the steamers' bells begin to ring;
the people on board to stir and wake; the lights may be extin-
guished, and take their turn of sleep; the active boats shake
themselves, and push out into the river; the great bridge opens,
and gives them passage; the church bells of the city begin to
clink; the cavalry trumpets blow from the opposite bank ; the
sailor is at the wheel, the porter at his burthen, the soldier at
his musket, and the priest at his prayers
And lo! in a flash of crimson splendor, with blazing scarlet
clouds running before his chariot, and heralding his majestic ap-
proach, God's sun rises upon the world, and all nature wakens
and brightens.
O glorious spectacle of light and life! O beatific symbol of
Power, Love, Joy, Beauty! Let us look at thee with humble
wonder, and thankfully acknowledge and adore. What gracious
forethought is it—what generous and loving provision, that
deigns to prepare for our eyes and to soothe our hearts with such
a splendid morning festival! For these magnificent bounties of
Heaven to us, let us be thankful, even that we can feel thank-
ful ; (for thanks surely is the noblest effort, as it is the greatest
delight, of the gentle soul,) and so, a grace for this feast, let all
say who partake of it.
See! the mist clears off Drachenfels, and it looks out from
the distance, and bids us a friendly farewell. Farewell to holi-
day and sunshine ; farewell to kindly sport and pleasant leisure !
Let us say good bye to the Rhine, friend. • Fogs, and cares,
and labors are awaiting us by the Thames ; and a kind face or
two looking out for us to cheer and bid us welcome.