THE LIFTED VEIL


Give me no light, great Heaven, but such as turns
To energy of human fellowship;
No powers beyond the growing heritage
That makes completer manhood.




CHAPTER I


The time of my end approaches.  I have lately been subject to attacks of
_angina pectoris_; and in the ordinary course of things, my physician
tells me, I may fairly hope that my life will not be protracted many
months.  Unless, then, I am cursed with an exceptional physical
constitution, as I am cursed with an exceptional mental character, I
shall not much longer groan under the wearisome burthen of this earthly
existence.  If it were to be otherwise--if I were to live on to the age
most men desire and provide for--I should for once have known whether the
miseries of delusive expectation can outweigh the miseries of true
provision.  For I foresee when I shall die, and everything that will
happen in my last moments.

Just a month from this day, on September 20, 1850, I shall be sitting in
this chair, in this study, at ten o'clock at night, longing to die, weary
of incessant insight and foresight, without delusions and without hope.
Just as I am watching a tongue of blue flame rising in the fire, and my
lamp is burning low, the horrible contraction will begin at my chest.  I
shall only have time to reach the bell, and pull it violently, before the
sense of suffocation will come.  No one will answer my bell.  I know why.
My two servants are lovers, and will have quarrelled.  My housekeeper
will have rushed out of the house in a fury, two hours before, hoping
that Perry will believe she has gone to drown herself.  Perry is alarmed
at last, and is gone out after her.  The little scullery-maid is asleep
on a bench: she never answers the bell; it does not wake her.  The sense
of suffocation increases: my lamp goes out with a horrible stench: I make
a great effort, and snatch at the bell again.  I long for life, and there
is no help.  I thirsted for the unknown: the thirst is gone.  O God, let
me stay with the known, and be weary of it: I am content.  Agony of pain
and suffocation--and all the while the earth, the fields, the pebbly
brook at the bottom of the rookery, the fresh scent after the rain, the
light of the morning through my chamber-window, the warmth of the hearth
after the frosty air--will darkness close over them for ever?

Darkness--darkness--no pain--nothing but darkness: but I am passing on
and on through the darkness: my thought stays in the darkness, but always
with a sense of moving onward . . .

Before that time comes, I wish to use my last hours of ease and strength
in telling the strange story of my experience.  I have never fully
unbosomed myself to any human being; I have never been encouraged to
trust much in the sympathy of my fellow-men.  But we have all a chance of
meeting with some pity, some tenderness, some charity, when we are dead:
it is the living only who cannot be forgiven--the living only from whom
men's indulgence and reverence are held off, like the rain by the hard
east wind.  While the heart beats, bruise it--it is your only
opportunity; while the eye can still turn towards you with moist, timid
entreaty, freeze it with an icy unanswering gaze; while the ear, that
delicate messenger to the inmost sanctuary of the soul, can still take in
the tones of kindness, put it off with hard civility, or sneering
compliment, or envious affectation of indifference; while the creative
brain can still throb with the sense of injustice, with the yearning for
brotherly recognition--make haste--oppress it with your ill-considered
judgements, your trivial comparisons, your careless misrepresentations.
The heart will by and by be still--"ubi saeva indignatio ulterius cor
lacerare nequit"; the eye will cease to entreat; the ear will be deaf;
the brain will have ceased from all wants as well as from all work.  Then
your charitable speeches may find vent; then you may remember and pity
the toil and the struggle and the failure; then you may give due honour
to the work achieved; then you may find extenuation for errors, and may
consent to bury them.

That is a trivial schoolboy text; why do I dwell on it?  It has little
reference to me, for I shall leave no works behind me for men to honour.
I have no near relatives who will make up, by weeping over my grave, for
the wounds they inflicted on me when I was among them.  It is only the
story of my life that will perhaps win a little more sympathy from
strangers when I am dead, than I ever believed it would obtain from my
friends while I was living.

My childhood perhaps seems happier to me than it really was, by contrast
with all the after-years.  For then the curtain of the future was as
impenetrable to me as to other children: I had all their delight in the
present hour, their sweet indefinite hopes for the morrow; and I had a
tender mother: even now, after the dreary lapse of long years, a slight
trace of sensation accompanies the remembrance of her caress as she held
me on her knee--her arms round my little body, her cheek pressed on mine.
I had a complaint of the eyes that made me blind for a little while, and
she kept me on her knee from morning till night.  That unequalled love
soon vanished out of my life, and even to my childish consciousness it
was as if that life had become more chill I rode my little white pony
with the groom by my side as before, but there were no loving eyes
looking at me as I mounted, no glad arms opened to me when I came back.
Perhaps I missed my mother's love more than most children of seven or
eight would have done, to whom the other pleasures of life remained as
before; for I was certainly a very sensitive child.  I remember still the
mingled trepidation and delicious excitement with which I was affected by
the tramping of the horses on the pavement in the echoing stables, by the
loud resonance of the groom's voices, by the booming bark of the dogs as
my father's carriage thundered under the archway of the courtyard, by the
din of the gong as it gave notice of luncheon and dinner.  The measured
tramp of soldiery which I sometimes heard--for my father's house lay near
a county town where there were large barracks--made me sob and tremble;
and yet when they were gone past, I longed for them to come back again.

I fancy my father thought me an odd child, and had little fondness for
me; though he was very careful in fulfilling what he regarded as a
parent's duties.  But he was already past the middle of life, and I was
not his only son.  My mother had been his second wife, and he was five-
and-forty when he married her.  He was a firm, unbending, intensely
orderly man, in root and stem a banker, but with a flourishing graft of
the active landholder, aspiring to county influence: one of those people
who are always like themselves from day to day, who are uninfluenced by
the weather, and neither know melancholy nor high spirits.  I held him in
great awe, and appeared more timid and sensitive in his presence than at
other times; a circumstance which, perhaps, helped to confirm him in the
intention to educate me on a different plan from the prescriptive one
with which he had complied in the case of my elder brother, already a
tall youth at Eton.  My brother was to be his representative and
successor; he must go to Eton and Oxford, for the sake of making
connexions, of course: my father was not a man to underrate the bearing
of Latin satirists or Greek dramatists on the attainment of an
aristocratic position.  But, intrinsically, he had slight esteem for
"those dead but sceptred spirits"; having qualified himself for forming
an independent opinion by reading Potter's _AEschylus_, and dipping into
Francis's _Horace_.  To this negative view he added a positive one,
derived from a recent connexion with mining speculations; namely, that a
scientific education was the really useful training for a younger son.
Moreover, it was clear that a shy, sensitive boy like me was not fit to
encounter the rough experience of a public school.  Mr. Letherall had
said so very decidedly.  Mr. Letherall was a large man in spectacles, who
one day took my small head between his large hands, and pressed it here
and there in an exploratory, auspicious manner--then placed each of his
great thumbs on my temples, and pushed me a little way from him, and
stared at me with glittering spectacles.  The contemplation appeared to
displease him, for he frowned sternly, and said to my father, drawing his
thumbs across my eyebrows--

"The deficiency is there, sir--there; and here," he added, touching the
upper sides of my head, "here is the excess.  That must be brought out,
sir, and this must be laid to sleep."

I was in a state of tremor, partly at the vague idea that I was the
object of reprobation, partly in the agitation of my first hatred--hatred
of this big, spectacled man, who pulled my head about as if he wanted to
buy and cheapen it.

I am not aware how much Mr. Letherall had to do with the system
afterwards adopted towards me, but it was presently clear that private
tutors, natural history, science, and the modern languages, were the
appliances by which the defects of my organization were to be remedied.  I
was very stupid about machines, so I was to be greatly occupied with
them; I had no memory for classification, so it was particularly
necessary that I should study systematic zoology and botany; I was hungry
for human deeds and humane motions, so I was to be plentifully crammed
with the mechanical powers, the elementary bodies, and the phenomena of
electricity and magnetism.  A better-constituted boy would certainly have
profited under my intelligent tutors, with their scientific apparatus;
and would, doubtless, have found the phenomena of electricity and
magnetism as fascinating as I was, every Thursday, assured they were.  As
it was, I could have paired off, for ignorance of whatever was taught me,
with the worst Latin scholar that was ever turned out of a classical
academy.  I read Plutarch, and Shakespeare, and Don Quixote by the sly,
and supplied myself in that way with wandering thoughts, while my tutor
was assuring me that "an improved man, as distinguished from an ignorant
one, was a man who knew the reason why water ran downhill."  I had no
desire to be this improved man; I was glad of the running water; I could
watch it and listen to it gurgling among the pebbles, and bathing the
bright green water-plants, by the hour together.  I did not want to know
_why_ it ran; I had perfect confidence that there were good reasons for
what was so very beautiful.

There is no need to dwell on this part of my life.  I have said enough to
indicate that my nature was of the sensitive, unpractical order, and that
it grew up in an uncongenial medium, which could never foster it into
happy, healthy development.  When I was sixteen I was sent to Geneva to
complete my course of education; and the change was a very happy one to
me, for the first sight of the Alps, with the setting sun on them, as we
descended the Jura, seemed to me like an entrance into heaven; and the
three years of my life there were spent in a perpetual sense of
exaltation, as if from a draught of delicious wine, at the presence of
Nature in all her awful loveliness.  You will think, perhaps, that I must
have been a poet, from this early sensibility to Nature.  But my lot was
not so happy as that.  A poet pours forth his song and _believes_ in the
listening ear and answering soul, to which his song will be floated
sooner or later.  But the poet's sensibility without his voice--the
poet's sensibility that finds no vent but in silent tears on the sunny
bank, when the noonday light sparkles on the water, or in an inward
shudder at the sound of harsh human tones, the sight of a cold human
eye--this dumb passion brings with it a fatal solitude of soul in the
society of one's fellow-men.  My least solitary moments were those in
which I pushed off in my boat, at evening, towards the centre of the
lake; it seemed to me that the sky, and the glowing mountain-tops, and
the wide blue water, surrounded me with a cherishing love such as no
human face had shed on me since my mother's love had vanished out of my
life.  I used to do as Jean Jacques did--lie down in my boat and let it
glide where it would, while I looked up at the departing glow leaving one
mountain-top after the other, as if the prophet's chariot of fire were
passing over them on its way to the home of light.  Then, when the white
summits were all sad and corpse-like, I had to push homeward, for I was
under careful surveillance, and was allowed no late wanderings.  This
disposition of mine was not favourable to the formation of intimate
friendships among the numerous youths of my own age who are always to be
found studying at Geneva.  Yet I made _one_ such friendship; and,
singularly enough, it was with a youth whose intellectual tendencies were
the very reverse of my own.  I shall call him Charles Meunier; his real
surname--an English one, for he was of English extraction--having since
become celebrated.  He was an orphan, who lived on a miserable pittance
while he pursued the medical studies for which he had a special genius.
Strange! that with my vague mind, susceptible and unobservant, hating
inquiry and given up to contemplation, I should have been drawn towards a
youth whose strongest passion was science.  But the bond was not an
intellectual one; it came from a source that can happily blend the stupid
with the brilliant, the dreamy with the practical: it came from community
of feeling.  Charles was poor and ugly, derided by Genevese _gamins_, and
not acceptable in drawing-rooms.  I saw that he was isolated, as I was,
though from a different cause, and, stimulated by a sympathetic
resentment, I made timid advances towards him.  It is enough to say that
there sprang up as much comradeship between us as our different habits
would allow; and in Charles's rare holidays we went up the Saleve
together, or took the boat to Vevay, while I listened dreamily to the
monologues in which he unfolded his bold conceptions of future experiment
and discovery.  I mingled them confusedly in my thought with glimpses of
blue water and delicate floating cloud, with the notes of birds and the
distant glitter of the glacier.  He knew quite well that my mind was half
absent, yet he liked to talk to me in this way; for don't we talk of our
hopes and our projects even to dogs and birds, when they love us?  I have
mentioned this one friendship because of its connexion with a strange and
terrible scene which I shall have to narrate in my subsequent life.

This happier life at Geneva was put an end to by a severe illness, which
is partly a blank to me, partly a time of dimly-remembered suffering,
with the presence of my father by my bed from time to time.  Then came
the languid monotony of convalescence, the days gradually breaking into
variety and distinctness as my strength enabled me to take longer and
longer drives.  On one of these more vividly remembered days, my father
said to me, as he sat beside my sofa--

"When you are quite well enough to travel, Latimer, I shall take you home
with me.  The journey will amuse you and do you good, for I shall go
through the Tyrol and Austria, and you will see many new places.  Our
neighbours, the Filmores, are come; Alfred will join us at Basle, and we
shall all go together to Vienna, and back by Prague" . . .

My father was called away before he had finished his sentence, and he
left my mind resting on the word _Prague_, with a strange sense that a
new and wondrous scene was breaking upon me: a city under the broad
sunshine, that seemed to me as if it were the summer sunshine of a long-
past century arrested in its course--unrefreshed for ages by dews of
night, or the rushing rain-cloud; scorching the dusty, weary, time-eaten
grandeur of a people doomed to live on in the stale repetition of
memories, like deposed and superannuated kings in their regal
gold-inwoven tatters.  The city looked so thirsty that the broad river
seemed to me a sheet of metal; and the blackened statues, as I passed
under their blank gaze, along the unending bridge, with their ancient
garments and their saintly crowns, seemed to me the real inhabitants and
owners of this place, while the busy, trivial men and women, hurrying to
and fro, were a swarm of ephemeral visitants infesting it for a day.  It
is such grim, stony beings as these, I thought, who are the fathers of
ancient faded children, in those tanned time-fretted dwellings that crowd
the steep before me; who pay their court in the worn and crumbling pomp
of the palace which stretches its monotonous length on the height; who
worship wearily in the stifling air of the churches, urged by no fear or
hope, but compelled by their doom to be ever old and undying, to live on
in the rigidity of habit, as they live on in perpetual midday, without
the repose of night or the new birth of morning.

A stunning clang of metal suddenly thrilled through me, and I became
conscious of the objects in my room again: one of the fire-irons had
fallen as Pierre opened the door to bring me my draught.  My heart was
palpitating violently, and I begged Pierre to leave my draught beside me;
I would take it presently.

As soon as I was alone again, I began to ask myself whether I had been
sleeping.  Was this a dream--this wonderfully distinct vision--minute in
its distinctness down to a patch of rainbow light on the pavement,
transmitted through a coloured lamp in the shape of a star--of a strange
city, quite unfamiliar to my imagination?  I had seen no picture of
Prague: it lay in my mind as a mere name, with vaguely-remembered
historical associations--ill-defined memories of imperial grandeur and
religious wars.

Nothing of this sort had ever occurred in my dreaming experience before,
for I had often been humiliated because my dreams were only saved from
being utterly disjointed and commonplace by the frequent terrors of
nightmare.  But I could not believe that I had been asleep, for I
remembered distinctly the gradual breaking-in of the vision upon me, like
the new images in a dissolving view, or the growing distinctness of the
landscape as the sun lifts up the veil of the morning mist.  And while I
was conscious of this incipient vision, I was also conscious that Pierre
came to tell my father Mr. Filmore was waiting for him, and that my
father hurried out of the room.  No, it was not a dream; was it--the
thought was full of tremulous exultation--was it the poet's nature in me,
hitherto only a troubled yearning sensibility, now manifesting itself
suddenly as spontaneous creation?  Surely it was in this way that Homer
saw the plain of Troy, that Dante saw the abodes of the departed, that
Milton saw the earthward flight of the Tempter.  Was it that my illness
had wrought some happy change in my organization--given a firmer tension
to my nerves--carried off some dull obstruction?  I had often read of
such effects--in works of fiction at least.  Nay; in genuine biographies
I had read of the subtilizing or exalting influence of some diseases on
the mental powers.  Did not Novalis feel his inspiration intensified
under the progress of consumption?

When my mind had dwelt for some time on this blissful idea, it seemed to
me that I might perhaps test it by an exertion of my will.  The vision
had begun when my father was speaking of our going to Prague.  I did not
for a moment believe it was really a representation of that city; I
believed--I hoped it was a picture that my newly liberated genius had
painted in fiery haste, with the colours snatched from lazy memory.
Suppose I were to fix my mind on some other place--Venice, for example,
which was far more familiar to my imagination than Prague: perhaps the
same sort of result would follow.  I concentrated my thoughts on Venice;
I stimulated my imagination with poetic memories, and strove to feel
myself present in Venice, as I had felt myself present in Prague.  But in
vain.  I was only colouring the Canaletto engravings that hung in my old
bedroom at home; the picture was a shifting one, my mind wandering
uncertainly in search of more vivid images; I could see no accident of
form or shadow without conscious labour after the necessary conditions.
It was all prosaic effort, not rapt passivity, such as I had experienced
half an hour before.  I was discouraged; but I remembered that
inspiration was fitful.

For several days I was in a state of excited expectation, watching for a
recurrence of my new gift.  I sent my thoughts ranging over my world of
knowledge, in the hope that they would find some object which would send
a reawakening vibration through my slumbering genius.  But no; my world
remained as dim as ever, and that flash of strange light refused to come
again, though I watched for it with palpitating eagerness.

My father accompanied me every day in a drive, and a gradually
lengthening walk as my powers of walking increased; and one evening he
had agreed to come and fetch me at twelve the next day, that we might go
together to select a musical box, and other purchases rigorously demanded
of a rich Englishman visiting Geneva.  He was one of the most punctual of
men and bankers, and I was always nervously anxious to be quite ready for
him at the appointed time.  But, to my surprise, at a quarter past twelve
he had not appeared.  I felt all the impatience of a convalescent who has
nothing particular to do, and who has just taken a tonic in the prospect
of immediate exercise that would carry off the stimulus.

Unable to sit still and reserve my strength, I walked up and down the
room, looking out on the current of the Rhone, just where it leaves the
dark-blue lake; but thinking all the while of the possible causes that
could detain my father.

Suddenly I was conscious that my father was in the room, but not alone:
there were two persons with him.  Strange!  I had heard no footstep, I
had not seen the door open; but I saw my father, and at his right hand
our neighbour Mrs. Filmore, whom I remembered very well, though I had not
seen her for five years.  She was a commonplace middle-aged woman, in
silk and cashmere; but the lady on the left of my father was not more
than twenty, a tall, slim, willowy figure, with luxuriant blond hair,
arranged in cunning braids and folds that looked almost too massive for
the slight figure and the small-featured, thin-lipped face they crowned.
But the face had not a girlish expression: the features were sharp, the
pale grey eyes at once acute, restless, and sarcastic.  They were fixed
on me in half-smiling curiosity, and I felt a painful sensation as if a
sharp wind were cutting me.  The pale-green dress, and the green leaves
that seemed to form a border about her pale blond hair, made me think of
a Water-Nixie--for my mind was full of German lyrics, and this pale,
fatal-eyed woman, with the green weeds, looked like a birth from some
cold sedgy stream, the daughter of an aged river.

"Well, Latimer, you thought me long," my father said . . .

But while the last word was in my ears, the whole group vanished, and
there was nothing between me and the Chinese printed folding-screen that
stood before the door.  I was cold and trembling; I could only totter
forward and throw myself on the sofa.  This strange new power had
manifested itself again . . . But _was_ it a power?  Might it not rather
be a disease--a sort of intermittent delirium, concentrating my energy of
brain into moments of unhealthy activity, and leaving my saner hours all
the more barren?  I felt a dizzy sense of unreality in what my eye rested
on; I grasped the bell convulsively, like one trying to free himself from
nightmare, and rang it twice.  Pierre came with a look of alarm in his
face.

"Monsieur ne se trouve pas bien?" he said anxiously.

"I'm tired of waiting, Pierre," I said, as distinctly and emphatically as
I could, like a man determined to be sober in spite of wine; "I'm afraid
something has happened to my father--he's usually so punctual.  Run to
the Hotel des Bergues and see if he is there."

Pierre left the room at once, with a soothing "Bien, Monsieur"; and I
felt the better for this scene of simple, waking prose.  Seeking to calm
myself still further, I went into my bedroom, adjoining the _salon_, and
opened a case of eau-de-Cologne; took out a bottle; went through the
process of taking out the cork very neatly, and then rubbed the reviving
spirit over my hands and forehead, and under my nostrils, drawing a new
delight from the scent because I had procured it by slow details of
labour, and by no strange sudden madness.  Already I had begun to taste
something of the horror that belongs to the lot of a human being whose
nature is not adjusted to simple human conditions.

Still enjoying the scent, I returned to the salon, but it was not
unoccupied, as it had been before I left it.  In front of the Chinese
folding-screen there was my father, with Mrs. Filmore on his right hand,
and on his left--the slim, blond-haired girl, with the keen face and the
keen eyes fixed on me in half-smiling curiosity.

"Well, Latimer, you thought me long," my father said . . .

I heard no more, felt no more, till I became conscious that I was lying
with my head low on the sofa, Pierre, and my father by my side.  As soon
as I was thoroughly revived, my father left the room, and presently
returned, saying--

"I've been to tell the ladies how you are, Latimer.  They were waiting in
the next room.  We shall put off our shopping expedition to-day."

Presently he said, "That young lady is Bertha Grant, Mrs. Filmore's
orphan niece.  Filmore has adopted her, and she lives with them, so you
will have her for a neighbour when we go home--perhaps for a near
relation; for there is a tenderness between her and Alfred, I suspect,
and I should be gratified by the match, since Filmore means to provide
for her in every way as if she were his daughter.  It had not occurred to
me that you knew nothing about her living with the Filmores."

He made no further allusion to the fact of my having fainted at the
moment of seeing her, and I would not for the world have told him the
reason: I shrank from the idea of disclosing to any one what might be
regarded as a pitiable peculiarity, most of all from betraying it to my
father, who would have suspected my sanity ever after.

I do not mean to dwell with particularity on the details of my
experience.  I have described these two cases at length, because they had
definite, clearly traceable results in my after-lot.

Shortly after this last occurrence--I think the very next day--I began to
be aware of a phase in my abnormal sensibility, to which, from the
languid and slight nature of my intercourse with others since my illness,
I had not been alive before.  This was the obtrusion on my mind of the
mental process going forward in first one person, and then another, with
whom I happened to be in contact: the vagrant, frivolous ideas and
emotions of some uninteresting acquaintance--Mrs. Filmore, for
example--would force themselves on my consciousness like an importunate,
ill-played musical instrument, or the loud activity of an imprisoned
insect.  But this unpleasant sensibility was fitful, and left me moments
of rest, when the souls of my companions were once more shut out from me,
and I felt a relief such as silence brings to wearied nerves.  I might
have believed this importunate insight to be merely a diseased activity
of the imagination, but that my prevision of incalculable words and
actions proved it to have a fixed relation to the mental process in other
minds.  But this superadded consciousness, wearying and annoying enough
when it urged on me the trivial experience of indifferent people, became
an intense pain and grief when it seemed to be opening to me the souls of
those who were in a close relation to me--when the rational talk, the
graceful attentions, the wittily-turned phrases, and the kindly deeds,
which used to make the web of their characters, were seen as if thrust
asunder by a microscopic vision, that showed all the intermediate
frivolities, all the suppressed egoism, all the struggling chaos of
puerilities, meanness, vague capricious memories, and indolent make-shift
thoughts, from which human words and deeds emerge like leaflets covering
a fermenting heap.

At Basle we were joined by my brother Alfred, now a handsome,
self-confident man of six-and-twenty--a thorough contrast to my fragile,
nervous, ineffectual self.  I believe I was held to have a sort of half-
womanish, half-ghostly beauty; for the portrait-painters, who are thick
as weeds at Geneva, had often asked me to sit to them, and I had been the
model of a dying minstrel in a fancy picture.  But I thoroughly disliked
my own physique and nothing but the belief that it was a condition of
poetic genius would have reconciled me to it.  That brief hope was quite
fled, and I saw in my face now nothing but the stamp of a morbid
organization, framed for passive suffering--too feeble for the sublime
resistance of poetic production.  Alfred, from whom I had been almost
constantly separated, and who, in his present stage of character and
appearance, came before me as a perfect stranger, was bent on being
extremely friendly and brother-like to me.  He had the superficial
kindness of a good-humoured, self-satisfied nature, that fears no
rivalry, and has encountered no contrarieties.  I am not sure that my
disposition was good enough for me to have been quite free from envy
towards him, even if our desires had not clashed, and if I had been in
the healthy human condition which admits of generous confidence and
charitable construction.  There must always have been an antipathy
between our natures.  As it was, he became in a few weeks an object of
intense hatred to me; and when he entered the room, still more when he
spoke, it was as if a sensation of grating metal had set my teeth on
edge.  My diseased consciousness was more intensely and continually
occupied with his thoughts and emotions, than with those of any other
person who came in my way.  I was perpetually exasperated with the petty
promptings of his conceit and his love of patronage, with his
self-complacent belief in Bertha Grant's passion for him, with his half-
pitying contempt for me--seen not in the ordinary indications of
intonation and phrase and slight action, which an acute and suspicious
mind is on the watch for, but in all their naked skinless complication.

For we were rivals, and our desires clashed, though he was not aware of
it.  I have said nothing yet of the effect Bertha Grant produced in me on
a nearer acquaintance.  That effect was chiefly determined by the fact
that she made the only exception, among all the human beings about me, to
my unhappy gift of insight.  About Bertha I was always in a state of
uncertainty: I could watch the expression of her face, and speculate on
its meaning; I could ask for her opinion with the real interest of
ignorance; I could listen for her words and watch for her smile with hope
and fear: she had for me the fascination of an unravelled destiny.  I say
it was this fact that chiefly determined the strong effect she produced
on me: for, in the abstract, no womanly character could seem to have less
affinity for that of a shrinking, romantic, passionate youth than
Bertha's.  She was keen, sarcastic, unimaginative, prematurely cynical,
remaining critical and unmoved in the most impressive scenes, inclined to
dissect all my favourite poems, and especially contemptous towards the
German lyrics which were my pet literature at that time.  To this moment
I am unable to define my feeling towards her: it was not ordinary boyish
admiration, for she was the very opposite, even to the colour of her
hair, of the ideal woman who still remained to me the type of loveliness;
and she was without that enthusiasm for the great and good, which, even
at the moment of her strongest dominion over me, I should have declared
to be the highest element of character.  But there is no tyranny more
complete than that which a self-centred negative nature exercises over a
morbidly sensitive nature perpetually craving sympathy and support.  The
most independent people feel the effect of a man's silence in heightening
their value for his opinion--feel an additional triumph in conquering the
reverence of a critic habitually captious and satirical: no wonder, then,
that an enthusiastic self-distrusting youth should watch and wait before
the closed secret of a sarcastic woman's face, as if it were the shrine
of the doubtfully benignant deity who ruled his destiny.  For a young
enthusiast is unable to imagine the total negation in another mind of the
emotions which are stirring his own: they may be feeble, latent,
inactive, he thinks, but they are there--they may be called forth;
sometimes, in moments of happy hallucination, he believes they may be
there in all the greater strength because he sees no outward sign of
them.  And this effect, as I have intimated, was heightened to its utmost
intensity in me, because Bertha was the only being who remained for me in
the mysterious seclusion of soul that renders such youthful delusion
possible.  Doubtless there was another sort of fascination at work--that
subtle physical attraction which delights in cheating our psychological
predictions, and in compelling the men who paint sylphs, to fall in love
with some _bonne et brave femme_, heavy-heeled and freckled.

Bertha's behaviour towards me was such as to encourage all my illusions,
to heighten my boyish passion, and make me more and more dependent on her
smiles.  Looking back with my present wretched knowledge, I conclude that
her vanity and love of power were intensely gratified by the belief that
I had fainted on first seeing her purely from the strong impression her
person had produced on me.  The most prosaic woman likes to believe
herself the object of a violent, a poetic passion; and without a grain of
romance in her, Bertha had that spirit of intrigue which gave piquancy to
the idea that the brother of the man she meant to marry was dying with
love and jealousy for her sake.  That she meant to marry my brother, was
what at that time I did not believe; for though he was assiduous in his
attentions to her, and I knew well enough that both he and my father had
made up their minds to this result, there was not yet an understood
engagement--there had been no explicit declaration; and Bertha
habitually, while she flirted with my brother, and accepted his homage in
a way that implied to him a thorough recognition of its intention, made
me believe, by the subtlest looks and phrases--feminine nothings which
could never be quoted against her--that he was really the object of her
secret ridicule; that she thought him, as I did, a coxcomb, whom she
would have pleasure in disappointing.  Me she openly petted in my
brother's presence, as if I were too young and sickly ever to be thought
of as a lover; and that was the view he took of me.  But I believe she
must inwardly have delighted in the tremors into which she threw me by
the coaxing way in which she patted my curls, while she laughed at my
quotations.  Such caresses were always given in the presence of our
friends; for when we were alone together, she affected a much greater
distance towards me, and now and then took the opportunity, by words or
slight actions, to stimulate my foolish timid hope that she really
preferred me.  And why should she not follow her inclination?  I was not
in so advantageous a position as my brother, but I had fortune, I was not
a year younger than she was, and she was an heiress, who would soon be of
age to decide for herself.

The fluctuations of hope and fear, confined to this one channel, made
each day in her presence a delicious torment.  There was one deliberate
act of hers which especially helped to intoxicate me.  When we were at
Vienna her twentieth birthday occurred, and as she was very fond of
ornaments, we all took the opportunity of the splendid jewellers' shops
in that Teutonic Paris to purchase her a birthday present of jewellery.
Mine, naturally, was the least expensive; it was an opal ring--the opal
was my favourite stone, because it seems to blush and turn pale as if it
had a soul.  I told Bertha so when I gave it her, and said that it was an
emblem of the poetic nature, changing with the changing light of heaven
and of woman's eyes.  In the evening she appeared elegantly dressed, and
wearing conspicuously all the birthday presents except mine.  I looked
eagerly at her fingers, but saw no opal.  I had no opportunity of
noticing this to her during the evening; but the next day, when I found
her seated near the window alone, after breakfast, I said, "You scorn to
wear my poor opal.  I should have remembered that you despised poetic
natures, and should have given you coral, or turquoise, or some other
opaque unresponsive stone."  "Do I despise it?" she answered, taking hold
of a delicate gold chain which she always wore round her neck and drawing
out the end from her bosom with my ring hanging to it; "it hurts me a
little, I can tell you," she said, with her usual dubious smile, "to wear
it in that secret place; and since your poetical nature is so stupid as
to prefer a more public position, I shall not endure the pain any
longer."

She took off the ring from the chain and put it on her finger, smiling
still, while the blood rushed to my cheeks, and I could not trust myself
to say a word of entreaty that she would keep the ring where it was
before.

I was completely fooled by this, and for two days shut myself up in my
own room whenever Bertha was absent, that I might intoxicate myself
afresh with the thought of this scene and all it implied.

I should mention that during these two months--which seemed a long life
to me from the novelty and intensity of the pleasures and pains I
underwent--my diseased anticipation in other people's consciousness
continued to torment me; now it was my father, and now my brother, now
Mrs. Filmore or her husband, and now our German courier, whose stream of
thought rushed upon me like a ringing in the ears not to be got rid of,
though it allowed my own impulses and ideas to continue their
uninterrupted course.  It was like a preternaturally heightened sense of
hearing, making audible to one a roar of sound where others find perfect
stillness.  The weariness and disgust of this involuntary intrusion into
other souls was counteracted only by my ignorance of Bertha, and my
growing passion for her; a passion enormously stimulated, if not
produced, by that ignorance.  She was my oasis of mystery in the dreary
desert of knowledge.  I had never allowed my diseased condition to betray
itself, or to drive me into any unusual speech or action, except once,
when, in a moment of peculiar bitterness against my brother, I had
forestalled some words which I knew he was going to utter--a clever
observation, which he had prepared beforehand.  He had occasionally a
slightly affected hesitation in his speech, and when he paused an instant
after the second word, my impatience and jealousy impelled me to continue
the speech for him, as if it were something we had both learned by rote.
He coloured and looked astonished, as well as annoyed; and the words had
no sooner escaped my lips than I felt a shock of alarm lest such an
anticipation of words--very far from being words of course, easy to
divine--should have betrayed me as an exceptional being, a sort of quiet
energumen, whom every one, Bertha above all, would shudder at and avoid.
But I magnified, as usual, the impression any word or deed of mine could
produce on others; for no one gave any sign of having noticed my
interruption as more than a rudeness, to be forgiven me on the score of
my feeble nervous condition.

While this superadded consciousness of the actual was almost constant
with me, I had never had a recurrence of that distinct prevision which I
have described in relation to my first interview with Bertha; and I was
waiting with eager curiosity to know whether or not my vision of Prague
would prove to have been an instance of the same kind.  A few days after
the incident of the opal ring, we were paying one of our frequent visits
to the Lichtenberg Palace.  I could never look at many pictures in
succession; for pictures, when they are at all powerful, affect me so
strongly that one or two exhaust all my capability of contemplation.  This
morning I had been looking at Giorgione's picture of the cruel-eyed
woman, said to be a likeness of Lucrezia Borgia.  I had stood long alone
before it, fascinated by the terrible reality of that cunning, relentless
face, till I felt a strange poisoned sensation, as if I had long been
inhaling a fatal odour, and was just beginning to be conscious of its
effects.  Perhaps even then I should not have moved away, if the rest of
the party had not returned to this room, and announced that they were
going to the Belvedere Gallery to settle a bet which had arisen between
my brother and Mr. Filmore about a portrait.  I followed them dreamily,
and was hardly alive to what occurred till they had all gone up to the
gallery, leaving me below; for I refused to come within sight of another
picture that day.  I made my way to the Grand Terrace, since it was
agreed that we should saunter in the gardens when the dispute had been
decided.  I had been sitting here a short space, vaguely conscious of
trim gardens, with a city and green hills in the distance, when, wishing
to avoid the proximity of the sentinel, I rose and walked down the broad
stone steps, intending to seat myself farther on in the gardens.  Just as
I reached the gravel-walk, I felt an arm slipped within mine, and a light
hand gently pressing my wrist.  In the same instant a strange
intoxicating numbness passed over me, like the continuance or climax of
the sensation I was still feeling from the gaze of Lucrezia Borgia.  The
gardens, the summer sky, the consciousness of Bertha's arm being within
mine, all vanished, and I seemed to be suddenly in darkness, out of which
there gradually broke a dim firelight, and I felt myself sitting in my
father's leather chair in the library at home.  I knew the fireplace--the
dogs for the wood-fire--the black marble chimney-piece with the white
marble medallion of the dying Cleopatra in the centre.  Intense and
hopeless misery was pressing on my soul; the light became stronger, for
Bertha was entering with a candle in her hand--Bertha, my wife--with
cruel eyes, with green jewels and green leaves on her white ball-dress;
every hateful thought within her present to me . . . "Madman, idiot! why
don't you kill yourself, then?"  It was a moment of hell.  I saw into her
pitiless soul--saw its barren worldliness, its scorching hate--and felt
it clothe me round like an air I was obliged to breathe.  She came with
her candle and stood over me with a bitter smile of contempt; I saw the
great emerald brooch on her bosom, a studded serpent with diamond eyes.  I
shuddered--I despised this woman with the barren soul and mean thoughts;
but I felt helpless before her, as if she clutched my bleeding heart, and
would clutch it till the last drop of life-blood ebbed away.  She was my
wife, and we hated each other.  Gradually the hearth, the dim library,
the candle-light disappeared--seemed to melt away into a background of
light, the green serpent with the diamond eyes remaining a dark image on
the retina.  Then I had a sense of my eyelids quivering, and the living
daylight broke in upon me; I saw gardens, and heard voices; I was seated
on the steps of the Belvedere Terrace, and my friends were round me.

The tumult of mind into which I was thrown by this hideous vision made me
ill for several days, and prolonged our stay at Vienna.  I shuddered with
horror as the scene recurred to me; and it recurred constantly, with all
its minutiae, as if they had been burnt into my memory; and yet, such is
the madness of the human heart under the influence of its immediate
desires, I felt a wild hell-braving joy that Bertha was to be mine; for
the fulfilment of my former prevision concerning her first appearance
before me, left me little hope that this last hideous glimpse of the
future was the mere diseased play of my own mind, and had no relation to
external realities.  One thing alone I looked towards as a possible means
of casting doubt on my terrible conviction--the discovery that my vision
of Prague had been false--and Prague was the next city on our route.

Meanwhile, I was no sooner in Bertha's society again than I was as
completely under her sway as before.  What if I saw into the heart of
Bertha, the matured woman--Bertha, my wife?  Bertha, the _girl_, was a
fascinating secret to me still: I trembled under her touch; I felt the
witchery of her presence; I yearned to be assured of her love.  The fear
of poison is feeble against the sense of thirst.  Nay, I was just as
jealous of my brother as before--just as much irritated by his small
patronizing ways; for my pride, my diseased sensibility, were there as
they had always been, and winced as inevitably under every offence as my
eye winced from an intruding mote.  The future, even when brought within
the compass of feeling by a vision that made me shudder, had still no
more than the force of an idea, compared with the force of present
emotion--of my love for Bertha, of my dislike and jealousy towards my
brother.

It is an old story, that men sell themselves to the tempter, and sign a
bond with their blood, because it is only to take effect at a distant
day; then rush on to snatch the cup their souls thirst after with an
impulse not the less savage because there is a dark shadow beside them
for evermore.  There is no short cut, no patent tram-road, to wisdom:
after all the centuries of invention, the soul's path lies through the
thorny wilderness which must be still trodden in solitude, with bleeding
feet, with sobs for help, as it was trodden by them of old time.

My mind speculated eagerly on the means by which I should become my
brother's successful rival, for I was still too timid, in my ignorance of
Bertha's actual feeling, to venture on any step that would urge from her
an avowal of it.  I thought I should gain confidence even for this, if my
vision of Prague proved to have been veracious; and yet, the horror of
that certitude!  Behind the slim girl Bertha, whose words and looks I
watched for, whose touch was bliss, there stood continually that Bertha
with the fuller form, the harder eyes, the more rigid mouth--with the
barren, selfish soul laid bare; no longer a fascinating secret, but a
measured fact, urging itself perpetually on my unwilling sight.  Are you
unable to give me your sympathy--you who react this?  Are you unable to
imagine this double consciousness at work within me, flowing on like two
parallel streams which never mingle their waters and blend into a common
hue?  Yet you must have known something of the presentiments that spring
from an insight at war with passion; and my visions were only like
presentiments intensified to horror.  You have known the powerlessness of
ideas before the might of impulse; and my visions, when once they had
passed into memory, were mere ideas--pale shadows that beckoned in vain,
while my hand was grasped by the living and the loved.