Part 44 (1/2)
I missed you when the storm came on; I have missed you ever since.
Others went in search of you and came back. I could not sleep, but the rest are sleeping, so I stole down to watch for you. Brother, brother, if any harm chanced to you, even the angels could not comfort me; all would be dark, dark! But you are safe, safe, safe!” And she clung to me yet closer.
”Ah, Lilian, Lilian, your vision in the hour I first beheld you was indeed prophetic,--'each has need of the other.' Do you remember?”
”Softly, softly,” she said, ”let me think!” She stood quietly by my side, looking up into the sky, with all its numberless stars, and its solitary moon now sinking slow behind the verge of the forest. ”It comes back to me,” she murmured softly,--”the Long ago,--the sweet Long ago!”
I held my breath to listen.
”There, there!” she resumed, pointing to the heavens; ”do you see?
You are there, and my father, and--and--Oh! that terrible face, those serpent eyes, the dead man's skull! Save me! save me!”
She bowed her head upon my bosom, and I led her gently back towards the house. As we gained the door which she had left open, the starlight s.h.i.+ning across the shadowy gloom within, she lifted her face from my breast, and cast a hurried fearful look round the s.h.i.+ning 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 s.h.i.+vering form with my dripping garments, all the while my eyes--following the direction which hers had taken--dwelt on the walls of the nook within the threshold, half lost in darkness, half white in starlight. And there I, too, beheld the haunting Luminous Shadow, the spectral effigies of the mysterious being, whose very existence in the flesh was a riddle unsolved by my reason. Distinctly I saw the Shadow, but its light was far paler, its outline far more vague, than when I had beheld it before. I took courage, as I felt Lilian's heart beating against my own. I advanced, I crossed the threshold,--the Shadow was gone.
”There is no Shadow here,--no phantom to daunt thee, my life's life,”
said I, bending over Lilian.
”It has touched me in pa.s.sing; I feel it--cold, cold, cold!” she answered faintly.
I bore her to her room, placed her on her bed, struck a light, watched over her. At dawn there was a change in her face, and from that time health gradually left her; strength slowly, slowly, yet to me perceptibly, ebbed from her life away.
(1) A missile weapon peculiar to the Australian savages.
CHAPTER LXXIII.
Months upon months have rolled on since the night in which Lilian had watched for my coming amidst the chilling airs--under the haunting moon.
I have said that from the date of that night her health began gradually to fail, but in her mind there was evidently at work some slow revolution. Her visionary abstractions were less frequent; when they occurred, less prolonged. There was no longer in her soft face that celestial serenity which spoke her content in her dreams, but often a look of anxiety and trouble. She was even more silent than before; but when she did speak, there were now evident some struggling gleams of memory. She startled us, at times, by a distinct allusion to the events and scenes of her early childhood. More than once she spoke of commonplace incidents and mere acquaintances at L----. At last she seemed to recognize Mrs. Ashleigh as her mother; but me, as Allen Fenwick, her betrothed, her bridegroom, no! Once or twice she spoke to me of her beloved as of a stranger to myself, and asked me not to deceive her--should she ever see him again? There was one change in this new phase of her state that wounded me to the quick. She had always previously seemed to welcome my presence; now there were hours, sometimes days together, in which my presence was evidently painful to her. She would become agitated when I stole into her room, make signs to me to leave her, grow yet more disturbed if I did not immediately obey, and become calm again when I was gone.
Faber sought constantly to sustain my courage and administer to my hopes by reminding me of the prediction he had hazarded,--namely, that through some malady to the frame the reason would be ultimately restored.
He said, ”Observe! her mind was first roused from its slumber by the affectionate, unconquered impulse of her heart. You were absent; the storm alarmed her, she missed you,--feared for you. The love within her, not alienated, though latent, drew her thoughts into definite human tracks. And thus, the words that you tell me she uttered when you appeared before her were words of love, stricken, though as yet irregularly, as the winds strike the harp-strings from chords of awakened memory. The same unwonted excitement, together with lengthened exposure to the cold night-air, will account for the shock to her physical system, and the languor and waste of strength by which it has been succeeded.”
”Ay, and the Shadow that we both saw within the threshold. What of that?”
”Are there no records on evidence, which most physicians of very extended practice will perhaps allow that their experience more or less tend to confirm--no records of the singular coincidences between individual impressions which are produced by sympathy? Now, whether you or your Lilian were first haunted by this Shadow I know not. Perhaps before it appeared to you in the wizard's chamber it had appeared to her by the Monks' Well. Perhaps, as it came to you in the prison, so it lured her through the solitudes, a.s.sociating its illusory guidance with dreams of you. And again, when she saw it within your threshold, your fantasy, so abruptly invoked, made you see with the eyes of your Lilian!
Does this doctrine of sympathy, though by that very mystery you two loved each other at first,--though, without it, love at first sight were in itself an incredible miracle,--does, I say, this doctrine of sympathy seem to you inadmissible? Then nothing is left for us but to revolve the conjecture I before threw out. Have certain organizations like that of Margrave the power to impress, through s.p.a.ce, 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 superst.i.tious illusions, that they have not yet been traced--as, if truthful, no doubt they can be, by the patient genius of science--to one of those secondary causes by which the Creator ordains that Nature shall act on Man.”
By degrees I became dissatisfied with my conversations with Faber. I yearned for explanations; all guesses but bewildered me more. In his family, with one exception, I found no congenial a.s.sociation. His nephew seemed to me an ordinary specimen of a very trite human nature,--a young man of limited ideas, fair moral tendencies, going mechanically right where not tempted to wrong. The same desire of gain which had urged him to gamble and speculate when thrown in societies rife with such example, led him, now in the Bush, to healthful, industrious, persevering labour.
”Spes fovet agricolas,” says the poet; the same Hope which entices the fish to the hook impels the plough of the husband-man. The young farmer's young wife was somewhat superior to him; she had more refinement of taste, more culture of mind, but, living in his life, she was inevitably levelled to his ends and pursuits; and, next to the babe in the cradle, no object seemed to her so important as that of guarding the sheep from the scab and the dingoes. I was amazed to see how quietly a man whose mind was so stored by life and by books as that of Julius Faber--a man who had loved the clash of conflicting intellects, and acquired the rewards of fame--could accommodate himself to the cabined range of his kinsfolks' half-civilized existence, take interest in their trivial talk, find varying excitement in the monotonous household of a peasant-like farmer. I could not help saying as much to him once. ”My friend,” replied the old man, ”believe me that the happiest art of intellect, however lofty, is that which enables it to be cheerfully at home with the Real!”
The only one of the family in which Faber was domesticated in whom I found an interest, to whose talk I could listen without fatigue, was the child Amy. Simple though she was in language, patient of labour as the most laborious, I recognized in her a quiet n.o.bleness 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 grat.i.tude, the claims which that kindness imposed. Even for the blessing of life, which she shared with all creation, she felt as if singled out by the undeserved favour of the Creator, and thus was filled with religion, because she was filled with love.
My interest in this child was increased and deepened by my saddened and not wholly unremorseful remembrance of the night on which her sobs had pierced my ear,--the night from which I secretly dated the mysterious agencies that had wrenched from their proper field and career both my mind and my life. But a gentler interest endeared her to my thoughts in the pleasure that Lilian felt in her visits, in the affectionate intercourse that sprang up between the afflicted sufferer and the harmless infant. Often when we failed to comprehend some meaning which Lilian evidently wished to convey to us--we, her mother and her husband--she was understood with as much ease by Amy, the unlettered child, as by Faber, the gray-haired thinker.